It probably doesn’t seem like whether or not a candidate accepts evolution is very relevant to the job they’ll do in office. After all, the vast majority of politicians have no opportunity to directly impact or even influence the field of biology. Although, in many cases, it is used as a litmus test of sorts by bible literalists to determine if a candidate is a true believer.
During the 2008 Republican debate at the Reagan Library, all 10 candidates were asked if they believed in evolution. Three indicated they did not. More recently, Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell was quoted as saying evolution was a myth. And Sarah Palin states in “Going Rogue” that she doesn’t believe in evolution. Clearly, some politicians see this position as playing to a certain group of voters.
However, there is a larger concern about someone with a staunch position against evolution. That person is basically saying they are immune to data and reason. Evolution has 200 years of scientific data and research behind it. The politicians discounting it as fiction are not doing so because they’ve studied all the information and have come to the conclusion the theory doesn’t hold water. Rather, they are faced with the situation that significant data are contrary to their ideology or worldview, and so they are dismissing the data.
This is not simply a matter of placing religion as paramount. This is a matter of once this person has taken a position, there is no reasoning with them. They will not be swayed. Some may see this as a sign of strength, but after eight long years of George Bush’s damn the data, stay the course policies, we should all be very wary of anyone who remotely thinks they already have the answers, and who won’t be truly open to rational arguments from the other side.
Evolution is not a question of faith. It’s a question of rationality… and we need more of that in politics.
We all remember Senator Ted Stevens trying to explain the Internet as a “series of tubes“. And the Supreme Court’s recent faux pas while trying to get a handle on this text messaging thing. Well it turns out that technophobia isn’t a new phenomenon in Washington.
Back in 1930, the Senate tried to ban dial telephones because they felt it was inappropriate and wasteful to do the work of operators themselves. The resolution, which passed, read:
Whereas dial telephones are more difficult to operate than are manual telephones; and Whereas Senators are required, since the installation of dial phones in the Capitol, to perform the duties of telephone operators in order to enjoy the benefits of telephone service; and Whereas dial telephones have failed to expedite telephone service; Therefore be it resolved that the Sergeant at Arms of the Senate is authorized and directed to order the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. to replace with manual phones within 30 days after the adoption of this resolution, all dial telephones in the Senate wing of the United States Capitol and in the Senate office building.
At the time, they stated a hope the telephone company would take a hint and give up nationally on this foolish roll-out of phones people had to dial themselves. The horror.
So yes, let’s listen to these guys on technical issues like ACTA, broadband initiatives, intellectual property laws, and cyber-security. At least we can take solace in knowing that being a Luddite is apparently a longstanding job requirement.
The Journal of Risk Research has published study results asserting a strong correlation between whom people accept as experts and whether or not the expert espouses a position the person agrees with. In other words, people tend to listen to experts who tell them what they want to hear.
On the surface, this isn’t too surprising, and it would be easy to dismiss this as a natural tendency for people to be intellectually lazy. After all, it requires a lot of brain power to analyze and refute contrary arguments (or a lot of emotional strain to keep from wrapping your fingers around the other person’s neck).
Yet there is a more complex issue underlying this phenomenon, and significant stakes to it in the political arena. Many of the intractable issues facing us today have competing sets of experts advising two polar opposite strategies. From economics to global warming, we are besieged with diametrically different expert opinions. How are we supposed to decide who to trust?
The vast majority of us lack the domain expertise as well as the time to vet expert sources of information. Is this scientist or this economist telling the truth or at least being honest about what is known versus what is speculation or prediction on his part? We likely can’t tell from listening to the expert.
A secondary strategy used is to weigh the volume of experts. If you have 20 people telling you one thing and 2 people telling you another, the best bet is to side with the majority. But in a sea of 24 hour news, political action committees, and the Internet, it has become impossible to even gauge the volume. There might be 10, 256 on one side and 6,857 on the other, but no one is going to bother to count.
So we’re left with trusting the source of the expert. We are left having to trust that CNN or the NY Times has done their homework and is being honest. But given that we all have particular trusted sources for news and information we go to time and again, this places an enormous amount of power in the hands of the information brokers and distributors. Power that some are clearly abusing.
It may not be feasible to verify each expert’s credentials, nor even practical to count the experts on each side of an issue. But it is reasonable to do your homework on your frequent sources of news. Remember, caveat emptor is is still sound advice, even if all you’re buying is someone’s credibility.
Are you pessimistic, paranoid, and unable to perform a basic compound interest calculation? Then maybe divorce insurance is for you. After all, the future is uncertain, and nothing says, “I’ll love you forever,” like cutting that monthly premium check.
A company called WedLock is now offering a cash payout should the day ever come that you can’t stomach living happily ever after anymore. It’s a little something to soften the blow, or so it seems. Prices are just $16/month per $1250 unit. That is, $160/month will net you $12,500 upon your decree. But don’t order yet. There’s also a $250/unit bonus for every year you manage to stay hitched after the 4-year mandatory waiting period for the policy to go into force.
Time magazine thoughtfully did some of the math for us using this hypothetical 10 unit purchase and assuming the marriage lasts 10 years. The $19,188 you paid in premiums will get you $27,500 in divorce-dollars. Should you manage to stay together for 20 years, your $38,400 investment will get you a cool $78,400. Of course, should you screw up and pull off the whole “til death do us part” thing, you get nothing.
While it may seem like you are getting decent return on your investment, consider that over 10 years the policy is only yielding 6.8% APR. Granted, in the current economy that looks like a good return, but historically it’s a pretty conservative investment return. The stock market has consistently returned an average of over 10% APR for the last century. Over 20 years, the return drops to 6.45%. So the longer you stay married, the more money the insurance company makes. It should be comforting to know that at least someone has the incentive for you to stay with your spouse.
Entrepreneur John Logan is responsible for this new financial product and says even he is surprised how much insurance his customers are buying. He says some are spending more than $1000/month in premiums. This certainly causes you wonder how someone comes by $1000/month in disposable income while being so profoundly bad with money.
The bottom line is that you are much better off to simply invest the monthly premium yourself. Not only is your return likely to be better, but should you celebrate your 20th anniversary together, you can use the nest egg to take the whole family on a great vacation rather than lamenting all the cash you’ve tossed down the drain to preserve your happiness.
The mere existence of insurance like this is validation for the USA being ranked 24/30 countries in math ability. While the sale of this product is not criminal, the fact that’s it’s selling is certainly a crime.
Being #2, you try harder. So the folks doing poop research were not about to sit idly by while other researchers made electricity from pee. Hence, the Park Spark project which is turning poop into light. Ahhhh, the glamor of science.
The initial implementation is a street light in a dog park. The project encourages you to contribute your dog droppings to the natural composter, which then siphons off the methane gas to fuel the light.
But this is only the prototype. And there’s noting special about dog poop beyond the fact that dogs have figured out how to train humans to clean it up for them. Recycling being as popular as it is, it won’t be long before there are poop powered lights throughout your neighborhood. I suppose eventually there could be a direct sewer feed, but early adopters will likely have to settle for curb-side donations.
I can see it now. Grab the newspaper and tuck it proudly under your arm as you announce to the family, “I’ll be back in a bit… I gotta top off the street lamp.” Make no mistake, this movement will say way more about you than a Prius parked in the driveway ever could. You’ll be the talk of the cul-de-sac.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to vote this week on whether or not to undercut the EPA’s intention to regulate greenhouse gasses. The specific wording of the amendment is not known, but support from both Republicans and moderate Democrats is likely to make it pass. While it should be under the purview of the legislature make such laws, of concern here is more the way it is being accomplished.
The Clean Air Act (PDF) is the responsibility of the EPA to administer. Section 202(a) of the act provides for the agency to classify new pollutants to be regulated based on studies done by the National Academy of Sciences, and also requires those findings to be submitted to the House. The House of Representatives is within its right to reject those findings. In fact, that was attempted back in June, and the motion failed.
Of concern is the wording of the specific motion. The motion rejected the finding that CO2 poses an endangerment and that there is a human cause or contribution to greenhouse gas levels. In essence, they’re trying to rule on the validity of the science. They are saying they reject the National Academy of Sciences results and even reject the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that found carbon dioxide a pollutant subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. It seems that refuting all that data and analysis should require a bit more than a vote.
It would be one thing if the Congress changed the Clean Air Act to specifically exclude greenhouse gasses or if they changed the process by which new pollutants are identified. But that is not the tack being taken. The Senate is trying a similar end-around by hobbling an appropriations bill. Again, basically saying to the EPA they are thwarting their legal ability and obligations to use the best environmental science available to make policy.
There are certainly ample political reasons to sometimes ignore science. Fine. Say that. But discounting or demonizing science for political ends needs to stop. Science is not subject to legislation. It’s one thing to make the case that we cannot afford to deal with greenhouse gasses right now. It’s another entirely to claim greenhouse gasses are not putting us at risk.
To all the ladies out there: please consider this news carefully before you send your sweetie off to the gym, or give him grief for resting his lard-ridden ass on the sofa.
A study fresh from Erciyes University in Turkey shows that fat men make better lovers. That is, unless you’re in a hurry to get to a 50% off shoe sale or make a manicure appointment. In those cases, you’ll definitely want a gym rat. The study found a pronounced correlation between low BMI and premature ejaculations. So apparently 50 push-ups is not the only thing your studly man can rip off in under a minute.
If you want that slow easy lovin’, you need a man who knows about slow and easy. You need a beer and chicken wing fueled love machine who’s not afraid to stop and catch his breath now and again.
So feel free to drink in that ripply ab eye candy showing on the E! network. Go ahead and ogle those big guns hanging from the hunks on your favorite reality show. And we’ll be right here on the couch when you’re ready for some real lovin’.
The Obama administration is now appealing a federal judge’s ruling that reversed the go-ahead Obama gave to stem cell researchers just after taking office. At issue is a federal law prohibiting the extraction of stem cells resulting in the destruction of a human embryo. And while this works its way through the courts, US scientists are once again hamstrung relative to their foreign counterparts.
It can’t be argued that the stem cell extraction doesn’t destroy the embryos, and in that light, the judge’s ruling is likely correct given the current law. However, the argument has always been simply that those embryos were going to be destroyed or allowed to expire anyway. (Frozen embryos have an effective shelf life of about 10 years.)
In the U.S. alone, there are some 400,000 frozen embryos awaiting disposition. Most have been abandoned by couples who either succeeded in having children and no longer need the surplus, or who have given up hope of having children. Either way, extraordinary fertilization techniques continue to create thousands more embryos each year than will never see the inside of a uterus.
Debate rages over whether those embryos are people or property, but whichever side you are on, the current stem cell law makes no sense. If the embryos are property, then parents and/or clinics have the right to dispose of them as they wish. This obviously would include turning them over for scientific research.
If embryos are people, then the practice of creating and shelving them in a freezer is clearly as immoral as destroying them outright, whether for science or not. The law should require that each and every embryo be given a reasonable chance to grow. This means fertilization processes could only produce one or two embryos at a time, and that those embryos would need to be promptly implanted into wombs. This would dramatically reduce the success rate and increase the cost of procedures like in-vitro fertilization. The alternative would be to require that all the dozens of extra embryos created in the process be implanted in other women. Although it seems this would have to result in women being legally drafted to bear children, or at the very least make you pretty nervous when one of your girlfriends announced she and her hubby were trying in-vitro.
While it may be easy to stand against the destruction of embryos for science, even in light of all the potential good stem cells may provide for health care. It’s much harder to stand for consigning many couples to a childless existence.
Yet it’s morally and legally inconsistent to have it both ways.
A new product called the Backscatter Van (video) seems ripe to violate your 4th amendment rights. The van, produced by the American Science & Engineering company, is essentially a mobile backscatter x-ray scanner. This is the same technology used in those new airport scanners. The difference here being that the unmarked van can surreptitiously scan your car, house, storage locker, or any other unshielded structure it can drive near.
The company has sold over 500 vans to various domestic and foreign governments. And Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing, has revealed that at least some of the units have been purchased by domestic law enforcement.
While the units are ostensibly to be used to locate explosives, dirty bombs, and other terror related paraphernalia, it’s almost inconceivable the vans won’t eventually be deployed to search for contraband, drugs, and back seat passengers without seat belts. Meanwhile Reiss opines, “From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be.”
Really? The Supreme Court has already ruled that thermal imaging a home constitutes a 4th Amendment search, and therefore requires a warrant. And thermal imaging generates much lower resolution images than backscatter x-ray. It’s virtually inconceivable the ruling on this new technology would be more lenient. Further, it’s well established that the insides of cars, trucks, and other vehicles are not searchable without a warrant or probable cause. Therefore, randomly x-raying vehicles can’t possibly be legal.
Could there still be a role for this tech when used in conjunction with proper judicial process? Sure, but like wire tapping, thermal imaging, and other remote monitoring techniques there will be ample opportunities for misuse and abuse as well.
The 4th Amendment assures us a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy. Yet, in a world where almost everyone has a camera in their pocket, where it’s commonplace for stores or street corners to have surveillance equipment, where almost all transactions are recorded electronically, and almost all communication is electronically vulnerable there is increasingly little privacy to be expected. Now we can be seen moving about inside our homes and hauling groceries home in our cars.
In part, I wish my life was interesting enough to warrant all that monitoring. But just because it’s not doesn’t mean it’s okay to surveille me anyway. That’s not how fundamental rights work in this country. At least it didn’t used to be.
A new model of the universe has been proposed by Wun-Yi Shu, an associate professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. It has the potential of supplanting the Big Bang Theory as the standard accepted model of cosmological origin.
In the new theory, the universe has no beginning and no end. Things we currently understand as constants such as the speed of light and gravity, become variable. And time and space as well as length and mass become interchangeable in much the same way that the famous E=mc^2 equation allows energy and mass to interchange. It’s heady stuff, but it eliminates the need for dark energy and solves the supernovae red-shift problem that plaque current models. On the other hand, it doesn’t offer any clues about the cosmic microwave background radiation which has been repeatedly observed and the Big Bang explains nicely. So it is fraught with its own issues. Still, it’s one of the more radical yet plausible ideas to arise in cosmology in decades.
Should Shu’s new model bear out and the Big Bang gets pushed to the dustbin a couple of significant problems arise. Minimally (and perhaps most importantly) would be the fate of the TV show. It’s not at all clear that Sheldon would ever recover. But I think the larger issue could be the perception on the part of the non-science community that somehow this shows that science itself is somehow flawed.
Science deniers have long clamored that cosmology, biology, geology, and other sciences are flawed because there are things the current theories of science cannot explain. This is most often used as an argument for why supernatural forces are behind the inner workings of the universe. But sometimes they are also used as political levers such as is the case with the global warming deniers.
My fear is that should a major current theory like Big Bang be proved false, this will be spun as a huge “I told you so” by those who would seek to discount science in general. How can scientists be trusted that evolution is true? After all, these were the same folks who said Big Bang was true and look what happened to that!
Ironically, scientists would view the demise of a major theory in favor of a new and better one as a validation of the success of the scientific method. This is exactly how science is supposed to work. A theory is used to comprehensively explain all the known data. But invariably, as more data is gathered, holes begin to show up in the theory. In some cases, the theory is expanded, but in other cases, whole new theories are required. Quantum physics is a great example of a whole new theory created to explain behavior that Newtonian physics could not account for. At present, both these theories exist in parallel, but physicists recognize that eventually they must somehow be reconciled.
It’s important to understand that this is not a bad thing. Rather, it is the very definition of scientific progress. As we observe more, our explanations (theories) get revised. This is not a step backward, but a leap forward. Science will never understand and explain absolutely everything. That’s not a failure, it truly is an opportunity, and the whole raison d’être for science.
And if Sheldon is half the scientist he’s portrayed as, he’ll be leading the fight to have the show’s name changed. But don’t worry, he’ll still have oatmeal on Mondays. Let’s not get all crazy here or anything.
Time travel is one of those things that seems so simple until you think about it too much and then your brain just hurts. It isn’t so much the mechanics of traveling in time. It doesn’t really matter if you prefer to travel in a DeLorean, a phone booth, a TARDIS, or a starship slingshot around the sun. In a pinch you can even use an enchanted pocket watch or even the occasional hot tub. After all, while Einstein’s relativity predicts it should be possible, his equations didn’t specify the type of vehicle required. Yet it’s the mind bending implications of what happens once you do start hopping about on the timeline that are really interesting.
The implications of being able to travel in time depend entirely on the assumptions you make about how time is woven together. And this is something humans currently don’t understand, which gives you a lot of latitude to be ridiculously creative. This is maybe why it is a frequent dinner table topic at my house.
Most often in fiction, time is seen as a dependent tapestry of sorts. If you go back and make changes, then your future is disrupted. The most obvious problem here being the famed “grandfather paradox.” Suppose you went back in time and killed your grandfather before your father was ever born. Then you would not have been born. So you couldn’t have gone back in time to kill your grandfather. So he’s still alive, and you are born… except that you killed him.
There are other silly implications of the tapestry model which Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure had great fun with, and Dr. Who inexplicably adopted for their most recent season finale. Assuming you have access to a time machine, you can effect instantaneous changes to the present by simply deciding that at some point in the future you’ll go back into the past and effect the change. Suppose you find yourself locked out of your house. You could decide that later today you’ll pop back to yesterday and hide the spare key under the plant on the porch. Voila! The key is now there when previously it wasn’t. So basically, as soon as you get your hands on a flux capacitor, you can perform magic. Cooler yet, you will have always been able to perform magic. And since you can’t, it means you never will. Another dream shot to hell.
To get around this, some physicists have proposed a quantum model of time. Essentially it posits that time is not linear, but rather branches out at each instance to allow for all possible outcomes. So when you go back and make a change, it’s not really a change since both the reality with the change and without the change co-exist. Aside from the brain cramp induced by trying to conceive of a tree with infinite branches each in turn having infinite child branches and so on out until infinity, this creates the WTF paradox. In essence, any time you are confronted with a decision, it doesn’t matter what you do because the mere existence of the decision point means you made all available choices in one of the parallel universes. So why sweat the choice? I mean, WTF? Is your grandpa alive or dead? Well, yes.
Along comes Seth Lloyd at MIT who has another model for all this timey-wimey stuff. Since quantum outcomes are all probabilistic, Lloyd’s theory is that probabilities are altered to prevent paradoxes. That is, the universe actually enforces rules against time travel paradoxes by making paradox inducing actions improbable. This is all predicated on the existence of “closed timelike curves”. These structures are information pathways across space-time that link paradoxical events. In essence, should you try and go back and kill your grandfather, the chances of the bullet being a dud or the gun misfiring become a statistical certainty. Basically, the universe will simply not allow you to ruin your grandmother’s day.
Einstein’s equations allow for these closed timelike curves, and Lloyd’s team has even done some experiments with photons demonstrating that quantum statistics are demonstrably altered when paradoxical possibilities are introduced. This is a far cry from proof about how time works, but it is one of the more promising steps I’ve seen, and so far it makes my brain hurt less than the other possibilities. And understanding the nature of time is somewhat of a prerequisite to doing a time-ship conversion on an old British police box.
There are innies, outies, and the occasional pierced one (and whatever the hell you classify that picture to the the right as), but right after that, belly buttons get pretty darned uninteresting. Or do they?
Yet these folks are claiming that how far your belly button is off the floor (after adjusting for height differences) will determine if you are a runner or a swimmer. High navels make you a runner and low navels make you a swimmer.
Further, Africans tend toward high navels and Europeans toward low, which apparently explains why blacks dominate track & field while whites rule the pool. Yet they go on to note that belly button height is really correlated to body type. That is, if you have longer legs your navel is relatively higher than a person of the same overall height with short legs and a long torso. Duh. The Duh-plus is that people with long legs have an advantage on the track while long torsos are an advantage to swimmers.
So while the whole belly button claim makes for a great headline, all that’s really being said is runners should be tall with long legs and swimmers should be tall with long torsos. Anybody who’s ever watched the Summer Olympics on TV should already have had a handle on that. Or is it news that blacks tend toward longer legs while whites tend toward long bodies? Hardly.
Therefore, I guess we really didn’t learn much here today. Except that maybe if you can hang a bottle out of your belly button that you absolutely should. Because your husband is really gonna need a drink when he gets home.
The journal Pediatrics announced (via CNN) that the BMI measurement is maybe not so accurate, and suggests you measure your neck instead. Eh?
On the one hand, I thought this was great news as I’ve always found the BMI a bit depressing. BMI calculators always peg me as just a couple of points into the “Overweight” category. But like most men I’m able to rationalize my weight as being right where it should be. Especially if I’m about to go out for chicken wings. Further, the article says the trouble with BMI is, “it deems athletes or muscular people to be obese and underestimates body fat in older people.” I’m not “older people” yet, so I must be athletic or muscular. Cool.
And now this neck thing is poised to validate my svelte rationalization. Let’s check the table:
Based on age, a neck of this circumference or larger could indicate overweight or obesity, researchers say: Boys
Age 6: 11.2 inches
Age 10: 12.6 inches
Age: 14: 14.2 inches
Age 18: 15.4 inches Girls Age 6: 10.6 inches
Age 10: 12 inches
Age 14: 12.6 inches
Age 18: 13.6 inches
Source: Pediatrics
Okay, so I dig out a tape and measure my neck and… crap! I’m a solid half-inch overweight. ARRRGHHHH!!! Oh wait… muscular people have bigger necks. That must be it. Yes, I just have a sinewy neck. Of course. Well now that I’ve got that all worked out, maybe I should fire up the grill and make a double bacon cheeseburger. Yum!
Ensconced in the northeastern US, it’s sometimes easy to not see what passes for a normal school day in vast portions of the country, and it’s often hard to see how this impacts our economy and our future. But that makes it no less real.
To start, take a gander at the video below. It shows a glimpse of a high school science classroom in Dayton, TN. The teacher is an unabashed creationist. He rationalizes that he gives actual science a fair hearing, but also admits to giving equal weight to supernatural (i.e. non-scientific) explanations. His students are clearly young-Earth creationists, and he admits he would do nothing to dissuade that. The final student is perhaps the most shocking as he can’t fathom how an African-American person would evolve from a white person. The level of ignorance expressed in that one statement suggests these kids are actually exposed to frightfully little science.
It would be nice to dismiss this classroom as an anomaly, but that’s simply not the case. In general, kids on the coasts are mostly free of this sort of religious intrusion in schools. Still, some are taught “alternative science” in their churches that refutes the classroom science. But I suppose in these cases it at least creates a genuine two-sided debate. And while students may not “believe” in science, they can at least explain it. Yet in the country’s heartland, there is not even a 2-sided discussion. The students are graduating as science illiterate.
Where’s the harm in that, you might ask? After all, these students may be science illiterate, but they are God-fearing, moral, upright, and productive additions to their local communities. Isn’t that a good thing? Yes, but…
For the latter half of the 20th Century, the US was the undisputed economic powerhouse on the planet. Our middle class bloomed and the country enjoyed the most prosperous period of its history. What drove that? Science and technology. The US grew and attracted the brightest and most innovative minds. We generated the technology and the subsequent industry that was exported around the globe. It can be claimed without hyperbole that the economy was driven by our mastery of science.
Today we see our economy flagging. And I don’t mean just the latest disaster. Throughout most of the last decade our economy has been based on our ability to game the markets and banking system. Meanwhile, other countries have arisen to fill the technology void. Korea, China, Taiwan, India, and others have taken over the mantle of innovation and industry. They are ascending. Us, not so much.
It’s no coincidence that US students are now consistently ranked around 17th out of the top 30 industrial nations in science and math skills. We usually rank right about the same level as Turkey. It’s not that we don’t produce any bright geeky students. We do. But we don’t produce the volume required to compete effectively in global markets against countries who grow engineers like we grow corn.
The counter-argument is often that teaching creationism as science might stunt a student’s biology career, but it shouldn’t keep us from producing scads of software engineers and physicists. But I say that’s sophistry. First, a lot of the innovation space with our rapidly aging populace is in medicine and biology, so we do need people who really understand the life sciences. But moreover, when a child’s early exposure to science of any flavor is basically that a bunch of whackos in lab coats have this nutty idea, but really the way the world works is something else, they learn an inherent distrust of science in general. Why would a student want to pursue a career using the same fundamental techniques that yielded such “flawed theories” as evolution? It requires a pretty significant cognitive dissonance to believe that biology, geology, anthropology, cosmology, and several other sciences are fundamentally wrong, but quantum physics is right on the money.
So yes, it does matter to me that students far from here are learning that science is hooey. It matters to me not because it’s any sort of personal affront to me, but because it diminishes the future of our country. We all want our children to grow up and be more prosperous and better off than we were. But I fear that won’t be true. Religious faith is a good thing for many people. But you can’t build industry around it. You can’t export it. And you can’t eat it. Religion has its place, but we allow it to dilute science at our own peril.
Newsweek reports on the reopening of the debate surrounding gender segregated education. But maybe the larger question is, what’s magic about gender?
The article gives a fairly balanced coverage of a lot of the arguments that have been going on for decades. Most boil down to the question, are learning styles truly different, or are they merely reinforcing gender stereotypes? One interesting point is that while mixed gender classrooms have historically been seen as a possible disadvantage to girls, there’s increasing thought they might really be detrimental to boys.
The article reaches no particular conclusion, and I also can’t say I have a strong personal opinion one way or the other. But what troubles me is more that if we start thinking girls learn differently from boys, why would that be the only line to be drawn? Sure, it brings up the obvious notion of going back to racially segregated schools. But what about other delineations that are likely more pedagogically defensible?
How about if we use the elementary level IQ tests they give all the kids anyway to assign kids to middle and high schools based on IQ? Could anyone reasonably argue that schools full of nothing but the best and brightest would have outstanding academic achievements? Still, the public backlash against any such proposal would be swift and loud.
What if you could show that kids with musical ability learned differently than others? Kids from troubled homes? Fat kids? The key point seems to be that as a society, we likely wouldn’t entertain dividing our public school students based on most all criteria. Why would we reasonably entertain doing it for gender?
I think until we can answer the question of why gender should be so much more important than any other dividing line, this notion of gender segregation in schools is a non-starter.
This site is rife with satire, politics, religion, tech geekery, and snippets of life. It's a place to keep and share the somewhat random musings, rants, and observations which otherwise clutter my brain. I hate clutter.
