Misunderstanding Evolution

Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg have written an article called "Why Do Some People Resist Science?" that examines, among other things, how the intuitive thinking of children can be a roadblock to their understanding of how nature actually works.

Their theory is interesting and almost surely correct.


I've excerpted the paragraph below for my own separate purpose, not because it summarizes Bloom and Weisberg's theory:

Consider, for example, that most adults who claim to believe that natural selection can explain the evolution of species are confused about what natural selection actually is—when pressed, they often describe it as a Lamarckian process in which animals somehow give birth to offspring that are better adapted to their environments. Their belief in natural selection, then, is not rooted in an appreciation of the evidence and arguments. Rather, this scientifically credulous sub-population are deferring to the people who say that this is how evolution works. They trust the scientists.

The popular confusion of Lamarck's theory of evolution with Darwin's theory of evolution (and later theories) is one of my main pet peeves. I am truly amazed at how often well-educated people don't know the difference.

In my first year of college, one of my honors-program classmates derided me for completely rejecting Darwin's theory. Of course, I wasn't doing that. I was only telling my classmate that he was incorrect when he said that evolution took place as a result of the inheritance of acquired traits . He thought that this was the basis of Darwin's theory.

To be fair, Darwin's theory isn't perfect, but my classmate was clearly talking about Lamarckism, calling it Darwinism, and believing that it was established fact. For example, he was claiming that if you bound a person's ears beginning in childhood, then that person's children would somehow inherit small ears. I have since learned how common such mistakes are.

This is my explanation for how the confusion happens:

In high-school biology classes many out-dated evolutionary theories are explained along with the most up-to-date theories. This is as it should be since the students need to learn about the history of science.

Lamarck's theory is often illustrated by the "giraffe story" which claims that some ancient proto-giraffes stretched their necks to reach the higher leaves and then their offspring were born with pre-stretched necks.

If the biology teacher is good at his job, he then explains that that's not what actually happened. In reality, some giraffes were born with long necks because of random mutations (which are mostly bad or irrelevant, but sometimes good). Since they had an advantage over the shorter necked giraffes, they lived longer and had more offspring. This natural selection was how the long-neck gene spread through the giraffe population.

When the students remember evolution, however, they remember the giraffes-stretching-their-necks story because it's more visual and easier to understand. It sounds like a Just So Story.

The random mutation and natural selection story, in contrast, is counter-intuitive and complex and requires an understanding of genetics that most high school students (and most college-graduates) don't have.

(All this fits in with what Bloom and Weisberg were saying, by the way.)

Buddha in the Tree

I wedged this little Buddha head into a cranny at the base of an oak tree that is in my front yard. I'm hoping that the tree will grow around it. I put a toy soldier in the same spot several years ago and it's completely disappeared into the tree.

Many hours after I had shoved the Buddha's head into the tree and taken the picture, I started preparing this blog entry. I tried to find a website that I saw a few years ago. It showed pictures of things (fences, signs, a gun, a bicycle, etc.) that trees had grown around. I was going to provide a link, but I couldn't find that site. I did, however, find this, which I had never seen. Strange.

Lesha's Grown -N- Sexy Mens Department

Photo taken at the local Goodwill.

Jews for Allah

Separated as babies in China, twin girls reunited in Louisiana

Ten years after life took them on different paths, two fraternal twins born in China and abandoned at an orphanage were reunited Saturday in Pineville surrounded by their adoptive parents.

Eleven-year-old Jennie Nadel and Rachel Halbrook didn't know of the existence of each other until a few months ago, after Allison Hornsby connected the dots.

[EDIT]

Hornsby explained that the search for Jennie's twin sister began when someone translated Jennie's Chinese name to English.

It was during a business trip to China that Hornsby, who is in the toy import business, was conversing with a business colleague and a Chinese speaker who happened to see Jennie's passport.

"He said to me 'Do you know what her name means?'. I said, no. 'It means big twin,' he said."

Hornsby said that day she learned that in Chinese culture it's very common for a family who has twins to name them, 'little twin' and 'big twin.'

Full article

European Man Found in Ancient Chinese Tomb

Human remains found in a 1,400-year-old Chinese tomb belonged to a man of European origin, DNA evidence shows.

Chinese scientists who analyzed the DNA of the remains say the man, named Yu Hong, belonged to one of the oldest genetic groups from western Eurasia.

[EDIT]

The tomb containing Yu Hong's remains has been undergoing excavation since 1999.

It also contains the remains of a woman of East Asian descent.

The burial style and multicolor reliefs found in the tomb are characteristic of Central Asia at the time, experts say.

The people pictured in the reliefs, however, have European traits, such as straight noses and deep-set eyes.

"The mixture of different cultures made it difficult to confirm the origin of this couple, and the anthropologists also could not determine the race of these remains, owing to the partial missing skulls," Hui said.

To learn more about the history of the couple, Hui's team studied their mitochondrial DNA, a type of DNA inherited exclusively from the mother that can be analyzed to track human evolution.

The research shows that Yu Hong arrived in Taiyuan approximately 1,400 years ago and most probably married a local woman.

Carvings found in the tomb depict scenes from his life, showing him to have been a chieftain of the Central Asian people who had settled in China during the Sui dynasty (A.D. 580 to 618).

The carvings suggest that his grandfather and father lived in northwest China's Xinjiang region and were nobles of the Yu country for which he is named.

Yu Hong died in A.D. 592, at the age of 59. His wife, who died in A.D. 598, was buried in the same grave.

Full article

Derb

John Derbyshire is one of the most intriguing journalists I know of. He writes smartly and bravely about the big taboos, he has a very eclectic set of beliefs, and his personal history is interesting. The fact that he was beaten up by Bruce Lee (in a movie, not for real) also really adds an air of coolness to his persona.

He's written a fascinating article called "Towards a White Minority" at National Review Online. Here's a little of it:

This reinforces a number of findings from recent years suggesting that people are much more willing to be taxed for the benefit of people like themselves than for the benefit of the Other. Old people already grumble about paying taxes to support extravagant educational establishments. As the racial generation gap opens up, with the oldsters being noticeably more white and Anglo than the kids being educated, the grumbling will escalate into action — most likely, the simple action of yet further residential segregation, the old and white-Anglo living here, the young and dark Hispanic living there.

Though, of course, the unwillingness to be taxed to support the Other cuts both ways. How will a majority nonwhite young workforce feel about paying out income and Social Security taxes for the sustenance of old, white Anglos? I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I, at least, have looked forward glumly to my last days, most likely spent stuck, incapable, in some cruddy nursing home with a bunch of other helpless white geezers, my daily needs in the hands of resentful black and brown orderlies whose educations featured long catalogs of the wrongs done to Them by Us.

Back of all that is the question: As white Anglos decline into a minority, will we see the rise of white-Anglo race consciousness? The common understanding at present is that open expressions of race consciousness are taboo for white-Anglo Americans, but just fine for everyone else. A leading black presidential candidate subtitles his best-selling biography “A Story of Race and Inheritance”; the main lobbying organization for Hispanics carries the proud title “National Council of the Race”; and so on. This word is, however, not available to white-Anglo Americans in reference to themselves, and white-Anglo Americans are indoctrinated from childhood to believe, or to pretend to believe, that race is an empty category.

Full article

Earlier this year, Derbyshire and Joey Kurtzman had a great dialogue at Jewcy about whether the points Kevin MacDonald made in his Jewish trilogy (A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Culture of Critique) were valid. It's a long set of articles that roams a little off-topic and everything in it is interesting, so I won't even try to excerpt any of it. You should just read the whole thing (Kurtzman's contributions are at least as good as Derbyshire's) starting here.

Tom Tomorrow's "Great Moments In Punditry: Four Years Later"

WWII Porno-Propaganda

The first item was a two-page folding leaflet. Its theme was the Kaisers Germany's patriotic song " The Watch on the Rhine". A very gloomy picture of a snow covered grave somewhere on the Russian front, headed the first verse of the Watch on the Rhine:

Lieb vaterland magst ruhig sein _ ( dear fatherland you may rest assured )

By rights that inspiring thought would be followed by a second verse.

Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein _ ( Firm stands true the watch on the Rhine.)

Instead, the picture of the soldiers grave and its reassuring caption was followed by a second page overleaf showing in colour a picture of a naked girl, painted in the style favored by Adolf Hitler in such beloved pictures as "Leda and the Swan" about to seat herself on the upright penis of some dark haired and dark skinned non-German.

The Caption read: "Fest steckt's und treu der Fremdarbeiter rein."

(" Firmly sticks it and true the foreign worker in").

Full article

Another article with many more examples

White, Non-Hispanics To Be Minority Among U.S. Newborns By 2011

In 2006 white, non-Hispanics accounted for:

• 56 percent of persons 9 and younger
• 60 percent of persons 10 to 19
• 67 percent of persons 20 to 64
• 81 percent of persons 65 and older

From July 1, 2005 to July 1, 2006, the white population grew by a miniscule 0.26 percent. The minority population grew by 2.42 percent.

• If the white and minority populations continue growing at their respective 2005-06 growth rates, present day minorities will attain majority status by the year 2038. (Table 1.) (This is much earlier than the Census Bureau projects, primarily because they presume a reduction in legal immigration.)

Full article

Albana the Contortionist

I did a Google image search for "ska" for a project mostly unrelated to this blog and this was one of the first results.

Though it diverted me from what I was working on, I had to investigate.

Albana is a student (a "scholorship student" according to the website from which the photograph came) of Ska von Schöning.

This photo barely hints at the things that Albana can do. If you are interested in contortion acts, I encourage you to view the full gallery. I am particularly impressed by Albana's ability to do other activities such as brushing her teeth or talking on the telephone while performing.

I've been fascinated by contortionists since a trip I made to the circus when I was a boy. I wasn't really impressed with the three-ring fare, but the sideshow was another story. One of the sideshow acts involved a young woman (a Gypsy, I think) lying down in an elevated box and then having wide blades inserted into the box. How she avoided the blades was not visible from where the audience was standing, but for 50 cents any of us could go up on the stage and look into the box. As I walked by the box, I could see that she had contorted her body in such a way as to avoid the blades. It was impressive and well worth 50 cents to see. I have a clear memory of her in her twisted pose looking up and making eye contact with me as I walked by.

You should also check out The Incomparable Ula, though a few of her pictures (here, here, and here) seem a little disturbing if you don't know what's going on.

Eli Valley's "Song of Songs"

Thanks to Jewcy.

A History of "White Trash"

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you’d probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong.

The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans. As a term of abuse, white trash was used by blacks—both free and enslaved—to disparage local poor whites. Some of these poor whites would have been newly arrived Irish immigrants, others semiskilled workers drawn to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in the postrevolutionary building boom, and others still may have been white servants, waged or indentured, working in the homes and estates of area elites. The term registered contempt and disgust, as it does today, and suggests sharp hostilities between social groups who were essentially competing for the same resources—the same jobs, the same opportunities, and even the same marriage partners.

Full article

Dennis Kucinich and Wife

I have not been following the Democratic Presidential race as closely as I should have been. I did not even realize that Dennis Kucinich was married.

Bravo, Dennis, bravo.

Pat Buchanan's "But Who Was Right—Rudy or Ron?"

When Ron Paul said the 9-11 killers were "over here because we are over there," he was not excusing the mass murderers of 3,000 Americans. He was explaining the roots of hatred out of which the suicide-killers came.

Lest we forget, Osama bin Laden was among the mujahideen whom we, in the Reagan decade, were aiding when they were fighting to expel the Red Army from Afghanistan. We sent them Stinger missiles, Spanish mortars, sniper rifles. And they helped drive the Russians out.

What Ron Paul was addressing was the question of what turned the allies we aided into haters of the United States. Was it the fact that they discovered we have freedom of speech or separation of church and state? Do they hate us because of who we are? Or do they hate us because of what we do?

Osama bin Laden in his declaration of war in the 1990s said it was U.S. troops on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, U.S. bombing and sanctions of a crushed Iraqi people, and U.S. support of Israel's persecution of the Palestinians that were the reasons he and his mujahideen were declaring war on us.

Full article

Paul For President

I watched the Republican Presidential debate last night and V for Vendetta earlier this evening. Though the pairing was not planned (the movie just happened to make it to the top of my Netflix queue a few days ago), it was apt.

The most poignant part of the debate, I thought, was the happy defense by most of the candidates of torture. Only John McCain and Ron Paul finished their answers still looking human to me.

Earlier in the debate, Paul pointed out that the 9/11 attacks were largely a reaction to the military policy that the United States had followed in the Middle East for the previous several years, especially the bombing of Iraq. Rudy Giuliani responded, surely lyingly, that he had never heard anyone say such a thing and called on Paul to take back what he had said. Paul did not back down.

FOX News' post debate coverage included a text-messaging poll which asked viewers to vote for the candidate they thought won the debate. Paul finished second - behind Mitt Romney and ahead of Guiliani - in the poll, though he was in first place through much of the polling period. Most of FOX's commentators and guests condemned Paul's telling of the truth. Some demanded that he not be allowed in future debates. They dismissed the text-message poll as irrelevant, saying that it didn't really measure anything significant. (FOX's own Sean Hannity was among the polls detractors, though he didn't explain why FOX would sponsor such a silly poll and feature it so prominently as a part of their post debate coverage.)

For more on the reactions to Ron Paul, see:

Plenty of reasonable people can disagree about foreign policy. What's really strange is when one reasonable position is completely and forcibly excluded from the public debate.
Such was the case after 9-11. Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.

From Lew Rockwell's "Ron Paul Said It"

It’s a good thing for him that Russell Kirk didn’t have to live to see the deranged caricature of itself that American conservatism has now become. Kirk, one of the key architects of that movement, spent the last years of his life opposing every military adventure of the U.S. government. The average conservative today, on the other hand, who knows only what the government and its neocon shills tell him, would be at an utter loss to account for that.

From Thomas E. Woods, Jr.'s "Ron Paul Violated the Rules"

What Ron Paul’s participation in the 2008 presidential race is accomplishing is this: It is making people such as Rudy Giuliani think about things they’ve never thought about before and causing them to view the U.S. government and its long-time paradigm of empire and interventionism in an entirely different way. It’s also why he is engendering considerable discomfort among people who have long believed that the federal government is a deity whose foreign policies are beyond reproach. Don’t be surprised to hear more calls for suppressing Paul’s participation in future debates, even while the critics continue to wax eloquent about how U.S. soldiers are killing and dying in Iraq for the sake of “democracy.”

From Jacob G. Hornberger's "Giuliani’s Attack on Ron Paul Falls Flat"

V for Vendetta mirrors many of the themes that were discussed in the debate and evoked by its coverage. Of course, real world villains and heroes mostly seem pretty plain when compared to their cinematic counterparts. Maybe, if Ron Paul would wear a Guy Fawkes mask to the next debate....

Happy Mother's Day!

Is L.A. burning?

The recent fires in the Hollywood Hills reminded me of a sight I saw one night when I was living high up on Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon.

I had not watched the news or left the house that day, so I hadn't heard about or seen the fires. When I went outside for something (to do the laundry, I think) and looked to the east, I was surprised to see several fires burning on one of the other hills. The fires were miles away and there were lots of roads and canyons and other obstacles between me and them, so I wasn't afraid of them spreading to where I was. But, it was still an eerie thing to see. The fires must have been pretty big to have been so visible from far away, but I couldn't really judge their size any more precisely than that. It was already dark out. Even in daylight it would have been hard to establish a frame of reference for estimating the size of the fires since the area that was burning was mostly trees and bushes of various sizes. From a distance, the fires were just orange shapes growing and moving around an otherwise dark section of the hills. I was much too far away to hear any of the sounds that the fires and firefighters must have been making. It was very quiet where I was, as Laurel Canyon usually is.

Cannabis and the Christ

Although the idea that Jesus and his disciples used a healing cannabis ointment may seem far-fetched at first, when weighed against the popular alternative (one that is held by millions of believers) that Jesus performed his healing miracles magically, through the power invested in him by the omnipotent Lord of the Universe, the case for ancient accounts of medicinal cannabis seems a far more likely explanation.

Full article

Thanks to my good friend JC (no relation to the JC, so far as I know) for sending me a link to this interesting article.