Friday, February 06, 2009, 7:17 pm
TODAY'S post is gonna filled with lots and lots of Science.
So enjoy.
Why the Catholic church can't ignore science
* 06 February 2009 by Lawrence Krauss
* Magazine issue 2694.
IN DECEMBER, with great fanfare, the Vatican released Dignitas Personae, its latest report on bioethics. Sad to say, the document demonstrates once more that a morality rooted in outdated, pre-scientific understanding is not appropriate to modern realities.
I refer not to the hot-button issues of abortion or stem cell research but to the Catholic church's continued opposition to a decidedly pro-life medical intervention: in vitro fertilisation. The moral basis of the Vatican's opposition seems to be twofold: that only conception achieved through the sexual union of a man and a woman is sacred, and that the fertilised cell that results from such a union has a soul and therefore the dignity of a person.
Even before IVF was attempted, the Catholic church opposed it with the suggestion, as I understand it, that a baby conceived by this method would not have a soul. This objection was dropped after the first IVF babies were born and found to be like all other babies, growing up to be normal human beings indistinguishable from their non-IVF counterparts.
But while empirical evidence is the basis of science, faith has different foundations. The pope remains opposed to IVF on the grounds that sexual union is sacred, and therefore only conception achieved through sexual union accords sufficient dignity to the end product. I have to wonder, though, whose dignity is enhanced by withholding medically viable methods that have allowed infertile couples, now numbering in the millions, to conceive and give birth to children they will love.
Several years ago I was invited to the Vatican for a meeting on the future of the universe and life within it, where scientists and theologians tried to communicate with each other, presumably to allow both sides to enhance their understanding of fundamental issues related to our place in the cosmos.
I began my lecture with the somewhat glib remark that it was important for the theologians to listen to me, but not as important for me, as a scientist, to listen to them. I am not sure the theologians were happy to hear this, but I think discussions during our meeting reinforced the notion that the science-religion interface is, at best, a one-way street. I say that because, as a human being, my understanding of moral issues may or may not be improved by such discussions, but as a scientist my efforts to use empirical data to understand the workings of nature would be largely unaffected by them. Theologians, on the other hand, seem to me to have an obligation to attempt to understand the knowledge about the world that has been gained through science, because only through such knowledge can their theology possibly be consistent.
I thought it was more important for the theologians to listen to me than for me to listen to them
The Catholic church has understood this in other contexts. Official Catholic doctrine, as outlined in the 2004 document Communion and Stewardship, accepts the reality of biological evolution, and that the theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible. It has had to recognise that it would be fruitless to claim that evolution is inconsistent with a belief in God, because evolution did occur and is the source of the diversity of life on Earth. A similar argument earlier led the Catholic church to accept the reality of a heliocentric solar system and the existence of other stars and galaxies.
Failure to accept modern biomedical understanding of human conception will keep the church as mired in the past as it was when it opposed Galileo's understanding of the nature of our solar system. And as long as it allows the foundations of its morality to be fixed in the past, ignoring advances based on changing knowledge, its moral authority will remain questionable.
Lawrence Krauss is director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University in Phoenix
Why teenagers can't see your point of view
* 11:29 05 February 2009 by Ewen Callaway
Teenagers might have a new excuse for ignoring their parent's orders. Their brain's ability to adopt the viewpoint of others is still budding, new research suggests.
Known as theory of mind, the ability to infer another's perspective – emotional, intellectual, or visual – improves with age. Studies of infants, toddlers and children have documented gradual improvement in this skill with age.
In a typical test, kids watch two puppets – Sally and Anne – play with a marble, then put the marble back in a box. Anne "leaves" and Sally grabs the marble, plays with it, and then returns the marble instead to a bag.
Where will Anne first search for the marble, researchers ask the children.
"Before four, kids say she's going to look in the bag, but after four they know she has a false belief," says Iroise Dumontheil, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, UK, who led the new study.
However, brain scans suggest that a teenage mind toils harder when inferring the outlook of others, compared with adults. And a brain region implicated in theory of mind, the medial prefrontal cortex, continues to develop through adolescence, Dumontheil says.
For more click here.
Born believers: How your brain creates God
* 04 February 2009 by Michael Brooks
Read our related editorial: The credit crunch could be a boon for irrational belief
WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.
This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.
Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."
The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)
The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.
An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.
That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.
Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.
So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things - things with minds, or at least volition - and inanimate objects.
To read more...click here.
Auroras: What powers the greatest light show on Earth?
* 05 February 2009 by Stephen Battersby
See a gallery of auroras.
A few times a day, a gigantic explosion shakes the Earth's magnetic shield, triggering a chain of events that lights up the polar skies with dazzling auroras. These explosions are substorms, and how they happen has long been a mystery. Until now, no one has been able to explain how they gather the energy to create such spectacular displays, or what happens to trigger them.
Now a flotilla of NASA satellites is finally providing answers. They could help us understand not only one of nature's greatest spectacles, but also help predict more serious space weather, which can endanger satellites and astronauts, and even scramble electrical systems on Earth.
The northern and southern lights have fascinated people throughout human history, and there has been no shortage of attempts to explain them. Galileo described these auroras as sunlight reflected in vapours rising from the Earth, while Descartes proposed reflections from ice crystals instead. In the late 1600s, Edmond Halley was the first to correctly link the aurora to the Earth's magnetic field, though it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists confirmed that the display is created when electrons are funnelled by magnetic fields into the upper atmosphere.
Read on...click here.
Below is a quiz teaser from NewScientist
ENGIMA 1529
Square corbel
I invite you to fill in the grid with non-zero digits so that each row is a perfect square with different digits and each row contains all the digits in all rows below it. In no case must a digit be identical with the one below or above it. This can be done in several different ways.
(a) Find an example with the number in the top row divisible by 3.
(b) Find an example in which the number in the right-hand column is palindromic.
In each case please send in the number in the top row.
That's all for today's post. Hope you find them intellectually interesting.
Broaden your mind to new wonders of the world every moment.
Ja-na!~
I'm gonna get back what I deserve. For pride, dignity and freedom.
So enjoy.
Why the Catholic church can't ignore science
* 06 February 2009 by Lawrence Krauss
* Magazine issue 2694.
IN DECEMBER, with great fanfare, the Vatican released Dignitas Personae, its latest report on bioethics. Sad to say, the document demonstrates once more that a morality rooted in outdated, pre-scientific understanding is not appropriate to modern realities.
I refer not to the hot-button issues of abortion or stem cell research but to the Catholic church's continued opposition to a decidedly pro-life medical intervention: in vitro fertilisation. The moral basis of the Vatican's opposition seems to be twofold: that only conception achieved through the sexual union of a man and a woman is sacred, and that the fertilised cell that results from such a union has a soul and therefore the dignity of a person.
Even before IVF was attempted, the Catholic church opposed it with the suggestion, as I understand it, that a baby conceived by this method would not have a soul. This objection was dropped after the first IVF babies were born and found to be like all other babies, growing up to be normal human beings indistinguishable from their non-IVF counterparts.
But while empirical evidence is the basis of science, faith has different foundations. The pope remains opposed to IVF on the grounds that sexual union is sacred, and therefore only conception achieved through sexual union accords sufficient dignity to the end product. I have to wonder, though, whose dignity is enhanced by withholding medically viable methods that have allowed infertile couples, now numbering in the millions, to conceive and give birth to children they will love.
Several years ago I was invited to the Vatican for a meeting on the future of the universe and life within it, where scientists and theologians tried to communicate with each other, presumably to allow both sides to enhance their understanding of fundamental issues related to our place in the cosmos.
I began my lecture with the somewhat glib remark that it was important for the theologians to listen to me, but not as important for me, as a scientist, to listen to them. I am not sure the theologians were happy to hear this, but I think discussions during our meeting reinforced the notion that the science-religion interface is, at best, a one-way street. I say that because, as a human being, my understanding of moral issues may or may not be improved by such discussions, but as a scientist my efforts to use empirical data to understand the workings of nature would be largely unaffected by them. Theologians, on the other hand, seem to me to have an obligation to attempt to understand the knowledge about the world that has been gained through science, because only through such knowledge can their theology possibly be consistent.
I thought it was more important for the theologians to listen to me than for me to listen to them
The Catholic church has understood this in other contexts. Official Catholic doctrine, as outlined in the 2004 document Communion and Stewardship, accepts the reality of biological evolution, and that the theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible. It has had to recognise that it would be fruitless to claim that evolution is inconsistent with a belief in God, because evolution did occur and is the source of the diversity of life on Earth. A similar argument earlier led the Catholic church to accept the reality of a heliocentric solar system and the existence of other stars and galaxies.
Failure to accept modern biomedical understanding of human conception will keep the church as mired in the past as it was when it opposed Galileo's understanding of the nature of our solar system. And as long as it allows the foundations of its morality to be fixed in the past, ignoring advances based on changing knowledge, its moral authority will remain questionable.
Lawrence Krauss is director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University in Phoenix
Why teenagers can't see your point of view
* 11:29 05 February 2009 by Ewen Callaway
Teenagers might have a new excuse for ignoring their parent's orders. Their brain's ability to adopt the viewpoint of others is still budding, new research suggests.
Known as theory of mind, the ability to infer another's perspective – emotional, intellectual, or visual – improves with age. Studies of infants, toddlers and children have documented gradual improvement in this skill with age.
In a typical test, kids watch two puppets – Sally and Anne – play with a marble, then put the marble back in a box. Anne "leaves" and Sally grabs the marble, plays with it, and then returns the marble instead to a bag.
Where will Anne first search for the marble, researchers ask the children.
"Before four, kids say she's going to look in the bag, but after four they know she has a false belief," says Iroise Dumontheil, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, UK, who led the new study.
However, brain scans suggest that a teenage mind toils harder when inferring the outlook of others, compared with adults. And a brain region implicated in theory of mind, the medial prefrontal cortex, continues to develop through adolescence, Dumontheil says.
For more click here.
Born believers: How your brain creates God
* 04 February 2009 by Michael Brooks
Read our related editorial: The credit crunch could be a boon for irrational belief
WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.
This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.
Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."
The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)
The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.
An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.
That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.
Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.
So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things - things with minds, or at least volition - and inanimate objects.
To read more...click here.
Auroras: What powers the greatest light show on Earth?
* 05 February 2009 by Stephen Battersby
See a gallery of auroras.
A few times a day, a gigantic explosion shakes the Earth's magnetic shield, triggering a chain of events that lights up the polar skies with dazzling auroras. These explosions are substorms, and how they happen has long been a mystery. Until now, no one has been able to explain how they gather the energy to create such spectacular displays, or what happens to trigger them.
Now a flotilla of NASA satellites is finally providing answers. They could help us understand not only one of nature's greatest spectacles, but also help predict more serious space weather, which can endanger satellites and astronauts, and even scramble electrical systems on Earth.
The northern and southern lights have fascinated people throughout human history, and there has been no shortage of attempts to explain them. Galileo described these auroras as sunlight reflected in vapours rising from the Earth, while Descartes proposed reflections from ice crystals instead. In the late 1600s, Edmond Halley was the first to correctly link the aurora to the Earth's magnetic field, though it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists confirmed that the display is created when electrons are funnelled by magnetic fields into the upper atmosphere.
Read on...click here.
Below is a quiz teaser from NewScientist
ENGIMA 1529
Square corbel
I invite you to fill in the grid with non-zero digits so that each row is a perfect square with different digits and each row contains all the digits in all rows below it. In no case must a digit be identical with the one below or above it. This can be done in several different ways.
(a) Find an example with the number in the top row divisible by 3.
(b) Find an example in which the number in the right-hand column is palindromic.
In each case please send in the number in the top row.
That's all for today's post. Hope you find them intellectually interesting.
Broaden your mind to new wonders of the world every moment.
Ja-na!~
I'm gonna get back what I deserve. For pride, dignity and freedom.
