Posts filed under 'Science in culture & policy'
A friend sent me a link to this new magazine called GOOD. It includes features such as “The Color of War: An embedded artist chronicles Iraq” and “Search And Destroy: Ramming and sinking whale boats wherever they can be found.” To be sure, neither of those topics is Martha Stewart’s kind of “good thing” - but it sure sounds interesting! Heck, they even have a section called “Provocations”.
The best part is that if you subscribe to GOOD, your entire $20 fee will go to the charity of your choice (they have twelve to choose from, including DonorsChoose, Teach for America, UNICEF and WWF.) They say they’re doing it in order to self-select subscribers that fit their readership model, and I think it’s going to work! Their goal is to get 50,000 subscribers and so far they have just over 10,000.
So if you were going to do some end-of-the-year donations anyway, you might want to channel some of your money through GOOD and get something good for yourself, too.
December 28th, 2006
The Economist: Liberalism and neurology | Free to choose?
As if the concept of free will wasn’t fraught long before we had MRI.
Update: this post from musings on neurology, etc. offers a reading list of primary literature on neurology & free will.
December 22nd, 2006
Vanity Fair: Christopher Hitchens On Why Women Aren’t Funny
This piece is titled “Provocation.” So I’m not really offended. I mean, come on; it’s Christopher Hitchens, what do you expect? Over at Scienceblogs, some bloggers have responded about the science, but I think they’re taking Hitchens too seriously. Here he goes:
Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence. Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid. Women aren’t like that. And the wits and comics among them are formidable beyond compare: Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, Ellen DeGeneres. (Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?)
See? Provocation. But what does he mean about Dorothy Parker? Come on, Hitch, don’t be catty. Dorothy was vicious, but she was also very funny. Can’t a woman be both?
Hitchens later observes:
Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.
I must agree with that. When women’s wit is mocking, it’s perceived as threatening. I admit, when I make people laugh, which I do, I’m usually being sarcastic. Uh-oh. Is that a bad idea?
In her entertaining yet depressing play-by-play of gender conflict, Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide
(Amazon), Maureen Dowd shares some pearls of philosophy from a book her mother gave her, How to Catch and Keep a Man:
Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether. It ruins the aura of softness, womanliness, and kindness you should be attempting to create around yourself.
I’d laugh that off - after all, the book also advises that “men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects” - but as Dowd says a few pages later:
if there’s one thing men fear, it’s a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?
“Critical” and “funny” are not always the same thing. But they can be. They were for Dorothy Parker. That Hitchens thinks she wasn’t really funny is quite striking, because it supports Dowd’s contention. Perhaps he should have titled his piece, “Why Women Aren’t Funny To Men.” Or, “Why Women Aren’t Funny To Me.”
Anyway, I don’t like his generic, catch-all idea of humor. Humor is subjective. I’m bored by the Three Stooges, but adore Jon Stewart. Does that make me dour, or discriminating? Sarcastic humor and scatological humor - are they the same thing? Do they even activate the same part of the cortex? I doubt it. Although it’s amusing to contemplate the grant proposal for the PET study to find out.
At least, I think it’s amusing.
Oh dear.
December 17th, 2006
Pharyngula: Feminism is undermining human evolution!
Pharyngula has simply got to be my favorite blog. In this post, PZ Myers refutes an annoying pseudo-expert, William Tucker, who spews a lot of bogus biology on his roundabout way to bashing feminism.
Here’s a sample of Tucker’s article:
It is precisely because females play a dominant role and males are so passive and unambitious that bonobos did not produce an evolutionary line that led to human beings. . . feminism, in its most obviously primitive forms, is undermining human evolution. Everywhere in the Western world, the emancipation of women has initially led to rising divorce rates and plummeting births.
If PZ hadn’t already ripped this idiot apart, I’d get really mad. Tucker seems to claim that the differences between the human Y chromosome and chimp Y chromosome are the root cause of our species’ divergence - basically, everything important that separates humans from chimps is male, because women don’t have a Y chromosome. Tucker doesn’t seem to understand that the unpaired Y, unlike the paired X, is more vulnerable to picking up accidental garbage during cell division - changes that are most likely evolutionarily meaningless. In fact, over time the Y is losing little bits here and there: it’s shrinking! If, by undermining evolution, feminists are actually slowing shrinkage of the sacred Y, maybe Tucker should thank them?
Best of all, Tucker doesn’t seem to think “humanity” is evenly distributed between genders. If the Y is so essential, then it does follow that Y-deprived women wouldn’t be very advanced:
In other words, what differentiates us from our mammalian relatives is changes that have occurred in the male of the species. . .
As far back as 1972, Elaine Morgan, a feminist, writing in The Descent of Woman, noted that in fact the role of females hadn’t changed much from chimp to human. Mothers nurse and care for their offspring in basically the same way chimps do. In terms of social role, there really isn’t much difference between human females and other animals.
I’m not even going to get into the way he’s misusing Morgan’s words. This guy is, bluntly, a moron. I’m so glad PZ got to him first, and much more effectively than I could have. As it is, I’ll just conclude that people who don’t understand biology should refrain from invoking it to justify their politics. The real biologists tend to get offended.
October 21st, 2006
Experts: Some women perform well in math
Talk about a non-surprise.
The title of this article, as usual, is misleading. The study served not to verify that some women can do math (duh), but to demonstrate the powerful effect gender stereotypes have on women’s math performances. In this study, women who were told that men are innately superior at math did worse on a subsequent math test than women who were told gender doesn’t affect math aptitude. Even women who are merely reminded of their gender in a math-free context do worse! It kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
This study follows on the heels of a Canadian study by J.P. Rushton that got a lot of press in September. Rushton is just the latest of a pack of researchers arguing that men are demonstrably smarter, including controversial Brits Lynn and Irwing, who claimed in Nature that men have an advantage of ~5 IQ points. I haven’t yet read Rushton’s article (no access to the journal, Intelligence) but apparently Rushton and his team based their conclusions on SAT scores, which I find suspicious. Not everyone takes the SAT, only those intending to go to college, and more women take it than men. The extent to which students prepare for the SAT also varies. Back when I took the SAT, I was under the naive impression it measured innate ability. I didn’t study or review for it at all - what would be the point? When I did quite well on verbal but only moderately well on math, it was exactly what I, and everyone else, expected. After all, I’m pretty smart for a girl. I’d been told so often that girls aren’t as smart as boys, especially in math.
It kinda makes you wonder how many of the girls taking the SAT expect to underperform because of their gender. (If you believe overt gender bias has been eliminated from our schools, then you must live in a very different region of the country than I).
I’ve completely internalized the idea that I am “bad at math.” I refuse even to balance my checkbook. Every time I consider my own math abilities, I recall my 6th grade math teacher, Mr. Florence, who told me I was a stupid girl and made me cry in front of my entire class. I can’t remember how I felt about math before Mr. Florence, but after a week with him, I was definitely “bad at math.” The As I earned in college calculus and physical chemistry count as absolutely nothing against the humiliating memory of his class.
It kinda makes ya wonder.
October 20th, 2006
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