Thursday, March 15, 2007

God's dupes by Sam Harris - Moderate believers give cover to religious fanatics -- and are every bit as delusional

Thanks to Andrew Greet for sending this in.

Reposted from the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-harris15mar15,0,671840.story?coll=la-home-commentary

Pete Stark, a California Democrat, appears to be the first congressman in U.S. history to acknowledge that he doesn't believe in God. In a country in which 83% of the population thinks that the Bible is the literal or "inspired" word of the creator of the universe, this took political courage.

Of course, one can imagine that Cicero's handlers in the 1st century BC lost some sleep when he likened the traditional accounts of the Greco-Roman gods to the "dreams of madmen" and to the "insane mythology of Egypt."

Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham — the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo.

The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things. As a result, Iron Age ideas about everything high and low — sex, cosmology, gender equality, immortal souls, the end of the world, the validity of prophecy, etc. — continue to divide our world and subvert our national discourse. Many of these ideas, by their very nature, hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources.

Of course, no religion is monolithic. Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn themselves into bombs; or the Dominionist Christians, who openly call for homosexuals and blasphemers to be put to death.

Outside this sphere of maniacs, one finds millions more who share their views but lack their zeal. Beyond them, one encounters pious multitudes who respect the beliefs of their more deranged brethren but who disagree with them on small points of doctrine — of course the world is going to end in glory and Jesus will appear in the sky like a superhero, but we can't be sure it will happen in our lifetime.

Out further still, one meets religious moderates and liberals of diverse hues — people who remain supportive of the basic scheme that has balkanized our world into Christians, Muslims and Jews, but who are less willing to profess certainty about any article of faith. Is Jesus really the son of God? Will we all meet our grannies again in heaven? Moderates and liberals are none too sure.

Those on this spectrum view the people further toward the center as too rigid, dogmatic and hostile to doubt, and they generally view those outside as corrupted by sin, weak-willed or unchurched.

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

People of all faiths — and none — regularly change their lives for the better, for good and bad reasons. And yet such transformations are regularly put forward as evidence in support of a specific religious creed. President Bush has cited his own sobriety as suggestive of the divinity of Jesus. No doubt Christians do get sober from time to time — but Hindus (polytheists) and atheists do as well. How, therefore, can any thinking person imagine that his experience of sobriety lends credence to the idea that a supreme being is watching over our world and that Jesus is his son?

There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know.

Let us hope that Stark's candor inspires others in our government to admit their doubts about God. Indeed, it is time we broke this spell en masse. Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain — from cosmology to psychology to economics — has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.

Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

reposted from: richarddawkins
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments

Debating Climate Change

Debate Skills? Advantage: Climate Contrarians

Last night at the Asia Society and Museum, a panel of notables debated the merits of the proposition "global warming is not a crisis." Arguing for the motion were the folksy (and tall) Michael Crichton, the soft-spoken Richard Lindzen and the passionate Philip Stott. Arrayed against were the moderate Brenda Ekwurzel, the skeptical Gavin Schmidt and the perplexed Richard Somerville. (Note: all the adjectives are mine.)

The hosts--the Rosenkranz Foundation and Intelligence Squared U.S.--asked the audience to vote both prior to and after the event. Early voting skewed heavily against the motion: 57 percent in the audience favored dismissing it while only 30 percent supported it. But that was before anybody opened their mouths.

[More:]

Robert Rosenkranz, chairman of the eponymous foundation, brought up the first bugaboo of the night in his introduction: "I am old enough to remember the consensus on global cooling." And the second: how can we know what the future climate will be when we can't even predict the weather a year in advance, something that would be worth billions of dollars?

As Somerville later pointed out, any consensus over global cooling was more in the media hype surrounding it than anything else.
Climate and weather are two separate things, climate being the average of weather over a given time period. We cannot say that it will be 76 degrees F next March 15 but we can say, based on atmospheric physics, that 20 years from now the month of March will, on average, be warmer than it is now.

As Lindzen noted in his opening remarks, the climate is always changing. The question is whether the warming we are currently experiencing--and every panelist agreed that warming was happening--is worrisome and/or manmade. For example, Lindzen argued that in a warming world we might expect less severe weather as a result of the decreased temperature difference between the poles and the equator. And he noted that India has warmed in recent decades yet its agricultural yield has increased. (Perhaps Prof. Lindzen is not familiar with the Green Revolution?)

But Lindzen shared a dry, dispassionate presentation of potentially confusing science with all of his colleagues on the opposite side. They came to debate the physics of climate change but ended up in a debate about the morality of it. For example, Somerville, a distinguished IPCC author, called the global warming crisis a "decisive change for better or worse." Scientifically reasonable perhaps, but hardly inspiring. "Science can inform these decisions but it cannot determine them," Schmidt added (though he did slightly better by likening climate science to CSI), before noting the lawyerly tactics of his opponents and urging the audience to "spot the fallacy." And Ekwurzel struggled to make the metaphor of a doctor diagnosing a disease without knowing all the particulars of how the patient's body works: "choosing not to fight global warming is as foolish as not treating fever in a child."

All fine and good except that they were faced with the folksy anecdotes of Crichton and the oratorical fire of Stott. As the novelist mused, the weather is changing, no one is arguing that, but "all anybody wants to do is talk about it, no one wants to do anything about it." Adding "if they're not willing to do it why should anyone else?" And, by the way, shouldn't we be focusing on poverty today rather than the weather 100 years from now?

When Stott took the microphone he chastised everyone for their hypocrisy. Humans have been changing climate by land clearing and farming since they evolved; scientific consensus is not infallible (remember eugenics?); and Tony Blair (Stott is British, though he also noted Al Gore's extravagant energy budget) refuses to curtail his flying. As fellow Schmidt later noted, if we could just harness the energy of the old style Marxist debater Stott, a switch away from fossil fuels would be easy.

The proponents of climate change crisis had nothing to offer other than the science. Where was the anti-Crichton? Maybe Bill McKibben? Al Gore may have had a personality facelift and started calling climate change a moral crisis but he probably would have looked wooden next to Stott, perhaps Jon Stewart? The proponents seemed underarmed for the debate and, not surprisingly, it swung against them, particularly when Schmidt made the fatal debating error of dismissing the ability of the audience to judge the scientific nuances.

Despite presentations riddled with suspect science--cosmic rays featured prominently, though they show no trend that matches the observed warming--the audience responded to Crichton's satirical call for a ban on private jets more than Ekwurzel's vague we need to throw "everything we can at the climate crisis." By the final vote, 46 percent of the audience had been convinced that global warming was indeed not a crisis, while just 42 percent persisted in their opinion that it was. The whole debate, for better or worse, can be heard on WNYC AM 820 on March 23 at 2 PM EDT (podcast and webstream will be available via that link as well). And check out Gavin Schmidt's take on the event here.

Listen closely. Obscured by the rhetoric was significant common ground: global warming is real, it is a problem (though how big remains debatable) and it is primarily an energy problem. Lindzen does not buy the global cooling red herring; Crichton thinks humanity will "de-carbonize" its energy sources anyway; and Stott just wants us to focus on poverty and human misery as the key crisis to be addressed. There is no doubt that the billions of people living without access to clean water, suffering from curable diseases, and unable to escape penury because of a lack of cheap energy is an absolute crisis. What he may have overlooked is that these problems may be worsened by climate change (shrinking glaciers in the Tibetan plateau do not bode well for thirsty Indians and Chinese) or solved by implementing solutions to it (photovoltaic cells for those in sunny climes unconnected to any grid). No one is suggesting an end to foreign aid in favor of concentrating exclusively on climate change. In fact, foreign aid and technology transfer must be part of any global effort to combat the problem.

And there are other changes the developed world can make to ease the burden of climate change on those not rich enough to adapt: yes, Michael Crichton, changing a lightbulb is important. Switching one 75-watt incandescent light bulb for the equivalent compact fluorescent will save 55 pounds of CO₂ every year. Those pounds add up and there are a host of similarly easy and cheap changes to make. Modern technology offers us a range of cleaner, better, faster products; a car from 1972 cannot compare to a car from 2007, nor can similarly aged coal-fired power plants. Why wouldn't we want to buy a modern one? Does anybody detect a consensus on that?

Parents 'don't recognise obesity'

Parents need more support to encourage healthy eating

The government is launching a plan to tackle obesity by helping parents recognise the warning signs that their children are overweight.

It follows a claim by the Medical Research Council that many people do not know their children are overweight.

The Department of Health has pledged to do more in the next year to support parents in encouraging healthy eating and physical activity.

But critics said the government had not acted quickly enough to tackle obesity.

The government has set a target of halting the yearly rise in rates of obesity in the under-11s by 2010.

There is no question that the Government has not done enough and what they have done has not been done quickly enough

Shadow Health Minister, Andrew Murrison

But Dr Susan Jebb and colleagues from the Human Nutrition Research unit at the MRC found several major barriers were preventing families from adopting healthy lifestyles even though they knew the importance of a healthy diet and exercise.

Their review of the evidence showed people have a poor perception of their own weight status and are even worse at spotting when their child is overweight or obese.

Busy lifestyles, irregular working hours and fears that having a healthy lifestyle is too difficult to achieve also put people off healthy choices.

According to the MRC report, average time spent preparing meals has fallen from two hours to just 20 minutes over the past two decades.

And safety concerns prevent children being allowed to walk to school or play outside.

Battleground

One of the biggest problems facing parents is their child's willingness to accept new foods.

Trying to coax children to eat healthily often takes a backseat to trying to have a pleasant mealtime, said the researchers.

Dr Jebb said 80% of parents recognised that an unhealthy diet and lack of physical activity contributed to obesity.

"But people don't necessarily realise that it applies to their child," she said.

"More than 40% of children over the age of six choose their evening meal on half of all occasions but they lack the skills to choose wisely.

"It's not surprising that parents try to avoid conflict to make a pleasant atmosphere at home but it leads to a lack of exposure and familiarity with different foods."

Launching the Government's Healthy Living Programme, Public Health Minister Caroline Flint said they would be rolling out a series of initiatives to support families, such as 'Top Tips for Top Mums' to help families share ideas for getting children to eat fruit and vegetables.

"We're not short of information but the information hasn't always been leading to behaviour change," she said.

"This is where the theory becomes reality - something that is really meaningful for people."

Andrew Murrison, the shadow health minister, said: "There is no question that the government has not done enough and what they have done has not been done quickly enough.

"When it comes to implementation they have failed so far."

Dr David Haslam, clinical director of the National Obesity Forum, said obesity had been a priority for the government but nothing to date had made the slightest bit of difference because of a lack of concrete ideas.

"At least they're putting measures in place to try and actively do something," he added.

reposted from: bbc
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Galaxy in Volans

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2007 March 15

NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans
Credit & Copyright: SSRO-South (D.Goldman, J.Harvey, R.Gilbert, D.Verschatse) - PROMPT (D.Reichart) Explanation: Distorted galaxy NGC 2442 can be found in the southern constellation of the flying fish, (Piscis) Volans. Located about 50 million light-years away, the galaxy's two spiral arms extending from a pronounced central bar give it an ominous hook-shaped appearance. This striking color image also shows obscuring dust lanes, young blue star clusters and reddish star forming regions surrounding a core of yellowish light from an older population of stars. But the star forming regions seem more concentrated along the drawn-out northern (top) spiral arm. The distorted structure is likely the result of a close encounter with a smaller galaxy located just outside this telescopic field of view. The picture spans about 1/6 of a degree, or 150,000 light years at the estimated distance of NGC 2442

reposted from: nasa
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Are we born prejudiced?

17 March 2007 - From New Scientist Print Edition.

In 1992, during the war between Serbia and Croatia, The Washington Post ran an interview with a Croatian farmer named Adem, who had a horrific story to tell. Over the previous year, Adem said, discourse between local Serbs and Croats had deteriorated, as individual identities dissolved into a menacing fog of "us" versus "them". Then group animosity turned into something far worse. Serbs from a neighbouring village abruptly rounded up 35 men from Adem's village and slit their throats. The summer before, the killers had helped their victims harvest their crops.

Earlier this year a small group of Z-list celebrities caused an international incident during the filming of the UK version of the reality TV show, Big Brother. The seemingly racist comments made by Jade Goody and her cronies to Bollywood film star Shilpa Shetty provoked thousands of shocked viewers to write letters of complaint. There was a media frenzy. Questions were asked in Parliament. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who happened to be on a visit to India, felt he had to comment on the affair.

Two very different stories; one common theme. Proof, if it were needed, that the human tendency to judge others in the crudest terms - race, religion, ethnicity, or any arbitrary marker - has not been consigned to the history books, no matter how much we might wish it were so. Somewhat disturbingly, scientists now suggest that this is not really surprising because such prejudice is part of human nature.

If they are correct, then the roots of group animosity and hatred run very deep indeed, which may be depressing news for those trying to make a difference in ethnic or sectarian hotspots from Darfur and Iraq to inner cities and football terraces. Yet researchers also insist that facing up to our authentic nature is the only way to gain real insight into the forces that drive group conflict, and to learn how we might manage and defuse such urges. "We shouldn't treat prejudice as pathological just because it offends us," says anthropologist Francisco Gil-White. "If we aim to transcend ethnic strife, we would be wise to understand the role that perfectly normal human psychology plays in producing it."

Psychologists have long known of our proclivity to form "in groups" based on crude markers, ranging from skin colour to clothing styles. Think of inner-city gangs, Italian football supporters, or any "cool" group of stylish teenagers. "Our minds seem to be organised in a way that makes breaking the human world into distinct groups almost automatic," says psychologist Lawrence Hirschfeld of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Many experiments confirm this, and show that we tend to favour our own group, even when that group is just an arbitrary collection of individuals.

In 1970, for example, a team of researchers led by psychologist Henri Tajfel of the University of Bristol, UK, randomly divided teenage boys from the same school into two groups, and gave every boy the chance to allocate points to two other boys, one from each group. This could be done in different ways - some increasing the combined total for both recipients, and others increasing the difference between the two. The boys consistently chose options of the latter kind, favouring recipients from their own group. Experiments like these are enough to convince Tajfel and others that if you put people into different groups, call them red and blue, north and south, or whatever, a bias towards one's own group will automatically emerge.

This in itself does not make us racist. In fact it may not be such a bad thing: research published last year suggests at least one useful function of our groupist tendencies. Political scientists Ross Hammond of the Brookings Institute in Washington DC and Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan have discovered, perhaps surprisingly, that it can promote cooperation (Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol 50, p 926). Taking their cue from Tajfel's finding that in-group favouritism emerges with minimal prompting, Hammond and Axelrod decided to try to emulate this in a simple computer model. Imagine a population of individuals, interacting in pairs at random, and engaging in some activity where both would benefit from cooperation, but each was also tempted to cheat - getting more for themselves at the other's expense. With no insight into the likely behaviour of others, individuals in such a world would have no way - besides pure guesswork - to maximise the outcome of their interactions. But add one simple element, colour, and everything changes.

People in Hammond and Axelrod's world come in four colours, assigned randomly at birth. When interacting with others, they might now adopt one of several basic strategies. An individual might act randomly, as before, ignoring colour - which would make sense as the colours say nothing about how an individual is likely to behave. Alternatively, a person might always cooperate or always cheat, regardless of the other's colour. Another option would be to follow a groupist "ethnocentric" strategy - cooperating with anyone of the same colour, but always trying to cheat those of another colour. Finally, agents might be anti-groupist - only cooperating with someone of another colour. The researchers randomly assigned one of these strategies to each agent. They also gave all agents the ability to learn from one another, so that any strategy that did well would tend to be copied and so spread.

What happened then, they discovered, was that agents of each particular colour began to gather together. At first, a few groupist agents of the same colour might find themselves together by chance. Within such a group, cooperative interactions lead to good outcomes, causing others nearby to copy their strategy, swelling the group. In the model, Hammond and Axelrod found that strongly ethnocentric groups of different colours came to fill the world, at the expense of others. Anyone who did not follow the groupist strategy tended to suffer. Even someone ignoring colour - and remember colour initially signified nothing about an agent's behaviour - would also get wiped out. In short, once people begin to act on colour, it comes to matter. What's more, it turns out that the overall level of cooperation is higher in this world where there is in-group favouritism than in a world where agents are colourless. "Ethnocentrism is actually a mechanism for generating cooperation, and one that does not demand much in the way of cognitive ability," says Hammond.

Axelrod and Hammond are well aware that their model is a far cry from the complexities of real-world racism. Still, it is interesting that colour prejudice emerges even though colour has no intrinsic significance. Modern genetics has dispelled the naive notion that racial divisions reflect real biological differences. We know that the genetic variation between individuals within one racial or ethnic group is generally much larger than the average difference between such groups. As in the virtual world, race and ethnicity are arbitrary markers that have acquired meaning. But you won't get far telling Blacks and Hispanics in the racially charged areas of Los Angeles that their differences are just "superficial" cultural constructs. "Race doesn't matter because it is real," says historian Niall Ferguson of Harvard University, "but because people conceive it to be real."

What's more, this misconception seems to be deeply ingrained in our psyche. For example, Hirschfeld found that by the age of 3 most children already attribute significance to skin colour. In 1993, he showed a group of children a drawing of a chubby black child dressed up as a policeman, followed by photos of several adults, each of whom had two of the three traits: being black, chubby and dressed as a policeman. Asked to decide which person was the boy as a grown-up, most children chose a black adult even though he was either not overweight or minus a police uniform. "Kids appear to believe," says Hirschfeld, "that race is more important than other physical differences in determining what sort of person one is."

“By the age of 3 most kids already attribute significance to skin colour”

More recent brain imaging studies suggest that even adults who claim not to be racist register skin colour automatically and unconsciously. In 2000, a team led by social psychologist Allan Hart of Amherst College in Massachusetts found that when white and black subjects viewed faces of the other race both showed increased activity in the amygdala - a brain region involved in grasping the emotional significance of stimuli. Yet consciously, these subjects reported feeling no emotional difference on seeing the different faces. In another study of white subjects, in the same year, neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University and colleagues found that those individuals whose amygdala lit up most strongly also scored highest on a standard test for racial prejudice.

Does this mean that our species has evolved to see the world in terms of black and white? Not necessarily. After all, our ancestors would not normally have met people whose skin was a different colour from their own: neighbouring ethnic groups would have looked pretty much alike. So, it's possible that our tendency to classify people by colour might simply be a modern vice, learned early and reinforced throughout our lives - even, paradoxically, by anti-racist messages. That seems unlikely, however, when you consider our attitudes to ethnicity. In fieldwork among Torguud Mongols and Kazakhs, neighbouring ethic groups living in central Asia, Gil-White investigated ideas of ethnic identity to find out whether people link it more with nurture (a child being brought up within a group) or nature (the ethnicity of biological parents). The majority of both groups saw ethnicity as a hidden but powerful biological factor, unaffected by someone being adopted into another group. "They perceive the underlying nature as some kind of substance that lies inside and causes the members of an ethnic group to behave the way they do," he says. Like race, ethnicity has no biological significance, yet this is exactly how we perceive it.

Many researchers now believe that we have evolved a tendency to divide the world along ethnic lines. For example, anthropologist Rob Boyd from the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that our ancestors, given the rich social context of human life, would have needed skills for perceiving the important groups to which individuals belonged. Being attuned to ethnic differences would have allowed individuals to identify others who shared the same social norms - people with whom it would have been easiest to interact because of shared expectations. It would have paid to attend to cultural differences such as styles of clothing, scarification or manner of greeting, that marked one group out from another. In the modern world, colour is simply mistaken as one such marker.

That might explain why we tend to divide the world into groups and why we use ethnic differences and skin colour as markers to help us do this. It even gives a rationale for in-group favouritism. But what about out-group animosity? Is prejudice part of the whole evolved package? Gil-white believes it is. He argues that within any group of people sharing social norms, anyone who violates those will attract moral opprobrium - it is considered "bad" to flout the rules and benefit at the expense of the group. This response is then easily transferred to people from other ethnic groups. "We're tempted to treat others, who are conforming to their local norms, as violating our own local norms, and we take offence accordingly," says Gil-White. As a result we may be unconsciously inclined to see people from other ethnic groups not simply as different, but as cheats, morally corrupt, bad people.

Natural but not nice

"I think all this work refutes those naive enough to believe that if it weren't for bad socialising, we would all be nice tolerant people who accept cultural and ethnic differences easily," says Daniel Chirot, professor of international studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. That may sound disturbing, but being biologically primed for racism does not make it inevitable. For a start, what is natural and biological needn't be considered moral or legal. "The sexual attraction that a grown man feels for a 15-year-old female is perfectly natural," Gil-White points out. But most societies forbid such relations, and all but a very few men can control their urges.

“Being biologically primed for racism does not make it inevitable”

Besides, if ethnocentrism is an evolved adaptation to facilitate smooth social interactions, it is a rather crude one. A far better way to decide who can be trusted and who cannot is to assess an individual's character and personality rather than to rely on meaningless markers. In today's world, that is what most of us do, most of the time. It is only when it becomes difficult to judge individuals that people may instinctively revert to the more primitive mechanism. Hammond and Axelrod argue that this is most likely to happen under harsh social or economic conditions, which may explain why ethnic divisions seem to be exaggerated when societies break down, as a consequence of war, for example. "To me this makes perfect sense," says Chirot. "Especially in times of crisis we tend to fall back on those with whom we are most familiar, who are most like us."

Knowing all this, it may be possible to find ways to curb our unacceptable tendencies. Indeed, experiments show how little it can take to begin breaking down prejudice. Psychologist Susan Fiske from Princeton University and colleagues got students to view photos of individuals from a range of social groups, while using functional MRI to monitor activity in their medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a brain region known to light up in response to socially significant stimuli. The researchers were shocked to discover that photos of people belonging to "extreme" out-groups, such as drug addicts, stimulated no activity in this region at all, suggesting that the viewers considered them to be less than human. "It is just what you see with homeless people or beggars in the street," says Fiske, "people treat them like piles of garbage." In new experiments, however, she was able to reverse this response. After replicating the earlier results, the researchers asked simple, personal questions about the people in the pictures, such as, "What kind of vegetable do you think this beggar would like?" Just one such question was enough to significantly raise activity in the mPFC. "The question has the effect of making the person back into a person," says Fiske, "and the prejudiced response is much weaker."

It would appear then that we have a strong tendency to see others as individuals, which can begin to erode our groupist instincts with very little prompting. Perhaps this is why, as Chirot points out, ethnocentrism does not always lead to violence. It might also explain why in every case of mass ethnic violence it has taken massive propaganda on the part of specific political figures or parties to stir passions to levels where violence breaks out.

If the seeds of racism are in our nature, so too are the seeds of tolerance and empathy. By better understanding what sorts of situations and environments are conducive to both, we may be able to promote our better nature.

Mark Buchanan is a writer based in Oxford, UK

From issue 2595 of New Scientist magazine, 17 March 2007, page 40-43

reposted from: New Scientist
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We must face our prejudicial urges

Editorial: We must face our prejudicial urges

17 March 2007
From New Scientist Print Edition.

HAVE you ever judged a stranger by some superficial marker - their shoes, how they speak or what's on their bookshelves? In the absence of any better information, it is only natural to resort to crude indicators like these to get some idea of what kind of person you are dealing with. If the outward signs suggest the two of you have things in common, don't you respond more favourably to them? It is, after all, easier to interact with someone who is on your wavelength.

As this illustrates, humans have a deeply ingrained tendency to form groups. Now try replacing shoes or books by "race" or "ethnic group" and you will start to understand why some scientists see prejudice as a part of human nature (see "Born prejudiced"). They argue that we see other people in terms of "us" and "them" because we have evolved to identify others with whom we can interact productively. Two researchers have even gone so far as to show that a form of colour prejudice can arise spontaneously in a virtual world full of interacting agents, and that when it does it leads to greater cooperation.

At first sight the implications of this research seem shocking, but they deserve further thought. Even if it is in our nature to be prejudiced against people outside our group, and even if such discrimination evolved for a good reason, that does not mean we are stuck with it. Modern genetics tells us that we are all are pretty much the same: genetic variation is generally far greater within an ethnic group than between groups, so what we recognise as racial markers are biologically next to meaningless.

What's more, most of us realise that judgements based on these superficial markers give only crude stereotypes. This may have worked just fine for our prehistoric ancestors, living in small groups with few outside interactions, but it will not get you far in today's global melting pot where we meet people from a huge variety of backgrounds. In any case, there is a more effective way to identify people with whom to do business - get to know them as individuals. Seeing how they behave is a far more accurate guide than crude markers.

The challenge facing us is to confront our true nature. Instead of denying that our tendency to prejudice exists, we would do well to understand why and when it is most likely to be triggered. This might give us the chance to set aside the urge to crudely pigeonhole people, and instead deal with them as individuals. Such behaviour is certainly more constructive and civilised, and it stands to improve our success as social, political and business animals. It would be naive to suppose that such self-knowledge will instantly dissolve the deep-seated prejudice that exists around the world, but it is a start.

reposted from: new scientist
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1,000 Black Holes Revealed in New Sky Survey


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March 13, 2007—Imagine how the night sky might appear if you had x-ray vision, and it might look much like this—a field of black with more than a thousand glowing spots as bright and colorful as Christmas lights.

But those aren't stars; they're supermassive black holes churning away at the centers of distant galaxies.

This image, taken by a suite of space- and Earth-based telescopes, is the largest sample ever of the mysterious, light-swallowing giants, which are hundreds of millions of times more massive than the sun.

"We're trying to get a complete census across the universe of black holes and their habits," said Ryan Hickox of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), which coordinated the project, in a press statement.

"We used special tactics to hunt down the very biggest black holes."

NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory captured much of this panorama, which covers a swath of night sky in the constellation Bootes some 40 times larger than the full moon (inset).

The telescope made the image by detecting x-rays emitted by the black holes as they draw in material around them. These invisible rays give scientists clues as to how large, strong, and fast the objects are. (In this image, blue represents high-energy x-rays, green medium energy, and red low energy.)

This unusual group picture will give scientists plenty of material for future study into supermassive black holes, astronomers added.

"We found well over a thousand of these monsters and have started using them to test our understanding of these powerful objects," CfA's Christine Jones said.

—Blake de Pastino

reposted from: nationalgeographic
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