Posts
All Comments
Fox's Shep Smith put the smackdown on Ebola fear mongering in a brief but forceful statement.
Unfortunately, some of Shep's colleagues have been part of the problem. I don't do Facebook. But for those of you who do, may I suggest that this video is worth sharing? This is a video that ought to go viral (pun sort of intended, but also kind of hard to avoid).
Two items of relevance to this blog in last night's priesthood session of General Conference stood out to me. First, as President Uchtdorf described research showing that people with low skill tend to overrate their own performance, it became clear to me that he was describing the Dunning-Kruger effect. Pres. Uchtdorf didn't mention the corollary, that people with low skill also fail to recognize true competence in others. This bit of psychology is often invoked in online discussions when some ignoramus starts yammering on about things he clearly does not understand, and rejects correction. As Dunning and Kruger put it, in the abstract of one of their publications,
Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.I thought it was great that Pres. Uchtdorf injected this nerdy bit of psychology into Church discourse, and I will be interested to see if/how it is footnoted in the printed text. The overall talk was very good, and I expect that it will be widely used for fourth-Sunday lessons. Maybe we can think of other ways Dunning-Kruger is manifest amongst the Saints.
The bad news is that the Ebola outbreak is awful and is likely to get worse in western Africa. I'm feeling a little impish, so here are reasons not to worry based on the kinds of things global warming skeptics say.
1. Cases of Ebola are down in some villages, and in most of Africa and the rest of the world they remain at record lows.
2. Disease epidemiological models can be manipulated to get inflated results. They also can't take into account future medical advances.
3. Scientists who study Ebola are totally dependent on government funding. They have an incentive to make Ebola seem like a crisis.
4. The earth, and humans in particular, have experienced disease outbreaks before. They're still here, and they will adapt.
5. Resources sent to Africa are a drain on our economy.
6. The Ebola scare is an excuse to give the government and the United Nations control over people's lives.
7. Even if we do contain this outbreak, Ebola will pop up somewhere else.
8. It could be that other factors like poor nutrition are more to blame.
9. Intervention efforts may actually kill more people than would die if the epidemic was left to burn itself out.
See? Problem dismissed.
Obviously this is satire, but it's worth pointing out that most of the above statements are true. How can they be both true and wrong? The answer is: context.
On the other hand, maybe there really is reason to worry. Just for fun I did a search for Ebola conspiracy theories. Should I be surprised that the Tea Party was claiming that the outbreak is part of a plot to take away our freedoms (i.e. guns)? And for the sheer fun of sheer madness, watch this:
I like how he repeatedly said, "pathenogens".
This is mostly a note for myself, but I thought I would post it for anyone interested. I've been re-reading Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, by Peter Enns. Although written for an evangelical audience, it applies almost equally well to Mormons. (I've mentioned the book before, and it is routinely recommended by Ben Spackman.) In reading chapter 2 I was struck by Enns's explanation for why Genesis resembles the older myths of other ancient cultures. Before proceeding it is important to know what Enns means by 'myth.'
Myth is an ancient, premodern, pre-scientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?
It is important to remember where Abraham came from and where he was headed....The Mesopotamian world from which Abraham came was one whose own stories of origins had been expressed in mythic categories for a considerable length of time. Moreover, the land Abraham was going to enter, the land of the Canaanites, was likewise rich in its own myths....Although the Egyptians aren't mentioned, they also had a rich mythology. That Enns builds his argument around Abraham is of special LDS interest given our Book of Abraham. However, the argument is equally applicable to Moses. God's covenant people were surrounded by powerful polytheistic cultures and empires for hundreds to thousands of years. It makes sense that they needed myths of their own, and that those myths looked somewhat similar to those of their neighbors.
As God entered into a relationship with Abraham, he "met" him where he was--an ancient Mesopotamian man who breathed the air of the ancient Near East. We must surely assume that Abraham, as such a man, shared the worldview of those whose world he shared and not a modern, scientific one. The reason the opening chapters of Genesis look so much like the literature of ancient Mesopotamia is that the worldview categories of the ancient Near East were ubiquitous and normative at the time. Of course, different cultures had different myths, but the point is that they all had them....
What makes Genesis different from its ancient Near Eastern counterparts is that it begins to make the point to Abraham and his seed that the God they are bound to, the God who called them into existence, is different from the gods around them....
We might think that such a scenario is unsatisfying because it gives too much ground to pagan myths. But we must bear in mind how very radical this notion would have been in the ancient world. For a second-millennium Semitic people...to say that the gods of Babylon were not worth worshiping but that the true god was the god of a nomad like Abraham--this was risky, ridiculous, and counterintuitive....
To put it differently, God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham--and everyone else--thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel's story would come to focus on its God, the real one.
[T]he question is not the degree to which Genesis conforms to what we would think is a proper description of origins....The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship....Genesis makes its case in a way that ancient men and women would have readily understood--indeed the only way.
Daniel Peterson spoke at the annual FAIR conference last month, and the transcript of his talk has been posted online. Peterson's talk was titled, "Some Reflections On That Letter To a CES Director," a reference to a document that has been circulating for a year or two that compiles together a lot of criticisms of the Church. Not surprisingly, the issue of DNA and the Book of Mormon was raised. After dismissing the relevance of genetics under the theory that the Book of Mormon peoples were a very small group mixing with a large established population, Peterson turned to the introduction of the Book of Mormon.
[Letter to a CES Director] “Why did the Church change the following section of the introduction page of the 2006 edition of the Book of Mormon shortly after the DNA results were released?” Quote: “The Lamanites were the principal ancestors of the American Indians” is changed to, “The Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians.”This is the kind of thing that drives believers-turned-critics crazy, and I can sympathize. I have a specific memory [1] of reading the introduction to the Book of Mormon as a missionary and coming across the passage in question. This was before DNA had become an issue, but it was still the case that virtually everyone outside the Church thought that American Indians came from Asia. I remember reading that line about the Lamanites being the "principal ancestors of the American Indians" and thinking that if the prophets and apostles were certain enough to put that in the introduction, then it must be the case.
Well, the implication is “because the DNA evidence undercut the Church’s position.” That’s not true. I happen to know the backstory, which has never been published. The backstory is, there were people who objected to that heading when it was done in the late 1970s/early 1980s. They were overruled by someone who was in a position of authority. But, they said the Book of Mormon never actually makes that claim. Don’t make the Book of Mormon claim things it doesn’t actually claim. We set ourselves up sometimes for problems when we claim things for the book, but that the book, when carefully read, does not claim for itself.
Over at his blog, Sic et Non, Daniel Peterson highlighted a Scientific American article from last June asking what happens if society stops believing in free will. The article is pay-walled but, according to Peterson's summary, experiments suggest that people become less judgmental and punitive. However, they are also more likely to act less like a Boy Scout.
Participants in scientific experiments who’ve just read a strongly anti-free-will passage seem to show a significantly greater tendency (50%!) than their fellow participants to cheat on academic tests. Other experiments showed a higher tendency to cruelty among readers of such passages, and decreased impulse control.
"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed [Federal Reserve chairman Ben] Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."Yes, in a sense money is an illusion, but it's an illusion that works [1]. However, if enough people actually came to believe that dollars, for example, were worthless, life would suddenly be a lot harder. (Even for the gold hoarders, I think, but that's a topic for another day.)
According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it's all a lie!"
Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with the remains of torn currency.
Most of our DNA probably doesn't really do anything and could be dispensed with. Some may find that statement to be surprising, but there are good reasons to believe it. "The Case for Junk DNA," published a couple of months ago at PLoS Genetics, explains some of the history behind the idea of junk DNA as well as experimental and observational support. (A layman's explanation is provided by Carl Zimmer here.) The argument rests on a few basic facts:
1. Much of our (and other organisms') genome is made up of repetitive sequences, broken genes, bits and pieces of viruses and other self-replicating virus-like elements. A few may have secondarily taken on function in helping to regulate genes, or even create new genes, but attributing some kind of essential function to most of it would be like saying that the phrase "copy and paste me" peppered throughout Shakespeare's works serves a narrative function.
2. There is no correlation between genome size and organismal complexity. As illustrated by the image below, genome size can vary widely, even between closely related lineages. (Millions of bases shown on a log scale, with the star indicating humans.)
...if most eukaryotic DNA is functional at the organism level, be it for gene regulation, protection against mutations, maintenance of chromosome structure, or any other such role, then why does an onion require five times more of it than a human?
About a month ago I was browsing through Science and noticed a review of a recent book by historian Peter Bowler. (The review requires a subscription, so instead I'll direct interested readers here for a roughly equivalent review.) His book, Darwin Deleted, imagines a world where Darwin did not exist, as a device for illuminating other ideas about evolution. Apparently he argues that if Darwin had not existed, evolution might not have been as contentious of an issue. This is because, while many religious people weren't particularly thrilled with the idea of evolution, it was natural selection as a mechanism that really got their dander up. It was just too materialistic--even for some scientists. In fact, during the early twentieth century natural selection took a back seat until the modern synthesis of the 1940s put it back in the center. As I understand it, Bowler imagines a world where evolution was accepted relatively peacefully, with natural selection being discovered later.
Bowler also argues that the atrocities of World War II would still have occurred without Darwin. This seems completely obvious to me, but a staple of anti-evolution propaganda is to blame Darwin for Hitler. In fact, just last week the Discovery Institute posted a video on YouTube doing just that. At first glance you can see why the argument appears convincing. Darwin said that evolution occurs by survival of the best adapted, so Hitler took Darwin's theory to the logical conclusion by attempting to eliminate the weak.
I can accept that some people just repeat this kind of thing because that's what they heard, but it's harder for me to believe that thinking people take such things seriously. It seems transparently nasty and dumb to me. For one thing, even if Darwin did serve as a source of Hitler's inspiration, that fact wouldn't have any logical consequence for the validity of Darwin's ideas about how nature works. (I bet the German artillery loved Newton's ideas too!) Moreover, we could hardly hold Darwin responsible for the deeds of a future sociopath. But what I find more annoying is that people who say this must ignore or forget known facts and social currents that existed independent of Darwin.
For example, animals were bred for desired traits for centuries and millennia before Darwin. Darwin himself drew on artificial selection--i.e. breeding--for his insight of natural selection. Consider the following quote:
… Experience has long since taught mankind the necessity of observing certain natural laws in the propagation of animals, or the stock will degenerate and finally become extinct. But strange to say, in regard to the human animal, these laws, except in certain particulars, are more or less disregarded in these latter times. The inevitable consequence is, the race is degenerating, new diseases are introduced, while effeminacy and barrenness are on the increase: and worse than all, this evil condition of the body has its effects upon the mind…That was George Q. Cannon writing in 1857, three years before he was called as an Apostle and a year before Darwin published Origin of Species. You could just as easily say that Hitler was applying widely accepted principles of animal breeding to humans. It simply doesn't take a theory of species formation to decide that your race (however defined) is better than others, or to hate Jews, or to be nationalist, or to think the "weak" are a drain on society, and so on. The Nazis appropriated anything that seemed to lend support to their ideology. If Darwin's theory was one of those, then that's unfortunate but it's hardly Darwin's fault (he died in 1882, for heaven's sake) and means nothing for its validity as science.
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.Oh, that's terrible! Except when you look at the context you see that the sentence is the first half of a hypothetical he uses to make a point about how extinction erases the gradations between species. And considering Europe's colonial enterprise Darwin's statement probably seemed like an unremarkable prediction [1]. It's rather uncharitable to rip that sentence out of context and present it as though Darwin hoped for the extinction of other races, as the DI video does, but that's the kind of garbage I've come to expect from them.
© Blogger templates The Professional Template by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP
