People to Watch- David Berlinski

He is the author of numerous books, including The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and It Scientific Pretensions (Crown Forum, 2008; Basic Books, 2009), Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics for the Modern Library series at Random House (2004), The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky (Harcourt, 2003), The Advent of the Algorithm (Harcourt Brace, 2000), Newton’s Gift (Free Press, 2000), and A Tour of the Calculus (Pantheon, 1996). William F. Buckley Jr. said of The Devil’s Delusion that “Berlinski’s book is everything desirable; it is idiomatic, profound, brilliantly polemical, amusing, and of course vastly learned.

”

Why humans sing?

According to David Attenborough;

It's tempting to think that human beings very early in their history used music in a similar way. And there can be little question that a male with a good singing voice in our own society today is still a source of sexual attraction and excitement. What else is a serenade? Watch a pop concert! And just as among the great reed warblers, quality counts. Females have been selecting males with a versatile larynx since way back in our ancestry.

Today young men sing together to generate camaraderie, and religious people use song to generate the deepest and most profound emotions among themselves and their listeners. But the prime function of song is something else. Shakespeare wondered if music was the food of love. Well, vocally at least, it certainly was. And what is more, it still is.

Be sure to check our Carnival of Podcasts.

Book Cover Art of the Day

Not A Chimp: The Hunt For The Genes That Make Us Human

Memo to Self- Exercise gluteus maximus

“Ancient humans exploited the fact that humans are good runners in the heat,” Dr. Bramble said. “We have such a great cooling system” — many sweat glands, little body hair.

There is other evidence that evolution favored endurance running. A study in The Journal of Experimental Biology last February showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running.

“The big toe is lined up with the rest, not divergent, the way you see with apes and our closest nonrunning relatives,” Dr. Bramble said. “It’s the main push-off in running: the last thing to leave the ground is that big toe.”

Springlike ligaments and tendons in the feet and legs are crucial for running. (Our close relatives the chimpanzee and the ape don’t have them.) A narrow waist and a midsection that can turn allow us to swing our arms and prevent us from zigzagging on the trail. Humans also have a far more developed sense of balance, an advantage that keeps the head stable as we run. And most humans can store about 20 miles’ worth of glycogen in their muscles.

And the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is primarily engaged only during running. “Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk,” Dr. Lieberman said. “There are so many features in our bodies from our heads to our toes that make us good at running.”

-The Human Body Is Built for Distance


Related:
The human gluteus maximus and its role in running

The Bushman's Buttocks: A Lesson to be Learned!

Steven Pinker with Colbert

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Steven Pinker

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Funny Political News

Christian Bale Parody
Joke of the Day

THE ART INSTINCT

THE ART INSTINCT-Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
By Denis Dutton

Denis Dutton is the founder and editor of the hugely popular Web site Arts & Letters Daily, named by the Guardian as the best Web site in the world. He also founded and edits the journal Philosophy and Literature, and is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

What does this mean?

A mule is a biological hybrid, an offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. According to a new paper, all of this cross-pollination has real benefits: mules are significantly smarter than either of their parents.

-Mules are Smarter

Religions protect against disease

Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive.

Mr Fincher is not arguing that disease-protection is religion’s main function. Biologists have different hypotheses for that. Not all follow Dr Dawkins in thinking it pathological. Some see it either as a way of promoting group solidarity in a hostile world, or as an accidental consequence of the predisposition to such solidarity. This solidarity-promotion is one of Mr Fincher’s starting points. The other is that bacteria, viruses and other parasites are powerful drivers of evolution. Many biologists think that sex, for example, is a response to parasitism. The continual mixing of genes that it promotes means that at least some offspring of any pair of parents are likely to be immune to a given disease.

Mr Fincher and his colleague Randy Thornhill wondered if disease might be driving important aspects of human social behaviour, too. Their hypothesis is that in places where disease is rampant, it behoves groups not to mix with one another more than is strictly necessary, in order to reduce the risk of contagion. They therefore predict that patterns of behaviour which promote group exclusivity will be stronger in disease-ridden areas. Since religious differences are certainly in that category, they specifically predict that the number of different religions in a place will vary with the disease load. Which is, as they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the case.

Proving the point involved collating a lot of previous research. Even defining what constitutes a religion is fraught with difficulty. But using accepted definitions of uniqueness, exclusivity, autonomy and superiority to other religions they calculated that the average number of religions per country is 31. The range, though, is enormous—from 3 to 643. Côte d’Ivoire, for example, has 76 while Norway has 13, and Brazil has 159 while Canada has 15. They then did the same thing for the number of parasitic diseases found in each country. The average here was 200, with a range from 178 to 248.

-Religious diversity may be caused by disease


I guess with evolutionary psychology and statistics one can prove almost anything.

Dawkins Legacy

Related;
A Natural Selection

Economics of the End of the World

John Kay on economics of the end of the world;

Last week was the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. If you weren’t celebrating, you should have been. The incident was probably the nearest we have come to extinction in modern human history – and we survived.

A large object – presumably an asteroid or meteorite – collided with the Earth. If it had landed in Manhattan, it would have destroyed New York. A bit bigger, and it would have been calamitous wherever it landed. A similar event at Yucatan, 65m years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs and most other species. It would have wiped us out too had we been there. We survived Tunguska because the impact was not too large....

Martin Rees, who engages with a litany of catastrophes, gave his book the provocative title of Our Final Century? But while technology causes many problems, it also fixes many. The Black Death was probably bubonic plague and if so we could now cure it. Even the asteroid can be deflected if we see it coming.

It is difficult to think about these issues in a dispassionate way. In his book Catastrophes, Richard Posner – an American legal scholar who loves economics more than most economists – proposes a cost/benefit analysis of all possible disasters. But the attempts to model the end of the world are mostly bogus. We have good data on frequencies of near-Earth objects but there is no meaningful way to attach probabilities to these other calamities.

The best way of dealing with grave uncertainties, as with more banal disasters, is to buy options against them. For each potential catastrophe, we should undertake research to ascertain what we might do if a remote possibility becomes a plausible reality. Instead, we talk endlessly about less dangerous issues that give more scope for moral and political posturing. Speeches about man-made environmental damage and terrorism arouse audiences, but asteroids and grey goo elicit only a chuckle. Our actions against more catastrophic threats are few, ineffectual and sometimes counterproductive.

In the meantime, mark February 1 2019 and April 13 2029 in your diaries. These are the next dates on which a very large object from space may land on your head.

Parenting Advice from Steven Pinker

Pinker goes on to suggest that we'll probably never really know exactly what part genetics plays in the differences between races and genders - "it's a taboo field of academic research" - but he has been prepared to accept that the claim that men and women's talents - and, by extension, those of different races - overlap but are not identical is quantifiably defensible. "Those who argue this is nothing more than racism or sexism are guilty of statistical illiteracy," he says. "Besides which, just because someone may have a genetic predisposition towards doing a particular thing, it doesn't follow they will automatically do it." Pinker himself is a case in point. While most scientists would accept that humans are genetically programmed to reproduce, Pinker has steadfastly resisted the temptation.

This could well be just a reflection of the relatively low status he gives parents in child development. "The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated," he says. "A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration." Large parts of government social policy, too, are governed by the principle that parents are central to child development. So what does he suggest government should do instead? "It's a tough one," he admits. "But I think it would be better off looking at how cultural change is effected within society."

His views on parenting don't make him an easy person to interview. The standard practice is to try and draw together various threads from childhood to present a coherent portrait of how a life and ideas have been shaped. Yet all that goes out of the window with Pinker if you want to play by his rules. So what sort of him would be talking to me now if he hadn't had Jewish parents and hadn't been born in Montreal in the 1950s? "You mean if I'd been kidnapped at birth and placed with a working-class family somewhere completely different?" he laughs. "There are a lot of variables, but there's a better than average probability I would have been doing something in much the same scientific and intellectual fields."

Like most kids, Pinker had no real idea of what he wanted to do. "I used to like reading," he offers. "We had a set of encyclopaedias and I must have got through about 90% of them." So he was a bit of a nerd? "Yes. Wait, I mean a bit. I did have friends and I did subscribe to Rolling Stone." He was also a bit of a hippy on the sly - still is, you suspect, as he keeps his hair unfashionably long - and when the time came to go to college, he signed up for the year-old Dawson's College in Montreal. "It promised interdisciplinary courses and alternative styles of learning. I'm glad I went, but I came to realise there was something to be said for more traditional learning.....

Pinker certainly shows no signs of abandoning his successful formula of mixing the counter-intuitive with good science. He had sleepless nights before the publication of The Blank Slate - "I knew I was going to get vilified for it in some quarters" - and he'd do well to get in a good supply of sleeping pills before his next book comes out - on how the world is now a far safer place, with fewer wars, genocides and homicides than at any time in its history. But is there a chance his controversy will become the norm and that he'll end up as a national institution just as his old sparring partner once was? "I like ice hockey," he laughs. "No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life. It's just a bunch of people beating the shit out of each other chasing the puck." Sounds like as good a metaphor as any to me."

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg jamming with whales

Tyler Cowen recommends David Rothenberg


David Rothenberg jamming with whales

I, the flu

They found that each year's dominant strain in Europe, the Americas or other regions was traceable to ancestors first seen in a large region of East and Southeast Asia (an area bigger than China alone). It was never directly descended from a strain seen in temperate zones the previous year. In fact, the evidence strongly suggested that flu virus goes extinct each summer in temperate climates -- there is none left to smolder and evolve.

What the researchers now believe happens is that the world is reseeded each year by new, slightly different variants. "The strains are coming out [of Asia] fully formed," Colin A. Russell, one of the researchers, said in a telephone news conference.

The route the new strains then take seems to reflect both proximity to East Asia and the amount of travel between regions. The first stops are Australia and the Pacific islands known as Oceania, which the virus reaches about three months after it arises in Asia. Three to six months later it crops up in Western Asia, Europe and then North America. The last stop is South America.

-Researchers Chart Flu's Global Journey

Can Bluefin tuna become extinct and other podcasts

Bluefin tuna extinction threat

A tuna weighs 300kg. Barbara Block describes how a tuna is caught, tagged and released. One tuna tagged off the United States swam for four years after being tagged. The tags were developed in Tasmania. Of the three species of bluefin tuna, the southern bluefin tuna, managed by Australia is in the worst condition. They are most severely affected by over-fishing. California has the only facility in the world where there are bluefin tuna in captivity. Feeding and providing space for such large fish presents some major challenges. Almost all the globe's bluefin tuna catch goes to Japan. It is suggested Japan's whaling activity is a way of diverting attention from the country's tuna catch.

Humans - built for long-distance running?

Daniel Lieberman is interested in what makes the human body look the way it does. His passion is running. There are features over our whole body which help us to run well. One is the toes. Short toes help running. Tendons in the leg act as springs. These evolved around 2 million year ago. The bum tenses with every stride, preventing the trunk from pitching forward. There are features in the spine, neck and head. These all make us good long-distance runners but have no use in walking. Daniel Lieberman suggests we were good hunters on the savannas of Africa.

Steven Munro challenges the endurance running model of man. He says water played a more important part in human evolution. Early humans foraged on land, in trees and in shallow water. They lived in many coastal settings and colonised inland lake basins and rivers.

Richard Lewontin: science as politics

Should scientists speak freely on issues beyond their academic competence -- or keep quiet? Richard Lewontin is a professor of genetics at Harvard and a critic of those who conjure world systems out of faint biological trends. The acquisitive habits of bower birds don't necessarily give insights into American capitalism. The same-sex behaviour of sheep doesn't tell you much about Gay Pride. But Lewontin's late friend Steven Jay Gould, also of Harvard, was often willing to tackle big issues, from religion to race. Did he go too far?

Cooking with hominids

Public policy: It's so obvious

Dr Adam Graycar is Dean and Professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. Before that he was a senior bureaucrat, as Head of the Cabinet Office in South Australia. In this talk he suggests that sometimes obvious problems could be solved if government departments would work together, instead of working in their own jurisdiction without sufficient communications with other sections.

Your irrational mind

Like it or not, you're not the beast of reason you think you are. Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at MIT, argues that we're surprisingly and predictably irrational. Sex, freebies, expectations, placebos, price -- they all cloud our better judgment in rather sobering ways. Dan's unique research was partly inspired by a catastrophic accident which caused third degree burns to 70% of his body.

Buffy the Concept Slayer

Islam and philosophy - Tariq Ramadan

The three trillion dollar war

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES

When he was an old man, Michael Sherbrook remembered in writing the momentous events of his youth: “All things of price were either spoiled, plucked away or defaced to the uttermost…it seemed that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could. Nothing was spared but the ox-houses and swincotes…”

He was talking about the destruction of Roche Abbey, but it could have been Lewes or Fountains, Glastonbury, Tintern or Walsingham, names that haunt the religious past as their ruins haunt the landscape.

These were the monasteries, suddenly and for many shockingly, destroyed during the reign of Henry VIII. But was the destruction of monastic culture in this country an overdue religious reform or the grandest of larcenies?

Muller Says European Capitalism Is `Struggling to Adapt'
Jerry Muller, a history professor at Catholic University of America, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene from Washington about his essay "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," concepts of nationalism and European capitalism

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Related;
Larry Summers on the role of universities;

But I think that we will almost certainly make more progress in advancing the values that we all share, if every issue is open for academic debate and if the response to distrastful argument is logical counter argument, rather than statements of revulsion. So I will always wish that I had handled that whole situation differently, but at the same time I think it is very important to uphold the principle of the right to be speculative, the recognition that when you offer hypotheses and judgments in a tentative way, they sometimes turn out to be right and they sometimes turn out to be wrong. People will debate over time the merits of different hypothesis. But I think it is something that is very, very important. Which isn’t to say that with the benefit of hindsight not gone to the NBR that day, but it is to say I think we do need to do a certain amount of soul searching around concepts of freedom of discussion and how we regard controversial hypotheses.

In the pipeline- good reads on economic history

Joel Mokyr is writing two books;

The Enlightened Economy: an Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850

Neither Fluke nor Destiny: Evolutionary Models in Economic History

Iyigun gives some excerpts form the first book;

"The centrality of technology in the emergence of modern economic growth is not really contested. Growth was possible through capital accumulation, increasing trade, better internal allocations, freer markets, and improved institutions. But all of those processes would eventually run into diminishing returns. It is technology that remains at the foundation of modern economic growth... A full explanation will need to deal with both the growth of useful knowledge and with the incentives and opportunities to take full advantage of it... I [emphasize] the role played by the Enlightenment in generating this knowledge.

The European Enlightenment was a multifaceted phenomenon, much of it concerned with natural law and justice, religious and political tolerance, human rights and freedom, inequality, legal reform, and much else. At the deepest level, however, the common denominator was the belief in the possibility and desirability of human progress and perfectability through reason and knowledge. Kant’s famous suggestion for the motto of the Enlightenment as “dare to know” is particularly apposite in this context.'

'

Related;
On the "to be read" list

Economic Growth Lecture of the Day

Oded Galor on Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth;

Oded Galor presents his collaborative research with Omer Moav on an evolutionary growth theory that captures the interplay between the evolution of mankind and economic growth since the emergence of the human species. The researchers argue that for much of man’s existence his life was characterized as a stagnant period of struggle for survival and that a gradual process of selection changed the composition of types within the human population and made it more complimentary to the growth process. Additionally, this change in human types permitted the take-off from stagnation to economic growth.

The model for their research is based on four fundamental elements: the main ingredients of the Malthusian world (economies characterized by fixed factors of production and subsistence consumption); the main ingredients of Darwinian evolution (variety, intergenerational transmission of traits, and natural selection); a link between evolution of the human species to the process of economic growth; and a link between the rate of technological progress, demographic transitions, and sustained economic growth.

According to Dr. Galor, increases in the return to human capital induce parents to substitute quantity for quality of children. This bias towards quality offspring increased as technological progress intensified, reinforcing the growth process and allowing mankind to break free of the Malthusian trap. In their research, Galor and Moav conclude that this set the stage for the industrial revolution and eventually, the modern world eceonomy.

Reading for the Godless

Orderly Universe: Evidence of God?

Synthetic life- the future has arrived

Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life


State of the Art on Bio-Hacking


Related;
Top 10 New Organisms of 2007

This Weekend, Start Building a New Life Form

Bio Hacking Resources

Biological Engineering courses online- MIT

Introduction to Bioengineering- Video lectures

Theistic Evolution

The most controversial part of his speech came, however, when he began to challenge each religious perspective of evolution in an attempt to demonstrate the ability to simultaneously appreciate God and science. To begin, Collins made a surprisingly strong scientific case for the existence of evolution. Showing a chart of the chromosomes of humans and chimpanzees, he made it visually clear that the only difference was the very long human chromosome two, compared to that of the chimpanzee. Each chromosome has a very specific sequence at the tip called a telomere; Collins showed that the human chromosome two has a telomere embedded in the middle, evidence that somewhere in the evolutionary process, there had been a fusion. So how can we reconcile faith with this undeniable evolution? Atheism, Collins argued, “takes a position of knowledge we don’t really have.” If we admit that we know such a tiny amount about the world, how can we know for sure that God doesn’t exist? Creationism, on the other hand, should be thought of as St. Augustine explained it: “we shouldn’t insist on a particular interpretation because if we find out it is wrong, then we fall with it.” Believing the Bible’s creation story literally then, according to Collins, is incorrect. When questioned later about the existence of Adam and Eve, he even hesitatingly offered the view that perhaps they were more representative of something that happened across species, since our genetic gene pool suggests that we are actually descended from a group of 10,000 people in Africa.

Collins’ attack on Intelligent Design was one of the most thought provoking, calling it “interesting but ultimately flawed.” One of his main critiques was with the theory of “irreducible complexity,” which argues that cerain structures cannot have evolved piece by piece because a removal of any part of the structure causes the functioning of the entire structure to collapse. Implicit in the theory is the belief that such “irreducibly complex” systems could not have evolved sequentially but must have been created as a unit, a challenge to evolution. To counter this argument, Collins cited renowned proponent of intelligent design William Dembski’s example of the bacterial flagellum, which is made of a number of proteins; if one B2 protein is knocked out, the whole stops working. And yet, he claimed, evolution works in steps, and it is possible that each of the proteins in the flagellum is descended from a different form in other organisms. If the exact mechanism of this evolution seems a little vague, Dembski justified his own position in an interview with The Stanford Review, “[advocates of the evolution of the flagellum] imagine possible precursors to the flagellum (such as the type-III secretory system), but neither specify how many intermediate systems with different functions would have had to intervene in evolving from one to the other, nor do they quantify the number of genetic changes that would have been needed, nor do they show that such changes would have provided selective advantage, as required by Darwinian theory.”

Ultimately, Collins offered his own way to reconcile faith and science: Theistic Evolution. In this vein, God created the universe 13.7 billion years ago with its “parameters tuned to allow the development of complexity over time,” meaning that God planned to include evolution, including the evolution of human beings. After evolution had “prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’” in the human being (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of free will, good and evil, and a soul. God used DNA as an information molecule; thus DNA is the language of God.

There is an obvious way to reconcile the two, Collins shows, through a rejection of extremes, and an embrace of “harmony in the middle.” Appealing as this may sound, it remains to be seen whether believers in the Bible as the Word of God can reject the idea of Adam and Eve in lieu of a mutated chimpanzee who, one day, received the extraordinary gift of human intelligence.

-The Language of God: Francis Collins Speaks at Stanford

Jeffrey Lang on evolution in Islam