That was an interesting talk, but they really ought to get enough microphones for all the speakers.  The pops and crackles made every time a mic was moved, along with the volume variance between the different speaker either made things hard to hear, or painful.  And I have no clue what was being said in that video that was being shown on the screen.

I am still shocked that people aren’t howling for peoples heads over those robocall voter fraud issues, though.  Calling people to tell them that the election is on a different day, or different location or that a winner has already been elected is just sick and a quick search on Google seems to indicate that it’s far too common.

Oh yeah, the mic sounds were KILLING me.  I had to sit with my hand on the volume knob.  But other than that, great subject panel, I always find the videos you post to be enlightening ♥

This is really a great panel. If the sounds are putting you off try to just grin and bear it, it really is worth hearing what everyone has to say.

how to deal with a bunch of NAZIS-the END OF AMERICA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZi4J-1F3UM

while you were talking NOTHING you lost your country….

what happened to the OLD SH*THEADS?

you don’t want to see what happened to the OLD SH*THEADS….

BUNCH OF LITTLE NAZIS!

http://www.unfacts.org/factsforum/viewtopic.php?t=4607

Please don’t feed the troll.

Here’s something for the Panda readers -

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/18/richard-dawkins-sex.html

“I’m sure Hvistendahl is right when she says, “Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live”, and when she compares it to the American wild west “with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence.”

But is she right to blame Western science and governments for making sex selection possible?”

Yeah, because no society ever selected on the basis of gender before the scientific revolution?

Don’t worry about feeding that particular troll.  Dennis Markuze is a drive-by variety, and seems to be quite insane.  Give him attention or ignore him - it doesn’t seem to matter.  He appears to be in dire need of mental health care, and even if he were listening, I doubt anything anyone said to him would even register.

Hmm 1/10

Just be careful not to click on any of the links in djudge’s rant.

I did, once, accidentally, and almost immediately ended up with the first computer virus I’d ever suffered through.

Is there a connection? Maybe not, but crazy troll should be avoided.

what happened to the OLD SH*THEADS?

Yeaaaah!  Finally someone appreciates me.

What’s “Western” about science? For centuries the “West” was considerably behind Asia and the Islamic World in science.

idiosynchronic@6: The evo psychers are always making the same leap of logic that can be illustrated here (emphasis totally mine):

In nature, the balance of males and females is maintained by natural selection acting on parents. As Sir Ronald Fisher brilliantly pointed out in 1930, a surplus of one sex will be redressed by selection in favour of rearing the other sex, up to the point where it is no longer the minority. It isn’t quite as simple as that. You have to take into account the relative economic costs of rearing one sex rather than the other. If, say, it costs twice as much to rear a son to maturity as a daughter (e.g. because males are bigger than females), the true choice facing a parent is not “Shall I rear a son or a daughter?” but “Shall I rear a son or two daughters?”

So, Fisher concluded, what is equilibrated by natural selection is not the total numbers of sons and daughters born in the population, but the total parental expenditure on sons versus daughters. In practice, this usually amounts to an approximately equal ratio of males to females in the population at the end of the period of parental expenditure.

Note that the word ‘decision’ doesn’t mean conscious decision: we employ the usual ‘selfish gene’ metaphorical reasoning, in which natural selection favours genes that produce behaviour ‘as if’ decisions are being made.

My answer to that sort of thing is always the same: dear Ricky, please demonstrate a concrete mechanism exists that will lead to some concrete genes that by some concrete pathway separable from other possible factors will tend to actually produce behavior that demonstrably leads people at some non-noise rate to actually behave “as if” they were making these “decisions.”  Or else this is just wishy-washy fallacious “If P then Q; Q; therefore, P” BS that people only believe because they just drop any freaking standard of evidence when confronted with something they want to believe anyway for ideological reasons.

I should add that the last time I came across an evo-psych theory that was related to this (“Polygamous societies are more violent because a minority of men who marry multiple the women deprive other men of women, and then those men end up as brutal killers in the service of the propagation of the genes of their closest married relatives”), (a) there was no critical examination of anything as relevant to this as, say, actual rates of polygamy in the countries they cited as examples, (b) there was no mention of a number of comparatively peaceful polygamous societies that could serve as counterexamples, (c) the whole subtext was “Science proves it: them Arabs are scary!”

Er, Sacundim, Fisher isn’t necessarily talking about human beings, nor about behaviour.

Sex ratios tend to come up with the classic example of deer. And, indeed, there is at least one potential mechanism.

Human social factors just about swamp any claim to evolutionary bias of this type.  Human evolution can only be seen in things like immunities.

Comment #15: Phoenician in a time of Romans on 06/20 at 02:47 AM

Er, Sacundim, Fisher isn’t necessarily talking about human beings, nor about behaviour.

I didn’t quote and respond to Fisher; I quoted and responded to Dawkins.

Human social factors just about swamp any claim to evolutionary bias of this type.  Human evolution can only be seen in things like immunities.

Which was indirectly one of the points, but I’m coming at it from another angle: there’s way too much attention given to evo psych “theories” that on examination amount to nothing more than “genes can magically do anything”: the pervasive assumption in some circles that once you have a claim that some trait of an organism enhances fitness, you can jump right away to the conclusion that this trait is inheritable and was selected for.  Development and DNA expression are just black boxes that will do whatever it takes to make your evo psych theories come true…

Which is why I bolded the paragraph that I bolded from Dawkins, because it’s a perfect example.

Which is why I bolded the paragraph that I bolded from Dawkins, because it’s a perfect example.

Wha?

I read that as something very different from evo-psych - Dawkins was just highlighting that he was using teleological speaking as a shorthand for evolutionary processes.  It’s nothing to DO with evo-psych - he was speaking metaphorically as if GENES made decisions, while pointing out his error.

ckitching @8 Was that really Dennis? I couldn’t tell because it didn’t say “BLASPHEMING BITCHES” anywhere, which is the line I always look for.

0/10 for disappointing me. :(