Viva la Evolución!

Creation, a Darwin biopic starring the wonderful Paul Bettany, came out recently. In a disgusting development, the majority of US distributors have refused to pick it up. This is a film which would tear the nation apart, apparently. It would prove so hugely controversial in this, our country of Big Macs, guns and superstition, that they could only lose money on it.

That's my charitable interpretation, and the most likely scenario.

The uncharitable one, and the idea that fills me with fear, is that they are simply willfully ignorant, backwards people themselves. The elites, the presumably well-educated potentates who mandate what we see and hear and experience - because media is far more powerful than politics - could themselves be prey to the same regressive pettiness that the rest of us proles face. As a shameless elitist myself, I suppose I had more faith in the sinister media oligarchy.

Numbers after the jump.

Non-human persons

There's an AAAS conference coming up in San Diego, focusing on the ethical implications of dolphin intelligence. Several very interesting people will be speaking. A few of them are quoted in this article, which outlines the ongoing controversy about intelligence and animals and what it means, or should mean, to us. The abstract for the conference:

The dolphin brain has a large cerebral cortex and a substantial amount of associational neocortex. Most anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain. More important, recent research in marine science has revealed that dolphins have a remarkable degree of cognitive and affective sophistication. For example, dolphins can recognize their image in a mirror as a reflection of themselves -- a finding that indicates self-awareness similar to that seen in higher primates and elephants. These and other studies, which have found that dolphins are also capable of advanced cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, artificial language comprehension, and complex social behavior, indicate that dolphins are far more intellectually and emotionally sophisticated than previously thought. Considerable research indicates that they are significantly different from fish and other marine species, and this research has significance for commercial policy and practice. This symposium will present the scientific findings and explore their ethical and policy implications.

Fitna فِتْنَةٌ‎

Geert Wilders goes on trial today, accused of incitement and discrimination against Muslims. His film, Fitna, presents suras from the Qur'an... and scenes of atrocities committed by people inspired by them. He could be fined or jailed if convicted.

Really?

Hideous pandering and audiovisual aids after the jump.

Morally perfect

I haven't been posting that regularly. The internet's been a bit of a sterile promontory recently, and I haven't found anything to get that worked up about.


In fact, that's sort of the problem. There are a great many social things I probably should be actively involved in, fighting against, agitating for, etc. But I'm not. I have good friends who are very much invested in society and politics and injustice, but I can't even get it up for international news. There's a distinct sense of unworthiness that comes of hanging out with feminist vegans, a kind of realization that my morality perhaps doesn't extend as far as it should.

Guilt and rationalizations after the jump.

Blueshift

So, it looks like I've got a job next year. And a PhD program lined up after that. That's six years. 2016. That's the future... they'll have flying cars by then. I'll be 28.

This is ridiculous and scary and perhaps the best, most meaningful opportunity I've ever had. I've got so much work to do on myself before I can even contemplate becoming the sort of person who is knowledgeable/educated/going places/self-sufficient/in charge/responsible for things and yet it seems that I already am?

The future is here. It's rushing up at me in an alarming, delicious way. Everything is suddenly blue-shifted. And blue is my favorite color.

A curious constitution

Back at the old place of employment, with wonderful big beasties frolicking around, biting each other, doing flips and trying to mate with the pool toys.

Now it's back to a schedule, with bedtimes and alarm clocks and such. Real life, in other words. What a relief.

I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.

Sherlock Holmes, from "The Sign of the Four"

The Sokal Affair

Long ago, the Sokal affair put Alan Sokal on my list of people I want to be when I grow up. Someone reminded me of him today, and I thought I'd share the wonderful. The Wiki page (linked above) is really worth reading, as is Steven Weinberg's analysis of the paper and the situation.

Sokal, a physicist and mathematician, wrote an essay in the postmodern style, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", arguing - tongue firmly planted in cheek - that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. The paper was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by a respected humanities journal. On the day it was published, Sokal announced that it had been a hoax: in his words, "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics. It was a bad day for bullshitters everywhere.

Steven Weinberg, another physicist, summarized it:

The targets of Sokal's satire occupy a broad intellectual range. There are those "postmoderns" in the humanities who like to surf through avant garde fields like quantum mechanics or chaos theory to dress up their own arguments about the fragmentary and random nature of experience. There are those sociologists, historians, and philosophers who see the laws of nature as social constructions. There are cultural critics who find the taint of sexism, racism, colonialism, militarism, or capitalism not only in the practice of scientific research but even in its conclusions. Sokal did not satirize creationists or other religious enthusiasts who in many parts of the world are the most dangerous adversaries of science, but his targets were spread widely enough, and he was attacked or praised from all sides.

I've posted about this before (see "The White Stuff"), but the anti-science squawking of the academic far left is almost as irritating, if not as dangerous, as convergent nonsense excreted by the Know-Nothing far right. Education, it seems, don't cure stupid. It merely gives you the means to elaborate on stupid for pages and pages and pages.

On that note, for the linguistically inclined, the Chomskybot is also worth playing with.

One last tidbit of wisdom from Sokal:

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)

Alan D. Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries - Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text
46/47, 217-252 (1996).