by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

To our surprise, our February 3 Quarks Daily post has generated a good deal of comment from those who identify as New (or “Gnu”) Atheists, nearly all of it critical. It’s not that we don’t like criticism– we are philosophers, and criticism is our business. Our surprise rather derives from the way in which much of the criticism has been targeted. In fact, it seems to us that much of the criticism is mistargeted. Criticism that misses its mark is not a kind of criticism; it’s no criticism at all. And we’re happy to be criticized. So we’d like to clarify.

Our post began with a statement of fact. Reasonable Atheism is not yet available, yet we have been charged with accommodationism. What we failed to note is that shortly after Prometheus Books distributed a catalog announcing the publication of Reasonable Atheism, we received a handful of emails decrying our forthcoming book as accommodationist drivel. The author of one email characterized accommodationism as consisting in the very thought that religious believers are owed respect. In the first paragraph of our original post, we encapsulated the charge of accommodationism as it was brought in these emails. These provided the occasion for thinking about the charge of accommodationism.

We have been criticized for not citing our sources. For the record, most of the emails we received came from people who did not include surnames. Who are these people? We have no idea. And we’d like not to encourage them. Yet some critics have assumed that if we have been charged with accommodationism, and then have sought to respond to that particular way of wielding the charge, it must be that we believe that New Atheists are in some sense guilty of… well… something.

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by Edward B. Rackley

While other countries are rediscovering people power and casting out dictators, Haiti is allowing them back. ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier came and went last January; Aristide now has a passport and may return any moment. If Baby Doc’s mute visitation was a desperate bid to correct a country’s freefall, his affect conveyed the opposite: an unreadable face and inchoate gestures of a now pitiful, once grandiose despot. Aristide’s return will be neither silent nor impassive.

So ended 2010 in Haiti, surely the country’s worst year since independence in 1804. The massive quake in January, then Hurricane Tomas, followed by a crippling epidemic of cholera. The year ended with a rocky electoral contest, still unresolved. These unwelcome malheurs conspired to attract the gaze of international media, holding it momentarily. Other spectacles now crow for our attention. Eclipsed by Libya and her neighbors, Haiti’s grip remains tenuous, its silence ominous. Jokes about the depths to which it has sunk—now a platform for foreign dignitaries so low even Sarah Palin can step up—would be funny if they weren’t true.

Leveled to rubble in January 2010, Port-au-Prince is gradually reconstituting itself, but progress will be painfully slow. The city was already mired in failed urban policies long before the catastrophic shudder; the flight of human capital among the political class only advanced as Haiti’s crisis deepened. Today’s void means easy access for anyone of means seeking political office, including pop singers at home and abroad (Michel Martelly and Wyclef). Haiti’s exhausted political class requires new blood, but where are the viable candidates? Popular elections rarely mean the collective interest is served; instead, a leader’s wish becomes his followers’ command. State-sponsored thuggery is a Haitian specialty.

To a new arrival, as I recently was, the obstacles confronting the average Haitian appear to stack up, layer by layer, to a point of monolithic immobility.

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by Misha Lepetic

By now the scrappiness of the emerging economies’ entrepreneurial class has become a recognized trope of the folklore of globalization. Starting with Muhammad Yunus’s initial investments in the microfinance concept, to Tata Motors’ Nano, Western observers are being treated to an ever-increasing flow of news celebrating how doughty innovators are operationalizing elegant solutions to sticky problems that developed nations have, for many decades now, attempted to solve with boatloads of aid money, much of which was eventually misspent, misappropriated or outright stolen by its recipients, their governments and/or various inexperienced or misguided middlemen.

Now, augmented by the newly formulated war-cries of sustainability and climate change, these kinds of innovations and the drive behind them seem to be taking on even greater importance. In these neo-liberal, post-regulation end-times, the narrative tells us: Let a thousand flowers bloom. But what is it that we really see, and will we get what we expect?

Before we can understand what our expectations might be, we should ask about measurement, since what and how we choose to measure ultimately reflects back to us the criteria for its success. In the language of business and the capital markets, there are narrowly defined criteria that determine success factors, such as return on investment, cost of goods sold, and depreciation and amortization of tangible and intangible assets. Some of these criteria are little more than fictions spurred on by tax considerations, but each plays a crucial role in whether a firm decides to make an investment in new product development, how it may choose to commercialize this development, and most importantly, at what point it will consider the product a success, or withdraw it from the marketplace.

There are, of course, serious lacunae here. Currently accepted practices do not compel firms to take into account factors such as waste stream management, or greenhouse gas production, or carbon footprint. Nor do relevant regulatory bodies consistently provide incentives, such as tax write-offs or R&D subsidies, that would serve to introduce these exogenous costs into mainstream financial decisionmaking.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Science and technology play increasingly important roles in our lives. Advances in medicine, transportation, and communications have made life a lot easier but at the same time contribute to new problems like pollution, habitat loss, and dwindling resources. Our best chances for overcoming these problems may also lie in science and in an improved understanding of our natural world.

Most people probably realize that understanding science is important – at least for scientists – but scientists as well as members of the public may not fully appreciate the importance of understanding the Nature of Science (NOS) – that is, the nature of scientific knowledge and the processes that generate it. We’re so accustomed to science being part of our lives that we take for granted that everyone knows what it is. But they don’t. Studies have shown that NOS misconceptions are prevalent among high school and college students and even among teachers (Lederman, 2007).

Many people view science as a body of rigid, unchangeable facts and it’s hard to blame them – after all, most of us learned science as if this were the case. We were given text books and lectured to as if to say “here’s what we know, it’s all true, just memorize it”. Of course, much of the content of text books, at least at high school and undergraduate levels, is fairly basic and well-established, but learning it from a book or a lecture doesn’t teach us much about the scientific process.

So what is science then? Nova Education recently asked Dr. William McComas, a prominent researcher in science education, and he provided a very nice answer. Here are some of the key points:

• Science produces, demands and relies on empirical evidence
• Experiments are not the only route to knowledge
• Science uses both inductive reasoning and hypothetico-deductive testing
• Scientists make observations and produce inferences
• There is no single step-wise scientific method by which all science is done
• Science has a creative component
• Observations, ideas and conclusions in science are not entirely objective
• Historical, cultural and social influences impact the practice and direction of science
• Scientific knowledge is tentative, durable and self-correcting

I have nothing to add to McComas's explanation, except that I think it's really important for people to understand. Why? Because NOS misconceptions may underlie rejection of science and because the nature of science is also essentially the nature of progress.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Where does the environmental movement get its moral force? There are any number of practical reasons to care about, say, global warming, given that a world with a dramatically different climate will probably be dramatically less comfortable for us. But this is quite different from the set of reasons usually advanced by environmental advocates. These center around preserving the environment for its own sake and limiting human impact on the natural world. And they typically seem to be making a strong ethical claim. Humans have spoiled a once pristine natural world; humans, through greed, have upset the natural balance. Implicit in this narrative is a warning that, depending on your preference, is Promethean or Edenic: we have reached too far in our attempt to escape our natural state and must now bear the consequences.

These are unusual arguments. Most of our moral intuitions and behavior is founded on relationships to other moral subjects. And there is a very strong and compelling moral reason to address global warming that does involve humans. A changing climate will affect and is affecting the livelihood of millions of people and these people are disproportionately poor and vulnerable. Our moral obligation to mitigate the effects of warming on the environment can be seen to stem from our obligation to other human beings.

This argument makes no reference to the natural or to preservation as an intrinsic good. It also involves a complex mix of factors to be weighed against each other. We are obligated to help preserve the environment because of our obligation to help give people a decent quality of life, but there are many other ways this can be carried out. For example, making people richer and giving them lifestyles closer to those in the developed West would also have the same effect, but this might act against the preservation of the environment. Given that we rarely see these sorts of debates in the environmental movement, it seems that the impact on people is not the primary motivation.

So what about moral arguments that are not centered on humans? Do we have more than practical and aesthetic motivations to preserve the climate as it is now?

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by Robert P. Baird

A little over a month ago I asked Mahmood Mamdani if he’d be willing to have a conversation about Ugandan politics in advance of the presidential elections here. Often described as the intellectual heir of Edward Said, Mamdani has attracted praise, scorn, and much international attention for his richly detailed and often stridently contrarian analyses of contemporary African events. He is the author, most recently, of Saviors and Survivors, a critical and controversial analysis of the Save Darfur Coalition.

Mamdani is one of the most acute observers of African events working today, and he has a deep and complicated personal relationship to Uganda’s recent political history. Born in Kampala to Indian Muslim parents, he was exiled (along with the rest of the country’s Asian population) by Idi Amin in 1972. He earned a Ph.D from Harvard in 1974 and has taught at universities in Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, and the U.S. Currently he is a professor of anthropology and government at Columbia University and the director of the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) in Uganda. He and his wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair, split their time between Kampala and New York.

Mamdani graciously agreed to an interview, but by the time we met in his purple-walled office at the MISR, the uprising in Egypt had become all-engrossing. I decided to take the opportunity to get his early thoughts about the revolutions in North Africa. (As it happened, the Feb. 18 presidential elections in Uganda saw Yoweri Museveni extend his twenty-five-year rule over Uganda with 68% of the vote, despite widespread and credible allegations of bribery and vote-rigging.)

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

The perils of writing about Ramanujan, as I did in my last 3QD column, is that there will always be those who insist that a better educated Ramanujan would have been a worse mathematician. One response is to say that by the same token a worse educated Euler would have been a better mathematician, an argument that to my knowledge has never been made, another is to relate a remarkable story that parallels the tale of Ramanujan. A story that is reasonably well known within the world of chess but has somehow escaped the attention of the world outside.

In the telling of the story much of what I quote is borrowed from several sources, the most important being a compilation by Edward Winter. The material available is insufficient to piece together a life but it is enough to outline the story. In 1929, a man from Sargodha in Punjab arrived in England, part of the entourage of a Nawab. He had learnt chess in the Indian way, the modern form played in the West had some significant modifications, and he finished last in the first tournament he played. He learnt from the experience and within months went on to win the British Chess Championship, repeating the feat in 1932 and 1933. He also played top board for Britain in three chess Olympiads registering impressive performances against some of the top players in the world. His one game against the Cuban world champion Jose Raul Capablanca was a victorious masterpiece, and is counted among the great games of all times. And then in 1933 he disappeared, headed back to what is today Pakistan with his patron, never to play competitive international chess again.

The talented chess player and writer Reuben Fine, a contemporary, has written of him:

The story of the Indian Sultan Khan turned out to be a most unusual one. The “Sultan” was not the term of status that we supposed it to be; it was merely a first name. In fact, Sultan Khan was actually a kind of serf on the estate of a maharajah when his chess genius was discovered. He spoke English poorly, and kept score in Hindustani. It was said that he could not even read the European notations.

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A Simple Ontology

It may be that a flower’s petals
are held to stems by thought
and the wind is a counter-thought
that plucks petals from stems,
shifts them across a field
and sets them softly upon the grass
to repose in contemplative resolution
next to the notion of a grub-pulling crow

For all I know the wind itself may be
a palpable bright idea,
something about motion
and the abhorrence of vacuums
something about coming and going,
about ferocity, about stillness
about war and the absence of war

Maybe the moon is the concept of fullness,
loss, abatement, regeneration from slivers,
hope at the hour of the wolf, the opposite of
darkness at the break of noon, the
upside of shadow

For all I know Descartes may have had it right
and this, from horizon to horizon, may be
a simple ontology, an inherent
daisy chain of ideas
chasing its tail

Anyway, one idea
conceived in this synapse nest
is to harvest thought from thought
under a perception of blue
while the conception of breeze
riffles the hint of hair
and I place them like dreams of plums
into the essence of basket
and give them with the intention of love
to my belief in the natural
thought of you

by Jim Culleny
Feb.26, 2011

by George Wilkinson

Cells across the tree of life are built with very similar components: A wall to keep everything in, DNA which stores the genome, and RNA and protein which take care of the mechanics and metabolism. These components are heavily interdependent, and it is an ongoing puzzle how the modern cell emerged from the prebiotic chemistry of early earth. (See Wikipedia here ). There are two major approaches to try to bridge this gap. The first is to try to synthesize biotic compounds from a soup of plausible precurors, as in Miller and Urey’s “lightning experiment.” [Miller shown performing the experiment in photo on the right.] The converse approach is to scrutinize living organisms for hints of their ancestors, specifically the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA).

RNA was likely to be among the very first of the modern information polymer classes to emerge, because RNAs can do the jobs of genome storage (now done mainly by DNA) and enzymatic action (now done mainly by protein). Proteins might have come second, and DNA last. So how did DNA take over the job of genome storage?

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Parts one and two.

(Wherein we dump the obsolete Adam and Eve tale of the Advent of Consciousness for a more radical and contemporary one based on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.)

by Fred Zackel

“Something fell out of the mirror.”

“Did you hold it upside down?”

“Yes.”

“Did you shake it?”

“Yes.”

“After I told you not to?”

“I got curious.”

We must congratulate ourselves. Name another animal capable of creating its own meaning for its existence and then imposing it on the universe. We might even be the ones who most delay their own extinction.

Are we there yet?

Our Divine is simply the most acceptable conceptual metaphor our limited minds can imagine and can cope with at this time. The nearest equivalent to our group mind consensus.

Our Divine is a snapshot of our conceptions of the Divine.

Ever-changing and always needed.

Usually the Divine just needs a tweak here and there. Generally we really don’t imagine the Divine any incrementally better than we did yesterday. But we can work with this business model better than other previously available ones.

Sometimes a new god comes to town.

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This chart's been making the rounds lately everywhere, from top political bloggers to financial gadflies to music industry maven Bob Lefsetz. It's gone viral, crossed over, become a smash … in other words, it's done everything that records don't do anymore. (Except maybe Cee Lo's, which is retro in every good possible way.)

This chart's got a 'hook' – in this case, a simple and clean presentation that illustrates the rise and fall of the music business. And it has so many overtones: economic, musical, personal …

The story's simple: Vinyl got replaced by tape, then tape started falling off just as revenues from CDs picked up the slack and started skyrocketing. The business kept falling upward, making more and more money as it went. Until it didn't.

When Things Go Wrong … It Hurts Me Too

I had it … I had a deal lined up. I was going to make it.

In the late seventies rock and roll seemed to be booming. I had some songs and a five-piece band, and two managers were fighting over me. One was still struggling, on the way up. He'd take me out to breakfast once in a while according to then-standard manager/artist protocol: rented limo, Eggs Benedict and champagne, an offer of coke in the back seat on the way back. He'd managed to scrape up an offer from a second-rate record company that had a lot of hits once, but was struggling to be relevant again. The other manager couldn't care less about impressing me. But he had a superstar New Wave client and got me into a couple of major labels, both of which booked studio time for demos.

The first manager was a nice guy – not always a plus in a manager – and he had the hustle it might've taken to break an unknown act. But I dropped him and went with the guy who had the superstar in his stable. Everything was going great until I met the superstar at a party and mentioned his name. “I'm sorry I have to walk the same planet as that asshole,” she said. Uh-oh.

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by Jen Paton

Some travelers to Paris, mostly the Japanese, are supposed to suffer psychologically when the real City of Light does not match up to the imagined one. The disease is called Paris Syndrome: “fragile travelers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis.”

Perhaps it’s an ailment that doesn’t just afflict foreigners. Europeans seem to have developed a kind of Europe Syndrome, in that the ideas they have of their countries, or more precisely, their cities, fail to meet the reality of contemporary urban Europe, and they just aren’t sure how to deal with it. Hence the growing success of rightist nationalism from Sweden to Hungary, with attendant visions of forests of minarets growing across the continent. Hence, also, the scrambling of so many European leaders to declare multiculturalism failed and dead. But how can something have failed, let alone be dead when it is being lived, however precariously, every day? Can multiculturalism as a lived reality fail or die, when it simply is?

This partial sightedness stood out to me in reading many of the reviews of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, reviews which cannot help but note that Javier Bardem returns to a Barcelona that is anything but the sundrenched, nubile-American filled playground of Woody Allan’s Vicky Christina Barcelona.

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by Dave Maier

A reader writes in to ask (“naïvely,” as he thinks):

In Kant's transcendental idealism, what is at stake? And, if we take it that it is a form of anti-realism and a source of later anti-realisms in philosophy, what is at stake in anti-realism? […] I see that one answer is that anti-realism lends itself readily to relativism, and if we want the comfort of believing that what we hold to be true or valuable is true or valuable “in fact”, then realism seems attractive and anti-realism problematic, whereas on the other hand we might think that we empowering our mental faculties in some important way if we adopt an idealist or anti-realist conclusion. [Also,] if truth has some kind of epistemic criteria and does not reduce to correspondence to a reality, but these criteria are objective in the sense that they enable us to establish that a claim is indeed true or correct, this might be thought to facilitate the meaningfulness of our moral and aesthetic claims against the possibilities of emotivism and expressivism. […] Maybe this move owes a debt to Kant, because Kant's idealism gives epistemic criteria for the truth even of empirical propositions while nonetheless maintaining an “empirical realism” according to which there are objective truths.

Dear reader:

That is one heck of a question, and not at all naïve. It would be a better and much different world if everyone were clear on realism, anti-realism, their relation to each other and to the other views which try to get beyond them, not to mention Kant. I am not a Kant scholar, but as a pragmatist I do have some things to say about realism et al, so let me give your question a necessarily compressed as well as highly contentious go.

As I see it, the best way to approach Kant is to see him as trying to get past a traditional impasse (not of course always seen as such by the tradition itself): that our intellect is such as constantly to pose questions about its relation to the world that it cannot answer. It's not that these questions are simply too hard – there's no philosophical problem with that, as we run into such problems all the time – but that they are incoherent. That is, in reflecting on itself as operating in the way that it in fact does, our intellect is inevitably drawn to certain conceptual train wrecks like a moth to a, um, train wreck. In Kant's own striking image, we're like the dove, who, tired of dealing with wind resistance, yearns for the ideal perfection of a vacuum – which would of course make flight impossible. (For more on the dove image, see here – a much better post than this one, if I do say so myself.) According to Kant and those of us following him this far, the trick is to get off the train at the right time – not following the moth into disaster, but also resisting nihilistic calls to abandon train travel entirely. As you can imagine, this can be a tricky business indeed.

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