Category Archives: Social Commentary

Philosophy, Science And Society, Social Commentary

A Grand Bargain?

11 Comments

…over evolution?

There are atheists who go beyond declaring personal disbelief in God and insist that any form of god-talk, any notion of higher purpose, is incompatible with a scientific worldview. And there are religious believers who insist that evolution can’t fully account for the creation of human beings.

I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.

If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.

The believers who need to hear this sermon aren’t just adherents of “intelligent design,” who deny that natural selection can explain biological complexity in general. There are also believers with smaller reservations about the Darwinian story. They accept that God used evolution to do his creative work (“theistic evolution”), but think that, even so, he had to step in and provide special ingredients at some point.

Perhaps the most commonly cited ingredient is the human moral sense — the sense that there is such a thing as right and wrong, along with some intuitions about which is which. Even some believers who claim to be Darwinians say that the moral sense will forever defy the explanatory power of natural selection and so leave a special place for God in human creation.

I’m not as sanguine as Bob Wright about the prospects for a truce between fundamentalist atheists and theists. I do believe in a teleology of the universe, and if he can make a scientific case for it, more power to him, but unlike creationists, I have sufficient confidence in my faith that I don’t demand that science validate it.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Facebook Etiquette Question

30 Comments

OK, I’m an antique. I’ve got a Facebook account, but I still haven’t figured out why, other than as another phone book for contacts with people that I want to contact. I was told by Burton Lee that I had to have an account to be in the 21st century but (again) he never quite explained why.

I can understand that it’s sort of a way to blog and have your own on-line community if you don’t have a real…you know…blog. And because I do have a real blog, and one fairly highly rated on Technorati, among other places, I don’t have time to build Facebook pages.

Anyway. What is the protocol for having Facebook Friends? What is a Facebook “Friend”? Because I get a lot of requests from people I haven’t met, and have never heard of, and don’t even have friends in common with, to become their Facebook Friends. I have several pending “friends” both with and without mutual Facebook Friends, and I just don’t know what to do with them.

I may be old fashioned, but in my day, the word “friend” meant something. Has it lost that meaning?

[Update a few minutes later]

You know, if someone of whom I had no previous knowledge requested to be my Facebook “Friend” with an explanation of who they were, and why, I’d be more inclined to at least consider it, but when it’s just a response from a click on a button that says, “Become a friend,” I’m not very inclined to say, “Great!” “More Facebook Friends.”

Is collecting FFs some kind of weird status symbol?

Business, Economics, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Landline Problem

19 Comments

I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.

I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.

Science And Society, Social Commentary

No Surprise To Me

9 Comments

Women are more attracted to men who are already taken. This matches up with my own experience that wearing a ring can be a chick magnet. It’s unfair, too, because it creates something like a barrier to entry. Errrr….so to speak.

There’s also this other shocking news:

Other researchers say the study provides interesting insights into mate poaching. “It tells us something about the role of social desirability in mate preference,” says Fhionna Moore of the University of Abertay Dundee, UK, whose own research has shown that richer women are more choosy about mates.

Richer women are more choosy about mates? Who would have guessed?

How do I get money for these kinds of studies? I think I’d like to do a study on whether or not men date women to have sex. Maybe there’s something in the stimulus bill.

[Update a few minutes later]

I would note that this is due to a similar psychology among employers — it’s easier to find a job, and you’re more attractive to them, if you already have one. It gets tougher to get one when you’ve been laid off.

General, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Every Man

5 Comments

“…would give up his brain for a decent size.”

That was the subject of one of the myriad spam emails I get encouraging me to enhance…something or other. I have to believe that women get them, too.

Anyone who responds to such idiocy had no brain to give up in the first place. It’s as stupid as the ones that tell me that no one can resist buying a new watch. Watch me.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Holy War On Religion

23 Comments

…by some scientists.

Even though I generally agree with them, I am as put off by atheistic evangelizing as I am by any other kind. This is not a productive strategy to promote either science, or secularism. And I’m interested to read Chris Mooney’s latest book. I enjoyed Storm World, and it looks like his views have evolved somewhat from this book, which I found overly polemical.

General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire, Social Commentary

Some Thoughts On Comparing The President To Hitler

18 Comments

They seem to have won back their democracy, no thanks to the White House.

As a test of the state of “Bush the Nazi” rhetoric, I went to Google and typed in “Bush is a Nazi” and got 420,000 hits, well behind “Hitler was a Nazi” (654,000 hits), but then Hitler WAS a Nazi and had a 75-year head start. (Computer searches like this are very crude instruments. They sweep up many references that cannot fairly be listed as slurs. But they do offer a rough idea of the amount of name-calling.)

President Clinton did fairly well in the Nazi sweepstakes (158,000 hits, but that’s only 20,000 references for each presidential year, compared to 120,000 annually for the 3 1/2 year-incumbency of George Bush.) The odd thing is that I typed in the names of every Nazi I ever heard of, excluding only Hitler himself, and the group total was still less than George Bush gets alone. This might indicate that either that George Bush is by far the second most important Nazi of all time, or that the Democrats and the left now require some sedation.

But that was then, this is now…

And remember, that was five years ago. I’ll bet that a similar search now would provide much larger results.

Business, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space

Yes, And No

14 Comments

Some people in comments there think that Keith Cowing is making too big a deal of NASA’s inability to keep up with who does and doesn’t work for it, and even who still remains on the preferred side of the dirt.

I agree that, in itself, it is a pretty trivial issue, in the context of the much bigger problems at the agency, and it’s certainly one that most people don’t do well with, or many bureaucracies. But I’ll bet that there are some organizations that get this kind of thing right, because they have an organizational culture to get everything they do right. This isn’t, after all (to use the hackneyed and inaccurate expression) rocket science. If NASA can’t do something as basic as this, why should we trust it with billions of taxpayers’ dollars to build manned launch systems? Particularly when, even if they meet their own program goals, they will have such trivial capabilities (a few people to space a few times a year)? And if NASA can’t do something as basic as this, it might be for the same reasons that they have trouble developing new cost-effective launch systems.

Anyway, the evidence so far indicates that we shouldn’t trust them to do so.