Here is part of an interview with primatologist, Frans de Waal, in The Believer dealing with the evolution of morality:

BLVR: Much of your work recently has been aimed at correcting another misconception—that morality is exclusively a human invention, something that evolved long after we split from other apes. Do you think apes and bonobos are moral species? Do they exhibit moral behavior?

FDW: Well, I usually don’t call it moral behavior. I tend to call it building blocks or prerequisites for morality. I don’t think that chimpanzees are moral beings in the human sense. But they do have empathy, sympathy, reciprocity. They share food, resolve conflicts. All of these elements are present in human morality. So what I argue is that the basic psychology of the great apes is an essential element of human morality. Humans add things to that, making our morality far more complex. And that’s why I don’t want to call chimpanzees moral beings exactly.

BLVR: Why do you want to hesitate if you believe that chimpanzees have gratitude and empathy, indignation, maybe, what we call the moral emotions?

FDW: They have the moral emotions, yes. You can see gratitude, outrage, a sense of fairness—you can see parallels and equivalences in all the great apes. But to get to morality you need more than just the emotions. So yes, empathy is a good thing to have. And I cannot imagine how humans could have morality without empathy, but what morality adds to that, for example, is what Adam Smith termed the “impartial spectator.” You need to be able to look at a situation, and make a judgment about that situation even though it doesn’t affect you yourself. So I can see an interaction between two humans and say this one is wrong and this one is right. I’m not convinced that chimpanzees have this kind of distance in their judgments. They certainly have judgments about what they do and how they interact with others. And how others treat them. I’m sure they have opinions about that, about how to react to that, but whether they have opinions about more abstract interactions around them and a concept about what kind of society they want to live in. Do they have a concept about fairness between others, or do they only care about fairness for themselves? That kind of distance that you see in human moral reasoning. I’m not sure you’ll find that in a chimpanzee.

BLVR: Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought I read something in Chimpanzee Politics and some other work indicating that chimps do react with a kind of indignation when they see one chimp mistreating another chimp. A third party will react, punishing the offender.

FDW: Yes, true. Yes.

BLVR: Wouldn’t that count?

FDW: Yes—I think you can probably find examples of this in chimpanzee life. But in a way even the interactions around them affect themselves: these are their friends, their relatives, their rivals. They are never impartial spectators. If chimpanzees have a morality, it likely is a self-centered morality.

BLVR: Can you give some examples of empathy in other species?

FDW: Well, yes. Today, you saw that old [chimpanzee] female Penny who can barely get up on the climb bars, right?

BLVR: Yes.

FDW: We often see young females push her up onto the climber. So that’s altruistic helping because it’s really hard to imagine that they’re doing it to get some favor back from this old lady. I give many examples in my books of sophisticated empathetic behavior in chimpanzees, including those that clearly require “theory of mind”—the ability to take the perspective of other chimps.

BLVR: So you think when a young chimp is helping Penny up the climb bars, she feels her frustration in some way, and she does this by taking her perspective, imagining what it must be like not to be able to climb on her own?

FDW: Well, the young chimp must understand Penny’s goal and also the trouble she has trying to reach her goal. That’s a very complex action right there. In humans there is a literature that says that perspective-taking requires a strong sense of self. A “self-other” distinction. Which is why in children, perspective-taking comes only at two years, when they are able to recognize themselves in the mirror. So we did the mirror-recognition experiments with chimps and also recently with elephants. Because elephants are very well known as highly altruistic animals. And they have large brains. So the thinking was that more complex empathy, based on perspective-taking, must correlate with mirror recognition.

Read the full interview here.
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A clean honey room is not only essential, but difficult. Honey is sticky and messy. One drop can be tracked all through the room. Honey is hard to clean up. Hot water is essential! Once we got our equipment up and running, we began working on our room. Since the building was already build, I simply had to add insulation, wiring and plumbing. Okay I went a little further and added high speed Internet and satellite TV. Once the insulation, wiring and most of the plumbing was complete I began hanging the dry wall. Hanging is the easy part. Mudding, taping, sanding, mudding, taping, sanding...that's the tedious and hard part for me.

The main part of my honey room measures 12' x 14' but it also has a 4' x 5' section where one door takes you to our honey display room, and the other door takes you to our hive manufacturing area. But, you'd be surprise how little space is need to house a lot of honey processing equipment. I contacted our state health department and obtained their guidelines in what they want to see in a honey room.

I purchased a high powered 6' fluorescent fixture and also bought the plastic bulb covers. This is more than enough light for the room.

Next it was time to add the honey pump and the 1 1/2" pvc to carry the honey.

First, I had to rebuild the pump. It mean taking the pump apart several times, cleaning it, replacing O rings and making sure it worked. Roper, the manufacturer of the pump, has an excellent support staff that helped me configure my pump for my operation. My pump is a Roper 2835P. The P stands for packing. I also bought new packing for the pump. The pump is powered by a pulley from a 3/4 horse motor. This motor was in good shape, though I had to re-wire it to reverse the motor rotation.

Once the pump was ready, we simply started plumbing the pipe from the catch tank beneath our uncapper up to our 500 gallon storage tank. As you can see in the pictures, the line is angled so that we don't waste honey sitting in the line. Sometimes, we need every drop. So, by sloping the line, we can easily drain the honey from the lines and wash the lines out if needed.

We added clean-outs to drain and clean the lines.

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Buying Out Another Bee Business...
From Florida To Illinois

Back in August of 2006, I traveled to Florida from Illinois to purchase the bees and honey processing operation from Mr. James West, the inventor of the West Small Hive Beetle Trap. I purchased around 70 hives, two huge radial motor powered extractors, a nice honey pump, a hot-water tank, a 500 gallon stainless steel honey storage tank, a cowen automatic uncapper, lots of old hive bodies, supers, queen excluders, beetle traps and other beekeeping equipment. What a journey!!


It took me exactly one year to design and engineer my honey processing building. First, I had to place a pump in the well located near our honey building. I rented a Terramite backhoe and started trenching a water line to the building. Then, we had to add cold and hot water lines throughout the building. We also had to dig a dry well.

The next step was to design a way for hot water to flow to the sink and down the drain, but also create a way for hot water to recirculate through the 500 gallon honey storage tank, as well as through the knife blades on the automatic uncapper. The blades require heat to melt the cappings from the frames. With the help of my brother, Mark Burns who works for WPS Industries Group, I was able to complete the hot water recirculation plumbing.

Why run hot water through the honey storage tank? Actually, the tank is doubled-walled, so the water never touches the honey. In the winter, we want to make sure the honey does not freeze and crystallize. So, the warm water allows us to keep the honey around 70-80 degrees Fahrenheit during our Illinois winter. The room in which this tank stands is sometimes not heated during the night.

RESTORING OLD, BUT GREAT EQUIPMENT!

The next step was carried out while doing all the above. That's why it took me a year! I had to restore the old equipment, primarily the honey extractor and the uncapper.

Below is a before and after shot of a section of the Cowen Uncapper. I had to replace worn out bolts, bearings, bars, chains and rewire it. I know every piece, personally, and totally repainted every piece.

What is an uncapper? When the bees produce honey, they seal it off in the comb with a wax capping over the cells. In order for us to extract or sling out the honey, we must uncap the wax seal first.

Many beekeepers use a hot knife for small operations, which is all that is needed.

However, larger operations can process more frames at a time with an automatic uncapper. In our case, our uncapper will uncap 10 frames of medium supers in 60 seconds. Both sides!

Here's a video of the uncapper...

Once uncapped, the frames, filled with honey, travel down a conveyor belt to an operator who then places them into our 33 frame radial extractor. This extractor is operated by a pressure clutch system and is driven by a 3/4 horse motor. We coated the inside of the extractor with FDA Food approved epoxy coating, primarily to make it easier to clean up after each use. In the photo to the left, you can see the uncapper being wired, and the extractor in the background.

Stop back in tomorrow for a continuation of our tour through the honey room!

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A nice op-ed piece by Timothy Ferris in New York Times: The Mix Tape of the Gods

Thirty years ago today, the Voyager 1 space probe — a one-ton robotic craft whose long antennas make it look rather like a spider the size of a school bus — was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a mission to reconnoiter Jupiter and Saturn. To succeed, Voyager would have to survive five years in the vacuum of space, where it would encounter cosmic rays, solar flares, the hurtling rocks and sand of the asteroid belt, and Jupiter’s intense radiation bands.

The probe did all that, transmitting back reams of scientific data and memorable color photos: of the sputtering red and yellow volcanoes of Jupiter’s moon Io; of the shimmering blue ice that shrouds Io’s fellow satellite Europa, beneath which a liquid ocean is suspected to dwell; of Saturn’s myriad rings and the murky mysteries of its orange satellite, Titan, whose hazy atmosphere is thought to approximate that of the early Earth.

Having accomplished its mission, Voyager 1 might have quietly retired. Instead it remains active to this day, faithfully calling home from nearly 10 billion miles away — so great a distance that its radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, take more than 14 hours to reach Earth. From Voyager’s perch, the Sun is just another star, south of Rigel in the constellation Orion, and the Sun’s planets have faded to invisibility.

Its twin, Voyager 2, explored all the outer planets (we can now say "all" after the sad demotion of Pluto - no no, I'm not upset about it at all :o) ) and is also reaching the edge of our solar system:

That limit is defined by a teardrop-shaped bubble called the heliosphere, where the solar wind (particles blown off the Sun’s outer atmosphere) comes to a halt.

If all continues to go well, Voyager should pierce the heliosphere’s outer skin by around 2015. It will then depart into the void of interstellar space, where it is destined to wander among the stars forever.

This is truly awesome:

Forty thousand years will elapse before Voyager 1, departing the realm of the Sun at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour, passes anywhere near another star. (It will drift within 1.7 light years of a dim bulb called AC+79 3888.) And 358,000 years will elapse before Voyager 2 approaches the bright star Sirius.

Out there, our concepts of velocity become provincial. The stars are moving, too, in gigantic orbits around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Voyager, a toy boat on this dark sea, will not so much approach Sirius as watch it sail by, bobbing in its mighty wake.

Contemplation of Voyager’s billion-year future among the stars may make us feel small and the span of our history seem insignificant. Yet the very existence of the two spacecraft and the gold records they carry suggests that there is something in the human spirit able to confront vast sweeps of space and time that we can only dimly comprehend.

If some recoil from the brink of space, others find it liberating. Our perspective was aptly expressed by the 18th-century science writer Bernard de Fontenelle, in his fictional dialogue “A Plurality of Worlds.” “You have made the universe so large that I know not where I am, or what will become of me,” complains a lovely young marquise whom Fontenelle is tutoring. “I protest it is dreadful.”

“Dreadful, Madam?” Fontenelle replies. “For my part, I am very easy about it.

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Who has the real robe of Saint Francis of Assisi? Well, here is a good example of how science can help resolve issues regrading religious objects.

Four Franciscan churches in central Italy claim that they each hold a habit of St Francis of Assisi, the friar who founded the Franciscan order in the early 1200s. Carbon dating has now substantiated one of those claims, and helped to shore up a story from the church's history many centuries later. In Italy, religious relics are venerated by millions of Catholics who believe that God works miracles through them, or who simply fear them. Every year more than three million visitors come to the major shrine of St Francis, a basilica in Assisi that hosts famous frescoes depicting the saint's life, and one of the habits said to have belonged to the saint. A second robe is held at the Sanctuary of La Verna near Arezzo in Tuscany; a third at the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Florence; and a fourth at the Basilica of Cortona near Arezzo.

And nuclear science to the rescue (really we don't get a chance to say this very often):

So the order asked Italian nuclear scientists to check up on the habits. "The request came directly from the Franciscan order," says Pier Andrea Mandò of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Florence. He and his team took a few tiny samples from the robes and used a standard technique known as accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) to measure the amount of isotope carbon-14 in the cloth. The result, presented this week at the European Conference on Accelerators in Applied Research and Technology in Florence, shows that the robe kept in the Basilica of the Holy Cross is 100 years too young to have belonged to St Francis. But the one held in the Basilica of Cortona dates to between 1155 AD and 1225 AD, roughly contemporary with the saint.

Now this is a nice story. But then I got to this:

Investigations of relics are not unusual in Europe, although they can give rise to much controversy. "Many relics have been recognized as fake, such as the arm of St Anthony of Padua, which turned out to be a stag's penis on examination," says Antonio Lombatti, a researcher of medieval church history at the National History Institute in Parma, Italy.

Huh! Really? Now this is weird and I did not find much info about this claim even on Wikipedia. I guess we should get back to a much more standard controversy:

Particularly hostile debates between scientists and men of faith followed the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin — a linen cloth bearing the image of a man that many think is the imprint of Jesus. The research dated it at least from 1260 AD.

See Skeptical Shroud of Turin for more on the controversy.
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7 Habits of Highly Ineffective PeopleSee also: How to Procrastinate More Productively
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There is a lot of work to be done in the month of September. Over the last few weeks, we have been sprinkling powdered sugar in the hives. The bees become covered with this dusty sugar, and so in an effort to clean themselves up, they also clean off the mites. Mites to a bee are like fleas on a dog. Only the mites do more damage to the overall health of a hive if they get out of control. There is research being conducted that may suggest that mites contribute to the cause of CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder. So, to keep them under control, we dust our hives with powdered sugar.

The Procedure We Use To Dust For Mites

Sometimes we grind our own powdered sugar. This can be accomplished either in a coffee grinder or a blender. You can only grind a small amount at a time, so we find it easier to go to the local grocery store and buy the powdered sugar. Even though it contains some corn starch, this small amount isn't suppose to bother the bees.

It is important to pour at least 1 cup of powdered sugar over the top of the frames of each hive body full of bees. Then, we use a bee brush or our gloves to sweep the sugar down between the frames. Some people dust each side of the individual frames, but I don't like putting sugar down into the cells that are uncapped. 1 cup per hive body is plenty, though some people use two cups.

If you noticed in the picture above, we've made a framed screen so that we can lay the screen onto the top of a hive body, then pour sugar onto the screen. This holds the bees down while we spread the powdered sugar around. Then we remove the screen and sweep the remaining sugar down between the frames. We then add the next hive body on top and repeat the process.

Speaking of repeating the process, this "sugar drop" has to be repeated on exact day, in three consecutive weeks. In other words, for three Monday in row, or three Saturdays in a row...whatever day you did the first drop. This consecutive treatment allows you to break the mite cycle and kill those which may have been in the sealed brood chambers.

Some good advice is to use LOTS OF SMOKE! Especially if the weather is adverse or your bees are adverse!

Tomorrow, we'll go inside the honey room and show the progress we've made here, and continue the work, now that the honey production is over for the year.

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Here is a study that shows that psychiatrists are the least religious of American physicians. However, its not as dramatic as the news headline makes it appear.

Psychiatrists are more likely to be Jewish or have no religious affiliation than U.S. doctors overall and less likely to be Protestant or Roman Catholic Christians, said the study, published on Monday in the journal Psychiatric Services.

In terms of percentages, only 10% of all doctors and 17% of psychiatrists say that they are not affiliated with any religion. On the other hand, 31% of all college professors have no religious affiliation (this is a pdf file of the paper on beliefs of college professors by Gross & Simmons).

So what's the big deal about psychiatrists being the least religious amongst doctors? I'm really not sure. But here are some speculations by the lead investigator of the study:

Dr. Farr Curlin, a University of Chicago medical professor who led the study, said research by the American Psychiatric Association in 1975 saw similar patterns among psychiatrists.

"There still seems to be something about the field to lead doctors who are religious to be less likely to go into it," Curlin said in a telephone interview.

Anti-religious views expressed by some early figures in the field, including Sigmund Freud, may play a role in driving religious medical students from psychiatry, he said.

And does Dr. Curlin have a similar explanation for college professors? I think he is making a big deal out of this slight difference. Some of the reasons are probably true but then, so what? Furthermore, I'm not sure what to make of the over-representation of Jewish psychiatrists. A more troubling (perhaps?) result is this:

The survey asked the doctors to whom they would refer a patient with continued deep grieving two months after his wife's death. More religious doctors were less likely to send patients to psychiatrists and more inclined to send them to a member of the clergy or religious counselor, the survey found.

Overall, 56 percent of doctors said they would send him to a psychiatrist or psychologist, 25 percent to a member of the clergy and 7 percent to a health care chaplain.

Protestant doctors were half as likely as those with no religious affiliation to send a patient to a psychiatrist or psychologist, the survey found.

Hmm...let me quickly check the affiliation of my doctor.

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Here's the YouTube part:Here's a description:HBO BUYS U.S. TV RIGHTS TO SECOND LIFE MACHINIMA SERIES, PROMOTES IT AS OSCAR NOMINEE CONTENDER
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The host of "What the Buck" explains a little bit of the history of his channel and some of the things that made it successful. If you aspire to building a resonant channel on YouTube, you might want to take a look.
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Back to the old question: how to approach touchy scientific issues that come in conflict with religion? There is an interesting recent survey that shows that American adults understand that science is important, they are in favor of science, but when it comes in conflict with core religious values, they side with religion. And more importantly, they know that the reason for their views are religious and not based on lack of evidence! This is problematic at one level (low emphasis on evidence for evaluating matters involving physical science), but it raises again the issue of how to properly address scientific issues that could possibly conflict with religion. From this perspective, Richard Dawkins' approach of attacking religion and presenting more evidence is clearly not going to work. Here is the survey: How the Public Resolves Conflicts between Faith and Science.

On the acceptance of evolution:

Indeed, according to a 2006 survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 42% of Americans reject the notion that life on earth evolved and believe instead that humans and other living things have always existed in their present form. Among white evangelical Protestants – many of whom regard the Bible as the inerrant word of God – 65% hold this view. Moreover, in the same poll, 21% of those surveyed say that although life has evolved, these changes were guided by a supreme being. Only a minority, about a quarter (26%) of respondents, say that they accept evolution through natural processes or natural selection alone.

But most people are pro-science and understand that there is scientific consensus on evolution:

Interestingly, many of those who reject natural selection recognize that scientists themselves fully accept Darwin's theory. In the same 2006 Pew poll, nearly two-thirds of adults (62%) say that they believe that scientists agree on the validity of evolution. Moreover, Americans, including religious Americans, hold science and scientists in very high regard. A 2006 survey conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University found that most people (87%) think that scientific developments make society better. Among those who describe themselves as being very religious, the same number – 87% – share that opinion.

Thus, the public simply ignore the scientists when scientific ideas come in conflict with religion - and evidence doesn't feature much in the debate:

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin's theory.

But here is a surprising result from the survey:

This reliance on religious faith may help explain why so many people do not see science as a direct threat to religion. Only 28% of respondents in the same Time poll say that scientific advancements threaten their religious beliefs. These poll results also show that more than four-fifths of respondents (81%) say that "recent discoveries and advances" in science have not significantly impacted their religious views. In fact, 14% say that these discoveries have actually made them more religious. Only 4% say that science has made them less religious.

So the question is, how to best approach scientific ideas that clash with religion. Richard Dawkins' thinks that if you show evidence, all smart people will immediately side with it. This may still work, except he puts science and religion in opposition and makes one choose between them. The Pew survey shows that under these circumstances, most of the public will choose religion over science.

I think the starting point regarding that should be an emphasis on the use of evidence for physical phenomenon irrespective of ones' faith. Is it even possible? Hmm...well...you can use God for "meaning" - to answer the "why" questions and leave "how" questions to science and scientific evidence (in the same spirit of Gould's non-overlapping Magistaria and Galileo's two books: book of scripture and book of nature). Second, take advantage of the existing positive attitude towards science, and show how ideas like evolution has shaped modern medicine and is saving lives every day (Is it possible to show that a rejection of evolutionary theory in the modern world would almost be an immoral position from this perspective?). If this makes someone more religious...that is fine...as long as they accept that events in the physical world can be explained only by natural causes. Check out this article on Framing Science, published in Science, in the context of global warming debate, evolution, and the stem cells controversy. Also check out Krauss & Dawkins on this issue and also Michael Shermer.
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The September issue of National Geographic has a good and well-balanced article on Pakistan. It is titled, Struggle for the Soul of Pakistan, and it talks about two versions of Islam competing for power there - a peaceful version of the planes and a harsher religion of the mountains. It summarizes the rise of fundamentalism in the 80's (jihad against the Soviets) and the 90's (the rise of the Taliban) and also provide a glimpse of the present. I will add some quotes from the article below that are relevant to this blog, but if you do have time, please read the section on Abdul Sattar Edhi - he has been doing phenomenal humanitarian work for the past 60 years (see Edhi Foundation) and his story is truly incredible.

The article has a nice beginning - Pakistan is indeed situated on a religious fault line:

If there is an address, an exact location for the rift tearing Pakistan apart, and possibly the world, it is a spot 17 miles (28 kilometers) west of Islamabad called the Margalla Pass. Here, at a limestone cliff in the middle of Pakistan, the mountainous west meets the Indus River Valley, and two ancient, and very different, civilizations collide. To the southeast, unfurled to the horizon, lie the fertile lowlands of the Indian subcontinent, realm of peasant farmers on steamy plots of land, bright with colors and the splash of serendipitous gods. To the west and north stretch the harsh, windswept mountains of Central Asia, land of herders and raiders on horseback, where man fears one God and takes no prisoners.

This is also where two conflicting forms of Islam meet: the relatively relaxed and tolerant Islam of India, versus the rigid fundamentalism of the Afghan frontier. Beneath the surface of Pakistan, these opposing forces grind against each other like two vast geologic plates, rattling teacups from Lahore to London, Karachi to New York. The clash between moderates and extremists in Pakistan today reflects this rift, and can be seen as a microcosm for a larger struggle among Muslims everywhere. So when the earth trembles in Pakistan, the world pays attention.

The more radical madrassas were built and funded for the war against the Soviets in the 80s, and it is through these madrassas, that the Taliban (literally, students) later arose.

During the 1980s, as the mujahideen prevailed against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the winds of extremism blowing from the northwest began to chill all of Pakistan. Millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia flowed into the hard-line Sunni madrassas clustered along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, which eventually spread across Pakistan. Not all Pakistani madrassas today are fundamentalist or radical. Some are shoestring operations run by moderate clerics to meet the educational needs of the poor. But the majority—more than 60 percent—are affiliated with the fundamentalist Deobandi sect, an austere interpretation of Islam that calls for a rejection of modernity and a return to the "pure," seventh-century Islam of the Prophet Muhammad. Politically savvy and extremely well funded, more than 10,000 of these schools operate across Pakistan today, compared with fewer than 1,000 before General Zia took power. Thousands more operate unofficially.

By the time Zia died in a mysterious 1988 plane crash, the Islamization of Pakistan was well under way. The following year, the Soviet Union, preoccupied with its own implosion, pulled its demoralized troops from Afghanistan. The U.S. promptly declared victory and returned home, leaving the Afghan people to the chaotic rule of the mujahideen warlords. One crucial chapter in the story of radical Islam's ascendancy had come to a close. The one we are still living had just begun. Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the Afghan jihad now moved freely in and out of northwestern Pakistan and its Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The madrassas swelled with the children of the Zia Generation. In the rugged mountainous land shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan, the seeds of the Taliban, and al Qaeda, had been sown.

And to get a glimpse of a Deobandi madrassa, here is an amusing exchange:

My new friends want to know why Americans think they are terrorists. It's a good question, and an innocent one, judging by the young and open faces of the dozen or so students sharing their evening meal with me. They don't look like terrorists as they sit in a semicircle on green mats in the courtyard of Jamia Uloom-ul-Quran, a small Deobandi madrassa located in a historic downtown mosque in Peshawar. This provincial capital served as headquarters for the Afghan resistance against the Soviets, and jihad is still a going concern here. A block away from the madrassa, at shops selling shoes and used clothes, I'd bought a 50-cent al Qaeda DVD of a suicide bomber preparing for a mission. At the end of the disc, over religious music, the bomber is shown in his car at a distant crossroads, blowing up a convoy. "We know that shop," the students say. "But we're not terrorists."

A few of the students appear to be ten or younger, but most are in their late teens or early 20s. They say their dream for Pakistan is "a peaceful nation, in which justice prevails, in keeping with Islamic law." But they believe, as many here do, that Islam is under attack. By America, by the West, by India, by their own government. Under these circumstances, they say, jihad is justified. What about suicide bombing? Is it sanctioned by Islam? "You must think we have classes here in making bombs or AK-47s!" exclaims one boy, and they all laugh.

"In any Muslim land that's occupied, suicide bombing is allowed," says a personable older boy named Rafiullah, who has bright brown eyes and the beginnings of a beard. A few mention Iraq and Palestine as places where such bombings are justified. Another boy mentions Afghanistan. "But it's not allowed in Pakistan," Rafiullah says, "since we're not an occupied country." ("Not yet!" somebody else interjects, to laughter.) "Nobody has a right to blow you up, even if you're a non-Muslim, or an infidel. If you are here as a guest, you are welcome." He reaches to shake my hand, as if to reassure me.

By the way, I grew up in Karachi in the 80' s and for me (and probably for a lot of Karachiites) Peshawar was scary conservative even then. Perhaps Alabama for someone growing up in New York city, except Alabama with lots and lots of guns (preferably AK-47s).

But if the state does not provide education, what options do people have:

About a third of the students at the Deobandi madrassa in Peshawar, for instance, are poor kids from far-flung regions of the North-West Frontier Province or the tribal areas. They are like Mir Rahman, 16, a sweet-faced boy from a family of poor herders in the Mohmand Tribal Area. The family lives miles from the nearest public school, which is so badly run that few kids attend. It's not unusual in Pakistan to hear of public schools that receive no books, no supplies, and no subsidies from the government. Thousands more are "ghost schools" that exist only on paper, to line the pockets of phantom teachers and administrators. Faced with choosing between bad public schools and expensive private ones, many poor parents send their children to the madrassas, where they get a roof over their heads, three meals a day, and a Koran-based education—for free.

But Zia managed to reshape the whole education system and it will take time to reverse the damage:

Pervez Hoodbhoy lives every day with the consequences of the lack of public education in Pakistan. An MIT-trained professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, he was speaking to a graduate-level class in physics a few days after the huge earthquake that devastated Kashmir in 2005, describing the geophysical forces that produced the disaster. "When I finished, hands shot up all over the room," he recalls. "'Professor, you are wrong,' my students said. 'That earthquake was the wrath of God.' "

This, he says, is the legacy of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose education ministry issued guidelines on bringing an Islamic perspective to science and other subjects in the public schools. "The Zia Generation has come of age," he says. "It isn't Islamic to teach that earthquakes are caused by the movement of tectonic plates. Instead, you are supposed to say, by the will of Allah, an earthquake happens." Today a government commission is working to modernize education, but "it goes deeper than updating textbooks," he says. "It's a matter of changing society."

A step in the right direction...but it will take time. Zia (with a supportive US) did enormous damage and it will take at least another generation to reverse the effects of his Islamization.


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Discusses things that did not work as newspapers migrated to the web:Web Editors Reveal Online Flops or FailuresA good chance to learn something from history.
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7 Ways to Grow the Action HabitFrom the article: "People at the top of every profession share one quality — they get things done. This ability supercedes intelligence, talent, and connections in determining the size of your salary and the speed of your advancement. Despite the simplicity of this concept there is a perpetual shortage of people who excel at getting results. The action habit — the
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This time its on energy/quantum healings, chakras, and homeopathy. Actually this episode is quite funny and it includes discussions of body black holes, Atlantian DNA and other such amusing topics. I also liked the ending where there is a good discussion of placebo effect and why people find alternative medicine attractive.
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There has been a division amongst atheists on how to respond to the recent resurgence of religion. Whereas, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris et al. have gone on all out offensive, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss et al. have promoted a more tolerant (and perhaps a more reasonable) approach (check out discussion between Krauss and Dawkins here). Shermer's latest column in Scientific American is titled Rational Atheism, and is "an open letter to Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens".

He correctly states that:

Whenever religious beliefs conflict with scientific facts or violate principles of political liberty, we must respond with appropriate aplomb. Nevertheless, we should be cautious about irrational exuberance.

Shermer then lists five points that can be summed up as: Have a positive message and be tolerant of others if you want your beliefs to be tolerated.

Here are his 5 points:

• Anti-something movements by themselves will fail

• Positive assertions are necessary
  

• Rational is as rational does (i.e. "It is irrational to take a hostile or condescending attitude toward religion because by doing so we virtually guarantee that religious people will respond in kind")
  

• The golden rule is symmetrical (i.e. "If atheists do not want theists to prejudge them in a negative light, then they must not do unto theists the same")

• Promote freedom of belief and disbelief (i.e. "As long as religion does not threaten science and freedom, we should be respectful and tolerant because our freedom to disbelieve is inextricably bound to the freedom of others to believe")
  

The last point, in particular, is crucial.

All of this may be more reasonable but it won't sell many books nor will it make for good television.
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Science & religion debates, on many occasions, center around issues of origins. It is about defining limits & boundaries and this justifiably makes scientists uncomfortable. For a while, the origin of the Earth was considered a problem beyond the boundary of science. But not today and now we have a very detailed explanation of the formation of the Solar System.

We may be getting closer to solving another origins question - the origin of life. Here is a claim that scientists will be able to create life from scratch in the next 3-10 years. This is a bold (and exciting) claim!

"Creating protocells has the potential to shed new life on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.

If you are creating life at home, please note of the following minor challenges:

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.

A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step -- creating a cell membrane -- is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step -- getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

I'm not a biologist, so I don't know how crazy and speculative these ideas are. However, scientists have been making attempts in this direction for a few decades now, so its totally plausible that we are getting close. I love the last step of letting evolution take over after mixing-in the right ingredients - I do that with cooking all the time.

And here is the Frankenstein we were all waiting for in the news story:

In Gainesville, Florida, Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases -- adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) -- molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.

Eight new bases! If successful, this would indeed be quite awesome...but don't know what kind of effects it will potentially have.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.

I hope so. Still a very neat story.

Now lets solve the issue of the origin of the universe.

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This time its on astrologers, psychics, dowsers and even a bit on post-modernists. There should really be no sympathy for psychics. Enjoy!
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Here is Taner Edis talking about the religious state of Islamic science. This serves as a nice companion piece to an earlier article by Pervez Hoodbhoy. One thing they absolutely agree on is the separation of science with Islam, and this may be the biggest hurdle in the development of basic sciences in the Islamic world. Also check out Edis' excellent book, An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam.

Why was it so much harder for science to take root in the Muslim world?

It was harder for science to achieve intellectual and institutional independence. This was not restricted just to science. In the Western world, the institution of law achieved a kind of autonomy from religion early on. Some historians argue that this was really a precursor to science achieving autonomy as well. In the Muslim world, law was never entirely disentangled from religion. Islamic culture has not been as supportive of intellectual independence for different areas of life.

Did science actually decline in the Islamic world in the 14th or 15th centuries? Or is it just that science in Europe exploded a little later, leaving science in the Islamic world far behind?

It depends on which historian you consult. The older point of view has been that Islamic intellectual life and science went into a period of decline after the Golden Age. But nowadays, many historians argue that science in the Islamic world continued to develop at its own pace. I don't know if I would entirely agree. But it's definitely true that much more emphasis has to be put on Europe taking off and therefore a relative gap opening. It's not so much a story of Islamic decline as Europe inventing an entirely new way of thinking about the natural world and really making a break with medieval ways of thinking. That didn't happen in the Islamic world.

Yes, its more complicated than that, but still this is an important point when considering why scientific revolution didn't take place in the Islamic world.

On "Islamic Science" or "Islamization of science":

Many Muslim thinkers talk about trying to resurrect and tap into the past glory of Islamic science. Are you saying this is a mistake?

Yes and no. If you go back to the 9th through the 12th centuries, some practices were useful, such as being more open to intellectual currents from many directions. But other things are not going to be helpful. If you look into the literature on Islam and science, one of the names you will very soon encounter is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is a Muslim philosopher of science. He works in the United States but has origins in Iran.

He teaches at George Washington University. Clearly, he has a distinguished academic position.

That's right. Seyyed Hossein Nasr says he's trying to revive certain distinctly Muslim ways of thinking about the universe. But it's a revival of all the strands of classical Islamic thought, including those strands which are very antithetical to science as we understand it today.

Where does this actually create problems?

One of the features of medieval Islamic science that some modern Muslim thinkers want to revive is the way of perceiving the universe as a spiritual, God-centered place. This tends to work against the independence of science from religious institutions. It's precisely this autonomy that helped science make the breakthrough in the Western world. In the Muslim world, this is still a relatively controversial concept. There is a tendency to say that science should operate under the guidance of religious concerns. I think this is one of the obstacles facing science in the Islamic world.

But this is complicated. Everyone agrees that Western science has been successful at what it does. And yet I'm willing to bet that many Islamic thinkers would say the price of scientific success in the West has been too high. Once science was divorced from religion, you could argue that it was only a matter of time before secular values would triumph, atheism would become a viable option, and the modern world would end up with the rampant materialism and consumerism that we have today. A lot of Islamic thinkers don't want that version of Western science.

This is a dilemma for many people in the Muslim world who are thinking about science and religion. On the one hand, there is a desire to catch up, especially in the technological realm which underpins the military and commercial superiority of the Western world. On the other hand, there is a desire to adopt modern science in such a way that local religious culture is not corrupted. So yes, they are very concerned not to go down the Western path. You can find many Muslim thinkers who say that Western Christians made a mistake by allowing science to operate independently of religious constraints. However, that is the way modern science has achieved the success it has. So it's hard to negotiate between these options.

I don't want to sound like I'm describing the Muslim world as a monolithic entity with no differences between Muslims. There is a very heated internal debate in Muslim countries about how to respond to the modern West, and science is only one concern. Some say the Islamic world has to secularize. Turkey has for many decades been an example of taking a more secular path and adopting westernization full scale. It has had some successes, though it hasn't fully taken root. But a lot of people think if you try and westernize totally -- if you separate science from religion and you separate politics from religion -- then you end up with the more compartmentalized modern society that we're familiar with in the West. And they're reacting against it. The intellectual options in the debate over science and religion are very similar to what we have in the West. What's different is the historical background and the institutional landscape. In the Islamic world, the liberal option is much weaker compared to what we have in the Western world.

By "the liberal option," do you mean reading sacred texts as metaphor rather than literal truth? For instance, liberal Christians don't take the creation stories in Genesis as scientific fact. They read these stories more as poetry. Are you saying that option, for the most part, doesn't exist for Muslims because the Quran is seen as a text that's been handed down from God?

It would be an overstatement to say that option does not exist, but it has a much weaker social position. Let me give an example. Here in the United States, the mainstream scientific community has a big problem with creationist movements and intelligent design. As scientists, one of our closest allies in trying to combat creationism is the liberal religious community. It's much more effective to send somebody to a school board meeting who's not a scientist but actually a priest or rabbi or minister in a more liberal denomination and to explain that they don't see a conflict between teaching evolution and religion. But in the Muslim world, this is much more difficult because the public affinity toward creationism is much stronger. Darwinian thinking really hasn't penetrated the popular discourse. Plus, it's very hard for scientists who work in Muslim countries to find liberal religious figures who would go out there and publicly say Darwinian evolution is not a problem for Islam.

This is the new science battle ground in the Islamic world. Some religious scholars have somewhat accepted evolution, for example, very conservative Israr Ahmad in Pakistan, but they are outnumbered and even those that have accepted still have problems with human evolution.

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Richard Dawkins has a new 2-part documentary Enemies of Reason that take shots at astrologers, psychics, dowsers and people dealing with other New-age crap. It starts on August 13th on Channel 4 in UK. So anyway of getting it to the US or a copy on the internet??

Here is a review from The Sunday Times.

And a medium found Dawkins' father on the far side:

When Dawkins consulted a medium who has appeared on daytime television and charges £50 for instant phone readings she said she could hear or see his father “on the other side”.

He did his best not to look surprised as she continued: “I’m aware of your father stood right behind you. “On a spiritual level he wasn’t the most openest man with his thoughts and his feelings. Ummm, I kind of want to say that I do love you and I do care – but that wouldn’t have been his character.” (Or that of many middle-class father figures of his generation, a sceptic might have said.)

But Dawkins let her continue. “I’m aware that you don’t have you dad’s photograph out” – it was true, he didn’t – “so I’m a little bit concerned why. So I’m going to ask you: why don’t you have it out?” Dawkins had a bombshell ready: “Well, he might be aware that I don’t have it out because he comes to the house about once a week.” “Oh, he’s still here,” she said, adding after a few seconds: “I don’t feel it’s working.”

“Is that because you thought my father is dead and discovered that he’s still alive?”

“No, nothing to do with that. I don’t know.”

She commented later: “As a clairvoyant you’re only as good as the client.”

well...of course.

And here is an interview that includes couple of short clips from the show.

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This should not not be an issue to worry about. However, here is an article from Boston Globe, Understanding Evolution is Crucial to Debate that talks about some of the challenges.

Even a great curriculum doesn't necessarily mean an individual teacher is doing a good job. Across the country, school boards and instructors contend with pressure to adopt books or offer supplements that "balance" biology texts or "teach the controversy." The Institute for Creation Research, for one, hasn't given up on Massachusetts. An event planned for Methuen in November will teach "creation evangelism" and "scientific evidence for creation/design in nature." On the institute's website, students and teachers across the country can get inspiration and tools to challenge an evolution-based curriculum.

Some teachers assign their evolution module a slot at the end of the year, then run out of time. Some speed right through it. When confronted with students' probing questions, the AAAS discovered, teachers find themselves at a loss. "The state standards say nothing about what goes on in the classroom," points out Louise Mead, education project director for NCSE.

Read the full article here.

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Science sections of bookstores are lined up with books that have God somewhere in the title (The Language of God, The God Gene, God in the Machine, God's Equation, etc). Its all about selling books and about getting attention in the media. Astronomers also have a special penchant for this. For example, we have fingers of god - an observational effect that makes clusters of galaxies appear elongated in our direction and to some it seems that cosmic fingers are pointing towards us. Some also described the variations in cosmic background radiation as the fingerprint of Creation. But here is an excellent article in defense of using such metaphors, and it focuses on the Higgs Boson - now also known as the God particle: What's in a name? Parsing the 'God Particle' as the Ultimate Metaphor

In a stroke of either public relations genius or disaster, Leon M. Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, referred to the Higgs as “the God particle” in the book of the same name he published with the science writer Dick Teresi in 1993. To Dr. Lederman, it made metaphorical sense, he explained in the book, because the Higgs mechanism made it possible to simplify the universe, resolving many different seeming forces into one, like tearing down the Tower of Babel. Besides, his publisher complained, nobody had ever heard of the Higgs particle.

In some superficial ways, the Higgs has lived up to its name. Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work on the so-called Standard Model, of which the Higgs is the central cog. Billions of dollars are being spent on particle accelerators and experiments to find it, inspect it and figure out how it really works.

But physicists groan when they hear it referred to as the “God particle” in newspapers and elsewhere (and the temptation to repeat it, given science reporters’ desperate need for colorful phrases in an abstract and daunting field, is irresistible). Even when these physicists approve of what you have written about their craft, they grumble that the media are engaging in sensationalism, or worse.

But he presents an interesting defense for the use of this metaphor:

My guide in all of this, of course, the biggest name-dropper in science, is Albert Einstein, who mentioned God often enough that one could imagine he and the “Old One” had a standing date for coffee or tennis. To wit: “The Lord is subtle, but malicious he is not.”

Or this quote regarding the pesky randomness of quantum mechanics: “The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice.”

With Einstein, we always knew where he stood in relation to “God” — it was shorthand for the mystery and rationality of nature, the touchstones of the scientific experience. Cosmic mystery, Einstein said, is the most beautiful experience we can have, “the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

“He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement,” he continued, “is as good as a snuffed-out candle.”

If we didn’t already have a name for the object of Einstein’s “cosmic religion,” we would have to invent one. It’s just too bad that the name has been tainted and trivialized by association with the image of a white-bearded Caucasian-looking creature who sits in the clouds attended by harp-strumming angels.

This is wonderful stuff! However, I don't think public has a clear understanding of Einstein's impersonal god and he is often quoted out of context or misquoted altogether. But the main point of the article is more interesting:

Historians have suggested that it was a mistake for the antiwar movement of the 1960s to yield the flag — a powerful symbol of patriotism — to the war’s supporters, and likewise I think it would be a mistake for scientists to yield such a powerful metaphor to creationists and religious fundamentalists.

But at what cost? Creationists and religious fundamentalists are not the bigger problem. The more sophisticated Intelligent Design proponents are already exploiting the use of these metaphors and are successfully blurring the boundary between science & religion. Perhaps we can hold-off on these metaphors for a bit - at least until ID controversy takes a back seat in the media. But I completely agree with the spirit of the article and its ending:

Is there a God who worries about the flight of every sparrow? Einstein said that was a naïve and even abhorrent idea.

Do I believe the universe is a mystery? Absolutely. Is that mystery ultimately explicable? Intellectual empires from Plato to Einstein have been founded on that presumption, bold and optimistic as it is, and I wouldn’t advise betting against it.

In the meantime, I wouldn’t dream of depriving any future Einstein of his or her rhetorical or metaphorical tools.

Not to mention myself.

ah...written almost in God's language ;)

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Here is an excellent article by Pervez Hoodbhoy, Science and the Islamic world - the quest for rapprochement, published in this month's Physics Today. This is also a good summary of arguments from his book, Islam and Science - Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality. This is a long article but definitely worth the effort - so please read it and if you like, post comments here.

Couple of interesting things to note:

According to a recent survey, among the 57 member states of the OIC, there are approximately 1800 universities.⁵ Of those, only 312 publish journal articles. A ranking of the 50 most published among them yields these numbers: 26 are in Turkey, 9 in Iran, 3 each in Malaysia and Egypt, 2 in Pakistan, and 1 in each of Uganda, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan. For the top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about 1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article is less than 1.0 (the survey report does not state whether self-citations were excluded).

An average of less than one citation!! I really hope self-citation has been excluded from the study. But I think he rightly points out that just pouring money into science and education is not going to change much. What really needs to be changed is the attitude towards learning:

Poor teaching owes more to inappropriate attitudes than to material resources. Generally, obedience and rote learning are stressed, and the authority of the teacher is rarely challenged. Debate, analysis, and class discussions are infrequent.

An intellectual climate is essential. There are new universities coming up in Dubai, Sharjah, and Saudi Arabia and it will be interesting to see if students there will be exposed to intellectual traditions of the world and if they will have freedom to explore the boundaries of their own ideas.

Here, as in other Pakistani public universities, films, drama, and music are frowned on, and sometimes even physical attacks by student vigilantes who believe that such pursuits violate Islamic norms take place. The campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore.

Here, Pervez is talking about Quaid Azam University (QAU), which is the second highest ranked university amongst Islamic countries. Theater, films and music pose an interesting challenge. Even during the peak of Greek translations in the Islamic world (8th-10th century), much of Greek dramas and theater works were ignored. There is, of course, a rich tradition of story telling in the Arab world, such as the Arabian Nights, but I'm not sure how much theater and music permeated the general culture.

No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics. The Ahmedi sect to which he belonged, and which had earlier been considered to be Muslim, was officially declared heretical in 1974 by the Pakistani government.

The treatment of Ahmedis in Pakistan is simply shameful. In fact, in order to get a Pakistani passport, one has to declare that Ahmedis are non-Muslims (check out for yourself from the Government of Pakistan website and download passport application form from here. Look for item number 25). Ah...bigotry has so many faces. I really really hope, this insane portion of the passport form is dropped by the government soon.

In the article, Hoodbhoy later makes a bold statement regarding veils:

The imposition of the veil makes a difference. My colleagues and I share a common observation that over time most students—particularly veiled females—have largely lapsed into becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions.

I'm curious if sociologists and psychologists have looked into the impact of veiling in a conservative society like Pakistan. The last 10 years have seen a sharp increase in voluntary veiling by educated, middle-class women, and there must be a noticeable difference in work and educational environments.

While in the remaining article, he talks about the importance of scientific and intellectual thinking, his most bold assertion (for Muslim countries) is tucked in his concluding paragraph:

Just as important, the practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced by the state. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade those who do not.

Complete freedom of religion and secular humanism for Muslim countries! Amen. Hey...even US can use some secular humanism.
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Consitent with Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict seems to be fine with evolution:

Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.

“They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other,” the pope said. “This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

He said evolution did not answer all the questions: “Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question, ‘Where does everything come from?’”

This is a fair question until we actually find out.

So it appears that the Pope has not fallen for Intelligent Design. Its not completely clear from the news story, but I think he is endorsing Theistic evolution - that evolution is guided by God. Fair enough, as long as he does not include supernatural as an explanation for any physical/biological phenomenon. His statement that "the theory could not exclude a role by God" is a bit ambiguous, but I'm assuming that he is talking about providing meaning behind evolution.

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