When I was a kid all the books on Iran & Iraq would note that the difference between the two nations wasn’t just a letter. Kind of funny now that the American government is wondering about Iran’s role in looking the other way as Al Qaeda crossed its territory. Randall has a long post ruminating over the Iran situation. I don’t spend many cycles thinking about international policy or reading much about it, and frankly I find the likes of Hanson & Ledeen as predictive as the columnists over at ESPN, but the latter are more entertaining. But let’s compare Iraq and Iran for a moment….

‘

	Iraq	Iran
Shia	65%	90%
Sunni	35%	10%
Arab	75%	5%
Kurd	20%	5%
Turkic	5%	30%
Persian	–	50%
Population	25 million	70 million

Yes, I’ve rounded and simplified (putting Azeris into the ‘Turkic’ category like Iraq’s Turkoman). Both countries dispaly ‘ethnic diversity.’ But there is a difference, Iran is basically a Shia nation. I emphasize the term nation, because as everyone is now aware, Iraq is a quasi-nation. Now, Iran is no France or Germany, and the ‘ethnic differences’ between the various groups are not clear cut & fluid. But Azeris (most of the ‘Turkic’ element in Iran) have a big stake in the country, and the Safavid dynasty which made Iran a Shia nation in the 16th century was Turkic in origin, not Persian. Like Turkey, Iran was not cobbled together by European powers, rather, its nationhood was given more focus by the expansion of Western powers. Posted by razib at 01:09 AM

In The science of the text (see below) a reader correctly observes that: “The Quran is the word of God, and that’s why Muslims believe in it 100%” I have pointed this out before to suggest that there are axiomatic problems with deviating too much from the text of the Koran. But note this from Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras (page 18):

It was this latter model that the Shi’a adopted…If the Qur’an was the actually Word of God, how could fallible mortals ever hope to comprehend its true meaning….

God always leaves a loophole because the human mind can not comprehend his ways and his words, but humans must jump through the opening. The majority Sunnis (unlike the Daudi Bohras and to a lesser extent other Shia) emphasize the Koran and the Hadiths as axioms that guide their thinking, superseding the judgements of their religious superiors (at least de jure). But, I could imagine a scenario where textual liberals emphasize the Koran’s opacity over its transparency as a nodd toward the greatness of God, attempting to leverage the righteous piety of conservatives toward the ends of flexibility.

Addendum: Imagine Islam is a person. I think some of the comments below indicate attribution error, that is, ascribing to the individual essential characteristics based on behaviors when said behaviors are dictated more by situational factors. So…in response to Luke why many Muslims don’t tend to take a more non-medieval attitude toward interpretation of their central text, well, it’s because most Muslim nations exist in a state of quasi-civilized barbarism (and many Muslim immigrants come from societies where barbarism is normative). That is simply their current situation, which may constraint “The West” in its response to various aggressions and insults, but one should not presume that the present is a perfect back-reflection of the future.

For example, would an American who lived in Philadelphia in in 1680 predict that 300 hundred years in the future Virginia, and the Southern colonies in general, rather than Puritan Massachusetts would be the hot-bed of Protestant revivalism? One must be cautious about behaving as if the future has already been determined. Hate the sinner, not the sin!

Related: Abiola extends my thoughts. Let me note, what I refer is “gelding” is partly self-delusion. For example, the Christians of today likely think those of the past were misguided to insist on coerced conversion of heathens and wedding of violence to the faith. I personally don’t know or care if any of this really follows from Christianity, but I’m glad that most Christians (in the West at least) adhere to this new Truth rather than the old one.

Posted by razib at 01:40 PM

Internet Infidels has a piece up titled ‘Predicting Modern Science: Epicurus vs. Mohammed‘. A debate between those who argue that the Koran predicts many of the discoveries of modern science and those who reject this assertion serves as the background. When I was a child the book The Bible, the Qu’ran and Science: The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge was making the rounds. I happened to read it and found it to be a most unconvincing text, teasing from scripture bizarre interpretations that dovetailed with modern physiology or cosmology (it was kind of like a more sexually preoccupied version of something like The Fingerprint of God).

In my personal experience Muslims tend to take the evidentiary tack quite a bit more often than Christians. Partly this is the result of the special place that the Koran has in Muslim thought, its sacrality and almost magical properties imbue it with an aura of literality that might imply in the minds of some that the sum of all knowledge must be found in the text. Another problem is that in some ways Islam has been less impressed by the bracing impact of modern secularism, ergo, some Muslims seem to assume that unbelief is due to either obstinance or ignorance, rather than its own merits.

The piece above makes the case that the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus’ predictions, or more properly fantastical hypotheses vaguely informed by reason and empirical evidence, are more congruent with the state of modern scientific knowledge than the Koran (I do believe that Epicurus’ reductionistic materialism helped make his guesses more predictive than if he was of a mystical ‘holistic’ bent, in that in the latter case I wonder if his hypotheses would have been clear enough to be tested in the context of modern science in the first place). A plain reading of the evidence will likely point to this direction to most non-Muslims, while many Muslims will remain skeptical, which goes to show that arguments from evidence serve to buttress the faith of believers rather than convert anyone through force of reason or empiricism. The author’s point, that if you look at any obscure text you can glean predictive power is instructive, The Bible Code and God and the Astronomers are both books that exploited human preconceptions and dispositions, people wanted to see certain patterns, they saw them and never bothered to consider contradictory patterns that might nullify the force behind their conclusion.

I recall what a friend of mine once told me: when someone is cured of cancer, praise be to God, and when someone dies a slow death, to hell with modern medicine!

Posted by razib at 01:50 AM

A report on Yahoo that the Democratic National Convention does not have enough toilets for the media. Cited reporter, Jim Drinkard. Gotta be a joke.

Posted by scottm at 08:54 AM

In the comments section of the recent post on the evolution of language Michael Farris states:

My own working theory is that language evolved mostly visuo-gesturally (as in natural sign languages) perhaps with simultaneous vocalizations and the vocalizations took over as the hands became needed for more and more everyday tasks.

This theory is of course not provable….

I’ve stumbled upon the “gesture => vocalization” theory before. I find it interesting that Michael thinks that this theory is not “provable,” for if the gesture => vocalization hypothesis is correct it seems likely that their will be a neurological footprint in the hardware of the brain that we could detect.

The reason I have some hope that these hypotheses might be testable in some sense is that similar ideas have been bounced around in the simpler field of the study of numeracy. In The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Stanislas Dehaene tells of how some cognitive scientists suggested mental counting was an abstraction of the ticking off of fingers. Years later neuroscientists discovered that some individuals who had suffered brain damage no longer had the ability to manipulate their fingers also lost the ability to count!

The moral of the story is that hypotheses might seem pie-in-the-sky when one is viewing the situation from within one discipline, but future synthesis of knowledge with other fields might change that perception in unpredictable ways. While evolutionary anthropologists theorize about language in the context of ultimate ends, and cognitive scientists posit mental models and paradigms that explain the proximate phenomena, neuroscientists will map and explore the very physical structure of the brain itself, where both evolution and modular concepts will be tested and explicated.

Here is a review of The Number Sense from a few years back. If you liked The Language Instinct, it will be a good addition to your library.

Addendum: To my mind, all language theories must grapple with FOXP2, this locus is implicated in vocalization in birds as well, and the fact that it has mutated considerably in humans in comparison to how conserved it is in other mammal lineages is very suspicious.

Posted by razib at 01:17 PM

Milla Jovovich, the Russian actress of Fifth Element fame, is starring in not one but three separate films about experiments gone awry creating either “vampires” or “zombies”; Resident evil, Resident evil 2, and Ultraviolet. Quick question for all readers, when was the last time you saw science or scientists in movies as the only answer to an overwhelming evil?

Posted by scottm at 06:57 AM

Imagine going throught he process of genetic screening in preparation for an IVF procedure and a test for deafness is purposely withheld from your because the advocates for the deaf hold the position that deafness is not a disability.

Meet Karen Coveler the mother of a newly born deaf child and a doctoral candidate in genetics at the time of her pregnancy.

Harry Ostrer, director of the human genetics program at New York University Medical Center, suggested in a scientific journal article six years ago that a routine screening test for the gene might be appropriate – particularly for Ashkenazi Jews, because 80 percent to 90 percent of inherited deafness in their children is caused by mutations in the gene. But Dr. Ostrer said that almost no one offered it, including the genetic counselors he supervises, because of opposition from advocates for the deaf who argued that deafness was not a disease.

“If people ask us, ‘What about that deaf test I heard about?’ we will tell them about it,” Dr. Ostrer said, “But we aren’t more proactive about it because of the sensitivities of the deaf community.”

[ . . . . . ]

But the group, to which most obstetricians look for guidance on genetics, does not recommend routine screening for Fragile X, the most common inherited form of mental retardation, even though the number of couples at risk of having a child with Fragile X is almost double the number of those at risk of having one with cystic fibrosis. But the Fragile X test is typically only offered to women who know of a relative with mental retardation.

[ . . . . . ]

But Dr. Ronald Librizzi, chief of maternal fetal medicine at Virtua Health, a chain of hospitals in New Jersey, says that merely offering a test can exert pressure on a couple to consider an abortion. When Dr. Librizzi polled the obstetricians under his supervision about whether they should offer Fragile X screening, the majority told him, “We don’t need another thing to scare our patients with,” he said.

Dr. Librizzi’s network is one of several that has declined to offer routine Fragile X screening. He also said he wished that the obstetricians’ association had not recommended that all patients be told about the cystic fibrosis test.

So here, just like the German legislators I blogged about a few days ago, we have physicians purposely setting themselves up as knowing what’s best for their patients despite the fact that the patients are most likely self-selecting and voluntarily subjecting themselves to genetic tests in order to lessen the chance of passing dibilitating conditions onto their new-born children. The doctor’s conscience is assuaged and the parents, and the child, have to live with an avoidable medical condition.

Is there no limit to this type of paternalism? Is the nanny-state mentality so ingrained that it is impossible for such people to concieve of patients and citizens making informed decisions that are appropriate for their life’s circumstances and goals?

Posted by TangoMan at 06:00 PM

While we in the West are debating the use of stem-cells in research and pondering the ethics of Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis, the Chinese research effort is moving in unexpected directions.

Nine Japanese with damaged spinal cords underwent cell transplants in China with cells taken from aborted fetuses, Japan Spinal Cord Foundation officials said Thursday.The transplants were conducted by Huang Hongyun, a doctor at the Capital Medical College Hospital in Beijing, in the hopes that the paralyzed patients will regain some movement, the foundation said.

The treatment is not available in Japan, and the effectiveness and safety of the procedure has not been verified, according to the foundation.

The Web site Spine Damage China International Recovery Support Center solicits patients from Japan.

According to the Web site, the procedure involves removing mucosal cells from an aborted fetus’s nose, growing them and injecting the results into the patient’s spine.

The transplant is believed to aid in the regeneration of nerve cells in the injured spinal cord, possibly enabling patients to regain feeling and eventually movement in paralyzed limbs, according to the Web site.

Huang says he has treated several hundred patients and claims many of them have shown improvement.

The Chinese center has not disclosed the long-term effects or the safety of the treatment, the Japan Spinal Cord Foundation said, adding that there have been reported cases of side effects.

Posted by TangoMan at 05:29 PM

An anthropologist is now proposing that language arose as a way to pacify and reassure babies during our evolutionary past. Human infants are particularly underdveloped and mothers would need to put them down to get about their daily activities, and talking was a way to keep them calm. The implication here is that since language was a response to coping with bipedal locomotion & big brains, it might be a far more ancient feature of humanity (broadly defined as hominids) than the “Great Leap” of the past 100,000 years (bipedal locomotion is millions of years old, while the human brain has increased in size gradually rather than in one leap). I don’t find the argument persuasive in that I can’t see why syntax and complex lexicons needed to arise to reassure babies. Anyway, if mother-infant interaction is so important, it seems kind of weird that ‘papa’ might be the most ancient of words.

Addendum: I should add that there are very different paradigms that explain the utility of language. For example, most people tend to accept the thesis that language exists to facilitate the communication of information of practical import (eg; “The mammoth is there!”). But, a fast rising rival is the “gossip” theory, that is, language is a grooming substitute, so its relevance is less direct environmental fitness than social fitness. Geoffrey Miller takes this to its logical extreme and basically suggests that language is a tool men use to impress and seduce women, improving their reproductive/sexual fitness (in addition to sexual selective takes on the gossip theory, that is, that gossip serves to communicate social status, ergo, genetic fitness).

Posted by razib at 12:02 PM

I haven’t kept close track of the NFL since for the past 4-5 years, but I was surprised a few years ago to notice that Robert Smith of the Vikings had retired. He gained 5.2 years per carry his last year. So what happened? I guessed he did the math, at 28 he was already past his prime as a running back, and he would probably face a precipitous drop off in productivity. Ask Eddie George what it’s like to be a great post-30 year old running back. But Smith was still at his peak, it didn’t make sense. Well, here is a story about Smith and his new book. Snips below:

…Smith uses it as a soap box — pleading for a lessened importance placed by Americans on sports and athletes.

…“I had never been a big fan of football, and to have to spend all that time preparing to play a game really started to wear on me. It was like being caught in a remedial math class each week.”

Posted by razib at 07:57 PM