waka waka waka

Over at Dr. William Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website there is a dicussion thread underway, prompted by a silly item in the New York Times about cognitive neuroscience and the soul. In the original article, the author, obviously unfamiliar with the labyrinthine convolutions of mind-body philosophy, embarrasses herself with the following:

But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges — not just in people but in other animals as well.

The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force.

I winced when I read this. As Bill V., an unrepentant dualist, correctly points out, it is the purest hogwash. It is so incoherent that, as scientists often say of a poorly organized hypothesis, “it’s not even wrong”.

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No-one should be surprised by the grumbling on the Left about the Supreme Court’s decision on racial discrimination, for reasons that hardly need enumeration here. In broaching the subject at all I am on thin ice, as a white male: a member of a morally stunted, congenitally tainted group that is deemed in many circles utterly disqualified from discussions of prejudice, inequality, and so on. But, if I may press on anyway, and act the provocateur to my many friends on the sinistral side of the aisle, the decision is correct. Here’s why; it’s really quite simple, as Chief Justice Roberts and the concurring justices understood.

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Michael Moore is on his (presumably steel-reinforced) soapbox once again. In his newest movie, Sicko, he brings his folksy propaganda style to bear on the American health-care system, which is, he alleges, fundamentally inferior to the socialized arrangements in place in other countries, including even the tyrannized and impoverished nation of Cuba (whose “revolutionary” medical infrastructure we glanced at in an earlier post.)

For a different perspective, see this essay in today’s Wall Street Journal.

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Today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I enthusiastically recommend as an excellent source of news about all branches of science) had an interesting item about social hierarchies in fish. As is so often the case with discoveries of organizing principles in nature, the research is likely to help us understand not just the particular system under examination (in this case reef colonies of gobies), but ourselves as well.

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A little while ago we opined that, odd as it may seem, here in America the particulars of a politician’s faith matter less than that he have some sort of religious affiliation. Quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney seems to agree:

I think the American people want a person of faith to lead the country. I don’t think Americans care what brand of faith someone has.

It’s nice to have explicit confirmation from such a prominent public servant, but a bit disappointing nonetheless. One can still hold out hope that an avowed faith in, say, centaurs, or the John Frum cargo cult, would cause a few raised eyebrows among the electorate, but perhaps not.

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I should probably have done a bit more research before posting the preceding item; the legalities in this case are clearer than I had realized.

Most states, including Ohio, consider “non-therapeutic” abortions after 24 weeks to be unlawful; it appears also that the Ohio criminal code considers the “unlawful termination of another’s pregnancy” to be murder. So it seems that under Ohio law, Mr. Cutts can plausibly be charged with the murder of Ms. Davis’s fetus in this case, as her pregnancy had advanced beyond the legal threshold. The relevant sections of the Ohio Revised Code are here (abortion) and here (homicide).

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As noted by Steven Pinker in his introduction to the 2007 Edge Question, there are some topics that one ventures into at one’s own risk. Here’s one:

The police in Canton, Ohio, have just arrested one Bobby Cutts, Jr., for the foul and gruesome murder of Jessie Davis, who was due to give birth in two weeks or so. The case captured the nation’s attention over the past few days, in part because of the horrifying eyewitness testimony of Davis’s son, a mere toddler, who told the police that “Mommy was crying”, and “Mommy’s in the rug”.

The news services are now reporting that Cutts, himself a police officer, is to be charged with two murders: the unfortunate woman herself, and the fetus she was carrying. And it is this legal construction that I am curious about.

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We had a real treat Thursday night: the Celebrate Brooklyn outdoor-concert series presented a performance by the Richard Thompson Band at the Prospect Park Bandshell.

If you aren’t familiar with Richard Thompson, you should be: since his early days as a member of Fairport Convention back in the 60’s, he has been regarded as one of the world’s most gifted and passionate singers and songwriters, and he is also a preeminent master of both the acoustic and electric guitar. It is hard to pin him down musically; his influences range from the traditional folk music of his native Britian all the way through blues, R&B, and psychedelic rock. He is also blessed with an enormous baritone voice, a rich and expressive instrument that just seems to get better with age.

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While poking around at Andrew Staroscik’s brand-new biology weblog Mixotrophy, I found a link to a remarkable presentation, by one Blaise Aguera y Arcas, from this year’s TED Conference. He is describing a new image-display technology called Seadragon, which is in turn the engine that powers a new system, Photosynth, that programmatically assembles tagged photos found on the Web into astonishing, zoomable, 3-D mosaics. I’m no sibyl, but I’ll be surprised if this isn’t an important new technology.

Each year the website Edge.org — which I will recommend once again to you all, as it is one of the Web’s most stimulating destinations — asks the intellectual community a carefully chosen question, presents the answers on its website, and then gathers them together into a book. Previous questions have included What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?, What Do You Believe is True, Even Though You Cannot Prove It, and What Is Today’s Most Important Underreported Story? (you can see the whole list here).

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We don’t often offer video selections in this space two days running, but time, unfortunately, does not permit a lengthy post today. So here is a remarkable glimpse of the vicissitudes of life on the veldt, featuring a herd of Cape buffaloes, a hunting party of lionesses, and even a crocodile or two. Place your bets.

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Here’s an odd little item that popped up in the news yesterday: a strange ball of light (which, curiously, seems to cast a sort of shadow) moseying around the parking lot of the First Judicial Courthouse in Santa Fe, NM. It was picked up by a surveillance camera, and the video has been making the rounds. Charles Fort would have approved — and in fact the Fortean Times also carried the story. Have a look.

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With a hat tip to Peter Hankins, today we take a look at a simple yet outstandingly accurate piece of meteorological technology: the Weather Stone.

The late Victorian era was a time of smug certainty in the scientific world. The Darwinian revolution had the God of the Gaps on the run, technological innovation was accelerating briskly, and the great intellectual cataclysms of the 20th century — relativity, quantum mechanics, and Gödel’s theorem, foremost among many — were still nothing more than dim smudges on the horizon.

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Among the books and periodicals I have hoarded here at home are quite a few old issues of National Geographic: I’ve been a subscriber since the early 80’s, and don’t throw them away. I’ll often pull out an old copy in an idle moment, and yesterday I was looking at one from December 1988. The theme was Our Endangered Earth, and one of the stories was about the Urueu-Wau-Wau, an isolated tribe from the western Brazilian rain forest.

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Today I drove my son Nick up to Becket, MA, in the heart of the Berkshires, where he will be spending the summer as a counselor at Camp Becket, a healthy and wholesome place if ever there was one. This morning my car was parked several blocks from my home, and as I was walking over to get it at about 7:45 a.m. I noticed several cardboard boxes on the sidewalk, overflowing with books. Though I was already running late, I was drawn as irresistably as a twister to a trailer park, and spent a few minutes rummaging around. As it turned out this was not the usual curbside assortment of fad diets, lurid bodice-rippers, and outdated sports almanacs, but appeared to be the abruptly and ignominiously discarded library of someone of considerable intellectual depth. There were dozens — perhaps more than a hundred — books on philosophy, science, mathematics, and computer science, and I gathered up a handful and headed on, frustrated that I didn’t have more time, and making a note to myself to stop back by when I was back from the drive to Becket.

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The prominent Swiss Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan is a controversial figure: to some, he is an important moderate voice, one that could do much to heal the deepening rift between Islamic and Western culture, while to others his call for an assimilable, Europeanized form of Islam masks a more radical agenda that is closer to the aims of his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of the radical Islamist intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who was a comrade of Ramadan’s father Said.

Now Horace Jeffery Hodges, whose engrossing weblog The Gypsy Scholar is linked to on our sidebar, has written an excellent series of posts examining Tariq Ramadan’s ideas and influences. If you have an interest in the history, philosophy, and personalities that have shaped the current phase of this ancient struggle — and how could you not? — you should go and have a look. The series begins here.

One of the warmer and more persistent disagreements between liberal and conservative viewpoints in recent years has been over the commingling of religion with politics. We hear a steady drumbeat from the Left alleging that the Bush cadre is trying to turn the USA into a “theocracy”, and in academic circles, where the prevailing attitude toward religion is pitying scorn, if not downright hostility, conservative Republicans are as rare as hen’s teeth. Meanwhile, in the opposite corner, reactionary firebrands like Ann Coulter inflame the pious with books such as her recent screed, Godless.

So it was interesting to see CNN present a program over the weekend in which the current crop of Democratic presidential aspirants fed the electorate great helpings of santimonious treacle in an effort to demonstrate that their worldview was informed not only by the shrewd and worldly calculus of political advantage, but also by the sine qua non of American public life, namely “faith”.

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We are back from San Francisco, having enjoyed ourselves immensely. We stayed at the highly recommended Huntington Hotel, on the Matterhorn-like eminence known as Nob Hill, with a delightful view northward over the Bay from the 10th floor. We dined at a succession of splendid restaurants (in particular I recommend Venticello and Rue Lepic), and took long walks all over town, hammering in pitons as needed. We saw some old friends, and took an enchanting stroll through Muir Woods, a redwood forest just a few miles beyond the Golden Gate. The weather was, by my lights, perfect: in the sixties each day, with a fresh and invigorating breeze straight from the cool Pacific.

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We will be gone for a few days: my lovely and patient wife Nina and I are off to San Francisco to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. I may have a moment here and there to write, but quite possibly not. We’ll be back at the beginning of next week, but meanwhile, please browse our voluminous archives, or visit the outstanding websites listed on our sidebar.

Today, June 4th, would have been my mother’s 72nd birthday. I thank again all of you who offered so many kind words of support during her last days, which were chronicled in these pages a little over a year ago. She was a truly exceptional woman, and we miss her terribly.

We call your attention to a recent addition to our sidebar: Duff and Nonsense, a website maintained by one David Duff, who lives and writes, I believe, in Ireland. Mr. Duff has commented on some recent posts here at waka waka waka, and upon following the links back to his own site, I spent a pleasant interval poking around. He writes lightheartedly, with clarity and style. Do pay a visit.

Well, it’s begun again: the annual descent into Hell that is summer in Gotham. Today got up to around 90°, with life-threatening humidity, and a pitiless white sky. These are, of course, optimal conditions for moving furniture up and down several flights of stairs, which was how I spent much of the afternoon, as my daughter was moving into her new apartment.

As a result, I am spent. There will be no post today.

In the J. Robert Oppenheimer speech about Einstein that was the subject of yesterday’s post, we find the following paragraph:

Einstein is also, and I think rightly, known as a man of very great good will and humanity. Indeed, if I had to think of a single word for his attitude towards human problems, I would pick the Sanscrit word Ahinsa, not to hurt, harmlessness. He had a deep distrust of power; he did not have that convenient and natural converse with statesmen and men of power that was quite appropriate to Rutherford and to Bohr, perhaps the two physicists of this century who most nearly rivaled him in eminence. In 1915, as he made the general theory of relativity, Europe was tearing itself to pieces and half losing its past. He was always a pacifist. Only as the Nazis came into power in Germany did he have some doubts, as his famous and rather deep exchange of letters with Freud showed, and began to understand with melancholy and without true acceptance that, in addition to understanding, man sometimes has a duty to act.

Having no recollection of this correspondence between these two great thinkers, I was interested to track it down — and I was also struck by the timeliness, and relevance to matters currently under discussion here, of the final phrase above: “…in addition to understanding, man sometimes has a duty to act.”

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