The Good, The Bad, The Spin

Michael Shermer likes to tread dangerous waters. His latest dip into challenging the received turbulance of our times is an evolutionary explanation for the state of Modern Capitalism. Politicos, religionists and the lay masses, if they actually take a gander through Shermer’s The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, will likely recoil in disagreement. “You mean to say democratic life is not God-ordained?” they may gasp.

Shermer, chief evolutionist and resident skeptic at Skeptic Magazine, has long maintained the root of human behavior lies not only in our biology but in how our surroundings influence our actions. In this latest iteration, Shermer traces human evolution to explain why we are the way we are today. “If our species is about a hundred thousand years old, then 90 percent of our history has been spent in (a) state of relative economic simplicity,” he writes.

It’s true. The 1997 anthropological manifesto Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environmentdescribes in various essays how our hunter-gatherer ancestry got along in sustainable bands and tribes. Shermer, similar to these others before him, then extrapolates the “relative state of economic simplicity” into what we are today: consumer traders. (more…)

A couple of years ago I received a phone call of a reporter. She wanted to know the effects of human-ingested substances–pharmaceuticals, caffeine–on the environment and other humans after being deposited in sewage. Before referring her to the resident environmental scientist experts, I did some research.

Five minutes and a few Google search terms later I found a readily available report (from an expert, non-news-media source) on the subject that essentially said the amounts of such substances are so minuscule that there is no ill effect.

My short amount of research, and the reporter’s excellent sense of judgment, effectively killed the story.

But it’s a story that won’t die that easily. And the cost is being shared by everyone as a result of the Associated Press’ latest iteration last week, which stirred the pot and generated fear among readers by suggesting not enough is being done about potentially toxic public waters. Water agencies are going out to test local water supplies as a result of this story in an attempt to calm public fears and address the issue.

The AP story is so full of qualifiers–the word “may” appears over and over–the the story’s unintended reaction, maybe, is to engender fear. JunkScience.com has this to say: (more…)

Contrast how New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has handled his demise with Geraldine Ferraro, who also recently resigned from working on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Ferraro recently said of Barack Obama: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Taking heat for this remark, she resigned from a fund-raising position on the Clinton campaign.

Her closing remarks:

“I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign.

“The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won’t let that happen.

“Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?”