"More intelligence and fewer offspring?"

"Perhaps Idiocracy was stating a more general rule...."

But another thing...

When it comes to humans, for example, though our brains are only 2% of our bodies, they take up a whopping 20% of our energy requirements. 

If that's really true, it could be the key to why one person can eat heartily and never gain weight while the next person, eating the same thing, gets fat. Maybe it's a big brain/small brain distinction. Also, is it possible that instead of going to the gym or getting on a bicycle when we hope to lose weight, what we really should be doing is studying calculus or reading philosophy?

ADDED: Idiocracy primer:

A euphemism for "aging": "evolving."

Example:

One of my wise [yoga] teachers told us that after 50, she began to cross off the list poses that she no longer felt made sense for her evolving body.

Cue the episode of "Outer Limits" where David McCallum enters the evolution machine:



Tip for "wise" teachers: You're not evolving. And why you find the notion of evolving more comforting than aging is a mystery you might want to ponder.

"Your ignorance makes me ill and angry."

Also... here's the trailer for "Altered States":

"Charles Darwin earned almost 4,000 write-in votes..."

"... against a Georgia congressman who denounced evolution and other scientific theories as 'lies straight from the pit of hell.'"

Bad science everywhere. The science freaks vote for a dead man. They get their minds around evolution, but not death. Darwin's dead. Also, he was never an inhabitant of Georgia or even a citizen of the United States. Can you criticize ignorance with ignorance? If 2 wrongs don't make a right, do 2 stupids make a smart?

When I voted on Tuesday, confronting many candidates running unopposed, I thought about writing a name in the write-in spot for a small fraction of a second, but I'd never make a joke out of my ballot.

I did make a joke to someone with in line, and then I felt bad about it. I was in the A-L line and Meade had to go to the M-Z line. The man ahead of me said something about alphabetical order, and I said "Just don't vote based on alphabetical order," and then I fretted that he might have interpreted my remark as a nonjoke, an imprecation to vote for Obama over Romney/Baldwin over Thompson, which would violate the posted rule against political discussions in the polling place.

On the Capitol Square, today in Madison...

A Farmers Market day...



No protesters around the Hans Christian Heg statue. The sun is shining on the strings of peppers, and everyone seems pretty happy.



Around on the State Street side of the Square, there was protest activity...



... of a tired, embarrassing kind.

"Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place," if you don't believe in evolution.

Says Bill Nye ("the science guy"), arguing that children must be taught evolution as a fundamental truth.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You're just not going to get the right answer....

Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.

Video at link, via Metafilter, which links to this response from the Creation Museum. The world becomes fantastically complicated if you do believe in evolution....

Nye is good on the subject of understanding science and the importance of science, but he dips into the stuff of religion when promotes science for the purpose of exciting us, dispelling mystery, and avoiding feeling crazy. These are the very psychological needs that religion serves quite well for great numbers of human individuals. When Nye proffers science for these purposes, he is promoting it as a religion substitute. Did he even notice he was doing that?!

Quick sex.

Sorry, ladies, it's a survival strategy.

The noises can attract predators, the male is distracted and he has less energy to fight off an attacker or to run away. Perhaps that is why males almost always attempt to finish so quickly. Surprisingly, however, there has been little evidence to support this hypothesis until recently.

"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African..."

"... that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."

Says the famous paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey. That's a funny quote, isn't it? It starts out so big. If only everyone would accept evolution, then... then what? What would follow? He doesn't say World Peace. He says a chance of a better response to challenges.

I'm sure the people who don't believe in evolution think if only everybody would believe that God created human beings in His own image, that we'd have a better chance of responding better to challenges.

Here's a poll about what works, pragmatically, not about what is true. That is: DO NOT use this poll to express your belief in the existence of God and His role with respect to the creation/evolution of human beings:

What belief is more likely to overcome disharmony among the people of the world?
	God watches over and loves His Creation, humanity.
	Humankind arose from evolution, with no divine plan or supervision at any point.
pollcode.com free polls

Anticipating your possible need to express your belief in what is true, I am providing this additional poll:

What is actually true (or most likely true)?
	There is a God, and He created human beings in their current form.
	There is a God, and He created the process of evolution that unfolded over the eons.
	Human beings evolved without the participation of any God.
pollcode.com free polls

Why sleep deprivation makes you fat.

"Unfortunately, we have caveman's hard-core wiring... and insufficient sleep in primitive times was read by the body: Danger, store fat."

Obama's opinion on the issue of same-sex marriage isn't what evolved.

"I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married."

What evolved was his opinion about whether it was worthwhile to admit what he really has thought all along (which you had to be a bit dense not to know).

Pressure on Obama to "evolve" some more on same-sex marriage.

Tune in and witness the evolution before your very eyes in just a few minutes.

The sudden booking suggests an interest on the part of the White House to get Mr. Obama in front of cameras, albeit in a carefully controlled interview setting, as soon as possible.

The presumably friendly interviewer – evolution extractor — is Robin Roberts of “Good Morning America.

UPDATE: Obama evolves, endorses same-sex marriage.

Biden says something decent and sound, only to be swallowed back into the inane, unbelievable political script.

Here's Biden being a wholly decent and sensible person....

"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties."

But, no! You can't say that. It's too completely straightforward and reasonable. He couldn't have meant that, the most obvious and ordinary thing to say on the subject of same-sex marriage (unless you're actually opposed to it). He had to be saying... oh, you know, the careful script that's been worked out for the Obama reelection campaign.

My link goes to a long article in the NYT headlined "A Scramble as Biden Backs Same-Sex Marriage," but I'm disappointed that it fails to include the awkward quote that went yesterday. Here it is, officially from a "spokesperson for the vice president":

The vice president was saying what the president has said previously – that committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans, and that we oppose any effort to rollback those rights. That’s why we stopped defending the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in legal challenges and support legislation to repeal it. Beyond that, the Vice President was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.

Evolving. Isn't it funny, that the term "evolution" has been appropriated to paper over such bullshit? Why, I remember when "evolution" was the bugaboo of the kind of Biblical sticklers who hate gay marriage!

***

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first meaning of "evolution" is "I. A movement or change of position.  a. Mil. and Navy. A manoeuvre executed by troops or ships to adopt a different tactical formation." Apt! Here's the oldest usage:

1616   J. Bingham in tr. Ælian Tactiks xxviii. 132   The nature of this Euolution is clearely to leaue the File-leaders in front, and Bringers-vp in reare.

Bringers-vp in reare. Really, amusingly, ineffably apt!

ADDED: "They are so sensitive to Biden doing this because, number one, gay money in this election has replaced Wall Street money," said NBC Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd.

Journal of Higher Education portrays education professors as inferior because they "were about twice as likely as general faculty members to be unaware that human beings are apes."

What?! Human beings are not apes! We're primates, but not apes. If you're going to lay into other people for being "unaware," get your facts straight!

"Once our babymaking days are over, fat is stored in larger quantities and also stored more centrally, where it is easiest to carry about."

"That way, if times get tough we can use it for our own survival, thus freeing up food for our younger relatives."

Should we not honor fat, including — precisely — the very thing we've been hating: the way we get fat in middle age?

These changes strongly suggest that middle age is a controlled and preprogrammed process not of decline but of development....

[Middle age is] a resilient, healthy, energy-efficient and productive phase of life that has laid the foundations for our species’s success. Indeed, the multiple roles of middle-aged people in human societies are so complex and intertwined, it could be argued that they are the most impressive living things yet produced by natural selection.

The fat middle of middle age is an advantage evolution built into the human animal.

By the way energy-efficient is the right term. People who complain about their "slow metabolism" as if it's dysfunctional are not thinking straight. They're just sad they can't without consequences be the fuel-guzzlers they'd love to be. (If we personalized our cars more, we might see our gas-guzzler cars as lovable gourmands, taking lusty pleasure in scarfing down lots of extra food. And — lucky them! — they never put on a pound!)

System One and System Two — the brain's " two independent sytems for organizing knowledge."

Writes Freeman Dyson, explaining Daniel Kahneman's new book "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

System One is amazingly fast, allowing us to recognize faces and understand speech in a fraction of a second. It must have evolved from the ancient little brains that allowed our agile mammalian ancestors to survive in a world of big reptilian predators. Survival in the jungle requires a brain that makes quick decisions based on limited information. Intuition is the name we give to judgments based on the quick action of System One. It makes judgments and takes action without waiting for our conscious awareness to catch up with it. The most remarkable fact about System One is that it has immediate access to a vast store of memories that it uses as a basis for judgment. The memories that are most accessible are those associated with strong emotions, with fear and pain and hatred. The resulting judgments are often wrong, but in the world of the jungle it is safer to be wrong and quick than to be right and slow.

System Two is the slow process of forming judgments based on conscious thinking and critical examination of evidence. It appraises the actions of System One. It gives us a chance to correct mistakes and revise opinions. It probably evolved more recently than System One, after our primate ancestors became arboreal and had the leisure to think things over. An ape in a tree is not so much concerned with predators as with the acquisition and defense of territory. System Two enables a family group to make plans and coordinate activities. After we became human, System Two enabled us to create art and culture.

The question then arises: Why do we not abandon the error-prone System One and let the more reliable System Two rule our lives? Kahneman gives a simple answer to this question: System Two is lazy. To activate System Two requires mental effort. Mental effort is costly in time and also in calories. Precise measurements of blood chemistry show that consumption of glucose increases when System Two is active.

This is a fabulous article with lots of great stuff worth reading, but I just want to lock onto the point about consuming calories. Yes, we're lazy, but we do all manner of ridiculous things to consume calories and they tend to require overcoming laziness. If activating System Two is a substitute for trudging on a Stairmaster or whatever, maybe even lazy people will do it. Can we lose weight by thinking hard? I'll leave it to others to collect and analyze the evidence. That's just my instant, intuitive take on the matter.

Why so many deaths in triathlons... nearly all in the swimming phase?

Panic attacks. Officially, drowning, but the root cause may be panic:

“My world is anatomic,” said Steven Shapiro, Vermont’s chief medical examiner, whose office investigated the deaths of two men this year. “I can’t point to the body and say: ‘There’s the panic attack, there’s the arrhythmia.’ Once you’re in my office, there’s no panic and the rhythm is asystole,” he said, using the medical term for cardiac standstill.
Nevertheless, circumstantial evidence strongly points to panic, with the biggest piece of evidence the most obvious. Something is happening in the swim that isn’t happening on the bike or run.

“I was taken by surprise the very first time I did a triathlon,” said James A. Millward, a 50-year-old history professor at Georgetown University. “I swam about 50 yards, I couldn’t get into a breathing rhythm, I felt more and more anxious, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m having a panic attack.’ ”

Millward has done the Nation’s Triathlon four times and has had the sensation each time after jumping into the Potomac River with scores of other racers. The overwhelming urge is to get his head out of the water. 

It's easy to see why the human body may have evolved this response.

Chris Matthews feels something "big" and "hard" and "bad" and it's Rick Perry.

Chris Matthews. I know. Why am I even listening? I didn't listen to the MSNBC commentary after the debate. (I immediately switched over to the Brewers game.) But I did turn on the recorded commentary this morning as I was making coffee, and I heard this overheated rant about Rick Perry. This is my transcription of Matthews chattering:

It's real: this man's absolute opposition to scientific information. The thought that this country would elect or seriously consider electing someone who stands out there and says I don't accept science on climate change and clearly doesn't want to study it any further. I think that's the big, hard, bad news for the Republican Party. Their front-runner, tonight, seemed to be anti-science and this country has to win the battle of science in the world against China and India and the other [something] countries. If we give up on science, if we get the image of being a yahoo country, a monkey-business country, we got a real problem in terms of our national identity and this fellow we're looking at right now is leading the charge, the luddite charge against modern technology and modern information. So I think that's the hard, bad news for the Republican party.

So Mr. Science there — the man whose leg felt a thrill when he heard Barack Obama — says "big, hard, bad" and "hard, bad" when he sees Rick Perry. I'd say Matthews is scared. He's spewing emotion. But he would like us to believe he's devoted to science! A burbling bundle of emotion attempts to embody seriousness about science. It's absurd.

What is a "monkey-business country"? Did some notion of the "monkey trial" flitter through his flickering brain? Perry said nothing about evolution, but whatever. He seemed "anti-science" to Matthews, and Matthews opened up his anti-science floodgate and "monkey-business country" popped out, along with "yahoo" and "luddite," which are also rattling around in the same word bin in the mind of Matthews.

Let's look at the transcript and try to inject a little reality into the Matthews word-mush. John Harris of Politico has just asked Jon Huntsman — Jon Meade Huntsman Jr. — which of his fellow Republicans has been "saying crazy or inane things." Huntsman demurs. Harris tries again: "You yourself have said the party is in danger of becoming anti- science. Who on this stage is anti-science?" Huntsman says:

Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I'm saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can't run from science. We can't run from mainstream conservative philosophy. We've got to win voters.

Odd that "We can't run from mainstream conservative philosophy" and "We've got to win voters" followed the notion that "we can't run from science." Does he think it's difficult to be scientific and conservative? Anyway, Huntsman's main point is that if Republicans aren't scientific, it will "turn people off" and they won't win. That's about science, but not about the devotion to science. It's just a pragmatic statement about winning elections.

Harris turns to Rick Perry, even though Huntsman didn't name Perry (as Harris, obviously, had hoped). Harris doesn't pick up the evolution thread, but he asks Perry about "climate change": "You said that weekly and even daily, scientists are coming forward to question the idea that human activity is behind climate change. Which scientists have you found most credible on this subject?" Of course, Perry doesn't name any scientists. He says:

Well, I do agree that there is -- the science is -- is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans' economy at -- at -- at jeopardy based on scientific theory that's not settled yet, to me, is just -- is nonsense. I mean, it -- I mean -- and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

But the fact is, to put America's economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy.

Now, that's just not anti-science. Perry resists signing on to the opinion of the experts who portray themselves as the scientific consensus, but he didn't say he "clearly doesn't want to study [climate change] any further," which is the way Chris Matthews characterized his remarks. Perry said he wanted accurate science and more science — especially when it is the basis for proposals that would have a "monstrous economic impact."

Citing statistics showing success improving air quality in Texas, Perry says:

That's the way you need to do it, not by some scientist somewhere saying, "Here is what we think is happening out there." The fact of the matter is, the science is not settled on whether or not the climate change is being impacted by man to the point where we're going to put America's economics in jeopardy.

That's not anti-science. That is a practical man setting a high burden of proof about the degree to which science must be "settled" where the effect on the economy is severe. You may disagree on the question of how settled the science is, but that doesn't make him anti-science.

Matthews, brought on to analyze the debate, seems barely to have heard what Perry actually said. He simply unleashed a torrent of words around the subject of science and tried to scare people — if anyone was still watching — about this yahoo monkeyman Perry.

"Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve."

NPR reports (respectfully!), noting first that Gallup and Pew polls show that 4 out of 10 Americans believe in the literal truth of the account of the origin of human beings that appears in Genesis. There's no link to the specific polls so we can see the questions asked, but I find it hard to believe that so many people belief in the literal story of Adam made out of dust and Eve fashioned from a rib and so on. (Even staying strictly within the text, the first few pages of Genesis seem to have 2 different accounts of the creation of man and woman.)

[N]ow some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account....

To many evangelicals, this is heresy.

"From my viewpoint, a historical Adam and Eve is absolutely central to the truth claims of the Christian faith," says Fazale Rana, vice president of Reasons To Believe, an evangelical think tank that questions evolution. Rana, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Ohio University, readily admits that small details of Scripture could be wrong.

"But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you've got a problem," Rana says.

Rana and others believe in a literal, historical Adam and Eve for many reasons. One is that the Genesis account makes man unique, created in the image of God — not a descendant of lower primates. Second, it tells a story of how evil came into the world, and it's not a story in which God introduced evil through the process of evolution, but one in which Adam and Eve decided to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, says that rebellious choice infected all of humankind.

"When Adam sinned, he sinned for us," Mohler says. "And it's that very sinfulness that sets up our understanding of our need for a savior.

Mohler says the Adam and Eve story is not just about a fall from paradise: It goes to the heart of Christianity. He notes that the Apostle Paul (in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) argued that the whole point of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection was to undo Adam's original sin.

"Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul's description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament," Mohler says.

Are these really the stakes? If evolution is true, Christianity makes no sense? If you don't believe that, at least you can appreciate what a painful position those who do are in. I strongly doubt that the 4 out of 10 Americans who told pollsters they believe in the Genesis account of creation also think that "the whole point of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection was to undo Adam's original sin." Doesn't Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection make more sense if you think of yourself as the sinner in need of forgiveness?

"If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished."

"Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning."

God's blog.

Later:

Wow. Just wow. I don’t even know where to start. So the man and his buddy the rib-thing have dominion over everything. They’re going to get pretty unbearable really fast. What You need to do is make them think that there were other, bigger, scarier creatures around a long time before them. I suggest dinosaurs. No need to actually create dinosaurs—just create some weird-ass dinosaur bones and skeletons and bury them in random locations. Man will dig them up eventually and think, What the f?

Is this humor from The New Yorker funny?
	Great if you're not religious, otherwise: awful.
	Funny for the religious and the non-religious alike.
	Amusing for (some) religious folk, pretty stupid to anyone else.
	The humor depends more on whether routine internet-related stuff still tickles you.
	Bad. Just bad. For anyone with or without a brain. With or without a God.
pollcode.com free polls

How foolish do these Miss USA contestants sound responding to the question whether evolution should be taught in schools?

This video clip is making the rounds on some lefty blogs:



These women don't seem to realize how well-established the theory of evolution is and how central it is to the study of science. Of course, it should be taught in school. The more lively present-day issue is whether intelligent design may also be taught alongside evolution, but that isn't what the women were asked. The question prompts them to think of evolution as something that perhaps ought not to be taught in schools. From the bizarre similarity of the answers, I would extrapolate standard beauty-contest advice: Look for the prompt in the question and echo it back with some embellishment that makes you sound thoughtful, caring, and respectful of diversity.

But maybe, as Nicolle Belle at Crooks and Liars says:

The way that the majority of these women express their view that there are multiple and equally scientifically valid arguments truly shows the success of the religious right to muddy the waters and dumb down the populace by introducing skepticism over scientific theory.

By the same token, these answers may show how fundamental it is in America to believe in gathering information, listening to the argument about what might be true, and developing your powers of judgment. So, to some extent, what these women are saying aligns with the scientific method.

More than anything else, however, what I hear in these answers is a deep instinct toward freedom of choice. I felt moved to transcribe Miss New Jersey's remark because it was so perfectly typical of what they all seemed to be saying:

"I think everything should be taught in schools, every single aspect of evolution and anything you can think of. I think they should have the option of learning everything that there is to learn and then kind of choose what they like to believe."

Now, there is something absurd about that.  You don't want to teach kids everything you can think of, and they shouldn't be choosing what to believe based on what they like, but there's something beautiful and quintessentially American about that commitment to the free flow of information and the freedom of belief. It's not that far from the statement on the "sifting and winnowing" plaque here at the University of Wisconsin... about which I once said:

I would like to see some "continual and fearless" judgment about who should be given the opportunity to amass the pile of material that students are assigned to sift and winnow.

That is, you don't just throw anything you can think of at the students and leave it to them to find the truth. And some things are so well-established that it's a good idea to teach them quickly and simply as facts and save the "sifting and winnowing" activity for some other set of material. That brings us back to evolution: Should schools teach it as a fact — this is the theory — or use this subject as an occasion for teaching students how to look at evidence and judge it critically? I think that is the interesting question, and it is not at all obvious which approach is more supportive of science/religion.

Michelle Obama's lesson from the Tucson massacre: Teach your children "the value of tolerance – the practice of assuming the best, rather than the worst, about those around us."

"We can teach them to give others the benefit of the doubt, particularly those with whom they disagree."

Shouldn't we learn to be perceptive, analytical, and aware that some of the individuals among us are, in fact, mentally sick and need something other than tolerance and wishful thinking about how good they might be? So why is the First Lady telling us to teach kids the opposite?

We can also teach our children about the tremendous sacrifices made by the men and women who serve our country and by their families. We can explain to them that although we might not always agree with those who represent us, anyone who enters public life does so because they love their country and want to serve it.

But that's quite obviously untrue! Some people seek power for the wrong reasons or go astray after they've reached power. We need to observe the government with a clear, active, and critical eye. I can certainly understand how someone who holds power would love to turn off the criticism, but that is not the system we have, and it's self-serving for government officials to tell us to inculcate these false beliefs in children.

It would make more sense to teach creationism instead of evolution than to teach these wishful lies about government since children need to learn how to be effective citizens and lulling them into passive admiration of the government undermines the democratic process. Believing or not believing in creationism, by contrast, isn't going to change what happened in the grand expanse of evolutionary time.