Category: Culture
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Cultural Folkways in Flux
A fascinating post over at The Crux, Votes and Vowels: A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics. Here’s the section which I might quibble with though: Labov points out that the residents of the Inland North have long-standing diffe…
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How Game of Thrones Should Have Ended
I haven’t watched most of the films (or video games, or T.V. shows) being parodied by How It Should Have Ended. But I have read A Game of Thrones. So I’m confused as to why this struck me as rather unfunny, in comparison to most of the othe…
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The collapse of logic & human culture
Slavery’s last stronghold: Moulkheir Mint Yarba returned from a day of tending her master’s goats out on the Sahara Desert to find something unimaginable: Her baby girl, barely old enough to crawl, had been left outdoors to die. The usually stoic mother — whose jet-black eyes and cardboard hands carry decades of sadness — wept…
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When independent thought flourishes
One of the things I instinctively hated about my “ancestral culture,” that of Bangladesh, is that there wasn’t that great of an emphasis on individual independent thought. Why, for example, was it important never to drink water while you were eating, as opposed to after you were done? The response was simple: that’s the rule.…
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Who is the decider of the good life?
‘Ashley treatment’ on the rise amid concerns from disability rights groups: A controversial procedure to limit the growth of severely disabled children to keep them forever small – which ignited a fiery debate about the limits of medical intervention when it was first revealed five years ago – has begun to spread among families in…
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Everlasting permanence
By this point you have probably read about Jonathan Franzen’s comments about digital books. For example: “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.” This seems to be a recapitulation of the…
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Monogamous societies superior to polygamous societies
The title is rather loud and non-objective. But that seems to me to be the upshot of Henrich et al.’s The puzzle of monogamous marriage (open access). In the abstract they declare that “normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.” Seems superior to me. As a…
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Social conservatives have a lower I.Q.? (probably)
In light of my previous posts on GRE scores and educational interests (by the way, Education Realist points out that the low GRE verbal scores are only marginally affected by international students) I was amused to see this write-up at LiveScience, Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice. Naturally over at Jezebel there is…
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Born to conform
There is a new paper in Nature, Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers, which is very interesting. As Joe Henrich observes in his view piece the panel of figure 2 (see left) is probably the most important section. The study focuses on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania. Their language seems to be an…
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To be atheist is an offense
I have seen references to this around the web, and don’t really know if I can believe this, because the details are so disturbing to consider. So I’ll pass it on, You can expect threats if you discuss Sharia: My One Law for All Co-Spokesperson Anne Marie Waters was to speak at a meeting on Sharia Law…
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Moving Secularism Forward, March 2012
Because of scheduling conflicts* I can’t make ScienceOnline2012 (I had planned to make it). But I thought I would put in an announcement here that in a month and a half I’ll be at the Moving Secularism Forward conference put on by the Center for Inquiry. I’m going to be on a political panel on…
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The extraordinary sex ratio of our age
The New Atlantis has a nice piece, The Global War Against Baby Girls. It’s relatively heavy on charts and maps, so I recommend it (yes, it has a particular ideological perspective, but that’s really not consequential, as I assume most readers do not favor skewed sex ratios either). There’s nothing too surprising in it (assuming…
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The dynasty which created Iran
Shah Ismail I The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time just had an episode on the Safavid dynasty. If you want to understand how Iran as we understand it came to be, and you know nothing about the Safavids, this program is essential. Because of its outsized role in Western antiquity the pre-Christian Achaemenids…
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Where Europe expanded & New Guinea persisted
The model outlined in Guns, Germs, and Steel serves to a great extent as a corrective to ideological theories about the expansion and rise to dominance of European power in the 18th and 19th centuries, before its crest in the 20th. Jared Diamond famously gives a great deal of weight to biogeographical parameters. Charles C.…
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Iraq: not as bad as Yemen
You probably know that the USA has officially withdrawn from Iraq. And you probably also know that in many ways Iraq became the de facto 51st American state for nearly a decade (I remember that my phone’s news app had an “Iraq” section back in 2007). Looking back 10 years ago I recall my attitude…
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Population around the Mediterranean
With the collapse various North African regimes there has been a great concern about the migration of people from the southern shore of the Mediterranean to the northern. The of the reasons for this concern is that there is an imbalance in population growth. So I thought I’d review some of the data on Mediterranean…
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“Doctors don’t cure nothing”
NSFW As I observed before, modern medicine is subject to some of the same statistical issues as social science in its tendency to put unwarranted spotlight on preferred false positive results. Trials and Errors – Why Science Is Failing Us: This doesn’t mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally…
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Are genes the key to the Yankee Empire?
That’s the question a commenter poses, albeit with skepticism. First, the background here. New England was a peculiar society for various demographic reasons. In the early 17th century there was a mass migration of Puritan Protestants from England to the colonies which later became New England because of their religious dissent from the manner in…