Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations:

Science and religion have come into conflict repeatedly throughout history, and one simple reason for this is the two offer competing explanations for many of the same phenomena. We present evidence that the conflict between these two concepts can occur automatically, such that increasing the perceived value of one decreases the automatic evaluation of the other. In Experiment 1, scientific theories described as poor explanations decreased automatic evaluations of science, but simultaneously increased automatic evaluations of God. In Experiment 2, using God as an explanation increased automatic evaluations of God, but decreased automatic evaluations of science. Religion and science both have the potential to be ultimate explanations, and these findings suggest that this competition for explanatory space can create an automatic opposition in evaluations.

The authors used the same priming strategies utilized in Project Implicit. So the ScienceDaily summary claims, ” A person’s unconscious attitudes toward science and God may be fundamentally opposed, researchers report, depending on how religion and science are used to answer “ultimate” questions such as how the universe began or the origin of life.” The shift in outcome contingent upon inputs was pretty stark, as evident in these two figures:

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I don’t know much about this topic, but I thought this paper was cool, Avian Paternal Care Had Dinosaur Origin:

The repeated discovery of adult dinosaurs in close association with egg clutches leads to speculation over the type and extent of care exhibited by these extinct animals for their eggs and young. To assess parental care in Cretaceous troodontid and oviraptorid dinosaurs, we examined clutch volume and the bone histology of brooding adults. In comparison to four archosaur care regressions, the relatively large clutch volumes of Troodon, Oviraptor, and Citipati scale most closely with a bird-paternal care model. Clutch-associated adults lack the maternal and reproductively associated histologic features common to extant archosaurs. Large clutch volumes and a suite of reproductive features shared only with birds favor paternal care, possibly within a polygamous mating system. Paternal care in both troodontids and oviraptorids indicates that this care system evolved before the emergence of birds and represents birds’ ancestral condition. In extant birds and over most adult sizes, paternal and biparental care correspond to the largest and smallest relative clutch volumes, respectively.

You can read the summary at ScienceNow, but here’s some cross-taxa context from Polygamy, Paternal Care In Birds Linked To Dinosaur Ancestors:

Scientists had long wondered about the origins of polygamy and paternal care patterns among modern-day Paleognathes — an ancient avian lineage that branched off soon after birds evolved from dinosaurs and includes ostriches, emus and tinamous. No such reproductive behavior exists among the vast majority of other vertebrates. Males contribute to parental care in less than 5 percent of mammal and non-avian reptile species, and while more than 90 percent of bird species co-parent to some degree, it is only among the Paleognathes that both polygamy and paternal care rule.

Nature is a wondrous thing!

On today’s Talk of the Nation there was a show with the title, Obama And The Politics Of Being Biracial. Here’s the intro:

President-elect Barack Obama defines himself as African-American. His mother is a white American, and his father is a black African. This hits a nerve with some people, who wonder why Obama doesn’t use the term biracial to describe his race.

The obvious answer is that the United States Barack Obama looks black. Some of the guests noted this. That being said, I was a bit peeved with the fact that there wasn’t even a nominal nod to the fact that there are many biracial people who are not of mixed black & white ancestry, and the conventions and dynamics which are operative in their lives are different.
A caller brought up Halle Berry, and how America seemed to have no problem with the fact that she identified as black. Halle Berry is a black actress, though she did note that she enjoyed the fact that her role in The Rich Man’s Wife was not color-coded. But Halle Berry does not have the freedoms of someone like Jennifer Lopez, who is racially ambiguous enough to play a white woman in Out of Sight. But Jennifer Lopez is not “officially” biracial, so I thought I would make the point by contrasting Berry with two other biracial (if comparatively obscure) women who have been in films, Norah Jones and Kristen Kreuk. To my knowledge Norah Jones did not play a half-brown woman in My Blueberry Nights, while Kreuk is “white enough” to play Snow White for a Hallmark movie. Imagine if one of the Mowery sisters (biracial) were to play Snow White!

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Wired has feature, Vote for the Sexiest Geeks of 2008. Jade Raymond seems the most legit on the two dimensions of evaluation.

Heather Mac Donald, Rick Warren and the Presidency.

Heather Mac Donald, Rick Warren and the Presidency.

‘Gross’ Messaging Used To Increases Handwashing, Fight Norovirus:

In fall quarter 2007, researchers posted messages in the bathrooms of two DU undergraduate residence halls. The messages said things like, “Poo on you, wash your hands” or “You just peed, wash your hands,” and contained vivid graphics and photos. The messages resulted in increased handwashing among females by 26 percent and among males by 8 percent.

Most human cognition is implicit, and we’re really not as amenable to rational appeals we like to think we are. Remember this research?:

We examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational concerns, on human cooperative behaviour.

Jake Young has a skeptical take on the contention that science can save the economy. He ends:

In short, I think the suggestion, while well-meaning, is misguided. If all that would happen in this project was that more brains would be applied to the problem, I would support it. It would probably be harmless even if it was ineffective. However, I think it may be worse than that. Given the dismissiveness bordering on contempt with which most scientists hold economic problems, I think their participation would be actively unhelpful. What would result is a lot of acrimony and very little progress.
The pretension exemplified by articles like this are the problem, not the solution. Why do we assume that scientists riding in like the cavalry will save the day? Scientists need to get some humility and some goddamn’d respect in dealing with economic issues. The economy is no less difficult than the subjects we are studying, and we all know how long progress can take.
Further, the defining feature about all recessions and booms is that they end. This is something that neoclassical economics got right. The Great Depression and the Japanese recession during the 90s did end eventually. The long-term may take a long time in coming, but eventually it does arrive.

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Is online. Also note the collected papers of R. A. Fisher.

Mike White finally left a comment on my post Complex traits & evolution:

I’m trying to make a distinction between what geneticists call complex or quantitative traits (traits affected by different alleles of many different genes, with a quantitative range of phenotypes), and something I would call a physiologically complex (or complicated) trait.
Complex or quantitative traits include both height and intelligence. But I’m arguing that something like height is not physiologically complex the way intelligence is.
…
So, for example, in the case of height, you can imagine that it is easy for a single allele of large effect to reach high frequency in a given population, resulting in a fairly tall (or short) population.
I don’t think that such a thing is very likely for intelligence, because, unlike what I think is the case for height, single alleles of large effect on intelligence probably also have large deleterious effects (like neurological disorders) – something like intelligence is so physiologically complex that it is much easier to ‘break’ with a large-effect allele than something like stature, where an allele that extends how long growth plates in your leg bones are active (for example) is unlikely to also have major deleterious effects.
And to get race-specific differences, given current human genetic variation, you need single alleles with large effects – thus you have genetic differences between populations in height and skin color, but not IQ.

I disagree that alleles of large effect are necessary. We already have a large range of extant variation across human populations. From what I can tell about the Breeder’s Equation QTLs of large effect are not needed.