David Sloan Wilson in This View of Life:

Phil Plait in Slate:

After writing yesterday about the now-famous/infamous debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, I don’t want to make this blog all creationism all the time, but indulge me this one more time, if you will. On BuzzFeed, there is a clever listicle that is a collection of 22 photos showing creationists holding up questions they have for people who “believe” in evolution…

…I won’t go too deep, but if you have these questions yourself, or have been asked them, I hope this helps.

I’ll repeat the question below, and give my answers.

1) “Bill Nye, are you influencing the minds of children in a positive way?”

I’m not Bill, but I’d say yes, he is. More than just giving them facts to memorize, he is showing them how science works. Not only that, his clear love and enthusiasm for science is infectious, and that to me is his greatest gift.

2) “Are you scared of a Divine Creator?”

No. In fact, if there is a Judeo-Christian god, that would have fascinating implications for much of what we scientists study, and would be a rich vein to mine. Perhaps a more pertinent question is, “Are you scared there might not be a Divine Creator?” There is more room for a god in science than there is for no god in religious faith.

3) “Is it completely illogical that the Earth was created mature? i.e. trees created with rings … Adam created as an adult ….”

It might be internally consistent, even logical, but a bit of a stretch. After all, we can posit that God created the Universe last Thursday, looking exactly as it is, with all evidence pointing to it being old and your memories implanted such that you think you’re older than a mere few days. Consistent, sure, but plausible? Not really.

More here.

Batya Ungar-Sargon in Aeon:

Solomon is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women whose encounters with evolution, science, new atheism and biblical criticism have led them to the conclusion that there is no God, and yet whose social, economic and familial connections to the ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic communities prevent them from giving up the rituals of faith. Those I spoke to could not bring themselves to upend their families and their children’s lives. With too much integrity to believe, they also have too much to leave behind, and so they remain closeted atheists within ultra-Orthodox communities. Names and some places have been changed – every person spoke to me for this story on condition of anonymity. Part of a secret, underground intellectual elite, these people live in fear of being discovered and penalised by an increasingly insular society.

But they are also proof of the increasing challenges fundamentalist religious groups face in the age of the internet and a globalised world. With so much information so readily available, such groups can no longer rely on physical and intellectual isolation to maintain their boundaries. In addition to exposing religious adherents to information that challenges the hegemony of their belief systems, the internet gives individuals living in restrictive environments an alternative community.

More here.

Duncan Kelly at the Times Literary Supplement:

As Ghosh notes, Weber had always been a superb political analyst. His “probability” theory about when peace would come and the possibilities of German victory was as ruthlessly realistic as anything else he wrote. Yet if objectivity in the midst of war set him apart, one of Ghosh’s major points is that politics for Weber, although a grand human ideal, had been on the decline for centuries as the crucial arbiter of human conduct. Now, it meant nothing more or less than earthly Herrschaft, so that there were only so many ways one could talk about its development, or think about its valences. For those who hold fixed ideas about Weber the political animal, Ghosh’s claims will be hard reading. But part of the problem with seeing him as a straightforward nationalist was that even incandescent rage about national shame was allied to a profound understanding of geopolitics and political responsibility. This made it clear to him that “reaction” and public retribution, or power politics without content, were futile modes of engagement. Subtler and more “responsible” policy was required if long-term success was to be achieved, and that would have to take place in diplomatic back channels by “responsible” statesmen. Germany was actually quite successful at this when seen in comparative perspective, a point amplified recently by Adam Tooze in The Deluge: The Great War and the remaking of global order(2014).

Weber’s well-known refrains about the dangers of a politics of national vanity (Eitelkeit), made most famously in his lecture on the vocation of politics, were in fact extant in his writings from the start. For example, in a perspicacious essay realistically assaying the prospects of Germany against the European world powers during the war, he once more stated his belief that “objective politics” was not a “politics of vanity”, but one whose actions necessarily took place in the shadows.

more here.

Dan Duray at Bookforum.

A few reviews have likened Guantánamo Diary to Memoirs from the House of the Dead, written after Dostoyevsky’s four years in Siberian exile. Diary does share that book’s vignette structure. But while Dead’s narrator draws on his observation of the lives of his fellow prisoners to create a mounting sense of existential despair, the frequently isolated Slahi—who spent a decade in Germany and easily communicates without culture clash—turns his attention to Gitmo’s guards and interrogators. These figures are generalized through redaction and turn out to be, rather than ominous symbols of spiritual dislocation, merely thoughtless and careless—stupidly cruel in ways that only a late-stage empire (or maybe a fraternity) can accommodate.

The guards beat him and tried to convert him to Christianity. They taught him chess and then got angry when he won. “That is not the way I taught you,” one guard scoffed. (Slahi learned his lesson: It really is better to let the Wookiee win.) They threatened to “bring in black people” if he continued refusing to cooperate. “I don’t have any problem with black people, half of my country is black people!” he writes. They asked him to do an interview with “a moderate journalist from The Wall Street Journal and refute the wrong things we’re suspected of.” “Well,” Slahi replied, “I got tortured and I am going to tell the journalist the truth.” The interview was canceled.

more here.

Michael Booth at The Paris Review:

“Jante Law is just as normal as the law of gravity,” newspaper editor and anthropologist Anne Knudsen assured me. “You find it everywhere, especially in peasant societies, and back [in Sandemose’s day] there were peasants peasants peasants all over the place in Denmark. This kind of ideology became the State ideology when democracy was established in the country [in 1849] and it got a second life with Social Democracy, and all of this was transmitted from generation to generation by propaganda and by a unified school system.” She added, “But, you know, the envy part is not the important part. The important part is the inclusiveness: we want to include you, but that is only possible if you are equal. It’s what peasants do.”

I opened a newspaper to see if I could spot signs of Jante Law in action today, and, what do you know, there was a story about the Swedish Tetra Pak packaging heir Hans Rausing’s drug-fueled downfall: the gloating headline reads HIS BILLIONS COULD NOT SAVE HIM. Another concerns the bankruptcy of a flamboyant Danish businessman from a humble background who amassed a collection of snazzy cars and foreign homes and made the mistake of parading them in the media over the years. Again, the article is dripping with Jante revenge, detailing the luxuries he has had to give up: “Three years ago he told this newspaper proudly of his Bugatti, his Lamborghini, and the Porsche he was about to buy,” the article read. “Now he has run dry of cash.”

more here.

Andrea Collier in NBC News:

February is not only Black History Month, but it is also the month when many titles by Black authors are released. 2015 kicked off with a wide selections of books and stories to settle into. From history, to biography to great fiction storytelling here are a few gems to propose to your book club.

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, does her literary magic with God Help the Child, an emotional story of a woman called Bride, and the way childhood trauma shaped her life and her loves.

The Crossover​ by Kwame Alexander

The Crossover is the story of twin brothers who have skills on the basketball court. One of the twins sees a life beyond the hoops, with his love of beats and music. The story in verse book, that took home the 2015 Newbery Award is a great book for the middle school reader.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

From KurzweilAI:

Investigators at Nationwide Children’s Hospital say they have developed an optimized analysis “pipeline” that slashes the time it takes to search a person’s genome for disease-causing variations from weeks to hours. An open-access preview article describing the ultra-fast, highly scalable software was published in the latest issue of Genome Biology.

“It took around 13 years and $3 billion to sequence the first human genome,” says Peter White, PhD, principal investigator and director of the Biomedical Genomics Core at Nationwide Children’s and the study’s senior author. “Now, even the smallest research groups can complete genomic sequencing in a matter of days. However, once you’ve generated all that data, that’s the point where many groups hit a wall. … Scientists are left with billions of data points to analyze before any truly useful information can be gleaned for use in research and clinical settings.” To overcome the challenges of analyzing that large amount of data, White and his team developed a computational pipeline called “Churchill.” By using novel computational techniques, Churchill allows efficient analysis of a whole genome sample in as little as 90 minutes, the researchers claim. “Churchill fully automates the analytical process required to take raw sequence data through a series of complex and computationally intensive processes, ultimately producing a list of genetic variants ready for clinical interpretation and tertiary analysis,” White explains. “Each step in the process was optimized to significantly reduce analysis time, without sacrificing data integrity, resulting in an analysis method that is 100 percent reproducible.” The output of Churchill was validated using National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) benchmarks. In comparison with other computational pipelines, Churchill was shown to have the highest sensitivity at 99.7 percent, highest accuracy at 99.99 percent, and the highest overall diagnostic effectiveness at 99.66 percent, according to the researchers.

More here.

Gary Greenberg in Bookforum:

In 1917, psychiatrist Thomas Salmon lamented that the classification of diseases was still “chaotic”—a “condition of affairs [that] discredits the science of psychiatry and reflects unfavorably upon our association,” and that left the profession unable to meet “the scientific demands of the present day.” In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted to declare that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness, a determination that, however just, couldn’t possibly be construed as scientific. And for the six years leading up to the 2013 release of the fifth edition of its diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, the APA debated loudly and in public such questions as whether Asperger’s disorder were a distinct mental illness and if people still upset two weeks after the death of a loved one could be diagnosed with major depression. (The official conclusions, respectively: no and yes.)

To the diagnostic chaos was added the spectacle of treatments. Psychiatrists superintended horrifyingly squalid asylums; used insulin and electricity to send patients into comas and convulsions; inoculated them with tuberculin and malaria in the hope that fever would cook the mental illness out of them; jammed ice picks into their brains to sever their frontal lobes; placed them in orgone boxes to bathe in the orgasmic energy of the universe; psychoanalyzed them interminably; primal-screamed them and rebirthed them and nursed their inner children; and subjected them to medications of unknown mechanism and unanticipated side effects, most recently the antidepressant drugs that we love to hate and hate to love and that, either way, are a daily staple for 11 percent of adults in America.

It’s not just diagnostic uncertainty or therapeutic disasters that cast suspicion on the profession.

More here.

Over at the Rationally Speaking podcast:

Elise CrullFeynman famously said that a philosopher of science is as much use to scientists as an ornithologist is to birds. This episode of Rationally Speaking features philosopher of physics Elise Crull, who explains why Feynman is misguided, and what philosophers have to say about important issues in physics — like quantum mechanics, physical laws, and whether anything “really” exists at all.

Gil Garcetti in The LA Review of Books:

ON MY FIRST READING of An Eye for an Eye, Mitchel P. Roth’s new book, I recall closing it and asking myself a series of questions: “What have I learned?,” “How do I feel about what I had read?,” “Was it worth my time and effort?” This book is not a quick read, not a book where you can quickly turn to the next page. Often you have to, and want to, ponder what you’ve just read. But if you are interested in the subject matter, or if you are a judge, lawyer, elected official, or a “student” of jurisprudence, reading this book will be worth your time and effort.

My dominant feeling was when I finished my first read of the book was disappointment — but it was not the content of the book that disappointed me. The book is the first I have read that attempts to chronicle and dispassionately explore the world history of crime and punishment. Professor Roth’s effort is forceful, scholarly yet easily readable, informative, sometimes even entertainingly informative, and, lastly, provocative. Roth has said it was not written with the purpose of being a university textbook, but it easily could be the bones of a very interesting class for students of history or those interested in the law, government, philosophy, or criminology. The book is crammed with interesting facts and statistics and dozens of fascinating and sometimes gory anecdotes that have been brought together through disciplined and thorough research by the author (and probably others working with him). Roth, who teaches criminal justice and criminology at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, has done an admirable job of scholarship.

My disappointment stemmed from the conclusion I drew, based on the facts Roth presents: that there is not one nation in the history of the world whose people, government, or rulers haven’t been responsible for perpetrating horrific acts of cruelty, sadism, and savagery on other human beings. Is this the nature of man? Are we any safer today than 100, 500, 1,000, or 5,000 years ago? Roth could persuasively argue that we are indeed much safer — at least from the common street criminal. When you put aside acts of terrorism and accept that crime statistics in some countries are at best woefully inadequate, I think he is probably correct.

More here.

Martin Gayford at The Spectator:

Rubens was a truly European figure. Not for nothing is the preface to the RA catalogue penned by Herman Van Rompuy. A passion for Rubens spanned the political and religious borders of 17th-century Europe. He worked for the King of Spain, the court of France, the Grand Duke of Tuscany and Charles I. His energy and industriousness were astonishing. In addition to his work as an artist, he spent time and effort on diplomacy — he was in London to negotiate a treaty on behalf of Philip IV of Spain and his regent, Rubens’s patron, the Archduchess Isabella in Brussels.

Then, as Ben van Beneden says, he was ‘one of the great collectors of his time, with a collection that could rival those of princes’ — of his own pictures and other people’s, and most of all of classical antiquities about which he corresponded with scholars in France and Italy. Rubens mixed with the most powerful individuals of his day — despite some aristocratic resentment — on something like an equal footing. He ended up with not only a mansion in Antwerp, stuffed with artistic riches, but also a country house.

Yet despite his immense achievements and success, Rubens’s personality remains a little elusive. A large number of his letters survive, mainly written in Italian, the lingua franca of the day, but there is little intimate or revealing in them. Most are concerned with politics and diplomacy: the public persona, not the private man. Another oddity of his career was the extent to which — quite apart from the output of his workshop — Rubens collaborated with other artists.

more here.

Charles Trueheart at The American Scholar:

Transitory, confusing, hopeless, the Paris Commune of 1871 is easily ignored or misunderstood. The title of John Merriman’s new book gets right to the point he wants us to remember: that it ended in an orchestrated genocide. Soldiers slaughtered tens of thousands of Parisians, both combatants and civilians, while the rest of France looked away or cheered the killers on.

The Commune’s misbegotten spasm of early people power lasted just 64 days and occurred in the political and social vacuum left by three successive French humiliations—the catastrophic Franco-Prussian War, the crushing Siege of Paris, and the ignominious dissolution of Napoleon III’s Second Empire.

When the siege ended, in January 1871, with the French government’s capitulation, better-off Parisians in the central and western parts of the city sought to shake the blues by reverting to habits of prewar gaiety, jamming the brasseries, departments stores, and boulevards.

In the northern and northeastern arrondissements, meanwhile, a miserable population seethed in crowded slums. The building of Haussmann’s Paris that so dazzled the world had drawn cheap labor in quantity from the provinces and beyond. Many of these people were now out of work. The war had brought refugees to join them. Their suffering was acute, their anger directed at the business classes, the political leadership, and the Catholic clergy. It boiled over almost overnight.

more here.

Mary Rose Doorly at The Dublin Review of Books:

In a foreword to the collection, Jane Smiley describes the paradox in Munro’s writing as, “simultaneously strange and down to earth, daring and straightforward”. Laid out in the chronological order in which the stories were published, Family Furnishings reveals Munro’s lifelong fascination for the mundane and the freakish. Her characters, often taken from life, often drawn with autobiographical authority, seem to live in a kind of reality where the extreme facts co-exist in the same non-hysterical breath with the most banal.

Talk of scrubbing a floor, for example, is given a strange parity with the disposal of a murdered man’s body in “The Love of a Good Woman”, the opening story in this collection. The discovery of the body in the lake is described through the innocent gaze of a group of young boys who hardly understand the true import of the events, only the unforgettable underwater image of the dead man’s arm, as though he is waving. Munro’s great skill here, as in so much of her work, is the conscious undervaluation and negative exaggeration in which she draws the reader’s innocence into this closeness of extremes.

In “Dimensions”, where a young woman tries to come to terms with a shocking family tragedy in which a father kills his three children, we again see the trademark Munro approach of mixing up the ordinary with the appalling:

A trickle of pink foam came out from under the boy’s head, near the ear. It did not look like blood at all, but like the stuff you skim off the strawberries when you’re making jam.

more here.

Guy Raz in npr.org:

Last semester, Brown senior Malcolm Burnley took a narrative writing course. One of the assignments was to write a fictional story based on something true — and that true event had to be found inside the university archives. “So I went to the archives and started flipping through dusty compilations of student newspapers, and there was this old black-and-white photo of when Malcolm X came to speak,” Burnley says. “There was one short article that corresponded to it, and very little else.” Malcolm X came to speak at Brown University in Providence, R.I., on May 11, 1961. Burnley noticed that at the end of the article, there was a brief mention of another article — also from the Brown student newspaper — written by a senior named Katharine Pierce. Her article was the reason Malcolm X wanted to visit Brown. 0He tracked down Pierce's phone number and gave her a call. “I immediately started asking her what she remembered about provoking Malcolm X to come.” It had been 50 years since Malcolm X's speech at Brown, but Pierce slowly started to remember how it all happened. “I just felt that integration was a greater path,” Pierce says, “more reasonable and a greater path for success.” Today, Pierce lives about an hour north of New York City. In 1961, she believed the Nation of Islam's message of separation of the races was destructive, so she wrote a detailed critique. Somehow, it caught the attention of the Nation of Islam. Two weeks after the piece was published in the Brown Daily Herald, representatives called. “They said that Malcolm X wanted to come to Brown and defend his views, because Katharine's essay was so critical of the organization,” Burnley says.

…”There are 20 million so-called 'negroes' here in America. Twenty million ex-slaves. Twenty million second-class citizens. No matter what other classification you try to put on them, you can't deny that we are ex-slaves. You can not deny that we are second-class citizens. And the fact that we are second-class citizens means someone has done us an injustice and deprived us of that which is ours by right.”

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Tania Lombrozo in npr.org:

Thinking machines are consistently in the news these days, and often a topic of discussion here at 13.7. Last week, Alva Noë came out as a singularity skeptic, and three of us contributed to Edge.org's annual question for 2015: What do you think about machines that think? In response to the Edge.org question, I argued that we shouldn't be chauvinists when it comes to defining thinking — that is, we should resist the temptation to restrict what counts as thinking to “thinking like adult humans” or “thinking like contemporary computers.” Marcelo Gleiser suggested that we're already living as transhumans, enhanced by our technogadgets and medical improvements. And Stuart Kauffman considered Turing machines, the quantum and human choice. In addressing the relationship between humans and thinking machines, all three of our responses — and those by many others — raised questions about what (if anything) makes us uniquely human. Part of what's fascinating about the idea of thinking machines, after all, is that they seem to approach and encroach on a uniquely human niche, homo sapiens — the wise.

Consider, for contrast, encountering “thinking” aliens, some alternative life form that rivals or exceeds our own intelligence. The experience would be strange, to be sure, but there may be something uniquely uncanny about thinking machines. While they can (or will some day) mirror us in capabilities, they are unlikely to do so in composition. My hypothetical aliens, at least, would have biological origins of some kind, whereas today's computers do so only in the sense that they are human artifacts and, therefore, have an origin that follows from our own. When it comes to human-like robots and other artifacts, some have described an “uncanny valley“: a level of similarity to natural beings that may be too close for comfort, compelling yet off. We might be slightly revolted by a mechanical appendage, for instance, or made uneasy by a realistically human robot face.

More here.

Campbell Robertson in The New York Times:

DALLAS — A block from the tourist-swarmed headquarters of the former Texas School Book Depository sits the old county courthouse, now a museum. In 1910, a group of men rushed into the courthouse, threw a rope around the neck of a black man accused of sexually assaulting a 3-year-old white girl, and threw the other end of the rope out a window. A mob outside yanked the man, Allen Brooks, to the ground and strung him up at a ceremonial arch a few blocks down Main Street. South of the city, past the Trinity River bottoms, a black man named W. R. Taylor was hanged by a mob in 1889. Farther south still is the community of Streetman, where 25-year-old George Gay was hanged from a tree and shot hundreds of times in 1922. And just beyond that is Kirvin, where three black men, two of them almost certainly innocent, were accused of killing a white woman and, under the gaze of hundreds of soda-drinking spectators, were castrated, stabbed, beaten, tied to a plow and set afire in the spring of 1922.

…The bloody history of Paris, Tex., about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, is well known if rarely brought up, said Thelma Dangerfield, the treasurer of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. Thousands of people came in 1893 to see Henry Smith, a black teenager accused of murder, carried around town on a float, then tortured and burned to death on a scaffold. Until recently, some longtime residents still remembered when the two Arthur brothers were tied to a flagpole and set on fire at the city fairgrounds in 1920. “There were two or three blacks who were actually around during that time, but you couldn’t get them to talk about it,” Ms. Dangerfield said.

Picture: Downtown Dallas in 1910, when Allen Brooks, a black man, was hanged from a telephone pole.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

From the New York Times:

One in 100 articles in The New York Times over the past few years have used the term “economist,” a much greater rate than other academic professions, according to a recent article in The Upshot. Economic analysis and pronouncements are crucial to most policy decisions and debates.

But given the profession’s poor track record in forecasting and planning, and the continued struggles of many Americans, have we given economists too much authority?

More here.