I'm not sure exactly what the arguements Fodor puts forth in his book, but if he just stuck to attacking the notion that what evolutionary theorist types do is 'science' or more to the point can be, and therefore will ever be, science, that would work quite well, given that the theory of evolution isn't scientifically demonstratable at all. I wouldn't think that being a philosopher type in theis instance, and not a biologist, would hamper them at all, examining chains of inference is philosophy, not biology, and if one had to pick out one group of people who's thinking on what a scientific chain of inference looks like being really really bad, evolutionist theorists who think they're doing science would do just fine.

You forgot Ken Griffey Jr. His father played right field for the Big Red Machine in the 70's. 
 
Per Steve Hsu above: 
 
I do believe that, above a certain cutoff, academic science is the single largest accumulator of top-ability brains. I can debate that with anyone who wants to claim otherwise (perhaps citing hedge funds, silicon valley, defense industry, etc.). 
 
In intellectual life, the 'best' intellectual is... the one other people think is the smartest. In academia, getting other people to think you're clever is literally how one gets ahead, and the process is formalized. This isn't to say that the signal to noise level is always low, it doesn't seem to be low at all in the hard sciences, pure or applied, and math, in that actually being clever is indispensible, or at least looms large, to getting the tenure committee to think you're clever, though the rest of the academy doesn't seem to work like that. Either way it would seem that the way professors get chosen would seem to midwife an enormous amount of selection pressure for people who care how clever other people think they are over people who don't care how clever other people think they are. 
 
What would be the deciding factor as to who'd win a prizeless 'who is the smartest' debate?

How do you buy stuff off Amazon if you don't have a credit card?

Lot's goin on in that, but as far as the western part of the roman empire being involved, the Church ending up as it did was somewhat intentional in that Constantine sort of wanted it that way. 
 
The late roman empire was exactly that, an empire, a state without anything resembling a nation or a tribe that went along with it. When the empire fell, there were lot's and lot's of different tribes running around, Burgundians, Franks, Lombards, Goths, who were Burgundians... first and foremost, that's where their tribal allegiance lay. By say 1000, or even a bit earlier, there weren't any such tribes anymore, and a European in a Catholic area's tribe was confessional, RCism was his tribe. France was a kingdom, not a nation, and France and the French, or England and the English, as they are understood now, did not as yet exist, and noone who lived in England or France identified themselves as such, not even on the level a modern day Red Sox fan identifies with Red Sox nation. If the real John of Gaunt had delivered the 'this England' speech in the 1390's that Shakespeare puts in his mouth in a play written in the 1590's, his contemporaries would have looked at him like he was from Mars. 
 
I don't know how this might relate to India or China, but this state of affairs coming about was policy as far as the Church was concerned, and they obviously succeeded most of the time (England, but not Ireland, being a failure).

I'm a reader, who also didn't fill out the survey. I've got 5 kids like Cochrane also. I go to church too, if you want to figure that in. I've got a wife, kids, a very demanding job, and no time to waste reading blogs, but I do it anyway. GNXP is a great timewaster.

Every high school graduating class is the best ever and every set of presidential candidates are the worst pair ever. 
 
Two constants in an ever changing universe.

One last, per German being 'earthy'. 
 
I'd ssay that it is at least possible, that German sounds 'earthy' to us and French sounds 'airy', because of what the German and French words mean in English. 
 
If anyone in GNXP's wide international readership is a native Chinese speaker, does German sound 'earthy' and French sound 'airy' to native Chinese speakers?

I've wondered about stuff like that too. 
 
Of course our latinate vocabulary comes mostly from French, but I'd bet words that don't really resound in the gut to an English speaker might do so to a French speaker, so they don't really mean the same thing even if they were synonyms on some sort of level. I'd also suppose that lots of words that don't create a gut reaction that are directly from latin, very well did to an ancient Roman. I'm not sure that just the specifics to how it sounds matters all that much. 
 
But maybe it does and I'm wrong. French, Latin, and Greek, have reputations for being better 'philosophical' languages than English, because the words themselves, based on how they're pronounced not getting to the hearer's gut, but... I kind of doubt it. I can just imagine a native French speaker listening to some guy like Marshal Ney going off on a cussing tirade would hear something very much like us listening to General Patton doing the same, while he would sound vaguely ridiculous to us, because French doesn't sound all that cussed to us. 
 
Maybe the French commenter above could help us out on that score.

Per that LOTR quote: 
 
The passage gets it's coolness from the fact that every word in it leads to an emotional response in a native English speaker. The point about the latinate vocabulary is precisely, to a native English speaker, that it doesn't.

Per Orwell: 
 
I thought that 'Politics in the English Language' essay was at least partly about mealy mouthed usage of English's latinate vocabulary where a politician might use to say something but not say it, as when someone might say that there are too many deer, so we have to 'liquidate some portion of the deer population' rather than 'kill a lot of deer' (or people). In a native English speaker, words like 'kill', 'murder', and 'slaughter', I guess cause neurons to fire that cause neurons in the limbic system to fire, while the neuron for 'liquidate' isn't connected to the limbic system. Since 'connected to neurons in one's limbic system' doesn't fire any neurons in the limbic system, I guess a better way of putting that, is that a native English speaker understands "kill" in his belly as well as his head, but "liquidate" only in his head. 
 
Given that Z does a lot of controversial topics in his posts, I think staying with the latinate vocabulary is probably a good idea. If he were to go Anglo Saxon, the comment section would probably get a lot less high minded.

Per all that 'broken windows' stuff. I have a cousin who until recently was a lieutenant in the NYPD. His take on the whole broken windows stuff wasn't that enforcing small laws directly made big crimes like murder and assault go away, it was people who broke small laws tended to be the same people who broke big laws, and putting them away lowered the amount of big crimes. 
 
Also, if one stopped someone who just jumped a subway turnstyle, you'd search him, and you'd often find some drugs on him. Drug possession is a great charge for getting a perp off the streets, since drug possession is an open and shut sort of case, where assault, grand theft auto, and burglary, let alone murder, are generally harder crimes for a DA to build a case for. Since the perps for the big crimes tend to break small laws while carrying a vial of crack, and a stop and search for this is an open and shut conviction, that's how 'broken windows' lowers crime, it gets the perps for big crimes off the street on lesser charges. 
 
Per lots of theories about crime like leaded gas, just having a crime rate like the one in 1964 doesn't mean that crime in a general sense is the at the same level as 1964. If one had the same crime rate as in 1964 and the same prison population that there was in 1964, then you're back to where you were. A "true" crime rate would not be about counting crimes but counting criminals, and per that measure we haven't got anywhere on reducing crime in the past 15 years.

Per the "new" atheists, one of the things that the "old" atheists got right about atheism that the new atheists don't, is that one cannot do the whole judging men or their behavior as "good" and "bad", given that atheism, properly understood, doesn't recognize any standard of judgement to measure men against. 
 
Afew posts ago, Razib posited what some people think of as the "good life". The "good life" doesn't really work on it's own, a "good life" will differ depending on if one is a lion or a cockroach or a man. A "good life" per humans will be the sort of life a "good man" will at least attempt to lead when not under any form of compulsion, i.e. naturally. 
 
One of the things religions do is provide an ideal man, or the standard of judgement that men are measured against in order to pronounce goodness or badness on them. Atheims precludes any sort of standard of judgement beyond the likes/dislikes of individual men, the most an atheist like Dawkins can coherently say is that when he pronounces so and so or his actions good and so and so or his actions bad, is that he likes or dislikes what so and so does. Dawkins, or especially Hitchens think that there is something more to the whole good/bad thing so whatever one can say about their critiques of whatever brand of theism they make, one might expect them to get a better handle on atheism first, if they want to say something intelligent on the subject.

I think this whole thing is an example of 'libertarianism', which with regards to kids is our reigning philosophy or paradigm, failing. 
 
A libertarian is someone who takes economics really seriously. Per economics, there are a limited number of categories that 'things' can be in. They are either a member of society, i.e. economically rational man, a 'private' good, that can have positive or negative externalities, or a 'public' good, like a bridge, the police or the army. Kids just don't fit into any of these categories at all. 
 
I've only read two Ayn Rand novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and there aren't any kids in either novel, and though all libertarians aren't Randians, it illustrates the point, in that libertarian philosophy just doesn't deal with kids because it can't, so a 'philosophical' novel won't have any kids in it. 
 
They are certainly not full members of society. That leaves public or private goods. Unless you're in Brave New World, they're not public goods. Most libertarians shove kids into the 'private good' category, I once read something by Virginia Postrel, where she just says that's what they are, it is the only place to put them. 
 
But to use a more extreme example than the one given in the post, if kids really are 'private' goods, then Virginia Postrel would have no problem if the Smith's next door kept their kids handcuffed to the furnace in the basement. 
 
To Ms. Postrel's credit, in this instance she'd probably toss her philosophy in the trash at this point. If she wanted to be consistent, given that she doesn't actually follow it, she'd leave it there, and come up with a new one that actually describes how she thinks, but I doubt she'll ever get that far.

Men are much better at some tasks, either in groups or not, that don't get done or done well if the 'moral climate', for want of a better description, is more conducive to success if plain old screwing up is considered a 'sin'. 
 
One can see that men are more likely to get killed on the job because jobs where one can get killed are ones where screwing up is a sin punishable by death. Men are far more OK with that than women and are far more likely to take such jobs. 
 
One can generalize this, to men viewing reward and punishment based on naked success or failure, without any regard to if one's heart is in the right place, as far more in tune with their sense of justice than women do, women don't agree with that at all. 
 
I'd think that this is adaptive too, I'd hate to be the two year old of a woman who didn't think like a woman in this regard, such a two year old would be pretty miserable, if alive at all. 
 
Of all the 'men and women are interchangable' stuff that is currently in the zeitgeist, that boys and girls aren't any different has dropped out, since it's so at variance with reality. The 'Mom and Dad are interchangable parents' is still sort of current, and I'd think that's got to go at some point too. Obviously the two ways of looking at such things are more efficacious depending on how old the kid is. I'd think such things work best when Mom is in charge of the toddlers and Dad is in charge of the older ones, but the zeitgeist isn't anywhere near that yet, but if one assumes that the zeitgeist can ignore reality only so long, it will be (back) there someday.

If one really wants to get into what 'conservative' means in some sort of general sense, a political conservative is someone who likes political things the way that they are and a what is or is not conservative is determined by circumstance. The NYT had great fun when the USSR was going down calling the commie dead enders 'conservatives', and will so again if the govt of Iran ever implodes. 
 
The opposite of a conservative isn't a liberal, it's a radical, or someone who thinks that the present arrangements stink and wants to replace them. 
 
I don't have a link, but I remember reading somewhere that conservatives in the US were happier than liberals (radicals), and that's just what one would expect. A bad conservative I suppose, is one who likes things the way they are and, and as far as lots of other people being dissatisfied, has a rather let them eat cake attitude. 
 
A bad radical is someone who mistakes whatever his heart is enduring badly as something kings or laws can cure. Lots of them around too. 
 
Per liberal, that's not relative to a particular country, but is a distinct theory of what the role of the state is, at least per 'domestic policy', which is to enforce property rights, and also enforce some, usually non universal, list of possible private contracts. This leads to laissez faire as to the division of property. The opposite of that, is not laissez faire, or no private property, or no private contracts, though this can differ in degree as to how far one goes.

Per the rule, if you see a good fight going on, get in and get yourself some, Linux is a serious operating system. It was actually crap as of maybe ten years ago. but now it works great. The great advantage that Windows has is that it's a lot more user friendly, as in the user need not have any clue how a computer works to use it. 
 
If you follow such things, Sun Microsystems recently changed it's stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA because it isn't going to be in the hardware business all that much longer. I used to use Suns and didn't want to switch because Sun had a large reliability advantage for the same reason Apple has one over Windows, because they made their own hardware and so didn't have any third party drivers written for peripherals screwing things up. Sun hardware wasn't as good as an off the shelf PC though, but if one wanted to run Unix on an off the shelf PC, one had to run Linux. I had to migrate to Linux PC's because one of Sun's new chipsets had a nasty little bug I found in it concerning calling a isnan function that made it slow to a crawl which made it useless for my high powered number cruching apps. So I switched to Linux, and it's been great! I run Linux on a few 8 processor machine with 26 GB of RAM that if they failed, serious money would be lost. Linux works great, if one is doing some sort of real computing, as in computations, it's the best there is (not graphics or eye candy stuff). 
 
Sun is going to be a software company that sells JAVA because Linux drove them out of the hardware business. 
 
I must admit, I have Windows PC's for stuff like email and web surfing to GNXP.com. 
 
I just looked up the market cap for Red Hat. It's currently $4.2 billion. Agnostic must be Bill Gates, since he thinks that's chump change, and the content of his comments on Linux just prove it :). 
 
Wiki's basically a big message board. It's fine for what it is, though obviously if one is unhappy with what has found there, one can get one's money back.

That's one of those qeustions that become are very hard until you hit on the answer, but once you know the answer. 
 
Old stories, or works of literature, like the Iliad or the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, or the Gospels, are generally told from the 'a fly on the wall point of view'. Sometimes they might momentarily collapse into the 'psychological', but only rarely, and never more so than what 'a fly on the wall' might have no problem inferring. 
 
Novels are generally told from the '3rd person omniscent' point of view. In such a novel, who is the narrator? 
 
Apart from a work of fiction here and there and who might read such stuff, until the narrator of such a story becomes something an author can wrap his mind around, no stories from such a point of view will be written, at least more than a haphazard one here and there. 
 
Per fantasy writing, to use a famous author as a recurring example, makes a lot of stuff clear. Can Tolkien create a mountain on page 10 that he cannot knock down on page 11? What time was it in Middle Earth when he first set pen to paper? Just who is the narrator, Tolkein, vis a vis Middle Earth? 
 
It seems that people aren't really cognizant of all this now, it's so ingrained, but if you've read Paradise Lost, Milton doesn't use the 3rd person omniscient when God or Jesus makes an appearance, though he does occasionly concerning Lucifer. If he did, he'd have probably gotten into trouble, as in legal trouble, given the time he wrote.

Looking through all that more carefully, I'd guess the case of the disappearance of Mr. Smith must be crappy data. I had a prof back whenever who did a stint in the Bureau of Labor stats and he loved to give his class virtual tours of the sausage factory that was the BLS. The Census Bureau probably isn't any better.

One might think, not too farfetchedly, that having the name 'Smith' might correlate with cultural characteristics, i.e. Smith's have a really low fertility rate, and very importantly, 'went over the demographic cliff' far earlier than other groups. What was the median age of 'Smiths' in 1984, higher than average? 
 
Never heard of people changing their name before because it's Smith, so I guess I'm living and learning.

David B: 
 
I think yes, he sh*t in the woods.

The late John Paul II had Parkinson's.