49% of Americans think that ordinary tomatoes do not have genes, but genetically modified tomatoes do…
Okay that was back in 2008. Here’s some more [Infographic source: Less Wrong].
Do you think that scientific literacy has improved since then? I only managed to dig up some statistics as recent as 2010. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone with more recent figures, but it shows that things don’t get any better – only a 2% improvement for the question about tomatoe genes. [Table source: Discover, The Loom]
I have probably unfairly singled out the USA, but the above table reveals that the levels of scientific literacy are not that much better in other parts of the world. I sincerely hope that more recent statistics show a drastic improvement, but somehow I doubt it. And that’s worrying for the future of this planet.
A couple of months ago I went to my first quiz night at a popular bar. I performed reasonably well on the sports questions but was not so good when it came to general knowledge, although I always felt I was reasonably competent in this area.
Since then I’ve taken to reading random facts on a variety of subjects, and Wikipedia proved helpful with its Random Article functionality. [I do recommend cross-checking Wikipedia articles with other resources as they may not be entirely factual given that it is user-generated]
Today I came across this feature on Tidal Locking which was pretty interesting. You only ever see one side of the moon all the time because it is tidally locked with Earth. Look closely at the gif on the left and you’ll see this phenomena in operation. Notice how only one side of the moon is always presented to Earth while rotating around it, even though the moon is also rotating on its axis.
I suppose this is how the term “dark side of the moon” originated, since that side is not visible to Earthlings due to tidal locking. For a more in-depth explanation on the physics and mechanics of tidal locking, check out Wikipedia, the YouTube videos available online.
What would happen should the Earth become tidally locked with the sun? Well, in short, we’ll all be fooked as it will wreak havoc with our weather and just about everything else.
Easing into Sunday evening watching a debate found accidentally on YouTube, has left me with some things to carp about.
I am posting the YouTube video here, so if you’ve got two hours to throw away, knock yourself out. The debate was between well-known cosmologist Professor Lawrence Krauss and Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, who is styled as an author, lecturer and intellectual activist. The topic of debate was Islam or Atheism – Which Makes More Sense?
Need I point out who represented what point of view?
The points raised on both sides during the debate were not that important – I, and I’m sure those of you who listen to these kinds of debates will have heard them before in some form or the other. What really sustained my attention for two hours was the manner in which the debate was conducted, some of the strategies used, the seeming inability of the adjudicator Timothy Yusuf Chambers (a former Irish Catholic priest, converted to Islam) to affect any sort of control over the two protagonists, and an amusing event involving an outraged Muslim woman during the Q&A session, which I’ll come back to later.
While Hamza Tzortzis came clearly prepared with a lengthy written opening remark which he was at pains to point out was based on deductive logic, it was absolute rubbish. No doubt Lawrence thought so too and made it quite plain in his opening address. Deductive logic is all well and good, but if your conclusions are based on faulty premises, then it’s all just bullshit.
Professor Krauss on the other hand just winged his way through his opening statement, and chose to engage frequently with Tzortzis in and off the cuff manner. There was something I found disturbing about this though; Krauss often came across as rude, near-insulting and somewhat arrogant. But everything he said, made sense and was scientifically correct. To his credit, Tzortzis in the face of this onslaught of scientific reasoning tinged with rudeness, held it together remarkably well.
Krauss’s approach to the debate was of importance, and he even clarified that he preferred discourse to the strict and limiting formal debate format. The term he used was “chat,” because he explained that it allows more room for people to explore, and gain knowledge, rather than just throwing rigid ideas at each other. There is much merit in this.
After watching this and other debates, it has dawned on me how debate about such opposing ideas as atheism and religion have improved over the years. It used to be that religious apologists would simply quote from religious text and other dogmatic theological literature and demand that it be accepted as unadulterated truth. And it used to be that simply asserting things without having to provide proof or evidence was common. Now, apologists prepare more thoroughly using logic and even science. Alas, logic and science used incorrectly, even disingenuously, will never trump the scientific method.
And now we come to that amusing incident. During the Q&A session a clearly irate, albeit foolish woman decided to use the opportunity to complain about some guy who had entered the debate late, and decided to sit at the rear of the hall next to a group of girls of which the complainant was a member. She was quite adamant that her values as a Muslim woman was violated by this latecomer who according to her, should have chosen to sit elsewhere with other men, because she had clearly distanced herself from the men in the audience as was required of her belief system.
Krauss pointed out quite nonchalantly that the debate was clearly advertised as a non-segregated event, and she should have chosen to watch the debate on YouTube, rather than demand deference to her quaint beliefs.
Quite so, Professor Krauss, quite so.
And so who was the winner? I’ll leave you to decide, but for me, science always wins.
Belgian scientist Christian René, viscount de Duve who won the Nobel prize for Medicine together with Albert Claude and George Palade in 1974 for their work on subcellular biology, passed away on 04 May this weekend.
de Duve who was 95 years old, chose to end his life through euthanasia after suffering a fall. Here he provides some thoughts on what he terms “ultimate reality.”
Recently he was quoted by the Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir as saying,
It would be an exaggeration to say I’m not afraid of death, but I’m not afraid of what comes after because I’m not a believer. When I disappear I will disappear, there’ll be nothing left.
His daughter Francoise confirmed that he refused to take any anti-anxiety pills before administering the lethal injection, and died with a smile.
And so I got this perplexing question on my Contacts Page from someone by the name of Samuel who prefers to call himself Ghastly:
God Is real how could you not look at something and not see the miracles inside of it? So you are basically saying you can rape someone and be fine because in the end it doesn’t matter.
I’m simply astounded at how he jumped to the conclusion that I’d find rape acceptable because I don’t believe in one of the gods. Why he chose rape instead of one of the other no-no’s like murder or infanticide is not important. What is of concern is the perpetuation of the myth amongst believers, that without some arbitrary god’s absolute standard, there is no basis for good moral judgement and action.
If you examine the logic of Samuel’s belief, he’s basically saying that if there was no god, then he would find it acceptable to rape or act amorally in some other way. That’s totally absurd.
By his reasoning all non-believers are either rapists or potential rapists. He’s intimating that all non-believers are just hanging around waiting for the opportunity to rape someone, and that believers are all saints. That is a patently laughable insinuation where it not so serious and off the mark.
Frans de Waal a primatologist and biology professor at Emory University has conducted extensive research on the behaviour of Bonobo apes and concludes that they have some grasp of morality. While he’s not saying that apes are conclusively moral beings, his research indicates that they have the “basic building blocks” for morality. Professor de Waal also doesn’t reveal if he’s observed any apes worshipping the gods. Have you?
On this blog I am frequently confronted by people who post comments that seem to indicate that science has no contributing effect on good moral judgement and behaviour. Indeed science is portrayed as an enemy of religion by most fundamentalists, while religion is claimed as the sole harbinger of morality.
In the religious world it is generally taken for granted that morality would be totally absent were it not for the foundations laid by theology. Subsequently science and religion has been pitted against each other in nearly all social debate as competing forces, which they are not.
Science was never meant to replace religion and I think just about all scientists will agree. It’s unfortunate that religious folk continue to foster the belief that science is “out to get religion.”
I was therefore intrigued when I came across this scientific study published by Christine Ma-Kellams and Jim Blascovich in Plos One, which demonstrates a correlation between the exposure to science and sound morality. Here is an introduction, but the methods, procedure and conclusions are available through the link above:
Science has stood as a powerful force in shaping human civilization and behavior. As both an ideological system and a method for acquiring information about the world, it offers explanations for the origins of the physical universe and answers to a variety of other fundamental questions and concerns. Past research has noted that personal values influence both the questions that are asked and the methods used in arriving at the answers; as such, scientists have often been concerned with the moral and social ramifications of their scientific endeavors. Not surprisingly, the general consensus is that science is value-laden. However, no studies to date have directly investigated the link between exposure to science and moral or prosocial behaviors. Here, we empirically examined the effects of thinking about science on moral judgments and behavior.
It is important to note that “science” is multi-faceted construct that takes on distinct forms. On the one hand, the scientific style of thinking employed by scientists is unusual, difficult, and uncommon. Although science can serve as a belief system, it is distinct from other belief systems (e.g., religion) insofar as its counterintuitive nature and the degree to which it does not rely on universal, automatic, unconscious cognitive systems; as a consequence, relative to other belief systems like religion, science has few explicit “followers”. On the other hand, apart from the model of the scientific method of acquiring information about the world, we contend that there is a lay image or notion of “science” that is associated with concepts of rationality, impartiality, fairness, technological progress, and ultimately, the idea that we are to use these rational tools for the mutual benefit of all people in society. Philosophers and historians have noted that scientific inquiry began to flourish when Western society moved from one centered on religious notions of God’s will to one in which the rational mind served as the primary means to understand and improve our existence. As such, the notion of science contains in it the broader moral vision of a society in which rationality is used for the mutual benefit of all.
We predict that this notion of science as part of a broader moral vision of society facilitates moral and prosocial judgments and behaviors. Consistent with the notion that science plays a key role in the moral vision of a society of mutual benefit, scholars have long argued that science’s systematic approach to studying causes and consequences allows for more informed opinions about questions of good and evil, and many have argued that the classic scientific ethos stands as an ethically neutral, but morally normative, set of principles that guides scientific inquiry. We contend that the same scientific ethos that serves to guide empirical inquiries also facilitates the enforcement of moral norms more broadly.
Notwithstanding the adage that correlation does not prove causation, this work is invaluable as it was the first time that an empirical attempt was made to find a link between science and morality.
It would be interesting to see if further studies are done and if the results remain consistent with the initial findings.
Recently I’ve been engaged in quite a few debates on my blog about Evolution, Creation and the mental gymnasts’ take on creation – Intelligent Design.
I admit I’ve not always been eloquent or clear in my responses. So here’s a brilliant resource I’ve discovered that explains things clearly and simply.
Scientific understanding requires both facts and theories that can explain those facts in a coherent manner. Evolution, in this context, is both a fact and a theory. It is an incontrovertible fact that organisms have changed, or evolved, during the history of life on Earth. And biologists have identified and investigated mechanisms that can explain the major patterns of change.
And just for laughs, something else I found on a Dutch Facebook page, Freethinker:
Dr Joseph Mastropaolo who has a PhD in kinesiology, is offering $10,000 to anyone “who can prove in front of a judge that science contradicts the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis.”
The challenge has been designed to be played out in the form of a mini-trial, before a judge. One of the rules of the mini-trial is that the evolutionist challenger must also put up $10,000 to match the pocket change being offered by Mastropaolo and the Creation Science Hall of Shame Fame, a website to which he contributes articles. [You can check out the other rules including some preposterous claims for creation which compete for space on this page]
I fail to see how he’s going to win this challenge, let alone attract anyone of integrity to participate. Firstly the $10,000 reward is paltry; in fact it’s an insult. Any number of high school biology students could present the evidence (which is overwhelming) for evolution, but I doubt $10,000 would cover their travel and other costs to attend this proposed circus. Compared to the $1,000,000 being offered by the James Randi Foundation to proponents of the paranormal and supernatural, this prize is laughable.
Secondly scientific evidence is not adjudicated by a judge, no matter how esteemed. Scientific evidence is peer-reviewed. The evidence for creation (sic) is only supported by quacks, pseudoscientists and the religious faithful and nuts alike.
Mastropaolo maintains the absurd belief that evolution “is devoid of scientific evidence.” He further contends that since none of the esteemed list of scientists and institutions he lists on his challenge page have taken up the challenge, he can claim default judgement against the Debate Dodgers as he calls them. He then goes on to proclaim, quite ludicrously that “This is proof positive that evolution is an inverted-fantasy religion taught in the public schools in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America,” and “These data confirm the scientific peer-reviewed articles of objective, valid, reliable, and calibrated evidence that evolution exists nowhere in the universe, never has, never will, except as an inverted fantasy based on vitalism superstitions 2,500 years old.”
Wow! I for one am left in no doubt that Mastropaolo is just another Creationist blowhard, hoping to create a circus show that will likely spin some money for him and his cronies. Either that or he’s bat-shit crazy.
