It ain’t just men who are serial monogamists

In the latest blow, of many, to Pop Evolutionary Psychology, it turns out that some women marry multiple husbands serially. That’s in societies with fairly equitable power distribution.

The little boxes of life

Thinking about moving, going to a new job, but within the same career path, my post on David Brooks’ new column about America’s “advantages” over other Western countries having its price, and, lo and behold, an e-mail from a friend sums this up well. From that e-mail …

Not my poem, but the song that used to intro the HBO series “Weeds.” Malvina Reynolds wrote it in 1962:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

YouTube link here.

More doubt on Francis Collins as NIH chief

Francis Collins, President Obama’s nomination to head the National Institutes of Health, has already drawn skepticism NOT for being religious, but for being an evangelical Protestant of, if not conservative, no more than moderate stances on some metaphysical issues.

Now, he’s riffing Steve Gould and the non-conflicting magisteria idea to claim no conflict between science and religion. That said, he puts morals explicitly in the religious magisterium.

Now, throwing out the excesses of Pop Evolutionary Psychology, true ev psych and related fields like ethology have shed light on the evolutionary development not just of individual morals, but of a moral system, i.e., ethics.

Michael Gerson tries this explainer:

For Collins, modern science and Christianity are not competing answers to the same question; they are ways of thinking about two very different sets of questions, both of which should be taken seriously.

Not true in several ways. As noted above, they still today, as they have in the past, often think about the same questions. With strongly different answers. With scientific answers subject to empirical scientific research.

The “two magisteria” is just an updated, schmaltzy version of the “god of the gaps” idea.

New Skeptic’s Circle …

Is now up, including my spoof, The Bell Curve 2.0.

Celebrity deaths, nostalgia, fallacious reasoning

The old folk saying about “it happens in threes” often gets applied to celebrity deaths. Well, today it’s true. After Ed McMahon’s death earlier this week, then Farah Fawcett’s expected passing
and Michael Jackson’s surprise death is the third.

All three mean something.

First, with Farrah, I’m the right age that she was pin-up material when I was in junior high school. And Charlie’s Angels was definitely watchable.

Michael Jackson? Thriller broke out when I was in college; that part of Jackson, before he plunged into the drained shallow end of the pool of weirdness, means nostalgia.

So, too, does Ed. Nostalgia for the “simpler time” of America, the time of my parents more than myself.

At the same time, per my own self and people like Bob Carroll at Skeptic’s Dictionary, the “this happens in threes” is nothing more than an illustration of the bulls-eye fallacy.

World’s earliest known flute found

Beyond the age a 35,000-year-old treasure, this find in Germany raises other questions of music and human development.

For example, I’ve always figured a flute of some sort was the world’s first wind instrument, and probably the world’s first tuned instrument, followed by the first oboe-like instrument when a papyrus flute, softened enough by saliva at the top, because a double-reed wind instrument.

But, there is another instrument, and other aspects to music besides pitch.

Like rhythm.

This raises the question of what the first musical instrument man invented was. Drums are still likeliest, but rocks, logs, or bones as rhythm instruments are indistinguishable from rocks, logs or bones in and of themselves.

Neither Islam NOR Xianity NOR Judaism is ‘religion of peace’

Andrew Sullivan, whose internal and geo-politics must be called neo-Sulllivan, got that one wrong in his Iran live-blogging round-up.

Point is, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all three are neither “religions of war” or “religions of peace.”

Beyond finding admonitions to both war and peace in the Quran, we can do the same in the other two world religions.

The Tanakh has Isaiah talking about “bending swords into plowshares,” but another prophet later talks about “bending plowshares into swords.” Per a quote by Jesus, the temple is allegedly a “house for all nations,” but, earlier, King Saul is told to till all the Amalekites — men, women, children and even livestock.

In the Christian New Testament, Jesus, in one Gospel, tells Peter to put his sword away at the Garden of Gethsemane, after he cut off the ear of a servant of the high priest. But, earlier in that same account, he asked his disciples how many swords they had.

Elsewhere, he tells his listeners, “I came not to bring peace but division.”

And, as Islam had its jihad, Christianity had its crusades and ancient Israel had its Ha’Aretz Yisrael.

Bottom line?

They simply are religions, the youngest of them 1,500 years old, all coming from tribalist roots whose values systems almost make Pop Evolutionary Psychology sound true.

And they, and their Kool-Aid drinkers, label them as “religions of peace” as needed for external public relations, while not-insignificant minorities in all three push the “religions of war” side externally against the other two, or internally about their own “crusades” for “religious corporate communications,” also as needed.