Or perhaps this shooter cracked under economic pressures. And this other shooter cracked under anti-religious racism and the pressures of war.

Whenever these violent outbursts occur, I never feel that the explanations for them are adequate. Yet how we explain them — and our arguments over which explanations are better than others — say more about our prejudices and biases than the horrible events themselves. Certain factors come up again and again: mental illness, economic struggles, war trauma, religious extremism and racism. Not all of these elements are present in every case — and based on the two most recent events, I have neglected to list other forces that strongly influence “active shooter” cases, such as misogyny and homophobia. I think a big mistake some folks make, especially those in the punditry profession (which is congenitally given to conclusion-jumping), is latching onto one of these factors in isolation from the others. Those with an axe to grind against Muslims have seized upon the Ft. Hood shooting as a case that proves all their other condemnations of Islam as a religion, political correctness, multiculturalism, and, for good measure, Barack Obama and the “liberal media.” None of that is very helpful, but it isn’t much better to cite the other factors of war, racism, mental illness, etc. without considering them all together as systemic forces that will eventually combine to produce random acts of violence, whether of the active shooter kind, or in cases of rape, domestic abuse, and/or suicide. After all, most people with mental illnesses (a nebulous category that we should refrain from generalizing upon, anyway) do not go on shooting rampages. So far Marc Armbinder is the only high profile media professional who has urged restraint:

Does shooter story today focus on Islam, on the man himself and his demons, on the Army and war? Lots of data points = context needed.

This event, like the Columbine shootings ten years ago, will be endlessly pored over. I still have not figured out Columbine, but there is at least the positive influence of The Columbine Project to help teens address the kinds of issues that were brought to light by that awful event. Armbinder is right, however: context is needed, and to fully appreciate it, we need time to think before we speak.

So, ya know, STFU.

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Will ignores the fact that climate change is a noisy, long-term process. Today it is cooler at my house than it was yesterday. That does not mean that next week I will wake up to find snow on my doorstep. If you look at the annual mean temperature of the planet, you can cherry-pick one year, such as 1998, in order to make the false claim that there is no global warming. Of course, you could just as easily pick 1999, in which case the same logic would force you to conclude that there has been a staggering increase in temperature. But that’s not how climate scientists actually study global warming. They look at long term patterns, such as the red line in this graph from NASA, which represents the five-year mean since 1880. And when they do, they recognize a long-term trend of rising temperatures.

Zimmer goes on to quote the dodge made by the WaPo Ombudsman (shorter: Will is a columnist on the opinions page, so opinions don’t have to be so rigorously fact-checked) and laments the ongoing poor presentation of scientific information by mainstream corporate media.

I sympathize, of course, and wish the news media were more diligent about important issues that affect the fate of our species — like, say, Kim Jong Il lobbing warheads into the Sea of Japan, rather than CNN turning itself into 24-7 MJNN. But no one is going to get George Will to backtrack, and no one at WaPo has the temerity (to use a Willy word) to broach the subject with the nerdy blowhard. If they started with global warming, why not proceed to all the other disinformation he has been spreading these past 30 odd years? And why stop with George Will when Charles Krauthammer is only a click away? Why does David Broder’s inane “conventional wisdom” get a pass? And that’s just the op/ed pages, nevermind the news divisions that pass on Pentagon dictation and used Dick Cheney as a “confidential high-level source.”

All that is beyond Zimmer’s immediate concerns for the low level of scientific knowledge among the public. Yet the fact is, news is broken. The industry itself is collapsing, but even when it thrived, it spewed disinformation like an upchucking baby.

Hey, are you looking for an In Contempt strip today? Me, too!

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As the article indicates, this knowledge gap affects attitudes:

[The survey] found that at least two-thirds of Americans hold scientists and engineers in high regard, but the feeling is hardly mutual.

The report said 85 percent of science association members surveyed said public ignorance of science was a major problem. And by large margins they deride as only “fair” or “poor” the coverage of science by newspapers and television.

See? Them eggheads think we’re a bunch of ignoramuses! Kill their funding!

I joke. But scientists whose job has been to educate the public will not find this survey surprising nor my little joke very funny — financial support of valuable research (outside the interests of military and pharmaceutical industrialists) is all too tenuous. During last year’s election season, a group of prominent scientists were advocating a ScienceDebate 2008, a forum for competing candidates to demonstrate their understanding of important scientific issues and to propose relevant policies. Lawrence Krauss and Chris Mooney were out front promoting this forum:

When you think about it, the need for a debate on science is incontrovertible. It would reveal which candidates are best equipped to tackle contentious science-based issues, and it would help raise the level of scientific literacy across the board in this country.

Remember that debate? No? Cuz it didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t! I would be surprised if despite their enthusiasm Krauss and Mooney really thought such a debate would occur. Republican candidates had already embarrassed themselves on the topic of evolution; and John McCain, who had affirmed acceptance of evolutionary theory, was not interested in destroying his fragile support among fundamentalist Christians comprising his party’s base.

But, hey, he lost anyway. Obama is here, and he is all about Teh Science! No need to worry, right?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

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Whether people want to admit it or not, the way Fred Phelps and Benedict XVI talk about [lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered] is consistent with the way we’ve been treated by the Christian church for 2,000 years. Anything pro-LGBT in Christianity is a recent development. I know there are people who are willing to give Christianity a pass on that. Many more of us are not.

It will be argued that “not all Christians are like that” and that “you shouldn’t paint Christians with a broad brush.” Well, I can’t remember ever seeing a comment here (or anywhere else, for that matter) to the effect that every single Christian everywhere is a bad person. We are all perfectly aware that there are “affirming” and “accepting” congregations and a great many fine individual Christians. Comments tend to be about the Christian church at the institutional level and its supporters.

I’ve pointed out before that of the 30-odd state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, and the scores of anti-gay ballot initiatives and referenda across the country, every single one of them has been initiated or actively promoted by a Christian group. In contrast, I’m not aware of even one pro-gay measure that has come out of a Christian group. Not one.

Moreover, the “affirming” churches never seem to speak out against the language and behavior of the actively hateful ones. It’s all very well for churches to claim to be “affirming,” but that affirmation never seems to translate into action. The old phrase “all aid short of help” comes to mind.

QScribe goes on to discuss the long history of skepticism regarding the existence of God and/or gods, providing several amusing quotes from philosophers, scientists, social critics and at least one Founding Father whom American religious conservatives attempt to co-opt:

Thomas Jefferson: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva from the brain of Jupiter.”

The main argument is this: religions and the propositions they make about reality, history and morality should not enjoy a special exemption from skeptical inquiry. There’s no need to be an asshole, of course, but there is no need to check one’s critical thinking cap at the door, either.

One thing QScribe does not address, so I’ll add it here, is the role multiculturalism plays in stifling legitimate criticism. By and large I support multiculturalism as a way of respecting the liberties and rights of people in a pluralistic democracy. That includes the right to practice one’s religion and to express one’s faith openly and publicly with an expectation of respect, even from cranky atheists like me. Yet when such faith is used to deprive people of civil rights and liberties, to persecute them for their very mode of being; or even to impose its view on public school curricula (Intelligent Design, school prayer, etc.), articles of faith become fair game.

However, there is this view that skepticism is a Western construction; that using it to criticize the claims made by non-Western religions is a form of racism or imperialism. Recently Oktar Babuna, a Turkish physician has taken to publicly decrying the theory of evolution as a Western attack on Islam, sending out copies of his book on the subject to schools in Turkey; indeed, he ropes in Judaism and Christianity as allies in defense against this perceived attack on the unique relationship these faiths posit between God and humanity. To be sure, scientists who subscribe to these faiths are appalled. And it should be noted that evolutionary theory itself, pioneered by the devout Christian Charles Darwin, makes no claims on Biblical accounts of Creation or any other religious explanation of human and cosmic origins. It makes its own claims, striving do as all scientific theories to understand external phenomena based on evidence, theory, prediction and falsification. (Please note that last element; the scientific method trains skepticism most intensely on theories proposed in the name of science.) Nonetheless, the Turkish government has banned access to Web sites on evolution and prevented publication of the Darwin issue of its oldest and most respected science magazine. Notably, Babuna derives much of his inspiration from the American Creationist and Intelligent Design movements, which treat evolutionary theory as an assault on its faith. As ever, the assault is really the other way around. Here is Babuna:

These two ir-religious philosophies, Darwinism and materialism, are the foundation of the conflict and corruption going on in the world. Because we all believe, Christians, Jews and Muslims, that God has created the entire universe out of nothing and that he dominates all that exists with his omnipotence.

And his boss, Harun Yahya, who has recently written an 800-page refutation of Darwin, makes these claims:

I’m a believer in science. If I had ever found any hard evidence for evolution, in the Koran or in the world, I would accept it. There are millions of fossils, but none of them ever show creatures evolving. Darwinism is nonsense, and dangerous. Despots like Stalin and Hitler used Darwin to justify murdering millions.

The Son of Sam claimed his dog ordered him to go on a serial murderous rampage, but I don’t think we should hold the dog accountable, should we? Anyhoo, Babuna and Yahya, as implied by reporter Aaron Schachter, see the strident atheism of the Richard Dawkins school as a direct provocation, deserving of response. Fair enough, Dawkins is not always the most pleasant of critics, and he would claim provocation by the Creationists seeking to eliminate evolution from school curricula and the role of religion in promoting all sorts of nasty violence, for which a link can be made that is more direct than Darwin’s role in The Holocaust. Yet for all of this “he started it” playground sniping, the real issue is that a legitimate —and working— field of scientific theory is constantly under attack from groups who mask their fears of its implications behind characterizations of the scientific method as a kind of aberration of Euro-American thinking, a cognitive blip, an ideological weapon of Western Imperialism.

And, at the risk of seeming “uncivil,” that’s bullshit. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have certainly put forward some crazy racist ideas in the past, yet no one has been harder on them than modern practitioners of these fields; not only because such ideas are abhorrent, but because they are rendered utterly false by scientific skepticism, by testing the claims against reality. You want to drive a scientist crazy? Misuse his or her findings to justify your personal ideology; misuse the scientific method to prop up racism, as anyone who was alive during The Bell Curve controversies should recall with a sense of outrage that inspires the use of uncivil language. To be fair, plenty of people of faith feel a similar degree of anger when co-religionists misuse scripture to promote homophobia or sexism or any other agenda of oppression. Twenty years ago, I worked at a daycare center in a church, where I found someone had stashed a Chick comic book (I think it was this one), an artifact of fundamentalist crackpottery I thought hilarious. The priest I showed it to did not share my amusement: “If you find any more of these, bring them to me right away!” I have never forgotten the look on his face.

I feel more common ground with that priest, certainly, but that doesn’t mean I should not criticize the irrational claims of Creationists or of Islamist charlatans like Yahya and Babuna; or, for that matter, refrain from holding the claims of even friendlier strains of the Big Three religions. Critical thinking is not a form of incivility or Western imperialism. It’s our most important strategy for survival.

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Cartoon by Chris Madden

NASA has uncovered the original analog tapes recording the first moon landing 40 years after they were lost shortly after they were shot. According to the Sunday Express, the tapes will provide a clearer picture of the Apollo 11 crew’s activities than the blurrier footage we grown accustomed to.

However, viewers have only ever seen such poor quality footage because the original analogue tapes containing the pictures beamed direct from the lunar surface were lost almost as soon as they were recorded.

Instead, a poor quality copy made from a 16mm camera pointing at a heavily compressed image on a black and white TV screen has been the only record of the event.

Sounds great. As soon as they are up on the Internetx, I’ll force my kids to watch them with awe and wonder. “Feel the AWE! Feel the WONDER!” Then I will wax rhapsodic about Man’s innate drive to explore and conquer peoples with less developed military technologies. “Look at the stars, children,” I will intone sonorously with a slight catch in my voice. “That way lies our Manifest Density.”

Actually, I totally support space exploration, including a trip to Mars for study and possible colonization, should we ever get the technology challenges worked out. Sometimes I think fellow advocates get a little carried away.

Speaking of getting carried away, the Sunday Express places great confidence in the new tapes to perform what is probably miraculous:

Crucially, they could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.

On the contrary, I predict another forty years of even wilder conspiracy theories. Just start with the question, “Why are they just finding these tapes, now, huhhhh? How could a vast bureaucracy like NASA misplace evidence from what is supposed to be the biggest feat of exploration since Magellan, huh? HUH?” Then let your paranoid fantasies fly free.

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These findings are important, and awesome, and the more we can find, the better.

Here’s the “but” (cuz it’s me writing, so expect a “but”): Why does Conrad suggest that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated“? Let’s parse that statement a little. First, note the “one of” qualification. Given the history of previous racist assumptions held by earlier practitioners of his field of inquiry, Conrad is right to imply that the origins of human culture are probably spread throughout the world; in particular, Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and elsewhere along the path of human migration over tens of thousands of years.

My beef is with the term “originated.” How do we know that the bone flute artifact is not just one stop on the path of our species’ musical “evolution”? Bone tends to be more hardy than other likely materials for flute construction, such as wood, which would succumb to rot or to reclamation by the jungle. If our friends at Wikipedia are correct (they’re getting more reliable), homo sapiens occupied most of Africa some 100-150,000 years ago, and began migrating out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. Our species is roughly 200,000 years old. Geologically speaking, that’s a blink of an eye, but in terms of human development, a very long time for a species to move about, settle, hunt, gather, develop social relations, and cohere group identity, in which culture plays a central role. We can at least speculate that there are several kinds of musical instrument lost to history beneath the fecund soils of sub-Saharan African jungles or the sands of the Sahara itself as it creeps southward.

I’m not accusing Carlson of racism or of making racist assumptions, mind you. One could certainly make an argument (provided more archaelogical evidence, of course) that European forms of musicality originated in Germany, or that a significant branch of human musical invention took off from this point. It’s more a matter of care in how we phrase the significance of these findings, because they contribute to a larger impression of human cultural development, which in turn has had a significant influence on how we understand human evolution. The NYTimes articles I have linked to above show typical Euro-centric conflation of “evolution” and human creativity. Their author John Noble Wilford is an experienced science reporter and is no doubt aware of debates on this issue, yet here again we find a very casual use of the term “evolution” with all its cultural assumptions of a linear progression from lower to higher orders — of being, of consciousness, of sophistication, and so on.

This progression myth diverges significantly from the Darwinian theory of descent through modification in response to environmental challenges to survival and via genetic diversity that enables adaptation. The roles of chance, luck, and time play significantly here. Intentionality, not so much. When art evolves, humans move it forward in response to inherited conventions, prevailing theories, and the cultural needs of the moment; this is an active participation with history and context. As with our technology and our ability to transform our environment dramatically (including our food, for better or worse), art has an impact on our social relations, worldview, concepts of history and humanity, part of feedback loop with the actions we take in the world.

In short, art (and science, religion, and other aspects of culture) affects human development — as social creatures, not as biological creatures. I don’t rule out the possibility that a cumulative effect of our artifice — the net effect of our impact on our living environment — will have a future influence on development, provided we have the necessary genes to allow for whatever adaptation is needed. Certainly global warming is clear evidence of our transformative potential, though not a very good or “artistic” one. And in more recent times, we have been fucking with the gene pool to make our descendants more resistant to diseases, or to take on attributes we find preferable (oh yeah, no bigotry problems here, nooooo.) So far, however, these biological changes have taken a very long time, and will more than likely take another Very Long Time before we “evolve” into another species altogether.

Barring extinction, of course.

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Lancet has published a new study seeking to replicate the original article’s findings. Result? No dice.

This study provides strong evidence against association of autism with persistent MV RNA in the GI tract or MMR exposure. Autism with GI disturbances is associated with elevated rates of regression in language or other skills and may represent an endophenotype distinct from other ASD.

I’m with the The NY Times editorial board on this one:

The new study adds weight to a growing body of epidemiological studies and reviews that have debunked the notion that childhood vaccines cause autism. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization have found no evidence of a causal link between vaccines and autism.

Meanwhile, the original paper’s publisher — The Lancet — complained in 2004 that the lead author had concealed a conflict of interest. Ten of his co-authors retracted the paper’s implication that the vaccine might be linked to autism. Three of the authors are now defending themselves before a fitness-to-practice panel in London on charges related to their autism research.

Sadly, even after all of this, many parents of autistic children still blame the vaccine. The big losers in this debate are the children who are not being vaccinated because of parental fears and are at risk of contracting serious — sometimes fatal — diseases.

Parents of autistic children have reason to begrudge Lancet for publishing the originally misleading study. But that should not absolve us from resisting the paranoia it contributed to, especially now that the original findings have been refuted.

Tags: autism, vaccinations, MMR, Lancet study

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From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Tags: creationism, evolution, science, fundamentalism, religion, education

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Someone should tell the BushAdmin, which currently forbids Park Service employees from commenting on the age of the canyon out of deference for Young Earth Creationists. Indeed, the Grand Canyon tourist shop sells copies of a Grand Canyon: A Different View, a book purporting that the canyon was created by Noah’s Flood – and one geologists want removed.

My friend Patrick likes to tell the story of how his friend Barry, at Patrick’s request, tried to get a park official to tell him how old the canyon was; but the ranger refused, bearing a grimace of helpless shame as pointed him toward the book shop.*

Want a glimpse into the reasoning behind the Noah’s Flood claim? Check this site hyar. A snippet:

Well, sure. There’s no way that teeny widdle river could carve through that much rock in only 6,000 years. UNLESS, that is, there was some CATACLYSMIC event. Like, say, a really, really, really, really HUGE flood. With a guy in a boat with all the world’s animals paired up. Except the dinosaurs, who were just too damn nasty to have around. I mean, c’mon – lookit the size of them! They kept eating all the people, anyway. REBOOT!

But what if, say, the river had 17 MILLION YEARS, along with plate tectonics and other geologic forces that come along in that time? Wouldn’t that be, I dunno, “common sense”? Here’s the NY Times:

By dating mineral deposits inside caves up and down the canyon walls, the geologists said they determined the water levels over time, as erosion carved out the mile-deep canyon as it is known today. They concluded that the canyon started from the west, then another formed from the east, and the two broke through and met as a single majestic rent in the earth some six million years ago.

Previous theories had posited six million years as the earliest age for the beginning of the entire Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.

That’s what’s nice about science. They revise. New data comes along, and old theories get replaced by new ones. No one’s claiming absolute proof, just reasonable certainty. And scientists, while often guilty of being condescending and impatient, tend not to frame their arguments with contentions that a failure to accept their evidence is a straight path to hell:

Dude, I know I’m a dick, but really? Eternal hellfire? Jeez….

* This paragraph reflects corrections I have made since consulting Patrick. Originally I had misreported that Patrick himself had asked Grand Canyon park officials about the age of the canyon. Actually, Patrick had read the Huffington Post story about the Park Service reluctance to give an answer, and asked his friend Barry to check it out for him.

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