Policy Review The Future of Tradition

"But is it possible to defend tradition with the help of reason? Can a particular tradition be justified by reason? And what if our traditional belief conflicts with reason — can we rationally justify keeping it? Suppose we have been raised in the belief that we must wash our hands before every meal in order to appease a local deity in our pantheon, say, the god of the harvest; and suppose again that we have come to learn of the hygienic benefits of washing our hands before every meal. Must we keep the absurd tradition once we have grasped its scientific rationale? In either case, whether tradition and reason conflict, or tradition is revealed to be reason disguised, reason wins and tradition loses.

Where reason shines forth, then, tradition is no longer necessary. Hence the question before us: In a world that is being more and more rationalized, does tradition have a future? Or will we one day look upon it as we now look upon the myths of the ancient world — quaint and amusing, but of no real relevance to our lives?"

Danny Yee's Book Reviews The Invention of Tradition

""Many practices which are considered traditional are in fact quite recent inventions, often deliberately constructed to serve particular ideological ends. The Invention of Tradition is a collection of articles on the construction of symbolic and ceremonial traditions over the last couple of centuries, particularly by the British."

"Hugh Trevor-Roper describes the creation of the Scottish "Highland" tradition -- I was astounded to discover that the kilt was invented by an Englishman in 1730, while the so called "clan tartans" are a nineteenth century invention! In a similar vein (though without any revelations quite so surprising), Prys Morgan traces the development of Welsh national traditions during the Romantic period. David Cannadine's piece is quite topical, given the move towards a republic in Australia: he explains how most of the ceremonial associated with the British monarchy, which is often assumed to be of great antiquity, has in fact been constructed since 1870."

Anthony Giddens Tradition

" I don't think you can argue that just because, say, the Indianarmy uniform or the kilt were conscious inventions of the nineteenth century that these are not necessarily traditional. For something to be traditional it doesn't have to be embedded over a long period of centuries, and when you start to think about the role of tradition in the world you should reverse their argument and turn it on it's head. You should say that all traditions are invented traditions, because all traditions grow out of a continuous reappraisal of the past. Most traditions are involved with power, most traditions involve conscious elements of artifice, invention, deliberate creation. There are few traditions, if any, which just grew up in a spontaneous way. These things, therefore, should not disqualify a given set of behaviour from being called traditional. For beliefs and practices to be traditional, for them to repeat, they do not have to endure over very long periods of time."

So, what defines tradition?"

Science & Theology News Accessible ‘Endless Forms’ shows the evolution of evolution

"The [ intelligent design ] people argue that the world is just too complex to have come about through blind law — intelligence must have intervened. However, evo-devo [ evolutionary development ] today is starting to fill in the gaps — the gaps that, in the opinion of Michael Behe and his friends, demand miracles. Existence is a miracle and life is a miracle, but increasingly it seems that the gaps do not need special miracles. Regular science can do the job.

More generally, I would go back to where I came in. The best of all arguments against the critics of science is the wonderful world that the best science reveals and explains. Offense is the best defense. Richard Dawkins is surely right when he argues against the cramped little medieval world of Genesis taken literally, and for the wonderful land of evolutionary studies. Sean Carroll’s book on evo-devo is a great passport to that land. "

Science & Theology News The problem with Darwinian solutions

"To sum up, developmental geneticists have found that the genes that seem to be most important in development are remarkably similar in many different types of animals, from worms to fruit flies to mammals.

Initially, this was regarded as evidence for genetic programs controlling development. But biologists are now realizing that it actually constitutes a paradox: if genes control development, why do similar genes produce such different animals? Why does a caterpillar turn into a butterfly instead of a barracuda?

If evo devo actually resolved the problems raised by these questions, then more power to it. Yet the real problem here is that Darwinian biologists like Carroll and Darwinian philosophers of biology like Ruse are pretending that evo devo has resolved fundamental problems of evolutionary biology when in fact it hasn’t.

Harris Interactive: The Harris Poll Nearly Two-thirds of U.S. Adults Believe Human Beings Were Created by God

"Earlier this year, the State Board of Education in Kansas reignited an old debate – whether or not creationism should be taught in public schools – and shone the spotlight on a new theory, intelligent design. While many in the scientific community may question why this issue has been raised again, a new national survey shows that almost two-thirds of U.S. adults (64%) agree with the basic tenet of creationism, that "human beings were created directly by God."

At the same time, approximately one-fifth (22%) of adults believe "human beings evolved from earlier species" (evolution) and 10 percent subscribe to the theory that "human beings are so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them" (intelligent design). Moreover, a majority (55%) believe that all three of these theories should be taught in public schools, while 23 percent support teaching creationism only, 12 percent evolution only, and four percent intelligent design only."

redux [03.17.04]
The Cincinnati Post Science teachers wary: Fear new lessons based on religion

"The new lesson plan will serve to help students analyze the theory of evolution, supporters say. Critics -- including the Ohio Academy of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the faculty senate of Case Western Reserve University -- said the lesson plan includes elements of intelligent design, a theory that life is so complex that a higher being must have created it. The lesson plan refers students to printed materials and Web sites on the intelligent design concept."

""I've been teaching 32 years, and in all those years we have pretty much taken the stance that the kids have to understand there is more than one theory, but we are qualified, because of our training in the scientific method, to teach scientific theories," said Brandon, a biology teacher and department chairwoman at Norwood High School. "If they want to know about non-scientific theories, I advise them to go to their rabbi, their minister or their priest."

redux [02.03.04]
NPR: All Things Considered Georgia Wrestles Evolution Question

"NPR's Ari Shapiro in Atlanta reports that Georgia is considering whether its public school science instruction would drop any mention of evolution. Instead students would hear the term "biological changes over time." That's brought a torrent of criticism that the plan would offer an inferior education that would cost the state economically."

redux [04.15.03]
Guardian Unlimited The battle for American science

"As prescient observers of the events north of Atlanta last year realised, these aren't the old wars of science versus religion. The new assaults on the conventional wisdom frame themselves, without exception, as scientific theories, no less deserving of a hearing than any other. Proponents of [ Intelligent Design ] - using a strategy previously unheard of among anti-Darwinists - grant almost all the premises of evolution (the idea that species develop; that the world wasn't necessarily created in seven days) in order to better attack it.

"It's not that I don't think Darwinian evolution can't explain anything," says Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the movement's foremost academic advocate, when asked how he accounts for the very visible evolution of, say, viruses. "It's just that I don't think it can explain everything. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example, is one of the things it can explain.""

The Daily Times Creationism vs. evolution central debate behind rejection of textbooks

"Treadway said he had reservations about the approach to the theory of evolution in the three texts. He said he does not want people to believe he is against evolution, but wants it to be taught as a theory along with creationism.

"With the overwhelming references to evolution, I don't feel comfortable with (adopting these texts),'' Treadway said."

The Univeristy of Southern Mississippi: The Student Printz - Opinion Evolution: Put up or Shut up!

"Kent Hovind, a creation scientist from Pensacola, Fla. is coming to the Polymer Science building room 101 April 3 from 6 to 9 p.m. to speak about creation, evolution, and dinosaurs. There might be a debate, but probably not. I mean, who would want to defend the idea that we came from a rock? After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session.

This is not religion versus science. They must both be accepted by faith. Although they are both only theories, one is right and the other is wrong. While you must decide for yourself which view is correct, you should first learn what the creationist worldview is, before passing judgment."

redux [06.27.02]
Scientific American 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

"When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination.

Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy."

redux [04.13.02]
The New York Times 'Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics'
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before we get to the scientific arguments of the neo-creos, a word should be said about their motivation. Just what do they have against Darwinism? Unlike the old-fashioned creationists, they are not especially worried about evolution conflicting with a literal reading of Genesis. Then why can't they join with the mainstream religions, which have made their peace with Darwinism? In 1996, for example, Pope John Paul II said that the theory of evolution had been ''proved true'' and asserted its consistency with Roman Catholic doctrine. Stephen Jay Gould, though agnostic himself, salutes the wisdom of this papal pronouncement, arguing that science and religion are ''nonoverlapping magisteria.'' But the neo-creos aren't buying this. They think that belief in Darwinism and belief in God are fundamentally incompatible. Here, ironically, they are in agreement with their more radical Darwinian opponents. Both extremes concur that evolution is, in the words of Phillip Johnson, ''a purposeless and undirected process that produced mankind accidentally'' and, as such, must be at odds with the idea of a purposeful Creator."

redux [09.23.01]
The New York Review of Books Saving Us from Darwin

"Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities - one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath, absolution, and grace, the other a curiously inept cobbler of species that need to be periodically revised and that keep getting snuffed out by the very conditions he provided for them. Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away thirteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company? And should the God of love and mercy be given credit for the anopheles mosquito, the schistosomiasis parasite, anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague...? By purporting to detect the divine signature on every molecule while nevertheless conceding that natural selection does account for variations, the champions of intelligent design have made a conceptual mess that leaves the ancient dilemmas of theodicy harder than ever to resolve."

redux [02.05.00]
Slate Is Natural Selection the Result of Design?

Steven Pinker: "Warm rooms are a goal of thermostats, thermostats a goal of people, people a goal of their genes. Darwin, and then Dawkins, made it scientifically respectable to talk about genes as having goals, because natural selection makes them act as if they do. But natural selection itself, being a product not of a teleological process but of the physics and mathematics of replicating systems, has no right to have a goal in the way that genes or people or thermostats do."

Robert Wright: " A system can be entirely mechanical, complying with the laws of physics and mathematics, yet be teleological, designed to realize a purpose. In fact, that seems to be true of all teleological systems I know of, including genes and people and thermostats."

redux [09.05.01]
The Third Culture Science and the Psychology of Beliefs

"The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things, or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else."

redux [09.13.00]
Scientific American A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn

"Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it."

The Telegraph We got it wrong, admits space shuttle chiefs

"The future of the American space shuttle programme was in doubt last night after Nasa suspended further flights while it determines why a large chunk of the shuttle's fuel tank broke away on lift-off."

"Nasa has acknowledged that, after spending more than $1 billion on safety improvements to deal with exactly this type of accident, it still does not know the cause."

""I honestly don't know how hard it is to fix this," said the Nasa administrator Michael Griffin yesterday. "If we had to go over it again, we would do something more than had been done. It was considered good enough to fly. That was an error.""

redux [02.22.03]
Washington Post Engineers' E-mails Warned NASA Downplaying Shuttle Problems

"In one e-mail sent three days before the shuttle's Feb. 1 disintegration as it hit the Earth's atmosphere, a Langley engineer complained that those managing Columbia's flight had chosen not to make simple studies to clarify landing risks and were treating such information "like the plague."

The engineer, Robert Daugherty, also said he understood NASA engineers at flight headquarters in Texas had privately estimated its safety during landing was "survivable but marginal.""

redux [02.01.03]
The New York Times Speed Makes Space Flight Very Risky, Experts Say
[requires 'free' registration]

"A success rate of about 95 percent is more typical of the trade, Dr. Postol said. With two catastrophic failures in 113 flights, for a 98.2 percent success rate, the shuttle program is not looking much different -- for sound physical reasons, he said.

"Capt. Bill Readdy, associate administrator for space flight and a former astronaut, said at a news conference yesterday afternoon: "Today was a very stark reminder that this is a very risky endeavor, pushing back the frontiers in outer space. And after 113 flights, unfortunately, people have a tendency to look at it as something that is more or less routine. Well I can assure you it is not.""

The Guardian Unlimited Nasa chiefs 'repeatedly ignored' safety warnings

"Fears of a catastrophic shuttle accident were raised last summer with the White House by a former Nasa engineer who pleaded for a presidential order to halt all further shuttle flights until safety issues had been addressed.

In a letter to the White House, Don Nelson, who served with Nasa for 36 years until he retired in 1999, wrote to President George W. Bush warning that his 'intervention' was necessary to 'prevent another catastrophic space shuttle accident'."

Richard Feynman Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle

"If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers."

redux [02.06.03]
Reason The Limits of Complexity

"The week has brought a painful reminder of the limits of complex systems and human fallibility."

"So there is the crux of the matter, across shuttle, software, and oil truck. At what point does complexity make a system more prone to break, rather than less? Can added cost always justify greater reliability? How do we know when the risk of something going wrong is too great?

If in answering such questions you require or assume perfection, something might go very wrong indeed."

Houston Chronicle 10 years after Challenger, NASA feels shuttle safety never better

"In 1988, SAIC evaluated the launch risk for NASA relying primarily on factors applicable during the shuttle's pre-Challenger era, including the flawed solid rocket booster. The assessment produced a range of risk with a mean probability of a shuttle loss at one in every 78 launches.

The risk mean for a shuttle loss during the liftoff improved to one in every 248 ascents when the assessment was repeated this year and the shuttle's post-Challenger actual track record was factored into the calculations.

The New York Times With a Push From the U.N., Water Reveals Its Secrets
[requires 'free' registration]

"Today, more than a billion people lack access to safe drinking water. Polluted water contributes, each year, to the death of about 15 million children under age 5. By midcentury, between two billion and seven billion people will face water shortages.

"No region will be spared from the impact of this crisis," Koichiro Matsuura, director general of Unesco, recently warned. "Water supplies are falling while the demand is dramatically growing."

He estimated that in the next two decades the average amount of water available per person on the planet will shrink by a third."

redux [03.21.03]
Nature How to slake a planet's thirst
[requires 'free' registration]

"By this time next year, some 1.75 million people will have died before their time for the simple reason that they must scratch out their existence without access to safe drinking water. This is the toll from cholera, dysentery and other diarrhoeal diseases that the World Health Organization attributes to unsafe drinking supplies."

"Whatever transpires in the Iraqi desert over the next few weeks, the water crisis will still be with us, quietly exacting its devastating toll (see page 251). As the world's population continues to expand, and climate change alters the hydrology of river basins, as many as 7 billion people in 60 countries could face water scarcity by 2050, if action isn't taken."

redux [11.12.02]
Reason Online Water, Water Nowhere?

"One thousand Arkansas rice farmers have just about pumped away all their ground water. Naturally, they are looking to taxpayers for relief."

"The Arkansas rice farmers' situation is a microcosm of a problem affecting much of the world. A new report from the International Food Policy Research Institute, "World Water and Food to 2025," addresses the global freshwater crisis. "Unless we change policies and priorities, in twenty years, there won't be enough water for cities, households, the environment, or growing food," Mark Rosegrant, lead author of the report and a senior research fellow at the IFPRI, warned in a press release. "Water is not like oil. There is no substitute. If we continue to take it for granted, much of the earth is going to run short of water or food--or both.""

The New York Times Editorial/Op-ed One Subsidy Too Many
[requires 'free' registration]

"Americans are depleting their water supplies, especially their once-vast underground aquifers, at a rapid pace. Yet this alarming fact has failed to register with influential segments of the population, including developers who keep building unsustainable subdivisions and farmers who keep growing unsustainable crops. A case in point are the rice growers of Arkansas, who are on the brink of pumping one of the state's biggest aquifers dry and are now imploring the federal government to bail them out."

"The White River ecosystem, which includes two important wildlife refuges, will inevitably suffer. What's most irritating about the scheme, however, is that it further enriches an industry that is already extravagantly subsidized."

Mother Jones Water for Profit

"Instead of ushering in a new era of trouble-free drinking water, Atlanta's experiment with privatization has brought a host of new problems. This year there have been five boil-water alerts, indicating unsafe contaminants might be present. Fire hydrants have been useless for months. Leaking water mains have gone unrepaired for weeks. Despite all of this, the city's contractor -- United Water, a subsidiary of French-based multinational Suez -- has lobbied the City Council to add millions more to its $21-million-a-year contract.

Atlanta's experience has become Exhibit A in a heated controversy over the push by a rapidly growing global water industry to take over public water systems. At the heart of the debate are two questions: Should water, a basic necessity for human survival, be controlled by for-profit interests? And can multinational companies actually deliver on what they promise -- better service and safe, affordable water?"

Paul Simon Excerpts from Tapped Out: The Coming World Water Crisis and What We Can Do About It

"Buried in all the daily news trivia, the careful reader can find strong warnings about our future. The Financial Times of London begins a story: "Water, like energy in the late 1970s, will probably become the most critical natural resource issue facing most parts of the world by the start of the next century."8 The British publication, People and the Planet, predicts that by the year 2025 at least sixty-five nations will experience serious water shortages.9 Another British journal, Worldlink, the magazine of the World Economic Forum, has a cover article titled "Water: The Next Source of Trouble."10 A scholarly journal on international law calls the shortage of fresh water "the national security issue of the twenty-first century."11 "Water Crisis Looms, World Bank Says" is the heading of a story on an inside page of the Washington Post of August 3, 1995. The Associated Press story accompanying that heading quotes World Bank Vice President for Environmentally Sustainable Development Ismail Serageldin: "We are warning the world that there is a huge problem looming out there.....The experts all agree on the need to do something fast. The main problem is the lack of political will to carry out these recommendations."

That is the crux of the matter: political will. That is not going to be generated by World Bank reports. It must come from aroused citizens who understand the severity of the problem and demand action. Almost four centuries ago, a British writer noted: "Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruel master.""

The New York Review of Books The World Is Round

"Friedman's by now famous discovery of the world's flatness came to him when he was talking to Nandan Nilekani, CEO of one of India's leading new high-technology companies, Infosys Technologies, at its campus in Bangalore. The Indian entrepreneur remarked to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." The observation is commonplace, but it hit Friedman with the force of a revelation. "What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened.... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!" Five hundred years ago, Columbus "returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round." As a matter of fact it was not Columbus who provided the proof but the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, whose ship circled the globe in a three-year voyage from 1519 to 1522. Regardless, Friedman sees himself as a latter-day Columbus who has discovered that the world is no longer round: "I scribbled four words down in my notebook: 'The world is flat.'"

The metaphor of a flat world is worked relentlessly throughout this overlong book, but it is not its incessant repetition that is most troublesome. It is Friedman's failure to recognize that in many ways, some of them not difficult to observe, the world is becoming distinctly less flat."

Wired Magazine Why the World Is Flat

"This is Globalization 3.0. In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind."

The New York Times Global Playing Field: More Level, but It Still Has Bumps
[requires 'free' registration]

"Mr. Friedman is right that there are forces flattening the world, but there are other forces making it less flat. At issue is the balance between them. So is the world really much flatter than before?"

"Meanwhile, the new ''rules of the game'' that were part of the last round of global trade negotiations -- notably intellectual property regulations requiring all countries to adopt American-style patent and copyright laws -- are almost surely making the playing field less level. They will make it easier for those who are ahead of the game to maintain their lead."

New York Press FLATHEAD: The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.

"On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is."

phew. that was a loooooooong hiatus! but hey, what can i say - i've been busy.

if things go as planned, i'll have things back up and running here soon, although it may take a little while to really get back in the swing of things.

stay tuned.