Beer or souls?

Phil Zuckerman has written a book called Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll); I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds like a good approach, looking at secular societies like Scandinavia and comparing them to religious societies, like the US. At this point, I don’t know much more about it other than what I see in the reviews, and the Depth Deception blog finds an unwittingly hilarious review in Christianity Today. The final paragraph will leave you giggling.

Zuckerman sells humanity short. If people are content but no longer care about transcendent meaning and purpose or life beyond death, that’s not a sign of greatness but tragic forgetfulness. Their horizon of concern is too narrow. They were made for more. What does it profit a society if, as this book’s jacket notes, it gains “excellent educational systems, strong economies, well-supported arts, free health care, egalitarian social policies, outstanding bike paths, and great beer,” but loses its soul? Can a country build strong social systems and keep its soul? While I am thankful for Zuckerman’s reminder about Christianity’s social implications, and the example of a place that meets those obligations differently than we do, I am sad he misses the rest.

Wait…societies have souls? Weird. So is the Roman Republic in heaven? Do they still bicker with the Macedonian soul?

I’m going to go out on a limb here, though, and admit that if I had the choice between a country with free health care and great beer, and one that had neither of those things but that claimed to possess an imaginary, invisible, intangible ghost, I’d go with the ghostless one with health care and beer.

At least it was a good review. It convinced me to add this book to my purchasing list.

I still don’t know what women want

The NY Times ran an interesting article on sexology a short while ago, focusing on the differences in arousal between men and women. Like any guy, I read it hoping to discover the magic switch that turns women on, but as expected, the message is that female arousal is very, very complicated. This was not a surprise. One of the curious results, though, was that not only do men and women differ in the specificity of stimuli that induce arousal, but women’s brains (measured by self-reporting) and women’s bodies (measured by plethysmograph) don’t agree — vaginal arousal was measured when subjects saw video clips of mating bonobos and a variety of different sexual situations, while at the same time they reported a lack of interest.

It’s fascinating stuff, but I have to raise an objection. They try to use evolution to explain what’s going on.

Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary “to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring.”

Evolution’s legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings. Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or perhaps simply the sight of a male ape’s erection, stimulated this reaction because apes bear a resemblance to humans — she joked about including, for comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study.

That all sounds very plausible, but plausibility isn’t enough — this is a perfect example of a just-so story. I’d want to see comparative data, but our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, are so different from us in sexual behavior that it would be difficult to generate an appropriate comparison. I’d want to see the causal and molecular basis for this behavior in women, but again, it’s going to be so complex that I doubt we’ll find simple relationships, let alone molecular evidence of selection. I’d want to see historical evidence that women who lacked a lubricity response to the prospect of unwanted sexual activity were more prone to injury that affected childbearing, but that doesn’t exist.

While not doubting the physiological relevance of the research, this too-willing cooption of evolutionary explanations just bugs me.

As an antidote, I have to recommend a book I’ve mentioned before, an excellent survey of evolutionary explanations for female sexuality, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Elisabeth Lloyd. It steps through various proposed scenarios and shows the lack of legitimate evidence or, in quite a few cases, neglect of evidence that contradicts the hypotheses. It’s one of the best books around for demonstrating how rigorous evolutionary logic should be applied.

Unfortunately, that book doesn’t tell me what women want, either. The conclusion is that the female orgasm is probably an evolutionary byproduct, and that adaptive explanations are inappropriate and unjustified. I suspect the same answer applies to the work on female arousal.

Fogel speaks

This gets better and better. President Daniel Fogel of the University of Vermont has given several interviews on the Ben Stein affair, and clarified quite a few matters. He explicitly says he did not ask Stein to withdraw from the commencement ceremonies, but when you read these comments, it’s clear that that there was a lack of support from the UVM administration and that he was confronted with some serious objections, and Stein withdrew knowing that if he persisted it was going to get ugly. Here’s one interview with Fogel:

I think the fundamental concern of the people that wrote to me was that, while they are quite open to having a speaker with Mr. Steins views on campus, they felt that he should not be honored at the commencement ceremony when so many of his views seemed to be affronts to the basic premises of the academy, about scientific and scholarly inquiry and collaterally, people were deeply disturbed by his views on the roll of science in the Holocaust.

…

But I have to say, the issue here, and this is important, is not freedom of expression. Ben Stein has come to our campus to speak, and some of the faculty that are colleagues here wrote to me to say that they have no objection to him coming here to speak.

It was the legitimate concern among members of the community regarding the implications of granting an honorary degree to someone whose ideas fundamentally ignore the basics of scientific inquiry.

That’s a smart and important point: this was not about freedom of expression, since Stein clearly has a surfeit of venues in which he opens his tendentious mouth, but a question of a scientific research institution giving a science denier and propagandist a platform to validate his anti-university views. He reiterates this position in another interview:

“This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view. Ben Stein spoke here last spring to great acclaim,” UVM President Dan Fogel said. “It’s an issue about the appropriateness of awarding an honorary degree to someone whose views in many ways ignore or affront the fundamental values of scientific inquiry and I greatly regret that I was not attuned to those issues.”

Fogel just shot way up in my esteem…and ouch, that has got to sting Stein’s well-padded keester.

This poll is dead. Please let it rot in peace.

I’m getting a big surge in requests to pharyngulate this poll, Should the motto “In God We Trust” be removed from U.S. currency?. Stop, please. That poll is already blown to smithereens; just look at the numbers. Almost 11 million votes. The results are hacked, oversubscribed, and the product of massive flooding. When you see something like that, there’s no point in asking me to swamp the poll, because it’s done gone and sunk already, and is plummeting to depths that will make the Marianas Trench sigh with envy.

I like my polls fresh and tangy, ripe with stupidity. This one ain’t, although the stupidity is reekingly high, I will admit.

Cheerful news of the day

Doesn’t it just make you feel so darned good when you hear stories of megachurches and televangelists in decline?

Once one of the nation’s most popular televangelists, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller is watching his life’s work crumble.
 

His son and recent successor, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, has abruptly resigned as senior pastor of the Crystal Cathedral. The shimmering, glass-walled megachurch is home to the “Hour of Power” broadcast, an evangelism staple that’s been on the air for more than three decades.
 

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, Schuller Sr. implored the Eagle’s Club members – who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue – for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

It’s not just Schuller!

Today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape is also to blame, said Quentin Schultze, a Calvin College professor who specializes in Christian media.
Church-based televangelism led by powerful personalities filled TV in the 1980s, but now only a handful of shows remain, he said. Among the struggling ministries are those of Oral Roberts and the late D. James Kennedy of “The Coral Ridge Hour” TV show.

Ah, I dream of a day when all of the churches are in collapse. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t say that the loss of attendees is because of growing enlightenment: it’s because these organizations are dependent on the personal charisma of their leaders, and when they go, people just go searching for another happy sheep-fleecer. It’s still a start, though.

Looky here: a new Order of the Molly winner

The people have spoken, and the honored recipient of the Molly for December is…Nerd of Redhead! This, of course, merely confirms the nerdishness and raises it to new heights, so the nick is now even more appropriate.

Next, we have to pick some other nerd to get the OM after his or her name for the month of January. Leave your nominations/votes in the comment thread below.

The usual lies

The climate change denialists have been whooping it up in my email lately, crowing in triumph over the fact that James Hansen’s former “supervisor” has disavowed his work and claims there were no political efforts to suppress the scientific facts. I haven’t really cared — it’s an argument from imaginary authority, nothing more — but I was very amused to learn that this “fact” is in the same category as other denialist “facts”: it isn’t. This fellow, John Theron, is a cranky old gomer who retired 15 years ago, and was thus not even present in the oppressive Bush administration, and never had supervisory authority over Hansen at all.

I’m also sure that won’t matter at all. The myth of Hansen’s supervisor will be repeated forevermore.