Just a few months back ACS had dropped 36 Iranian members from its fold. ACS has now reversed its decision after protests from its members and other organizations. However, these Iranian members still cannot enjoy full member benefits.

From Science (May 18, 2007):

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has reinstated 36 Iranian members dumped in January because of the U.S. trade embargo. But ACS will continue to withhold certain member benefits until it obtains a government license.

Although U.S. organizations are prohibited from doing business with anybody in Iran, Cuba, or North Korea, an exemption enables U.S. scholarly societies to have members in those countries. But late last year, ACS officials decided that the full range of membership benefits--which includes discounted journal subscriptions, career counseling, meeting invitations, and insurance--crossed the line.

That ruling drew protest from scores of ACS members. And ACS Executive Director Madeleine Jacobs says she was not part of the decision. "I learned about the move from Science," she says (Science, 30 March, p. 1777). Last week, the society reversed its decision. But it could be months before ACS obtains a license that would enable it to provide Iranian members with discounted meeting registrations and career-development services.

Curious, that the Executive Director of ACS was not consulted nor informed about a decision with definite political overtones. ACS has now reversed its decisions and lets hope now that they restore full benefits to Iranian members soon.
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There is a fascinating article in Science (May 18, 2007) by Paul Bloom & Scolnick Weisberg. It is titled Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science and some aspects, such as the existence of soul or opposition to evolution, feed directly into science and religion debates. Paul Bloom was our first speaker for our Science & Religion lecture series at Hampshire College, and he talked about the origins of dualistic thinking in children that possibly leads to a concept of God. If interested, check out his excellent article, Is God an Accident? in the Atlantic Monthly (February 2001).

The Science article claims that some resistance to science is a human universal and is rooted in what children know about science intuitively and how they learn. A modified version of the paper is published at Edge. Here is the abstract for the paper:

The developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.

You can read the full article here.

About resistance to science:

There are two common assumptions about the nature of this resistance. First, it is often assumed to be a particularly American problem, explained in terms of the strong religious beliefs of many American citizens and the anti-science leanings of the dominant political party. Second, the problem is often characterized as the result of insufficient exposure to the relevant scientific facts, and hence is best addressed with improved science education.

We believe that these assumptions, while not completely false, reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of this phenomenon. While cultural factors are plainly relevant, American adults' resistance to scientific ideas reflects universal facts about what children know and how children learn. If this is right, then resistance to science cannot be simply addressed through more education; something different is needed.

They then talk about children know prior to their exposure to science. For example, young children have a sense of "naive physics" - that objects fall when dropped, as well as a sense of "naive" or "common-sense psychology" - that people act and react in response to social and physical events. While "naive physics" also leads to a number of erroneous scientific conclusions (e.g. a ball out of a curved tube will follow a curved path), it is "common-sense psychology" that is more relevant for science and religion debates.

First you have the issue of seeing purpose and design everywhere:

One significant bias is that children naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose. For instance, four year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining"), a propensity that Deborah Kelemen has dubbed "promiscuous teleology." Additionally, when asked about the origin of animals and people, children spontaneously tend to provide and to prefer creationist explanations.

Just as children's intuitions about the physical world make it difficult for them to accept that the Earth is a sphere, their psychological intuitions about agency and design make it difficult for them to accept the processes of evolution.

Then there is the issue of "dualism" or mind/body separation, that leads to ideas about soul, etc:

One of the most interesting aspects of our common-sense psychology is dualism, the belief that minds are fundamentally different from brains. This belief comes naturally to children. Preschool children will claim that the brain is responsible for some aspects of mental life, typically those involving deliberative mental work, such as solving math problems. But preschoolers will also claim that the brain isn't involved in a host of other activities, such as pretending to be a kangaroo, loving one's brother, or brushing one's teeth. Similarly, when told about a brain transplant from a boy to a pig, they believe that you get a very smart pig, but one with pig beliefs and pig desires. For young children, then, much of mental life is not linked to the brain.

(check out Paul Bloom's Descarts' Baby for more details)

These conceptual errors, however, can lead to real social consequences:

The strong intuitive pull of dualism makes it difficult for people to accept what Francis Crick called "the astonishing hypothesis." Dualism is mistaken — mental life emerges from physical processes. People resist the astonishing hypothesis in ways that can have considerable social implications. For one thing, debates about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, stem cells, and non-human animals are sometimes framed in terms of whether or not these entities possess immaterial souls. For instance, in their 2003 report (Being Human: Readings from the President's Council on Bioethics), the President's Council described people as follows: "We have both corporeal and noncorporeal aspects. We are embodied spirits and inspirited bodies (or, if you will, embodied minds and minded bodies)."

But how do children learn about science:

Some culture-specific information is not associated with any particular source. It is "common knowledge." As such, learning of this type of information generally bypasses critical analysis. A prototypical example is that of word meanings. Everyone uses the word "dog" to refer to dogs, so children easily learn that this is what they are called. Other examples include belief in germs and electricity. Their existence is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they "believe in electricity." Hence even children and adults with little scientific background believe that these invisible entities really exist, a topic explored in detail by Paul Harris and his colleagues.

Other information, however, is explicitly asserted. Such information is associated with certain sources. A child might note that science teachers make surprising claims about the origin of human beings, for instance, while their parents do not. Furthermore, the tentative status of this information is sometimes explicitly marked; people will assert that they "believe in evolution."

When faced with this kind of asserted information, one can occasionally evaluate its truth directly. But in some domains, including much of science, direct evaluation is difficult or impossible. Few of us are qualified to assess claims about the merits of string theory, the role in mercury in the etiology of autism, or the existence of repressed memories. So rather than evaluating the asserted claim itself, we instead evaluate the claim's source. If the source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often without really understanding it. As our colleague Frank Keil has discussed, this sort of division of cognitive labor is essential in any complex society, where any single individuals will lack the resources to evaluate all the claims that he or she hears.

This is not just limited to science and we do that for other areas as well. Children do the same:

Adults thus rely on the trustworthiness of the source when deciding which asserted claims to believe. Do children do the same? Recent studies suggest that they do; children, like adults, have at least some capacity to assess the trustworthiness of their information sources.

So in a nutshell,

the developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.

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I was away the past few weeks so I couldn't update the blog. But when I got back I saw this in the May 18th issue of Science:

The intelligent design (ID) movement has suffered setbacks lately, but the biblical literalists known as young-Earth creationists are going strong. This month, the Institute for Creation Research, based near San Diego, California, launched the International Journal for Creation Research.

Described as a "professional peer-reviewed journal," the publication promises to supply "hard data based on cutting-edge research" to support theories such as "the young earth model, the global Flood, [and] the non-evolutionary origin of the species."

The editor-in-chief is Andrew A. Snelling, a former geologist for a uranium-mining company who has a Ph.D. from Sydney University and is now in Brisbane, Australia.

So now what to do? A number of scientists have been saying that ID or Creation scientists don't publish in peer-reviewed journals. I guess they forgot to mention who the "peers" should be. I don't think ID will be far behind in creating their own peer-reviewed journal. Nevertheless, their guidelines will not be as entertaining as those for the International Journal for Creation Research:

According to the instructions to authors, papers will be evaluated as to whether they "are formulated within a young earth, young universe framework" and whether they "provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammatico-historical/normative interpretation of Scripture."

No these guidelines are real and not from the Onion.

Here are the full guidelines:

2. Review the Paper for possible inclusion into the IJCR review process. The following criteria are to be used in judging the papers:

(a) Is the Paper’s topic important to the development of the creation model?

(b) Does the Paper’s topic provide an original contribution to the creation model?

(c) Is this Paper formulated within a young-earth, young-universe framework?

(d) If (c) above is not satisfied, does this Paper offer a very constructively-positive criticism and provide a possible young-earth, young-universe alternative?

(e) If the Paper is polemical in nature, does it deal with a topic rarely discussed within the origins debate?

(f) Does this Paper provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammatico-historical/ normative interpretation of Scripture? (if necessary refer to Walsh, R.E., Biblical Hermeneutics and Creation, Proceedings First International Conference on Creationism, Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA, 1986, Vol. 1, pp. 121–127).

First paper for submission: Carl Sagan was wrong in using "Billions & Billions". He should have used "Hundreds and Hundreds".
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This is an educational web site that uses a subscription model to generate revenue:http://headsprout.coThe price is really high - you pay $100 to get the first 40 lessons, then another $100 for the next 40. And the web site controls things so that, practically speaking, only one kid can use the lessons. Compare this to the cost of a typical educational computer game on CD at maybe $20 to $30. Why
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In less than two minutes, this puts life (especially in academia) in perspective. This is the first part of a web series called Hometown Baghdad. It follows the lives and thoughts of three students at the university trying to survive in Baghdad. Most of these episodes are under 2 minutes and have been shot by an all Iraqi crew. You can watch other episodes here. Please also check out The Perils and Promise of Higher Education at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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The ruler of Dubai, Shiekh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, is donating 10 billion dollars to set up an educational foundation. This is thought to be one of the largest charitable donations in history - and amazingly its for research and education!

Sheikh Mohammed, known as a successful racehorse owner as well as ruler of Dubai, said his personal initiative was aimed at creating what he called "a knowledge-based society" in the Middle East.

At the moment, he explained, there was high illiteracy in the region - where more than 40% of Arab women cannot read or write. The whole Arab world publishes fewer books than the country of Turkey. And spending on scientific research is only a tiny fraction of that in developed countries.

"There is a wide knowledge gap between us and the developed world in the West and in Asia. Our only choice is to bridge this gap as quickly as possible, because our age is defined by knowledge," the sheikh said.

...

Sheikh Mohammed hopes to increase education and research, and also to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the region.

"In order to realise these objectives, I have decided to establish the Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum Foundation to focus on human development, and have I decided to endow a fund of $10bn to finance its projects," he said.

This is quite encouraging, It also has serious potential as Dubai has already shown to be one of the more progressive states in the region. Read the full story here.

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A BBC reporter completely lost his head during the filming of a documentary about Scientology - the UFO religion of Ron L. Hubbard and has several high profile followers, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta. Yes, Scientology is a bit scary (and so is Sweeney in this video)...but whatever the reason, there is no excuse for such an outburst. It raises other issues also: How does one go about defining religion? Who makes that decision? And should the treatment of its members be different simply because of nomenclature?

So is Scientology a cult or a religion? Does it really matter?

Here is the BBC story on the controversy and here is coverage from Telegraph

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This is a cool video. Yes, yes, we are apes and not monkeys. Eh...close enough.

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Here is a great example of bad science, bad religion, and bad journalism. For your amusement, please check the news clip at this website about Frank Tipler's proof of God.

So what is the proof?

Tipler calls God the cosmological singularity--stemming from ancient theologians definition of God. Tipler uses hard core science, Einstein's principals of general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

"You can show using physics forces this universe to continue to exist, " Tipler says, "as long as you're using...general relativity, and quantum mechanics, you are forced to conclude that God exists."

So he is redefining God as a "cosmological singularity" (point of infinite density from where our universe started with a Big Bang), and I guess then he is showing that it has to exist. But apparently if you use "hard core" physics (this means you have to use "general relativity and quantum mechanics" in the same sentence) then you have to conclude that God exists - and God ends up on the right side of the equation.

Professor Tipler knows there is skepticism in the church and among some of his colleagues.

"I am not being blasphemous," Tipler says, "I'm just following the ancient tradition that says science put the tenant of religion to the experimental test and we find God exists."

Ha...so only "some" of his colleagues (I imagine physicists) are skeptical about his ideas??? They didn't even interview a token physicist about it in the piece. In fact Tipler's ideas are presented in the news report as the view of science. And just in case you were wondering if there are any experiments we can perform to test his ideas, the statement towards the end of the news report takes care of that: "even science cannot touch him - Tipler says God is the divine substance outside space, time and matter". Ok...

And, I guess, the news report tried to end on a lighter note:

Tipler's latest book, "The Physics of Christianity", takes his principals even further. In it, he says physics can justify the birth of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead and the spiritual body and the incarnation.

There you go..."hard core" physics at work. I wonder if he applies for NSF funding to do this work...

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Apparently this is the message that is coming out from debates amongst conservatives (in the US). But first the more scary stuff: During the first debate amongst Presidential candidates for Republicans, three of the 10 candidates indicated that they did not believe in evolution (just let go of the problem for now that one does not really believe or disbelieve in evolution). So just to make sure, the three candidates are: Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado. Thankfully, their chances for winning the Republican nomination (let alone the Presidency) are slim to none - but its still scary that 30% of Republican candidates do not accept evolution.

However, New York Times has a broader story about how views about evolution are splitting the conservatives.

For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor. As an alternative to Darwin, many advocate intelligent design, which holds that life is so intricately organized that only an intelligent power could have created it.

Yet it is that very embrace of intelligent design — not to mention creationism, which takes a literal view of the Bible's Book of Genesis — that has led conservative opponents to speak out for fear their ideology will be branded as out of touch and anti-science.

Ok...this is quite reasonable. But wait...

Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin's scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today's patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.

and here is a more traditional view that Darwinism is to blame for all social problems:

"The current debate is not primarily about religious fundamentalism," Mr. West, the author of "Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest" (2006), said at Thursday's conference. "Nor is it simply an irrelevant rehashing of certain esoteric points of biology and philosophy. Darwinian reductionism has become culturally pervasive and inextricably intertwined with contemporary conflicts over traditional morality, personal responsibility, sex and family, and bioethics."

The technocrats, he charged, wanted to grab control from "ordinary citizens and their elected representatives" so that they alone could make decisions over "controversial issues such as sex education, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and global warming."

The linking of evolution to political ideologies, to say the obvious, will lead to problems. I had posted a few months back that belief in evolution in US is higher amongst political liberals than political conservatives and we have to make sure that we de-link the theory of evolution that successfully explains the biological diversity found in nature with its use for justifying political ideologies.

And who knew, that the most sensible words would in the end be coming from The Weekly Standard:

To many people, asking whether evolution is good for conservatism is like asking if gravity is good for liberalism; nature is morally neutral. Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard and Carson Holloway in his 2006 book, "The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion and the Future of Democracy," for example, have written that jumping from evolutionary science to moral conclusions and policy proposals is absurd.

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Every year there are deaths due to accidents during the annual Pilgrimage to Mecca. But crowd models appear to be helping reduce these accidents.

From Science (April 20, 2007):

The annual Pilgrimage, or haj, to Mecca in Saudi Arabia offers one of the world's greatest challenges in crowd control. The millions in attendance create a volatile environment in which pilgrims have been trampled to death performing a ceremony on the Jamarat Bridge in Mina, where they hurl stones at pillars representing the devil. In January 2006, more than 360 people were killed in a stampede near the bridge. Haj officials have since instituted new safety rules and enlarged the bridge; they have also sought advice from experts in traffic and crowd flow.

One of these experts is Dirk Helbing, a physicist at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, who was asked to suggest safe routes for crowd movements. Last week, he reported on this work at a physics conference at the University of Leicester, U.K. He and co-workers analyzed videotapes of the 2006 disaster, observing how thick crowds of people, like high-density flows of fluids, can turn "turbulent," causing groups to move erratically. When this happens, people fall and get trampled. Helbing described how it is possible to identify changes in crowd behavior in advance of the turbulence and thus pinpoint danger spots.

So next time you are in a crowd, you can ask people to be less "turbulent."

The changes have apparently been effective: At the latest haj, from 29 December to 1 January, there were no major incident.

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This article provides a nice summary of neuroscientific studies of religious experiences (such as meditation, religious ecstasy, etc): God is in the Dendrites: Can "neurotheology" bridge the gap between science & religion?

Here lies the answer:

Out of politeness, perhaps, or a hope for future Templeton grants, neurotheologists tend to play down the most direct implication of their research—that religious ecstasy is an illusion.

However, these studies are totally fascinating!

P.S. the cartoon of a praying brain is also very cool.
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More appropriately, what kind of God did Einstein believe in? A new biography of Einstein has just come out. Its called Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson. You can read an excerpt from the book about Einstein's faith here.

About his definition of God:

Einstein tried to express these feelings clearly, both for himself and all of those who wanted a simple answer from him about his faith. So in the summer of 1930, amid his sailing and ruminations in Caputh, he composed a credo, "What I Believe," that he recorded for a human-rights group and later published. It concluded with an explanation of what he meant when he called himself religious: "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

People found the piece evocative, and it was reprinted repeatedly in a variety of translations. But not surprisingly, it did not satisfy those who wanted a simple answer to the question of whether or not he believed in God. "The outcome of this doubt and befogged speculation about time and space is a cloak beneath which hides the ghastly apparition of atheism," Boston's Cardinal William Henry O'Connell said. This public blast from a Cardinal prompted the noted Orthodox Jewish leader in New York, Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, to send a very direct telegram: "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words." Einstein used only about half his allotted number of words. It became the most famous version of an answer he gave often: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

Einstein on atheism:

But throughout his life, Einstein was consistent in rejecting the charge that he was an atheist. "There are people who say there is no God," he told a friend. "But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views." And unlike Sigmund Freud or Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw, Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believed in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists. "What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos," he explained.

In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful. "The fanatical atheists," he wrote in a letter, "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres."

On the relationship between science & religion:

Einstein later explained his view of the relationship between science and religion at a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. The realm of science, he said, was to ascertain what was the case, but not evaluate human thoughts and actions about what should be the case. Religion had the reverse mandate. Yet the endeavors worked together at times. "Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding," he said. "This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion." The talk got front-page news coverage, and his pithy conclusion became famous. "The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

But he was very clear about his deistic views:

But there was one religious concept, Einstein went on to say, that science could not accept: a deity who could meddle at whim in the events of his creation. "The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God," he argued. Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic causality.

Also check out Walter Isaacson's interview on Fresh Air about this new biography.
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This announcement is more or less for the local community here in western Massachusetts. We have Lawrence Principe from Johns Hopkins University for the third Hampshire College Science & Religion lecture this Thursday (April 12th). We are recording the lecture also and I will post it on the blog in the next couple of weeks. I have heard him talk as part of the Teaching Company's Great Courses on History of Science: Antiquity to 1700 and Science & Religion (yes, I'm completely addicted to courses by the Teaching Company) and he is fantastic! So I'm really looking forward to his talk.

Here is the full announcement:

Hampshire College Lecture Series on Science & Religion

Natural and Supernatural: Miracles and the Order of Nature
by Lawrence Principe

Thursday, April 12, 2007
5:30p.m., Franklin Patterson Hall, Main Lecture Hall
Hampshire College

Abstract:
In the popular press and daily conversation we often hear events casually described as miracles. This abusive use of the term, however, leads us to forget that the word has a precise and highly-restricted theological meaning that was developed over centuries of scholarly investigation, particularly in the Latin Middle Ages. This lecture illustrates how precise discussions of miracles opened up crucial questions about the way the world works and the way in which human beings are able to study and understand it using the method we now call science. Indeed, several current science/religion issues are illuminated or resolved by a careful consideration of the miracles.

Lawrence Principe is Professor of the History of Science, Medicine & Technology and Professor of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, the Carnegie Foundation chose him as the Maryland Professor of the Year, and in 2004 he was awarded the first Francis Bacon Prize by the California Institute of Technology, awarded to an outstanding scholar whose work has had substantial impact on the history of science, the history of technology, or historically-engaged philosophy of science. In addition to his academic papers, he is the author or co-author of three books including The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle & his Alchemical Quest.

About the Hampshire College Science & Religion Lecture Series:
This is the first year of a three-year lecture series that aims to bring together philosophers, theologians, historians and scientists to discuss topics in science & religion. The themes for the lecture series are as follows:

2006-2007: Nature, Belief & the Supernatural
Paul Bloom: "Bodies & Souls" October 26th, 2006
David Sloan Wilson: "Evolution & Religion: Two side-shows and the main event" March 8th, 2007
Lawrence Principe: "Natural & Supernatural: Historical Perspectives on Miracles and the Order of Nature" April 12th, 2007
2007-2008: A History of Conflict & Cooperation
2008-2009: A Matter of Origins & the Meaning of Life


For more information on the Lecture Series please visit http://scienceandreligion.hampshire.edu/

Sponsors:
The Hampshire College Integrated Science & Humanities Initiative
Hampshire College Office of the President
Hampshire College Office of the Dean of Faculty
The Schools of Cognitive Science, Natural Science, and Humanities, Arts & Cultural Studies
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Its slightly hard to justify this story here, but its very cool. This week's Science (April 6, 2007) reported on a conference titled, "The Mind of the Chimpanzee", held at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo from March 23-25. While it had many fascinating discussions on chimpanzee culture, habits, tool-making, etc., one thing that stood out was about a chimp who was taught to remember sequence of numbers:

After the zoo's Elizabeth Lonsdorf, a conference co-organizer, kicked off the meeting by having the participants give each other a "proper chimp greeting," she introduced Kyoto University's Tetsuro Matsuzawa, one of the few researchers who studies both wild and captive chimpanzees. Matsuzawa's talk kept the audience participation level high, eliciting loud "oohs," "ahhs," and guffaws. Matsuzawa described the numerical skills of a chimpanzee named Ai and her son Ayumu, who live at the university's Primate Research Institute in Kyoto. Building on work he first reported in Nature 7 years ago, he showed videos of Ayumu using a touch-screen monitor to select the randomly displayed numbers 0 through 9, in ascending order.

Well this is quite amazing. But wait...here's the real kicker:

He then repeatedly performed a more difficult variation on this task, in which the numbers were masked with white blocks shortly after they were flashed on the screen. "No one can do this," he said, proving the point with a hilarious clip of his graduate students failing the exercise with only four masked numbers. "Our common ancestors might have had immediate memory, but in the course of evolution, they lost this and acquired languagelike skills," posited Matsuzawa.

This is great stuff! (here is a 36-second clip of Ayumu working with numbers)

And now to justify this post for science & religion, here is a link to a nice short story by Robert Silverberg called The Pope of the Chimps

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This is an interesting news story reporting on an article published in the March issue of Consciousness & Cognition:

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.

The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

and here is the connection with claims of alien abductions:

Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors.

And why do some people make such errors:

As for what might make people more prone to committing such errors to begin with, McNally says that it could be the byproduct of especially vivid imagery skills. He has found that people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.

Read the full story here
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Not a very smart move from ACS. From Science (March 30, 2007):

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has reluctantly rescinded the membership of some 36 Iranian scientists after the society determined that having members in Iran violates U.S. law. The society hopes to reinstate them after obtaining a government license, a step that could set a precedent for other U.S. societies with Iranian members.

U.S. organizations are prohibited from doing business with individuals in Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, but an exemption permits the trade of informational materials. That provision allows U.S. scholarly societies, whose journals are a major benefit to its overseas members, to retain ties to members in those countries.

But ACS's stance changed after Assistant General Counsel David Smorodin reread the embargo rules and concluded that selling publications to members at discount rates, a common practice, represents a service above and beyond the trade of informational materials. He also believes that membership benefits such as "insurance, career counseling, invitation to meetings, and educational opportunities" are not exempt under the rules, although he acknowledges that overseas members typically do not use those privileges. "We had no choice as a federally chartered organization but to comply with the law," says Smorodin, adding that his interpretation of the regulations did not "win [me] any friends within the ACS."

Yes, Iranians were planning on side-stepping US embargo by buying ACS publications at a discount rate and by getting career counseling from them. Phew - ACS thwarted their efforts just in time.

In January, ACS's membership off ice informed the society's 36 Iranian members that their memberships were being discontinued, although they could still purchase materials from the society at the full rate. The move angered David Rahni, an Iranian-American chemist at Pace University in Pleasantville, New York, and an ACS member, who says ACS should "refrain from allowing politics" to get in the way of scientific openness. Smorodin says the society will soon apply for a license from the Department of Commerce's Office of Foreign Assets Control allowing it to serve its Iranian members.

However, there is still some hope:

Other associations are troubled by ACS's proposed solution. "We have no plans to do anything similar," says Judy Franz of the American Physical Society in College Park, Maryland, which also has members in Iran. "We would resist having to obtain a license to the extent we can."

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From the episode aired on March 25th.

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Last week National Public Radio's Terry Gross had back-to-back interviews with Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins on the issue of science and religion. In specific, her question was: can one be a scientist and a believer? Here is the link to Dawkins interview:

Richard Dawkins explains "The God Delusion"

In his most recent book, British scientist Richard Dawkins writes about the irrationality of a belief in God, examines God in all his forms and sets down his arguments for atheism. The book is The God Delusion.

Dawkins is a professor of "the public understanding of science" at Oxford University.

The New York Times Book Review has hailed him as a writer who "understands the issues so clearly that he forces his reader to understand them too."

An interesting part of the interview is when Dawkins is talking about the meaning of life (about 16 minutes into the interview)

And here is the link to Francis Collins interview:

Francis Collins on "The Language of God"

Geneticist Francis Collins is director of the National Human Genome Research Project. He is also an evangelical Christian, and author of the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

He is quite clear about religious belief and evolution (about 16 minutes into the interview) and about the debate regarding stem cells research (32 minutes in). Unfortunately, he also brings in the old "fine tuning" argument (that the laws of universe are so finely tuned for the existence of humans, that it must have been done by a higher power) and issues of morals as evidence for God, while at the same time claiming that there cannot be any evidence that can show the existence of God (9 minutes into the interview).

Dawkins and Collins provide an interesting contrast. If you want to see a more head-to-head debate between the two, check out this Time magazine article from last year, that let them address each other more directly:
God vs Science

At many places Francis Collins appears reasonable, but on some issues his views are quite incompatible with science. Here is his response to a question about miracles:

TIME: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn't it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method, which depends on the constancy of natural laws?

COLLINS: If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science?

COLLINS: Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.

So how do you decide: Is there something that we don't understand just as yet, or is it a result of true supernatural intervention? May be this is a good place to recall Hippocrates from fourth century B.C., "Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things."

And to conclude, here is an appropriate cartoon:

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From Nature (March 29, 2007):

Did Darwin delay publishing his theory of evolution by natural selection because he feared an outcry from the establishment? This has been a popular belief, and has been stoked by the fact that although Darwin began formulating the theory in 1837, he did not publish On the Origin of Species until 1859.

Now John van Wyhe, a science historian at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that after a painstaking trawl through the letters, notes and books written by, to or about Darwin, he can rule out the idea once and for all. But van Wyhe's work has irritated several prominent historians, who argue that he has gone too far in downplaying ideas about Darwin's reluctance to publish. "Portraying Darwin as having no feelings or reactions to the outside world warps the biographical picture," says David Kohn, editor of the Darwin Digital Library of Evolution.

This is all well and good. The problem is how van Wyhe established that there was no delay:

To carry out his study, Van Wyhe searched for the word "delay" in primary and secondary sources covering the period in which Darwin was working on Origin of Species. He says Darwin and those who knew him never unambiguously referred to a delay in publishing, or gave any explanation for the 20-year 'gap'. Indeed, in all the texts on Darwin, he says, the earliest reference to a delay appears in the 1940s. Only in a 1948 popular book, Darwin: Before and After, in which Robert Clark describes how Darwin was made ill by "an uncertainty that he allowed to haunt him for twenty years", do you see all the elements of the modern story, says van Wyhe.

According to van Whye, Darwin just didn't get to writing Origin of Species (hmm...the problem of not being under any tenure clock)

By documenting exactly what he was doing during the 'gap years', van Wyhe makes the case that Darwin just didn't get down to writing Origin of Species until he had completed other work in hand, including an eight-year study of barnacles. He was determined to build a formidable mass of documentation supporting his theory and to solve major stumbling blocks, such as that posed by non-reproductive castes of social insects. This, together with a busy personal life but poor health, filled the years. In other words, Darwin did not postpone publication; he just didn't publish until he was ready. "In my view, this settles the question once and for all," says van Wyhe.

The last statement notwithstanding, the "delay" analysis is not going to solve this issue easily:

But several Darwin scholars are not convinced. Kohn and others agree that the way in which cultural and social pressures influenced Darwin's decisions may have been overplayed, particularly in the public arena, with less attention being paid to the involved process of scientific discovery. But the consensus in the field is likely to remain that a multitude of factors underpinned Darwin's delay.

Kohn points out that searching for explicit references to a "delay" is a simplistic approach to the problem, and that other factors should be considered. For example, Darwin often criticized religion in his notebooks, which suggests that he would have been aware of the probable implications of his theory for religion.

This work of John van Wyhe is published in Notes and Records of the Royal Society (doi:10.1098/rsnr.2006.0171;2007)

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From New York Times (3/20):
Scientist finds the beginnings of morality in primate behavior

The scientist here is Frans de Waal. He is a fantastic writer and here the article is talking about his new book Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved in which he argues that morality in humans has evolved through natural selection and we can learn about its origins through the behavior of non-human primates.

Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped.

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Dr. de Waal’s views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates, starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject.

He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality.

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

Of course, this automatically leads to the question of origin(s) of religion:

Dr. de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal’s view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.

Also check out Frans de Waal's Chimapanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes and The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural reflections of a Primatologist

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Here is an excellent description of Creation science and ID by British comedian Robin Ince (from the show "Comedy Cuts").

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Here is Washington Post review of a new book about the 2005 Dover trial over the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools:
Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and The Battle for America's Soul

In 2004, when the Dover, Penn., school board voted to require biology classes to use a supplemental textbook that promoted the theory of intelligent design rather than evolution, the conflict that erupted was about far more than semantics. As Edward Humes describes in this lively and thoughtful book, Dover -- like Dayton, Tenn., during the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" -- became a proving ground for clashing beliefs about the origins of life and constitutional questions about the separation of church and state.

"The scientific community sees the creationist critics of evolution as yahoos, religious zealots, and scientifically suspect charlatans," writes Humes. "The creationists see the evolutionists as immoral and dishonest purveyors of a pseudoreligion called Darwinism that makes God superfluous." Each side is guilty of misrepresenting the other. In Dover, the people on each side believed those on the other were attempting to indoctrinate their children. And everyone soon realized that this local controversy had national implications.

Humes takes the title of his book, Monkey Girl, from the taunt leveled at a child whose mother objected to the new policy. Some parents, including teachers in the school district, viewed intelligent design as a stealth form of creation science. Although many of these parents were Christians (two even taught Sunday school), they felt that teaching ID in a public school classroom improperly injected religion into education. They brought their case, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, with the aid of the ACLU, the National Center for Science Education and lawyers from the Philadelphia firm Pepper Hamilton.

You can download the official judgement at the ACLU site (its 14o pages - but its fantastically written and nicely demonstrates why ID should not be taught in science classrooms):

Judge John E. Jones III, a Republican, emerges as the hero in Humes's tale. In his eloquent ruling for the plaintiffs, which should be read by every student of law, he noted, "This case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy." Even before Jones issued his ruling, the citizens of Dover reached their own verdict: In the next school board election, "every one of the eight incumbents who favored intelligent design was ousted," Humes writes.

Read the full review here
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It seems that Turkey will be the conduit for anti-evolutionary ideas to the Islamic world. On the one hand there is Harun Yahya (see SRN: Feb 3, 2007), who aligns his organization with Creationist scientists in the US (promoting the idea that all species were created as is), and on the other hand there is Mustafa Akyol, who wants to promote the idea of Intelligent Design (ID) of the variety supported by the Discovery Institute also in the US (promoting the idea that evolutionary theory cannot explain certain biological features and that the best explanation is that these have been designed by some intelligence). So on February 24th, there was an ID conference in Istanbul that was apparently attended by 500 people.

The conference was titled "The Origin of Life On Earth" (you can find talk abstracts at thewhitepath.com)

First, Mustafa Akyol made an opening speech in which he criticized the mindset of Turkish intellectuals who equate science with materialism without question. In the speeches given by David Berlinski and Paul Nelson, a brief but comprehensive criticism of Darwinism and naturalism was introduced along with a summary of basic Intelligent Design arguments. John Lennox made a broader criticism of scientific materialism and reductionism. The last speaker, Alpaslan Açıkgenç, explained how Islam looks at science, nature and life. The presentations were followed by questions and answers.

Aah...so the basic goal was to attack naturalism. It doesn't appear that these talks were really addressing the issue of the origin of life on Earth - unless we include the last talk that was relying directly on the Quran for evidence. After all evolutionary theory explains the diversity of life on Earth but doesn't really address the issue of origin of life nor does ID. (Check here for What is the theory of evolution?)

It will be interesting to see how ID does in Muslim countries. It sounds vaguely scientific and it talks about 'design' which resonates well with several passages in the Quran. The ID proponents in the US go to extreme lengths to not specify the "Designer" as God. This way they can make an attempt to sneak ID in the school system without violating the Church & State separation. However, this issue doesn't exist in most Muslim countries and there is a real danger of such a theory being brought into schools (and colleges). Ironically, Turkey may be one of the few Muslim countries where ID with explicit religious connections will have a hard time getting into the education system.
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