1. This Is Not a Test

Comment #99905 by M31 on December 17, 2007 at 7:47 pm

> No one voted for Nader because people ignore him on the ballot as they think they are "wasting" their vote on a candidate that does not have a chance.

I'm not convinced that this is true. The reason most people don't vote for Nader is because they disagree with his policies. I voted for him in 2000, but I didn't in 2004 and I wouldn't vote for him if he were running in 2008. This is not because I don't think he can be elected, or because I'm afraid of wasting my vote when I could use it toward preventing some really bad republican from getting elected. It's because I don't think he'd make a very good president, atheist/agnostic or not.

2. Chimps beat humans in memory test

Comment #94004 by M31 on December 4, 2007 at 3:11 pm

This is very interesting. But, one thing to keep in mind is that the chimps doing the tests had been trained from a very young age to do this test, and the one they really focus on is the best chimp out of a pool of chimps that were trained in this way. To really do a fair comparison I think they'd need to have the chimps go up against humans that have been practicing this test from a very young age. In any case I guess it's not really that surprising that chimps may have quicker visual reflexes than humans.

3. The planet hunters

Comment #47269 by M31 on June 3, 2007 at 8:29 pm

MelM:
Thanks for the post, that's quite amusing to me that YECs take hot jupiters as evidence for creation. Never mind the fact that there are actually some fairly robust theories of migration (and in fact, that the biggest theoretical problem has always been stopping migration not starting it) - whenever they don't understand something (or, I suspect, when they hear a scientist say that s/he doesn't understand something presently) it automatically means that there will never be a natural explanation for it, ergo it was created.

What's particularly laughable to me though is their statement that hot jupiters are no problem for creation. Of course, nothing at all is ever a problem for creation - the universe could have been created in any possible state. In fact, I've never really understood why they wouldn't just say "God created the universe to look like it arose from natural processes" and then not worry about it any more, it seems far easier for them to do than adopting this stupid stance of trying to come up with hairbrained explanations for why all ages and dates measured by scientists are wrong. It just makes them look completely ignorant (I suppose that answers my question though).

4. If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

Comment #46624 by M31 on May 31, 2007 at 9:42 pm

The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but already some worry that it raises troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry -- rather than free will -- might diminish the importance of personal responsibility. Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

Statements like this always confuse me. If it's demonstrated that morality is fundamentally brain chemistry (and honestly, I think it'd be a much bigger surprise if it isn't), then that's just how things are. Why does it matter whether or not philosophers and theologians are troubled? Who cares? If they are worried that the knowledge that morality is fundamentally brain chemistry will cause people to act less morally or lose their sense of personal responsibility, they should do a controlled experiment to test that hypothesis. Just talking about it and being troubled by the possibility is useless.

5. Two idiots get a forum

Comment #35676 by M31 on April 28, 2007 at 8:32 am

I can't believe they would give the banana video guy a forum on ABC!... Geez. I hope the rational response squad people will bring a wild banana with them just to show how 10000 years of human cultivation and selective breeding have led to a banana that's long, tasty and seedless.

6. Study: Religion is Good for Kids

Comment #34963 by M31 on April 25, 2007 at 6:11 pm

It's hard to tell how much stock to put in the result without seeing the paper and numbers for the correlation. Nonetheless, I don't think it's good practice to go about distrusting correlations simply because we don't like them - if the correlation is signficant, then I think the relation is a fact, and we shouldn't just simply deny it. It's hard to say though whether religion is causing the good behavior or whether parents with good behaving kids are more likely to go to church regularly...

Taking it at face value, and supposing that religion is the cause of the good behavior. I think there are a number of reasons why that might be the case. First of all note that presumably a child is being rated as well behaved if s/he listens to the adults and obeys their instructions. That is a big emphasis of religion, especially for kids - listening to authority. So it's not surprising to me that kids who are religious are better at listening to authorities. If they're in family's like mine, they'd get taken out and spanked if they don't sit still in church. And of course, instilling the fear of hell is a good way to motivate a kid to sit still and listen to the adults. What this doesn't address though is how good the kids will be at thinking for themselves and solving problems and so on once they grow up. I'd bet that kids who are not raised with religion will tend to be better at thinking for themselves when they grow up, but there's no way to know without doing the experiment, and it'd be an interesting puzzle if the opposite were true.

7. Potentially habitable planet found

Comment #34939 by M31 on April 25, 2007 at 4:00 pm

Nonetheless, this is still an incredibly cool result! Particularly that they can detect a planet that's only 5 earth masses with radial velocity!

8. Potentially habitable planet found

Comment #34938 by M31 on April 25, 2007 at 3:57 pm

"There is a very big jump from a planet being able to support "life" and finding "intelligent life," no?"

Indeed, it's by no means clear that this planet actually could support life either. There is some reason to think that any volatiles (like water) that might have been present during the formation of this planet were boiled off long ago when the star was quite a bit brighter than it is now (M-dwarfs take a long time to settle down onto the main sequence, and they remain active for billions of years). I think the best you can really say is that it's the first exo-planet that we cannot summarily rule out having a surface with liquid water. If we could find one of these things in transit then you could determine the planets density and maybe have an idea of whether or not it's an ocean planet... but even then, as you say, the leap from a planet with liquid water to life (and then intelligent life) is by no means secure.

9. Thanks for the Facts. Now Sell Them.

Comment #31904 by M31 on April 14, 2007 at 10:58 pm

I think this article really misses a fundamental point that people like Dawkins have made crystal clear: that darwinian evolution IS fundamentally in conflict with any substantial religion. The creationists are right to think that evolution leads to atheism - it does!

They give no example of what would be a good or effective way to sell evolution without dealing with one of its fundamental implications: that every organized religion is *wrong*. Frankly, I don't think it's possible - you can't shy away from the implications of the fact that we are actually descended from bacteria and that there was no guiding hand in the process. Churches often recognize this and that's why they present such a strong opposition to evolution. You have to deal with this directly, you can't hide the issue or point to the handful of scientists who have managed to compartmentalize their thoughts.

Ultimately, I think it can only be the facts that sell evolution. I don't know of anyone who has done a better job of explaining the facts and their implications in an absolutely clear way than Richard Dawkins.

10. The God Debate

Comment #29139 by M31 on April 1, 2007 at 8:49 pm

DavidMarsh: ""If there is no God, if I am simply complicated ooze, then the truth is, your life doesn't matter, my life doesn't matter."

Why can't they (religious people) accept that we have it within us to make our own lives meaningful and not rely on the big sky fairy to give it meaning?"

I agree very much with you here David. Furthermore, I wonder why some theists are so offended by nature and the world around them. Why is it "just" "complicated ooze"? - why not "Isn't it amazing that we are made of atoms?! The same thing the mountains and trees and fish and zebra and the sun and all the stars and planets in the galaxy are made of! We are fundamentally a part of nature!" Why is it so depressing that long long ago our ancestors were unicellular organisms struggling to make it on a vast and barren planet? Why do they have to assume that we are fundamentally separate from nature to have meaning in their lives?

Finally, I don't understand how making our lives subject to the whims of a deity gives them meaning. In particular, the notion that this life is rotten and that all that matters is that you believe a certain legend so that your soul goes to heaven seems to take away meaning from life rather than adding any meaning to it.

11. The God Debate

Comment #29125 by M31 on April 1, 2007 at 6:28 pm

It's amusing that Warren ended with Pascal's wager. It could also be that there is an afterlife in which non-theists and skeptics are given eternal paradise while believers are punished forever - or any permutation thereof. Theists have no default advantage when it comes to an afterlife - it's the same gamble for everyone.

12. Snake Oil and Holy Water

Comment #28348 by M31 on March 28, 2007 at 9:44 pm

This is really a remarkable essay both for its insight as well as its clarity.

13. Out There

Comment #25393 by M31 on March 12, 2007 at 10:28 pm

"why on earth should scientists believe that - if the LHC creates any - they will ever find out about it?"

I think the possible dark matter candidates that they hope to create would react slightly with normal matter (usually via the strong or weak force), but only under special circumstances. For example, axions supposedly could turn into photons in the presence of very strong magnetic fields.

14. Conservapedia v Wikipedia

Comment #24613 by M31 on March 7, 2007 at 3:17 pm

Some hilarious snippets from the conservapedia tirade against wikipedia:

1. Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception.

9. Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation." Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.[9] Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family) and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.

15. Why there are almost no genuine atheists

Comment #24487 by M31 on March 6, 2007 at 9:47 pm

29. Comment #24480 by Liveliest Crib:

Brilliant post!

16. Religion and Politics

Comment #24486 by M31 on March 6, 2007 at 9:38 pm

30. Comment #24371 by nvlawyer: "A scientist might have faith that there is life on other planets, but he may not believe in God. It still takes faith to motivate him towards doing something more than what has been done in the past."

Others have addressed this statement very nicely, but it's one that I see come up a lot (essentially equating a porported "faith" in extraterrestrial life with faith in God) and it really bothers me. There is a huge difference between suspecting that there exists extraterrestrial life and believing in God. The hypothesis of extraterrestrial life is an inference based on our understanding of the processes that may have given rise to life on this planet, and thus has some evidence making the hypothesis reasonable.

I would argue by analogy. Twenty years ago the only planets we knew of were the ones in our solar system. Yet if you had asked any astronomer whether or not they thought planets exist around other stars they would have said "almost certainly yes". Was this just a complete leap of faith based on their own hope that we are in fact not special? No, it was motivated in part by our theory of how the planets in our own solar system formed. That theory, developed to explain the observations in our own solar system, implied that planet formation should be a natural result of star formation and that many other stars should therefore have planets. So indeed it came as no surprise when astronomers started finding other planets in the 90s. What was surprising was that there was a whole variety of solar systems (ones with very hot gas giants, ones with eccentric orbits) that had not been anticipated and has thus required revisions of our theories - the basic principles though seem to be holding up.

Similarly, the theory of evolution by natural selection suggests that, once you get a self-replicating molecule, natural selection can act to create very complex forms of life. So already the difficulty of producing life is reduced substantially. The question is how easy is it to form the replicators? While I don't think we really know, it apparently didn't take very long for them to appear on the Earth (within a few hundred million years of the Earth becoming habitable) and so it might be something that happens quite easily. It's a reasonable hypothesis, and if true it would suggest that life is very common in the cosmos. Note that the theory of planet formation similarly had some loose ends analogous to the formation of the initial replicators - it had been unclear how to go from small grains of dust to big boulders in a protoplanetary debris disk, and while there has been considerable theoretical progress on this question, we now know empirically that it's a problem that nature has solved.

Over the last half a millenium we have repeatedly learned that we are not very special. So there is some sense in feeling confident about hypotheses based on that principle - but no one would have a religious "faith" in such a hypothesis until it has been empirically confirmed. Moreover, the hypothesis has to have something besides just this principle for people to be confident in it. For example, do I think that somewhere in the galaxy there are other aliens speaking english? No, I doubt it. Why? Because the evolution of a specific language is largely random (in terms of what sounds go to what concepts), and is unlikely to be repeated exactly in a few hundred billion trials (number of stars in the galaxy). Do I think that somewhere in the galaxy there is a creature with something like an eye? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is true since the evolution of the eye on Earth was largely fostered by the presence of copious visible wavelength photons from the sun being transmitted by the atmosphere - a condition that is likely to be repeated on earth-like planets around other sun-like stars.

17. Why there are almost no genuine atheists

Comment #24443 by M31 on March 6, 2007 at 5:29 pm

Conversely, when one presses a purported atheist, one almost always finds that the person believes in various propositions that simply don't make sense without a belief in some source of an ultimate moral order, i.e., what most people would call "God." For instance, almost everyone who claims to be an atheist still makes lots of "ought" statements, as in "we ought to preserve biological diversity," or what have you.

Nonsense. There is no need to suppose an ultimate moral order to say something "ought" be done. I say something ought be done because my brain prefers certain outcomes and will have good or bad feelings when different things happen (they are either hardcoded in to begin with, or they may be preferences that are generated over my life by the interaction between the machine that is my brain and its inputs). The preferences and feelings are still very real (such as the desire to not see my best friend visciously murdered, and the sense of grief that would accompany such an event), and I will continue to act on them. There is no need to suppose that these preferences are dictated by an external super-being.

18. God: The Failed Hypothesis

Comment #24110 by M31 on March 4, 2007 at 9:29 pm

Quite interesting. I particularly like his discussion of how Noether's theorem eliminates the need to posit an intelligent being to create the laws of physics.

19. Atheists come in last

Comment #22897 by M31 on February 23, 2007 at 10:13 pm

If you look at
http://www.pollingreport.com/politics.htm
you get a sense for how these numbers have changed over time.

Some of the ones of interest here:
Atheist -
Date: Yes No Unsure
2/9-11/07 45% 53% 3%
2/19-21/99 49% 48% 3%
9/10-15/58 18% 77% 5%

Homosexual -
Date: Yes No Unsure
2/9-11/07 55% 43% 2%
2/19-21/99 59% 37% 4%
4/29-5/2/83 29% 64% 7%
7/21-24/78 26% 66% 8%

It looks like we've come a long way since 1958, but no change for the better since 99 (for atheists or homosexuals).

20. Ancient boy's skeleton sparks evolution debate

Comment #21155 by M31 on February 7, 2007 at 7:40 pm

I like this quote:

"Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his," Leakey, who founded the museum's prehistory department, told The Associated Press. "The bishop is descended from the apes and these fossils tell how he evolved."

21. Some stars and planets in scale

Comment #18591 by M31 on January 21, 2007 at 10:08 pm

This is such a nice demonstration, I'm always expecting it to end at Betelgeuse, but it keeps going on!

It is kind of sad that Uranus gets overlooked so much nowadays just because its somewhat unfortunate name makes it the butt of so many jokes. I guess for this demo they figure that Uranus and Neptune are almost the same size so it doesn't add much to include it. In the exo-planet field people always talk about looking for Neptunes or "Hot Neptunes" around other stars, but never a Hot Uranus Search, for obvious reasons I suppose.