Liz's Bloglet - Sunday 21 October 2007

Dr. James Watson was not removed from his position as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for expressing scientific questions about the genetic basis of intelligence. It was for things like this:
Dr Watson added that he hoped everyone was equal, but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".

You cannot be the director of a scientific institution and say things like this (you cannot be the director of a daycare center and say things like this), because this suggests you discriminate in hiring and that is against the law. This is especially important for Cold Spring because of their history of supporting eugenics research.

The idea that free speech rights and the support of intellectual freedom in academia means that people running research institutions should be allowed to discount the intellectual abilities of their subordinates based on genetics with no scientific evidence to support them (and outside of their own research expertise) is a very weird position to hold.

The reason more scientists aren't speaking out about this, is because to most of us the idea of "race" determining "intelligence" was debunked several decades ago. Having a well-reasoned discussion about it at this point is about as interesting as discussing vulcanology with someone who doesn't "believe" in plate tectonics or the botany of carnivorous plants with someone who doesn't "believe" in evolution. _
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09:48:34 AM, Sunday 21 October 2007

One of the religious bloggers I read frequently has a daughter who attends King Middle School in Portland, ME, the school that has been in the news for having a free clinic (available to students whose parents sign a permission slip) which will begin to offer birth control to girls who need it. She has adapted her response into a newspaper article. I share it for those who still don't get what a true "Christian response" to an issue like this would look like. _
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08:09:16 AM, Sunday 21 October 2007

A really good post on a Durham blog addressing why the Lacrosse Rape Case and Durham have bizarrely struck such a nerve nationwide So much good stuff:

The external negativity about Durham did not begin with Duke lacrosse. It won’t end with Duke lacrosse. At its heart, to my mind, is the same source of the rabid complaints about New Orleans after Katrina, or the jibes at other major urban centers: namely, Durham is a diverse, socioeconomically integrated city in an increasingly fragmented United States.

...

Frankly, a large segment of the U.S. population can’t understand why anyone would choose to live inside Durham. What they may not realize is, many of us who are here wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else.

...

So to those partisans in this impolite war: I invite you to criticize the case, the prosecution, the actions of the police and the city manager and city leaders… even the population itself to the extent of how residents struggled with the case. And if wrongs have been done, the City and taxpayers will be held accountable, it seems certain.

But I ask that you also take a look at the tone and nature of the more inappropriate rhetoric, particularly those elements that take a dim view on a terrific city, elements who talk in undertones darker than one wishes to see in the human psyche. And when you do, ask yourself: is the lacrosse case in and of itself really the only element of this story that has caused so much rage? Or does the raw emotion have its base in the kind of fear of the other that has become so much easier in a divided America?

It’s a vital question, because civic society only works so long as society is civil. _
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03:16:35 PM, Friday 19 October 2007

Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says

Reading Creek Running North may be hardwired in me, as well. _
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11:31:32 AM, Friday 19 October 2007

We keep getting emails about how Norman Myers will be here for a few weeks and would like to meet with students. Which is very cool. Except I keep thinking it's Norman Mailer _
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03:23:45 PM, Thursday 18 October 2007

Wrote a thesis. Adapted it for publications. Helped edit 3 other articles of related work. Wrote a grant proposal. Wrote a dissertation proposal. Wrote another paper. Now, as I'm writing the first chapter of my dissertation, this stuff is finally starting to get doable. _
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10:56:36 AM, Thursday 18 October 2007

Edge asked a bunch of influential thinkers WHAT IS YOUR FORMULA? YOUR EQUATION? YOUR ALGORITHM? The answers range from the theoretical (PZ Myers), to the philosophical (Danny Kahneman), to the archetypical (Benoit Mandelbrot) _
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10:14:02 AM, Thursday 18 October 2007

At the elite colleges - dim white kids

In related news, endowment returns are up, tuition is up, financial aid is down

Private foundations are required by law to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments each year on their missions, but public charities — a category that includes colleges — face no such requirement. Holding colleges to the same standard is an idea that clearly interests Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the minority leader of the Senate Finance Committee and Capitol Hill's closest scrutinizer of non-profits.

Pseudo-Ivy University of Basketball and Lacrosse acquired over $1 billion from its endowment last year a 25.6% return _
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02:24:04 PM, Tuesday 16 October 2007

Help _
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08:44:07 AM, Monday 15 October 2007

I am Emily X See the faces and hear the voices as Planned Parenthood employees explain why their work is so important. 40 days of pro-choice blogging to counter 40 days of protesting at Planned Parenthood. _
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04:12:26 PM, Sunday 14 October 2007

Countries where abortion is illegal have the same abortion rate as those where it is legal The big difference is how many women die from complications from illegal abortions. _
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07:26:32 PM, Saturday 13 October 2007

I can't decide how Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize will play in the circles that tend to deny anthropogenic climate change. On the one hand, the Nobel name is generally associated with "real science" of the biomedical and physics kind, so maybe there will be some legitimacy there. But some of these folks also advocate "alternative medicine" and think evidence-based medicine is biased. And others of them are young earth creationists who have a problem with any physics that talks about the origins of the universe and really any biology insofar as evolution is always part of it.

Plus, this is the Nobel Peace Prize, which Jimmy Carter and Arafat both won, so it's obviously for lying commies anyway.

So, my guess is, further legitimacy in the eyes of reasonable people who were aready convinced and no effect on the opinion of the loony fringe. _
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06:48:58 AM, Friday 12 October 2007

I've also been meaning to apologize for the appearance based on my sidebar that I only listen to the same 10 songs over and over again.

Pseudo-Ivy League University of Basketball and Lacrosse has fortified their firewall such that I can no longer audioscrobble. Rest assured I am listening to all kinds of new and interesting New Folk and Bluegrass and occasional new awesome R&B like Corrinne Bailey Rae and you're all missing out. _
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02:50:19 PM, Thursday 11 October 2007

This ev-psych bullshit must stop
I'll surprise no one here when I say that from a big-picture sociological perspective, I think this is a reaction to feminism. For men, it's a reaction to the relative success of feminism, which has succeeded in threatening (though not dislodging) male privilege and in demanding (but not achieving) equal opportunity for women. The EPBS frees men from the guilt induced by feminism; it reassures them that that they're at the top of the heap because of their innate qualities rather than because of male privilege; it lets them know that they don't have to make any further concessions to women's demands.

For women, it's a reaction to the relative failure of feminism. Feminism teaches us that we have the right to live as full, free human beings, but our still-sexist society makes this impossible. That hurts. It's painful as hell. And for those women who aren't fully up on feminist analysis of how patriarchy works, the EPBS sings a soothing song: feminism was wrong, it was a lie, and the reason men won't do the laundry or take care of the children or listen to you when you talk or give you a job or be faithful to you or treat you like a human being instead of a sex toy is because of evolution. That's just how things are. You can't change it, so there's no point in worrying about it. Just give in. Get a labioplasty, pick up the dirty socks yourself, look on the bright side. And smile more. _
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02:44:31 PM, Thursday 11 October 2007

The Rise of the Ghetto-Fabulous Party
In many respects, ghetto-fabulous parties are the culmination of conservative politics on college campuses. They reflect the ongoing insecurities of whiteness in the wake of the civil rights movement and the supposed prominence of multiculturalism and political correctness. Indeed, ghetto-fab parties are part of a broader reactionary movement that believes whiteness and the ivory tower are being imperiled by political correctness, radical professors and “minority rights.” Pushing against these perceived evils, conservative students have organized political theatrics on campuses, holding “affirmative action” bake sales and “white-only” scholarships. They have in essence created a culture today in which those with power think of themselves as victims and those without become targets for violence. _
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10:26:14 AM, Thursday 11 October 2007

I have to call the attention of those who might be interested to the fact that Michael Berube is back at Crooked Timber after being gone most of the summer and he's bashing Allan Bloom

In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.

As John Quiggin pointed out, this isn’t exactly a “decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past.” What’s more, my sense is that most people—that is, except for members of a certain Department, one of whom I’ll get to in a moment—would gladly trade Dryden and Pope for Austen and Woolf in any literary fantasy league you care to name. And since Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer (in 1965) have been replaced by Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton (in 1998), that leaves only the controversial Eliot-for-Morrison matchup, which is well described as an “invasion of politics,” since, unlike Morrison, Eliot didn’t have politics—or, if he did, at least he didn’t write about them, and so they were irrelevant to his stature as a writer. _
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03:48:37 PM, Wednesday 10 October 2007

SCHIP saved my family business (and also enabled his daughter to have normal speech and hearing).

I don't read Kos. This was linked by somebody else from Pandagon. But, wow. _
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02:32:37 PM, Tuesday 9 October 2007

If true, this is the best news out of the Middle East in a long time. _
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08:55:24 AM, Monday 8 October 2007

So, I think I mentioned previously that I'm in a Epistemologies of Biology reading group this semester. It is really interested to be talking about the philosophy of science among scientists. It is very different from talking about it with philosophy nerds or the exposure one gets from the New York Times science section.

We're all pretty comfortable agreeing that all scientists are constructivists. We all deal every day with the ways that our descriptions and understanding of the world fall short of the world, and the ways we feel unable to access what is real. Interestingly, we tend to agree a lot--we see constructivism as Fleck did and we struggle with formulating falsifiable hypotheses as Popper says we must. It could certainly be argued that we've all just been indoctrinated the same way with the same modern epistemology of science.

Our big disagreement happened this week, and I found it one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever participated in. We read a chapter from Susan Oyama's Evolution's Eye. Her basic contention is that biological programming by genes has come to completely dominate our understanding of life, at the expense of the many other factors which determine the appearance and behavior of organisms. Further, she argues that nature/nurture duality is useless because it paints things as a simple one-dimensional continuum--every "trait" can be said to be determined from some simple combination of nature and nurture, whether it's 100:0, 50:50, or 20:80.

Her argument is that we must look at every "trait" as the culmination of everything that's come before it, every phase of development, every chemical, every interaction with another organism, every behavior and experience. For this reason, she argues that immature/mature is a duality equally as useless as nature/nurture because one can no more say that an organism is "mature" than one can separate nature from nurture. One can no more pinpoint a gene that led to schizophrenia than one can pinpoint a single day in kindergarten that led to schizophrenia. One can just as easily say that experiences determine proteins which determine genes as genes determine proteins which determine experiences.

The average New York Times Science Page reader is pretty upset now. The average geneticist is, too--the ones in our group were really struggling to even figure out what Oyama was saying. But the evolutionary biologists and behavioral ecologists in our group were annoyed we were reading something so basic and unoriginal--this is how they've been working for 20 years. The primatologist was jumping up and down because it was a complete restatement of what she feels every time she tries to write a paper about her baboons' genes. One evolutionary biologist said, and I will struggle hard to paraphrase, "She doesn't go far enough. Genes are nothing more than an evolutionary adaptation to ensure some stability between generations."

As an ecosystem ecologist, this was a hard discussion for me to participate in. My organisms of study don't have genes. But I have always assumed that the traits of the microbes and bugs and even fish and beavers in my systems mostly are due to genes and beyond that I haven't thought much about this issue in my work. I had to think instead of my non-scientific world, of the people who think that a single chromosome means I can't do math and the people who were surprised when they cloned a calico cat and got a tabby. I've long thought that "biological programming" is an oversimplification and leaned more towards the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate. So this rethinking of "traits" shouldn't have upset me--it mostly just was outside of my experience rather than contrary.

So, maybe that's the next step in our thinking. We realize that the Human Genome Project is not going to cure all of our diseases or guarantee us children who are beautiful, brilliant, and skinny. And we stop thinking that "traits" that are "genetic" are different from those due to "environment". But considering how many people say stupid things every day about women and their two X chromosomes, or men just acting like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, it's going to be a long time before the New York Times Science Page catches up. _
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11:26:09 AM, Saturday 6 October 2007

Does this do any good? I don't know. But it's a tiny, insignificant thing that I can do. _
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01:04:06 PM, Friday 5 October 2007

As always, my love for xkcd is pure and knows no boundaries

Yesterday, I was having a problem in Access (yes I should use MySQL, shut up). I did a quick google and found someone had asked and had answered the same question previously on a users forum. Of course, the person who had written the useful information thought that having an animated icon of jiggling breasts next to their name was a really good idea. _
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11:05:12 AM, Friday 5 October 2007

I was on TV last night! _
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08:27:28 AM, Wednesday 3 October 2007

Distinctively American: The residential liberal arts college

Lot's of good stuff here, including by Eva Brann
Rarely does a college say to its public, especially its prospective parents: "Listen to us. These ways of gauging the value of an education are all wrong. Efficiency in learning is ineffective, and training for the future is, in the words of Octavio Paz, "preparing a prison for the present." We offer an education that is, to be sure, extended, expensive, nonutilitarian, uncertain (and certainly unquantifiable) in outcome, and possibly destabilizing. But here we love learning and are ready to help your children love it, and we are, moreover, prepared to tell you in detail why we do what we do: what the good of it is, and why we think that these four years are the proper completion to the upbringing you gave your children and the best insurance for a good life." _
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12:54:58 PM, Monday 1 October 2007

My friend Becca, who sometimes comments here, is a member of the Tucson Symphony. They are in the midst of serious labor contract problems and have put together a really good webpage explaining the issues and why it's a big deal (how long they all went to school, how much their instruments cost, how little they get paid anyway, and what their second and third jobs are).

I don't think anybody reading this lives in Tucson, but maybe at least this will inspire you to go see some professional musicians in action and support the side of labor in whatever disputes might be going on in your town. _
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09:09:01 AM, Monday 1 October 2007

I am going here tomorrow. For a week. I am not taking my laptop. I have to finish the outline for the 1st chapter of my dissertation before I leave. _
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12:33:20 PM, Friday 21 September 2007

Amanda Marcotte brings us the rather remarkable fact that, when it comes to Pitchfork record reviews, there are more bylines for guys named Mark than for all women combined. She then goes on to defend the rights of women everywhere to engage in Insufferable Music Snobbery. _
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03:14:23 PM, Thursday 20 September 2007

This story shows some of the things that are making me lean towards Edwards But I'm still interested in Obama and Kucinich. Any interest I had in Clinton went away with her announced healthcare plan, which appears only slightly better than what we have now. _
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01:22:01 PM, Thursday 20 September 2007

Everybody I know seems to be suffering from something along the range from scratchy throat to lost voice to nagging cough to full-on bronchitis. Is it some dust borne disease? Or is it just dust and air pollution? Now we need rain just for our health. _
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08:46:46 AM, Thursday 20 September 2007

My new favorite Gloria Steinem quote ever:
Q: Do you see the world through the prism of gender?

A: No, the world looks at me through the prism of gender.

From this interview _
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08:34:18 AM, Wednesday 19 September 2007

I'm just finishing up a box of tea that our neighbor gave us that she in turn got when helping a friend who is German move. Not being able to read German, I had no idea what kind of tea it was, but I liked how strong and full-flavored it was. While turning over the empty box I suddenly noticed, in the midst of all the German, "Darjeeling". I love Darjeeling. But I guess my tea palate is still not quite good enough to tell teas apart when they are labeled in German. _
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08:26:40 AM, Tuesday 18 September 2007

This may be complete nonsense, but I like the idea of the creative class of geek overturning the programming class of geek. _
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03:55:08 PM, Monday 17 September 2007

So poking around on MySpace led me to discover that a guy I went to high school with (who I mostly knew from the BBS he ran) has a song (along with his wife) on the soundtrack for the new Greg Kinnear movie. They appear to be an indy band that still records mostly in their living room in Cornelius, NC. That, apparently, is what the internet has done for us. _
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09:37:18 PM, Friday 14 September 2007

It was pointed out to me that today on Google is Roald Dahl day. _
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12:23:07 PM, Thursday 13 September 2007

Prisons purging books on faith from libraries Nothing quite like government chosen experts deciding which 150 books define a faith. I have a feeling that if Barth had to be purged that Bishop Spong's books were burned. _
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01:51:27 PM, Tuesday 11 September 2007

So, Remi and I have a question. We understand that as of the middle of February 2009 broadcast tv will switch to HD (i.e. digital broadcast) and our tv will no longer be able to pick up the broadcast signal. We understand that there will likely be some kind of a government subsidy or rebate on a converter box that will allow our tv to pick up the HD signal (and that subsidy will likely continue to cover low-income households). But we have no idea why everything is switching over. Can someone help us out? _
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09:58:34 PM, Saturday 8 September 2007

Every so often I rediscover the public library. I wish I didn't keep forgetting to go get more books. _
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09:42:12 AM, Saturday 8 September 2007

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