Category Archives: Uncategorized
How Many People Were Slaves In The North vs. The South?
As part of the current discussion of the use of the Concrete Flag to express one’s Free Asshatitute, in particular in relation to a volunteer firefighter who stuck one of the flags on the fire truck turing the Independence Day Parade in a small community in Outstate Minnesota, I saw someone state that there were more slaves in the North than in the South.
Specifically, the individual, commenting on a the flag story on a local news site, said:
Now, this particular joker was trying to say that there were lots of white people who “may as well have been slaves” in the North, or words to that effect. That is of course absurd because while there might have been (and later in history certainly was) a lot of exploitation of workers and poor and such, nobody was being owned, bred, treated like animals with the full force of the law, etc. Anyway, I found others making similar claims and claims and apparently some folks actually think that slavery was widespread in both the North and South.
Here are the data from the 1860 US Census, the census that measures the distribution of slaves at the start of the Civil War.
And I made a pie chart just for fun:
So now you know.
Gemini
Gemini is what got me into space, science, all of it. Amy Shira Teitel can bring you up to speed.
Gemini worked out almost everything that had to be worked out to go to the moon. Not the part with the big fire cracker under the tin can to take off from the moon, but most of the rest of it.
Science Communication Gone Rong!
And, just for fun, right after I tweeted this post, I got this:
What Woman Should Be On The Ten Dollar US Bill?
The US Treasury Department has announced that the $10 bill will have a depiction of a woman, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which allowed women to vote.
And now, apparently, everyone can vote on who that woman will be. Or, at least, make a suggestion.
The bill will be come on line in 2020.
You can learn more go HERE.
So, who do you think it should be?
#Bill The Storm Meme
NASA GISS Surface Temperature Graphs for May 2015
Provided here so you can get a higher resolution version of the graph. Click on the graph to get the full res version.
See here for a writeup on this month’s data.
What is the Magna Carta?
It begins with a garden or two. Once you have gardens, you have a resource that has the two most important characteristics anything can have with respect to human society. First, you can eat it. Second, your enemies can destroy it.
If you have just a few gardens and get your food somewhere else, no big deal. But back in the old days, and by “old days” I mean any time during the last several thousand years everywhere and anywhere that is not urbanized and has gardens, most people relied on their gardens. These gardens were maintained by families or small villages or occasionally larger cooperatives.
Since a garden can be destroyed by enemies, you have to have a way of defending the garden and everything else. So weapons, militarism, bellicosity, and all that become normal. Note that you could have a herd of beasts instead of a garden and something like this would still happen. Note that if among your beasts there are those you can mount, usually horses, then your weapons, militarism, bellicosity, and all that are now much taller and can run faster, so if you are the only ones with that setup you win.
This all leads eventually to an arms race that usually no one wins for too long. This is the Hobbesian world of Warre, where people are nasty brutish and short, or at least, their lives are. Eventually almost everyone in the world is doing this. Societies that resemble Medieval Europe’s Feudalism emerge wherever there is enough of this going on, which is why a French Knight and a Japanese Shogun and a Shona Chief are all kinda alike.
Then, something like climate change happens. Not the globally devastating climate change we are seeing today, but something likely more regional and not as severe, but that affects everyone’s gardens in roughly the same way. Over here you have famine more often, but over there you have higher productivity many years in a row. Maybe there is a three year long drought that causes mass migration, or maybe there is a summer with out a winter.
Or, if not climate change, population density increases too much and the gardens are not enough. So less than ideal land is planted, or more rapid turnover of cropping in a swidden system becomes normal, or something like that happens. People need to cooperate more to irrigate more, or to store or move around food more. The garden’s of the village become something slightly different.
In any event, the pot is stirred, but when you stir the Stone Soup of society over a large area, you don’t increase homogeneity like when you put all the different stuff in a blender to make a smoothy. Some stuff gets all mixed together evenly but other stuff clumps up and gets all goopy. The goopy parts, the clumps, those are Lords, or Bishops, or Shogan, or Overlords, or something that is bigger than in the old days. Instead of the guy in charge (and it will almost always be a guy because men can’t have babies and thus feel the need to take over everybody else’s junk all the time) being older and stronger and better connected than the other guys in a village, the guy in charge is the one with an extra 100 horses or a better blade or a clever strategy like stabbing the other guys up close instead of throwing something at them.
This is how you get a king.
Once you have one king, you’ll get other kings, or emperors, or whatever, until finally the only way somebody can be a lord or a chief is to suck up the king and that means fighting for the king. And taxes, you get them too. The gardens are now owned by the king, or if not, might as well be. The most convenient way to make this work, by the way, is to make sure that most people are not valid individuals, that they don’t have a place at the table. Those would be the slaves, or peasants, or whatever you want to call them.
Now there are kings or the equivalent everywhere, and some of them are relatively good and some are relatively bad. Badness may be enhanced by technology. Perhaps you’ve invented beer or wine but store it in lead casks so the privilaged few with the drink are more likely to be brain damaged. Or perhaps there is a mind-damaging venereal disease kings tend to get. Or perhaps just bad upbringing. Sometimes you get boy kings because the system of inheritance of power requires it, even though that is totally dumb. Boy kings can go either way. They tend to totally burn out or, alternatively, take over the world, eventually.
And you have kings with more power or with less power.
Eventually, in a region, something the size of a European Country or so, you get both a bad bad man as a king and a king that is very powerful all wrapped up in the same person. Everything that is bad about this sort of self organized system is now worse than it has ever been in anyone’s memory. It isn’t just the peasants taking it in the neck, but also, people in the middle who have power, lords and chiefs and such. Straws fall among the elite breaking one camel’s back after another.
This is when the people in the middle, who have now lost their power, insist on an agreement with the King that happens to benefit the peasants and slaves of the very distant future. That would be the Magna Carta, in the case of England. Other parts of the world have had other outcomes.
The BBC on the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, has produced a fun and interesting video exploring this history (though it starts later in time than the history I just outlined above.)
Are Pigs Really Like People?
We hear this all the time. Pig physiology is like people physiology. Pigs and humans have the same immune system, same digestive system, get the same diseases. Pigs are smart like people are smart. Pigs are smarter than dogs. And so on. Ask a faunal expert in archaeology or a human paleoanatomist: Pig teeth are notoriously like human teeth, when fragmented. Chances are most of these alleged similarities are overstated, or are simply because we are all mammals. Some are because we happen to have similar diets (see below). None of these similarities occur because of a shared common ancestor or because we are related to pigs evolutionarily, though there are people who claim that humans are actually chimpanzee-pig hybrids. We aren’t.
But what if it is true that pigs and humans ended up being very similar in a lot of ways? What if many of the traits we attribute to our own species, but that are rare among non-human animals, are found in pigs? Well, before addressing that question, it is appropriate to find out if the underlying assumption has any merit at all. A new study by Lori Marino and Christina Colvin, “Thinking Pigs: A Comparative Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Personality in Sus domesticus,” published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, provides a starting point.
There are two things you need to know about this study. First, it is a review, looking at a large number of prior studies of pigs. It is not new research and it is not a critical meta-study of the type we usually see in health sciences. The various studies reviewed are not uniformly evaluated and there is no attempt at assessing the likelihood that any particular result is valid. That is not the intent of the study, which is why it is called a review and not a meta-study, I assume. But such reviews have value because they put a wide range of literature in one place which forms a starting point for other research. The second thing you need to know is that the authors are heavily invested in what we loosely call “animal rights,” as members of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy and the Someone Project (Farm Sanctuary). From this we can guess that a paper that seems to show pigs-human similarities would ultimately be used for advocating for better treatment for domestic pigs, which are raised almost entirely for meat. There is nothing wrong with that, but it should be noted.
In a moment I’ll run down the interesting findings on pig behavior, but first I want to outline the larger context of what such results may mean. The paper itself does not make an interpretive error about pig behavior and cognition, but there is a quote in the press release that I’m afraid will lead to such an error, and I want to address this. The quote from the press release is:
Dr. Marino explains that “We have shown that pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans. There is good scientific evidence to suggest we need to rethink our overall relationship to them.”
What does that mean? In particular, what does the word “relationship” mean? In a behavioral comparative study, “relationship” almost always refers to the evolutionary structure of the traits being observed. For example, consider the question of self awareness, as often tested with the Gallup Test, which measures Mirror Self Recognition (MSR). If a sufficient sample of test animals, when looking in a mirror almost always perceive a conspecific, then that species is considered to not have MSR. If most, or even many, individuals see themselves, then that species is said to have MSR, a kind of self awareness that is linked to a number of important other cognitive capacities.
Humans have MSR. So, do our nearest relatives, the chimps have it? Do the other apes have it? Other primates? Is this a general mammalian capacity or is it a special-snowflake trait of our own species? It turns out that all the great apes have MSR, but primates generally do not. It may or may not appear among other primates (mostly not). So MSR reflects something that evolved, likely, in the common ancestor of humans and all the other apes. So, the relationship among the primates with respect to MSR, phylogenetically, is that MSR is a shared derived trait of the living apes, having evolved in or prior to that clade’s last common ancestor.
But we also see MSR in other species including, for example, elephants. The presents of MSR in elephants does not mean MSR is a widespread trait that humans and elephants both have because a common ancestor hat it. Rather, in some cases (the great apes), MSR is clustered in a set of closely related species because it evolved in their ancestor, and at the same time, it appears here and there among other species for either similar reasons, or perhaps even for different reasons.
This is why the word “relationship” is so important in this kind of research.
It is clear that Dr. Marino does not use the word “relationship” in that press release to mean that pigs and humans share interesting cognitive and behavioral traits because of common ancestry, but rather, I assume, the implication is that we may want to think harder about how we treat pigs because they are a bit like us.
One could argue, of course, that a species that is a lot like us for reasons other than shared evolutionary history is a bit spooky. Uncanny valley spooky. Or, one could argue that such a species is amazing and wonderful, because we humans know we are amazing and wonderful so they should be too. Indeed one could argue, as I have elsewhere, that similarity due to shared ancestry and similarity due to evolutionary convergence are separate and distinct factors in how we ultimately define our relationship to other species, how we treat them, what we do or not do with them. The important thing here, that I want to emphasize, is that human-pig similarity is not the same thing as human-chimp similarity. Both are important but they are different and should not be conflated. I honestly don’t think the paper’s authors are conflating them, but I guarantee that if this paper gets picked up by the press, conflation will happen. I’ll come back to a related topic at the end of this essay.
I’ve been interested in pigs for a long time. I’ve had a lot of interactions with wild pigs while working in Africa, both on the savanna and the rain forest. One of the more cosmopolitain species, an outlier because it is a large animal, is the bush pig. Bush pigs live in very arid environments as well as the deepest and darkest rain forests. There are more specialized pigs as well. The forest pig lives pretty much only in the forest, and the warthog does not, preferring savanna and somewhat dry habitats. Among the African species, the bush pig is most like the presumed wild form of the domestic pig, which for its part lived across a very large geographical area (Eurasia) and in a wide range of habitats. I would not be surprised if their populations overlapped at some times in the past. This is interesting because it is very likely that some of the traits reviewed by Marino and Colvin allow wild pigs to live in such a wide range of habitats. There are not many large animals that have such a cosmopolitain distribution. Pigs, elephants, humans, a few others. Things that know something about mirrors. Coincidence? Probably not.
Pigs (Sus domesticus and its wild form) have an interesting cultural history in the west. During more ancient times, i.e., the Greek and Roman classical ages, pigs were probably very commonly raised and incorporated in high culture. One of Hercules seven challenges was to mess with a giant boar. Pigs are represented in ancient art and iconography as noble, or important, and generally, with the same level of importance as cattle.
Then something went off for the pigs. Today, two of the major Abrahamic religions view pigs as “unclean.” Ironically, this cultural insult is good for the pigs, because it also takes them right off the menu. In modern Western culture, most pigs are viewed as muddy, dirty, squealing, less than desirable forms. Bad guys are often depicted as pigs. One in three pigs don’t understand their main predator, the wolf. There are important rare exceptions but they are striking because they are exceptions. This denigration of pigs in the West is not found globally, and in Asia pigs have always been cool, sometimes revered, always consumed.
I should note that I learned a lot of this stuff about pigs working with my good fiend and former student Melanie Fillios, who did her thesis (published here) on complexity in Bronze Age Greece, and that involved looking at the role of pigs in the urban and rural economies. At that time Melanie and I looked at the comparative behavioral and physical biology of cattle vs. pigs. This turns out to be very interesting. If you started out with a two thousand pounds of pig and two thousand pounds of cattle, and raised them as fast as you could to increase herd size, in a decade you would have a large herd of cattle, but if you had been raising pigs, you’d have enough pigs to cover the earth in a layer of them nine miles thick. OK, honesty, I just made those numbers up, but you get the idea; Pigs can reproduce more than once a year, have large litters, come to maturity very quickly, and grow really fast. Cattle don’t reproduce as fast, grow slower, take longer to reach maturity, and have only one calf at a time.
On the other hand, if you have cattle, you also have, potentially, milk (and all that provides), hoof and horn (important in ancient economies) and maybe better quality leather. I’ll add this for completeness: Goats are basically small cows with respect to these parameters.
Now, having said all that, I’ll summarize the material in the paper so you can learn how amazing pigs are. From the press release:
have excellent long-term memories; are whizzes with mazes and other tests requiring location of desired objects; can comprehend a simple symbolic language and can learn complex combinations of symbols for actions and objects; love to play and engage in mock fighting with each other, similar to play in dogs and other mammals; live in complex social communities where they keep track of individuals and learn from one another; cooperate with one another and show signs of Machiavellian intelligence such as perspective-taking and tactical deception; can manipulate a joystick to move an on-screen cursor, a capacity they share with chimpanzees; can use a mirror to find hidden food; exhibit a form of empathy when witnessing the same emotion in another individual.
Pigs are very snout oriented. They have lots of nerve endings in their snouts and can use the information they get from this tactile organ for social interactions and finding food. They can tell things apart very easily, learn new classifications, and remember objects and things about them. This makes sense for an animal that forages at the ground surface, including underground, for a very wide range of food types.
One of the cool human traits we often look for in other animals is the ability to time travel. We don’t actually travel in time, but in our minds, we can put ourselves in other places and other times, and run scenarios. Some of the basic capacities required to do this include a sense of lengths of times for future events or situations, and an understanding of these differences. Pigs can learn that of two enclosures they can choose from, one will let them out sooner than the other one, for example.
Pigs have excellent spatial memory and can learn where things are and how to find them. They can do mazes as well as other animals that have been tested in this area.
Pigs have individual personalities, to a large degree, and can discriminate among other individuals and recognize certain aspects of their mental state. This applies to other individual pigs as well as individuals of other species (like humans).
Pigs have a certain degree of Machiavellian intelligence. This is rare in the non-human animal world. If a pig has the foraging pattern for a given area down well, and a potential competitor pig is introduced, the knowledgable pig will play dumb about finding food. They don’t have MSR but they can use mirrors to find food.
Now, back to the evolutionary context. I’ve already hinted about this a few times. Pigs and humans share their cosmopolitain distribution, with large geographic ranges and a diversity of habitats. We also share a diverse diet. But, it goes beyond that, and you probably know that I’ve argued this before. Pigs are root eaters, as are humans, and this feature of our diet is probably key in our evolutionary history. From my paper, with Richard Wrangham, on this topic:
We propose that a key change in the evolution of hominids from the last common ancestor shared with chimpanzees was the substitution of plant underground storage organs (USOs) for herbaceous vegetation as fallback foods. Four kinds of evidence support this hypothesis: (1) dental and masticatory adaptations of hominids in comparison with the African apes; (2) changes in australopith dentition in the fossil record; (3) paleoecological evidence for the expansion of USO-rich habitats in the late Miocene; and (4) the co-occurrence of hominid fossils with root-eating rodents. We suggest that some of the patterning in the early hominid fossil record, such as the existence of gracile and robust australopiths, may be understood in reference to this adaptive shift in the use of fallback foods. Our hypothesis implicates fallback foods as a critical limiting factor with far-reaching evolutionary e?ects. This complements the more common focus on adaptations to preferred foods, such as fruit and meat, in hominid evolution.
Pigs and humans actually share dental and chewing adaptations adapted, in part, for root eating. The pig’s snout and the human’s digging stick have been suggested (see the paper) as parallelisms. And so on.
Yes, humans and pigs share an interesting evolutionary relationship, with many of our traits being held in common. But this is not because of shared ancestry, but rather, because of similar adaptive change, independent, in our evolutionary history. This whole root eating thing arose because of a global shift from forests to mixed woodland and otherwise open habitats, which in turn encouraged the evolution of underground storage organs among many species of plants, which in turn caused the rise of a number of above ground root eaters, animals that live above the surface but dig. Not many, but some. Pigs, us, and a few others.
That does not make us kin, but it does make us kindred.
ScienceDebate.org: Interview with Sheril Kirshenbaum
In 2008, I was visiting the Nobel Conference held annually at Gustavus Adolphus college in Minnestoa. The conference was on Human Evolution. The college provided space in a large room for people to have their lunch, and while I was having lunch on the first day, I noticed a table off to the side staffed by a serious looking man with a clipboard. The front of his table was adorned with a large “Science Debate 08” banner. Seemed interesting. So I wandered over and had a chat.
It turns out the man was Shawn Otto, one of the co-founders of Science Debate. Shawn, a Minnesota resident, is the author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the assault on science in America (and more recently this award winning novel). I’ve been closely following ScienceDebate ever since. (Though I certainly heard about ScienceDebate 08 earlier than that since it first launched on Scienceblogs.com … that long afternoon conversation with Shawn really drew me in.)
Science Debate was, and still is, a project intent on making the debate over science policy issues a normal part of the American presidential election process. We typically see candidates debate a few times during the election cycle, first within parties then after nominations are made between the major candidates. The debates are often divided up among a set of topics such as “The Economy” or “Foreign Policy.” Sometimes the topics pertain to an entire debate, other times, a single debate is parceled out into a few different topics. Given the importance of science to so much policy, it seems to be a good idea to have a debate, or part of one or more debates, on science and science policy.’
This does not mean a debate about the science. It means a debate about the relationship between science and policy. A good question about science might be, “What do you think is the best estimate of climate sensitivity, the global surface temperature increase produced by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial levels, given what we know about the Earth’s climate system?” But that would be a bad question for politicians running for US President. A good question about science policy might be “Most climate scientists are concerned that if we see a global surface warming of about 2.0 degrees Celsius by mid century, there would be severe negative consequences. What are the first policies you would try to implement and support to keep us under this 2.0 degree target?”
Many candidates, especially Republicans this year, like to note that they are not scientists, and therefore can’t really talk about science. But members of the Congress and the President pass or enforce laws that address science related issues. Saying “I am not a scientist” is similar to saying “I am not an economist” or “I am not a doctor” or “I am not a political science professor” in order to avoid questions about the economy, health care, or foreign policy. It doesn’t wash, and seems to not have been an effective way of dodging scientific issues.
ScienceDebate, the organization, has made a statement and asked people to sign on to it. The statement reads:
“Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for public debates in which the U.S. presidential and congressional candidates share their views on the issues of science and technology policy, health and medicine, and the environment.”
One of the key organizers of ScienceDebate is energy policy expert and writer Sheril Kirshenbaum. Regular readers of this blog will know of Sheril from my review of her book on the history of kissing. I recently contacted Sheril and asked her a few questions about ScienceDebate. Here is the interview.
Question: Election season is underway already. What are the goals for ScienceDebate.org for this US presidential election cycle?
Answer: Our first priority right now is raising awareness of ScienceDebate, especially beyond the science community. ScienceDebate is an initiative working to get Presidential candidates on record about what their policies would be on a variety of science topics like human health, climate change, food security and more. These issues affect everyone, no matter what party we’re affiliated with. And they are not “science” challenges, they are humanity’s challenges.
Question: What have you learned from the previous iterations of ScienceDebate’s efforts that will change what you do this time around?
Answer: During the past two presidential elections, all three major candidates (President Obama, Senator McCain, and GOP-candidate Romney) responded in writing to 14 questions cultivated and reviewed by our team on science and technology policy. Results were widely distributed in print and online prior to the elections through media partnerships with popular magazines and journals. President Obama formed a science policy team to help him respond, which helped him arrive in office with a clear idea of how science fit into his overall strategic objectives.
Now we are scaling up our efforts. We are working on a PSA campaign, bringing new media experts and community leaders into the initiative, and focused on the long-term sustainability of ScienceDebate.
Answer: Definitely. For example, back in 2008, Just six of nearly 3000 questions posed to then Senator Obama and Senator McCain by prime time interviewers even mentioned “climate change” or “global warming.”
In 2015, candidates are already talking about climate change regularly in their campaigns. Hillary Clinton is the first major candidate to make climate and energy policies central in her campaign. So we already know science will play a larger role in the election for 2016 than in previous years.
We’ve also seen science percolate out into mainstream culture in a big way over the past eight years. Television shows like The Big Bang Theory and Breaking Bad feature science as major themes. Cosmos came back with with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Bill Nye makes headlines regularly. There is a greater cultural appreciation of science than before.
Question: Science is, or should be, behind good science policy. Currently, what major areas of science do you see as central to a science debate for 2016?
Answer: With more severe droughts, storms, and floods, climate change is critical to address – as well as many related topics like food security, water availability and energy. Innovation and the economy are inherently related to science and technology so those are important too. Global leadership, research funding, biosecurity, pandemics, mental health, space exploration, ocean health, cybersecurity – there are a lot of areas to discuss and most aren’t mutually exclusive. We invite everyone to submit their topic ideas at our website for consideration.
*Question: The US effectively has a two party system. Is it fair to say that one of the parties has actually taken on anti-science as central to its dogma and approach? How does this impact on efforts to develop a science debate?
Having said that, is it true that anti-science attitudes exist across the political spectrum, and if so, how are the various issues structured across the parties? In other words, are there science policy issues that Democrats are bad at and different issues that Republicans are bad at? What are they?
Answer: To be clear, ScienceDebate does not weigh in on how candidates respond to questions on science policy – we leave that for other groups and media outlets. Our primary goal is to get all candidates on record on a variety of science topics before Election Day so we can be more informed as voters when we go to the polls.
Question: What can an interested person do for Sciencedebate? How can individuals get involved?
Answer: Visit our website, www.sciencedebate.org and add your name to show your support that science matters and should be discussed along the campaign trail. Help us share the message with your social networks and encourage friends to sign on as well. By increasing our numbers – now well over 42K including Congresspeople, Nobel laureates, over 100 university presidents, and many organizations – we are making the case that science cannot be treated as a special interest in politics, and should be a central part of the decision making process. Readers interested to get more involved in their communities can also contact me at sheril [at] sciencedebate.org.
The Magnificent Seven Nobel Laureates of Bjorn Lomborg
Bjorn Lomborg often touts, and has done so recently, that his Copenhagen Consensus Center works with seven Nobel Laureates. I’ve always let that pass but wondered if it was really true, who they were, and what that involvement consisted of. Graham Readfearn of DeSmog Blog has done the hard work of running this down and he found out that this is not as impressive as it seems. For one thing, one of the Seven is not actually alive. Of the other six, at least one is a very well known climate change contrarian, and overall the amount of work, and the quality of the work, they have produced is unimpressive.
Here is a meme I made to commerate Graham’s efforts:
Click the image to get the full size original.
Click here to learn more about Lomborg.
Secular Americans are more numerous than Catholic Americans
The “Nones” are rising, at the expense of the Nuns.
From “Openly Secular“:
Recently, two studies have been released that affirm the number of nonreligious Americans is rising. For several years, the percentage of secular Americans has been increasing rapidly and the media has been reporting on it. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes abundantly clear that this new data is fundamentally different and demonstrates a significant shift in the hearts and mind of American citizens, and critically, American voters.
These new studies, one conducted by the Pew Research Center on Religion & Public Life, the other by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) reveal that not only are there more religiously unaffiliated Americans (often called “nones”), but more of these people are calling themselves atheists or agnostics. At the same time, the number of Americans who identify as Christians is shrinking.
Since 1993, the percentage of Americans who claim no formal religious affiliation has grown from 9% to 22% according to the PRRI study. No other group has risen as sharply. Not only is the overall number of unaffiliated Americans surging, a greater proportion of these “nones” are identifying as secular. The Pew study shows that 31% of the “nones”—representing 17 million Americans—self identify as atheist or agnostic, up from 25% in 2007. An additional 39% of the “nones” say that religion is not important to them, which means 15.8% of the total population of the United States is atheist, agnostic, or secular.
Almost sixteen percent of potential voters carries a lot of political clout. A group of voters this large who believe in the separation of church and state simply cannot be ignored.
“This data is particularly meaningful as the 2016 presidential election approaches,” says Todd Stiefel, Chair of Openly Secular. “For the first time, politicians will not be able to ignore the substantial voting bloc of secular Americans. We have real clout and we vote. As the number of secular people continues to rise, more and more Americans will come to realize that many of their loved ones, next-door neighbors and coworkers do not believe in God, and that they are still moral, good people.”
Transparency vs. Harassment
Michael Halpern, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and climate scientist Michael Mann have written an editorial for Science, “Transparency and harassment.”
Open records laws hold Universities and other public institutions accountable, protecting against biasing influences such as we might see from funding sources. (See: Cry for me Willie Soon).
Over the last couple of decades, interpersonal conversations among researchers have shifted from the milieu of vibrating air molecules in a room (or transformed into electrical signals and transferred over a phone) to electronic form. Today, a very large part of the conversation ongoing among research colleagues, or teachers and students, ends up in emails or other forms of eCommunication.
Activists of any stipe have increasingly been using open records laws and regulations to access these private conversations, as well as early drafts of papers and other information. Halpern and Mann make the point that “[t]hese requests can attack and intimidate academics, threatening their reputations, chilling their speech, disrupting their research, discouraging them from tackling contentious topics, and ultimately confusing the public.”
They ask what is the appropriate way to attain transparency while at the same time not stifling research or producing an uncontrolled form of political weaponry ripe for abuse?
Not only is excessive and invasive use of open records procedure intrusive and intimidating, it is also costly. There have been several instances, cited by Halpern and Mann, of institutions spending significant resources on addressing requests for information, a cost that is paid whether or not the information is actually accessed in the end. And, when this goes to court, the costs go up. In one case, Mann’s institution was hit with information requests that came ultimately as a result of a congressional investigation. Halpern and Mann report that in this case,
The Virginia Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that excessive disclosure could put the university at a “competitive disadvantage,” and cause “harm to university-wide research efforts, damage to faculty recruitment and retention, undermining of faculty expectations of privacy and confidentiality, and impairment of free thought and expression.”
Halpern and Mann suggest that institutions such as Universities get up to speed, and get their researchers and faculty up to speed, to know how to properly handle information requests, “not to determine the appropriate response, but to help employees understand how access to correspondence could be misused.” If this is done, there may ultimately emerge a set of standards that fill in the logic gap between fair and reasonable disclosure and normal collegiate conversation. In short, Halpern and Mann are asking for a modernization of disclosure and transparency law and procedure, with the ultimate goal of creating legitimate public trust in science and avoiding the stifling effects of misuse of open records law.
The editorial is here, but it may be behind a paywall.
What is scientific consensus?
A group of scientists attending a major conference get together in a bar. They talk, but they agree on nothing because they are critical academics. The server comes along to take the beer order and says, “I noticed you all are constantly arguing. What are you arguing about?”
“Sensitivity,” one of them says. “It is the number of degrees C the Earth’s surface will warm with a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Is it 2, 3, 4? … We cant settle on a number”
The server considers their plight for a moment. Suddenly, she rips several sheets out of her order book and hands one to each of the scientists. She notices they all already have pens and mechanical pencils in their shirt pockets.
“Each of you write down a number for sensitivity. Don’t share. I’ll look at them all and if they are all the same number I’ll bring you your beer for free for the rest of the evening.”
The scientists comply. She looks at their numbers. They are all the same. Despite the quibbling they all had the same sense for what the number for climate “sensitivity” likely is. They get free beer for the evening.
Scientific consensus is what most scientists will nitpick about but ultimately agree on if free beer is at stake.
My first homework assignment for Making Sense of Climate Denial.
The funniest thing ever
Just so you know. This is not something where you watch the first minute and get it and go “oh that’s funny” or not and them move on. The plot is complex you must watch it until the very very end or don’t bother. Just sayin’ this because people seem to not do that a lot. Not a good way to go through life.
Anyway, watch this. Be prepared to ROFLYAO.
