Sapolsky on belief and biology

Robert M. Sapolsky is one of my favorite science writers — if you haven’t read Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), A Primate’s Memoir(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), or Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), I suggest you get off your butt right now and visit your library or bookstore. He’s a primatologist who studies the endocrinology and behavior of baboons, but he always presents his work in terms of the human condition. We aren’t so different, we primates.

If you don’t feel like getting up right this instant, though, at least click on this link to his speech to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. You’ll get a taste of that Sapolsky humanism that will get you wanting more, and he also has an interesting message: that religion is a kind of controlled psychosis.

It’s also a message that I’m surprised is not getting targeted by the creationists more. They are so hung up on godless evilutionism that they mostly don’t seem to realized that there is another, equally ferocious wolf coming up their flank, the neurosciences. Evolution is shredding their preconceptions about history and their origins, but neuroscience is going to rip out a different, but even more central concept: the soul. Minds are the products of electrochemical and molecular/physiological activity, not spirits or souls or extradimensional magical forces — brains are meat and thoughts are the product of ions and small molecules bubbling about in coordinated patterns. That doesn’t demean us and I think it makes us just as interesting and wonderful, but it is another case where the religious guesswork is proving wrong.

“Intellectual Conservative” seems to be an oxymoron

Many will argue with the conclusion of my title, but there are so many examples of outright intellectual vacuity from people who anoint themselves with the title “conservative” that it is fast becoming a synonym for “ignoramus”. We’ve lately been laughing ourselves silly at the absurdity called Conservapædia, but here’s another flabby, nutritionally empty scrap of junk food to chew over: a site called The Intellectual Conservative. In particular, I call your attention to yet another right wing rejection of a valid, well-established science by someone completely oblivious to either the principles or the evidence, in an article asking whether biology has a “Rational Evolutionary Hypothesis?” The author doesn’t seem to know anything at all about biology, but he has heard two names — Darwin and Dawkins — and no, sir, he doesn’t like ’em. He dislikes ’em so much that he’s willing to lie about them.

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God: flat broke

God’s money is no good.

Kevin Russell found out it’s not easy trying to cash a check from God. The 21-year-old man was arrested Monday after he tried to cash a check for $50,000 at the Chase Bank in Hobart that was signed “King Savior, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Servant,” Hobart police Detective Jeff White said.

I blame the televangelists. They’re skilled at cleaning out the savings of old folks, and while they were vacuuming up social security checks, they probably siphoned off every penny He had.

Don’t worry about Him, though — he’s still got a lot of equity in gilt furniture and old art in Italy, I hear.

Ask a Biologist

David Hone reminds me that I’ve been remiss in mentioning this new and very useful website, Ask a Biologist. The idea is so simple, you’ll wonder why there aren’t many more like it—it’s a kind of central clearinghouse where young people can ask questions about biology and get answers from real biologists and experts. If you’re a teacher, turn your kids on to it; tell them to submit a question to the list, and somebody with some expertise will try to answer.

in betenden Händen ist die Waffe vor Mißbrauch sicher

Hey, you mean America isn’t the sole refuge of pious war-mongers? I was sent this remarkable quote from Cardinal Meisner of Köln:

Einem Gott lobenden Soldaten kann man guten
Gewissens Verantwortung über Leben und Tod anderer
übertragen, weil sie
bei ihm gleichsam von der Heiligkeit Gottes mitabgesegnet sind … Wem käme es in den Sinn, Soldaten, die auch Beter sind , dann
noch als Mörder zu diskriminieren. Nein, in betenden Händen ist die
Waffe vor
Mißbrauch sicher.

It begins “One can in good conscience give a God-praising soldier responsibility over the life and death of others” and ends with the fine sentiment that “In praying hands weapons are safe from abuse.” My German is rusty enough that I would have great difficulty detecting sarcasm in that language, so someone should tell me if I’m missing some essential subtlety in the translation.

So, I’m wondering … if a soldier faithfully wears a “Gott mit uns” belt buckle, does that suggest that he can do no evil?

Shall we assume that any Muslim who hits the prayer mat four times a day is harmless?

Is Germany planning to disarm any atheists in the ranks, because they can’t be trusted with their weapons?

Open Enrollment Day—too much success!

Whoa, people…I expected I’d be adding 10 or 20 new blogs to the blogroll with my open enrollment day, not 125. I’ve added them all (and I’ve also made it easier to find the complete listing with a link on the sidebar), but right now I feel a bit bloated, like a tick who was aiming for a tasty capillary and managed to tap into the carotid instead.

Don’t be disappointed if I have to shed a few next month—there’s tons of good stuff there, but the volume is a little bit on the side of indigestible. I’ll have to reduce it a bit if I hope to have another of these open enrollment days in the future.