Rachel’s Musings

On Sunday, July 27, two people were murdered during a service at the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Knoxville TN (a timeline of the event is here - start at the bottom, right before the comments section). As freethinkers and secular humanists, I think it is important to support UUs everywhere in this difficult time. The national UU association has set up a Knoxville Relief Fund and many UUs are holding vigils and services. Although I don’t feel comfortable attending a church service, I have made a donation to the Fund indicating my support.

(Hat tip to Dan for the idea of Freethinker Solidarity)

A few years ago, Senator McCain seemed like a moderate Republican who did the rare thing: think for himself. Apparently, I didn’t do a good job checking his record before reaching that judgment because he his voting record is clear: he’s against abortion and birth control and he’s been that way for decades. More importantly, he is voting the party line. An interesting article on McCain at AlterNet digs into his record. It is rather disturbing, especially since his pandering to women voters seems to be working despite his appallingly anti-feminist, anti-science record. Some choice votes summarized in the article:

He opposed legislation requiring that abstinence-only programs be medically accurate and based in science. He voted to abolish funding for birth control and gynecological care for low-income women, and against funding for public education on emergency contraception.
[...]
McCain has an equally dismal record on other issues central to women’s lives — pay equity, fighting workplace discrimination, and supporting programs that help working mothers and their families.
[...]
On civil rights issues, his record, again, is poor. He has voted in favor of banning affirmative action hiring for jobs funded by the federal government, and says he’s against policies that might result in “quotas” — an oft-repeated conservative excuse for not supporting policies that rectify systemic inequities.
[...]
McCain voted at least six times to reduce, eliminate or restrict health insurance programs for low-income children and pregnant women. In August 2007, he again voted against a bill to expand coverage of SCHIP.

Let’s hope we can get the word out on his record and prevent President McSame!

PZ Myers posted the “desecration” of a cracker - the consecrated wafer used by Catholics during Mass - today, including a history of the murder of Jews who were - collectively - accused of desecrating crackers by (supposedly) stabbing them (and thus Jesus in the bizarre logic of the Catholic church). In commemoration of these persecutions, Myers also stabbed the cracker by piercing a rusty nail through it. However, he didn’t stop there. He also pinned down a copy of the Qur’an and The God Delusion. Yupp, that’s right: Richard Dawkins’ book. The point he was trying to make was that “nothing must be held sacred.” In addition to recounting history starting in 1215, PZ’s post includes some of the threats he has received, a brief update on the UCF student who started this particular episode of crackergate, and these words of wisdom right after the picture of the desecrated items:

I didn’t want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur’an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanities’ knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

The first comment shows how difficult it will be to break the religion-habit…

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) by Phil Zimbardo has been for me an example of the astonishing things that we humans are capable of. I guess as an example of human gullibility, I had not been skeptical about the experiment, which lacks quite a few scientific markers (aside from its ethical problems). During a talk by Barbara Oakley, she was asked to comment about the SPE because it showed the influence the situation and roles could have on human behavior. She responded that there are quite a few questions about this experiment and pointed us to a summary of the critique at Wikipedia. I finally had a chance to review this and am retiring another holy cow now: the experiment is, well, crap not nearly as thoroughly tested against reality as we are led to believe… (Thanks to a discussion in the comments, I now understand that Zimbardo does deserve credit for pointing to the importance of situational influences. I still think, though, that he, at best, could use SPE for the development of hypotheses, not as support for a theory, as he seems to be doing. I find it mindboggling that someone can become famous with such shoddy research - of course, who am I to criticize the famous Zimbardo. Well, I am a human being with a brain and I occasionally use that to debunk things, mostly for myself, but also for the few people who read my blog).

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Last I checked, there was a period called The Enlightenment between our current time and the Dark Ages. But apparently not everyone has benefited from enlightenment as recent news make clear. As the Anglican church prepares to open their doors to women bishops, at least one current bishop is so distraught, he’s trying to switch religions: From Anglican to Catholic. My church history is a bit sketchy but wasn’t the Anglican church founded in protest of something the Catholics did? Oh, yes, some king of England didn’t get the divorce he wanted, so he just formed his own church. Okay, maybe things are a bit more nuanced than that but essentially King Henry VIII who loved to marry seceded from the Catholic church in 1534 to get one of those marriages annulled. Now, apparently, letting women have equal rights is enough to run back to the original church. (Hat tip to Jender for the link!)

And then there’s Crackergate. A university student in Florida took a souvenir from a Catholic church, except it wasn’t just any souvenir, it was the small bread wafer used by Catholics during mass. Now he’s being accused of kidnapping Christ (never mind that Jesus died a couple millenia ago, if he ever lived, and now supposedly sits next to god, or does that come later? In any case, he’s dead and his body was never found). But that was only the beginning of Crackergate. PZ Myers dared to pick up this story and in his usual non-mincing style explained what he thought of the whole upset: It’s a cracker!. Now he’s being burned at the (for now figurative) stake: The Catholic League, which claims to defend Catholics’ civil rights, apparently doesn’t care about anybody else’s civil rights, like freedom of speech. They want PZ Myers fired from his assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota. And all that because PZ called a cracker a cracker. As I told the President of the U of M in an email supporting PZ: “I think Catholics have the right to pretend that the cracker used at mass is something other than a cracker (as a former Protestant, I never quite understood this). But I do not think they have the right to impose their fantasy on anyone else, which they are doing by acting offended about PZ’s post and, actually, about the original incident as well.”

Crackergate ties in interestingly with a recent discussion I’ve had over at the Feminist Philosophers’ Blog on hate speech and freedom of speech. The Catholic League is claiming that PZ Myers uttered hate speech. Actually, some are even claim it’s a hate crime. Sigh. (I wish commentators on PZ’s blog would stop the name calling, though. That is always uncalled for, imo.) And what’s the crime, if there is any? There is absolutely no hate crime here (maybe some poorly chosen words but that’s not a crime - we’d all be in prison if it were; and, yes, PZ threatened to “treat [consecrated communion wafers] with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse.” Okay, what kind of “heinous cracker abuse” can there possibly be?!? Maybe he’ll - gasp - eat it!). I think that PZ had the right to call a cracker a cracker. I wouldn’t have said some of the things he said but he’s not one to mince words. Even Fox said that the “small bread wafer [is] to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ.” It’s a symbol for crying out loud (or do they believe in magic? Sorry, I don’t get this mental acrobatic…)! It means something more than what it is to those people to whom it symbolizes something. It is what it is to people who don’t buy into that symbology. Demanding that everybody else sees the symbol the same way is just ridiculous - and it shows quite a bit of insecurity. Just like gay marriage doesn’t do anything to straight marriages, calling a cracker a cracker doesn’t do anything to someone who sees it as a symbol of something under certain circumstances unless that person isn’t quite sure about that symbolism. Plus, if you can make up the story that a cracker changes into something else, why not make up the story that once that wafer leaves the church it magically turns back into a cracker? That would resolve the whole thing. And it would be a very good way to protect against wafer kidnapping. To get up in arms about this symbol and calling it a kidnapping is simply silly (how can you kidnap a person who died millenia ago - assuming he ever lived - who is just symbolically present)? We need to learn to distinguish symbols from what they are symbolizing. By prosecuting people for, say, burning the U.S. flag, we are undermining the very freedoms this flag symbolizes. By screaming bloody murder over the cracker, any claim by the Catholic church makes that they are supporting love and hope become tainted (okay, a look at the church history does that even more).

There are a couple of interesting recent studies that provide updates to the gender and science discussion between Harvard professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke both pointing toward Spelke’s side of the argument that most, if not all, of the gender gap can be explained by the influence of social forces rather than by innate differences.

First, there is an interesting post on the Feminist Philosophers’ blog that summarizes a NY Times article on gender discrimination at universities, clearly supporting Spelke’s side by documenting differential treatment of applicants depending on gender. Although Pinker might be correct that there are innate differences, that does not excuse discrimination, though they might provide convenient self-justifications. If anything, the social forces are exaggerating these innate differences rather than compensating for them.

And then, articles here and here summarize a recent study using data collected by PISA, which

suggests that, when it comes to math, we can forget biology, as social equality seems to play a dominant role in test scores.^(source)

The overall result showed the usual pattern: Boys did better than girls in math and girls did better than boys in reading. But there was a catch: that result differed by country making the authors curious if there might be a relationship between the score differential and the status of women. They created a gender equality score and found that countries with very high gender equality do indeed have a much smaller math performance difference. Whereas countries with lower gender equality showed a much larger difference in math performance.

The correlations between gender equality and math scores held up under a statistical test designed to catch spurious associations. The authors even checked out the possibility of genetic effects not linked to the Y chromosome by examining whether genetic similarity between various European populations could account for these differences, but they found that it could not.^(source)

One of Pinker’s central arguments was that the gender gap was primarily prevalent in the extremes of the distribution. So, it is particularly interesting what this study found there:

The researchers also studied the percentage of students of each sex among the top scorers on the test. In the gender-equal countries, girls made up half or more of those who scored in the top one percent.^(source)

The results support Spelke’s argument, although it is interesting to note that Pinker never said that all of the gender gap can be explained by biology. His claim was that “the contribution of biology is greater than zero.” However, it seemed that he was using that to argue away the societal influences. We clearly cannot do that. This latest study shows the influence of gender inequality on girl’s math performance. It does not say that there are no innate differences. It simply highlights that the social forces Spelke pointed to have a dramatic effect. This study might also be the first step to the experiment Spelke suggested at the end of her talk: Remove the gender discrimination and biased treatment and then see what happens to the percentage of women in mathematics and science.