I know, I just had a quote posting, but here’s another hot off the presses. In response to ‘framing’ as laid out by Nisbet/Mooney, PZ has the money quote on why Mooney’s grand scheme for duping the public into greater acceptance of science is bullshit:

[Framing implies] a demeaning opinion of the public, and it assumes that the only way to approach people is to “pare down” the ideas. I think this is false. I can agree with the general idea of framing as a tool to get people to pay attention, but I think [Mooney/Nisbet are] going in the wrong direction.

Science educators need to get people to accept new ideas, and they have the goal of having people learn more. [Chris Mooney] and [Matt Nisbet] are too mired in the politics, where the idea is to get people to shift more laterally, to get them to back something without necessarily expecting them to actually acquire new information. Feed their frame, don’t expect them to actually change substantively, but get them to adopt a policy in a way that doesn’t require them to actually change attitudes or beliefs. That’s fine if you’re trying to get them to vote on a bill, but I’m not interested in that.

We want to challenge people, we want to annoy them and shake them up, we want to make them rethink, we want to make them absorb new information and come out of the process smarter. “Framing”, as [Mooney] and Nisbet have presented it, makes all that undesirable. [Framing is] actually a process for preserving the status quo, and if you dislike the status quo, it’s going to be the opposite of what we want to do.

Exactly. The last thing we want is for the public to treat science like a list of facts to memorize. As I said recently on Bitesize Bio, what we want above all is to be promoting inquiry and discussion of descriptive expertise by kinesthetic instruction of the scientific method where we can. And where that’s not feasible, by engaging the public in thoughtful discussion as though they were adults. We must trust that understanding of the scientific method itself will unlock doors to greater rationality in the layperson’s mind, which he or she will then choose to walk through on their own accord.

Not framing.

“My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public.”

- JBS Haldane, quoted in Evolution-the Fossils Say Yes!

Breaking news on a BBC documentary - click on image for video. (hattip: Loranablog)

Migrating Sandhill Cranes over the Platte River, Nebraska.
(Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU.)

I would be seriously remiss not to pass this one along. Hat tip: Hedwig the Owl

I’ve commented on various aspects of the origin of religion or religion as a natural phenomenon, including its psychological, cultural, and anthropological basis. But I’ve never put it all together in one place. Today, Razib of Gene Expression has such an article, that’s a very detailed and comprehensive summary of the subject (emphasis in original):

The plausibility of theism doesn’t need to be something we note only in terms of macrosocial metrics in regards to religious affiliation cross-culturally. As I imply above, theism is at root a psychological phenomena, and the bundle of biases and presuppositions which our biology confers upon us stack the deck in terms of weighting the plausibility of god concepts. This applies to atheists as well. We might not believe in god on the conscious level, but that does not mean that we are immune to the priming affect of agents, and likely supernatural agents as well. The folk wisdom about there being no atheists in foxholes is a reflection of this assumption. Now I’m not going to tell anyone who says they don’t believe in god that deep down they really do believe in god; rather, I simply believe that many of the psychological characteristics which prime one for finding god plausible are present in those who consciously assert that they don’t believe in gods. For example many atheists may feel unnerved in cemeteries despite a materialist world-view; the psychological response may be a result of social conditioning, but it is also possibly a cognitive reflex at an intersection of environmental inputs (think snake aversion as something similar).

Check it out:
Religion: biology ↔ psychology ↔ sociology ↔ history

“For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the Salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life — or death — that scientists know as ecology.”

-Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

One thing that keeps popping its head up with creationists and religionists in general is the misunderstanding that natural selection implies racism. Heck, even some evolutionists think that the mention of the word ‘race’ with regards to the human species, even when used in the taxonomic sense, implies ‘racism.’ This betrays a horrible misunderstanding of both natural selection and biological variation.

The premise of such misunderstandings of natural selection appear to me to be related to typological thinking, combined with the notion that selection ‘improves’ a population.

Check out my latest post on Bitesize Bio on Comments on Communicating Expertise and Knowledge. Quoting myself:

When scientists are working on open inquiry and empirical evidence in this manner, they are working on entirely different presumptions about the world than pseudoscience proponents. One can try to deal with the inconsistencies of underlying presumptions, but even scientists may have difficulty examining the merits and demerits of their own presumptions - much less laypersons unaccustomed to questioning even the outcomes of their presumptions. The system breaks down.

I’m still adjusting to Cyprus, and it’s tough. Greek lessons, job searches, establishing a new home, trying to lose a few pounds - not easy. The toughest part is of course giving up my support base back home, including my family and long-time friends, and having to rely on my wife’s family who I’m only just really getting to know. Brutal.

So blogging here has taken a back seat. I’ve still been blogging at Bitesize Bio however, on molecular biology and related topics, and I’ve been trying to participate in discussions on other blogs, such as:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, religion and reflection - Razib has some interesting comments on how to view religionists, given that religion is a natural phenomenon. Specific criticism is given to the “New Atheist polemicists,” and I step in to remind Razib that those polemicists do have a point.

The Discovery Institute is beating up Larry Moran - While the post could have been better titled “might better be phrased as “Disco Dancers nip at Larry Moran’s ankles,” I was mostly interested by the fact that Greg refused to link to the Dishonesty Institute. Kudos to Greg.

And Chris Mooney writes that sometimes refuting unscientific nonsense reinforces it - suggesting that people who take on pseudoscience propaganda would do better to ignore such material and remain in their ivory tower. You heard that right, the ol’ “Ignore them and they’ll go away” trick.

Chris Mooney lost a lot of fans with that last bit, including Brian Switek, SA Smith, PZ Myers, and myself.

The delusions of John Gray - A recent article in the Guardian by John Gray revisit the claim that scientific atheism is an ersatz religion, and PZ has his response: “They want more people to think rationally — why, that’s evangelism!” This smells to me of apologist excrement along the lines of Paul Davies’ NY Times article of last Autumn.

New bird species and new population of Blue Whale discovered.

Faith and irrationality - Mike shares a story of fear and self-loathing at Mercy Ministries, where faith becomes mental abuse.

And lastly, Save birds, play with your cat!

… Relevant to some of the themes of this blog, that is.

The shape of human variation - A while back, I had a person foolishly claiming that human races are merely a social construct, and thus don’t really exist. The reality is that the human species is an animal species, subject to the same rules of variation and geographical distribution as the rest.

Beck’s Petrel flies back from presumed extinction - Re-discovery stories are great, aren’t they?

Golfer kills migratory raptor - “Pro Golfer was trying to film an instructional video. Migratory raptor made the mistake of nesting on the course, and trying to defend her nest. So, he shot at it with a golf ball. Over. 10. Times.” Check here for a more comprehensive story.

Teachers under fire - In many parts of the US, the conflict between religious fanaticism is disturbing. This one is to be read along with this cartoon.