Farmer versus Fox

John, during your spell in the states, are you sure you didn’t pop over to Washington ?

Actually, Borf’s been arrested. Read the article: he’s my kind of kid. Yes, I know his reasoning is garbled, and his stances inconsistent. But that’s part of the point of being a teenager – to launch yourself into things that matter, get a point of view – let the coming years take the edge off him, by all means, but my god we need more 18-year olds like him rather than like him (actually, that’s unfair, he has some sensible things to say, and he’s not 18 any more…actually hang on he’s banging on about evolutionary psych and the crypto-racists at genexp again – I take back my retraction!)

Here’s the reason I have a soft spot for him:

He said he was an activist long before he got into graffiti. The first protest he attended was against capitalism in September 2002. It’s possible he would have been arrested if he’d gotten there on time, he said, but the protest was “too early.”

Quite right too.

You always had this sneaking suspicion. The preppy coiff, the supercilious attitude, the sneer lurking just beneath his lips. Superman has got to be a dick. But his immense popularity and admitted feats of derring-do make you swallow your accusations and doubt your thoughts.

Doubt no more. (But you can still swallow.) Thanks to an extensively researched investigation into his actions over the last 60 years or so, I have obtained access to all the proof needed that Superman is not just a dick, he’s a superdick. My personal faves:

petty graft
sociopath
enabler of non-consensual zoophilia
enemy of the family
Or how about committing your friends to maintain your privacy?
Then again, maybe that particular friend deserves it…

Post your favorites in comments.

UPDATE: this might take the cake…

Off to the Cardiff Science Festival today; Tom and I are doing one of the events, a science cafe where we’re the house boffins. Today’s program is here; if you’re that side of the sticks do come along (it’s free) to ask some awkward questions.

Livingstone remarked upon what he thought was a keystone of the successful London bid: that 300 languages are spoken by people of origins from across the world, who live together side by side. He continued:

This city typifies the future of the human race….I would like to congratulate Londoners – no panic – an incredible response of stoicism….I myself will use the UG to go to work on Monday as normal, and that is the advice I give to every Londoner….I wish to thank Londoners for their solidarity – there are some places where such an incident would unleash internal strife and physical violence, but Londoners have stood firm….If you go back a couple 100 years…there was a saying “city air makes you free” – and the people who come to London…have come for that…this is a city where you are free to be yourself, as long as you don’t harm anybody else…a city where you can seek your potential. And that is our strength….that’s what they seek to snuff out. But they will fail.

A pensioner on the streets following the explosions yesterday:

Nil desperandum.

Here’s another blitz quote, from H.V. Morton’s London, February 1941.

I do not know how many tons of high explosives have been tipped out upon the gigantic target of London since the Battle of London began on August 24th, 1940. The result is a grim city, a shabby city, except round and about Guildhall, where several famous streets have been burned to the ground.
The people of London, having developed a technique of living in the face of repeated danger, now accept the preposterous, and what was until so recently the incredible, as the normal background of existence. I often think that the ability to reduce the preposterous and the incredible to the level of commonplace is a singularly English gift.

by Pont

Half masonry, half pain; her head
From which the plaster breaks away
Like flesh from the rough bone, is turned
Upon a neck of stones; her eyes
Are lid-less windows of smashed glass,
Each star-shaped pupil
Giving upon a vault so vast
How can the head contain it?

The raw smoke
Is inter-wreathing through the jaggedness
Of her sky-broken panes, and mirror’d
Fires dance like madmen on the splinters.

All else is stillness save the dancing splinters
And the slow inter-wreathing of the smoke.

Her breasts are crumbling brick where the black ivy
Had clung like a fantastic child for succour
And now hangs draggled with long peels of paper,
Fire-crisp, fire-faded awnings of limp paper
Repeating still their ghosted leaf and lily.

Grass for her cold skin’s hair, the grass of cities
Wilted and swaying on her plaster brow
From winds that stream along the street of cities:

Across a world of sudden fear and firelight
She towers erect, the great stones at her throat,
Her rusted ribs like railings round her heart;
A figure of dry wounds – of winter wounds –
O mother of wounds; half masonry, half pain.

Mervyn Peake, Shapes & Sounds 1941

Taken from Michael Moorcock’s Mother London

Nothing you’ll get here you couldn’t get from google or the BBC.

I’m posting this to reassure that I’m fine, as is Disa, and from the numerous reports I have from friends and family, my sphere has been spared from the traumas occurring round the city. Three Two of the explosions were within ten minutes of my house, and one across the road from where I work. I may post some updates as the day progresses, and if anyone wants to use comments to declare their situation then do so.

UPDATE: The death toll is rising; I’ve been outside to meet with some friends and it seems people are pretty unflustered – this is on Lambs Conduit Street, just metres from Russell square – although police cordons are carving up this part of the city at present.

CORRECTION: The Russell Square and Kings Cross explosions were in fact one explosion in between the two stations. Likewise for Aldgate and Liverpool street.

UPDATE: Typing as I hear it: “They’re trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us from doing the things we want to do…. they should not and must not succeed. When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed…. We will show by our spirit and dignity, and the quiet and true strength there is in the British people, that our way will outlast theirs….This is a very sad day for the British people, but we will hold true to the British way of life.” – Tony Blair, 17:30 approx GMT

Ruseblogging is in vogue currently, keen as he is to prosecute proponents of evolution (the charge: raising to a religion what should be simply an explanatory paradigm). For more on that issue best visit Butterflies and Wheels where close readings hew out the rhetoric from the facts on most issues. Specifics found here, here and here

What the above description might not make apparent is Ruse is a fierce proponent of evolution himself – indeed, was introduced at this week’s symposium as “Huxley to David Hull’s Darwin”. So as a sort of counterweight to Ophelia’s posts at Butterflies and Wheels I thought it would be interesting to see Ruse shot from both sides.

His talk, “Darwinism and its malcontents”, was essentially a j’accuse directed against those who try and keep humans outside of the realm of nature and evolution. His wide-bore approach scattered shot into Alfred Russel Wallace; Soapy Sam and various dissenters from the evolutionary view, through to Intelligent Designers; and critically individuals such as Elisabeth Lloyd, David Buller and other individuals who are in concord with evolution per se but are making sounds (not sure precisely what, but a ‘tut’ or drawn-out ‘hmmmmm’ should do it) about how it is currently applied to brains, minds, and certain other features which may (or may not be) particular to humans. Lisa Lloyd analyses the proposed adaptive value of the female orgasm and finds it wanting, David Buller critiques the E-Psych program (debated here at Crooked Timber), and so on. [NB the site containing the Lloyd piece is an excellent resource on major issues within current biology.]

This wallification (to abuse a phrase I suspect intended to be abused) of humankind off from evolution could well be a topic for concern. Yet I found Ruse entirely unconvincing because he presented none of David Buller’s arguments against Evolutionary Psychology, or addressed Lisa Lloyd’s concerns with some seemingly inconsistent adaptive analysis. It was really framed as an argument from authority: Darwin believed that selection was operating ‘all the way up’, and we are all good Darwinists if we are nothing. A corollary is the insinuation that if you hold beliefs that an Intelligent Design proponent would be happy you have, then your beliefs are suspect.

Flimsy stuff, really; I don’t give a damn what Darwin really thought about human exceptionalism. I’m a scientist dammit. Show me the evidence and convince me! If Lloyds arguments do ultimately hit a wall in that they are fundamentally anti-materialist – really unwilling to accept that physical forces shaped these properties – then put the argument out step by painstaking step. It’s not clear that this is the case at all, and readers will know that I myself have issues with several components of the EP program while still firmly wedded to materialism. Yes I have read Darwins Dangerous Idea and yes it is wonderful, but the fact that selection could operate in all realsm does not entail that it must, or that it can’t be outstripped by other forces – either selection at another level (the old meme idea) or cultural learning forces that aren’t well described as selection at all, due to the levels of top-down direction, non-heritability or what-have-yous that make natural selection a specific, designed process, rather than just a catch-all for any kind of change.

Engaging and rumbunctious as he was – the overall tone was that of giving his colleagues a good teasing – it still had the insipid flavour of some sort of jovial McCarthism – these are the sorts of things we should not be thinking in the United States of Darwin. So it seems that Ruse is fighting on two fronts. It leads me to wonder whether this is because he has a very narrow and specific view of what evolutionary science is, and how it should proceed, and leads me further into ruminating whether that is a exemplary or terrible perspective.

There was a symposium at my department ‘to celebrate the academic career of Henry Plotkin‘ – i.e. his retirement or half-way point in the academic career, depending on how you want to look at it (half full, half empty, sour). Prof Plotkin was our head of department and supervised my final year project, gave inspiring lectures on evolution of mind and wrote good books on the same, so you bet I was there. Some thoughts follow.

David Hull gave a fairly gentle talk on evolutionary epistemology. I shall just pick out a few comments I found particularly interesting, chiefly on universality. This is a claim made about a feature or characteristic, specifically that it is found across [the class, taxa, all life – but most typically species, and in the context of humans neary always framed in this way] without exception excluding abnormal cases. According to Hull, although all humans possess characteristics, if species evolved as evolutionary biologists think they do, universals should be rare. In fact, Hull doubts that many exist at all, especially not the hundreds of traits claimed by Donald E. Brown to constitute his ‘Universal People’. What Hull points out is that universals are often achieved by arguing away variability – partitioning off the ‘normal’ population under consideration. As he points out, blue eye colour is found in 1% of the population, and is the result of a malfunctioning gene, but it’s just as human as anything else. I share this concern, which has its mirror in the tendency of some universalists to universalise from traits only seen in the abnormal – i.e. in psychopaths – which I wrote about here .

Hull also posed a question, which can be summed up as ‘Why are universals so universal?’ Why is the need to pin these things down so ubiquitous? He suggested two reasons, one being sheer outgrowth from the nature-nurture debate and the polarised positions this produces. He also suggested that it is due to a perceived link between universality and Laws of Nature – the Big Game of scientific endeavour – even though the considered view in biology is that there is no such thing. He concluded that perhaps it is also that essentialism is simply very hard to avoid.

Hull is also concerned with the future of science – whether it has a future, which he doesn’t take for granted and urges us not to. He is convinced that central to science is the notion of Mutual Use – collaboration, sharing of information, open access, which he feels must stay central to science to prevent it going under. So yay science blogging.

Tomorrow I’ll try to give a little on a few more talks.

More in Left2Right on relativism, this time of a special breed.

Living in close quarters with exotic strangers: the perfect hothouse setting for the growth of dormitory relativism. And I think it’s a gorgeous flower, not a weed.

Dormitory relativism says, oh, it’s all just taste or personal preference. You like atheism, I like religion; you embrace the sexual revolution, I prefer staying a virgin; you’re a radical, I’m a conservative. As long as you don’t leave the bathroom a mess and don’t keep me up at 2:00 in the morning with your stereo blasting, we can get along just fine. To vary the metaphor, dormitory relativism is the perfect peace treaty for getting along with people with sharply different views. Instead of bitter arguments and hatred, we get amiable shrugs.

To be defensible – to stay crassly political and eschew any claims about ethics or justification or epistemology or ontology – dormitory relativism has to be an as-if, wink-nudge-nod collective understanding. Dormitory relativism doesn’t say, “there is no point arguing about these matters because there’s nothing there but personal preference.” That’s rotten philosophy.

Read the whole thing, if only for gratuitous ice-cream analogies.

The comments thread that follows is spasmodically interesting, but I want to pick up on a comment by Steve Horwitz:

Don’s bifurcation of the dorm room and the classroom is problematic here. (I would suspect he would agree and that his use of “dormitory relativism” was a convenient rhetorical flourish for the underlying idea.) My students, who are not of Michigan caliber, far too often and too easily slide into that same relativism in the classroom, fearful that actually taking a hard position might generate negative social repercussions either in or out of the classroom. The degree to which we encourage “dormitory relativism” as a way to “go along to get along” outside the classroom is probably correlated with its spillover into the intellectual space.

Why not, at least in the context of a college residence hall if not in other communities, challenge it at a deeper level? Why cannot members of a residence hall (standing in for other communities) find ways to move beyond treating moral positions as if they were ice cream preferences while still managing to play by rules that enable the civility and mutual respect necessary for living together? We expect tough classroom discussions to accomplish that lofty goal, why not in other forums as well? By accepting literal and metaphorical forms of “dormitory relativism” do we do a disservice to students by stunting their ability to engage in meaningful and tough dialogues in a variety of settings, including ones where they, literally, have to live with the consequences of what they say and the moral and political views they hold?

I think I agree more with Mr Horwitz than Mr Herzog. But in reality, I think that at times I do practise dormitory relativism. Many of my friends and family hold opinions that I disagree with (not violently, but not negligibly either) that I will often gloss over rather than tackle head-on. It seems tiresome and pointless to play welfare-state shuffle or taxation frenzy (actually, if that was a real game, I would SO play it) with someone who just doesn’t see the world on your terms. Is there a clue in the word ‘dormitory’? That is, when we shunt up to the family level or winch in people who are not just entering adulthood, and forming and fusing opinions, but who are relatively entrenched and perhaps defined by their ideas, are we on a different playing surface entirely? But just how entrenched are we, at any age? One of my elderly relatives is characterised by an involvement with the world and a widening of ideas that has only increased with age. Is this the wisdom that accompanies our later years? Perhaps it is exceptional, and wisdom as commonly understood is instead the focusing and greater articulation of a single world-view, corroborated by evidences selectively remembered over a great span. Is it simply self-gratification for youth to yank the beards of the wise, or is it necessary – even if it is too late to make any real impact on the way they organise their lives? To give an example, would even the most militant atheist do missionary work in hospices?