1. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, ed. Richard Dawkins

Comment #181560 by Blake C. Stacey on May 17, 2008 at 1:07 pm

Oxford UP graciously sent me a review copy, and I wrote about it at somewhat greater length than Peter Forbes did, here:

http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=680

This concludes today's installment of Blatant Self-Promotion. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

2. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

Comment #180322 by Blake C. Stacey on May 14, 2008 at 3:11 pm

Oxford University Press graciously sent me a review copy of this anthology, and I wrote about it (with spoilers) here:

http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=680

3. Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

Comment #175611 by Blake C. Stacey on May 5, 2008 at 5:29 pm

Naug wrote,

Wilders is a moron and the film Fitna is piece of sad propaganda. If you've seen it just consider that it is in fact a 15 minute long appeal to emotion, no way make an argument. Actually, the hallmark of a bad one. Had it been 1 hour longer we might have called it Repelled - No Islam allowed.

I watched Fitna. It was insultingly bad. It took a real problem — the existence of religious doctrines which lead to violence — and spun it into a xenophobic, propagandistic piece of schlock.

That's not an argument to censor it, just a reason not to pay for it.

What I want to see is a 15-minute movie where scenes of battered wives in the American Heartland and still photos of the Abu Ghraib victims play on one side of the screen, while on the other flash Bible verses. Certain famous passages from Leviticus and Deuteronomy should do just fine, along with Luke 14:27 and Ephesians 5:24. We can play country-western music on the soundtrack, and at one point, we can throw in a bar graph showing the number of American exchange students and backpackers in Europe.

4. Religious education as a part of literary culture

Comment #161123 by Blake C. Stacey on April 14, 2008 at 9:04 pm

Come to think of it, you can't understand how Shakespeare or his audience saw the Bible by reading any of the translations in common circulation nowadays, anyway.

MelM said,

Or, why not put explanations needed for Shakespeare into editions of Shakespeare--foot notes or end notes etc. Even a companion to Shakespeare might be in order--perhaps also including some history or whatever else is needed to make the plays more understandable.

Most editions have such footnotes. In addition, Isaac Asimov wrote a companion of just that sort, called, naturally enough, Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare. I have a sentimental fondness for it.

5. Religious education as a part of literary culture

Comment #161122 by Blake C. Stacey on April 14, 2008 at 8:57 pm

The comment system ate my comment the last time I tried to say anything on this thread, so I'll just copy-and-paste something I wrote in a discussion here last December:

Typically, one reads an assertion along the following lines: "There are umpty-ump references to the Bible in Shakespeare, so in order to understand our cultural heritage, we have to learn about the Bible." To which I say, read the footnotes!

How many of those Biblical allusions can be clarified with a sentence or two, down at the bottom of the page — or by Ken Branagh's acting and direction? Furthermore, Shakespeare was not a scholar, seeking out jots and tittles of theological nicety in order to win himself tenure. He wrote for people who had heard Bible stories, and thus he gave plenty of attention to the nasty bits ("O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!") in addition to folklore which isn't in the Bible at all ("they say the owl was a baker's daughter"), not to mention an encyclopaedia's worth of Greco-Roman mythology. For his voyages into "serious literature", did Shakespeare turn to Testamental themes? No, he penned poems called The Rape of Lucrece (Roman legend) and Venus and Adonis (Greek myth, filtered through Roman authors). To understand and appreciate in fullness the Bard of Avon, shouldn't we learn about Adonis in addition to Adonai? Even the argument for "cultural heritage" leads us to abandon bibliolatry.

Then, of course, there's the English history behind, well, all the English historical plays, from King Lear right the way through to Elizabeth's proud papa. I know that my own schoolbooks left the British Isles behind for most of that time period, focusing on Henry the Navigator while ignoring the Henry of Agincourt. The Wars of what Roses?

http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,2026,Happy-Newton-Day,Richard-Dawkins-New-Statesman,page2#99382

Bottom line: bibliolatry should not distort our view of what is actually necessary to understand history and culture.

6. 'Expelled' ripped off Harvard's 'Inner Life of the Cell' animation

Comment #159150 by Blake C. Stacey on April 11, 2008 at 1:56 pm

A fellow by the 'nym of Quidam made a very neat illustration of how plagiarized the Expelled clip is, which I've shamelessly reposted here, with due attribution:

http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=637

There is no ethical way to defend creationism, because the assertions at its core are fundamentally untrue; we are now seeing that dishonesty infect the entirety of the creationists' behavior.

7. Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Comment #150017 by Blake C. Stacey on March 26, 2008 at 11:59 am

Happy birthday! Let there be many great arguments, discoveries and other joys of the scientific life in your future.

8. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148222 by Blake C. Stacey on March 22, 2008 at 11:27 am

According to PZ, clips from the Harvard/XVIVO animation are on the DVD the Expelled people were distributing. See the footnote here:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/still_straining_to_find_an_exc.php

9. Flipping particle could explain missing antimatter

Comment #147091 by Blake C. Stacey on March 19, 2008 at 7:20 pm

The link to the actual paper is broken. This one should work:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0659

10. Fleas on the Horizon: In Defense of God

Comment #139676 by Blake C. Stacey on March 6, 2008 at 11:40 am

Ah, finally! A cookie from some random server was being blocked.

11. Fleas on the Horizon: In Defense of God

Comment #139641 by Blake C. Stacey on March 6, 2008 at 9:48 am

Norm Doering:

I tried to access your review of Vox Day's flea-book, but Blogger marks your site as "objectionable", and when I click the "go ahead" button, nothing happens. In the small hours of one insomniac night, I tried reading Vox's work myself. My reaction is recorded in the comments here:

http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2008/02/vox_day_abusing_darwin.php

12. Study: Religion colors Americans' views of nanotechnology

Comment #128731 by Blake C. Stacey on February 17, 2008 at 8:42 pm

I was going to say something fairly lengthy about this study, but I found that I mostly agreed with what Russell Blackford had to say about it:

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2008/02/religion-and-nanotechnology.html

The only thing I'd add is that I'd really like to see more details about how the respondents' level of well-informedness was measured.

13. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #116908 by Blake C. Stacey on January 27, 2008 at 7:02 pm

Who said that there is a curious effectiveness in mathematics?

Eugene Wigner called the effectivenss of mathematics "unreasonable". Many other people don't see it that way.

Any thoughts as to why mathematical reasoning corresponds so well to the physical world?

Well, first of all, a lot of mathematics was invented following the example of the physical world. So, what's the big surprise? You could probably cook up an "anthropic" argument, following Dawkins' lead (pp. 135 and following in The God Delusion), and say that any Universe which did not show the kind of regularity which we can capture in mathematics is not a Universe friendly to life, let alone intelligence. . . .

For some contemplations on this subject, including remarks by Paulos, see here:

http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2007/09/is_math_a_gift_from_god.php

14. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #116883 by Blake C. Stacey on January 27, 2008 at 5:36 pm

Oh, for crying out loud: why can't we get a review which quotes a relevant passage in full, or at least gives a complete paraphrase? I've got Irreligion right here, and I'm gonna copy a chunk of page 79. Right after the "rightfully seen as arrogant and overbearing" remark, Paulos writes the following:

It's been my experience, at least in this country, that it is more likely to be the religious who personally and aggressively question atheists' and agnostics' lack of faith or pejoratively label it as secular autism or worse. The latter question and labeling seem especially arrogant as there is no compelling argument for the existence of God.

I find it hard to disagree. The verbal assaults upon the Uppity Atheists perpetrated by "moderate" religionists and those among the godless who just want everybody to stay quiet have come to resemble a madness of the center. It's a new in-group mentality, built upon one of the oldest criteria: the people who are In are the ones who are willing to say, "Let's not rock the boat."

The only place I could find where Paulos takes a "neo-atheist" to task in a specific way is on page 110:

This phenomenon of an assumed religious inheritance and its many consequences is not necessarily "wicked" or an "abuse," as Richard Dawkins has suggested, but it does indicate that religious beliefs generally arise not out of a rational endeavor but rather out of cultural traditions and psychological tropes.

Pretty mild stuff. And even by the end of that paragraph, he's approving of Dawkins:

To refer to Catholic children, Protestant children, or Islamic children is to assume that the children automatically inherit their parents' worldview. Although often true, this assumption isn't a necessary fact of life, and, as Dawkins has wisely noted, it might be salubrious if referring to children in this way came to sound as wrong-headed as referring to them as Marxist children or capitalist children.

[emphasis added]

By the way, strong evidence exists to the effect that the story of Euler and Diderot is indeed apocryphal. The short version is that Diderot was himself a mathematician and Euler had better manners; a slightly longer retelling can be found at the following URL,

http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=433

if you'll excuse my blatant self-promotion.

15. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #110258 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 5:37 pm

Actually, around MIT, the expression has been that he's "blissfully meditating in a tank full of green tea and nanites" — but I'm not sure how widely that meme is spread.

16. The Group Delusion

Comment #110253 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 5:30 pm

Steve Zara:

Of course, this also be an attempt to further confuse Mary Midgley...

Do we really have to try?

17. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #110251 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 5:26 pm

Steve Zara:

Although it may take a lot longer than Kurzweil believes, I can't see any fundamental problem with developing AI, even if, in the end, it means actually simulating the neurons rather than programming.

Probably, there's some middle ground between the two. We might be able to simulate groups of neurons, see what they do, use some theoretical calculations to predict how those groups will interact, encapsulate groups of neurons with higher-level organizational units (cortical columns, etc.) and so forth. We could then construct AIs with some but not all of the human brain's computational abilities, or program a machine with extra copies of a particular substructure. . . .

Maybe we could make an AI with the religion circuits trimmed out?

I'd love to see this happen in my lifetime. Heck, maybe it'll happen before I get tenure (though I expect it'll be after I go bald). However, I reserve the right to feel dispirited when the most famous advocate for this whole research programme himself acts in such an unscientific way.

18. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #110244 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 5:12 pm

I'm not appealing to any magic ingredient. I just think that whether we wait ten years, twenty years, thirty years or a century for an AI to pass the Turing Test is important. Setbacks matter, particularly when you're trying to predict how, say, the organized religions of the world will react to "transhumanizing" technology. Also, the "data" which Kurzweil uses to support his claim that Strong AI will happen relatively soon (2020, 2030) is just bogus. I don't like seeing grandiose claims being founded on bad data, and to be honest, I'm a little irked that the claims are so much better known than the criticisms of them.

19. The Group Delusion

Comment #110240 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 5:06 pm

Kidding, right?
RD is the king of putting what he can into laymans terms, and especially at great risk of being ostracized as 'pop' when he started out.

No, not kidding at all.

I've been trying to read through the scholarly literature on the subject, in the peer-reviewed journals, and it's a mess — the kind of mess you get when people from different fields collide on a topic and overestimate the degree to which they understand one another.

20. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #110229 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 4:50 pm

BAEOZ:

I recall there's also a situation where a neuron can act as a coincidence detector or "AND gate", firing off an action potential when two signals arrive roughly simultaneously on two different dendrites. It's used in the inferior colliculus of barn owls, IIRC, as part of their sound-localization apparatus.

Computational neuroscience was a little too long ago for this poor brain. . . .

21. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #110226 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 4:46 pm

Sure, the human brain constitutes a proof by example that human brains are possible. But how can we say with any degree of assurance that the theoretical and technological breakthroughs necessary to duplicate that feat will ever happen?

As the saying goes, you can make a person by unskilled labor, but achieving "strong AI" — and understanding how the components work together to achieve what they do — is a more difficult task. We can't just brush off the problem with a handwave and say, "Wait until the computers double in power a few more times." First, each advance in computer power requires real work by the technologists and the engineers, and second, we have to match the power of our machines with our ability to program them.

We could have had blogs in 1994. We had forms-capable browsers and the ability to shuffle text, didn't we? But, instead of the blogosphere, we got GeoCities. The socially transformative power of technology does not keep in lockstep with the theoretical potential of technology, and that potential can often only be assessed in retrospect.

22. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #110207 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 4:11 pm

Big City:

That wasn't my complaint. Sure, if you could somehow read the state of each neuron in my head and feed that to an emulator program running on some computer, then you might well be able to create a copy of me inside the machine. I find that a wholly believable concept. My problem is that Kurzweil invents the data to support claims like, "A computer with the power to reproduce the human brain will arise in 2025." He contends that Moore's Law is a special case of some grander principle, a principle which will make the increase of computer power to the necessary level an inevitable occurrence — and the glossy, stylish graphs he trots out to support that idea are total bollocks.

23. The Group Delusion

Comment #110203 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 4:02 pm

To an outsider like me (I'm a physics boffin), this area is probably the most confusing in biology, thanks in large part to the tangled terminology. More than once, I've watched arguments unfold (in Q&A sessions after talks and such) in which the participants might well have been agreeing, but neither knew what the other meant when they said "group selection".

A physicist with an interest in biology and some familiarity with the theoretical literature says, "I've created this model and made a computer simulation which shows such-and-such an effect happening. I think it counts as altruism. Does this show up in biology anywhere?"

The biologist says, "Sure, that's just kin selection."

"Well, maybe, but there's this extra assumption in so-and-so's mathematical model of kin selection which I don't think is satisfied by my model."

"What assumption is that?"

"There's this thing about populations distributed across space, and this other thing about the mapping from genotypes to fitness not being constant over time, and. . ."

The physicist starts trying to draw equations in midair using rapid, wiggly hand and finger gestures.

"Yeah, yeah, but what else could it be, other than kin selection?"

"It, er, it looks a little like we're seeing the emergence of trait groups — "

"Group selection? That's impossible!"

And round and round we go, circling the drain of comprehension. It's really rather disheartening.

24. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up

Comment #110083 by Blake C. Stacey on January 10, 2008 at 1:07 pm

In reply to Big City's comment 88:

A great set of books on the topic, for any level of reader/interest, are Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and "The Singularity is Near". They are two of the most interesting books I have read. They should give you a very good grasp of the topic.

Kurzweil always makes my head spin. He takes the valid point that once you accept the mind has a material origin (in the electrochemical, biological processes of the brain), then you should acknowledge that a mind could also be implemented on a different physical platform — and then he overlards that point with obscurantism and misrepresentation. His "Law of Accelerating Returns" is nothing more than bad statistics applied to an understanding of biology, physics and cosmology on the level of the inside front cover of popularized science books. Predicting the date of the "Singularity" by extrapolating Moore's Law is the futurist's version of calculating the age of the Earth by adding up the lifetimes in Genesis. Gah!

For a classic demonstration of this point, see this by PZ Myers:

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/singularly_silly_singularity/

I met Kurzweil a few years ago, and he seemed like a nice fellow (he and I actually belonged to the same fraternity chapter at MIT, although many years apart). But damn, he can say some goofy stuff.

As for the new Paulos book: I liked it. Concise, perhaps a little choppy in places, leavened with humor.

25. What have you changed your mind about? Why?

Comment #105624 by Blake C. Stacey on January 1, 2008 at 9:12 am

I suspect there's more going on with altruism than we've figured out yet — that this sort of story will play out again with other mathematical models, particularly when we look at new situations where randomly varying replicators experience non-random survival. Who's to say what kind of selection predominates with memes, for example, or in neuron wiring or in the competition between clonal lineages of B lymphocytes? I have the gut feeling that our familiar experience with kin selection won't translate perfectly well, and we'll be needing new mathematical models — but that's just my gut doing the thinking.

Happy New Year, everybody!

26. Archbishop of Canterbury Praises Richard Dawkins

Comment #104389 by Blake C. Stacey on December 28, 2007 at 12:11 pm

I think that "Professor Dawkins' understanding of the beauty of the world around us" far exceeds that of any sixteenth-century mystic, for the simple reason that he — and most of the people commenting on this website — knows more about that world around us than did the mystics of a less enlightened age.

27. This Week's Flea

Comment #100465 by Blake C. Stacey on December 18, 2007 at 4:45 pm

RascoHeldall wrote,

I am half-tempted to become a Flea myself and write my own response to Dawkins, so pitiful is the general standard of argument in these things. How hard can it be to actually READ what someone writes?

Or is strawmanning obligatory with these things?

I'm actually planning to do just that, starting in about a month (when a few more pressing obligations will hopefully be concluded). I enjoyed The God Delusion quite a lot, but like many of my fellow Uppity Atheists, I have my bones to pick with it, some simply due to my having been trained in physics instead of biology. When I realized how thoroughly bankrupt the replies from the theologians' corner were turning out to be, I figured I might as well provide the elaboration, critique and sequel myself.

I was going to do this during that whole "write a book during November" shindig, but earning a living had to come first.

28. Happy Newton Day!

Comment #99382 by Blake C. Stacey on December 16, 2007 at 2:14 pm

For better or worse, ours is historically a Christian culture, and children who grow up ignorant of biblical literature are diminished, unable to take literary allusions, actually impoverished.

This is actually the part of Dawkins' standard argument set with which I have the strongest quarrel. (As a physics boffin, I naturally have some disputes with the way biologists have talked about issues in present-day physics, but such debates tend to become esoteric quickly.) Typically, one reads an assertion along the following lines: "There are umpty-ump references to the Bible in Shakespeare, so in order to understand our cultural heritage, we have to learn about the Bible." To which I say, read the footnotes!

How many of those Biblical allusions can be clarified with a sentence or two, down at the bottom of the page — or by Ken Branagh's acting and direction? Furthermore, Shakespeare was not a scholar, seeking out jots and tittles of theological nicety in order to win himself tenure. He wrote for people who had heard Bible stories, and thus he gave plenty of attention to the nasty bits ("O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!") in addition to folklore which isn't in the Bible at all ("they say the owl was a baker's daughter"), not to mention an encyclopaedia's worth of Greco-Roman mythology. For his voyages into "serious literature", did Shakespeare turn to Testamental themes? No, he penned poems called The Rape of Lucrece (Roman legend) and Venus and Adonis (Greek myth, filtered through Roman authors). To understand and appreciate in fullness the Bard of Avon, shouldn't we learn about Adonis in addition to Adonai? Even the argument for "cultural heritage" leads us to abandon bibliolatry.

Then, of course, there's the English history behind, well, all the English historical plays, from King Lear right the way through to Elizabeth's proud papa. I know that my own schoolbooks left the British Isles behind for most of that time period, focusing on Henry the Navigator while ignoring the Henry of Agincourt. The Wars of what Roses?

It might be a fun idea to build a semester-long class around a couple Shakespeare plays, going over the historical and mythological background necessary to pick up all the references which the Elizabethan audience would have instantly grokked. My high school offered a full class on Greek and Roman myths, so it's not a difficult elective to imagine — but would I demand teaching that material instead of biology, algebra or civics? There are only so many hours in a school day, mind.

I could propose a much better secular argument for religious education, of the descriptive rather than the doctrinaire kind: it might do a little to help keep religion from screwing up the world too badly. This rationale is no doubt troubling to those who do not have a secular view, and might be a harder sell than some pretty praise for "cultural heritage" and repairing children's "impoverishment". Since we are all familiar with this argument, we also know the worry which comes bundled with it: in America, won't religion classes be subverted by the religionists and turned into instruments of proselytization? I wonder if distributing the "religion curriculum" we advocate for secular reasons across multiple classes — history, literature, even civics and government — might be a better way to keep such influences at bay.

29. ...and another FLEA...

Comment #96390 by Blake C. Stacey on December 10, 2007 at 1:18 pm

Man, that typeface takes me back. Suddenly, I have the urge to challenge the MCP to a light-cycle game.