Saturday Science: But Is It Art?

Archaeologists have discovered what they're calling the earliest example of human drawing:

A small stone flake marked with intersecting lines of red ochre pigment some 73,000 years ago that was found in a cave on South Africa’s southern coast represents what archaeologists on Wednesday called the oldest-known example of human drawing.

The abstract design, vaguely resembling a hashtag, was drawn by hunter-gatherers who periodically dwelled in Blombos Cave overlooking the Indian Ocean, roughly 190 miles (300 km) east of Cape Town, the researchers said. It predates the previous oldest-known drawings by at least 30,000 years.

This had me scratching my head:

While the design appears rudimentary, the fact that it was sketched so long ago is significant, suggesting the existence of modern cognitive abilities in our species, Homo sapiens, during a time known as the Middle Stone Age, the researchers said.

Um, hello? Same species, same capabilities. Sure, allow time for building a cultural history, but why would anyone be surprised that early modern humans would draw? And, while I don't want to belabor the point, this is the Middle Stone Age, meaning fairly advanced and sophisticated tool-making. Did someone say "cognitive abilities"?

Footnote: I was reminded while viewing a nature/paleoanthropology documentary on Netflix (Nova's Dawn of Humanity) that until recently, scientists pooh-poohed the idea that modern humans -- or humans in general -- could have originated in Africa, which is what all the evidence points to. Just goes to show you -- scientists are not free from prejudice or pre-conceived notions. By the way, the program itself is fairly good -- about finding another missing link.

Today's Must-Read #2: Looks Like Someting Was Edited

For most rational people, it's a given that the Bible was composed by a number of different authors over a period of time. Well, it looks like Leviticus wasn't immune:

The original version of Leviticus expressly permitted gay sex, a Biblical scholar writes in the New York Times.

Idan Dershowitz is a fellow at Harvard and has studied the development of the Old Testament carefully, including Leviticus 20:13 which reads that “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

. . .

“There is good evidence that an earlier version of the laws in Leviticus 18 permitted sex between men,” he argues. “In addition to having the prohibition against same-sex relations added to it, the earlier text, I believe, was revised in an attempt to obscure any implication that same-sex relations had once been permissible.”

Take that, Tony Perkins.

Looks like somebody way back when had issues.

Today's Must-Read: Another Point of Contact

Trump's sense of his own superiority, no matter how unjustified by real-world events, rests on a foundation that -- well, it's flimsy at best. Digby takes a hard look:

Like history's monarchs, Trump believes that the qualities that make him successful are in-born. He once said he possesses a genetic “gift” for real estate development.

“I'm a big believer in natural ability,” Trump told me during a discussion about his leadership traits, which he said came from a natural sense of how human relations work. “If Obama had that psychology, Putin wouldn't be eating his lunch. He doesn't have that psychology and he never will because it's not in his DNA.” Later in this discussion, Trump said: “I believe in being prepared and all that stuff. But in many respects, the most important thing is an innate ability.”

Perhaps Trump's conviction that DNA — not life experience — is everything explains why he proudly claims that he's “basically the same” today as when he was a boy. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same,” he said. “The temperament is not that different.”

(Emphasis added.)

Do I have to comment?

That whole passage is so ridiculous as to defy analysis. And he probably believes every word of it.

And it's not that big a leap from that attitude to the idea (which I find somewhat bizarre) that people not like him (i.e., brown people) are inferior.

And people wonder why he's such a big hit with people like Tony Perkins and David Duke.

If Wishes Were Nickels

From The Guardian:

President Barack Obama has warned Donald Trump he won’t be able to pursue many of his more controversial policies once he is in office.

In his final international speech before he leaves the White House in January, Obama said he could not guarantee Trump would not try to implement controversial positions he took during campaign but he could guarantee “reality will force him to adjust” how he approaches the issues.

Uh, Mr. President? You seem to assume that Trump has some contact with reality.

Today in Trump's America: The Kaepernick Reaction

So now it's worked its way down to high-school football games:

The announcer of the Friday night football game at McKenzie High School in Alabama's Butler County had something to say to those who may choose not to stand for the national anthem.

"If you don't want to stand for the national anthem, you can line up over there by the fence and let our military personnel take a few shots at you since they're taking shots for you," the announcer said at the game versus Houston County High School, according to Facebook poster Denise Crowley-Whitfield.

Crowley-Whitfield said the crowd went "crazy cheering" following the speech.

The announcer was identified as Pastor Allen Joyner, of Sweet Home Baptist Church in McKenzie, according to Joyner's relatives and friends, who also posted to Facebook and praised the statement.

I'd like to say, "Well, it's Alabama," but that's too easy. (Of course, considering Alabama's history with minorities of all kinds over the past -- 240 years? -- it makes sense that something like this would happen there.)

Strangely enough, all those Facebook posts praising this asshole got deleted pretty quickly. Maybe because of reactions like this:

Mark Bender, a 22 year Air Force veteran from Texas, spoke out against Joyner in a post on the Sweet Home Alabama Baptist Church's Facebook page, calling the pastor's words "abhorrent and disgusting."

He said he is "deeply offended and saddened" by Joyner's "hateful rhetoric.

"We fight so that all Americans retain their rights and freedoms to protest," Bender wrote. "I would never turn a weapon on my own countryman simply because they protest by remaining seated during the national anthem, by refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance, refusing to stand or pledge during any act. These things we do, these pledges, these songs, these are not compulsory acts. They are acts that we are all free to join or not.

"I am proud that we have that freedom whether or not I agree with someone's non-violent protest," he continued. "You, on the other hand are promoting extremist violence by way of state sanctioned executions. You are obviously standing for the compulsory actions by way of preaching hatred, jingoism, American exceptionalism -- all because people do not believe or think as you do. I am grateful that the majority of Americans do not thirst for their brother's blood as you do. You are a disgrace, those who agree with you are a disgrace, and you are a black mark upon this great nation. You should certainly hang your heads in shame."

Maybe they stopped and thought about it? Enough to think that maybe something like this might be, just a wee bit, socially unacceptable?

And this is priceless: the church of which he is pastor claimed that not only were this jerk's comments taken out of context, but he was misquoted as well. A twofer.

Oh, and they deleted that comment within an hour.

On "Deplorables" (Updated)

I couldn't agree more with Josh Marshall's comments:

Let me take a moment to address this "basket of deplorables" comment because I think it's critically important to get this right. Hillary Clinton has simply said what is the premise of most election coverage of the 2016 campaign: a big chunk of Trump supporters are haters. Racists, misogynists, people who are angry at the social and demographic changes in the country that most Americans see as progress. They want to stop it in its tracks and they want payback for what has happened already. To emphasize the point, this is not just what she and likely the great majority of her supporters believe. It has been the premise of most reporting on the campaign and validated by a vast cache of public opinion data confirming these points.

It may have been easier not to say this and left herself vulnerable to a faux-populist counterattack. But she did say it. She cannot unsay it. And since it is not only basically true but in fact a matter of central importance to the entire election, it is truly critical that she not back down.

Add in the tribalists -- the hard-core Republicans who put party over country -- and you've got Trump's base.

Should she have said it? It's hard to know what to answer -- Marshall's comment about faux-populist rage has an element of truth -- a big element of truth -- but she's going to get that no matter what she says about anything. And I think it's about time that the Democrats started hitting harder, if you know what I mean: I'm tired of the party that demonstrably is working for the good of the country as a whole being on the defensive. And the thing about the right wing -- like any other bullies, if you stand up to them, they'll fold.

And as for her "apology":

I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,” Clinton said in a statement. . . .

Maybe you have to have a life-long of in-your-face attitude, but I read that as "I regret saying only half -- that was wrong."

The Clinton campaign came out with this statement yesterday afternoon:

“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that's never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ -- that was wrong. But let's be clear, what's really ‘deplorable’ is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values. It's deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people. It's deplorable that he's attacked a federal judge for his ‘Mexican heritage,’ bullied a Gold Star family because of their Muslim faith, and promoted the lie that our first black president is not a true American. So I won't stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign. I also meant what I said last night about empathy, and the very real challenges we face as a country where so many people have been left out and left behind. As I said, many of Trump's supporters are hard-working Americans who just don’t feel like the economy or our political system are working for them. I'm determined to bring our country together and make our economy work for everyone, not just those at the top. Because we really are ‘stronger together.’”

Clarify -- don't apologize.

Update: Just ran across this, by Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic:

One way of reporting on Clinton’s statement is to weigh its political cost, ask what it means for her campaign, or attempt to predict how it might affect her performance among certain groups. This path is in line with the current imperatives of political reporting and, at least for the moment, seems to be the direction of coverage. But there is another line of reporting that could be pursued — Was Hillary Clinton being truthful or not?

(Emphasis added.)

And, as Coates goes on to demonstrate, she was.

It's sobering to realize just how far from reality the media have drifted, when no one -- well, almost no one -- is asking that basic question. But then, according to one of the sock-puppets scheduled to moderate the presidential debates, fact-checking is not their job.

Really? Since when?

Today's Must-Watch

Rachel Maddow on the history of "nativism"* and anti-immigrant sentiment in the US (fair warning: there's a section running several minutes of The Hairpiece spewing hate):

Adam L. Silverman has this post at Balloon Juice on the same subject.

It's a recurring nightmare, and it's not just America, or even any country established by immigrants. Look at what's going on in Europe right now, and the countries of Europe are largely homogeneous in ethnic make-up. Or were. Or think about the inter-tribal conflicts in Africa resulting from the creation of nation states with boundaries imposed by the colonial powers. It's all "Us vs. Them."

In part, I think it's due to our existence as social animals: by definition, membership in a group leads to distrust of those not in the group. Think of howler monkeys or gibbons vocalizing to establish their territories -- certainly one of the less harmful means of doing that. Chimps can get violent.

But we're so much more advanced than that. Aren't we?

Yeah, I'm Still Here

Somewhere. I've been apprised that my absence has been noticed. It's nothing serious -- just that the news is more of the same, only kicked up an order of magnitude, and the combination of Kim Davis (who got an award for breaking the law) and the Republican presidential wannabes is sort of paralyzing.

This, however, interested me. Via Digby:

One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

The fallout from this is pretty substantial:

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

I have so far resisted that sort of connectivity -- I don't have a cell phone, and I've avoided getting involved in most social media -- no Facebook, no Twitter, none of that. I do notice, however, the number of people I see -- mostly younger people, but by no means exclusively -- who are on the bus, or walking down the street, or in coffee shops or restaurants -- who aren't really there. They're on their phones. I remember seeing people on rollerblades with their ears stopped up with earphones while they were 'blading down the sidewalks or streets, and thinking "These people must be nuts -- that's a great way to get killed." Phones aren't quite that extreme (although a lot of these people are listening to music), but still. . . . They're not only shutting themselves off from human contact, but from the world around them.

I have seen this resilience during my own research at a device-free summer camp. At a nightly cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature. These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude.

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.

Bus rides are part of my "alone time" -- I seldom even read on the bus: I watch the world outside, and the people riding with me. But then, I've always been an observer. And I have a high tolerance for being alone.

I wonder if it's a fear of being alone that drives part of this technological connectedness. After all, we're social animals, hard-wired to travel in groups. Being alone is something that a lot of people avoid, I think, even in situations like running errands or riding the bus -- so, grab your phone and stay connected. Except you're not, really.

It's sobering to realize how much of our communication relies on the nonverbal -- facial expression, body language, tone of voice -- that you don't get on a phone or on the Internet. That's what really does the damage. (Why do you think emoticons were invented? An attempt to replace some part of what we're missing by face-to-face contact.)

There's a lot more to be said on this topic -- I find myself tempted to wander off on all sorts of tangents, but I'm not going to. Read both the Times article and Digby's post, and you can wander off on your own tangents.

Evidence? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Evidence!

The pope has weighed in on gender, the way it's supposed to be:

"Let's think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings," he continues. "Let's think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation."

"With this attitude, man commits a new sin, that against God the Creator," the pope says. "The true custody of creation does not have anything to do with the ideologies that consider man like an accident, like a problem to eliminate."

"God has placed man and woman and the summit of creation and has entrusted them with the earth," Francis says. "The design of the Creator is written in nature."

I honestly can't remember, right now, when I've seen a clearer example of the impermeable membrane with which so many Christians wrap themselves. "The design of the Creator is written in nature." Where does he think our recent (relatively) rethinking of gender and sexuality in general come from? Psychologists and biologists aren't in the habit of making these things up. (Unlike, say, Catholic bishops.)

What more is there to say? Except maybe, "Open your eyes, Francis, and take a look at the world around you."

Footnote: This attitude probably accounts for most, if not all, of the problems we're having with the environment today: "God has placed man and woman and the summit of creation and has entrusted them with the earth[.]" It's a slightly different take on the old "dominion over all things" idea, but the seed is still there, to which I can only respond, "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie."

About Vaccinations

There's a good post over at Mahablog on the anti-vaxxers and their consequences. She has the close to the same reaction that I do, not only to the whole "vaccinations cause (fill in favorite horrible condition)" mantra, but to the self-obsessed "health" nuts in general:

Health fads aren’t new at all, but fads about diets have gotten so prevalent they’ve spawned a new term — orthorexia. Suddenly gluten is bad. Suddenly people have to de-tox. Like we didn’t have livers for that. Not that I’m exactly a role model of sensible eating, but I do run into people who are absolutely obsessed with only eating certain foods from a few trusted, and out of the way, sources. It’s like anything sold in a chain grocery store might cause sudden death.

My working theory for at least some of this craziness is that food and health fads have taken the place of religion for some people as a means for protecting themselves and their loved ones for the scary things out there. Prayer has been replaced by colon cleanses.

I've seen labels at my local Jewel crowing that the packaged ham is gluten free. Ham? Why would you find gluten in ham to begin with? Yes, gluten -- which is nothing more than the protein in wheat and similar grains -- is sometimes added to other foods as a stabilizing agent, but meat? Granted, there are people with gluten allergies, but all the manufacturers need to do is include information on gluten on the label. Jewel is jumping on the latest food-fad bandwagon. (The idea the gluten is "bad for you" is patently ridiculous, unless you're one of those with the aforementioned allergies.)

I have a friend who at one point was avoiding carbohydrates -- she called them "empty calories." I sort of lit into her, pointing out that your body needs carbohydrates, that's mostly what it burns for energy, especially at rest, and carbs are not "empty calories." It's amazing the nonsense that people pick up from the media that becomes received wisdom. (Well, that's my problem with received wisdom, now that I think of it. Who knows what these "authorities" have been smoking?)

Back to vaccinations. The real problem here is that we need our herd immunity; without it, diseases -- such as, for example, measles -- have a nice big playground. (I was talking to my sister yesterday and we were remembering all the vaccinations we had as children. She remembered the polio vaccinations, which I had forgotten, but who in the hell would want polio to come back? Or smallpox? I religiously get my pneumonia vaccinations -- having had pneumonia twice in the past five years, I can assure you it is no fun -- two or three days in the hospital and maybe three to four weeks for a full recovery -- and my shingles vaccination, and even flu shots, even though I have variable reactions to the flu vaccines: sometimes I get sick for a night, sometimes I don't, but I'd rather spend a night in bed than a week.) So now, thanks to Sarah Palin, among other luminaries, we have measles outbreaks all over the country.

O'Brien's last statement gets to the heart of it:

The measles outbreaks also reminds us that the things we do, or don’t do, really do affect other people in myriad ways. We can go around pretending that our personal choices are just our business, but it’s not always that simple.

That's it, with a small caveat: some of our personal choices are purely personal, but a lot of them simply aren't, because we're social animals, we travel in groups, and for better or worse, what's experienced by one member of the group has a big chance of eventually being experienced by most, if not all, of the others. Like measles.

Divine Retribution

Jim Burroway, in today's "Daily Agenda" at Box Turtle Bulletin, has a couple of interesting items that fall under the heading "Moralistic Reactions to Disease." I'm going to mix them up a bit -- he's following the "Daily Agenda" format, which doesn't necessarily lead to a clear narrative.

First, some fairly recent history, in the form of this quote from the ever benign Pat Buchanan, from a New York Post column in 1983, when AIDS was rearing its ugly head:

Through much of the first decades of the AIDS crisis, moralistic preachers, pundits and politicians described the fatal disease as divine punishment for what they saw as illicit behavior. In 1983, for example, New York Post Columnist Pat Buchanan wrote, “The poor homosexuals… they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”

That's not a new attitude. Burroway outlines some of the history in both entries, which are concerned with the reaction to venereal disease, as they used to call it, from scientists. Yes, scientists.

In 1916, Dr. Winfield Scott Hall, professor of physiology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, published a book, Sexual Knowledge, “for the instruction of young people, young wives and young husbands… on the best way and the best time to impart sexual knowledge to boys and girls.”

It contained gems of scientific thought like this:

Nature has devised a retribution for illicit intercourse in the form of venereal disease. If the parties observe fidelity to their marriage vows, venereal disease is experienced in wedlock only on very rare occasions, and then through some accidental infection, as from contact with some public utensil, as a public water closet, a public towel, or a drinking cup. So rare is this unfortunate accident, however, that we may say that intercourse in undefiled wedlock results normally in pleasure and gratification to both parties; while intercourse out of wedlock, or illicit intercourse, is destined, as a rule, to be visited with retribution.

There was pushback, of course -- not everyone was a moralistic asshole, not even in 1916. The immediate response to Hall's book came from Dr. William J. Robinson, who, unfortunately for Hall, was editor of the American Journal of Urology and Sexology. My favorite bit from his review (which Burroway quotes at length):

Venereal disease is Nature’s retribution for illicit intercourse. And what is measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria a retribution for? What is consumption, cancer, heart disease, Bright’s disease, a retribution for?

Some years before, biologist Ilya Mechnikov addressed the same issue, in rather more moderate tones:

In the question of the prevention of syphilis, the moral problem is still more easy to settle. … The certainty of safety from this disease might render extra-conjugal relations more frequent, but if we compare the evil which might come from that with the immense benefit gained in preventing so many innocent persons from becoming diseased, it is easy to see which side the scale dips.

Now, lest you think that this is all a nice little historical quirk, think about the current outcry in some quarters against PReP and the use of a potential HIV vaccine. The surface reason is that these measures will encourage people to be careless. I suspect you don't have to dig very far to uncover an underlying assumption: promiscuity is bad. (Even in Mechnikov's comment, there is the underlying assumption that "illicit" sex is wrong, but we must protect the "innocents.")

This is not an attitude that has left us. Do I need to draw the obvious comparison to the "right to life" anti-abortion activists -- who are now revealing themselves as not just opposed to abortion, but to any form of birth control? Yes, it's heavily involved with misogyny, and it comes from the "Christian" right -- the same group that is so obsessed with gay sex, which is, by definition, "illicit." The assumption is that any sex outside of what they deem appropriate is due for punishment, whether it be some horrible disease or merely an unwanted baby that you can't care for. (I'm not going to go into what sorts of sexual behavior are "natural" for human beings -- going back into history and looking at the behaviors of our closest relatives, there are all sorts of things going on, from monogamy to alpha males keeping harems to free love. I'll let the anthropologists sort it out.)

But it's not only about sex -- it's about the whole idea of disease as a "punishment," which on its face is ridiculous -- unless, of course, you subscribe to the belief that we are all born bad. Needless to say, I don't subscribe to the idea of "original sin." My sins, such as they are, are my own, thank you very much, and I'm not about to ask forgiveness for being born.

And I'm afraid that, try as I might, I can't ascribe this idea to anything other than a world view that tries to dictate to nature how it's supposed to behave. (One of my favorite quotes from former Senator Frothy Mix runs to the effect that birth control, etc., are bad because they lead to sexual behavior that isn't the way it's "supposed to be.")

The problem is, nature isn't listening.

Do read Burroway's entire post -- it's quite illuminating.

The FDA's New Blood Ban

Which is what it amounts to. Towleroad has the most complete summary of the situation I've seen so far:

The new changes would finally allow gay men to participate in blood drives provided that they had not engaged in sexual contact with other men for at least a year, however.

Here's the agency's press release, which makes a lot of claims but doesn't quite convince me:

Over the past several years, in collaboration with other government agencies, the FDA has carefully examined and considered the available scientific evidence relevant to its blood donor deferral policy for men who have sex with men, including the results of several recently completed scientific studies and recent epidemiologic data. Following this review, and taking into account the recommendations of advisory committees to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA, the agency will take the necessary steps to recommend a change to the blood donor deferral period for men who have sex with men from indefinite deferral to one year since the last sexual contact.

John Aravosis has a good post with some of the responses, as does Joe Jervis.

I'm usually willing to acknowledge baby steps in the right direction, but there is simply no justification for the FDA's recommended change; of course, there was no justification for the lifetime ban to begin with. From all I've been able to find, the new policy does not reflect current science or accepted procedures for other groups. As HRC noted in its response, "The American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers, and the American Association of Blood Banks have characterized the blood ban as medically and scientifically unwarranted as far back as 2006."

Seems like Obama hasn't been all that successful in weeding out the homophobia in the Executive Branch.

The Universe Is A Crapshoot

Which is the way I normally state the position taken in this post by Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo. He starts off:

Psychologists at the Yale Mind and Development Lab explore the human tendency to believe that "everything happens for a reason."

We look for causes. I don't really know if this is hard-wired or the results of millennia of conditioning, but we do. From the article he cites:

This tendency to see meaning in life events seems to reflect a more general aspect of human nature: our powerful drive to reason in psychological terms, to make sense of events and situations by appealing to goals, desires and intentions. This drive serves us well when we think about the actions of other people, who actually possess these psychological states, because it helps us figure out why people behave as they do and to respond appropriately. But it can lead us into error when we overextend it, causing us to infer psychological states even when none exist. This fosters the illusion that the world itself is full of purpose and design.

I take this as the basis of our tendency to personify animals and objects, to ascribe meanings and motivations that may or may not there. (In the case of animals, probably, although we may not really understand their motivations, which is one reason birds fascinate me: they're sometimes fairly inscrutable, such as when a whole flock just suddenly takes wing for no apparent reason. And cats are the masters of inscrutability. Objects? Not so much.) Ultimately, it's the basis of religion: natural phenomena become persons of great power and sometimes inscrutable motives -- gods and spirits. (The article notes that many people believe this tendency is the result of religious belief. It's actually the other way around.)

The consequences can be devastating:

Whatever the origin of our belief in life’s meaning, it might seem to be a blessing. Some people find it reassuring to think that there really are no accidents, that what happens to us — including the most terrible of events — reflects an unfolding plan. But the belief also has some ugly consequences. It tilts us toward the view that the world is a fundamentally fair place, where goodness is rewarded and badness punished. It can lead us to blame those who suffer from disease and who are victims of crimes, and it can motivate a reflexive bias in favor of the status quo — seeing poverty, inequality and oppression as reflecting the workings of a deep and meaningful plan.

I'm not sure that these are the best examples -- poverty, inequality, and oppression are not random events: there are human actors involved somewhere along the line. (Just think about the increase in poverty and the steady decline in the standard of living for most of us in the richest country on earth. Sorry, that didn't just happen.) But for victims of natural disasters and just plain old accidents, the conclusion can hold true. In Sullivan's words,"$#!+ happens." For a religious believer, "It's God's will," whatever variety of god you happen to believe in.

There. That should be something to chew on for a while. And do click through and read Sullivan's post. It's not terribly long, but it's incisive.

Today's Must-Read

Interesting post by Digby today on something that has become a big flaw in our public discourse, starting with a quote from this interview with Reza Aslan:

... someone like Sam Harris or Bill Maher sees religion as defining people of faith, their values, their motivations, and I see people as defining their religion.

Or, to put in in my own words: You can find something in just about any sacred text to justify what you wanted to do anyway. The glaring example of that, of course, is the self-styled "Christians" who are locked into Leviticus and a genital-based morality.

Digby goes on:

We know too many religious people of different faiths for whom religion is just one part of who they are and who are completely balanced, tolerant, open and often evolving in their interpretation of their faith not to. I also know atheists who take a fundamentalist point of view and are totally intolerant of any challenge to their worldview.

I got into a "discussion," if you want to call it that, in a comment thread with a woman who quickly revealed herself to be about the most fundamental of fundamentalists. She kept throwing out bizarre "arguments," which I answered with facts. She finally resorted to calling me a child of Satan. What was instructive, aside from her lack of general knowledge about the world in general, was her complete inability to entertain the idea that a differing point of view could be valid.

Digby notes that "There is more to human behavior than religions belief." That's undeniably true, and those who rely on religious belief to explain everything are missing a lot. (And, as Digby also points out, this does not excuse atheists, who may not subscribe to religion per se, but too often share the same mindset.) There is a tendency to see the world in black and white, although I'm not ready to ascribe that tendency to a certain group: it's a matter of basic psychology that we first classify things according to stereotypes; it's only as we come to know more that we modify those classifications, add a little nuance to our perceptions. It strikes me that some people don't want to learn more, perhaps because it challenges their assumptions, which makes them uncomfortable. (Alright, it scares the bejeezus out of them.) I guess I can think my lucky stars that I grew up in a family that valued learning and managed to avoid having my innate curiosity educated out of me. (Strangely enough, my sister is one of the least curious people I know.) Hence my basic philosophy: Poke it and see what it does. The beginnings of the scientific method.

Aslan, early on, makes one very important point:

So let’s say you had Bill Maher and Sam Harris as a sort of captive audience in a lecture hall for a half hour, and only a half hour. What would you focus on? What do you want them to hear that you don’t think they’re hearing?

This is going to sound odd to say, but probably nothing, because when you are dealing with that kind of level of certainty, whether you are talking about a religious fundamentalist, or an atheist fundamentalist, which is precisely what someone like Sam Harris is, it’s really a waste of time to try to argue either data points or logical reasoning, because they have already made up their mind and it becomes kind of useless to have that kind of conversation.

See my anecdote above, about the woman who called me a child of Satan.

The interview is a must-read, as are Digby's comments.

Saturday Science: On "Natural Law"

I'm sure that you've all heard of the Catholic doctrine of "natural law," particularly regarding human sexuality. Well, it seems to have nothing to do with nature, as evidence this story about flamingos at the Edinburgh Zoo:

“When the first egg arrived the parenting couple got really excited and accidentally knocked it off the nest – their natural instinct was then to abandon the egg.

“We don’t usually intervene with our flamingo flock but as this was our first egg since 2010, we carefully picked it up and placed it back on the nest.

“Luckily, one of our same-sex male couples went straight onto the nest, fostered the egg and raised it as their own.”

This is not all that rare. We all remember Silo and Roy at the Bronx Zoo, the inspiration for the book And Tango Make Three -- which, incidentally, tops the banned books list regularly.

So, homosexual behavior occurs in nature rather more frequently than the Catholic bishops would like to admit -- it's been observed in over 450 vertebrate species, in everything from mating rituals to pair bonding.

As for raising offspring:

“We’ve been able to utilise these male male bonds and it’s working out fairly well. Male male pairs are equally able to rear youngsters.”

Same-sex animal pairings raising neglected babies is common both in zoos and in the wild.

Earlier this year, a Kent zoo said that a pair of gay penguins who are raising a baby together are doing a much better job than their straight counterparts.

That holds true of humans, as well (here's a fairly recent review of the literature in this area, and here's a report from the American Psychological Association). And then there's the recent Australian study (Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families) that indicates that children raised by same-sex couples score higher in general health and happiness.

One other thing about "natural law" -- its conflation of sex and reproduction. Unfortunately for the bishops, people mostly don't have sex to make babies -- they have sex because it feels good.

There's a much politics as science in this, for a good reason: the story about the flamingos hit me about the same time this one did, featuring this quote from Cardinal Raymond Burke:

If homosexual relations are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are — reason teaches us that and also our faith. . . .

Based on evidence from reality, there's obviously a lot more faith than reason in the Church's teachings on sexuality, which, given its conflation of sex and child-rearing, makes the ability of same-sex parents to successfully raise children a key issue. Oh, and one other thing keeps popping into my head on this topic: Control sex and you control the people.

Not that the Church would ever do that.

About Those "Sissies"

Offered without comment:

OK, without much comment: This is a film that should be distributed in places like Uganda, Nigeria, Russia, where they still hold to those stereotypes, which at this point are laughable in any civilized nation.

And no, I'm not an athlete, or a Navy Seal, or mountain climber, or any of those real macho types, but you know something? People don't mess with me on the street.

"I don't hate gays, but. . . ."

We're starting to hear that more and more. Jean Ann Esselink at The New Civil Rights Movement knows what it means, and lays it out plainly:

There seems to be a new strategy afoot by the anti-gay forces, who for years have been successful at depriving gay Americans of equal treatment by vilifying them. For the last half century, since the time when Harvey Milk urged gays to "come out, come out wherever you are," every passing year makes that character attack less productive. It was one thing when gays could be cast as deviants and criminals and mentally ill, but people don't like their sons and brothers and friends called names and disrespected. As a result, the traditional "God hates fags" rhetoric has been softening. Gay rights opponents are transitioning to a new, more devious posture. The words may sound kinder, but the message is not.

The same politicians, pundits and priests who once stood proudly and proclaimed their opposition to gays with words like "abomination", now preface their anti-gay remarks with a phrase like: "I don't hate gay people, but..." or "I have nothing against gay people but..." I named this tactic the "gay but" a few years ago after Rick Santorum was ballsy enough to speak those very words on camera.

What you need to remember about the "gay but" phenomenon is that what comes after "I don't hate gays but..." is usually an example of the hatred the speaker has just denied.

"Hate" is a stronger word than I would use, but considering the source is bigotry, maybe that's the right word after all. And the last comment there is key: consider "but" a flag announcing that you should ignore everything that came before -- the "I don't hate gays" part, which is a thinly disguised lie -- because what comes after the "but" is the real substance, which usually translates to something like "I just don't think they should be considered human beings."

One of the commenters brought up the equivalence with "Hate the sin, love the sinner," another one of those assaults on language and reason. That one is even better at demonstrating how these "Christians" (because they are almost always "Christians") can weave falsity into anything: the "sin" of course, is homosexual behavior, a viewpoint based not on any real understanding of morality but on cherry-picking 3,000 year-old (at least) tribal taboos from their holy book, the holy book of a tribe of nomads who considered women and children property and whose prime directive was "spawn 'til you die." (What is morality? Good question. Let's start with the idea that it has to do with the way you treat others, not what you do with your genitals.) What they don't admit is that that behavior is a result of an essential component of the "sinner's" identity: contrary to what the ex-gay movement preaches (a movement, let us note, that at present is in tatters because it is based on that lie), same-sex orientation is an integral part of one's personality and identity, which is the thing that makes the "love the sinner" part complete bullshit.

Go read Esselink's article. It's worth it.

Saturday Science: "It Takes a Village. . ."

to raise a child."

It seems that there is an evolutionary advantage in altruistic behavior, which seems like a no-brainer, but scientists have to be able to point to specifics. And now it looks as though a group of researchers has found something significant:

Until now, many researchers assumed that spontaneous altruistic behavior in primates could be attributed to factors they would share with humans: advanced cognitive skills, large brains, high social tolerance, collective foraging or the presence of pair bonds or other strong social bonds. As Burkart’s new data now reveal, however, none of these factors reliably predicts whether a primate species will be spontaneously altruistic or not. Instead, another factor that sets us humans apart from the great apes appears to be responsible. Says Burkart: “Spontaneous, altruistic behavior is exclusively found among species where the young are not only cared for by the mother, but also other group members such as siblings, fathers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles.” This behavior is referred to technically as the “cooperative breeding” or “allomaternal care.”

I've held the opinion for a while that the "nuclear family" ideal held out by the anti-gay right -- a father, a mother, 2.4 children, and a dog -- is quite recent and goes against the pattern of the real "traditional" family: parents, children, grandparents, maybe a stray aunt or uncle, and the neighbors. Looks like I was right.

And it looks like that pattern has other benefits:

The significance of this study goes beyond identifying the roots of our altruism. Cooperative behavior also favored the evolution of our exceptional cognitive abilities. During development, human children gradually construct their cognitive skills based on extensive selfless social inputs from caring parents and other helpers, and the researchers believe that it is this new mode of caring that also put our ancestors on the road to our cognitive excellence. This study may, therefore, have just identified the foundation for the process that made us human. As Burkart suggests: “When our hominin ancestors began to raise their offspring cooperatively, they laid the foundation for both our altruism and our exceptional cognition.”

That's part of the new drive to "talk to your baby" that I've been seeing around. From the New York Times:

Another idea, however, is creeping into the policy debate: that the key to early learning is talking — specifically, a child’s exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better. It turns out, evidence is showing, that the much-ridiculed stream of parent-to-child baby talk — Feel Teddy’s nose! It’s so soft! Cars make noise — look, there’s a yellow one! Baby feels hungry? Now Mommy is opening the refrigerator! — is very, very important.

Another no-brainer: the more you interact with your kid, the better the kid's cognitive development. (And let's face it: language skills are a key component of cognitive development -- that's how we interact with the world.)

So now we're starting to understand how it happened.

The Religion Excuse

Recovery is coming slowly. I think it all just caught up with me and I'm just coming out of a case of severe exhaustion. But it is getting better. Better enough that I actually decided to do a post on something that caught my eye this morning.

I've been maintaining for a while that one can find in just about any sacred text from any religious tradition something that will justify doing what you wanted to do anyway. There's a very good post at Mahablog that delves into this idea in more detail. The key comment:

When we hear about violence associated with religion, we tend to think that religion caused someone to be violent. But it isn’t that simple. Most of the time, when you look closely at “religious” violence, there are all kinds of historical, cultural and political factors mixed in as well. This is true even of episodes like the Spanish Inquisition that appeared to be about doctrinal purity; much else lurked beneath the surface. Indeed, most of the time the historical, cultural and political factors are the real drivers of the violence, and religion is called in mostly to act as a moral cover or justification.

Add things like patriotism to the mix and you get a good picture of phenomena such as the Tea Party movement, for which "America" is inextricably intertwined with "the Bible" and "the Constitution" without any clear concept of what those ideas entail. There's the same tendency to cherry-pick those parts that the devout want to follow and ignore those parts that don't fit the agenda. Thus we find egregious assholes like Joe the Plumber coming out with comments like "your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”

Unfortunately, in any viable society, they do.

Read the whole post at Mahablog. I may come back to this later, after I've done some more thinking.

Saturday Science: Smarter Than We Thought

It seems Neanderthals weren't so dumb after all.

In the past, some researchers have tried to explain the demise of the Neanderthals by suggesting that the newcomers were superior to Neanderthals in key ways, including their ability to hunt, communicate, innovate and adapt to different environments.

But in an extensive review of recent Neanderthal research, CU-Boulder researcher Paola Villa and co-author Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, make the case that the available evidence does not support the opinion that Neanderthals were less advanced than anatomically modern humans. Their paper was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

"The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there," said Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. "What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true."

The article goes on to detail some of what we have learned about the Neanderthals' ability to hunt cooperatively, use the terrain to their advantage, and evidence of symbolic thought. This article doesn't mention, however, some of the strongest evidence for the latter. See this article on the burial site at Shanidar Cave for more info on that aspect.

Solecki’s pioneering studies of the Shanidar skeletons and their burials suggested complex socialization skills. From pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves, Solecki hypothesized that flowers had been buried with the Neanderthal dead—until then, such burials had been associated only with Cro-Magnons, the earliest known H. sapiens in Europe. “Someone in the last Ice Age,” Solecki wrote, “must have ranged the mountainside in the mournful task of collecting flowers for the dead.” Furthermore, Solecki continued, “It seems logical to us today that pretty things like flowers should be placed with the cherished dead, but to find flowers in a Neanderthal burial that took place about 60,000 years ago is another matter.” Skeletons showed evidence of injuries tended and healed—indications that the sick and wounded had been cared for. Solecki’s attitude toward them was encapsulated in the title of his 1971 book, Shanidar: The First Flower People.

Ongoing studies of Neanderthal skeletons unearthed in Iraq during the 1950s suggest the existence of a more complex social structure than previously thought.  (Karen Carr)

So next time you're tempted to call someone a Neanderthal, think twice -- they may be smarter than you.