The Blood is the Life!

[miss_s_b]

Fresh Squeezings from the veins of t'intertubes.

• Evolutionary Psychology is bad science. Yeah, yeah, I know, preaching to the converted here. But the article is a good one, and deserves to be disseminated as widely as possible.


• Speaking of science, Phil Willis MP tweets some welcome news. I fully agree with him that we need to make sure science is where it belongs at the heart of gov.


• Rebecca Dalzell tells a heartwarming tale of Radio 4 addiction. Radio 4 is one of those things that you either get or you don't. I count myself among the utterly addicted. I was led in by the Now Show and now I have the damn thing on for a minimum of 8 hours a day. Radio 4 is the rhythm of life; a comfort and an education in one. I'm glad I'm not alone. Especially in listening with rapt attention to gardeners' question time when I only have a few plant pots...


• andrewducker makes a fabulous point about comment threads. Pls take note, maintainers of Lib Dem Voice, which I have all but stopped visiting, given that you can no longer subscribe to comments and they still have that stupid please add us to your advertising whitelist! Oh, go on, PLEASE thing.


• Space Geeks! Look at this awesome audio-visual slideshow of Saturn and its moons, compiled by the BBC from various sources, including CassiniSaturn.

And today's Meme is an old one from the depths of my LJ:

Poll #619 Truth or Lie?

Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

View Respondents

One of these is true, five are lies. Vote for the one you think is true.

View Answers

My favourite song of all time is Living Dead Girl by Rob Zombie
0 (0.0%)

I have owned six dogs in my lifetime
0 (0.0%)

The first album I bought with my own money was Sheer Heart Attack by Queen. It was on cassette.
5 (50.0%)

I have eaten and enjoyed sheep's brain
2 (20.0%)

I have dyed my hair many colours, but never black
3 (30.0%)

My favourite beer is called Moonshine
0 (0.0%)

I'll give you the answers tomorrow.

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Comments

[softfruit]

Rebecca Dalzell tells a heartwarming tale of Radio 4 addiction.... a lovely little story but "the actor Stephen Fry"? Clearly she wasn't here long enough, surely by law he is either referred to as a) a comedian or b) a national institution?

Evo psych

[joeotten.blogspot.com]

The article is attacking some total cobblers, but is making a meal of it.

a. Gene for any complex behaviour stories are cobblers. Nobody has found these genes, it is all speculation.

b. "Trait x is there because it is or was adaptive." On its own this says nothing because the claim could be made of any trait at all. There's no more scientific content here than saying Goddidit. Anybody doing real science will have details that are not just speculation.

c. If there were genes-for-behaviour, it wouldn't just be bad behaviour. There is Genesis-type fall narrative going on here, of evolution corrupting good people. Well it sells newspapers I suppose.


And there is a real problem with how people to what they think is an explanation. An explanation seems somehow like it ought to temper moral judgement. Which is a big mistake - whether something was ever adaptive says nothing about whether it is right. If we had an ancestor that, like some spiders, would kill and eat its parents - would that really affect your judgement of somebody who ate their parents?

[etoile]

Why is there no ticky box? :(

[pmoodie.livejournal.com]

Re the evo-psych article – Sorry, not one of the converted! :)

I'd say there's plenty of sloppy science on both sides there, because both camps have a pre-determined conclusion that they're working backwards from. As soon as scientists have an agenda other than getting at the truth of what's going on, bad science is sure to be the result.

It seems clear to me that the real truth lies somewhere between the two fiercely vocal camps. Maybe one day if we all calm down and put aside our own political agendas, we’ll find out what it is.

[telegramsam]

Yea, there's a reason the university I went to shoved psychology up on North campus with all the other liberal arts and far away from the hard sciences, which where all firmly South of the football stadium.

It was in the same building as journalism. :D

"Science" my ass, psychology doesn't deserve an "-ology" suffix because there's no fucking study in it, it was barely better than philosophy in Freud's day and hasn't gotten any better. An hypothesis that cannot be tested, proven or disproven is not science, it's... at best wild speculation. And what few actual experiments are conducted tend to be so poorly constructed that the results are worthless (doesn't stop them from publishing the stuff though of course).

I hate bad science, it just gives the fundies something to point at and jump up and down yelling "See! See!" when they criticize science as a whole. X(

asquith

[(Anonymous)]

Personally I don't agree with Andrew Ducker at all. Subscribing to comment threads would just leave me with a ridiculous number of emails. Besides which, & even more so, I actually enjoy reading comments, which are often of more interest than the blog itself.

Conservative Home is a case in point, where you can really get the pulse of Tories by looking at what they say, whereas Montgomerie & Isaby have little of worth to say.

PS- Sorry for not having a login or owt.