Separation of Religion and Science: US behind Iran

"Teach Evolution, Learn Science: We're ahead of Turkey, But behind Iran," according to Gerald Weissmann. Mollas are a dime a dozen in the world today, but Iran's mollas aren't just any mollas -- they are animal-cloning, robot-building, satellite-launching, stem-cell-researching, uranium-enriching mollas.

That is why there is no quick military solution for the empire comparable to Israel's attack on the Osirak reactor in Iraq and Israel's bombing of what is said to be a nuclear facility in Syria. Iran has succeeded in the tasks of both mass education and higher education, building a deeper and broader base of scientific and technological human capital than in any other country in the region except Israel. That means that Iran can rebuild what gets destroyed.

Given its rate of scientific production, as reported in NewScientist, Iran may eventually catch up with Israel, too:

Scientific output has grown 11 times faster in Iran than the world average, faster than any other country. A survey of the number of scientific publications listed in the Web of Science database shows that growth in the Middle East -- mostly in Turkey and Iran -- is nearly four times faster than the world average.

Science-Metrix, a data-analysis company in Montreal, Canada, has published a detailed report (PDF) on "geopolitical shifts in knowledge creation" since 1980.

Is that a "threat" to Israel or the United States? Not if these two countries aren't run by people who are given to seeing the world as if it were the stage for a zero-sum game of power struggle. The question is if they are.

Chickengate: The Left and Science and Technology

By now you've probably heard of the Chickengate in Bolivia.

There is a chance that the president of Bolivia was joking about hormones in chickens causing premature baldness, reproductive developmental disorders, and other disorders due to sex hormone imbalances. ABI reports that the president was speaking "at times in a joking tone" ("a momentos en tono de guasa").

But if it was a joke, it in any case completely overshadowed what little coverage of the Summit on Climate Change in Bolivia there was in the corporate media. Seeking to counter the media coup, a gay indigenous man on the Left bravely put out a video statement: "I am a proud indigenous man, and I am a proud gay man, and I'd like to thank President Evo Morales for his leadership . . . in behalf of all humanity . . . in behalf of protection of our Mother Earth."

Evo can't be a homophobe -- especially given the new Bolivian constitution promulgated by his government specifically prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time in the history of Bolivia -- and the corporate media are wrong to try to pass him off as one.

However, the Chickengate in Bolivia does remind us that there is a tendency in considerable parts of the Left today to be too alarmist about science and technology, especially when it comes to food and energy. That basically leaves the people hanging in the scientific and political vacuum between the Apocalypticist Left and the Panglossian Right.

Stephen Jay Gould: This View of Life

Stephen Jay Gould (10 September 1941 -- 20 May 2002) was a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. His view of evolution of nature was historical and dialectical, unlike those of Darwinian fundamentalists, for whom adaptation and natural selection must explain all changes. This NOVA profile of Gould was originally broadcast on 18 December 1984.

New Prophets of the Proletariat

Historical materialism, in so far as it is a variety of materialism, takes nature, human and non-human, into account. One of the most important factors for social change in this century will be natural disasters, whose intensity and frequency are likely to increase due to climate change.

The business-as-usual scenario yields an increase of about five degrees Fahrenheit of global warming during this century. . . . How much will sea level rise with five degrees of global warming? Here too, our best information comes from the Earth's history. The last time that the Earth was five degrees warmer was three million years ago, when sea level was about eighty feet higher.

Eighty feet! In that case, the United States would lose most East Coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami; indeed, practically the entire state of Florida would be under water. Fifty million people in the US live below that sea level. Other places would fare worse. China would have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would produce 120 million refugees, practically the entire nation. India would lose the land of 150 million people. (Jim Hansen, "The Threat to the Planet," New York Review of Books 53.12, 13 July 2006)

James Hansen, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, Presentation at Albany Law School, April 18, 2006.

James Hansen, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, Presentation at Albany Law School, April 18, 2006.

The world at the end of the 21st century, if not sooner, may very well look like demographic and environmental nightmares of Mike Davis re-mixed, amplified, and in an endless loop. The impacts of climate change will be especially severe in the global South. Disasters will displace and dispossess untold numbers, and weak states unable or unwilling to provide for the newly displaced and dispossessed will be in for legitimation crisis.

Old priests of capitalism will be challenged by new prophets of the proletariat of global slums. The new prophets, however, are unlikely to speak the language of Marx. "Indeed, for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world" (Mike Davis, "Planet of Slums," New Left Review 26, March-April 2004). Can the new prophets, unlike the old ones, prevail?

Sex and Race

Reactions against racism of James Watson -- who said "he is 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says not really'" -- came very fast: Robin McKie and Paul Harris, "Disgrace: How a Giant of Science Was Brought Low" (Observer, 21 October 2007). It may be a sign that the scientific establishment now accepts as the scientific norm that race, IQ, or both are social constructs rather than immutable biological essences, scientists such as the late Stephen Jay Gould having successfully educated their fellow scientists and the general public.

It has not gotten that far when it comes to gender, though, probably because most people, even many scientists, still think that gender, unlike race, has a biological foundation called sex. However, the concept of sex has changed as much as gender -- for instance, from the one-sex/two-gender model (according to which a woman is an "imperfect" man) before modernity to the two-sex/two-gender model (which has us believe that men and women are "opposite" sexes) after modernity in the West (see Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press, 1990) -- demonstrating that it, too, is a social construct.

Sexual Math Revisited

Men are naturally more promiscuous than women.  That's an old idea, seemingly corroborated by survey data, study after study -- hence the idea has been an opium for sociobiologists, whose hobbyhorse is to construct just-so stories that rationalize and legitimate gender inequality.

But do the data tell us our sexual truth or sexual myth?  Gina Kolata, in her recent New York Times article,¹ pointed out: "It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women" in a given population.  Kolata has mathematician David Gale illustrate this point:

"By way of dramatization, we change the context slightly and will prove what will be called the High School Prom Theorem.  We suppose that on the day after the prom, each girl is asked to give the number of boys she danced with.  These numbers are then added up giving a number G.  The same information is then obtained from the boys, giving a number B.

Theorem: G=B

Proof: Both G and B are equal to C, the number of couples who danced together at the prom. Q.E.D."

Jordan Ellenberg of Slate takes issue with Kolata:

The problem is hiding in the distinction between the median (the number reported by the CDC study [that Kolata questions]) and the mean (the number Gale was talking about). . . . Consider a village with 200 people, evenly divided by sex.  Ninety of the women are virgins, but none of the men is.  Each man has slept with just one of the sexually active women; each woman who's had sex, then, has had 10 partners.  In this case, the median woman has zero sexual partners, but the median man has one.  So we see a big difference in medians between the male and female populations, just as in the CDC data.²

On page 3 of the CDC study, however, it is said: "Twenty-nine percent of men reported having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime compared with 9% of women who reported having 15 or more male sexual partners in a lifetime."

For men and women to have roughly the same mean, which has to be the case mathematically, and for men to have a much higher median than women, there ought to be a group of extraordinarily sexually active women who outclass the most sexually active men, helping raise the manhood median despite sexual lethargy of the other women, but the CDC study, based on self reported data, is no evidence for the existence of a female sexual overclass (see above, but also see Tables 7 and 9).

I conclude either men or women or both are lying.

Perhaps it is time to promote a new idea in order to correct the prejudice that makes people lie: what is attractive in women is wisdom and experience, and what is adorable in men is chastity and modesty.

1 "The Myth, the Math, the Sex," 12 August 2007, nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html.

2 "Mean Girls: The New York Times Slips Up on Sexual Math," 13 August 2007, slate.com/id/2172186/.

If All That Is Holy Were Profaned. . . .

Paul Krugman asks why "studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields [of the humanities and social sciences]" ("An Academic Question," New York Times 5 Apr. 2005). Krugman answers his own question by pointing out that, "[t]oday, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the 'party of theocracy'" and that, in the view of Republicans like Dennis Baxley, for a professor to say that "evolution is a fact" is an example of totalitarianism in academia (Krugman, 5 Apr. 2005).

A soft-line centrist view that seeks to reconcile creationism and evolution -- the view that "[h]uman beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process," held by 37% of Americans in 2001 (Deborah Jordan Brooks/Gallup, "Substantial Numbers of Americans Continue to Doubt Evolution as Explanation for Origin of Humans," 5 Mar. 2001) as well as theologians of mainline Protestant denominations -- shouldn't be an obstacle to pursuit of science; but a hard-line conservative view that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so," which 45% of Americans said they espoused (Brooks, 5 Mar. 2001), is -- and rightly so.

Right-wing views on politics and economy shouldn't require faith in hard-line creationism, though, so secular intellectuals on the Right, who profess to be concerned about the dearth of conservatives in science, ought to reclaim American conservatism from religious fundamentalists and secularize it. But there are few signs that secular rightists have found an odd couple of anti-Darwinist scientific belief and social-Darwinist economic policy, which together make up the dominant ideology of the Right, to be in need of quick divorce.

As for the ruling class, they have a large pool of well-educated and yet relatively inexpensive scientific labor in China, India, and Eastern Europe at their disposal, so they see no reason to worry about a potential negative impact of the Right's crusade against science on the state of R&D. Besides, if all that is solid melted into air and all that is holy were profaned, workers might at last be compelled to face with sober senses their real conditions of life, and their relations with their kind.

Give Me That Old Time Religion

Colin Purrington, a fighting evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore College, created a parody of the textbook disclaimer sticker designed by the Cobb County School District in Georgia:

That's pretty funny, but what I would really love to see is a satirical Polytheistic Intelligent Design website, adapted from David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, which asserts with a straight face:

[I]ntentional design normally occurs with a division of labor -- watches are the product of many hands, not one.

So, the universe or evolved life forms must have involved more hands than the Manhattan Project. Engineering shops. Mines. Mills. Shippers. Warehouses. Unions. Managers. Skilled and unskilled labor. (We're talking about the divine, so we will assume that this is a cooperative arrangement without bosses, wage-laborers, or celestial exploitation.) (JKS, "The Argument from Design and Polytheism," LBO-talk, December 13, 2004, 07:32:17 PST)

The website should play Pete Seeger singing "Old Time Religion" and come with animation of a dancing Aphrodite in "that see-through nightie":

Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
Give me that old time religion
It's good enough for me.

We will pray with Aphrodite,
We will pray with Aphrodite,
She wears that see-through nightie,
And it's good enough for me.

Many monotheists who Google the Net for "intelligent design" would happen upon it and go apoplectic, upon seeing a website that argues the universe was created by a communistic committee of sexually perverse gods.

Lesbian Pills: Sexuality, Science, and the Media

Journalism has a way of making a scientific mountain out of a virtual molehill. Sensationalism is most often seen in reporting on sexuality. If you look at the article below, you would think that scientists discovered that some pills make more lesbians:

Prof Lee Ellis and colleagues at Minot State University, North Dakota, traced the mothers of more than 5,000 American and Canadian students and members of gay and lesbian support groups, looking for links between prescription drugs taken during pregnancy and the sexual orientation of their children.

The researchers found that the mothers of homosexual women were at least five times more likely to have taken synthetic thyroid medications during pregnancy than mothers of heterosexual women, and eight times more likely to have used amphetamine-based diet pills such as Dexedrine and diethylpropion.

They also found evidence that some drugs have the opposite effect during pregnancy, reducing the probability of homosexual offspring. Mothers of heterosexual males were 70 per cent more likely to have taken drugs to combat nausea than those of male homosexuals. (Robert Matthews, "Pregnant Women Who Take Slimming Pills 'Are More Likely to Have Gay Children,'" Telegraph, December 5, 2004)

What's missing from the report (as well as others like it, for instance Beth Shapiro, "Study: Dieting Moms Likely To Have Lesbian Babies," 365Gay.com, December 6, 2004) is the facts that correlation does not itself prove causation; that the researchers only controlled for "three maternal variables: maternal age, maternal education, and self-rated maternal recall" (Lee Ellis and Jill Hellberg, "Fetal Exposure to Prescription Drugs and Adult Sexual Orientation," Personality and Individual Differences 38.1, January 2005); and that the actual populations of the mothers of homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual offsprings in the study who remember taking any of the nineteen pills whose effects the researchers investigated were minuscule segments of "the mothers of more than 5,000 American and Canadian students and members of gay and lesbian support groups" (Matthews, December 5, 2004).

How minuscule?

"Whereas seven out of 3241 (0.2%) of the mothers of female heterosexuals recalled having taken [amphetamine-based] diet medication [primarily Dexedrine and Tenuate Dospan] during pregnancy, two out of 144 (1.7%) of the mothers of homosexuals did so (p=0.033)"; and "Whereas 31 of the 3241 (1.0%) mothers of heterosexuals took these medications [synthetic thyroid medications, primarily Synthroid and Thyroxine] during pregnancy, six of the 144 (5.2%) mothers of homosexuals did so" (emphasis added, Ellis and Hellberg, January 2005). Even the researchers themselves offer this caviat: "It should be emphasized that because the sample sizes for most categories of drugs were often exceedingly small (especially in the case of mothers whose offspring were homosexual or bisexual), caution must be exercised in offering interpretations" (Ellis and Hellberg, January 2005).

Why the persistent temptation to search for biological causes of homosexuality and exaggerate skimpy findings? It must be because the dominant assumption is still that homosexuality, unlike heterosexuality which is simply assumed to be "normal," requires explanation. Even gay researchers are not immune to the temptation, though, as some of them understandably (though naively) hope that, once it is established that homosexuality is "biologically hardwired," they will be able to free gay men and lesbians (especially young ones) from execrable ex-gay "ministers" and "therapists" who pursue them for conversion to heterosexuality. It is much better to challenge the dominant assumption directly, however, by asking the public to consider a different question: since when and how has heterosexuality become the norm in the West?