Okay. It should be pretty obvious by now. I am no fan of free-market capitalism or big corporations. Also, I think that in this day and age, one of the role of government is to keep in check the powers of corporation rather than facilitate them.
This is an interview of Naomi Klein by Bill Maher, which alludes to my point of why the role of the government is to keep the powers of corporation in check. Everything you hear described here has been happening in Singapore for the past few years, and personally, seeing how free-market capitalism have screwed USA for the past few years, I am not keen for it to happen to my own country.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
有没有问题
(刊登于联合早报2007年10月14日)
根据海峡时报报道，李资政在南大部长论坛演讲接受观众的问题时，曾一度因为在场发问的人都是外国学生，而呼吁在场的新加坡学生勇于发问。言下之意，为何本地学生对于自己国家的事比不上国外来的学生呢？
对于本地学生不勇于发问的现象，有些人的见解是本地的教育制度原本就不鼓励学生发问。或者说，过去的教育只着重于教导学生死背课本里的知识，但对于激好奇心和鼓励发问，以及教导初院学生如何质询的课程 (Knowledge and Inquiry) 也是近期才实行的政策。因此，要等到一批勇于发问的学生，或许还有一些时间。
也有人认为本地学生不勇于发问的态度其实就是新加坡人民在谈到政治问题时的最佳写照，而这种不积极发问的心态源自于某种莫名的恐惧。我记得前几年开始写社论时，母亲曾认真地提醒我千万不要写相反于有关当局看法的言论，要不然政府不是把我捉去关起来，就是会起诉我毁谤，直到我破产为止。尽管我心领了母亲的善意提醒，不过对于这种政府随时将我关起来的想法还是觉得啼笑皆非。
然而，这却是许多人对于有关当局的看法。如果不同意有关当局的政策，他们就会将你整得很惨。至少，这是我和德士司机聊天时所听到的抱怨。或者，只要在任何网路上的论坛也可以看到诸如此类的说法。在某个程度上，这些疑虑是可以理解的，毕竟每个人对内部安全法令的理解并非全面。更何况，有关当局向来给人无可商榷的印象，就如同一位严父。
除了莫名的恐惧感外，我常听到的另一个不质问的理由是就算质问也没有用。反正有关当局什么都西都决定好了嘛，我们问了也是白问，这是一般民众的想法。其实，大家的想法如此消极也不是没有道理，因为大家感觉有关当局的政策从未询求民意，而本地民间团体的意见对于有关当局的政策的影响也似乎不是很大。例如民间团体多次要求有关当局更为广泛地接受同性恋者和撤销刑罚法典377A时，都被当局以时机尚未成熟的理由驳回。心理学里有一种现象叫做习得性无助感 (Learned Helplessness)，指的是生物在接连不断地受到挫折后所产生的一种无能为力和听天由命的心态。或许，大家不勇于发问的现象在某种程度上就如同一种广泛的习得性无助感吧。
还有另一种说法，就是由于有关当局办事非常有效率，因此大家都信任有关当局，所以鲜少提出问题。然而，如果说大家出于莫名的恐惧感和习得性无助感而不勇于质问有关当局在某种程度上是有关当局必须自我检讨，那么因为对有关当局加以信任而不提出质疑就是我们必须检讨了。就算有关当局现在办事非常有效，不过只要有一个错误的决定，或许咱们就得花上很久才能再度回到轨道。因此，这种因为信任政府而不提出问题的态度对大家都没有好处。就算再优秀和有效的政府，如果没有人民的参与和适当的讨论，也无法把国家发展往另一个高峰推进。有时候，向有关当局提出质问并非是不支持他们，或者是刻意找麻烦吧，而是我们身为公民的责任。
我想李资政大概也非常了解这点，所以才会在论坛演讲上呼吁本地学生们发问问题。因为，有时候没有问题才是真正的大问题吧。
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Radiohead -- Nude
After a few listens to In Rainbows, I've decided that I like this song a lot. Maybe I still have to listen to it a few more times to decide whether I would rank it above Kid A or OK Computer, but I'll have to say that the new album is not bad.
Also, I think Radiohead is one of the more progressive thinking band. They offered the album for digital download and you pay whatever amount you wish to pay (see here). However, if you want the deluxe version of the album, then you have to pay more (much more). And they are not selling the albums via a recording company, but directly to you from them. I think this is a great idea because: (a) now the artists can be directly in touch with their fans, without the record company ripping off either of them; (b) less wastage, in the sense that no albums need to be printed ...... with the invention of MP3 and digital downloading, the printing of albums seemed so last century; (c) I think what we are seeing here is a whole new model of how the music industry will move in the future. It might work, it might not work, but whatever the new model of the music industry in the future is, it will definitely not be CDs.
Also, I think Radiohead is one of the more progressive thinking band. They offered the album for digital download and you pay whatever amount you wish to pay (see here). However, if you want the deluxe version of the album, then you have to pay more (much more). And they are not selling the albums via a recording company, but directly to you from them. I think this is a great idea because: (a) now the artists can be directly in touch with their fans, without the record company ripping off either of them; (b) less wastage, in the sense that no albums need to be printed ...... with the invention of MP3 and digital downloading, the printing of albums seemed so last century; (c) I think what we are seeing here is a whole new model of how the music industry will move in the future. It might work, it might not work, but whatever the new model of the music industry in the future is, it will definitely not be CDs.
Radiohead -- Pyramid Song
This is a nice song by Radiohead from their album, Amnesiac. I am currently listening to their newest album, In Rainbows, and is sort of torn about it. All I have to say is that it is very different from their previous albums and I have to get used to it.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Another article about Apes...
This is an article from Science News Online, found here.
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Ape Aid: Chimps share altruistic capacity with people
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Ape Aid: Chimps share altruistic capacity with people
Bruce Bower
Many researchers have asserted that only people will assist strangers without receiving anything in return, sometimes at great personal cost. However, a new study suggests that chimpanzees also belong to the Good Samaritan club, as do children as young as 18 months of age.
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MAY I HELP YOU? New experiments indicate that chimpanzees aid strangers, regardless of personal gain, much as people, including very young children, do. |
Without any prospect of immediate benefit, chimps helped both people and other chimps that they didn't know, and the 18-month-olds spontaneously assisted adults they'd never seen before, say psychologist Felix Warneken of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues.
The roots of human altruism reach back roughly 6 million years to a common ancestor of people and chimps, the researchers propose in the July PLoS Biology.
"Learning and experience are involved in altruistic helping, but our claim is that there is a predisposition [in chimps and people] to develop such behavior without explicit training," Warneken says.
His team conducted three experiments with adult chimps living on an island sanctuary in Uganda and two experiments with 18-month-old German children. In the chimp version of the first experiment, 36 animals watched one at a time from a barred enclosure as an experimenter in an adjacent room—who had had virtually no prior contacts with the animals—reached through the bars for a stick on the other side. The stick was within reach of only the observing chimp.
Most chimps snatched the stick and gave it to the experimenter, whether or not the experimenter offered a piece of banana as a reward. No assistance came if the experimenter didn't first reach in vain for the stick.
A similar trial with 36 youngsters yielded comparable altruistic behavior, regardless of whether the experimenter offered toys as a reward.
The second round of experiments included 18 chimps and 22 infants who had helped at least once in the first experiment.
The chimps still retrieved a stick for an experimenter, although they now had to climb a 2.5-meter-high platform to reach the item. The children navigated barriers and hurdles to get a pencil for an experimenter. No reward was offered in either case.
The third experiment tested nine chimps' willingness to aid other chimps that they neither knew nor were related to. One chimp watched another in a separate room try to enter an adjacent space through a chained door in order to obtain food. Only the observing chimp could remove a peg in its enclosure to release the chain, allowing the other chimp to nab a snack.
All but one observing chimp did just that in numerous trials.
"These are wonderful experiments and present a real challenge to previous findings," remarks anthropologist Joan B. Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles. Silk and other investigators have reported that chimps don't give food rewards to their comrades, even at no cost to the potential donor.
Chimps may help others who fail to achieve observable goals, as in the new experiments, Warneken suggests. Further studies need to compare individuals' reactions to different types of cooperative tasks, Silk says.
The results "come as no surprise to any field worker who has spent lots of time close to wild chimpanzees," comments anthropologist William C. McGrew of the University of Cambridge in England.
Werewolf
Recently, a werewolf was sighted amongst the peaceful HDB estate of a certain neighborhood. Not just your regular type of werewolf, you know, but it almost seems certain that it is a color wolf (literary translated from Chinese, meaning lecher) as well. Not surprising to deduce, since all its victims were females whom had their breast and vulva attacked, badly clawed and bruised. As I said, not your regular werewolf who is interested in mutilating bodies of unknown victims, regardless of gender, and throwing their body parts all over the streets, but a color wolf who molests females only and who is not even interested in mutilating their body. Not a bit, not interested in even pulling out a finger, biting off an ear or just even tearing out strands of hair. No, all it was interested in was the breasts and the vulva. A colorful werewolf, I must say, and it is interesting to just wonder whether the rest of the werewolf community would view him as a disgrace. I could almost imagine two normal werewolves talking about this deviant one over some freshly severed human heads.
"What, you mean that bugger don't even attempt to seriously injure his victims?? Are you sure he is one of us, or just a crossbreed between a dog or whatever?"
"I don't know, maybe he has some problem with his mind. Doesn’t he know how a werewolf should behave? Molesting human victims?? Next thing you know he'll start turning into vegetarian or something."
"Yeah, better not go too close to him next time, if not others would think we are strange in the head too...."
"My sentiments exactly."
So on and so forth.
* * *
"So what makes you think the werewolf is a lecher?" I asked my friend.
It was a sunny afternoon; he was brewing some kind of green tea in his kitchen. Michael Stipe’s voice was booming out from the speakers to the tune of ‘What's The Frequency, Kenneth?’. I could never catch the lyrics of that song.
"Why not, it only attacks females, and apparently, sexually."
"Then why can't it be a lesbian? A lesbian color wolf.... that'll explain why it only attacks females too, right?"
"Well," my friend said thoughtfully as he laid down the freshly brewed green tea on the table, " your theory would stand, but for the fact that no males were attacked and mutilated. That would have happened if the werewolf were a lesbian. All lesbians hate males."
"That’s a bigotry remark." I retorted
"It’s my personal opinion." he retorted back.
"How would you know? You are not a lesbian, not even a female. How would you understand how a lesbian feels?"
"Well, neither are you."
"Gees, that's sort of true."
So with the conversation hanging in midair like a boneless jellyfish, we continued drinking the green tea. Not that it was nice, but that was the only drink available in his house when I paid a surprise visit, and the prospect of plain water didn't appeal to me.
"Well, why did it have to be a werewolf?" my friend asked.
"Pardon?"
"I mean, nobody actually saw the werewolf, right? And even the victims only saw the big hairy hands, a big hairy face and a big hairy body. For all we know, it could have been a genetically flawed vampire who had hair growing out of every part of his body."
"A vampire wouldn't have claws." I reasoned.
"Okay, so it may not have been a vampire, but it could be something else, right? Why a werewolf?"
"You’re being silly here, everybody is saying that it is a werewolf, the police, the medical experts, the religious people, the psychic and all the victims. It is all over the newspaper. You can’t argue with that."
"Well, at one point of time, everybody thought the world was flat." my friend was trying to beat me with his logic.
"Well, if it can be another monster, then why not a lesbian?"
"Ah, fuck off."
"So what's the thing with lesbians, huh? You got rejected by a girl who is a lesbian?"
"I told you to fuck off."
"Just drink the bloody tea."
* * *
When I received the phone call from my girlfriend, my alarm clock beside the bed showed that it was 2 am in the morning.
"Okay, look here, I’m really tired, can I call you tomorrow?" I mumbled groggily.
"Look, I’ll just ask you one question and I’ll hang up the phone. Do you want to marry me?"
I looked at the clock again. 2 am, I wasn't mistaken. I touched my face, it is there, I’m not dreaming.
"Look, can we just leave everything to tomorrow? I really tired and weary here and now what I want to do is to sleep. I’ll call you again the first thing I wake up tomorrow."
"I want an answer now,” my girlfriend demanded.
I hung up the phone.
Five minutes later, the phone rang again. More sober this time, I picked it up.
"Okay, please don't say anything and hear out what I’m going to say. It won't take more than five minutes,” she said.
I nodded, but realizing that she can't see me over the phone, I gave a grunt of acknowledgement.
"Today, well actually it was yesterday evening, we went out for dinner together, and after that you dropped me off below my flat before driving off, right?"
I grunted.
"Well, after you were gone, I walked towards the lift, took the elevator up to the tenth floor, and started walking towards my apartment, and did you know what I saw?"
"What?" I muttered
"Well, I saw the full moon. And it was when I saw this I realized that we have been going out together for more than four years. During this period, you never made any serious considerations for marriage. You never made any preparations, you consider meeting my parents a drag, and you always treat our relationship as if it was something temporary. And it was there and then I realized that you never had any intention in marrying me at all."
I tried to think of words to defend myself, but before I could react, my girlfriend had beaten me to it, "well, since you had absolutely no intention of marrying me, I don't see the point of carrying on with our relationship. I just want to call you now and tell you that you don't have to look for me again. Don’t call me either."
She hung up the phone.
I stared at the receiver, totally mystified. Okay, so I wasn't the type of guy who would want to desperately be married, but what have I done to warrant this kind of treatment, especially at two am in the morning.
I put down the receiver of the phone, and decided against calling my girlfriend back right away. Nope, knowing her, she wouldn't want me to call her back now.
I went to the toilet to relieve myself. And as I was urinating as if there was no tomorrow, I thought about the words that my girlfriend said. What does she mean? Does she think that I don't love her, so therefore I don't make arrangements to get married with her? I think that must be what she meant. Well, people sometimes have a way of talking huge amount of words to hide the true intention of these words, and it is up to me to understand what it really meant. I sighed as I washed up my hands by the basin. Doesn’t the poor girl know that love does not equate to marriage? Just because I will want to marry somebody doesn't necessary mean I love the person, and just because I love the person doesn't necessary mean that I must marry her. I must make this point clear to her tomorrow, I thought. In our times and generation, this post-modern era, marriage doesn't mean anything. It certainly does not equate to love.
As I passed by the living room going back to my bedroom, I noticed that I forgotten to bolt up the front door before I slept. I walked towards the door to fasten the bolt, but just as I reached out my hand, I decided otherwise and headed back to my room. Well, nobody would want to rob a guy like me, and I’m sure even if they wanted to do so, they have to get past the security guards downstairs and the heavy and sturdy steel gates. No normal human being could have done that without waking me up. It would take a supernatural being to break through all those barriers. And the only supernatural being I know around town only attacks females.
I went back into my bedroom, climbed back onto my bed and closed my eyes in an attempt to slip back to dreamland as fast as possible. There is an important presentation at work tomorrow and I have to make sure I don't screw this up. Just as I closed my eyes, I suddenly have this eerie feeling that somebody else is in the room. The hair on the back of my neck started to stand and I dare not open my eyes for fear of what I might have seen. I could have sworn that I could hear the heavy breathings and slight grunting of something in the room. Don’t worry; I kept assuring myself despite the loud beatings of my heart, if the werewolf were in here, in this room with me, he would not attack me because I am not a female. This is only a color wolf interested in females.
I could feel the breathing sounds coming nearer and nearer, and all the while, I was lying very still on the bed, mentally reassuring myself that everything is going to be just all right.
Conversation With The Sheep
Sheep: So, what you are trying to say is, you don't believe in love.
Owl: I never said that. All I said was that my idea of love is different from yours. I don't believe that there is "the one out there" or that I have to find "the right one for me". For me, I think love is all about getting used to whoever you are with, as long as you can stand the other person's faults and idiosyncrasies, that to me is love.
Sheep: But you can get used to anyone given enough time!
Owl: I don't deny that.
Sheep: That is so sad. This means you never truly loved. Love should be more than getting used to another person. There should be a spark somewhere, something to make it special, something that lets you feel that the other person is the right one for you. I feel so sorry for you.
Owl: Hey, don't fucking judge me with your definition of love. I am comfortable the way I am now, and what is wrong with defining love as the way I defined? I just think passion, romance and the whole concept of the perfect fit is overrated and a bunch of bullshit.
Sheep: Whatever, to each his own.
Owl: Yeah, to each his own.
Owl: I never said that. All I said was that my idea of love is different from yours. I don't believe that there is "the one out there" or that I have to find "the right one for me". For me, I think love is all about getting used to whoever you are with, as long as you can stand the other person's faults and idiosyncrasies, that to me is love.
Sheep: But you can get used to anyone given enough time!
Owl: I don't deny that.
Sheep: That is so sad. This means you never truly loved. Love should be more than getting used to another person. There should be a spark somewhere, something to make it special, something that lets you feel that the other person is the right one for you. I feel so sorry for you.
Owl: Hey, don't fucking judge me with your definition of love. I am comfortable the way I am now, and what is wrong with defining love as the way I defined? I just think passion, romance and the whole concept of the perfect fit is overrated and a bunch of bullshit.
Sheep: Whatever, to each his own.
Owl: Yeah, to each his own.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
雷光夏 -- 入山
这是雷光夏第一张专辑的最后一首歌。虽然不如《逝》这首歌受到瞩目，不过这却是我最喜欢的歌。听说词曲是改编自客家歌谣，也是我所读过最有意境的词之一。
《入山》
入山看到藤缠树
出山看到树缠藤
滕生树死缠到死
树生藤死死也缠
《入山》
入山看到藤缠树
出山看到树缠藤
滕生树死缠到死
树生藤死死也缠
Avalanches -- Frontier Psychiatrist
This is a nice mix-track from the Australian band Avalanches, from their only studio album, Since I Left You, released in 2001.
How Baboon Think
This is an interesting article that appeared in the New York Times Science and Technology section (here). It concerns how scientist try to study the baboon society.
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How Baboons Think (Yes, Think)
By NICHOLAS WADE
October 9, 2007
Royal is a cantankerous old male baboon whose troop of some 80 members lives in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana. A perplexing event is about to disturb his day.
From the bushes to his right, he hears a staccato whoop, the distinctive call that female baboons always make after mating. He recognizes the voice as that of Jackalberry, the current consort of Cassius, a male who outranks Royal in the strict hierarchy of male baboons. No hope of sex today.
But then, surprisingly, he hears Cassius’s signature greeting grunt to his left. His puzzlement is plain on the video made of his reaction. You can almost see the wheels turn slowly in his head:
“Jackalberry here, but Cassius over there. Hmm, Jackalberry must be hooking up with some one else. But that means Cassius has left her unguarded. Say what — this is my big chance!”
The video shows him loping off in the direction of Jackalberry’s whoop. But all that he will find is the loudspeaker from which researchers have played Jackalberry’s recorded call.
The purpose of the experiment is not to ruin Royal’s day but to understand what goes on in a baboon’s mind, in this case how carefully the animals keep track of transient relationships.
Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, have spent 14 years observing the Moremi baboons. Through ingenious playback experiments performed by themselves and colleagues, the researchers say they have worked out many aspects of what baboons use their minds for, along with their limitations.
Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”
Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth are well known for a 1990 book on vervet monkeys, “How Monkeys See the World,” in which they showed how much about the animals’ mental processes could be deduced from careful experiments.
When a baby vervet’s call is played to three females, for instance, the mother looks to the source of the sound. The two others look to the mother, evidence that vervets know whose baby is whose.
An experiment like this — recording the sounds, waiting until the animals are in the right place and performing numerous controls — can take months to complete, but the results are widely admired by other biologists. “Any work of Dorothy and Robert’s is going to be as good as you get in the field,” said Robert M. Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist and an author who has studied baboons in the wild for many years.
“There is no one else in the area of animal behavior who does such incredibly interesting experiments in the field,” said Marc Hauser, a biologist at Harvard who was their first student.
Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have summed up their new cycle of research in a book titled, after Darwin’s comment, “Baboon Metaphysics.” Their conclusion, based on many painstaking experiments, is that baboons’ minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it.
The shaper of a baboon’s mind is natural selection. Those with the best social skills leave the most offspring.
“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”
Baboon society revolves around mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines are in a troop, each with a rank order. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations.
By contrast, the male hierarchy, which consists mostly of baboons born in other troops, is always changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals.
Rank among female baboons is hereditary, with a daughter assuming her mother’s rank.
News of that fact gave great satisfaction to a member of the British royal family, Princess Michael of Kent. She visited Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth in Botswana, remarking to them, they report: “I always knew that when people who aren’t like us claim that hereditary rank is not part of human nature, they must be wrong. Now you’ve given me evolutionary proof!”
Baboons live with danger on every side. Many fall prey to lions, leopards, pythons and the crocodiles that in the wet season stalk the fords where baboons cross from one island to another. Baboon watchers are subject to the same hazards. Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth say their rules are not to work alone or to wade into water deeper than knee high. They often find themselves sitting in a tree with baboons waiting out a lion below. But going into New York is more petrifying, they contend, than dodging Botswana’s predators.
The baboons will bark to warn of lions and leopards, but pay no attention to some other species dangerous to humans like buffalo and elephant. On two occasions, baboons have attacked animals, a leopard and a honey badger, that threatened their human companions. “We haven’t lost any post-docs,” Dr. Seyfarth said.
For female baboons, another constant worry besides predation is infanticide. Their babies are put in peril at each of the frequent upheavals in the male hierarchy. The reason is that new alpha males enjoy brief reigns, seven to eight months on average, and find at first that the droits de seigneur they had anticipated are distinctly unpromising. Most of the females are not sexually receptive because they are pregnant or nurturing unweaned children.
An unpleasant fact of baboon life is that the alpha male can make mothers re-enter their reproductive cycles, and boost his prospects of fatherhood, by killing their infants. The mothers can secure some protection for their babies by forming close bonds with other females and with male friends, particularly those who were alpha when their children were conceived and who may be the father. Still, more than half of all deaths among baby baboons are from infanticide.
So important are these social skills that it is females with the best social networks, not those most senior in the hierarchy, who leave the most offspring.
Although the baboon and human lines of descent split apart some 30 million years ago, the species have much in common. Both are primates whose ancestors came down from the trees and learned to survive on the ground in large social groups. The baboon mind may therefore shed considerable light on the early stages of the evolution of the human mind.
In some of their playback experiments, Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have tested baboons’ knowledge of where everyone stands in the hierarchy. In a typical interaction, a dominant baboon gives a threat grunt, and its inferior screams. From their library of recorded baboon sounds, the researchers can fabricate a sequence in which an inferior baboon’s threat grunt is followed by a superior’s scream.
Baboons pay little attention when a normal interaction is played to them but show surprise when they hear the fabricated sequence implying their social world has been turned upside down.
This simple reaction says a lot about what is going in the baboon’s mind. That the animal can construe “A dominates B,” and distinguish it from “B dominates A,” means it must be able to break a stream of sounds down into separate elements, recognize the meaning of each, and combine the meanings into a sentence-like thought.
“That’s what we do when we parse a sentence,” Dr. Seyfarth said. Human language seems unique because no other species is capable of anything like speech. But when it comes to perceiving and deconstructing sounds, as opposed to making them, baboons’ ability seems much more language-like.
Assuming that early humans inherited the same ability from their joint ancestor with baboons, then when humans first started to combine sounds in the beginning of spoken language, “their listeners were all ready to perceive them,” Dr. Seyfarth said.
Baboons may be good at perceiving and thinking in a combinative way, but their vocal output consists of single sounds that are never combined, like greeting grunts, the females’ sexual whoop and the males’ competitive “wahoo!” cry. Why did language, expressed in combinations of sounds, evolve in humans but not in baboons?
A possible key to the puzzle lies in what animal psychologists call theory of mind, the ability to infer what another animal does or does not know. Baboons seem to have a very feeble theory of mind. When they cross from one island to another, ever fearful of crocodiles, the adults will often go first, leaving the juveniles fretting at the water’s edge. However much the young baboons call, their mothers never come back to help, as if unable to divine their children’s predicament.
But people have a very strong ability to recognize the mental states of others, and this could have prompted a desire to communicate that drove the evolution of language. “If I know you don’t know something, I am highly motivated to communicate it,” Dr. Seyfarth said.
It is far from clear why humans acquired a strong theory of mind faculty and baboons did not. Another difference between the two species is brain size. Some biologists have suggested that the demands of social living were the evolutionary pressure that enhanced the size of the brain. But the largest brains occur in chimpanzees and humans, who live in smaller groups than baboons.
But both chimps and humans use tools. Possibly social life drove the evolution of the primate brain to a certain point, and the stimulus of tool use then took over. Use of tools would have spurred communication, as the owner of a tool explained to others how to use it. But that requires a theory of mind, and Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth are skeptical of claims that chimpanzees have a theory of mind, in part because the experiments supporting that position have been conducted on captive chimps. “It’s bewildering to us that none of the people who study ape cognition have been motivated to study wild chimpanzees,” Dr. Cheney said.
“Baboons provide you with an example of what sort of social and cognitive complexity is possible in the absence of language and a theory of mind,” she said. “The selective forces that gave rise to our large brains and our full-blown theory of mind remain mysterious, at least to us.”
===================================================================
How Baboons Think (Yes, Think)
By NICHOLAS WADE
October 9, 2007
Royal is a cantankerous old male baboon whose troop of some 80 members lives in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana. A perplexing event is about to disturb his day.
From the bushes to his right, he hears a staccato whoop, the distinctive call that female baboons always make after mating. He recognizes the voice as that of Jackalberry, the current consort of Cassius, a male who outranks Royal in the strict hierarchy of male baboons. No hope of sex today.
But then, surprisingly, he hears Cassius’s signature greeting grunt to his left. His puzzlement is plain on the video made of his reaction. You can almost see the wheels turn slowly in his head:
“Jackalberry here, but Cassius over there. Hmm, Jackalberry must be hooking up with some one else. But that means Cassius has left her unguarded. Say what — this is my big chance!”
The video shows him loping off in the direction of Jackalberry’s whoop. But all that he will find is the loudspeaker from which researchers have played Jackalberry’s recorded call.
The purpose of the experiment is not to ruin Royal’s day but to understand what goes on in a baboon’s mind, in this case how carefully the animals keep track of transient relationships.
Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, have spent 14 years observing the Moremi baboons. Through ingenious playback experiments performed by themselves and colleagues, the researchers say they have worked out many aspects of what baboons use their minds for, along with their limitations.
Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”
Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth are well known for a 1990 book on vervet monkeys, “How Monkeys See the World,” in which they showed how much about the animals’ mental processes could be deduced from careful experiments.
When a baby vervet’s call is played to three females, for instance, the mother looks to the source of the sound. The two others look to the mother, evidence that vervets know whose baby is whose.
An experiment like this — recording the sounds, waiting until the animals are in the right place and performing numerous controls — can take months to complete, but the results are widely admired by other biologists. “Any work of Dorothy and Robert’s is going to be as good as you get in the field,” said Robert M. Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist and an author who has studied baboons in the wild for many years.
“There is no one else in the area of animal behavior who does such incredibly interesting experiments in the field,” said Marc Hauser, a biologist at Harvard who was their first student.
Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have summed up their new cycle of research in a book titled, after Darwin’s comment, “Baboon Metaphysics.” Their conclusion, based on many painstaking experiments, is that baboons’ minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it.
The shaper of a baboon’s mind is natural selection. Those with the best social skills leave the most offspring.
“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”
Baboon society revolves around mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines are in a troop, each with a rank order. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations.
By contrast, the male hierarchy, which consists mostly of baboons born in other troops, is always changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals.
Rank among female baboons is hereditary, with a daughter assuming her mother’s rank.
News of that fact gave great satisfaction to a member of the British royal family, Princess Michael of Kent. She visited Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth in Botswana, remarking to them, they report: “I always knew that when people who aren’t like us claim that hereditary rank is not part of human nature, they must be wrong. Now you’ve given me evolutionary proof!”
Baboons live with danger on every side. Many fall prey to lions, leopards, pythons and the crocodiles that in the wet season stalk the fords where baboons cross from one island to another. Baboon watchers are subject to the same hazards. Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth say their rules are not to work alone or to wade into water deeper than knee high. They often find themselves sitting in a tree with baboons waiting out a lion below. But going into New York is more petrifying, they contend, than dodging Botswana’s predators.
The baboons will bark to warn of lions and leopards, but pay no attention to some other species dangerous to humans like buffalo and elephant. On two occasions, baboons have attacked animals, a leopard and a honey badger, that threatened their human companions. “We haven’t lost any post-docs,” Dr. Seyfarth said.
For female baboons, another constant worry besides predation is infanticide. Their babies are put in peril at each of the frequent upheavals in the male hierarchy. The reason is that new alpha males enjoy brief reigns, seven to eight months on average, and find at first that the droits de seigneur they had anticipated are distinctly unpromising. Most of the females are not sexually receptive because they are pregnant or nurturing unweaned children.
An unpleasant fact of baboon life is that the alpha male can make mothers re-enter their reproductive cycles, and boost his prospects of fatherhood, by killing their infants. The mothers can secure some protection for their babies by forming close bonds with other females and with male friends, particularly those who were alpha when their children were conceived and who may be the father. Still, more than half of all deaths among baby baboons are from infanticide.
So important are these social skills that it is females with the best social networks, not those most senior in the hierarchy, who leave the most offspring.
Although the baboon and human lines of descent split apart some 30 million years ago, the species have much in common. Both are primates whose ancestors came down from the trees and learned to survive on the ground in large social groups. The baboon mind may therefore shed considerable light on the early stages of the evolution of the human mind.
In some of their playback experiments, Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have tested baboons’ knowledge of where everyone stands in the hierarchy. In a typical interaction, a dominant baboon gives a threat grunt, and its inferior screams. From their library of recorded baboon sounds, the researchers can fabricate a sequence in which an inferior baboon’s threat grunt is followed by a superior’s scream.
Baboons pay little attention when a normal interaction is played to them but show surprise when they hear the fabricated sequence implying their social world has been turned upside down.
This simple reaction says a lot about what is going in the baboon’s mind. That the animal can construe “A dominates B,” and distinguish it from “B dominates A,” means it must be able to break a stream of sounds down into separate elements, recognize the meaning of each, and combine the meanings into a sentence-like thought.
“That’s what we do when we parse a sentence,” Dr. Seyfarth said. Human language seems unique because no other species is capable of anything like speech. But when it comes to perceiving and deconstructing sounds, as opposed to making them, baboons’ ability seems much more language-like.
Assuming that early humans inherited the same ability from their joint ancestor with baboons, then when humans first started to combine sounds in the beginning of spoken language, “their listeners were all ready to perceive them,” Dr. Seyfarth said.
Baboons may be good at perceiving and thinking in a combinative way, but their vocal output consists of single sounds that are never combined, like greeting grunts, the females’ sexual whoop and the males’ competitive “wahoo!” cry. Why did language, expressed in combinations of sounds, evolve in humans but not in baboons?
A possible key to the puzzle lies in what animal psychologists call theory of mind, the ability to infer what another animal does or does not know. Baboons seem to have a very feeble theory of mind. When they cross from one island to another, ever fearful of crocodiles, the adults will often go first, leaving the juveniles fretting at the water’s edge. However much the young baboons call, their mothers never come back to help, as if unable to divine their children’s predicament.
But people have a very strong ability to recognize the mental states of others, and this could have prompted a desire to communicate that drove the evolution of language. “If I know you don’t know something, I am highly motivated to communicate it,” Dr. Seyfarth said.
It is far from clear why humans acquired a strong theory of mind faculty and baboons did not. Another difference between the two species is brain size. Some biologists have suggested that the demands of social living were the evolutionary pressure that enhanced the size of the brain. But the largest brains occur in chimpanzees and humans, who live in smaller groups than baboons.
But both chimps and humans use tools. Possibly social life drove the evolution of the primate brain to a certain point, and the stimulus of tool use then took over. Use of tools would have spurred communication, as the owner of a tool explained to others how to use it. But that requires a theory of mind, and Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth are skeptical of claims that chimpanzees have a theory of mind, in part because the experiments supporting that position have been conducted on captive chimps. “It’s bewildering to us that none of the people who study ape cognition have been motivated to study wild chimpanzees,” Dr. Cheney said.
“Baboons provide you with an example of what sort of social and cognitive complexity is possible in the absence of language and a theory of mind,” she said. “The selective forces that gave rise to our large brains and our full-blown theory of mind remain mysterious, at least to us.”
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Replication of The Milgram Experiment
How susceptible are we to authority figures? This is a replication of Stanley Milgram's famous obedience study conducted by illusionist Derren Brown in UK, and if you had never heard of the Stanley Milgram experiment before, the result might shock you.
Futurama Is Back!!!
One of my favorite cartoon series is Futurama by the creators of The Simpsons. Fox canceled it a few years back, but now they are bringing it back... It is kind of like The Simpsons in a futuristic setting, but the jokes are more for nerds and geeks (like me)... I can't wait until the release of the DVD!
Monday, October 08, 2007
Beirut -- Elephant Gun
For years I have been waiting for Jeff Magnum to get his act together and reform Neutral Milk Hotel. It seems from his interviews I read from several indie music websites that he has no interest in doing so. Well, when Beirut and The Decemberists came out with their albums, at least I have some consolation knowing that the Jeff Magnum sound has not been lost. This is a song by Beirut from their Lon Gisland EP.
Comic Strip Poking Fun on Libertarianism
Recently, I befriended several Libertarians and came to understand the Libertarian philosophy. While I agree with some of their concepts and ideals, I do not accept their argument that free-market capitalism is the best for all. While I am too busy(arrrggghhh, graduate school work!) putting in all my arguments against free-market capitalism in an essay right now (well, watch this space when I have a break from work), this cartoon forwarded to me by a friend summarizes (if not caricatures) some of my disagreements towards free-market capitalism.
Michael Shermer on Acupuncture
This is a YouTube clip from Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptic Magazine, on acupuncture. I thought he was being rather kind to acupuncture as a practice, given an earlier article posted on this blog regarding the over-hyped effects of acupuncture studies.
Atheist On The Rise
This is an article I found on the web. It is regarding the slow but steady rise of non-believers in the USA. Hopefully in Singapore, we will never have to endure the religious right running the show in our country.
=========================================================================
Atheists on the rise
Those who don't believe in God are finding strength in numbers in public and political arenas
By JACQUELINE L. SALMON and MARY JORDAN
The Washington Post
In England and its offspring, the United States, a legion of the godless is rising up against the forces of religiosity.
“People who were ashamed to say there is no God now say, ‘Wow, there are others out there who think like me, and it feels damned good,’ ” said Margaret Downey, president of the Atheist Alliance International, whose membership has almost doubled in the last year to 5,200. It had a 500-person waiting list for its convention in Arlington, Va., last month.
Books like The God Delusion, by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins, attempting to debunk religion have been surprise best-sellers the last two years, outselling such religious works as Pope Benedict XVI’s book on Jesus and popular Christian novelist Tim LaHaye’s latest book, Kingdom Come, according to Nielsen BookScan.
And atheists themselves are becoming much more vocal. Take columnist and author Christopher Hitchens. Recently he said a new book laying out Mother Teresa’s secret struggles with her doubts about God showed her spiritual wavering was actually atheism.
“She couldn’t bring herself to believe in God, but she wished she could,” said Hitchens, whose God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is among atheist best-sellers.
Representatives of atheist and humanist groups say the books probably haven’t converted many religious people. But, said Lori Lipman Brown, a lobbyist for the Secular Coalition for America, which represents eight atheist or humanist organizations, the books “tremendously increase the visibility of nontheist rights.”
“Nontheist” is another term for atheist, or someone who does not believe in a supreme being.
New groups of nonbelievers are sprouting on college campuses, anti-religious blogs are expanding across the Internet, and, in general, more people are publicly saying they have no religious faith.
More than three out of four people in the world consider themselves religious, and those with no faith are a distinct minority. But especially in richer nations, and nowhere more than in Europe, growing numbers of people are saying they don’t believe there is a heaven or a hell or anything other than this life.
A study released in June by the Barna Group, a religious polling firm, found that about 5 million adults in the United States call themselves atheists. The number rises to about 20 million — about one in every 11 Americans — if people who say they have no religious faith or are agnostic (they doubt the existence of a God or a supreme deity) are included.
They tend to have more education and be more affluent and more likely to be male and unmarried than those with active faith, according to the Barna study. Only 6 percent of people older than 60 have no faith in God, and one in four adults 18 to 22 describe themselves as having no faith.
Many analysts trace the rise of what some are calling the “nonreligious movement” to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The sight of religious fanatics killing 3,000 people caused many to begin questioning — and rejecting — all religion.
“This is overwhelmingly the topic of the moment,” said Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society of Britain. “Religion in this country was very quiet until Sept. 11, and now it is at the center of everything.”
Since the 2001 attacks a string of religiously inspired bomb and murder plots has shaken Europe. Muslim radicals killed 52 people on the London transport system in 2005 and 191 on Madrid, Spain, trains in 2004.
People apparently aiming for a reward in heaven were arrested in Britain last year for trying to blow up trans-Atlantic jetliners. And earlier this month in Germany, authorities arrested converts to Islam on charges that they planned to blow up American facilities there.
Many Europeans are angry at demands to use taxpayer money to accommodate Islam, Europe’s fastest-growing religion, which now has as many as 20 million followers on the continent. Along with calls for prayer rooms in police stations, foot baths in public places and funding for Islamic schools and mosques, expensive legal battles have broken out over the niqab, the Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes, which some devout women seek to wear in classrooms and court.
Christian fundamentalist groups who want to halt certain science research, reverse abortion and gay rights and teach creationism rather than evolution in schools are also angering people, according to Sanderson and others.
“There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy,” Sanderson said.
Though the number of nonbelievers speaking their minds is rising, academics say it’s impossible to calculate how many people silently share that view. Many people who do not consider themselves religious or belong to any faith group often believe, even if vaguely, in a supreme being or an afterlife. Others are not sure what they believe.
The term “atheist” can imply aggressiveness in disbelief; many who don’t believe in God prefer to call themselves humanists, secularists, freethinkers, rationalists or, a more recently coined term, brights.
“Where religion is weak, people don’t feel a need to organize against it,” said Phil Zuckerman, an American academic who has written extensively about atheism around the globe.
He and others said secular groups are also gaining strength in countries where religious influence over society looms large, including India, Israel and Turkey. “Any time we see an outspoken movement against religion, it tells us that religion has power there,” Zuckerman said.
One group of nonbelievers in particular is attracting attention in Europe: the Council of Ex-Muslims. Founded earlier this year in Germany, the group now has a few hundred members and an expanding number of chapters across the continent. “You can’t tell us religion is peaceful — look around at the misery it is causing,” said Maryam Namazie, leader of the group’s British chapter.
She and other leaders of the council held a news conference in The Hague to launch the Dutch chapter on Sept. 11, the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States. “We are all atheists and nonbelievers, and our goal is not to eradicate Islam from the face of the earth” but to make it a private matter that is not imposed on others, she said.
The majority of nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of religious fanatics. But some atheists are also extreme and want, for example, people to blot out the words “In God We Trust” from every dollar bill they carry.
Gaining political clout and access to television and radio airtime is the goal of many of these groups.
With a higher profile, they say, they can, for instance, lobby for all religious rooms in public hospitals to be closed, as a response to Muslims demanding prayer rooms because Christians have chapels.
Associations of nonbelievers are also moving to address the growing demand in Britain, Spain, Italy and other European countries for nonreligious weddings, funerals and celebrations for new babies. They are helping arrange ceremonies that steer clear of talk of God, heaven and miracles and celebrate, as they say, “this one life we know.”
For the younger generations, charter schools based on humanist principles have opened in New York City and Florida. CampQuest, an Albany-based group, runs five overnight camps around the country for atheist kids.
The budget of the Council for Secular Humanism has climbed 40 percent in the last two years, approaching $8 million this year. The council opened a public-policy think tank in Washington last year to push leaders of both parties for policies based on the humanist principles of “science, reason and secularism” instead of religious faith, said Paul Kurtz, the council chairman.
In March, Congress had its first self-avowed atheist when Rep. Pete Stark, a California Democrat, said he does not believe in a supreme being.
The movement formed its first political action committee in 2005, when American Atheists, which advocates for the separation of church and state, formed the Godless Americans PAC.
Despite atheists’ increased vocalism and visibility, it seems that the rest of America isn’t buying in.
In a nationwide poll last year by University of Minnesota researchers, Americans rated atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.”
They also associated atheists with everything from criminal behavior to rampant materialism. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, more than half would not vote for an atheist for president.
Views and demographics
28 percent of U.S. atheists have postgraduate degrees or professional training.
15 percent of nonatheists have postgraduate degrees or professional training.
1.3: Atheists’ average number of children.
1.95: Nonatheists’ average number of children.
3 percent of atheists are “strong Republicans.”
16 percent of nonatheists are “strong Republicans.”
Source: 2005 Baylor University Religion Survey and Barna Group
=========================================================================
Atheists on the rise
Those who don't believe in God are finding strength in numbers in public and political arenas
By JACQUELINE L. SALMON and MARY JORDAN
The Washington Post
In England and its offspring, the United States, a legion of the godless is rising up against the forces of religiosity.
“People who were ashamed to say there is no God now say, ‘Wow, there are others out there who think like me, and it feels damned good,’ ” said Margaret Downey, president of the Atheist Alliance International, whose membership has almost doubled in the last year to 5,200. It had a 500-person waiting list for its convention in Arlington, Va., last month.
Books like The God Delusion, by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins, attempting to debunk religion have been surprise best-sellers the last two years, outselling such religious works as Pope Benedict XVI’s book on Jesus and popular Christian novelist Tim LaHaye’s latest book, Kingdom Come, according to Nielsen BookScan.
And atheists themselves are becoming much more vocal. Take columnist and author Christopher Hitchens. Recently he said a new book laying out Mother Teresa’s secret struggles with her doubts about God showed her spiritual wavering was actually atheism.
“She couldn’t bring herself to believe in God, but she wished she could,” said Hitchens, whose God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is among atheist best-sellers.
Representatives of atheist and humanist groups say the books probably haven’t converted many religious people. But, said Lori Lipman Brown, a lobbyist for the Secular Coalition for America, which represents eight atheist or humanist organizations, the books “tremendously increase the visibility of nontheist rights.”
“Nontheist” is another term for atheist, or someone who does not believe in a supreme being.
New groups of nonbelievers are sprouting on college campuses, anti-religious blogs are expanding across the Internet, and, in general, more people are publicly saying they have no religious faith.
More than three out of four people in the world consider themselves religious, and those with no faith are a distinct minority. But especially in richer nations, and nowhere more than in Europe, growing numbers of people are saying they don’t believe there is a heaven or a hell or anything other than this life.
A study released in June by the Barna Group, a religious polling firm, found that about 5 million adults in the United States call themselves atheists. The number rises to about 20 million — about one in every 11 Americans — if people who say they have no religious faith or are agnostic (they doubt the existence of a God or a supreme deity) are included.
They tend to have more education and be more affluent and more likely to be male and unmarried than those with active faith, according to the Barna study. Only 6 percent of people older than 60 have no faith in God, and one in four adults 18 to 22 describe themselves as having no faith.
Many analysts trace the rise of what some are calling the “nonreligious movement” to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The sight of religious fanatics killing 3,000 people caused many to begin questioning — and rejecting — all religion.
“This is overwhelmingly the topic of the moment,” said Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society of Britain. “Religion in this country was very quiet until Sept. 11, and now it is at the center of everything.”
Since the 2001 attacks a string of religiously inspired bomb and murder plots has shaken Europe. Muslim radicals killed 52 people on the London transport system in 2005 and 191 on Madrid, Spain, trains in 2004.
People apparently aiming for a reward in heaven were arrested in Britain last year for trying to blow up trans-Atlantic jetliners. And earlier this month in Germany, authorities arrested converts to Islam on charges that they planned to blow up American facilities there.
Many Europeans are angry at demands to use taxpayer money to accommodate Islam, Europe’s fastest-growing religion, which now has as many as 20 million followers on the continent. Along with calls for prayer rooms in police stations, foot baths in public places and funding for Islamic schools and mosques, expensive legal battles have broken out over the niqab, the Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes, which some devout women seek to wear in classrooms and court.
Christian fundamentalist groups who want to halt certain science research, reverse abortion and gay rights and teach creationism rather than evolution in schools are also angering people, according to Sanderson and others.
“There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy,” Sanderson said.
Though the number of nonbelievers speaking their minds is rising, academics say it’s impossible to calculate how many people silently share that view. Many people who do not consider themselves religious or belong to any faith group often believe, even if vaguely, in a supreme being or an afterlife. Others are not sure what they believe.
The term “atheist” can imply aggressiveness in disbelief; many who don’t believe in God prefer to call themselves humanists, secularists, freethinkers, rationalists or, a more recently coined term, brights.
“Where religion is weak, people don’t feel a need to organize against it,” said Phil Zuckerman, an American academic who has written extensively about atheism around the globe.
He and others said secular groups are also gaining strength in countries where religious influence over society looms large, including India, Israel and Turkey. “Any time we see an outspoken movement against religion, it tells us that religion has power there,” Zuckerman said.
One group of nonbelievers in particular is attracting attention in Europe: the Council of Ex-Muslims. Founded earlier this year in Germany, the group now has a few hundred members and an expanding number of chapters across the continent. “You can’t tell us religion is peaceful — look around at the misery it is causing,” said Maryam Namazie, leader of the group’s British chapter.
She and other leaders of the council held a news conference in The Hague to launch the Dutch chapter on Sept. 11, the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States. “We are all atheists and nonbelievers, and our goal is not to eradicate Islam from the face of the earth” but to make it a private matter that is not imposed on others, she said.
The majority of nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of religious fanatics. But some atheists are also extreme and want, for example, people to blot out the words “In God We Trust” from every dollar bill they carry.
Gaining political clout and access to television and radio airtime is the goal of many of these groups.
With a higher profile, they say, they can, for instance, lobby for all religious rooms in public hospitals to be closed, as a response to Muslims demanding prayer rooms because Christians have chapels.
Associations of nonbelievers are also moving to address the growing demand in Britain, Spain, Italy and other European countries for nonreligious weddings, funerals and celebrations for new babies. They are helping arrange ceremonies that steer clear of talk of God, heaven and miracles and celebrate, as they say, “this one life we know.”
For the younger generations, charter schools based on humanist principles have opened in New York City and Florida. CampQuest, an Albany-based group, runs five overnight camps around the country for atheist kids.
The budget of the Council for Secular Humanism has climbed 40 percent in the last two years, approaching $8 million this year. The council opened a public-policy think tank in Washington last year to push leaders of both parties for policies based on the humanist principles of “science, reason and secularism” instead of religious faith, said Paul Kurtz, the council chairman.
In March, Congress had its first self-avowed atheist when Rep. Pete Stark, a California Democrat, said he does not believe in a supreme being.
The movement formed its first political action committee in 2005, when American Atheists, which advocates for the separation of church and state, formed the Godless Americans PAC.
Despite atheists’ increased vocalism and visibility, it seems that the rest of America isn’t buying in.
In a nationwide poll last year by University of Minnesota researchers, Americans rated atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.”
They also associated atheists with everything from criminal behavior to rampant materialism. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, more than half would not vote for an atheist for president.
Views and demographics
28 percent of U.S. atheists have postgraduate degrees or professional training.
15 percent of nonatheists have postgraduate degrees or professional training.
1.3: Atheists’ average number of children.
1.95: Nonatheists’ average number of children.
3 percent of atheists are “strong Republicans.”
16 percent of nonatheists are “strong Republicans.”
Source: 2005 Baylor University Religion Survey and Barna Group
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Monty Python -- The Ministry of Funny Walks
This is another classic clip from Monty Python Flying Circus... Very funny!
The Devil Tried To Buy My Soul
I was reading a book on René Descartes when I heard a knock on the door. Not the type of aggressive knocks that sounded like thunder booming, but gentle knocks that would almost make one mistake it for the sound of rustling branches of the trees outside the window. In fact, I almost dismissed the knocking sound as a figment of my imagination when it came again. Knock, knock, and knock.
I put down my book and walked towards the door. Who would come and look for me in this late hour of the night, I wondered. When I opened the door, there was this man in a business suit standing outside the door. The first impression that he gave me was that he looked gray. Not only was his business suit gray in color, so were his hair and eyebrows. I didn't know whether it was the night playing tricks on my eyes, but I could almost swear that his skin was also gray in color. In fact, it seemed to me that all colors had been taken from this man, and the only way to differentiate the outlines of the different parts of his body was by the varying shades of gray that seemed to paint different parts of his body.
"How may I help you?" I was trying hard not to stare. Damn, even his shoes and briefcase were gray in color.
"Well, I’m actually a salesperson and I have a very nice deal for you. Would you mind opening the door and letting me in so that we can talk things over a nice cup of hot coffee?" he smiled sincerely.
"Well, I don't know..." I hesitated.
"I’ve been walking up and down these blocks for three hours already, and frankly speaking, I’m quite exhausted and thirsty. Could you just let me in for a while for a nice cup of coffee so that I can tell you all about the deal while I rest my weary feet? You don't necessary have to accept my offer, just hear me talk about It." weariness showed in his smile this time.
What the heck, I thought, I’ve got nothing better to do anyway, and I didn't understand a fuck what Descartes was trying to say in the book. I’m sure this guy wouldn't want to rob me anyway. Even if he did, there's really nothing valuable in the house for him to take.
"Well then, come on in." I said as I opened the door for him.
He bowed slightly as he entered the house, as if to show appreciation for my hospitality. I offered him a seat in the living room and asked, "Well, do you want milk for your coffee?"
"Yes, thank you please."
So I went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. I don't actually drink coffee. In fact, I find the taste of coffee distinctly disgusting. However, my girlfriend is addicted to this beverage, so there is just a small bottle of coffee powder in the kitchen at all times. I made a cup of coffee for the man in the living room and a cup of hot Milo for myself. From the corner of my eye, I saw that he was taking out some documents from his briefcase and laying them out on the coffee table. Well, at least he wasn't a robber trying to rob me. As I carried out the two cups of beverages to the living room, I wondered what it was that he was trying to sell.
"Well, this is hot, so try to take it slowly." I told the man as I laid down the cup of coffee in front of him.
"Thank you very much,” he said politely as he took a swipe of the burning hot coffee. He placed the cup on the coffee table after his thirst seemed to have been quenched. All of a sudden, he took out a name card out of his shirt pocket and held it with both hands in front of me. I really do mean "all of a sudden". One moment I was enjoying the hot Milo, and the next moment there was a name card being thrust in my face.
I placed my cup on the coffee table and took the name card from him. It read:
The devil
666, Hell
I put down the name card and looked at the man in front of me straight in the eyes. He was still smiling politely and nodding his head slightly in response to my gaze. Is this some kind of a joke? I thought to myself. Perhaps this guy is mental. If this was the case, then I might be in serious trouble. He was still smiling politely. I wondered what I should do next, whether to play along with him or to demand an explanation for all these absurdities. It was at this point of time I noticed something very odd. When I had received him at the door, I dismissed the fact that his skin was gray in color as an illusion conjured up by the lack of light. However, as I scrutinized him more closely under the light now, I discovered that his skin was really gray in color. It wasn't my eyes playing tricks on me just now. He was still smiling politely. I suddenly remembered a part of a story I had read somewhere a lot time ago. I can't recall exactly which story it was, what the plot was, who the characters involved were or any other things about the story. However, there was one part where the devil came in the guise of a salesperson in order to purchase his soul from him. I drew in a deep breath. Well, what do you know? Truth is stranger than fiction.
"So, Mr. devil, what do you want from me?" I asked, trying to disguise any trace of nervousness that I have in my voice with nonchalance.
"Well, as I said just now, I came here to offer you a deal... a very lucrative deal, as a matter of fact. Yes, you will benefit from it. In fact, most of the others have said that they benefited from the deal. Of course, you do not have to agree, I’m just here to state my proposal, you know, I..."
"I think you can come straight to the point." I interrupted the devil.
"Yes, yes, time is precious, isn't it? Well, since that is the case, I’ll just go straight into the point" he paused, "I’ll like to buy your soul from you."
"My soul?" I queried.
"Yes, your soul. Of course, I wouldn't buy it from you cheaply. Yes sir, there are a lot of benefits to be gained when you sell your soul to me. First and foremost, you do not have to fear about eternal damnation. It’s not that once you sell your soul to me, you'll be subjected to eternal damnation, you know. You can still get to heaven if you accumulated enough good deeds in your life. I’m not forcing you to just give me your soul like that. I’m just asking you to sign a contract saying that your soul would belong to me on the precondition that you do not make it to heaven. You still have an equal chance of making it into heaven even if you sign the contract. And if you really sign this contract, I can grant you a few wishes as indicated in this blue document here. You can choose any three of the wishes indicated here. See, here's a good one, it says that you would be entitled to at least half a million dollars each year of your life on earth. Another one here gives you the opportunity to live up to the age of hundred, and these are just two of the numerous wishes you can choose from. Of course, I realize that sometimes customers like to custom their own wishes, so you can actually custom you wish on this column here too. However, it will be subjected to selection and discussion among my peers before acceptance. We simply can't grant you anything that's outside our scope of power, can we? These offers are really interesting, you know. In fact, there is absolutely no catch. Just think of it as buying an insurance from an agent." the devil spoke as though he had gone through this speech a million of times. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if he really had.
"So, what do you think of my offer?" the devil asked, smiling politely again.
"Well, much as your offer is interesting, I don't really think I can accept it." I replied after a moment's thought.
"Why?"
"Well, basically, I’m currently a psychology student in college, and as you would know, psychology is a behavioral science. Thus it can be considered as a branch of science itself. One of the interesting assumptions of science is that we must always base our judgment and perception on empirical data and experience, and anything that is abstract must be quantified in such a way that it can be measured empirically."
"The point you are trying to drive at?"
"Well, as psychologists, we basically deny the existence of a soul. It doesn't exist as far as we are concerned, as it falls outside the range of empirical measurement and experience. Since this is the case, how do you expect me to sell my soul to you? It just like asking me to sell you the hole in a donut after I have eaten it."
"Well, that really seemed to be a problem." the devil looked somewhat crestfallen at the prospect of a failed deal, "isn't there a compromise we can reach or something?"
"Well, I could sell you my pituary gland if you want to, that is the only thing I can think of that comes closest to your concept of a soul. The pituary gland is of course the gland in the brain that controls all behaviors in the body by the secretion of hormones, and yeah, maybe this is the 'soul' thing you were talking about? However, I can't sell it to you now.... will you still be interested in it after my death?"
"Well, I don't really need pituary glands, you know... I can easily get them from corpses buried under the ground...." the tone of disappointment in the devil's voice was difficult to hide now, "Even if I really wanted to buy that from you, I wouldn’t want to offer any wishes to you in exchange for it... that would be an unfair trade from my perspective."
"In that case, I don't think we can strike a deal here." I said.
"True, true, sad but true." the devil sighed as he brought the cup of coffee to his mouth.
"If there's anything else you'll like to buy...."
"Well, actually, no. We’re only interested in souls,” he said as he put the cup down on the coffee table, "well, I must be going now, can't stay here forever. Time is precious, and I’ve got a quota to meet."
"I’ll see you to the door."
After the devil had left with his grayish existence, I proceeded to finish my cup of Milo and washed up the cups. As I was drying up the cups and placing them back onto the shelf, I couldn't help but think, what if I had promised to sell him my soul without telling him that I, in actual fact, denied the existence of my soul? That would be cheating on my part, wouldn't it? I wondered what would happen if I actually pulled off a bloody stunt like that.... come to think of it, half a million bucks a year is quite a generous offer. But, oh well, it's too late to consider this option now.
I returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa. There was still some time left before my usual bedtime, so I decided to proceed with where I have left off with the book. The wind had started to blow outside, forecasting the imminent presence of a storm. I flipped over a page of the book, trying to disentangle my thoughts through Descartes’ elaborate use of language. Somewhere in the distant, I could hear a baby crying.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Friday, October 05, 2007
How Corporations Lie About Science
Below is a caricature (but quite true) ran this week in the comic series Non Sequitur on how corporations try to discredit scientific research by coming up with their bogus claims. While this is an exaggerated piece, most of it is quite relevant. Those interested in how big corporations (at least in United States of America) tries to fudge findings that question their product or practices can refer to Chris Mooney's excellent book, The Republican War On Science.
浊水溪公社 -- 卡通手枪
十八岁是个荒谬的年龄。
或许是荷尔蒙把脑袋搞乱了，或许是从幼稚蜕变成成熟的阶段，或许只是因为不知道自己要做什么罢了，反正大家都会做一些无聊的事，看一些无聊的戏，听一些无聊的歌。我们当时什么都没有。没有钱，没有经验，没有对於整个社会和国家的综观思考。有的，只是好像怎么挥霍都挥霍不完的青春和时间，就好像开了过量的啤酒，喝不完而导致啤酒泄气的感觉，让人对於所谓人生这种东西会感觉贫乏无味吧。
因为那么无聊，所以需要听荒谬的歌曲来配合自己的人生。浊水溪公社的《卡通手枪》这首歌就是这么跑入我当时的生命里，并且在某种程度成为我十八岁时的主题曲。或许这是对当时的无聊、荒谬和无所事事的心态的最佳写照吧。
===================================================================================
<卡通手枪>
词曲：柯仁坚
树上开着杜鹃
白云飘过窗前
可是我只能躺在床上打手枪
天空下着小雨
麻雀唱着歌曲
我只能打手枪一个人在夜里
老师说要用功读书
校长说要复兴民族
可是我只能躲在角落里打手枪
喔……民国八十四年
身上没有半毛钱
要怎么出头天 (天天吃大便)
喔……快到2000年
一年不如一年
好像卡通片
小飞侠努力打倒恶魔党
我的爱人你怎么忍心将我放
小甜甜从小住在孤儿院
这世界到处都是伤心人
铁金刚眼睛发出红外光
什么时候成功才能轮到我的身上
小叮当口袋有一只火箭
去杂货店买份报纸来打手枪
(阿嬷我不要做功课啦.......我不会三角和四方的数学理论啦......我只要打手枪就好了......哎呀......别这样死板嘛......人民连打手枪的权利都没有吗！我就只会打！有没有人捉打手枪的！啊啊啊啊.......出来了。)
或许是荷尔蒙把脑袋搞乱了，或许是从幼稚蜕变成成熟的阶段，或许只是因为不知道自己要做什么罢了，反正大家都会做一些无聊的事，看一些无聊的戏，听一些无聊的歌。我们当时什么都没有。没有钱，没有经验，没有对於整个社会和国家的综观思考。有的，只是好像怎么挥霍都挥霍不完的青春和时间，就好像开了过量的啤酒，喝不完而导致啤酒泄气的感觉，让人对於所谓人生这种东西会感觉贫乏无味吧。
因为那么无聊，所以需要听荒谬的歌曲来配合自己的人生。浊水溪公社的《卡通手枪》这首歌就是这么跑入我当时的生命里，并且在某种程度成为我十八岁时的主题曲。或许这是对当时的无聊、荒谬和无所事事的心态的最佳写照吧。
===================================================================================
<卡通手枪>
词曲：柯仁坚
树上开着杜鹃
白云飘过窗前
可是我只能躺在床上打手枪
天空下着小雨
麻雀唱着歌曲
我只能打手枪一个人在夜里
老师说要用功读书
校长说要复兴民族
可是我只能躲在角落里打手枪
喔……民国八十四年
身上没有半毛钱
要怎么出头天 (天天吃大便)
喔……快到2000年
一年不如一年
好像卡通片
小飞侠努力打倒恶魔党
我的爱人你怎么忍心将我放
小甜甜从小住在孤儿院
这世界到处都是伤心人
铁金刚眼睛发出红外光
什么时候成功才能轮到我的身上
小叮当口袋有一只火箭
去杂货店买份报纸来打手枪
(阿嬷我不要做功课啦.......我不会三角和四方的数学理论啦......我只要打手枪就好了......哎呀......别这样死板嘛......人民连打手枪的权利都没有吗！我就只会打！有没有人捉打手枪的！啊啊啊啊.......出来了。)
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Asobi Seksu -- Thursday
This is another band in which I like, Asobi Seksu, from NYC. They are one of the few recent bands to explore the shoegaze genre, which is one of my favorite band sounds.
Richard Dawkins on Faith
This is an article by Richard Dawkins from the Washington Post, where he talks about
the corrupting influences of religion. The original article can be found here.
====================================================================================
Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds
Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women and so on. It would be absurd to suggest such a thing: just as absurd as to generalize about all atheists. I am not even concerned with statistical generalizations about the majority of religious people (or atheists). My concern here is over whether there is any general reason why religion might be more or less likely to bias individuals towards all those unpleasant things in Christopher Hitchens’s list: to make them more likely to exhibit them than they would have been without religion. I think the answer is yes.
Religion changes, for people, the definition of good. Atheists and humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. Most religious people think them bad, too, but some religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. For non-religious people, the behavior of consenting adults in a private bedroom is the business of nobody else, and is not bad unless it causes suffering – for example by breaking up a happy family. But many religions arrogate to themselves the right to decide that certain kinds of sexual behavior, even if they do no harm to anyone, are wrong.
The actions of the Taliban, their vile bullying of women, their sanctimonious hatred of all that might lead to enjoyment, their violence, their ignorant bigotry, their hatred of education, their cruelty, seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous – really good people.
The nineteen men of 9/11, having washed, perfumed themselves and shaved their whole bodies in preparation for the martyr’s paradise, believed they were performing the highest religious duty. By the lights of their religion they were as good as it is possible to be. They were not poor, downtrodden, oppressed or psychotic; they were well educated, sane and well balanced, and, as they thought, supremely good. But they were religious, and that provided all the justification they needed to murder and destroy. Their madrassas and their mullahs had given them good reason to think they were on a fast track to paradise.
Polls suggest that 13% of British Muslims regard the 7/7 London bombers as blessed martyrs. Neighbors and friends expressed bewilderment that such nice, gentle, kind, youth-clubbing, cricket-loving young men could do such terrible things. But once you understand what they truly and sincerely believed – that it was Allah’s will that they blow up buses and subways – it becomes all too easy to understand.
It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list.
The following quotation from the Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg has become well known, but it is so devastatingly true that it is worth quoting again and again: “With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”
the corrupting influences of religion. The original article can be found here.
====================================================================================
Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds
Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women and so on. It would be absurd to suggest such a thing: just as absurd as to generalize about all atheists. I am not even concerned with statistical generalizations about the majority of religious people (or atheists). My concern here is over whether there is any general reason why religion might be more or less likely to bias individuals towards all those unpleasant things in Christopher Hitchens’s list: to make them more likely to exhibit them than they would have been without religion. I think the answer is yes.
Religion changes, for people, the definition of good. Atheists and humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. Most religious people think them bad, too, but some religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. For non-religious people, the behavior of consenting adults in a private bedroom is the business of nobody else, and is not bad unless it causes suffering – for example by breaking up a happy family. But many religions arrogate to themselves the right to decide that certain kinds of sexual behavior, even if they do no harm to anyone, are wrong.
The actions of the Taliban, their vile bullying of women, their sanctimonious hatred of all that might lead to enjoyment, their violence, their ignorant bigotry, their hatred of education, their cruelty, seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous – really good people.
The nineteen men of 9/11, having washed, perfumed themselves and shaved their whole bodies in preparation for the martyr’s paradise, believed they were performing the highest religious duty. By the lights of their religion they were as good as it is possible to be. They were not poor, downtrodden, oppressed or psychotic; they were well educated, sane and well balanced, and, as they thought, supremely good. But they were religious, and that provided all the justification they needed to murder and destroy. Their madrassas and their mullahs had given them good reason to think they were on a fast track to paradise.
Polls suggest that 13% of British Muslims regard the 7/7 London bombers as blessed martyrs. Neighbors and friends expressed bewilderment that such nice, gentle, kind, youth-clubbing, cricket-loving young men could do such terrible things. But once you understand what they truly and sincerely believed – that it was Allah’s will that they blow up buses and subways – it becomes all too easy to understand.
It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list.
The following quotation from the Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg has become well known, but it is so devastatingly true that it is worth quoting again and again: “With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”
Astreal -- Stay Awake
This is from the BIGO Singles series... I like Astreal because amateurish as they sound, they are still one of the few shoegaze sounds that I hear in Singapore...
Monday, October 01, 2007
战争纪念馆
寻找间迷路，因为
道路交换了行驶
方向。错乱了我的左右
不分。地图上没有明白
标志往来的方向
823战争纪念馆。金门
反正只是一些无聊的数字
代表了死亡的地址，或者
子弹的速度所遗忘的
日期，如同身份证编号
记录这些历史的轨迹
我们总是喜欢玩数字游戏
64、54、228、911等等
当时光洪流理所当然侵蚀后
或许只留下这些号码。
走进一场时空错乱，因为
在里头迷失了存在。是否
战争纪念馆于全世界
都长得同一个模样。旧相片
和同样的历史剧本，叙述
我们如何抵抗外敌，或者
我们如何消灭敌人。无论
新加坡、柬埔寨、台湾、中国、美国
都上演着同样的戏码。都在
砍杀同样的外敌。疑问是
如果全都是坏人，那么
好人都死去哪里了？
我实在搞不清所谓战争
纪念馆的价值。难道
只是让我们体验过去的痛苦
尽管冷气不断安抚
灼热的脸庞。或许一朵花
枯萎比新鲜更有价值。或许
伟人铜像只是因为重量，如同
抛入河流的锚，沉淀
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