Countries are like families

Sometimes when it is hard to understand politics, budgets, economics, and sociology I find it helpful to think of nations and states like big families. Drawing on this analogy, there was a good New York Times opinion piece by Thomas Friedman, Still digging.

It is amazing (and sad) for me to watch the battle going on in the USA about tax cuts for the wealthy. Ideology rules. At some point you have to compromise and realise that when you have a huge debt, you have to make hard and painful decisions: cut spending, raise revenue or do both. You can't keep putting it off...

New book on science and the Bible

I have been asked to review the new book, Science, Creation, and the Bible by Richard F. Carlson and Tremper Longman III. Here are the chapter headings.

1. Theological and Scientific Sources and Their Interpretation
2. Characteristics of Theology and Science Relevant to the Conflict
3. Biblical Interpretation–A Key Element in Resolving the Creation-Evolution Conflict
4. Creation in the Old Testament
5. Creation in the New Testament
6. Genesis 1–2:3 and Genesis 2:25
7. Genesis 1 and 2 as a Worldview Statement of the Ancient People of Israel

I am looking forward to this. It is admirable that one author is a scientist and the other an Old Testament scholar.

Keeping the poison in perspective

This week I was surprised to see that The San Fransciso Chronicle had a front page article about biochemistry, Mono lake bacterium seen as model for life in space. The article was stimulated by a paper about to appear in the journal Science, A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic rather than phosporous. Earlier in the week a teasing press release from NASA had stimulated all sorts of wild speculation on the internet.
This episode reminds me of all the hype surrounding the claimed discovery of "life on mars" about decade ago, which was actually the discovery of some "dead germ materials on a meteorite that may have come from mars" which later turned out to be have other possible explanations. Some commentators said the discovery presented profound problems for Christianity. I failed to see this, even before the evaporation of the results.
So what has been discovered this time? Basically what the title of the Science paper says. In the extreme conditions found in Mono lake it seems there are some bacteria which are quite different from most other living things on the planet, which are poisoned by arsenic. These bacteria actually use arsenic instead of phosphorous. Do such life forms exist elsewhere? Where they important in the origin of life on earth? Maybe, but we have NO evidence. So any claims about life elsewhere are pure speculation and not scientific.

Who belongs in church?

Yesterday, in Seattle, my brother-in law and sister-in-law took my family to a performance of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by the Attic Theatre. It was not only entertaining and amusing but had a strong message of grace that Christmas (and church) is for everyone, regardless of their history or background.

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.
Luke 19:10

Huxley on the limits of science

T.H. Huxley (1825-1925) coined the term agnostic and was known for his antagonism towards Christian orthodoxy. Hence, I found it surprising to come across the following quote which I read in a report of John Hedley Brooke's talk at the 2010 London Conference of Christians in Science.

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious — fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance. 

The interpreters of Genesis and the interpreters of Nature (1885)
For more on Huxley and the famous non-debate with Wilberforce in Oxford see this earlier post.

Are Australians the WEIRDest people?

You often see the strangest things in public printers. Today I was visiting the chemistry department at Berkeley and while waiting for a colleague in a meeting room I noticed someone had printed a paper, The Weirdest People in the World? from the Journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, so I quickly skimmed it. Here are a few intriguing observations.

Henrich, Heiner, and Norenzayan [from the Psychology Department at University of British Columbia], the authors of the paper, define WEIRD as Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic. Their main point is that most "standard subjects" in studies of human psychology and behaviour are actually USA undergraduate students who are not only WEIRD but actually not representative of humanity in general! One example is the following.

A 2002 paper in the journal Nature, Altruistic Punishment in Humans, claimed to resolve the puzzle, Why are humans often altruistic when there is no evolutionary advantage? The Swiss authors found that there was a strong tendency for subjects (all WEIRD) to be willing to spend some of their own resources to punish fellow members of society who were "free loaders" who were not altruistic. In particular they claimed to show that "cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. "
However, Henrich et al., discuss a 2008 paper in the journal Science, by Hermann et al. Antisocial punishment across societies which contains the fascinating graphic below. One of the main findings of this study was that the extent of punishment of anti-social behaviour varied significantly between societies, even to the extent that some societies actually tended to punish altruism. But, what got my attention was that Australians showed the strongest tendency to punish free loaders!

Special or not so special

I just flew Brisbane to Los Angeles. I watched two movies. The first was The Other Guys which was barely o.k. as a plane movie but would probably be mediocre in a normal context. The second was The Special Relationship about the relationship of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. I found it quite educational (especially about Kosovo) but a bit depressing because it is probably quite believable. I thought it made of the main players Cherie Blair came out looking good but the Clintons and Tony Blair were not portrayed in a sympathetic light (I am not saying they should be). I thought the picture it painted of the Blairs was somewhat reminiscent of that in The Queen.