God, shmod! Again...

I was going to bitch about the idiotic, religious ending of the otherwise really great movie 'I am Legend' (and the ending is probably a consequence of the fact that it is an adaptation from an older film, but that's really no excuse: if you adapt the setting, the characters and the advertising, why not the shallow ethics?), but instead, I'm simply going to give you a link to a talk by Sam Harris, philosopher and neurologist, called Believing the Unbelievable: The Clash Between Faith and Reason in the Modern World.

And seriously: you believe a certain book is the absolute truth because the book itself says it's the absolute truth?
Smooth...

Alweer vreemd

Oorstokjes heten nu wattenstaafjes en mogen niet meer in de gehoorgang of de neus worden gestoken. Die vijf andere lichaamsopeningen daarentegen...

[Edit: in Van Dale staat bij 'wattenstokje' (synoniem van) echter 'staafje met watten aan de uiteinden, gebruikt om de oren te reinigen'. Maar ondertussen vraag ik me vooral af hoeveel mensen die dingen te diep in hun lichaam geploft hebben...]

What else is new?

Let us consider just one aspect of human nature: race. Again and again in modern literary studies, ideas of race are traced to particular historical origins, not entirely coincidentally the period the critic in question happens to focus on. But in evolutionary studies the explanation digs deeper. There has been much work done on multi-level selection, that is, natural selection occurring at the level of the gene, or the cell, or the organ, or the individual organism, the family, the group, the species, the species and its symbionts, or the whole ecosystem.²⁶ Cooperation at one level can develop because it allows those entities (whether cells or organs or individuals) that cooperate well to supplant other entities that either do not cooperate at all or not so well; their superior capacity for cooperation allows them to out-compete and ultimately oust those who do not cooperate so well. Within-group cooperation, in other words, evolves through competition against out-groups; "in-group amity" is at the expense of "out-group enmity."²⁷ In many social species from ants to hyenas, dolphins and chimpanzees, recognition of out-groups, of others from the same species who belong to different groups, operates by sight, scent or sound, and it can trigger fierce antagonism and conflict. In the human case for instance differences between languages and dialects and accents can clearly mark group boundaries.

But John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, two founders of evolutionary psychology, wondered why humans should notice race so much, because after all during the time the human psyche was evolving in Africa, race would have been useless as an identifier, since most proto-humans would never meet anyone of a different race. "Noticing people's sex and age, on the other hand, would make good sense: these were reliable if approximate predictors of behavior. So evolutionary pressures may well have built into the human mind an instinct"—modified by local culture, of course—"to notice sex and age, but not race." But why should race also keep appearing as a natural classifier?

Perhaps, Tooby and Cosmides reasoned, "race is merely a proxy for something else." In the Pleistocene, "one vital thing to know about a stranger is 'whose side is he on?' Human society, like ape society, is riddled with factions—from tribes and bands to temporary coalitions of friends. Perhaps race is a proxy for membership in coalitions," and people "pay so much attention to race in some countries because they instinctively identify people of other races as being members of other tribes or coalitions."

Tooby and Cosmides set up an experiment. Subjects were shown a series of pictures each associated with a sentence putatively spoken by the person in the picture. At the end, they saw all 8 pictures and all 8 sentences, and had to match each statement to the right picture. It was the mistakes that mattered, since these indicated how the subjects had mentally classified people. As expected, age, sex, and race were strong clues: the subjects would misattribute a statement made by one old person to another old person, or a statement by one black person to another black person. Then the experiment introduced another possible classifier: coalition membership. This was revealed purely through the statements made by the people depicted, who were taking two sides of an argument. Quickly the subjects began to confuse two members of the same side more often than two members of different sides. Revealingly, this largely replaced the tendency to make mistakes by race, though it had virtually no effect on the tendency to make mistakes by sex. As Matt Ridley comments in reporting this: "Within four minutes, the evolutionary psychologists had done what social science had failed to do in decades: make people ignore race. The way to do it is to give them another, stronger clue to coalition membership. Sports fans are well aware of the phenomenon: white fans cheer a black player on 'their' team as he beats a white player on the opposing team." Ridley adds: "This study has immense implications for social policy. It suggests that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, that racism can be easily defeated if coalition clues cut across race, and that there is nothing intractable about racist attitudes. It also suggests that the more people of different races seem to act or be treated as members of a rival coalition, the more racist instincts they risk evoking." He concludes with the moral that, "the more we understand both our genes and our instincts, the less intractable they seem."²⁸

26. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

27. Richard Alexander, in Randolph Nesse and George Williams, Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 138.

28. Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), pp. 265–66.

Source: Brian Boyd - Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural approach

What you should know...

I'm just saying, everyone should know:

Futurama, Bender's Big Score, the first of four Futurama films has arrived!

What you do with this knowledge is purely up to you...



A tad of information: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0471711/

Elke maatschappij zijn verslaving...

Cocaï€ne wordt al duizenden jaren gebruikt door de indianen in Zuid-Amerika. Dat hebben archeologen afgeleid uit rotsschilderingen en beeldhouwwerken die teruggaan tot 2500 voor Christus (Streatfield, 2002). De vroegere bewoners van het Andesgebergte, de Inca’s, kauwden op cocabladeren om verschillende redenen. Ten eerste werd het gebruikt tegen vermoeidheid. Hierdoor konden ze beter en langer werken op grote hoogte en werd hun honger deels onderdrukt. Ten tweede werd het kauwen van cocabladeren ook gebruikt als tijdsindicatie om afstanden te overbruggen. Afstanden werden dan uitgedrukt in het aantal porties coca die onderweg gekauwd werden (O’Brien & Cohen, 1984; Flynn, 1991).

bron: http://www.vad.be/dossiers/dossier_coca%EFne.pdf

Everything is believe, unfortunately...

Nu elke mening evenveel waard is, hoe onzinnig of weinig onderbouwd ook, steek ik veel meer energie in me nutteloos opwinden over de dingen die ik lees en hoor. Maar ik blijf hoopvol; de toekomst is altijd ongeschreven en ongetwijfeld zal men ooit wel beseffen dat 'een betere wereld voor iedereen' een betere holle slogan is dan 'een betere wereld voor mij en de mijnen'.
Tot dan ga ik me niet als 'moderne studentenkoepel' (ha!) onthouden van politieke uitspraken, noch mijn uitspraken beter afwegen en nuanceren (als jonge snaak heb is mijn impact sowieso betrekkelijk onbestaande, dus wat extremiteiten ga ik (nog) niet vermijden).

Maar nu prefereer ik de fantasiewerelden waar de hoop net dat iets tastbaarder is, en de academische wereld, waar theorieën valabel kunnen zijn zonder te werken.

Geloof is alles, maar lang niet alles is geloof.

Genesis (2)

"The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." - Confucius

That's all very well, mister Confucius, but what if you want to create a mountain? If you're omnipotent it should be a easy shmeasy, but even if you're only pretending to have every power conceivable so as to scare yourself up some followers, it can't be too hard, judging from the enormous amount of 'Grand Theft Planetoid' reports the Ultrasupermega Intergalacticspaceuniverse Policeforcepower (or UIP) got, some five thousand years ago, at the same time a conspicuous blue planet suddenly sprang up near Alpha Centauri. But we're not here to point fingers. We're here to enlighten, you with a little luck, me with little luck (I'll finally find out what people are not interested in reading).
So, this God (the quotation marks are still there, just, use your imagination) God decided to create the earth, the universe and everything, which he might have been too late in trying, as the UIP reports prove irrefutably that there was something else already, but there are two characteristics that all of His (the capital letter purely for clarity's sake) followers in the higher echelons share to the last, namely the ability to lie through the teeth and a very bloated sense of theatricality. Therefore, it's not a far stretch to assume that 'God' (the quotation marks just as a reminder) was the original master of theatrical lies and embellished this creation story a bit; just a bit.
But, to make a small accomplishment into a small story: six days later, there was Earth, just as it is today, with dinosaurs, fossil fuels and diamonds, all created in His infinite wisdom. It was perfect. But, as we all know, natural beauty bores rather quickly. And as even somewhat omnipotent beings have urges, God created his toyboy, the father of the whole of mankind and the reason that everyone today is always bitching about the weather if they can’t find anything else to bitch about: Adam. Now, I’m sure all you chauvinist pigs are going to say: ‘But hey, wasn’t Eve the one who brought about all of this ‘casting out’ business and shouldn’t we blame her and her entire ‘look at me, I’ve got internal genitals’ gender?’ Well, no, because Adam was not only the first man and first human, he was also the first proof of this God’s lack of perfection (and that’s also saying that the earth was perfect before we came along, which might fit into that unavoidable idea that anything is better in the past tense). Adam was human, which means that Adam was horribly imperfect (as are we all). Thus, as God failed to create something perfect, he himself cannot be perfect.
Of course, the theologists are now screaming that my idea of perfection is not God’s Idea of Perfection, but as I’m created in His image, I’m sure inherited I His ideals as well. No, the more possible – and slightly unnerving – option is that He never intended to create something perfect, that He was, in fact, a scientist without any morals who created His own strain of guinea pigs. And then, when we turned against Him, He would first try to repress us, but when that didn’t work, he tried again with peace, love and a stronger social structure, so that he could create vast networks of followers who would fight each other in a war for supremacy until only the strongest survived, so that he could enlist them in His awe inspiring galactic armada. Morally, this would place him far below the Nazi scientists, but I don’t really want to be lynched, so I sternly reject this theory.
No, God was imperfect, that’s for sure.

Genisis

Sorry, ik ben weer aan iets nieuws begonnen. U krijgt dus twee verhaaltjes door elkaar, pas op en reik u niet te ver.

The Garden of Eden and the stories concerning this mythical and mystical place have a prominent place not only in Christian theology, but also in every nook and cranny of our sizeable (no use for false modesty, is there) Western civilization. In our 'crime & punishment' mindset – coupled with the unavoidable idea that anything is better in the past tense – we have sought to interpret this is a number of ways, which some people still tend to do with religious texts, luckily, I might add. But how dramatic and futile our dealings with this tale have been. We have scoured the lands in search of this happy place filled with holly and delight, and the only reason for this that I can descry is that the world can never have enough places of pilgrimage (and really, holy men, we have enough, you can stop now, bury the symbols, whether it's half a circle, a cross or two triangles, I don't care, leave the mathematical figures to the people who know how to handle them, namely the mathematicians).
My extensive sources assure me that both Adam and Eve got their eviction notice at the very latest eight years and then some after, well, the creation of the earth, the universe and everything – although the earliest sources place it at some eight days after creation, or two days after they were created; those were some damn tough babies – and we know that our antagonist, we'll call him 'God' for simplicity, had made sure his children had not a care in the world. As such, they had no need for any kind of tools or even clothes, which makes it impossible to actually ever find that special little place (I mean the Garden, 'cause I've already found my special little place...). Unless there's still an ominous apple tree somewhere, with a snake hissing tempting, uhm, hisses; that would be a dead giveaway.
On a side note, I would've gone with The Holly Bush of Knowledge. I mean, come on, I would pluck an apple even if it didn't give me superpowers (five thousand years ago, rational thought was something special, apparently); I'd say, let them vomit a bit first, give them some diarrhea (from the holly berries) and then we'll see whether they still want their precious knowledge.
But, no, how dim-witted this 'God' person was is not really the issue here, we can draw our own conclusions on that. No, it's the story itself that I'm interested in, the classical 'entity creates boy in own likeness', 'boy is lonely so entity creates girl out of boy', 'boy and girl are deceived by snake', 'boy and girl eat an apple', 'boy and girl elope together, leaving behind an angry old entity'. A lot of stories end with angry, old entities.
Now, there are a few oddities here (apart from the fact that it lacks sense, reason or even the smallest snippet of believability, but that's always the case with religious writing (except for 'Star Trek'), so I'll let it slide), and as my throngs of thought trains tear their thrillingly tentative tracks through my head (ok, I overreached), let's analyze it as meticulously as possible. Lo and behold, a scientist at work!

Not yet, but soon (5)

And this leads us seamlessly back to Timmy, the loveable junkie. I know that last part for a fact, because we were screen buddies at college. This just meant that we got high and watched television series for the better part of our higher education. We even went back to some of the early twenty first century stuff, which was often better than the mind numbing series we had in our time, but the joints and the alcohol made us pretty, uhm, unfazed by this lack of quality. The problem was that while I did manage to at the very least show up for my exams, Timmy never did. The closest he ever got to taking an exam was doing the assistant in a nearby classroom. He still failed, however, because he hadn’t managed to get her off. Imagine, her orgasm could have changed the world. By the time I graduated, he had started to simply add the hashish to his packet of tobacco and carry around a hipflask filled with moonshine. The day I showed him my diploma was the last time I saw him. Until he brought about the end of the world, that is.
I called him a loveable junkie, and he really was. I don’t know if you’ve ever met junkies, but usually they’re invasive for pretty much all of the senses (in case you’re brave enough to ever lick one). But Timmy managed to keep his personal hygiene on a not unacceptable level, and he kept to himself, mostly, which is something people appreciate from addicted drug users. When he had reached that ominous thirty something age, he had become an integral part of the inner-city of his hometown on the Western European coast. Nobody minded him, and nobody really cared either, but it was an arrangement that seemed to work for everybody, albeit by the grace of Timmy’s uncle, who died when he was a much less ominous twenty something and left him enough money to remove his last care in the world: his next fix.
Now, I have been talking to you about the end of the world, but as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. Sure, it was the end of our civilization as we knew it; sure, billions of people died. But we’re humanity! We’re the fleshy, pink-skinned big-headed cockroaches of the galaxy! Sort of. Which means that that ‘heroic tale of a number of Earth’s survivors’ isn’t that heroic at all, and that Timmy really shouldn’t feel too bad about himself, as he was pretty much just a catalyst. Well, more or less, because a catalyst quickens a chemical reaction while staying out of it and emerging unscathed, but Timmy was already quite scathed at the time our story starts (and it will soon enough, keep your pants on), and he was dead before the reaction had even really started, but still, I’m sure you get my point.

Not yet, but soon (4)

But, chaos theory. As I said, it does not choose chaos over order, but instead it simply identifies chaos as a more complex form of order. We feared it because we thought chaos meant a loss of control (and boy, do we dig control), but the theory showed us that through ‘chaos’ – and I use this term loosely, as it has little to do with hooligans at a sports match – we could sustain or even increase our level of control, while greatly improving both individual and collective freedoms. As we began to realize that everything is tied in to everything else, we learned how to influence without interfering, by adjusting the elements we can control directly, to change the elements we don’t control. One of the greatest achievements so far is that every single citizen of the Human Empire now has common sense. It wasn’t that hard, really; all that was needed was a high standard of education across the board. Now, this wasn’t a walk in the park, a good education costs more than a nickel and a dime, but it brought down expenses in nearly every other area of the government budget, simply because less people were needed for control and repression. The reason it took humanity so long to figure this out, was that everyone was convinced that common sense was tied into a person’s intelligence. Don’t know why, really, the world isn’t that hard to understand if you receive the means to understand it a young enough age. But you all know that, of course, unless you’re one of those lunatics of the Moon Values Coalition who keep yammering about ‘the glory days of the free market’. Or perhaps if this manuscript has somehow traveled back in time to a point before the Chaos Revolution, but that seems highly unlikely.