New round of debate on Mooney, "Tom Johnson", etc.

For those who haven't seen it ... over at Phil Plait's place.

H/T Ophelia Benson.

Kitteh contest

Jerry Coyne has announced, so I'll follow suit, that the results of the kitteh contest have been decided. Your celebrity judges - Ophelia Benson, Miranda Celeste Hale, et moi - have reported, and the results will be announced this coming weekend over at Why Evolution Is True.

Currently reading: Atheism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Kerry Walters

This isn't a bad little book, but it's annoying the way it goes on so much with the false moral equivalence between religious fundamentalists and New Atheists. This is lazy, unfair, and (by now) boring.

There are also other occasional oddities among what is mainly solid discussion. One is this claim (bear in mind that we're talking here about a new book, with a 2010 publication date): "In fact, it's become a convention among the New Atheists to refer to unbelievers as 'brights,' with the accompanying implication that believers are dim(-)witted."

This is simply false. There is no such convention. Admittedly, a couple of folks tried on this idea of "brights" as a positive-sounding name for non-believers, though those people were not Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. The idea never really took off and it is just false to say that it's a convention adopted in New Atheist circles. I can assure Walters that you can hang round in Gnu circles as much as you like without encountering any such "convention". In fact, you'll be very unlikely to encounter the usage at all.

This sort of outright misinformation, doubtless unintended, gives the impression of an author whose finger is just not on the pulse.

Some cold water on life extension for mice

Kyle Munkittrick says: "Mice engineered to lack telomerase aged prematurely. When given telomerase treatments, the mice rejuvenated to age-appropriate health without adverse side-effects. That’s it. That’s the extend of the discovery."

Rogue boots

This picture is for especially for Jerry Coyne - I thought of him immediately when I came across it. Never mind the dialogue or Hank McCoy in the background; check out the boots that Rogue is wearing.

On saying no to the burqa

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Sergio Redagalli, the artist who created the image to the left, is currently under attack for alleged breach of anti-discrimination law.

Again and again, we see these sorts of attacks on freedom of speech and expression where it involves criticism or just plain rejection of religious or cultural practices. It's way past time to push back and defend the important freedom to speak out against these things if we disapprove of them.

As far as I'm concerned, the important issue is whether or not the burqa should be banned, not whether or not people should be legally entitled to express their opposition to it. For essentially Millian reasons, I don't favour a sweeping ban on wearing of burqas in public places (I'll be saying a fair bit more about the pros and cons in The Book). However, this garment is something unpleasant that we should tolerate, not something that we should approve of or welcome. It's certainly not something so precious that it must never be criticised or exposed to expressions of hostility.

And once again we see "Islamophobia" used as a stick to try to deny people freedom of speech. It's appalling, though not unexpected.

Quick catch-up on what's going on

Lots of debate on the free will thread two posts down, so I've been making comments there rather than creating new posts on related topics.

Meanwhile, I'm currently reading Thomas Pynchon's newest book, Inherent Vice (2009) and judging Jerry Coyne's kitteh contest (with Ophelia Benson and Miranda Hale).

Oh, and working on proofreading of a book manuscript. Hmmm, a fair bit happening, actually.

Finished!!!

Well ... a stage is finished. As of yesterday morning, I finished a respectable version of the last chapter of the new book - and I've since been sweeping back through the entire manuscript, tweaking here, pruning there, clarifying somewhere else, and generally doing a copyedit/proofread as I go. And I'm now declaring the first draft finished.

In a moment, I'll start printing it out, as there's no substitute for someone checking through a hard copy. I'll hand it over to long-suffering Jenny to do a layer of proofreading, and she's bound to catch some stuff that I missed.

This is, as mentioned, only the first draft, though I think it's a pretty good one. You'll be getting updates as things move along. For now, at least a tiny celebration is order while I think of the next task.

Clark on Sam Harris and free will

Over here, Tom Clark has a review of The Moral Landscape cum discussion of libertarian free will. I expect to return to this in the next few days. For now, here's a large sample (with material in bold quoted from Harris):

Harris rightly and crucially points out that there are viable conceptions of moral responsibility and moral judgment that survive the death of the little god. Wrongful acts are still wrong and condemnable in a world where their perpetrators are fully caused, and we are justified in holding perpetrators responsible since doing so is essential for an ordered society. But this essentially consequentialist notion of responsibility has major implications since it calls into question what Harris calls “the logic of retribution.” As he puts it:

Clearly, we need to build prisons for people who are intent on harming others. But if we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well. The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas and bad luck – which of these quantities, exactly, were they responsible for? No human being stands as author to his own genes or own upbringing, and yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout his life. Our system of justice should reflect our understanding that each of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life…The urge for retribution…seems to depend upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior. (109)

Harris also makes a broader point, connecting a naturalistic understanding of ourselves to compassion:

Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common humanity – and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics. It seems to me that few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. (110)

Harris acknowledges the strength of the retributive impulse – a natural endowment present in all of us to greater or lesser extent – and speculates about how it can best be managed in a future culture, one fully cognizant of the causes and cures of evil. Might we continue to punish perpetrators simply to satisfy the thirst for retribution? From a humanitarian standpoint let’s hope not, since once that thirst no longer serves its original social function, now taken over by prevention and rehabilitation, its satisfaction simply imposes unnecessary suffering. Harris again: “…it seems quite clear that the retributive impulse, based on the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion, and perpetuates a moral one.”

I'm on board with both Harris and Clark that the kind of free will that they're talking about doesn't exist. I'm also on board with the claim that this doesn't eliminate responsibility for our actions, though it may require that we nail down what "responsibility" really means. I'm not sure we really know what we're talking about when we use the word unreflectively, and it may not be straighforward to get to a considered understanding of it while also (at least approximately) tracking what work the word does in our ordinary discourse. Still, to adapt some phrasing from Dan Dennett, a sort of responsibility that is compatible with our being the products of natural forces, traceable beyond our wills, may be the only responsibility worth having.

I sometimes think that Clark overreaches a li'l in his views about the social and political implications of all this, but that's for another day. As I say, I'll return to it. Meanwhile have a look at his review and at the whole site of Naturalism.Org, which is well worth keeping up with if you're interested in such issues.

Benjamin Law on gay rights and anti-gay attitudes

A nice article over here.

Sample:

Straight guys, it turns out, are interesting. One study from the 1980s examined the behaviour of hundreds of primary school boys, and how homophobic language affected their interactions. When they started school, young boys were observed holding hands on their way to class, or hugging each other at recess. By the age of 10 — when epithets such as queer and faggot were starting to creep in — they were mock-punching each other and high-fiving instead. By the time they were teenagers, the amount of anti-gay slurs had reached a peak. Boys would go to cinemas together but sit separately, in case they were seen as gay.

Even now, in Brisbane, it’s common for me to get on a bus and see boys sitting with the entire aisle between them, in case people get the wrong idea. Homophobia, as I told the crowd, doesn’t just affect gay people. If “gay” is still one of the worst things you can be in the schoolyard, that inevitably affects the way we behave and interact. We stop listening to certain music, in case it’s gay. We stop playing certain sports, in case it’s gay. We stop talking to each other in certain ways — and avoid making friends with certain people — in case it’s gay.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, straight people get the raw end of homophobia too.