Denyse O'Leary

Uh, they did care; response was pretty good. Post here (June 7, 2011).

But, one “Larry Tanner” who self-describes as follows,

“Larry Tanner” is my nom de blog. I am married, a father of three beautiful children, and enjoying life in New England. I work with robotic technologies, teach classes in English literature, and ghostwrite non-fiction books for a rabbi – and I self-identify as an atheist. I’m currently working on a Ph.D. on matters of literature, textuality, and probabilistic reasoning.

was complaining (June 8, 2011):

However, I am surprised that that Carroll’s post has not generated more discussion at UD than it has: only about 23 responses in 24 hours.

Hi, Larry, I’m Denyse O’Leary, and that’s a nom de reality, okay? It’s an easily demonstrated fact that there is no particular relationship between readership and comments. We track both.

Stats? Yeah. Got stats. Read More ›

In “Does Islam Stand Against Science?” (June 19, 2011), Steve Paulson tells us that

We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science.

Interesting how doubting Darwin in the Muslim world if evidence of lack of advance in science, just as it is in the scientifically backward United States. (Scientists who doubt Darwin, for whatever reason, are just ignoramuses, of course.)

“If evolution gets associated with atheism, Read More ›

Why would anyone need “a growing body of evidence that humans are remarkably altruistic primates”? In a peaceful and prosperous society, one sees instances of altruism as well as its opposite every day. And, given most humans’ preference for peace and prosperity, we should just assume that we are acting most naturally when we can live that way. Anyway,

A growing body of evidence shows that humans are remarkably altruistic primates. Food sharing and division of labor play an important role in all human societies, and cooperation extends beyond the bounds of close kinship and networks of reciprocating partners. In humans, altruism is motivated at least in part by empathy and concern for the welfare of others. Although altruistic behavior is well-documented in other primates, the range Read More ›

“Are we all travelling “incognito“, my latest at MercatorNet June 21, 2011), looks at Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman’s book Incognito, focusing on his proposed neuroscience fix for criminal law:

“Those who break the social contracts need to be warehoused, but in this case the future is of more importance than the past.”

“Warehoused”? How, exactly, is that a reform? We are also told that a criminal’s “actions are sufficient evidence of a brain abnormality, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.” Yes, but one may as well say that a criminal’s “actions are sufficient evidence of infestation by Square Circle Disease, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.”

More. Also:

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At MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, we learn that “growing crops made us smaller” (June 20, 2011), John Roach tells us that the beginnings of agriculture were not obviously successful for our ancestors, as is often assumed:

People got shorter and sicker everywhere in the world when they started to farm about 10,000 years ago, according to a recent study that suggests the transition to an agricultural lifestyle came at a biological cost.

[ … ]

As people gave up the diverse diet of foraged foods and settled on eating a few staple food crops they “experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress,” Amanda Mummert, an anthropology graduate student at Emory University, said in a news release.

Compounding the problem, growth in population density spurred by agricultural settlements led to an increase in unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading infectious diseases and the transmission of novel viruses from livestock to humans, she added.

Some would add that the earliest crop plants were probably just pampered weeds, from the modern farmer’s perspective. The precious seed stock for food grains that are well suited to human stomachs must have been a work of centuries, done with only the knowledge of plant genetics that one might gain from observation and experience. It’s doubtful our ancestors would have persisted without Read More ›

In “Scientists put out call for respect” (Sydney Morning Herald, June 20, 2011), Phillip Coorey reports,

Australia’s scientific community will launch a campaign tonight aimed at redressing what it says is the damage to science which is being caused by climate change denial. Read More ›

In “Why liberals fell for ‘Muslim lesbian blogger’ hoax” (OC Register, June 17, 2011), Mark Steyn tells a story that shows why current Big Media won’t likely recover from their current tailspin:

On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl In Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, “Miss Brooks” and “Miss Arraf” were colleagues. “Amina” had posted at LezGetReal before starting “A Gay Girl In Damascus.” As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:”Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.”

It got so crazy that …

This problem will not get any better. There isn’t going to be a mainstream media that writes with any understanding whatever about the intelligent design controversy. The media that do that will either be new media or media emerging alive from the debacle. The only solution is, …

Read More ›

Steno tells us that Jay Richards’ (ed) God and Evolution won World Magazine’s Book of the Year (American), as did Norman Nevin’s (ed) Should Christians Embrace Evolution (British).

Don’t miss Marvin Olasky’s thoughtful discussion of why these two books deserved to lead. First, because

Think about the three main intellectual influencers of the 20th century: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. Two of the three—Freud and Marx—have lost most of their influence. The exception is Darwin. Two years ago his millions of fans celebrated the bicentennial of his birth, which was also the 150th anniversary of his famous book On the Origins of Species.He highlights the role of the Templeton Foundation in fronting Christian Darwinism, which most Christians actually do not and cannot accept.

Or, as I like to say, “Your church would make a nice little block of condos, but why are you giving it money in the mean time? Shouldn’t you be buying shares?” Read More ›

In his new book, The Science of Evil, developmental psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinkshe has the mysteryof evil worked out, or so Katherine Bouton explains, in “Book sees evil as zero empathy: Baron-Cohen’s study could stir controversy” (Halifax Chronicle-Herald, June 18, 2011):

“My main goal is to understand human cruelty, replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy,’ ” he writes at the beginning of the book, which might be seen as expanding on the views on empathy expressed in his 1997 book, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Bradford). Evil, he notes, has heretofore been defined in religious terms (with the concept differing in the major world religions), as a psychiatric condition (psychopathology) or, as he puts it, in “frustratingly circular” terms: “He did x because he is truly evil”).[ … ]

“What leads an individual’s Empathizing Mechanism to be set at different levels?” Baron-Cohen asks. “The most immediate answer is that it depends on the functioning of a special circuit in the brain, the empathy circuit” …

Must be somewhere near the charity neurons but far from the God circuit, right?

Baron-Cohen reckons without my friend Five Feet of Fury, who took his test and found it flawed: Read More ›

In a wide-ranging and thoughtful discussion, The European’s Martin Eierman asks Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute about the potential for genetic engineering enhancements of the mind, and Bostrom replies,essentially, that “we’ll get used to it.”

Bostrom: If you want to develop new drugs, you have to show that they are safe and effectively treat a disease. So when you want to find ways to enhance our brain activity, you perversely have to show that we are currently sick and need treatment. You cannot say, “I simply want to make this better than before”. We need to remove that stigma.

Some would butt in, before we try to enhance “mind,” “conciousness,”or “intelligence,” hadn’t we better decide what they are? There are no scientifically satisfactory definitions for any of these concepts. (There are the push poll definitions of various factions, but that is another matter.) Read More ›

Recently, kairosfocus posted some thoughts on quoting materialists saying what they actually think when they talk to each other or what they assume are sympathetic audiences (“quote mining”), a practice they very much dislike. After all, when kairosfocus quotes them to people for whose ears the frank admissions were not intended, he is necessarily quoting them “out of context.” That the materialists mean it and that the rest of us might be best off to know that they mean it is beside the point, of course.

He has also asked why the Darwin vs. design debate has become so poisonous and polarized. A critical factor is the easy money tied up in Darwinism – well-paid lecture room mediocrities fronting unsubstantiated ideas to a captive audience until retirement.

Darwinists may not think they’re well-paid but if viewpoint productivity mattered, Read More ›

Heck, it’s “science”, which is way better than being true, reasonable, or useful.

He tells us,

Recently, evolutionary psychologists have turned their sights on love and divorce. It didn’t take them long to notice that when people fall in love, there’s a period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak.

(Many parents of young adults, attempting to dissuade children from a predictably bad match, have noticed this.)

[ … ]

From this perspective, we are preprogrammed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed – which is, on average, about four years. Read More ›

Interesting timing if you consider the recent, controversial “simian Adam and Eve” article in Christianity Today (June 2011),which featured him: In the same quarter, process theologian Karl Giberson left from the Christian Darwinist think tank BioLogos and resigned from his teaching position at Eastern Nazarene (Boston). Neither move appears to have been announced. BioLogos issued a statement May 16, but this was some time after Darwinist blogger Jerry Coyne had noted Giberson’s disappearance from BioLogos (May 3, 2011).

Rumours certainly swirled, with Coyne suggesting “big trouble at BioLogos,” and wishing “good riddance to their science-polluting ways!” Another rumour drafted Uncommon Descent into the “despicable” role of wicked glee, for which there was no shred of evidence. Indeed, we’d always thought that Jerry’s “Uncle Karl” was better for us than for BioLogos …  after all, Southern Baptist point man Al Mohler had weeks earlier accused Giberson of “throwing the Bible under the bus.”

Giberson confirmed for us independently (June 4 2011) that, while writing books, he is looking for another position. Digging a bit, we also find that there has been some ferment in Giberson’s religious denomination, around the usual issues of the Word of God vs. the word of mod, and around him specifically. Some people are rejoicing at his departure: Read More ›

In Scientific American, Leonard Susskind is profiled as the “Bad Boy of Physics”: “Leonard Susskind rebelled as a teen and never stopped. Today he insists that reality may forever be beyond reach of our understanding (Peter Byrne, June 21, 2011),

Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind revels in discovering ideas that transform the status quo in physics. Forty years ago he co-founded string theory, which was initially derided but eventually became the leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. For years he disputed Stephen Hawking’s conjecture that black holes do not merely swallow objects but grind them up beyond recovery, in violation of quantum mechanics. Hawking eventually conceded. And he helped to develop the modern conception of parallel universes, based on what he dubbed the “landscape” of string theory. It spoiled physicists’ dream to explain the universe as the unique outcome of basic principles.Physicists seeking to understand the deepest levels of reality now work within a framework largely of Susskind’s making. But a funny thing has happened along the way. Susskind now wonders whether physicists can understand reality.

Is this a pattern or what? Read More ›

At New Scientist, Michael Marshall reports, “It is human nature to cooperate with strangers” (13 June 2011):

It seems humans really are the cooperative ape. A nomadic society in east Africa that lacks a centralised government can still regularly muster armies of several hundred warriors, most of whom are strangers to each other.

These would be Turkana men, raising a crowd to risk their lives rustling cattle. Marshall observes,

We are the only species prepared to cooperate in large numbers with unrelated individuals. The feeling was that such behaviour was a recent development, requiring a centralised political authority. Now it seems possible that such cooperation could have predated these organisational structures and may have featured in numerous large prehistoric societies hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In that case, we are allowed to believe that such co-operation exists.

Interesting that researchers Mathew and Boyd – instead of theorizing from baboons and vervet monkeys and then making an announcement that lies in the face of everyday observation – observed humans in real life (the Turkana here standing in for Cave Man).

I have noted the same quality in a starkly non-violent situation: A Toronto subway shutdown at rush hour. If humans have an “innate tendency” to interpersonal violence or lack of co-operativeness, the shutdown should demonstrate it – thousands of people from all over the globe suddenly stranded together at a major urban intersection. What happened? Why? Read More ›