Back when I was a kid I used to really enjoy reading books about Voyager, in large part because they were jam-packed with color pictures of the planets. Today you can get a lot of data and images just online…and I don’t check it out enough. We take so much for granted, in the 1930s artists sketched out their imaginings of planetary surfaces in pulp science fiction magazines…but today we can look at photos of the surface of Titan! Anyway, here are the Cassini-Huygens Top 10 Science Highlights.

Readers who are somewhat familiar with Islam should check out this comment over at Jason Soon’s blog by a Muslim named Amir Butler. It is, in essence, a long apologia for “Salafism.” After reading Western Muslims and the Future of Islam much of what he is saying is intelligible to me (and I know a little bit about Islam aside from that too!). Amir Butler is not a dissembler in the most direct fashion, but, he fails to remember that his audience does not share his axioms of belief. This makes a lot of what he says totally irrelevant and incomprehensible. For instance, the Muslim fixation with tawhid, is not something that can really be understandable outside of the religion. It is as interesting to non-Muslims as the details of the Monophysite controversies are to non-Christians (or more realistically, non-Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Christians). After reading Ramadan elucidate tawhid page after page, I felt like I was trying to read Heidegger ramble about Being or Wittgenstein whistle at elementary propositions (round and round we go, but the essence of God we never know!). Since the book was aimed at Muslims it made sense that he went on about tawhid, if Muslims can see that tawhid and Western democracy are compatible, all for the good. But many times when interviewed by non-Muslims the more pious of the believers tend to ramble on about Islamic concepts as if the interviewer really cares beyond trying to figure out a) why some Muslims blow themselves up around non-Muslims b) how non-Muslims can convince them not to do this anymore. As far as Amir Butler goes, I think his typological dodges simply seem like bizarre obfuscations, sociologically it is a plain fact that the most prominent Islamic nutsos have been self-proclaimed Salafis.1 This is the point that one needs to start from, the relationship of “Salafism” to the rest of Sunnism, or its difference from Shiism is really irrelevant, no one would care about Salafism if self-proclaimed Salafis hadn’t rammed jets into skyscrapers, most non-Muslims aren’t interested in what Islam is, they are interested in what Islam does.

Note: Also, let me add that I’m not one to consider pedantry a sin. But it seems to me that the response by Mr. Butler was totally off-base in the context of the question Jason was posing, how did the Salafi-Sufi split play out in Australia’s Muslim community. Instead of a sincere, prosaic and plain response Jason was on the receiving end of theo-babble.

1 – Butler either mistakes, or shades, the details a bit as well. He attempts for example to assert that the Muslim Brotherhood is non-Salafi, after dodging back and forth with quotes to obscure the term Salafi in such a fashion as to make it hard to know if he thinks it’s valid. The Brotherhood’s ideology is hard to characterize because it is an enormous group (Banna and Qutb were certainly influenced by Salafi thinkers if you don’t define them as Salafi), and the two primary groups which carried out the most radical Muslim terrorist acts in Egypt were breakaway factions of the Brotherhood which did explicitly espouse Salafi principles (Egyptian Islamic Jihad and The Islamic Group, Ayman Al-Zawahri is the leader of the first group).

In Descarte’s Baby the psychologist Paul Bloom puts a mild evolutionary psychological spin on child development and ties it in thematically with the concept of Cartesian dualism as an innate trait of human cognition (I agree with him there, I have to remind myself that my body isn’t just a flesh puppet, it is me). There wasn’t much new in here, though it was a breezy read, except for the chapter which dealt with digust, and how people use the term. The definition from dictionary.com is:

1. To excite nausea or loathing in; sicken.
2. To offend the taste or moral sense of; repel.

Bloom makes a simple argument that the atomic core of disgust is the aversion to spoilage of meats, and fear of contagion. Rotten meat smells, it is often slimy and has a sickly pallor. Though we are primed to this aversion, it takes time to kick in. Feces fall under one of the main items that are universal objects of disgust, but infants are not repulsed by their own shit. Freud of course made this data point a central aspect of his pseudoscience, but Bloom offers that infants who are relatively immobile when they soil themselves and become exhausted by crying because of their innate revulsion at their state might not be at an advantage. Far better to allow digust to work its magic on someone who can affect change, the parent.

The literature seems to suggest that attitudes toward disgust are time released and tend to crystalize by 5-6 and initiate around 3, the age at which many children start to be averse to their own feces. Bloom hypothesizes that disgust is a default feature that inculcates in us an early aversion to most foods, in particular, meats, because though we are ominivores our digestive tracts are not totally promiscuous. Though we are primed toward pickiness, the particular range of meats we consume is culturally conditioned. Research indicates that the later you transition a child toward “adult” solid foods, the smaller their range of acceptable foods are. In other words, bombarding children with a wide range of foods tends to acculturate them to the items and blocks the disgust response. While a Muslim is disgusted by pork, an East Asian might relish it. The extrapolation of meat disgust toward feces or other biological products is easy, like spoiled meat they smell, are often slimy and are soft to the touch. A disgust response toward someone with low standards of hygiene is likely an extension of the smell factor.

But all the circumstances I am pointing to are more applicable to definition 1. What about 2? A term like disgust is malleable. Something is not just either disgusting or not, and context matters (sex with a fat man is disgusting, sex with a rich fat man is not so disgusting, at least on the check account balance). Disgust is more often used as a metaphor when verbalized, and the metaphor often carries with it an implication of inevitable instinctiveness, like the response toward a pile of feces. But Bloom makes the point that the use of disgust as a metaphor is usually never so clear cut, but rather part of a rhetorical campaign. From page 174:

…it is just not true that we react to cloning in the same way that we do to incest, corpse mutilation, and bestiality. Many people think that human cloning is a bad idea, even a terrible idea, but this is not the same as feeling revulsion. Perhaps you tok the kids to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in the popular movie The Sixty Day? (Arnold goes to clone the family pet, and then, through sinister machinations, he gets cloned!) I would be surprised if Columbia Pictures were to release a popular actions film around the them of bestiality….

Bloom’s point is there is a wisdom to repugnance, but outside of the most abstract and detached discussions acts and objects that elicit genuine innate revulsion are not those that you have to make a case for. At this point standard phenomena in the past that would have elicited revulsion are trotted out and shown to now be considered rather banal. Consider black males having sexual intercourse with white females. The standard past denigration of this involved the depicition of black males as beasts, ergo, this was tatamount to bestiality, an act which in the literal sense humans do seem to find offensive (there are the rather numerous legal codes which punish the animal as well as the human, I don’t know what that says). Yet today there is a flourishing sub-genre of pornography that deals in black-white sex (often with black males and white females). A portion of the population no doubt still considers this disgusting (that is, if they do not consider pornography as a whole disgusting), but certain social norms have changed. In contrast, the market for bestiality and feces related porn seems rather limited, but the fact that there is a market for such products does clue us in to two important facts: 1) human variation in disgust might still exist, or, 2) disgust can be deadened over time, and coupled with the tendency toward seeking novelty, this can result in very bizarre predilections (I put pregnancy porn and lactation porn into the same bizarro category).

Psychological traits, tendencies and paradigms are part and parcel of many “high brow” discussions because they are part of the intellectual zeitgeist, whether the ideas were transmitted via developmental psychology popularizations picked up in one’s feminist book club, or Pinker’s latest bestsellar peddled by Barnes & Noble. Something like disgust illustrates that even simple tightly defined traits can’t be easily sliced, diced and dichotomized, the way we use language tends to result in our deployment of the ideas as if they were hammers when what is really needed in any dialogue is a knife.

From Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World:

…The German Turks in my queue for a 1998 workers’ charter flight to Berlin seemed a tribe apart from other queues filled with more sophisticated-looking Istanbul businessmen and holiday-makers. They were indeed of different origin, since Turkey had sent village folk to work in Germany, wanting to give industrial training to is rural underclass…The men were short, stock Anatolian types, wearing baggy trousers, clipped beards and gruff expressions, a pre-1980 rural style….

Just so you know, I think The Life of Meaning has potential to be the archeological version of what John Hawks is to paleoanthropology or Chris to cognitive psychology. Mark’s latest post is titled The War on Trees, which caught my eye in light of this story in The Times that chronicles the expansion of wilderness in much of Europe due to the graying of the populace and the depopulation of the countryside. This waxing of the wild isn’t just limited to Europe, here in the United States wolves are on the march again, reflecting both the change in general public attitudes and the diminishing of the rural populace which held the animals at bay with surreptitious hunting. And if you’ve ever driven through Vermont, you might be shocked to know that one century ago most of the state was farmland, and the rich foliage that characterizes the state today is due to secondary growth as farmlands that were abandoned by Yankees because of competition from fertile large scale operations out in the middle of the country.

Evolution at Two Levels: Gene and Form, is an article (based on a lecture) given by Sean Carroll, author of Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Evolgen has more. If you haven’t read the book, but read this article, save your money (I don’t think the first half of the book is worth it for the savvy reader, he spends way too much time on operons)….

I’ve just made brief post up on my blog regarding the rather virulent and violent strain of homophobia in the Muslim world, as a problem in itself and as a marker of deeper problems. Out of curiosity, how would GNXP readers go about trying to remedy these issues? What techniques of mimetic engineering would you apply?

Posted by randymac at 05:19 AM |

I’ve just made brief post up on my blog regarding the rather virulent and violent strain of homophobia in the Muslim world, as a problem in itself and as a marker of deeper problems. Out of curiosity, how would GNXP readers go about trying to remedy these issues? What techniques of mimetic engineering would you apply?

Posted by randymac at 05:19 AM

I figured I’d just reformat the poll results from The Telegraph that are making the rounds.

Q: Do you think the bombing attacks in London on July 7 were justified or not?

6% – On the balance justified
11%- On the balance not justified
77%- Not njustified at all
6% – Don’t know

Q: Whether or not you think the attacks were justified, do you personally have any sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried out the attacks?

13%- Yes, a lot
11%- Yes, a little
16%- No, not much
55%- No, none at all
6% – Don’t know

Q: Whether or not you have any sympath with the feelings of those who carreid out the attacks, do you think you understand why some behave in that way?

56%- Yes, I think I can understand
39%- No, I don’t understand how anyone could behave like that
4% – Don’t know

Q: The Prime Minister has described as ‘perverted and poisonous’ the ideas that led the London suicide bombers to carry out their attacks. Do you agree or disagree with him that their ideas must have been perverted and poisonous?

58%- Yes, I agree
26%- No, disagree
16%- Don’t know

Q: How loyal would you say you personally feel towards Britain?

48%- Very loyal
33%- Fairly loyal
6% – Not very loyal
10%- Not at all loyal
4% – Don’t know

Q: Which of these views comes closest to your own?

1% – Western society is decadent and immoral, and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end, if necessary by violence
31%- Western society is decadent and immoral, and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end, but only by non-violent means
56%- Western society may not be perfect, but Muslims should live with and not seek to bring it to an end
11%- Don’t know

Q: Do you agree or disagree with this statement? ‘British political leaders don’t mean it when they talk about equality. They regard the lives of white British people as more valuable than the lives of British Muslims.’

52%- Agree
29%- Disagree
18%- Don’t know

Q: If anyone is charged and put on trial in Britain in connection with the bombings on July 7, do you think they will or will not receive a fair trial?

37%- They will
44%- They will not
19%- Don’t know

Q: The leaders of Britain’s main political parties have said that they respect Islam and want to co-operate with Britain’s Muslim communities. In general, do you think Britain’s political leaders are sincere or not sincere when they say these things?

33%- Sincere
50%- Not sincere
16%- Don’t know

Q: How much responsibility do you think Muslims show now take on for peventing such crimes and bringing to justice those who commit them?

32%- A great deal of responsibility
34%- Some responsibility
10%- Not much
14%- None at all
1% – Don’t know

I left the last three poll questions off because I don’t think they were that interesting and this post is a bit long. You can find them at the link above. My only comment is that many of these people expressing sympathetic opinions about the terrorists must be grotesquely stupid, since they surely knew that the results would be made public and perhaps generate further animus toward their community as a whole.

…but getting bloody irritated. I was going to go into London yesterday around midday, switched on the TV to check travel details, and thought it was Groundhog Day.

As I couldn’t go yesterday, I was planning to go today (right now!), switched on the TV again, and find a suspected bomber has been shot dead at Stockwell (where coincidentally I used to live). Inevitably, several Tube lines are shut down.

Well, sod it, I’m going anyway. Must return some library books.

I was already vaguely thinking about posting something on the London bombings, but my thoughts at the moment are unprintable.

Meanwhile, there was an interesting report in today’s London Times about the discovery of a caterpillar species in Hawaii that eats snails. Evidently a gourmet! I won’t provide a link – if you’re interested, search Google News for ‘caterpillar’, ‘snails’ and ‘Hawaii’ and you’ll find several reports.