Salt

Interview with Joan Roughgarden

Charles Darwin and Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden have three things in common: a fascination with barnacles, a passionate desire to understand evolution, and a knack for controversy. While writing Evolution's Rainbow a few years ago, Roughgarden concluded that the astonishing diversity of sexual types and interactions meant that Darwin's theory of sexual selection (based on competitive males and choosy females) was not just wrong, but unfixable. She wants to replace it with social selection, in which a wide variety of social interactions, say, same-sex bonding and group membership, determine an animal's reproductive success and therefore shape bodies and behaviours. Her cooperation-based theory would, she argues, explain not just the peacock's tail, but the female spotted hyena's clitoral penis, the bonobo's use of sex for bartering and bonding, and the side-blotched lizard's five sexual types. Not surprisingly, most biologists are unwilling to jettison sexual selection. Some see her critique as a political statement reflecting her experience of metamorphosing from John to Joan in her early 50s. But many others take her ideas seriously, even if they strongly disagree. Roughgarden, a practising Christian, has now ventured into the face-off between evolution and religion. Robert Adler talked to her at her San Francisco flat.

Radio Open Source Interview

I'm making a plug for myself - I may have a sentence or two on a delightful show called Open Source Radio, hosted by Christopher Lydon.  The general format had to do with God and evolution - are we hardwired to believe in God?

It's not really a question that I'm quite qualified to answer, but being on a radio show with Daniel Dennett, who is a wonderful philosopher, was just a bit too much of an excellent opportunity. 

Dennett looks a lot like my father, so I wonder if it is genetically demonstrable that big white men with beards are genetically inclined to be atheists.  Kropotkin, Marx, Dennett, de Leeuw.  I'm a short, more indian looking fellow, and I believe I got the God is Good gene.

It's possible.

But as far as my own faith goes, a theory about evolution doesn't really affect my daily work.  In fact, I don't think about evolution that much - although I think its absolutely true.  But I do have a regular sense of awe, appreciation and call that feels a lot like God.  I am fully aware that this could be part of my imagination.  And if I've evolved to have an imagination, then so be it. 

There might be concomitant political questions.  Does my religion required I feel differently about other religions?  Then the form of argument becomes a bit different.  These are properly settled and argued via other public institutions.  Sometimes religious institutions can't agree and state institutions have to get involved.

I'm comfortable being a "religious humanist."  And if human beings are inclined to believe in God, then why not?  The next question is what sort of religion is suitable for the proper, the creative, and the affirming use of our imaginations?

Sometimes I wonder, what would a religion that tried to mitigate the fanaticism of religion, that tried to put limits on the mimetic impulse of human beings, that said "religion can be a projection of our urge to slaughter and scapegoat others."   What would such a religion look like - that destroyed religion?  I admit, I have sometimes thought it looks a lot like a freer form of Catholic Christianity.  And that would be... Anglicanism.  ;)

I did offer a prayer on the show.  I will be doing mass, so if someone is able to listen to it and give me a critique, great!  I think, personally, I did poorly.

Intelligent Design

As a priest, I'm upset by the growing reliance upon even a few moderate Christians to support Intelligent Design [which I got in the new issue of New Scientist].

First, if there is such a thing as intelligent design, it is still no evidence for God.  Aliens could have  intelligently designed whatever the IDrs think was crafted. 

Second, as a science, if design is open to falsifiability, we we are putting God up to scientific scrutiny.  This may be a worthwhile task, but it is not the same as working to understand nature.

I do believe that hich school students should study epistemology,  They could compare the way religious and scientific persons know and articulate the world.  This kind of philosophical skill has some merit. 

The problem is reflecting how evolution has been incorporated into popular morality.  Does it justify the exploitation of the weak?  Eugenics?  Male promiscuity?   Christians could contribute to popular culture if they instead examined the conflation of evolution with moral thinking, rather than attacking the scientific method. 

Christians are implicitly attacking a method of thinking, not merely the theory of evolution itself. They don't have much to offer here, if only because many of the wonderful ideas and facts we know are the product of hard, scientific, empirical thinking.  Not only has science offered an understanding of truth, that truth is reliable.  It works.

What we can do is explose the limits of evolution in popular morality.  That would make sense.  But it's not science.  It's our lives. 

Update: bodyandsoul] discusses this in more detail.

H5N1 Pandemic

The Avian Flu is on a lot of people's minds....

Foreign Affairs this month had several articles on the coming pandemic.  It is deeply troubling.  In particular, scientists are worried about the virus h5n1.  It's been around since 1997, when the flu hit Hong Kong.  There have been a few press releases.   The CDC has a very ... moderate description of the avian flu.  The NIH answers some questions about this highly pathogenic disease.

It seems to have spread to humans in Vietnam.    The Wall Street Journal today has an article on a professional chicken killer - to stop the disease from spreading.

Nature has a comprehensive listing of sites and essays.

So, why are we spending so much money in Iraq, again?   The ones running the country have no sense of public, or of health.  There is no way they could put the two together.

News Diary

Medicaid

There's no such thing as a free lunch.  Until governments start putting poor people in concentration camps, states will not be able to cut health costs of the poor.  Look - a part of me is quite tired of subsidizing the costs of fast-food and tobacco companies - but the pragmatic solution is to have a single payer plan rather than our current system of arrangments.   

The WSJ reports Over the past five years state and federal spending in Mississippi on Medicaid -- the health program for the poor and disabled -- has doubled to $3.5 billion. Fully one-quarter of state residents are in the program. "Medicaid is a cancer on our state finances," says Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the former head of the Republican National Committee and a close ally of President Bush.

Barbour's solution?

The House last week passed a bill that would cut about $200 million from Medicaid, by reducing the number of prescription drugs a patient can get each month from seven to five. The legislation also would reduce the number of inpatient hospital days and emergency-room visits Medicaid will cover each year. The measure is now with the Senate, where some are pushing a bigger tax on nursing-home beds.

Meanwhile, the state is starting visits with Medicaid recipients in person to root out those who don't qualify. "I don't know if it's one person, 1% or 100,000," says Mr. Barbour. "But we owe it to the taxpayers to find out." The state also plans to give each beneficiary the option of a "medical home" -- a doctor who can conduct an annual physical and coordinate care to reduce unnecessary emergency-room visits and other waste.

You know, this is exactly the kind of problem that justifies a modest tax investment.  Of course, Mississippi couldn't go it alone because it is such a poor state.  It would need federal help.  I admit, I'm amazed that after the tobacco landfall, that Mississippi was generous enough to raise its support for medicaid.   Such a willingness to give poor, sick, handicapped elderly people a little breathing room, of course, just wouldn't be morally right for a former tobacco lobbyist - it means more taxes!

Well, one nice thing is that Bush feels confident enough [and perhaps a bit more concerned about the deficit] to screw his rich agribusiness friends [and, of course, to be fair, community development corporations].   Ending farm subsidies is something Krugman's been encouraging for ten years now.

People Believe a 'Fact' That Fits Their Views Even if It's Clearly False

Sharon Begley writes:  "People build mental models," explains Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Western Australia, Crawley, who led the study that will be published in Psychological Science. "By the time they receive a retraction, the original misinformation has already become an integral part of that mental model, or world view, and disregarding it would leave the world view a shambles." Therefore, he and his colleagues conclude in their paper, "People continue to rely on misinformation even if they demonstrably remember and understand a subsequent retraction."

How about a blog that tracks blogs that don't issue wretractions?  Make credibility an issue - as Spinsanity attempts.   And please - use Factcheck to help get your news straight.

Griswold Sermon

"Perhaps because he has had to confront his own demons and befriend them he is unafraid of the demons brought to him by those seeking his counsel and encouragement....

"Love as an abstraction is one thing, but love experienced concretely, in relationship to others is, as Dorothy Day used to say quoting Dostoyevsky, “a harsh and dreadful thing.”  It is costly and all-demanding.  It is painful and purifying.  Above all it is the work of God in us."

Sermon preached at the SSJE to celebrate a brother's 90th birthday.  Hat Tip to Dr. Harmon

Recently read from On Being Liked by James Alison:  "In the light of the salvation opened up for us by Jesus Christ, we are immersed in an ongoing process of learning something new about who we are that we didn't know, and that this discovery is learned by us through our discovering ourselves to have been wrong about who we are, in in our consequent treatment of each other and ourselves." 

and  "What forgiveness looks like ... is like we as addicts are recipients of someone loving us in such a way that he wanted us to be free from our addiction, when we didn't even know we were addicted, and he chose to set us free...  by making it visible to us that we no longer need to live in that way, and that our in our very being we can be unbound from being formed by death....  Forgiveness turns out to be a creative moving towards someone whom I am like in such a way that they will be free from death with me so that together we will be a new "we"....  It is ... a living towards running the risk of being killed by the person, over time." [p42]

Interesting...