The Good, The Bad, The Spin

“The ideologies of the left and right took shape before Darwin, before Mendel, before anyone knew what a gene or a neuron or a hormone was. Every student of political science is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature. Why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?”

– Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

I get a kick out of what is known as politics. At its base, the idea of, to put it simply, who gets what and how much, ultimately is moral in nature. Yet morality arises from a strongly influenced genetic basis, an often unacknowledged need for group identity and preservation against attack.

Put in this context, the naming of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate was an exceedingly well-executed strategy (attack, for the cynical among you) against democrats. On top of it, the timing was impeccable. What validates the success of this strategy is the voluminous commentary since.

On the political left, it’s been particularly amusing. One local blogger, a feminist no less, refers to Palin as mere “passive” “arm candy” whose appointment is but a positive career move.

The subtle viciousness of these scenes should be given more prominence as sociobiologic states of self-preservation, as in the hard-wired prevalence of, in this case, cognitive dissonance. (more…)

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[NOTE: Republished from The Skeptic.]

Misinformation is everywhere, but nowhere more prolific than on the internet. A Google search for “homeopathy” or “UFO” returns a landslide list of mystery-mongering websites. Yes, there are a few skeptical web resources too — but a non-skeptic can be easily misled online.

On this episode, Derek & Swoopy talk with Tim Farley, a skeptic applying his 20-plus years of software development experience to the creation of advanced tools and techniques for fighting the battle against misinformation on the World Wide Web.

Tim’s popular websites include the Skeptical Software Tools blog “Skeptools” (which uses Web 2.0 techniques to aid the spread of critical thinking information online), and WhatsTheHarm.net, which has collected the stories of over 225,000 people who have been injured or killed as a result of supernatural and pseudoscientific practices from alternative medicine to hypnosis to faith healing.

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DOWNLOAD Episode #84 (50MB MP3)

[NOTE: This was originally published in 2001.]

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Cynthia Eller wields a cunning scythe. Bit by bit, she hacks away at the roots of goddess-oriented philosophy to reveal a landscape fraught with fantasy, imagination and gobbledygook. Gender studies has a new era upon it, one that must, if taken seriously, heed Eller’s accounting of the rise, and, should her book have any impact, demise of this seductive, female-dominated view of prehistory.

The goddess myth obviously serves a purpose. In the evolving social consciousness of civilized culture, portrayal of women in general leaves much to be desired. Simply, the female gender is clearly richer in different ways than men are, and women, because they biologically put their lives at risk in the reproductive process have a deeper kind of burden in serving life. But mainstream portrayals of women tend to disavow this organic aspect to femininity in favor of basically relegating them to being lesser than men. Patriarchy, in other words, is alive and well.

So the matriarchal projection into the prehistoric past is a perhaps all-too convenient redress for current grievances, Eller says, and thus, she takes to task the literature purporting a matriarchal dominated prehistory. New age fluff writers, archaeologists and anthropologists are treated to her critique, namely Marija Gimbutas, who dressed in different hats as both archaeologist and purveyor of distorted interpretations of the prehistoric past. Not surprisingly, according to Eller, the academic community never really took her seriously, not even enough to critique her work. (more…)