From: L-Soft list server at St. John's University (1.8c) To: Ian Pitchford Subject: File: "SCI-CULT LOG9808" Date: Saturday, September 26, 1998 11:26 PM ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 14:03:19 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Joseph Needham Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit In a message dated 98-07-26 01:04:31 EDT, you write: > Speak memory! Is there anyone out there with some > "Needham stories" worthy of "himself"? > > \brad mccormick > The one time I heard Joseph Needham speak was at MIT in the 1980's. He must have been in his eighties, but he looked about fifty. At one point the slide projector he was using in his lecture broke down. The staff went looking for a lightbulb, and Needham remarked that it was surprising that in the world's center of electrical engineering they couldn't change a lightbulb. While we were waiting, he decided to continue his lecture in the dark and suggested to us in the audience that we imagine the slides. Not a great anecdote, but a true one. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 14:08:12 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Joseph Needham X-cc: Valdusek@AOL.COM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Valdusek@AOL.COM wrote: > > In a message dated 98-07-26 01:04:31 EDT, you write: > > > Speak memory! Is there anyone out there with some > > "Needham stories" worthy of "himself"? > > > > \brad mccormick > > > The one time I heard Joseph Needham speak was at MIT in the 1980's. He must > have been in his eighties, but he looked about fifty. At one point the slide > projector he was using in his lecture broke down. The staff went looking for > a lightbulb, and Needham remarked that it was surprising that in the world's > center of electrical engineering they couldn't change a lightbulb. While we > were waiting, he decided to continue his lecture in the dark and suggested to > us in the audience that we imagine the slides. Not a great anecdote, but a > true one. > > Val Dusek And certainly a story which in no way *diminishes* my image of a man I much wish I had had the opportunity to know. \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 2 Aug 1998 08:20:01 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: articles on Darwinian discourse at Science-as-Culture web site X-To: darwin-and-darwinism@sheffield.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The following articles by Julio Muņoz-Rubio have been placed on the Science-as-Culture web site: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/indsac.html 'Political Economy at Nature. The Ideological Background of Darwinian Discourse' 'On Darwinian Discourse: Anthropologization of Nature in the Naturalization of Man' comments/discussion very welcome Best, Bob Young __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 21:35:24 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Hank Bromley Subject: Education/Technology/Power book MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Brief announcement: a book I co-edited, _Education/Technology/Power: Educational Computing as a Social Practice_ (SUNY Press), is now available. Those wishing more info may contact me or visit this web site: http://www.gse.buffalo.edu/fas/bromley/etp/ Thanks. -- Hank Bromley hbromley@acsu.buffalo.edu (sci-cult subscriber and occasional poster) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 16:17:27 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Fwd: Hazen Prize Nominations needed! Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >To expand interaction between professional historians and pre-University >educators, the History of Science Society--among other things--has launched >the HAZEN PRIZE for outstanding contributions to teaching the history of >science. > >This is the first year of the award, which will be delivered at the HSS >annual meeting in October 1998. The Prize committee has been looking for >nominations and is setting a specially delayed deadline of mid-August. >Those interested in making a nomination should contact: > >Prof Rich Kremer, Hazen Prize Subcommittee (Richard.L.Kremer@dartmouth.edu) > >URGENTLY. He can provide information about nomination procedures. > >The description of the prize is below: > >>Description of the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize >> >>"The prize is awarded in recognition of outstanding contributions to the >teaching of History of Science. Educational activities recognized by the >award are to be construed in the broadest sense and should include but not >be limited to the following: classroom teaching (K-12, undergraduate, >graduate or extended eductation), mentoring of young scholars, museum work, >journalism, organization and administration of educational programs, >educational research, innovation in the methodology of instruction, >preparation of pedagogical materials, or public outreach through non-print >media." >> >>The award is accompanied by a cash prize of $1000. >> ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 15:15:23 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: lists of lists: how to find email forums on any topic X-To: psa-public-sphere@sheffield.ac.uk, hraj@maelstrom.stjohns.edu, psychoanalytic-studies@sheffield.ac.uk, darwin-and-darwinism@sheffield.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" How to find mailing lists/email forums on various topics. There are many ways. The easiest is Liszt, a search engine whiich classifies over 80000 lists http://www.liszt.com/ Here are other responses to a query from someone about finding lists http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html/ Will let you do various things like search for keywords in all public Listserv lists. Here are two URLs for lists of lists. The first is a good site for searching for lists and the second is a pretty good list of lists. http://booster.u.washington.edu/AcademicServices/Library/newslists.html http://www.grohol.com/mail.htm In an effort to be helpful: Without spaces at each end of a link it won't work I've been told, and I've certainly found that to be true in my experience, however one can always cut and paste to get around that but this one also needs to have the last slash (/) deleted from the link to get it to work. List of children's disability lists: http://www.comeunity.com/disability/speclists.html List of adoption lists: http://www.comeunity.com/adoption/listservs.html These include applicable St Johns lists. Autism/PDD is included in the children's lists. Also large lists of lists: AOL's Mailing List Directory http://ifrit.web.aol.com/mld/production Well organized search, open to non AOL members CataList, the Catalog of Listserv Lists http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html A large database but only includes lists using Listserv software Liszt Directory of Email Discussion Groups http://www.liszt.com Comprehensive listing, based on websites Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists http://www.neosoft.com/internet/paml Easy to search, one of the first list databases. __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1998 20:40:42 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology X-To: darwin-darwinism@sheffield.ac.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: David Sloan Wilson Date: Thursday, August 13, 1998 9:27 PM My colleague and coauthor of Unto Others, Elliott Sober, recently organized a symposium on evolutionary psychology at the cognitive psychology meetings in Madison, Wisconsin. Participants included Frank Sulloway and Gerd Gigerenzer. I thought that Elliott's introductory remarks might be of interest to this group. He is not on this list but can be reached for private correspondence by the e-mail address below. David Sloan Wilson email: dwilson@binghamton.edu __________________________ Evolutionary Psychology -- A Manifesto Elliott Sober Philosophy Department University of Wisconsin, Madison 53706 ersober@facstaff.wisc.edu August 3, 1998 In the history of science, scientists sometimes have abandoned a research program because they have systematically explored its basic tenets without making any progress in solving problems. Perhaps phrenology was abandoned for this type of reason. One of the basic tenets was that different bumps on the head are associated with different psychological attributes. The attempt to figure out which bumps go with which traits never got very far. Eventually, scientists gave up on this program, and rightly so. However, there is another pattern in the history of science. In this second type of case, a research program is abandoned without its basic tenets being much explored at all. I am concerned that this may be the fate that awaits the research program of evolutionary psychology. Books that popularize evolutionary psychology give the impression that it is booming. But insiders know that only a handful of individuals are doing research of this sort. A look at the program of the present conference confirms this. There is a great deal of hostility towards evolutionary psychology in cognitive science. My worry is that this hostility will kill this research program before enough people spend enough time exploring how productive it can be. I do not associate evolutionary psychology with a specific set of doctrines. Research programs are not the same as the specific theories that are developed within a research program. Cosmides and Tooby are the most prominent workers in evolutionary psychology, but their claims do not define what the field is. Evolutionary psychologists may debate hypotheses of modularity; they may be skeptical about various adaptationist hypotheses. What they are committed to is the fruitfulness of exploring the idea that the mind is the product of evolution. Aside from creationists, I doubt that there are many people who doubt that the mind evolved. However, there is a great deal of skepticism with respect to a different claim -- that asking evolutionary questions will elicit illuminating answers. With respect to the question of whether there is a payoff to be had here, I suggest a simple answer: the only way to find out is to try. No argument can show a priori that evolutionary inquiry will be fruitless, nor can any show that it must succeed. The fact that the mind has evolved says nothing about whether present day science is in a position to develop this idea in interesting ways. To further defend evolutionary psychology against premature burial, I want to present four theses. I'd call these "truisms" instead of theses, except for the fact that they seem not to be obvious to workers in cognitive science. The first is this: Proximate and ultimate explanations are not in conflict. Mayr, Tinbergen, and others have made this point repeatedly and it is by now entirely standard. If you ask "Why do sunflowers turn towards the sunlight?" your question may be answered in two different ways. A plant physiologist may describe the proximate mechanisms inside sunflowers that make them do this. An evolutionist, on the other hand, may offer an ultimate explanation of why phototropism evolved. A (true) evolutionary account will supplement a (true) proximate account, not replace it. Evolutionary psychology will not replace the parts of cognitive science that aim to characterize proximate cognitive mechanisms. Rather, evolutionary psychology aims to explain why one set of cognitive mechanisms evolved, rather than another. My second thesis is this: There is more to evolution than natural selection. Evolutionary psychology does not have to be adaptationist. Adaptationism about this or that feature of the mind is a hypothesis to be tested, not something to be assumed true (or assumed false) a priori. As in the rest of biology, adaptationist hypotheses have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Some adaptationist models for some traits in some lineages may be well supported by data. Others may not be. As Philip Kitcher emphasized in his book on sociobiology, there is no magic bullet. The third thesis is that work on the evolution of a phenotype does not have to be postponed until the genetic and developmental features of the phenotype are understood. It is worth remembering hat Darwin got pretty far without knowing about Mendelism and that there has been lots of useful phenotypic modeling since then that has proceeded in the absence of genetic and developmental knowledge. The evolution of helping behavior -- of "altruism" in the evolutionary sense of that term -- is a good example. Of course, genetics and development are needed if we are to have a full understanding of a phenotype. But that doesn't mean that phenotypic questions can't be posed until these details are in place. The fourth thesis: Gould and Lewontin did not prove that the concept of adaptation is inherently bankrupt. What they did was criticize some existing approaches to questions about adaptation and offer a hypothesis about the evolutionary process. In the Spandrels paper, they accept the Darwinian claim that natural selection is the most important force in evolution; what they deny is that it is the only important factor. Workers in cognitive science who wonder how hypotheses in evolutionary psychology can be tested may want to look at what has happened to the issue of testability in evolutionary biology. Biologists didn't stop using the concept of adaptation after 1978, nor did they proceed just as they had before. Rather, new and more sophisticated approaches to the concept of adaptation were developed. The Gould and Lewontin article was widely interpreted as a challenge to do better, and a number of biologists tried to respond to this challenge. I see two interesting ideas at work in evolutionary biology now about testability. The first idea is to formulate adaptive hypotheses that make quantitative predictions, not just qualitative predictions. Work on sex ratio evolution provides an example. Optimality models in this area show how different mixes of males and females in a population will be optimal, depending on the pattern of mating. These models can be tested by measuring the sex ratio and measuring the pattern of mating. Although Gould and Lewontin rightly complain that it is often too easy to invent "just-so" stories, I don't think that this complaint applies to the case of sex ratio evolution. It isn't that easy to make up an explanation of why the ratio of males to females in our own species is slightly greater than unity at conception and birth and declines towards unity at reproductive age. The second strategy is to formulate adaptive hypotheses so that they cover a number of species, not just one. This permits comparative data to be used and a whole raft of new methods has been invented to deal with such data. Maybe it is easy to invent a number of adaptive hypotheses to explain why human males are larger than human females. However, it is harder to do so when the task is to explain why the degree of size dimorphism is associated with the sex ratio in mating groups in primates. Monogamous species tend to have males and females with more similar body sizes than species in which mating groups are made of more females than males. As both these examples illustrate, the way to respond to the Gould and Lewontin challenge is not to abandon the goal of testing adaptive hypotheses, but to reformulate them. If they make quantitative predictions, and if they make claims about patterns that should exist across a group of species, then it may not be so easy to invent explanations that fit the data. Elliott Sober ________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1998 14:18:53 PDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Edward Remler Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology X-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Content-Type: text/plain I found this posting informative. I was surprised and shocked to hear that so few people are active in Evolutionary Psychology. Is this due to peer pressure, to fear of not being promoted? But I have another question which I find even more interesting. Prof. Sober states: > What they are committed to is the >fruitfulness of exploring the idea that the mind is the product of >evolution. Aside from creationists, I doubt that there are many >people who doubt that the mind evolved. However, there is a great >deal of skepticism with respect to a different claim -- that asking >evolutionary questions will elicit illuminating answers. What can it mean to say the 'mind evolved' if that does not imply that the mind has been shaped by evolution? That its structures developed in response to evolutionary forces? I know that people say that drift can play a large role in evolutionary development, but even if this is assumed to be true to greater or lesser degree for the evolution of the brain, for some reason (obscure to me), this does not explain the virulent antipathy towards simply exploring this field.How can evolution not be a great guiding principle even if it is not the whole story? I do not think (?) that the point I am making is not already intellectually obvious to any reasonable person, yet there is this great antagonism towards this research. Of course, it is well known that there are sociopolitical undercurrents involved. My suspicion is that this antagonism is almost entirely emotional and political. Ed Remler > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1998 23:42:12 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Re: Sober's article Ed Remler wrote: Of course, it is well known that there are sociopolitical undercurrents involved. My suspicion is that this antagonism is almost entirely emotional and political. ____________ In retrospect it seems peculiar that we ever conceived of the brain as an organ - surely the brain is a collection of interlinked, modular, functional systems, and these systems underpin a domain-specific mind? As Sober's co-author David Sloan Wilson wrote in 1994: 'I think that their [Cosmides and Tooby's] basic vision of the human mind as a collection of Darwinian algorithms "has the obviousness-in-retrospect of a major scientific advance"' Furthermore, the notion of an evolutionary psychology goes all the way back to the first edition of The Origin of Species (1859): (p.488) "In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." I agree with Ed Remler that many of the reservations people have about the research program of evolutionary psychology are emotional and political, and of course some of these reservations are not unreasonable. I only hope that, one hundred and forty years after Darwin's original research proposal, these reservations wont prevent people from assessing modular hypotheses on their merits. Regards Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1998 20:02:14 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ted Winslow Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology In-Reply-To: <199808152119.RAA24880@comet.ccs.yorku.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Ed Remler wrote: > >I do not think (?) that the point I am making is not already >intellectually obvious to any reasonable person, yet there is this great >antagonism towards this research. Of course, it is well known that there >are sociopolitical undercurrents involved. My suspicion is that this >antagonism is almost entirely emotional and political. > Is this suspicion consistent with the view that phenomena of mind such as "virulent antipathy" and "antagonism" are best explained by evolutionary psychology? Ted Winslow York University Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW@YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. North York, Ont. CANADA M3J 1P3 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 09:10:53 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ted WInslow wrote: Is this suspicion consistent with the view that phenomena of mind such as "virulent antipathy" and "antagonism" are best explained by evolutionary psychology? ____________ What are "virulent anitpathy" and "anatagonism"? Are these things functional? Do they have a particular developmental course, a dedicated neural architecture and a characteristic pattern of dissociation? Are they domain-specific? Are they human universals? If the answer to some or most of these questions is "yes" then there may be a case for further investigation. In general the basic emotions - or affect programs - are good candidates for investigation by evolutionary psychology. Paul Ekman claims to have uncovered six species-typical human affect programs: surprise, anger, fear, disgust, sadness and joy. He gives specific definitions of these which don't always overlap with the way these terms are used colloquially. It's a fascinating field, see: Brown, D.E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw Hill. Darwin, C., & Ekman, P. (1998). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. [First published in Great Britain in 1872 by John Murray]. Ekman, P. (1971). Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. In J. Cole (Ed.), Nebraska Sympsium on Motivation, Vol. 19: University of Nebraska Press. Frank, R.H. (1988). Passions within reason: the strategic role of the emotions. New York; London: W. W. Norton. Griffiths, P.E. (1997). What emotions really are. The problem of psychological categories. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. The books by Frank and Griffiths are classics and deserve to be much better known than they are. Best wishes Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 10:50:15 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Forum for discussion of the work of Gregory Bateson X-To: darwin-and-darwinism@sheffield.ac.uk, psa-public-sphere@sheffield.ac.uk, psychoanalytic-studies@sheffield.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Forum for discussion of the work of Gregory Bateson The Bateson-l list is for discussion of all aspects of Gregory Bateson's ideas. Subscribers post article drafts, questions, thoughts, comments, criticisms, elaborations, replies, etc., on all facets of Bateson's work. To subscribe to Bateson-l send the command below in the body of your message: SUBscribe BATESON-L (e.g., "SUB bateson-l Margaret Mead") All commands to the LISTSERV program must be sent to "listserv@listserv.indiana.edu". To send messages to the Bateson-l list itself address them to "Bateson-l@indiana.edu". __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 09:50:35 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) X-To: Ian Pitchford MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ian Pitchford wrote: > > Re: Sober's article Ed Remler wrote: > > Of course, it is well known that there are sociopolitical undercurrents > involved. My suspicion is that this > antagonism is almost entirely emotional and political. > ____________ > > In retrospect it seems peculiar that we ever conceived of the brain as an > organ - surely the brain is a collection of interlinked, modular, functional > systems, and these systems underpin a domain-specific mind? As Sober's > co-author David Sloan Wilson wrote in 1994: > > 'I think that their [Cosmides and Tooby's] basic vision of the human mind as a > collection of Darwinian algorithms "has the obviousness-in-retrospect of a > major scientific advance"' [snip] Gosh! What organ *isn't* "a collection of interlinked, modular, functional systems"? Certainly a kidney or a jellyfish is at least this! But perhaps a *mind* is something else/more: A self-aware, open perspective upon Being [all that which is or ever was...] and its un-real-ized possibilities, as well as upon all other possible and actual perspectives upon Being and its un-real-ized possibilities... (in- cluding, of course, theorizing aboiut "Evolution")? With so much oppression in the world, I find it curious that so many persons in our so-called "society" work so hard to diminish not just the images they have of others ("students", "workers", "mental patients", etc.), but also the image they have of *themselves*. I guess this means Nietzsche was not *quite* on target in his hermeneutic of The Last Man? \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 15:56:18 +0200 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "F.C.Valk" Subject: Re: Forum for discussion of the work of Gregory Bateson MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit listserve address is refused by server! -----Original Message----- From: Robert Maxwell Young To: SCIENCE-AS-CULTURE@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU Date: zondag 16 augustus 1998 11:49 Subject: Forum for discussion of the work of Gregory Bateson >Forum for discussion of the work of Gregory Bateson >The Bateson-l list is for discussion of all aspects of Gregory Bateson's >ideas. Subscribers post article drafts, questions, thoughts, comments, >criticisms, elaborations, replies, etc., on all facets of Bateson's work. > >To subscribe to Bateson-l send the command below in the body of your >message: >SUBscribe BATESON-L >(e.g., "SUB bateson-l Margaret Mead") >All commands to the LISTSERV program must be sent to >"listserv@listserv.indiana.edu". >To send messages to the Bateson-l list itself address them to >"Bateson-l@indiana.edu". > > >__________________________________________ >In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young >Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk >26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 >4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for >Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and >writings: >http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html >Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ > 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 16:06:53 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Brad McCormick wrote: Gosh! What organ *isn't* "a collection of interlinked, modular, functional systems"? Certainly a kidney or a jellyfish is at least this! _____________ REPLY: Exactly, this is the point. Why exclude the brain or the mind from this general view of evolved modular systems? What theoretical framework could justify such exclusion? _____________ But perhaps a *mind* is something else/more: A self-aware, open perspective upon Being [all that which is or ever was...] and its un-real-ized possibilities, as well as upon all other possible and actual perspectives upon Being and its un-real-ized possibilities... (in- cluding, of course, theorizing aboiut "Evolution")? ____ REPLY: Everything is probably somthing more than any particular description, so what you say here is uncontroversial. The question is, very broadly, how and why do we have minds capable of learning the types of things that people routinely learn, including language and the capacity to understand behaviour in terms of mentalistic states? Both of these aforementioned abilities may depend on domain-specific systems, rather than some amorphous horizontal faculty of "general intelligence". ___ With so much oppression in the world, I find it curious that so many persons in our so-called "society" work so hard to diminish not just the images they have of others ("students", "workers", "mental patients", etc.), but also the image they have of *themselves*. I guess this means Nietzsche was not *quite* on target in his hermeneutic of The Last Man? _____ REPLY: I don't find anything diminishing about the pursuit of knowledge, whether hermeneutic or scientific. Best wishes Ian ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 12:20:44 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) X-To: Ian Pitchford MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ian Pitchford wrote: > > Brad McCormick wrote: > > Gosh! What organ *isn't* "a collection > of interlinked, modular, functional > systems"? Certainly a kidney or a jellyfish > is at least this! > > _____________ > REPLY: Exactly, this is the point. Why exclude the brain or the mind from this > general view of evolved modular systems? What theoretical framework could > justify such exclusion? The problem is at least as old as Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_: there are objects of consciousness (or whatever Pomo-ers will tolerate that the event of awareness of [whatever] be called, *and* there is consciousness itself, which is the consciousness *of* its objects. Is this a problem or is it "obvious"? If it's obvious, can someone explain to me how the "general view of evolved modular systems" subsumes transcendental ("critical") philosophy: Kant, Husserl, et al.? Habermas explicitly argues that systems theory cannot explain communicative reason, in many places. > _____________ > > But perhaps a *mind* is something else/more: A self-aware, > open perspective upon Being [all that which is or ever > was...] and its un-real-ized possibilities, as well as > upon all other possible and actual perspectives > upon Being and its un-real-ized possibilities... (in- > cluding, of course, theorizing aboiut "Evolution")? > > ____ > REPLY: Everything is probably somthing more than any particular description, so > what you say here is uncontroversial. See above. I most sincerely hope I have said something uncontrovertial (but I don't think so -- at least until someone helps me see how it is so). > The question is, very broadly, how and > why do we have minds capable of learning the types of things that people > routinely learn, including language and the capacity to understand behaviour in > terms of mentalistic states? Both of these aforementioned abilities may depend > on domain-specific systems, rather than some amorphous horizontal faculty of > "general intelligence". I wonder about this. Do we agree or disagree? Husserlian Phenomenology is precisely the discipline of tracing back the *detailed* constitutive processes which result in each of our particular beliefs and all other aspects of our lived experience. But is *that* what you are talking about? > ___ > > With so much oppression in the world, I find it > curious that so many persons in our so-called "society" > work so hard to diminish not just the images they have > of others ("students", "workers", "mental patients", > etc.), but also the image they have of *themselves*. I > guess this means Nietzsche was not *quite* on target in > his hermeneutic of The Last Man? > > _____ > REPLY: I don't find anything diminishing about the pursuit of knowledge, > whether hermeneutic or scientific. Agreed. I think science is immensely important. Husserl called it: "mankind's first infinite task". Joseph Needham said that the 17th century Chinese recoginzed it as something genuinely new: knowledge that was valid for anyone who made the effort to understand it, rather than only being true for those raised to believe it. But Husserl also argued at length in _The Crisis of European Sciences..._ (etc.) that such "science's" self-understanding was still largely "naive", i.e., that Galilean science is in principle only partially scientific, and that a fully mature science would have as its "object" not only the universe of objects but also the event of "having [whatever] object" -- experience, consciousness-in-the-first-person-living-present, or whatever one wishes to call the event an instance of which is *you* *reading* *this*. My contention is that hermeneutics subsumes [Galilean] science in an even more consequential way than scientific knowledge subsumes hermeneutics (the latter being the elaboration of the pre-scientific experience of putting a bullet or other object through somebody's [one's own or other's] skull). This issue has fundamental implications for education, funding research, and the entire texture of daily life. The question is always to *situate* scientific praxis (and all science, including a person writing or otherwise communicating a "law of physics" is praxis) in the overall world of lived experience, which is both an "ontological" and an ethical problematic. Can we clarify respective positions on this point? > > Best wishes > > Ian Best wishes, too! \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 10:13:03 PDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Edward Remler Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) X-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Content-Type: text/plain Brad Mccormick wrote: >> With so much oppression in the world, I find it >> curious that so many persons in our so-called "society" >> work so hard to diminish not just the images they have >> of others ("students", "workers", "mental patients", >> etc.), apropos my point about the sociopolitical and emotional basis of so much of the animus against Evolutionary Psychology. This response illustrates that point beautifully. The Church also had good moral (as well as intellectual) concerns underlying their order to Galileo to stop publicizing his work as *the truth* (they did not require him to cease his work or to teach it as hypothesis, as their modern counterparts would do) and most reasonable people understand the justified moral concerns in this case also (Feyerabend somewhere draws the same parallel). This is such an old question, and one so worked over--that we must rework it yet again is really depressing. ----------- >But Husserl also argued at length in _The Crisis of >European Sciences..._ (etc.) that such >"science's" self-understanding was still largely >"naive", i.e., that Galilean science is in principle >only partially scientific, My response to this is that Science is as Science does. Neither Husserl nor anyone can say what Science is unless it is to say what scientists actually do. Scientists define Science. Any one can say what they believe Science *should* do. And that is generally uninteresting because the fact of the matter is that scientists would like to do everything--they are unfortunately constrained by reality. >and that a fully mature science would have >as its "object" not only the universe of objects but >also the event of "having [whatever] object" -- experience, >consciousness-in-the-first-person-living-present, or >whatever one wishes to call the event an instance of >which is *you* *reading* *this*. But science does have this as its object. Give it another thousand years and it may succeed--and even that, only if it is given the freedom you wish to deny it. Ed Remler ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 13:41:24 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) In-Reply-To: <199808161713.NAA00811@russian-caravan.cloud9.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > -----Original Message----- > From: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture > [mailto:SCIENCE-AS-CULTURE@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU]On Behalf Of Edward > Remler > Sent: Sunday, August 16, 1998 1:13 PM > To: SCIENCE-AS-CULTURE@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU > Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) > > > Brad Mccormick wrote: > >> With so much oppression in the world, I find it > >> curious that so many persons in our so-called "society" > >> work so hard to diminish not just the images they have > >> of others ("students", "workers", "mental patients", > >> etc.), > > apropos my point about the sociopolitical and emotional basis > of so much > of the animus against Evolutionary Psychology. This response > illustrates > that point beautifully. The Church also had good moral (as well as > intellectual) concerns underlying their order to Galileo to stop > publicizing his work as *the truth* (they did not require him to cease > his work or to teach it as hypothesis, Is this altogether true? My understanding is that, at first, they said G. could teach heliocentrism as a mathematical speculation or instrument for computation, but that later he was even forbidden to do *this*. The truth (as I understand it) is that the heliocentric hypothesis could not be defended *to the exclusion* of the Tychonic alternative until the 18th(?) century, when aberration of starlight and stellar parallax were observed (I don't know much about astronomy). So Galileo couldn't *prove* heliocentrism was true. But The Roman Catholic Church *could* have been *catholic*, and proven its greatness (and not just its command of mass times acceleration in the deployment of instruments of torture), by tolerating this obnoxious little man and his great mind. > as their modern counterparts > would do) and most reasonable people understand the justified moral > concerns in this case also (Feyerabend somewhere draws the same > parallel). This is such an old question, and one so worked > over--that we > must rework it yet again is really depressing. I'm not sure what you're referring to here??? > > ----------- > > >But Husserl also argued at length in _The Crisis of > >European Sciences..._ (etc.) that such > >"science's" self-understanding was still largely > >"naive", i.e., that Galilean science is in principle > >only partially scientific, > > > My response to this is that Science is as Science does. Ditto Bill Clinton, Ken Starr, Adolf Hitler, and every thing and living being, too. I guess the "net" is that better ideas can only have force in the real world if they can be successfully *marketed* (I'm not being merely cynical here). > Neither Husserl > nor anyone can say what Science is unless it is to say what scientists > actually do. Scientists define Science. Any one can say what they > believe Science *should* do. And that is generally > uninteresting because > the fact of the matter is that scientists would like to do > everything--they are unfortunately constrained by reality. Ah! But let us conduct a thought experiment: Let us assume a scientist could do everything (s)he wanted to. They could still noit do anything they couled not *imagine*. *Therefore* scientists need to learn the message of Husserl et al. > > >and that a fully mature science would have > >as its "object" not only the universe of objects but > >also the event of "having [whatever] object" -- experience, > >consciousness-in-the-first-person-living-present, or > >whatever one wishes to call the event an instance of > >which is *you* *reading* *this*. > > But science does have this as its object. But in what "way" does it have it as its object? As an extension of the domain of objects measurable by instruments? Or via a reflective "turn" back upon their own being and doings? > Give it another > thousand years > and it may succeed--and even that, only if it is given the freedom you > wish to deny it. > > Ed Remler Husserl wrote in the 1930s (you can find lots of other figures in the history of thought to substitute, if you're tired of hearing this one name...). I'm not interested in denying scientists freedom to pursue their studies in the directions their studies take them. I *am* interested in their seeing a wider range of things to possibly study. For, as Susanne Langer (among others...) has said: The key issue is not the answers you find to your questions, but the questions you ask, which determine the limits of your possible experience. Other than chance encounters, we can only encounter in reality what we have previously encountered in fantasy. What do your think? Best wishes! \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 13:45:56 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ted Winslow Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Ian: You've not answered my question. Is the explanation that evolutionary psychology provides for the antagonism to evolutionary psychology (i.e. an explanation that treats the antagonism as emanating from a "collection of Darwinian algorithms") consistent with describing the antagonism as "almost entirely emotional and political" and connecting it with "sociopolitical undercurrents"? Ted Winslow Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW@YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. North York, Ont. CANADA M3J 1P3 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 12:15:16 PDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Edward Remler Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) Content-Type: text/plain >> Brad Mccormick wrote: >> >> With so much oppression in the world, I find it >> >> curious that so many persons in our so-called "society" >> >> work so hard to diminish not just the images they have >> >> of others ("students", "workers", "mental patients", >> >> etc.), >> >> apropos my point about the sociopolitical and emotional basis >> of so much >> of the animus against Evolutionary Psychology. This response >> illustrates >> that point beautifully. The Church also had good moral (as well as >> intellectual) concerns underlying their order to Galileo to stop >> publicizing his work as *the truth* (they did not require him to cease >> his work or to teach it as hypothesis, > >Is this altogether true? My understanding is that, at first, >they said G. could teach heliocentrism as a mathematical >speculation or instrument for computation, but that later he >was even forbidden to do *this*. I am farily well read on this subject but certainly no expert. The literature on the trial is supposedly the largest of any topic in the history of science. Since Galileo was finally put under house arrest, it was not posible for him to teach at all. Perhaps this is what you are referring to. In any case, whether or not the Church became less tolerant as their patience with him wore away is not apropos. ..... This is such an old question, and one so worked >> over--that we >> must rework it yet again is really depressing. > >I'm not sure what you're referring to here??? If the Church had not thought Galileo's work undermined the basis for their understanding of Christian morality, they would not have brought him before the Inquisition. The two Popes involved, and Cardinal Bellarmine, were educated, serious men with serious concerns. I say this to distinguish them from a large rabble (intellectually speaking) who always latches on in these cases for a variety of other reasons. I credit those who oppose Evolutionary Psychology today with analogous serious moral concerns. You talk about when heliocentrism was "proven" but that is not the point. If a reasonable person feels a theory is proven, then that person will have little problem with it. That person will somehow accomodate just as the Church has accomodated to heliocentrism. So I am not talking about people who consciously avoid what they consider to be the proven truth. The point about the trial of Galileo, and about the controversy we are discussing today, is the attitude to be taken by those who do not consider the case proven. Normally, we allow scientists to push their version of truth before proven, understanding that controversy is part of the process of getting at the truth. But if some of them, or their followers, use such theories immorally, should the moral ones subject the immoral ones to what is, in effect, a modern Inquisition. The answer to this question is the one I had thought had been thoroughly worked over and agreed upon. But I am wrong. >> ----------- >> >> My response to this is that Science is as Science does. > >Ditto Bill Clinton, Ken Starr, Adolf Hitler, and every thing and >living being, too. I guess the "net" is that better ideas can >only have force in the real world if they can be successfully >*marketed* (I'm not being merely cynical here) I am not sure what this means. If you are one of those who consider that science is just a matter of marketing, then my experience is that I cannot communicate with you. We are truly in different worlds. ... > Other than chance encounters, > we can only encounter in reality > what we have previously encountered in fantasy. > >What do your think? > What I think is that I agree with this but that it is irrelevant to the essential point of this discussion. Ed Remler ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 20:30:35 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ted Winslow wrote: You've not answered my question. Is the explanation that evolutionary psychology provides for the antagonism to evolutionary psychology (i.e. an explanation that treats the antagonism as emanating from a "collection of Darwinian algorithms") consistent with describing the antagonism as "almost entirely emotional and political" and connecting it with "sociopolitical undercurrents"? ____ REPLY: It's true that I've not answered your question, and that was deliberate as I don't want to assume that the phenomena you've mentioned ("antagonism" and "virulent antipathy" toward evolutionary psychology or anything else) do fall within the domain of evolutionary psychology, and I also thought you were asking about these emotions in general, since this is the only type of question that can be answered within the framework of evolutionary psychology. These emotions could exist as a result of natural selection, if they're manifestations of "affect programs" and if they meet the criteria I outlined, or they could be evolutionary byproducts, or exaptations, or the result of socialization and associative learning. Generally speaking multiple lines of enquiry need to converge on a common perspective in order to identify a modular system, and enquiries into these things usually draw on psychological and neuropsychological data, developmental studies, anthropological work, neurological studies of double dissociations, and so on. However, even if there are evolved "affective mechanisms" this doesn't provide any insight into any individual's behaviour or response to a particular phenomena, since individuals differ in both their biological characteristics and learning environment. So I suppose the answer could be "yes, an explanation of these emotions, drawing on evolutionary psychology, could be consistent with describing the antagonism as "almost entirely emotional and political" and connecting it with "sociopolitical undercurrents". But this is all getting far too convoluted and hypothetical for me. Best wishes Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 20:50:08 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Brad McCormick, Ed.D wrote: The problem is at least as old as Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_: there are objects of consciousness (or whatever Pomo-ers will tolerate that the event of awareness of [whatever] be called, *and* there is consciousness itself, which is the consciousness *of* its objects. ____ REPLY: This phenomological level of experience is individual and unique, but its existence is not incompatible with the thesis that the capacity for phenomenal consciousness is dependent on a dedicated neural architecture. This neural architecture may or may not be modular, and phenomenal consciousness may or may not be adaptive. The philosopher, Peter Carruthers believes it to be an exaptation. Since adherents of evolutionary psychology generally don't subscribe to eliminative materialism it does not have any anitpathy to phenomenology or hermeneutics and as far as I can see the two approaches are quite compatible. My appreciation of these philosophical issues is far from subtle but I think I agree with you that this view of evolved modular systems does not "subsume transcendental ("critical") philosophy: Kant, Husserl, et al." But I don't agree that hermeneutics subsumes science. Best wishes Ian ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 19:25:03 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Elliott Sober on Evolutionary Psychology (mind vs organ) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Edward Remler wrote: [snip] > If the Church had not thought Galileo's work undermined the basis for > their understanding of Christian morality, they would not have brought > him before the Inquisition. The two Popes involved, and Cardinal > Bellarmine, were educated, serious men with serious concerns. [snip] I feel Bertold Brecht eloquently addressed this issue in his play _Galileo_, where he says that an implication of the heliocentric cosmological theory is that is the sun and planets do not revolve around an immovable earth, perhaps the peasants (etc.) need not immutably revolve around an immutable feudal hierarchy. Heady stuff! Which leads to something I'm not sure exactly how to say, but I'll do my best: "Educated, serious men with serious concerns" often are engaged in the preservation of an iniquitous socio-economic status-quo the import of which far outweighs -- in their esteemed judgment -- such ephenera as "truth" (see above). I believe the proper appelation of this is: "The treason of the clerks", but, of course, they think differently. This is, in my opinion, one of the most serious issues in the history of the history of ideas, etc. Eppur si move (I also note, alas, that, for the past few days, the Museum of Technology in Florence, which has provided much Gailieo material, including his abjuration http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/museo/a/eabiura.html has been: Forbidden You don't have permission to access /museo/a/eabiura.html on this server. I would ask others to try the above link and let me know if *they* can get through, so that, if they can and I can't, I can report the problem to my Internet Servies Provider. Thank you.) \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 19:48:34 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: New, extensive web site on human nature Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Announcing a new web site, with extensive archives and other resources: Human-Nature.com. http://www.human-nature.com/ It has been set up with the broad aim of bringing into communication the variety of approaches to the understanding of human nature which have a regrettable tendency to be less in touch with one another than they might. The editors welcome writings and discussions on history, philosophy and social studies in the human sciences; Darwinian scholarship; Darwinian psychology, sociobiology and debates about them; cognitive psychology; modularity; narrative approaches; hermeneutics; verstehen; biography and autobiography; behavioural genetics; psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches and so on. This list of topics and disciplines is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive. Our main aim is both to act as host to original work and to seek to create an enabling space, a forum for constructive (including constructively critical) discussion and critiques of the terms of reference and assumptions of various approaches to the understanding of people as individuals, in groups, in institutions, in societies and as political and ideological beings. We are affiliated with a number of existing email forums and web sites and will add others as we think it appropriate to do so. We also provide a number of guides to internet resources, bibliographies and reading lists. We will add to these on an ongoing basis and welcome contributions and suggestions for links. ARCHIVES: The human-nature.com web site and others associated with it contain extensive archives of classical papers (e.g., by Barbara Heyl and David Ingleby) and most, and, in some cases, nearly all, of the writings of certain writers on human nature, group relations and society, e.g., David Armstrong, W. Gordon Lawrence, Toma Tomov, Robert M. Young, including a number of complete books, e.,g., by some of the above and by Em Farrell on eating disorders, David Clark on the story of a mental hospital. Others will be added in due course. REVIEWS OF DISCIPLINES & ISSUES: We are particularly interested in receiving overviews of recent work in disciplines relevant to the understanding of human nature, e.g., particular human sciences, narrative psychology, including historical and philosophical approaches. BOOK REVIEWS: Future: We invite authors and publishers to send us books at an early stage so that we can get them reviewed so as to appear on the web site at or very near the date of publication. Manuscripts or proofs can be sent (by post), providing that a copy of the published work is also sent when it is available. Present: People wishing to offer reviews of recently-published works are welcome to propose ideas or to submit reviews (as attachments, preferably in RTF - Rich Text Format). Past: We are also open to essays about books which have been published at any time, about which contributors to the site may wish to write an essay, critique or appreciation. Books may be sent by post to Human-Nature.Com, 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ, England. NEW ARTICLES at the Science-as-Culture site: 'Revisiting Basic Colour Terms' by Barbara Saunders (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven), an impressive historical and ideological analysis of theories of colour perception: http://www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/saunders.html Author's summary: 'In this paper a historiography of colour science and a re-reading of W. R. Rivers and E. H. Lenneberg casts new light on Berlin & Kay's Basic Color Terms. Unacknowledged commitments are presented, as too, are hints about links to a larger research programme, namely, Evolutionary Psychology. Throughout I claim that Berlin and Kay endow their ambitious project with an aura of strong prima facie evidence by fiat of colour science. Colour science in the relevant sense is not however an empirical but an a priori science, commitment to which fatally compromises Berlin and Kay's claims.' Comments welcome to pop00127@lambik.cc.kuleuven.ac.be 'The place of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits (CAETS) in the history of British social anthropology' by Keith Hart (Cambridge University) http://www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/hart.html Author's summary: 'This lecture, introducing a conference on anthropology and psychology to mark the centenary of the Torres Straits expedition, seeks to place the work of the expedition's anthropologists within the history of the British discipline. The expedition symbolised a turn from Victorian armchair evolutionism to 20th century ethnography with its emphasis on intensive fieldwork. The founders of modern British social anthropology, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, represented themselves as the authors of a "functionalist revolution" with few, if any antecedents. This has tended to obscure the intellectual contribution of W.H.R. Rivers, hero of Pat Barker's recent trilogy of novels, who first sought to maintain anthropology and psychology as separate disciplines, but then attempted a reflexive synthesis shortly before his premature death in 1922. The lecture suggests that British social anthropology once provided an allegorical commentary on a world organised by nation-states. If we wish to make sense of self and society in the post-national phase of human history, the example of the Torres Straits expedition and especially of Rivers deserves our serious attention.' Comments welcome: Keith Hart To propose writings or other projects for the web site, write to robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 09:16:19 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Evolutionary Psychology Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Ed Remler writes: <> This assumes that the animus against evolutionary psychology is purely emotional, and that evolutionary psychology is all, itself, objective science. But there is also an emotional and political force behind much of the support of evolutionary psychology in its Dawkinsian, genic selectionist version, different from Sober's group selectionist version. There are also geniunely scientific criticisms of mainstream Dawkins-style evol. psych. presented by Lewontin, Gould, Hubbard and many others. If one means by evolutionary psychology merely the evolutionary study of the development of the human mind and culture, then Remler is correct (and Gould, for instance has no animus against that.) But if one means by evolutionary psychology, the Dawkinsian version (I almost wrote Dickensian version) concerned with genes analogized to Chicago gangsters, etc., or E. O. Wilson's and others' such as about the inability of women, Mexican-Americans, etc. to succeed in science, law, and politics, then the motivations of those favoring evolutionary psychology are just as emotional and political and those of the opponents. It is a kind of "Machievelliansim for the little man," a pose of toughness and bigotry masquerading as objective science. If Prof. Remler, who is used to real science, like physics, were to look at the literature of evolutionary psychology, he would find a great deal of shoddy data and reasoning, as well as the amazing pose of tough-mindedness and sneering at those who believe in equality. Even Steve Pinker, certainly relatively liberal and mainstream, ridicules those who envisage a world without God or without war (quoting John Lennon's "Imagine" and then treating is as "treacle." The Texas center for Evolutionary Psychology of Human Differences (which incorporates older studies of race differences by Laughlin, Horn and others based on dubitable data) is very politically motivated (although they incorporate one genuine evolutionary psychologist, Buss, into their faculty for respectability. Sober and D. S. Wilson are attempting to capture the name "evolutionary psych." for their own, admirable and carefully thought out group-selectionist program of explanation. Good luck to them in their project, though I doubt they will succeed. But the mainstream of what is called evolutionary psychology is based on the selfish gene model and on genic selectionism, which Sober has logically criticized in an earlier paper with Lewontin. The mainstream does ally itself with a number of political positions, and like Dawkins and Dennett, redbaits their opponents such as Steve Gould on ocassion. Evolutionary psychologists love to pose as new Galileos, cowering persecuted by brutal humanists. In fact they seem to get grants and university positions quite succesfully and in fact dominate the popular media discussions of human nature, where hand-waving appeals to genes play the role that appeals to astrology play in (supposedly) less educated circles. The evol. psychs. themselves engage in a bit of politicing, as when the Colorado biology faculty threatened to boycott Lewontin when he had been invited to speak there (and one cannot question his competance in evolutionary biology). Prof. Remler ought to look at the evolutionary psychology of rape for examples of his detatched and objective science of these new Galileos. For instance Dan Dennett defends talk about a homosexual rapist spiney headed worm. In fact the worm is not engaged in rape and is not homosexual. It places a plug in the sperm duct of a competing male to prevent it from mating. Also see David Jantzen ("one of America's most creative ecologists" and geniunely a smart ecologist and conservationist) for his discussion of rape in plants, in which language is stretched beyond its meaning to make an implicit political point. The "rapist" is a male plant which happens to have a chemical on its pollen which counteracts another chemical on the female plant's ova that discourage fertilization. Similarly with fish rape, where the "rapist" fish never gets within yards of the victim, because the sperm and eggs are floating in the water external to their bodily sources. Similarly, one ought to look at Bouchard's twin studies, now widely praised, both by the popular media and by genetic engineers, because they purport to show 80% heritability of numerous traits such as political conservatism. This heroic Galileo had his grant applications refused by NIH and NSF for ten years, and went to the Pioneer Fund, which has numerous ties to segregationist, anti-immigrant, and even Klan, neo-Nazi and other such folks (even Remler would probably grant this is "pollitical" to some slight degree.) Pioneer is largely responsible for the financing of Jensen, Shockley, and many of the neo-fascist contributors to "Mankind Qauarterly" who supplied "data" for the "Bell Curve." One fellow associated with the Pioneer Fund was so far right, that the World Anti-Communist League expelled him for his attempts to bring old European Nazis into the organization. (Might this not be just a tad political?) Bouchard himself refuses to show his crucial data on the separateness of his supposedly separately reared twins to critics. He promised a book-length study a decade ago which would give this background. It never appeared. Meanwhile many scientists in and outside of the field have been convinced by his popular media presentations and coincidence anecdotes. Evolutionary psychologists such as Steve Pinker use these anecdotes as if they are lawful scientific data. Bouchard even gave the introduction to a segment on telepathic communication between twins on the TV show "Unvolved Mysteries" while he misled the NBC-TV reporter Robert Bazell about the publication status of his own work. Bouchard successfully circumvented the peer review process through publishing in the popular media. Please look at the actual literature of mainstream evolutionary psychology and its used in the popular media (which, no matter how vulgar and oversimplified for political purposes , the major figures in the mainstream of the field never criticize). To criticize the genic selectionist, Machievellian evoltutionary psychology, whose proponents far from being persecuted Galileo's bask in vulgarized conservative coverage in the popular media, is not to reject the project of an evolutionary account of human beings, a project that Sober and D. S. Wilson (not to be confused with E. O. Wilson) are pursuing. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 16:29:50 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: Evolutionary Psychology MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Val Dusek wrote: This assumes that the animus against evolutionary psychology is purely emotional, and that evolutionary psychology is all, itself, objective science. ___ REPLY: Animus is by definition purely emotional and, since there is no good reason why we should care about scientific knowledge at all, it is true to say that the pursuit of knowledge is value-laden - we just do seem to think that knowledge is good, no matter where it leads us. However, it's hardly objective to conclude that a discipline isn't objective just because a cursory examination of some peripheral texts suggests that its tenets might contradict left-wing political prejudices. _________________ Dusek continues: But there is also an emotional and political force behind much of the support of evolutionary psychology in its Dawkinsian, genic selectionist version, different from Sober's group selectionist version. There are also geniunely scientific criticisms of mainstream Dawkins-style evol. psych. presented by Lewontin, Gould, Hubbard and many others. ___________ REPLY: This is just wrong. Evolutionary psychologists don't particularly draw on the works of Dawkins, except inasmuch as his work represents mainstream biological thinking. You could equally well say that the discipline draws on Gould's works, since everyone has very much taken to heart his criticism of rapant adaptationism. ___________ Dusek continues: If one means by evolutionary psychology merely the evolutionary study of the development of the human mind and culture, then Remler is correct (and Gould, for instance has no animus against that.) But if one means by evolutionary psychology, the Dawkinsian version (I almost wrote Dickensian version) concerned with genes analogized to Chicago gangsters, etc., or E. O. Wilson's and others' such as about the inability of women, Mexican-Americans, etc. to succeed in science, law, and politics, then the motivations of those favoring evolutionary psychology are just as emotional and political and those of the opponents. It is a kind of "Machievelliansim for the little man," a pose of toughness and bigotry masquerading as objective science. _____ REPLY: Neither Dawkins nor Wilson are connected with modern evolutionary psychology, a discipline that was essentially refounded by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby - two people you don't seem to have heard of. Evolutionary psychology has two central theses, the massive modularity hypothesis and the adaptation hypothesis. The first is the characterisation of the mind as a set of domain-specific information processors, and the second is that claim that these modules are adaptations, not to the current environment, but to what John Bowlby called the EEA - the environment of evolutionary adaptation, that is primarily to the Plesitocene period. Since it's obvious that the mind also incorporates non-proprietary stores of information, features that are exaptations, non-modular systems, and mechanisms that philosopher Steve Stich calls "situated Kluges" I don't think that Gould has any general quarrel with the basic tenets of evolutionary psychology, though of course he is bound to have reservations as to whether any particular system has been selected for. Both he and Chomsky, for example, do not believe that universal grammar has been selected for but has arisen simply because of an increase in the processing power of the brain - a completely untenable position in my view. As for Dawkins and the "selfish gene" David Hull has pointed out that the book could justifiably have been called "The Altruistic Organism" since it is primarily about the evolution of cooperation through mechanisms such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Most of the criticisms of this work are based on Dawkins' choice of terminology and analogy, and I suspect that most people mistakenly think that "genic selectionism" is about the genetic basis of selfishness, rather than the genetic basis of cooperation. __________________ Dusek continues If Prof. Remler, who is used to real science, like physics, were to look at the literature of evolutionary psychology, he would find a great deal of shoddy data and reasoning, as well as the amazing pose of tough-mindedness and sneering at those who believe in equality. ___ REPLY: I'd like to see some evidence that you're familiar with the literature of evolutionary psychology, since your essay "Sociobiology Sanitized' displays none. You quote a popular work by a journalist I haven't heard of, and most of your other references are to Wilson and Dawkins, who don't work in the field. As for shoddy data, you mention "Daniel Kosman, editor of Science magazine, could claim authoritatively that the nature-nurture controversy was over and that nature won" The editor's name is Koshland. The editorial meant was published March 20, 1987, not 1984. Koshland did not say what you claim. His words were: 'The debate on nature and nurture in regard to behavior is basically over. Both are involved and we are going to have to live with that complexity to make our society more humane for the individual and more civilized for the body politic." Koshland also wrote in the same editorial: 'This picture [of nature/nurture interaction] may seem obvious to a scientist, but our judges, journalists, legislators, and philosophers have been slow to learn this lesson' (thanks to Hiram Caton for this reference). _____________________ Dusek continues: Even Steve Pinker, certainly relatively liberal and mainstream, ridicules those who envisage a world without God or without war (quoting John Lennon's "Imagine" and then treating is as "treacle." ___ REPLY: Even if this picture of Pinker's work is true I think you would have to say that his opinions have nothing to do with evolutionary psycholgoy as such. __________________ Dusek continues: Sober and D. S. Wilson are attempting to capture the name "evolutionary psych." for their own, admirable and carefully thought out group-selectionist program of explanation. Good luck to them in their project, though I doubt they will succeed. But the mainstream of what is called evolutionary psychology is based on the selfish gene model and on genic selectionism, which Sober has logically criticized in an earlier paper with Lewontin. The mainstream does ally itself with a number of political positions, and like Dawkins and Dennett, redbaits their opponents such as Steve Gould on ocassion. ____ REPLY: You are grouping together people on the basis of your own belief that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are identical. This is begging the question. Much of the debate between Gould, Dawkins, Sober, Wilson, Maynard-Smith et al is over general questions in evolutionary theory which may well depend more on matters of definition than of substance. Maynard-Smith, in his review of Sober and Wilson's book , agrees with much of their analysis, but fails to see a case for using the term "group selection". Similarly, the debate between Gould and Dawkins on "punctuated equilibrium" versus "gradualism" ("creeps" versus "jerks") may depend more on the definition of these terms than on the theoretical weight given to each process. That they both occur seems obvious. These debates don't affect the research program of evolutionary psychology as such. _________________________ Dusek continues: Evolutionary psychologists love to pose as new Galileos, cowering persecuted by brutal humanists. In fact they seem to get grants and university positions quite succesfully and in fact dominate the popular media discussions of human nature, where hand-waving appeals to genes play the role that appeals to astrology play in (supposedly) less educated circles. ___ REPLY: Evolutionary psychologists have a great deal in common with humanists, since they both oppose eliminative materialism, and they both subscribe to the importance of psychology as an irreducible level of explanation. The work of anthropologist Dan Sperber shows how evolutionary psychology is compatible with hermenutics, and the work of Pascal Boyer on the cognitive foundations of religious belief demonstrates how this level of explanation supplements our knowledge of human cognitive functioning with eliminating or minimizing the role of cultural influences. You are driving wedges between disciplines on the basis of your own faulty understanding of the subject. _______________ Dusek continues: The evol. psychs themselves engage in a bit of politicing, as when the Colorado biology faculty threatened to boycott Lewontin when he had been invited to speak there (and one cannot question his competance in evolutionary biology). _____ REPLY: What does this have to do with evolutionary psychology? ______________ Dusek continues: Prof. Remler ought to look at the evolutionary psychology of rape for examples of his detatched and objective science of these new Galileos. For instance Dan Dennett defends talk about a homosexual rapist spiney headed worm. In fact the worm is not engaged in rape and is not homosexual. It places a plug in the sperm duct of a competing male to prevent it from mating. Also see David Jantzen ("one of America's most creative ecologists" and geniunely a smart ecologist and conservationist) for his discussion of rape in plants, in which language is stretched beyond its meaning to make an implicit political point. The "rapist" is a male plant which happens to have a chemical on its pollen which counteracts another chemical on the female plant's ova that discourage fertilization. Similarly with fish rape, where the "rapist" fish never gets within yards of the victim, because the sperm and eggs are floating in the water external to their bodily sources. __________ REPLY: Are the evil consequences and intentions supposed to be apparent here? Are the facts different if the terminology is rephrased? Is the oppression inflicted by scientific terminology a serious concern? I just don't understand the thrust of your argument at all. __ Dusek continues: Similarly, one ought to look at Bouchard's twin studies, now widely praised, both by the popular media and by genetic engineers, because they purport to show 80% heritability of numerous traits such as political conservatism. This heroic Galileo had his grant applications refused by NIH and NSF for ten years, and went to the Pioneer Fund, which has numerous ties to segregationist, anti-immigrant, and even Klan, neo-Nazi and other such folks (even Remler would probably grant this is "pollitical" to some slight degree.) Pioneer is largely responsible for the financing of Jensen, Shockley, and many of the neo-fascist contributors to "Mankind Qauarterly" who supplied "data" for the "Bell Curve." One fellow associated with the Pioneer Fund was so far right, that the World Anti-Communist League expelled him for his attempts to ring old European Nazis into the organization. (Might this not be just a tad olitical?) ____ REPLY: It's just as easy to justify racism on cultural relativist grounds. Those who believe perception is structured by language or that emotions are culturally constucted must logically believe that people of other cultures are literally incapable of perceiving the world as we do or of responding to it as we do - this makes them "alien" in a way that evolutionary psychology never could. Racist views are particular to racists not to any particualr discipline, and racists will draw on anything they think will support their prejudices. Once again you don't present any information relevant to evolutionary psychology and its supposed prejudices. _____________ Dusek continues: Bouchard himself refuses to show his crucial data on the separateness of his supposedly separately reared twins to critics. He promised a book-length study a decade ago which would give this background. It never appeared. Meanwhile many scientists in and outside of the field have been convinced by his popular media presentations and coincidence anecdotes. Evolutionary psychologists such as Steve Pinker use these anecdotes as if they are lawful scientific data. Bouchard even gave the introduction to a segment on telepathic communication between twins on the TV show "Unvolved Mysteries" while he misled the NBC-TV reporter Robert Bazell about the publication status of his own work. Bouchard successfully circumvented the peer review process through publishing in the popular media. _____ REPLY: As far as I can tell from the bibliography it is to Bouchard's two peer-reviewed articles in Science that Pinker refers in "How the Mind Works". Bouchard's work can stand or fall on its own merits since its either true or false irrespective of his motivation. It's also obvious that twin studies are valuable tools in genetic research regardless of whether any particular study is of any value. _____________ To criticize the genic selectionist, Machievellian evoltutionary psychology, whose proponents far from being persecuted Galileo's bask in vulgarized conservative coverage in the popular media, is not to reject the project of an evolutionary account of human beings, a project that Sober and D. S. Wilson (not to be confused with E. O. Wilson) are pursuing. _______________ Here is Edward O. Wilson's comment from the back of Sober and Wilson's new book "Unto Others" "Unto Others is an important, original, and well-written book. It contains the definitive contemporary statement on higher-level selection and the evolutionary origin of co-operation." Now that they've been touched by the hand of Satan you may want to cast them into the wilderness. Regards Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 09:11:47 PDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Edward Remler Subject: Re: Evolutionary Psychology Content-Type: text/plain Val Dusek- Thank you for your note. I am obviously not as well versed in this field as you and I truly appreciate you information. My limited experience in the literature of the current debate is basically as follows. I have read major portions of E. O. Wilson's "Sociobiology" (a condensed version but still thick) and found in it nothing but what seemed to me to be quite reasonable and enlightening. Obviously he seems to have said other kinds of things elsewhere (or I have missed them in his book). The question is whether they are in scientific literature. Unless science journals in biology are vastly inferior to those in physics with respect to editorial policy, it seems to me unlikely. I also dimly remember reading Dawkin's book long ago. I think I skimmed it because it seemed to me to be merely a flashy popularization. I certainly had thought myself of the idea of the living creature as the tool of the DNA prior to reading the book. I do not think that this is such a subtle an idea or so difficult to think of. I am sure that it has occurred to very very many people independently. Since the book was merely a popularization I did not take it that seriously and am surprised that scientists get worked up over it. Popular books on physics are half-truths (necessarily) and physicists don't get worked up over that. Of course, I realize that typically the implications of biology for public policy are more direct than those of physics , but that is an issue separate from scientific truth (something which I believe exists). When I make the comparison with Galileo it is with respect to treatment within the scientific/academic community, and I think that where the comparison properly belongs. This brings me to a formative incident I had here at The College of William and Mary where I teach in the Physics Department. Years ago I was on a college-wide committe to invite speakers to an interdisciplinary forum. I had recently heard of sociobiology and thought that it would be great to invite Wilson. I was unaware of any controversy surrounding him. I was practically accused of being a Nazi and the suggestion was never seriously considered. If I had had the opportunity to hear him and he had said something outrageous, I would have risen in the audience and questioned him. The students and I missed out on a potentially very educational experience. My experience is, of course, not uncommon in the academic community and that is the community ultimately determining careers for people who may wish to develop evolutionary psychology. That is what I was responding to in Sober's talk. I share your concerns when it comes to public policy, statements to the press, and so on. In fact, although I have belonged to the ACLU forever, I often disagree with their views on free speech. I do not believe racist speech should be unbridled by law. But anti-racism cannot and need not interfere with real science. Part of the problem seems to be that a preponderance of people in academia do not believe such a thing as real science exists. They believe all is politics. It is a belief that not even the most rabid anti-Galilean priest held to. That--ye olde science wars--may be the root of the problem I am concerned with. I do not think we have a fundamental disgreement, only somewhat different experiences and therefore sensitivities. Thanks again for your remarks, and best wishes, Ed Remler ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 12:22:12 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Evolutionary biology MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I think Ian Pitchford's reply to Val Dusek pretty much covered the ground. Two minot points, however. 1) The demonization of E.O. Wilson strikes me as unfair, as well as absurd. In the frenzy of the '70's, all sorts of claims were made about the incipient "fascism" of "Sociobiolgy" (which claims, I'm ashamed to say, I took seriouslY0. If, at the time, anyone was guilty of "fascism", it was the people who shouted Wilson down--including, unfortunately, Lewontin and Gould, in their genteel way. The sociobioloby program is a broad and general philosophical notion, not a concrete research program, let alone a body of confirmed results. As Ian points out, evolutionary psychology is a much narrower and much more well-defined research program (although it is and will remain for some time necessarily speculative). I do think, however, that it's a little unfair to Wilson not to note that he is, in some sense, the godfather (no political inferences, via, Mario Puzo and Andrew Ross, please!) of evolutionary psychology. As I recall, for some workers, the term "evolutionary psychology" was insisted upon--in part--specifically because of the political danger of being tagged a "sociobiologist." Apparently, if one takes Sober seriously (and I do), that terminological ploy hasn't been entirely successful. There is still a large body of dogma that insists--in line with a doctrinal tradition that extends from Franz Boas to Judith Butler--on the infintite plasticity of human nature. And in the current academic climate, it's a dogma that remains powerful enough to make trouble for professional scientists and scholars. In other words, the phenomenon traced by Carl Degler a few years ago in "In Search of Human Nature" is still very much with us. I don't quarrel with Dusek's assertion that the "popular" literature is often saturated with heavily vulgarised and simpleminded versions of ethological biologism and hereditarinism. But academic life has its own deeply embedded vulgar prejudices. As Pitchford's explicit and documented rebuttal demonstrates, Dusek may have absorbed these prejudices rather too unquestioningly. You can't refute any particular claim of evolutionary psychlogy, or its methodological assumptions, on the basis of what the Pioneer Fund might or might not fund, any more than you can confirm them on the basis of a 500-word snippet in "Time" or "Newsweek." Norm Levitt ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 08:35:14 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Evol Psych. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Ian writes: <> I have been finishing a couple of papers and arranging travel and hustling university money to visit the Alhambra in Spain, as well as taking care of my niece and taking my mother to the hospital so I didn't reply to Caton yet. True I said Kosman instead of Koshland (so much for trying to work with a laptop in a hotel without my references). Thanks to you and Caton for correction. I flew back from Greece with one "Cosmic" Kosman, an Aristotle scholar (showing my pre-Darwinian primitivism) and because of all the chain- smoking and stringed instrument playing and fist fighting of the passengers in the row behind me on the overnight flight, my brain short-circuited in messing up the spelling. As for the rest of the discussion of his editorial, see Diane Paul, "the Nature Nurture Controversy: Buried Alive" in Science for the People, 1987 (maybe put it on exciting your Human nature website). One irony of Koshland's editorial is that he started off from the "proof" of the location of the gene for bipolar disorder, which turned out a few months later to be an error. One member of the large Amish family tree came down belatedly with bipolar and this thew off all the lod scores (showing how sensitive the tests are to a single node in tree). Koshland claims to be an interactionist, but in another editorial he starts off from an unfortunate Iranian immigrant who was mentallly disturbed and who demanded that the police chief of Oakland pull down his pants on TV. From this single incident Koshland goes on to advocate a massive program of genetic engineering to cure crime, poverty and homelessness. Koshland claims that schools, prisons, housing, and other social programs are "mere bandaids" and that the main causes of homelessness are genetic (perhaps the 1900 "seafaring gene" ?) :-) This hardly sounds like the balanced view he pretends to. Ian's REPLY: As far as I can tell from the bibliography it is to Bouchard's two peer-reviewed articles in Science that Pinker refers in "How the Mind Works". Counterreply: But in his earlier 1995 "The Language Instinct" he makes much of Bouchard's "eerie" annecdotes. Dusek continues: The evol. psychs themselves engage in a bit of politicing, as when the Colorado biology faculty threatened to boycott Lewontin when he had been invited to speak there (and one cannot question his competance in evolutionary biology). _____ REPLY: What does this have to do with evolutionarypsychology? The point is that the debate betwee evol. psych. or the earlier SOB (sociobiology) and its opponents is usually understood as one between objective scientists and emotional, politically biases leftists. I suggest that it is between emotional, politically biased rightists and emotional, politically biases leftists. But this is understandable, as the issues are closer to us and to social policy and gender roles than are studies of black holes or strings. REPLY: You are grouping together people on the basis of your own belief that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are identical. This is begging the question. Much of the debate between Gould, Dawkins, Sober, Wilson, Maynard- Smith et al is over general questions in evolutionary theory which may well depend more on matters of definition than of substance. I think it a mistake to reduce the Gould-Dawkins debate to one over "rates" as Dawkins attempts to. But that's a long story. Also, what SOB and mainstream evol. psych. share is their commitment to genic selectionism. Despite the fact that Dawkins is supposed to be popularizer, I have been surprised to what extent working biologists use him and his way of thinking, and even sometimes misattribute kin-selection to him rather than Hamilton et al. Thanks for the many and energetic replies, but this counter-reply to a few of them will have to do for now. Cheers, Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 09:27:43 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Evol (Evil?) Psychology MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Val Dusek wrote: Counterreply: But in his earlier 1995 "The Language Instinct" he makes much of Bouchard's "eerie" annecdotes. ___ REPLY: In "The Language Instinct" Pinker cites only the same co-authored peer-reviewed paper in Science referred to in "How the Mind Works". I append a brief note from Pinker about Bouchard's work. David Sloan Wilson is in Austria at the moment and unable to comment, but is more interested in substantive claims about the issues than in "unsupported accusations about motives." I have some detailed comments to make about a number of issues you raise in "Sociobiology Sanitized" but would like to make them in a more considered, formal response to the piece, since a number of those you mention have been kind enough to supply the relevant references. Derek Freeman, whose work is misrepresented in the article, is working on a new book "The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead : An Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Researches" (due for December publication) based on the Mead papers at the Library of Congress and has reconstructed on a daily basis just what research she conducted (thanks again to Hiram Caton for this information). I accept that your criticisms are inspired by noble motives but would urge you to consider that your characterization of the discipline of evolutionary psychology is wrong. The following description, from doyens of the discipline Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, would be endorsed by most of the small band working in it: "At present, crossing such [disciplinary] boundaries is often met with xenophobia, packaged in the form of such familiar accusations as "intellectual imperialism" or "reductionism." But by calling for for conceptual integration in the behavioral and social sciences we are neither calling for reductionism nor for the conquest and assimilation of one field by another. Theories of selection pressures are not theories of psychology; they are theories about the causal forces that produced our psychology. And theories about psychology are not theories of culture; they are theories about some of the mechanisms that shape cultural forms. In fact, not only do the principles of one field not reduce to those of another, but by tracing the relationships between fields, additional principles often appear." (The Adapted Mind, p.12) The standard picture of biological evolution endorsed by Dawkins, Gould, Wilson, and the others you mistakenly place in opposing camps does not result in a view of psychology that is reductive, eliminativist, or antagonistic to hermeneutics, cultural theory or philosophy. Indeed many of the principal exponents of the modular view of the mind are individuals working in philosophy of mind and biology such as Gabriel Segal, Peter Carruthers, Steve Stich, and Jerry Fodor, to name just a few. Regards Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK _______________ From: Steve Pinker To: Ian Pitchford Date: Monday, August 17, 1998 5:45 PM Subject: Evolutionary Psychology Dear Ian, As you guessed, I can't reply to all the commentary on How the Mind Works, because there has been so much of it -- the work of Bouchard and other behavioral geneticists has been published in countless refereed articles, and has been replicated with many techniques in half-a-dozen countries. Sincerely, Steve Pinker ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 02:51:03 PDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Edward Remler Subject: Re: Evol (Evil?) Psychology Content-Type: text/plain Ian Pitchford Relayed the following: -- the work of Bouchard and other behavioral geneticists has been >published in countless refereed articles, and has been replicated with many >techniques in half-a-dozen countries. > >Sincerely, >Steve Pinker > Now we are at a point at which something may be learned if Val Dusek explains why his comments on Bouchard leave a (to me) misleading impression of this work. 1) Was he unaware of that Bouchard's work has been replicated? 2) Does he believe that all this work is similarly tainted by ideology? 3) Was it an oversight? 4) Did he purposefully misrepresent the situation for a higher good? 5) Is Pinker misleading? 6) ...? Ed Remler ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 15:13:25 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Bouchard: bibliography MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This [incomplete] bibliography of publications by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. should assist anyone wishing to explore his work or Dusek's claim that "Bouchard successfully circumvented the peer review process through publishing in the popular media." Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK _________________ Arvey, R.D., Bouchard, T.J., Segal, N.L., & Abraham, L.M. (1989). Job satisfaction: Environmental and genetic components. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74(2), 187-192. Arvey, R.D., McCall, B.P., Bouchard, T.J., Taubman, P., & et al. (1994). Genetic influences on job satisfaction and work value. Personality & Individual Differences, 17(1), 21-33. Baker, L.A., Asendorpf, J., Bishop, D., Boomsma, D.I., Bouchard, T.J., Jr., Brand, C.R., Fulker, D.W., Gardner, H., Kinsbourne, M., & et al. (1993). Group report: Intelligence and its inheritance--A diversity of views. In T.J. Bouchard Jr & P. Propping (Eds.), Twins as a tool of behavioral genetics. Life sciences research report, 53. (pp. 85-108). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons. Betsworth, D.G., Bouchard, T.J., Cooper, C.R., Grotevant, H.D., & et al. (1994). Genetic and environmental influences on vocational interests assessed using adoptive and biological families and twins reared apart and together. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 44(3), 263-278. Bouchard, T.J. (1983). Do environmental similarities explain the similarity in intelligence of identical twins reared apart? Intelligence, 7(2), 175-184. Bouchard, T.J., Jr. (1991). A twice-told tale: Twins reared apart. In D. Cicchetti & W.M. Grove (Eds.), Thinking clearly about psychology: Essays in honor of Paul E. Meehl, Vol. 1: Matters of public interest; Vol. 2: Personality and psychopathology. (pp. 188-215). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bouchard, T.J. (1994). Genes, environment, and personality. Science, 264(5166), 1700-1701. Bouchard, T.J., Jr. (1995). Longitudinal studies of personality and intelligenc e: A behavior genetic and evolutionary psychology perspective. In D.H. Saklofske & M. Zeidner (Eds.), International handbook of personality and intelligence. Perspectives on individual differences. (pp. 81-106). New York, NY: Plenum Press. Bouchard, T.J., Arvey, R.D., Keller, L.M., & Segal, N.L. (1992). Genetic influences on job satisfaction: A reply to Cropanzano and James. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(1), 89-93. Bouchard, T.J., Lykken, D.T., McGue, M., Segal, N.L. et al. (1990). Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. Science, 250(4978), 223-228. Bouchard, T.J., Lykken, D.T., McGue, M., Segal, N.L. et al. (1991). "Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart": Response. Science, 252(5003), 191-192. Bouchard, T.J., & McGue, M. (1990). Genetic and rearing environmental influences on adult personality: An analysis of adopted twins reared apart. Special Issue: Biological foundations of personality: Evolution, behavioral genetics, and psychophysiology. Journal of Personality, 58(1), 263-292. Bouchard, T.J., Jr., & Propping, P. (1993). Twins as a tool of behavioral genetics, Life sciences research report, 53. (pp. xvi, 310). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons. Bouchard, T.J., Jr., & Propping, P. (1993). Twins: Nature's twice-told tale. In T.J. Bouchard Jr & P. Propping (Eds.), Twins as a tool of behavioral genetics. Life sciences research report, 53. (pp. 1-15). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons. Bouchard, T.J., & Segal, N.L. (1990). Advanced mathematical reasoning ability: A behavioral genetic perspective. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 13(1), 191-192. Bouchard, T.J., Segal, N.L., & Lykken, D.T. (1990). Genetic and environmental influences on special mental abilities in a sample of twins reared apart. Sixth International Congress on Twin Studies (1989, Rome, Italy). Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae, 39(2), 193-206. Eckert, E.D., Bouchard, T.J., Bohlen, J., & Heston, L.L. (1986). Homosexuality in monozygotic twins reared apart. British Journal of Psychiatry, 148, 421-425. Grove, W.M., Eckert, E.D., Heston, L., Bouchard, T.J., & et al. (1990). Heritability of substance abuse and antisocial behavior: A study of monozygotic twins reared apart. Biological Psychiatry, 27(12), 1293-1304. Hur, Y.-M., & Bouchard, T.J. (1995). Genetic influences on perceptions of childhood family environment: A reared apart twin study. Child Development, 66(2), 330-345. Keller, L.M., Bouchard, T.J., Arvey, R.D., Segal, N.L., & et al. (1992). Work values: Genetic and environmental influences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(1), 79-88. McGue, M., & Bouchard, T.J. (1984). Adjustment of twin data for the effects of age and sex. Behavior Genetics, 14(4), 325-343. McGue, M., & Bouchard, T.J., Jr. (1989). Genetic and environmental determinants of information processing and special mental abilities: A twin analysis. In R. Sternberg, J. (Ed.), Advances in the psychology of human intelligence, Vol. 5. (pp. 7-45). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. McGue, M., Bouchard, T.J., Jr., Iacono, W.G., & Lykken, D.T. (1993). Behavioral genetics of cognitive ability: A life-span perspective. In R. Plomin & G.E. McClearn (Eds.), Nature, nurture & psychology. (pp. 59-76). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. McGue, M., Bouchard, T.J., Lykken, D.T., & Feuer, D. (1984). Information processing abilities in twins reared apart. Intelligence, 8(3), 239-258. Moloney, D.P., Bouchard, T.J., & Segal, N.L. (1991). A genetic and environmental analysis of the vocational interests of monozygotic and dizygotic twins reared apart. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 39(1), 76-109. Resnick, S.M., Berenbaum, S.A., Gottesman, I.I., & Bouchard, T.J. (1986). Early hormonal influences on cognitive functioning in congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Developmental Psychology, 22(2), 191-198. Segal, N.L., Dysken, M.W., Bouchard, T.J., Pedersen, N.L. et al. (1990). Tourette's disorder in a set of reared-apart triplets: Genetic and environmental influences. American Journal of Psychiatry, 147(2), 196-199. Segal, N.L., Grove, W.M., & Bouchard, T.J., Jr. (1991). Psychiatric investigations and findings from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. In M.T. Tsuang, K.S. Kendler, & M.J. Lyons (Eds.), Genetic issues in psychosocial epidemiology. Series in psychosocial epidemiology, Vol. 8. (pp. 247-266). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Segal, N.L., Wilson, S.M., Bouchard, T.J., & Gitlin, D.G. (1995). Comparative grief experiences of bereaved twins and other bereaved relatives. Personality & Individual Differences, 18(4), 511-524. Tellegen, A., Lykken, D.T., Bouchard, T.J., Wilcox, K.J. et al. (1988). Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 54(6), 1031-1039. Waller, N.G., Bouchard, T.J., Lykken, D.T., Tellegen, A., & et al. (1993). Creativity, heritability, familiality: Which word does not belong? Psychological Inquiry, 4(3), 235-237. Waller, N.G., Kojetin, B.A., Bouchard, T.J., Lykken, D.T., & et al. (1990). Genetic and environmental influences on religious interests, attitudes, and values: A study of twins reared apart and together. Psychological Science, 1(2), 138-142. ________ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 16:26:01 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: MARGARET MEAD MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In 'Sociobiology Sanitized' Val Dusek claims: "The discrediting of Mead was an important step in the propagation of sociobiology in America. Shortly after Mead's death, Derek Freeman published a book (1983), largely prepared decades before, that he had feared to make public while she was still alive to reply. Freeman claimed to show that Mead's account of sexual freedom in Samoa was a myth. The press widely publicized Freeman's claims. Evolutionary psychologists casually refer to Freeman's work as disproving Mead's claims that sexual and violent behavior are culturally relative. There was a general celebration of Freeman's discrediting of a woman who had been so influential in the scientific societies and popular press. Neglected were the facts that Freeman had studied a different village than that studied by Mead, and studied it four decades later than Mead, during which time a U. S. military based had influenced the behavior of Samoans who worked on the base(for example, rape and assaults had become more frequent). Also, Freeman re-interviewed some of Mead's subjects decades later in the role of an honorary chieftain. An elderly woman might give a different report concerning her teen-age sexual activity to a community official and priest than she would have confided to another young woman at the time. Freeman in his earlier work on Iban agriculture (which contains some hasty racial generalizations) (1970 para 59) bragged that he had 'devious" ways of getting his subjects to say what he wanted.(1970, para 63). Nonetheless, Mead was portrayed as a silly female who had naively believed in a good human nature, while Freeman was the objective male scientist. Some journalists referred to "Miss Mead" and "Professor Freeman" despite the fact that Mead had many more academic honors than her critic. In fact the detached, supposedly Popperian Freeman had many axes to grind and was as committed to sexual repression, (including being outraged by the display of human genitals on statues in a public park) as Mead was committed to sexual freedom. Writers from psychologist Steve Pinker to science popularizer Martin Gardner write as if Mead was victim of a hoax, and anthropological relativism of cultural and mores is thus totally discredited." ______ Ian writes: This is the version of events kindly provided by Hiram Caton editor of "The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock" ( Lanham: University Press of America, 1990) ______ Dusek writes: 'The discrediting of Mead was an important step in the propagation of sociobiology in America'. Eight years separate the publication of Sociobiology (1975) and Margaret Mead and Samoa (1983). Sociobiology was well established by 1983. Wilson welcomed Freeman's refutation, and of course he viewed it as contributing significantly to the correction he espoused. Dusek doesn't report that Mead, by the force of her authority, stopped a 1975 resolution at the annual AAA meeting condeming sociobiology as racist, sexist, and elitist. She chided the childishness of the condemners and warned that the resolution would make the profession look foolish. "Shortly after Mead's death, Derek Freeman published a book (1983), largely prepared decades before, that he had feared to make public while she was still alive to reply". This canard was trotted out many times during the controversy. It's at variance with the facts of Freeman's long relation with Mead. On a number of occasions he conveyed directly to her the evidence for his disagreement. In August 1978, he wrote offering to send the first completed chapter of the manuscript that would become his book. An assistant responded that she was ill; in November Mead died (Caton, 204). Four years isn't a 'short time after Mead's death'. Dusek writes: 'There was a general celebration of Freeman's discrediting of a woman who had been so influential in the scientific societies and popular press. Neglected were the facts that Freeman had studied a different village than that studied by Mead, and studied it four decades later than Mead, during which time a U. S. military base had influenced the behavior of Samoans who worked on the base(for example, rape and assaults had become more frequent)'. This is confused. Freeman covered in great detail the differences that might emerge from the difference of time and place of their respective studies. One important piece of evidence was records of the Samoan court in the incidence of rape in Western Samoa at the time of Mead's study. It was the third most common offence and cases were reported in the Samoa Times (Freeman, 1983, 249). Had Mead consulted these records she could not have written, as she did, that rape was 'unthinkable' in Samoa. BTW, the naval base in Pago Pago has nothing to do with it. Military personnel did not venture inland. There was a dispensary and an anchorage on Mead's island (Ta'u). In fact, she lived at the dispensary as a member of the Holt household, and she was understood to be under the protection of the Admiral of the US Fleet (Samoans are very rank conscious). But her book mentions none of this 'taint' and it portrays Samoans as pristine pagans. Their puritanical Christian faith is scarcely mentioned and plays no role whatever in her story, nor could it, since that alone gives the lie to her myth. [Ian adds: US military government had been in place for over twenty years when Mead arrived in Samoa, knowledgeable in some aspects of Samoan culture but totally ignorant of its language; Christianity had been firmly established for over eighty years.] Dusek writes: 'Also, Freeman re-interviewed some of Mead's subjects decades later in the role of an honorary chieftain. An elderly woman might give a different report concerning her teen-age sexual activity to a community official and priest than she would have confided to another young woman at the time'. This is a garbled account of the testimony of Fa'apua Fa'amu Togia, Mead's busom companion during her sojourn. As the ceremonial virgin (taupo) of her village, Fa'apua was never unchaperoned. Her sworn testimony was given to Leulu F Vaa, a university lecturer, not to Freeman. For a detailed account, Freeman 1991; brief account Caton, 162-64. Dusek: 'Nonetheless, Mead was portrayed [by Freeman] as a silly female who had naively believed in a good human nature, while Freeman was the objective male scientist'. Freeman devotes 130 pages to setting the scene for Mead's research. It is primarily background on Mead's university studies in the milieu of anti-nature, anti-genetics opinion among humanists of the day. Freeman's Mead is not a silly young woman but a carrier, subsequently prophet, of cultural determinism, which is the great antagonist of Freeman's interactive paradigm. Dusek: 'In fact the detached, supposedly Popperian Freeman had many axes to grind and was as committed to sexual repression, (including being outraged by the display of human genitals on statues in a public park) as Mead was committed to sexual freedom'. This is burlesque. Freeman believes that Samoan upbringing is far too repressive. The repression vs freedom theme arises from the encounter between MM and her subjects. When they came to know how she had depicted them, they were deeply embarrassed and scandalized by her gross inversion of their mores. Mead's subjects were Christians of very severe sexual morality. Her conduct while among them, which included an affair with a young man stigmatized as a libertine, caused them great distress because they had bestowed on her the high honor of ceremonial virgin (taupo). Because of all this, they wished for Derek to 'set the record straight'. BTW, >taupo< (ceremonial virgin) is spelled with a 'u'', thus, taupou. Mead accepted the title although as a married woman she wasn't eligible. Her hosts didn't know that she was married. When they long after learned of this, they considered it to be a gross betrayal of their hospitality (in addition to the betrayal involved in her affair with a stigmatized miscreant). It signifies something about the bias of Freeman's critics that no one paused to note that Mead's conduct as an anthropologist was disgraceful of herself and her hosts. References Caton, H. 1990. The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. Lanham: University Press of America. Freeman, D. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa. Cambridge: Harvard. Freeman, D. 1991. There's Tricks i' th' World: An Historical Analysis of the Researches of Margaret Mead, Visual Anthropology Review 7: 103-128. _________ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 17:53:34 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: CALL FOR PAPER Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" * * * * * CALL FOR PAPERS * * * * * * * "Philosophical Writings" UK based philosophy journal invites submissions for Issue No. 9 Fall 1998. The journal is especially interested in articles, reviews, dialogues or reminiscences presented in an unusual format; we encourage postgraduate students and "new" academics to send us samples of their work. Please send two printed copies with 3.5" disc; articles up to 8000 words, reviews up to 2000 words to: The Editors, Phil. Writings Philosophy Department University of Durham 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN TEL 191-374-7641 FAX 374-7635 e-mail: D.M.Philips or S.P.James@durham.ac.uk ------------------------------------------------ Issue no. 8 Summer 1998 now available: Ole Skilleas (Bergen) "Critique of Writing in Plato's Phaedrus" Todd Long (Swansea) "A Selective Defense of Tolstoy's What is Art" Richard Taylor (Durham) "On Natural Suffering" Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe (Aberystwyth) "Higher Stages of Consciousness in the Theatre" David Large (Newcastle) "Brief Intro. to Ecological Philosophy" David Rose (Glasgow) "From Production to Consumption" Reviews, Features, Cartoons, Events. subscription: L15 per year for three issues, L6 for sample. institutions: L45 per year for libraries or departments. FREE! individual subscription if you manage to persuade your dept. or library to subscribe at the full price. Send your remittance to the address above. __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 07:53:40 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Bouchard Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Ed Remler writes: << Now we are at a point at which something may be learned if Val Dusek explains why his comments on Bouchard leave a (to me) misleading impression of this work. 1) Was he unaware of that Bouchard's work has been replicated? 2) Does he believe that all this work is similarly tainted by ideology? 3) Was it an oversight? 4) Did he purposefully misrepresent the situation for a higher good? 5) Is Pinker misleading? 6) ...? Ed Remler>> Yes, after 1987 Bouchard's work began to be published in peer reviewed journals. However, from 1980-1987 his work was not published in peer reviewed journals, despite its appearance in almost all of the major news media in the USA, including major city newpapers, weekly news magazines, and popular science magazines. He also misled NBC reporter Bazell about the publication status of his work. In the political news section of Science magazine his work was covered by Constance Holden (a critic of Head Start and defender of the Pioneer Fund) as major breakthrough in a way that would lead the casual reader to believe that it was published. Meanwhile the peer reviewers in the science article part of the journal were rejecting his work. I mention most of the briefly in my article on the SaC website. My own belief is that Pioneer funding plus the popular media publicity concerning the "eerie" anecdotes was what led Science and various psychology journals to later publish his stuff as respectable. Bouchard essentially circumvented peer review through the popularity of his anecdotes. Often when he speaks to scientific audiences, at colloquia, etc. he presents only or mostly his annecdotes, knowing that they are so striking he does not need to present statistics and other boring scientific stuff. As for ideological bias, at least several other of the twin and adoption studies groups, such as the one in Texas are indeed ideological biased. (See the story about the Texas one, which can be further elaborated on with documentation.) Even now that Bouchard's group has published in respectable media, why have they not produced their decade-long promised book which would give the kind of documentation of the separateness of the twins, which is the crucial point of contention (No one is claiming that his well-meaning grad students or postdocs is faking blood-pressure tests Burt-style.) Bouchard claims he is not responsible for the overwhelming popular media coverage of the twins annecdotes. He also claims he can't show his data to critics because of the laws on the protection of human subjects. But obviously he could strip his biographies of names and places or make up fictional ones as is often done in sociological or anthropological research. I being logged off by AOL and can't store on a guest machine, so this is enough for the moment. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 08:17:00 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Bouchard Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Ed Remler <> I find it odd that Ed Remler, who is a sincere and intelligent methodologist and physicist should be accusing me of misrepresenting the Bouchard situation, as if Bouchard's later publication after seven years of misleading reporters and eighteen years of regalling the public and scientists (such as Pinker, who stooped to using the anecdotes in his The Language Instinct--presumably because then the peer reviewed publications were only recently available) is now acceptable after the fact because he got into peer reviewed journals. (Perhaps institutional might makes right here.) Remler should be more outraged at Bouchard turning to the Pioneer Fund for funding. One irony of the latter is that people who should know better such as Paul Gross and various psychologists have been because of Bouchard's and other hereditarians' funding by it, have been defending the Pioneer Fund, perhaps without knowing its full associations. Barry Mehler has done quite a bit of research on the Fund. In this case to use the word "Nazi" or "racist" is not an exaggeration as it certainly was in the case of the early critics of Wilson (pace Levitt). As far as the ideological bias of other twin and comparative studies, I think that some of these, such as Plomin's or Scarr's use of them are not consciously ideologically biased or of bad intent. However the acceptance of various aspects of the methodology of heritability, the focus on group differences in ability, and the uncritical acceptance of Bouchard;'s work on the part of Scarr and other behavioral geneticists involves a structural ideological bias, not a bad intent. It is no longer acceptable to call people racists, no matter what they do because racist is identified by most with conscious psychological ill intent. (Even conscious intent is apparently no longer sufficient, as one fellow recently admitted yelling and throwing stuff onto his neighbors' lawn and admitted that he hated Blacks and wanted them to leave, but denied in lawsuit he was racist.) But structural or institutional racism, not of conscious intent, is, I believe a reality. Similarly, ideological bias, on the part of relatively liberal people such as Pinker need not be based on conscious ill intent. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 09:31:16 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Caton on M. Mead Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Here some brief intitial replies to Caton's post kindly forwarded by Ian: Caton writes toward the end of his criticism of Dusek: > > This is burlesque. Dusek replies: I think this is some projection on Caton's part. Freeman imagined in joking interviews with reporters, and his supporters have actually produced, literal burlesques, stage productions ridiculing Mead, as I'm sure Caton is aware. In an interview Freeman says he was thinking of writing a musical comedy on Margaret Mead that opens with her as a 1920s Charlston dancer or "flapper." In New Zealand the play "Heretic" with Derek Freeman as hero, recently was put on, in a production in which Mead was transformed by figures with oversized, grotesque heads, into Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Gloria Steinham. Freeman and his supporters did indeed engage in grossly sexist ridicule of Mead on stage. > > >Dusek writes: > > > > > >'The discrediting of Mead was an important step in the > > >propagation of sociobiology in America'. Caton replies: > > > Eight years separate the publication of Sociobiology (1975) and Margaret > > >Mead and Samoa (1983). Sociobiology was well established by 1983. Wilson > > >welcomed Freeman's refutation, and of course he viewed it as > > > contributing significantly to the correction he espoused. Dusek doesn't report > > >that Mead, by the force of her authority, stopped a 1975 resolution at the > > >annual AAA meeting condeming sociobiology as racist, sexist, and elitist. > > >She chided the childishness of the condemners and warned that the > > >resolution would make the profession look foolish. Dusek counter-replies. Of course the sociobiology debate had been going on for some time, but Gould, Lewontin, Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz and other anti-sociobiology intellectuals had captured the general intellectual journal, The New York Review of Books and discredited sociobiology (whether rightly or wrongly) to the general intellectual audience. True, SOB had captured the popular media, and specialized scientific journals of SOB and human evolution had been founded which produced a scientific specialty. But the discrediting of Mead, the icon of cultural relativism, who, I mentioned not only chaired prestigious societies and committees, but wrote influential Dear Abby columns for women in Redbook and elsewhere symbolized anthropological relativism and environmental determinism for many. To discredit her to the general public intellectual audience was an important step is shifting the weight of general intellectual opinion to a pro-SOB stance. I did not mean that it effected scientists who already were biological determinists or sexists, or members of the general public who believed in traits "running in the blood" before modern SOB. The fact that Mead opposed the AAA making a political statement against the field of SOB does not prove that Freeman's work lacked sexist or racial biases. It only shows that Mead was a better scientist than her critics make her out. She also was a good politician (as they do emphasize) and thought, correctly, that such political condemnations would allow people like Wilson (and later Freeman) to portray themselves as Galileo-like martyrs to science, as Wilson did portray himself in an article on "Intellectual Vigilantism" and Freeman did in the conservative National Association of Scholars journal. > > >Dusek: > > > > > >'Nonetheless, Mead was portrayed [by Freeman] as a silly female who had > a naively believed in > > >good human nature, while Freeman was > > >the objective male scientist'. > > >Freeman devotes 130 pages to setting the scene for Mead's research. It > > > is primarily background on Mead's university studies in the milieu of > > >anti-nature, anti-genetics opinion among humanists of the day. > > > Freeman'sMead is not a silly young woman but a carrier, subsequently > > >prophet, of cultural determinism, which is the great antagonist of Freeman's > > >interactive paradigm. I agree Mead was not a silly young woman (especially in her old age, although reporters liked to counterpose the twentysomething Mead of the 1920s-30s to the mature Freeman, rather than the mature and honored Mead to the mature Freeman.) But Freeman in his interviews, as above about Mead as "flapper" (or 20s dancer), did portray her as a silly young woman to reporters. I agree that Mead's studies were in the Boasian anti-heredity mileau. One thing conspicuously absent in Freeman and Caton's account was that this was also an anti-racist milieau. Mead was sent be Boas to study immigrants from Ellis Island to counter the psychological IQ tests and public statements by leading psychologists and biologists of the day that Eastern and Southern European immigrants were "feeble-minded" and use of those claims by Lauglin to support the 1924 Immigrant Restriction Act. Boas suffered for his earlier anti-war opinions, and was critical of racial hypotheses before British anthropology was. > > > > > >Dusek: > > > > > >'In fact the detached, supposedly Popperian Freeman had many axes to grind >>>and was as committed to sexual repression, (including being outraged by the >>>display of human genitals on statues in a public park) as Mead was committed > > >to sexual freedom'. > >This is burlesque. > >Freeman believes that Samoan upbringing is far too > > repressive. The repression vs freedom theme arises from the encounter > > between MM and her subjects. When they came to know how she had depicted > > >them, they were deeply embarrassed and scandalized by her gross > inversion > > >of their mores. Mead's subjects were Christians of very severe sexual > > >morality. Her conduct while among them, which included an affair with a > > >young man stigmatized as a libertine, caused them great distress because > > >they had bestowed on her the high honor of ceremonial virgin (taupo). > > >Because of all this, they wished for Derek to 'set the record straight'. I don't deny that Mead was a sexual libertine. That was part of the point I was making above. But Freeman had his opposite biases. Yes, Margaret Mead had sex with men (and perhaps later with women), and was in favor of a kind of sexual utopia. (Although even her first husband whom she dropped for Bateson while on field work thought so well of her several decades later that he wrote a touching defense of her in the New York Times during the Freedman controversy. I can only pray that my own ex-wife will treat me so kindly) And in a part of the letter not included in Ian's version forwarded to SaC. Caton: > > >The remainder of Dusek's polemic is more of the same. His is the mind of a > > >grim, dogmatic inquisitor. When people of that ilk get control of power, > > >they do what they can to rid the world of iniquity, meaning you. So watch > > >your step. > > > > > >Hiram Dusek replies: Apparently for criticizing people such as Freeman, Bouchard, et al, I am an inquisitor. Did I say Freeman or Bouchard or anyone else should be burned at the stake, fired from their chairs, or prevented from doing research? This is the same trick that E. O. Wilson used against his critics. If you dare to criticize him at all you are an inquisitor, and therefore you should be suppressed. This is classic projection. If you want to invade Poland, accuse the Poles of invading you. Wag the dog. An acquaintance of mine was once handing out leaflets that accused sociobiology of being a pseudo-science at a talk given by Wilson at the Community Church in Cambridge. Wilson called over a nearby policeman and informed the latter that this fellow was a possible violent disrupter (apparently hoping to get him apprehended or at least expelled from the area). In fact the the leafleter was a bright biophysicist later to hold positions at Bouchard's Minnesota and at Yale, who wished only to inform the audience by leaflet that there were arguments against the scientific perfection of Wilson's methodology. Perhaps Wilson's work is in fact not unfalsifiable (as Philip Kitcher has persuasively argued against me and the late anthropologist Tony Leeds), but is this grounds to call the police? Who are the inquisitors? Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 15:19:10 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: paper on the life and work of W. H. R. Rivers, anthropoligist, psychologist and psychiatrist (1864-1922) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" http://www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/whittle.html I have added another paper to the Science as Culture web site concerned with he 1898 Torres Strait Anthropological Expedition: Paul Whittle, 'W. H. R. RIVERS: A FOUNDING FATHER WORTH REMEMBERING' This is a talk given to the Zangwill Club at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge. It provides an overview of the work and influence of W.H.R. Rivers, anthropologist, psychologist and psychiatrist, who has recently come to public attention in the wake of the Regeneration trilogy of novels by Pat Barker, one of which won the Booker Prize. It complements two other papers from the recent conference aat St. Johns College, Cambridge, on the Torres Strait Expedition: Keith Hart, 'The place of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits (CAETS) in the history of British social anthropology' Barbara Saunders, 'Revisiting Basic Colour Terms'|, plus a list of Barbara Saunders' publications | a __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 19:19:23 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Mead, Bouchard, anecdotes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thanks to Val Dusek for forwarding some fascinating anecdotes, but I think we are in danger of losing site of the issues. The weight of the evidence is that Margaret Mead's study of Samoa is completely unreliable - if you take the single fact that she described rape as "unthinkable" when in fact court records show it to have been the third most common offence at that time I think it's reasonable to conclude that her report of events is not of an acceptable standard. Stories about her motivation or that of those who have criticised her work doesn't move us any further forward. I think we have also established that Thomas Bouchard has published in an astonishingly wide range of peer-reviewed journals and books with a large number of collaborators. To dismiss his work, and that of Freeman, Caton etc. on the basis of another set of (unreferenced) anecdotes is meaningless. Are we to assume that only work produced by left-wing ideologues is authoritative? Do anecdotes count as evidence only when they suggest that a scientist doesn't have a set of approved left-wing prejudices? Best wishes Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1998 10:27:38 +0100 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Human Nature Subject: Online: Evolution of Sex Differences X-To: darwin-and-darwinism@sheffield.ac.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thanks to Prof. Geary chapters one and seven of his forthcoming book Male, Female; The Evolution of Human Sex Differences are now available for reading online at: http://www.human-nature.com/books/geary.html Chapter 8: Sex differences in brain and cognition may be available at a later date. Authors wishing to submit excerpts and chapters for viewing online at this international multidisciplinary website devoted to exploration of the problematic concept of human nature should contact admin@human-nature.com. Human-Nature.Com http://www.human-nature.com/ ******* Male, Female; The Evolution of Human Sex Differences by David C. Geary RRP$49.95 discounted: $34.97 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1557985278/darwinanddarwini *********** Male, female is the first book to attempt to explain most human sex differences from a single theoretical perspective, Darwin's principles of sexual selection. The book is based on an extensive review of the scientific literature in biology, psychology, and anthropology but is written for a general audience. The books seeks to explian--not simply describe--sex differnces in parental care, mating strategies and preferences, social motives and emotionality, physical attributes, physical development, play patterns, social development, brain and cognitive functioning, as well as academic skills, psychological and behavioral problems (e.g., violence and depression), occupational choices and status, among many other things. Moreover, sex differences in many of these areas are examined across cultures and historical periods in order to illustrate both cultural and biological influences on the differences between boys and girls and men and women. Short jacket cover reviews were provided by eminent evolutionary psychologists and biologists including: David Buss (author of "The Evolution of Desire") who stated Male, female "is simply the best book that has ever been written on the topic of human sex differences." Randy Thornhill (Regents Professor of Biology, University of New Mexico), "this book is a must read for everyone with an interest in scientifically knowing human beings and why boys and girls and men and women are so different psychologically." Steven Pinker (author of the "Language Instinct" and "How the Mind Works"). "Male, female ... seeks to explain the differences between women and men rather than just describe them. The book is coherent, balanced, incisive, and well-written... a pleasure to read." ********* Contents Preface Chapter 1: Beginnings 1.1 The mechanisms of evolutionary selection 1.2 Overview Chapter 2: Principles and mechanisms of sexual selection 2.1 Why sexual reproduction? 2.2 Sexual selection 2.3 Summary and conclusion Chapter 3: Sexual selection in primates and during human evolution 3.1 The dynamics of sexual reproduction in primates 3.2 Sexual selection and human evolution 3.3 Summary and conclusion Chapter 4: Paternal investment 4.1 Paternal versus maternal investment 4.2 Paternal investment across primate species 4.3 Individual and cultural differences in the pattern of paternal investment 4.4 Paternal investment and the well-being of children 4.5 Summary and conclusion Chapter 5: Sexual selection in contemporary humans 5.1 Marriage systems 5.2 Female choice 5.3 Female-female competition 5.4 Male-male competition 5.5 Male choice 5.6 Cultural and historical variability in mating dynamics 5.7 Summary and conclusion Chapter 6: The evolution and development of the human mind 6.1 The motivation to control 6.2 Evolved cognitive modules 6.3 Development of functional systems 6.4 Summary and conclusion Chapter 7: Developmental sex differences 7.1 Physical development 7.2 Infancy 7.3 Play 7.4 Social development 7.5 Parenting 7.6 Summary and conclusion Chapter 8: Sex differences in brain and cognition 8.1 Social domains 8.2 Ecological domains 8.3 Summary and conclusion Chapter 9: Sex differences in modern society 9.1 Sex differences in academic competencies 9.2 Behavioral and psychological sex differences 9.3 Sex differences in occupational interests and achievement 9.4 Summary and conclusion Order now at the discounted price of $34.95 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1557985278/darwinanddarwini ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1998 11:12:33 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Course on "Political Correctness" turned down MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit SANFORD PINSKER: A campus fight over political correctness Copyright Đ 1998 Nando.net Copyright Đ 1998 The Christian Science Monitor (August 20, 1998 09:42 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) -- After an opinion survey found that many Bowling Green State University students felt classes were highly politicized by faculty members from the far left, a sociology professor, Richard Zeller, decided to launch a course to examine the phenomenon. His proposed course title is "Political Correctness." Authors on his book list include such prominent neoconservatives as Dinesh D'Souza ("Illiberal Education"), Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray ("The Bell Curve"), and Christina Hoff Summers ("Who Stole Feminism"). The professor was turned down flat - first by his own sociology department, then by the American studies, ethnic studies, and psychology departments. No matter that Zeller doesn't happen to agree with everything these authors propose - or, more important, that he is committed to teaching about political correctness in an even-handed way - his colleagues would have none of it. When Zeller took the controversy beyond the ivory tower to the local Ohio press, some on campus did not appreciate his whistle-blowing efforts. Others, however, wondered what the fuss was all about. The Zeller affair arrives in an era when it seems no sociology course would ever be turned down. In another department, Bowling Green once offered a course in the roller-coaster - complete with field trips. But Zeller's antagonists argue that his proposed course has no sociological content, and that he intends to use it as a forum to express his right-wing political philosophy. Gary Lee, chairman of the university's sociology department, likens Zeller's proposed course to an "infomercial," one that would end up with taxpayers footing the bill for advocacy rather than education. He also says that Zeller would grade students on the basis of how much they agreed with his politics. "This is clearly wrong," Lee insists, "and it doesn't matter whether the indoctrination comes from the left or the right." However, nothing in Zeller's file - he's taught at Bowling Green since 1976 - justifies such fears: No student or administrator has ever complained about him rigging the political deck in classrooms. At the heart of the dispute separating Zeller and Lee is how much politicization regularly goes on at Bowling Green and whether a double standard is now being applied to a professor out to teach what many regard as politically incorrect books. If Zeller's course proposal contained the requisite amount of "sociological content," Lee says, "it would have been approved without problem." But it didn't - even though, in Lee's words, "it could have." Does Lee mean that more might have been done to ensure that Zeller's reading list contained a fair representation of both sides on the "PC" debate? And if so, why didn't he, as chairperson, elicit the sort of conversations that not only lead to compromise but also to a sociology course both faculty members could be proud of? As with most academic squabbles, there are plenty of gray areas. For example, it is one thing if Zeller teaches about political correctness and quite another if he teaches students how to be politically incorrect. There also may be legitimate questions about his qualifications to teach about the neurobiology of intelligence testing or about postmodern-feminist theory. But these matters are only mentioned in passing by those out to kill Zeller's course before it makes the catalog. Again, the specter of double standards arises because Zeller may not be the only Bowling Green professor whose academic reach, and political passions, muddy the academic water. He is, however, probably the only professor in Bowling Green's history who has been so systematically stonewalled. Even his offer to teach "Political Correctness" as an overload and without compensation got Zeller nowhere. As the Bowling Green incident gets wider public exposure, I suspect other Zellers at other universities who will find themselves raising similar questions about what can or cannot be the stuff of an academically responsible course. Some courses will breeze through the grids while others will languish in that special circle of purgatory reserved for the right wing. Amid all the self-congratulatory talk about diversity one hears on American campuses, it is not at all clear that intellectual diversity is alive and well. If the result of Zeller's pressing for a course that might expose students to controversial thinkers and books had been an honest debate - rather than an exercise in character assassination - all of us might well have been benefitted. As it stands, however, everyone at Bowling Green has lost. SANFORD PINSKER is Shadek professor of the humanities at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., and editor of the National Association of Scholars' Academic Quarterly. --- This is a message from the Upstream mailing list. Visit the Upstream Website at http://cycad.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/ Visit the Upstream ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1998 14:18:30 PDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Edward Remler Subject: Re: Bouchard Content-Type: text/plain Val Dusek has written: .... My own belief is that Pioneer funding plus the popular media publicity concerning the "eerie" anecdotes was what led Science and various psychology journals to later publish his stuff as respectable. Bouchard essentially circumvented peer review through the popularity of his anecdotes. ....... MY COMMENT: This seems to me to be the crucial contention being made for it seems to me to be saying (in effect, when coupled with further statements quoted below) that this area of psychological studies has not achieved the status of a science. The peer reviewers did not have a sufficient objective basis to do the job we suppose them to do. An Experimenter is supposed to clearly state experimental technique (including statistical analysis) and assuming he or she is not lying, the reviewer can assess the quality of this technique. This seems to me to be intrinsically independent of pressure from popular media and such. Val Dusek states: ....... Even now that Bouchard's group has published in respectable media, why have they not produced their decade-long promised book which would give the kind of documentation of the separateness of the twins, which is the crucial point of contention (No one is claiming that his well-meaning grad students or postdocs is faking blood-pressure tests Burt-style.) '''' MY COMMENT: I gather from this that the presentation of the experimental situation in the articles was incomplete in this respect. This is a tricky problem for me to evaluate from my distance from this subject but ultimately, all experiments in all scientific fields must be independently reproducible and this would factor out this problem except if everyone were either lying, or biased, or in error on the point concerning separation. But then are there not many 'non-racist' psychologist who should have run experiments illustrating just this point? Dusek seems to feel that for some reason the mechanisms of normal science seem to have failed. For all I know he might be right and, again, the area of psychology is not yet science. Val Dusek writes: > >I find it odd that Ed Remler, who is a sincere and intelligent methodologist >and physicist should be accusing me of misrepresenting the Bouchard situation, MY COMMENT: I felt the misrepresentation was with respect to not mentioning the peer reviewed papers. Did I miss your mention of them somewhere? Val Dusek continues: >as if Bouchard's later publication after seven years of misleading reporters >and eighteen years of regalling the public and scientists (such as Pinker, who >stooped to using the anecdotes in his The Language Instinct--presumably >because then the peer reviewed publications were only recently available) is >now acceptable after the fact because he got into peer reviewed journals. >(Perhaps institutional might makes right here.) MY COMMENT: If peer review is functioning in this case then, as a matter of fact, whatever Bouchard did or did not do with respect to getting his work noticed should be irrelevant. He can be a thoroughly bad man but if is science is right, it is right. It is not institutional might making right it is scientific truth making right. I hope this does not sound too simplistic but ultimately this must be the case *if we are talking about a science*. Are We? All the other comments made by Dusek seem to me to be in the same class as that above. They may represent bad behavior on the part of Bouchard and other, even bias conscious or not, but it is all irrelevant if we are talking about a science. Ed Remler ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1998 19:13:51 PDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Edward Remler Subject: Re Bouchard Content-Type: text/plain Val Dusek has written: .... My own belief is that Pioneer funding plus the popular media publicity concerning the "eerie" anecdotes was what led Science and various psychology journals to later publish his stuff as respectable. Bouchard essentially circumvented peer review through the popularity of his anecdotes. ....... MY COMMENT: This seems to me to be the crucial contention being made for it seems to me to be saying (in effect, when coupled with further statements quoted below) that this area of psychological studies has not achieved the status of a science. The peer reviewers did not have a sufficient objective basis to do the job we suppose them to do. An Experimenter is supposed to clearly state experimental technique (including statistical analysis) and assuming he or she is not lying, the reviewer can assess the quality of this technique. This seems to me to be intrinsically independent of pressure from popular media and such. Val Dusek states: ....... Even now that Bouchard's group has published in respectable media, why have they not produced their decade-long promised book which would give the kind of documentation of the separateness of the twins, which is the crucial point of contention (No one is claiming that his well-meaning grad students or postdocs is faking blood-pressure tests Burt-style.) '''' MY COMMENT: I gather from this that the presentation of the experimental situation in the articles was incomplete in this respect. This is a tricky problem for me to evaluate from my distance from this subject but ultimately, all experiments in all scientific fields must be independently reproducible and this would factor out this problem except if everyone were either lying, or biased, or in error on the point concerning separation. But then are there not many 'non-racist' psychologist who should have run experiments illustrating just this point? Dusek seems to feel that for some reason the mechanisms of normal science seem to have failed. For all I know he might be right and, again, the area of psychology is not yet science. Val Dusek writes: > >I find it odd that Ed Remler, who is a sincere and intelligent methodologist >and physicist should be accusing me of misrepresenting the Bouchard situation, MY COMMENT: I felt the misrepresentation was with respect to not mentioning the peer reviewed papers. Did I miss your mention of them somewhere? Val Dusek continues: >as if Bouchard's later publication after seven years of misleading reporters >and eighteen years of regalling the public and scientists (such as Pinker, who >stooped to using the anecdotes in his The Language Instinct--presumably >because then the peer reviewed publications were only recently available) is >now acceptable after the fact because he got into peer reviewed journals. >(Perhaps institutional might makes right here.) MY COMMENT: If peer review is functioning in this case then, as a matter of fact, whatever Bouchard did or did not do with respect to getting his work noticed should be irrelevant. He can be a thoroughly bad man but if is science is right, it is right. It is not institutional might making right it is scientific truth making right. I hope this does not sound too simplistic but ultimately this must be the case *if we are talking about a science*. Are We? All the other comments made by Dusek seem to me to be in the same class as that above. They may represent bad behavior on the part of Bouchard and other, even bias conscious or not, but it is all irrelevant if we are talking about a science. Ed Remler ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 12:44:42 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Remler on Objectivity (and science studies) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Ed Remler wrote: all experiments in all scientific fields must be independently reproducible and this would factor out this problem except if everyone were either lying, or biased, or in error on the point concerning separation. But then are there not many 'non-racist' psychologists who should have run experiments illustrating just this point? Dusek seems to feel that for some reason the mechanisms of normal science seem to have failed. For all I know he might be right and, again, the area of psychology is not yet science. ____ REPLY: This comment illustrates perfectly the (unbridgeable?) divide between science and social studies of science. Many social contructionists don't actually believe that scientific theories are invalid. In fact many accept the validity of scientific theories such as evolution by natural selection or quantum mechanics as much as those scientists who expound them. Social constructionists believe that scientific *theories* are themselves ideological, or more specifically that only scientific theories compatible with the prevailing conservative ideology of capitalist society will become established as valid. This is what they mean by the social construction of science. From this perspective those scientists having an apparent, conscious, ideological motive are bad, but the rest, who actually believe in the objectivity of science are even worse, since they do the most severe damage by helping to preserve the image of science as non-ideological. This is why Val Dusek writes: "... structural or institutional racism, not of conscious intent, is, I believe a reality. Similarly, ideological bias, on the part of relatively liberal people such as Pinker need not be based on conscious ill intent." and "The point is that the debate betwee evol. psych. or the earlier SOB (sociobiology) and its opponents is usually understood as one between objective scientists and emotional, politically biases leftists. I suggest that it is between emotional, politically biased rightists and emotional, politically biases leftists." The argument is not against ideological bias as such, since everyone is ideologically biased and all scientific theories serve ideological ends. The various positions are explained well by Andrew Webster in his 1991 book "Science, Technology and Society": (p. 142) "Elzinga (1988) has argued that the new radicalism of the 1970s was split into three, the moderate more radical, and the 'ultra-leftist' tendencies, whose principal figures are Jerry Ravetz (1982), Hilary and Steven Rose (1976), Bob Young (1977) and David Dickson (1984) respectively. Ravetz challenges the view - one that can be found in Bernal's own work - that science is 'underneath it all' really a democratic and altruistic pursuit. Instead, scientists can be corrupt, as opportunitst, as elitist and sexist as anyone else. The point is to try and limit these tendencies where possible and build on those opportunities that enable science to become more accountable to society at large. The Roses adopt a more radical position than this by arguing that science is not bad science when it is 'abused' by its practitioners: the very nature of scientific inquiry in capitalist society embodies exploitation and class-based ideologies within its very ideas and theories, whether they are about IQ and intelligence, racial differences or gender and biology. Young and Dickson take this argument a further step by claiming that we can and must distinguish between a 'capitalist' and 'socialist science' providing us with different theories and facts about nature and society. The science in each is no more or less true than the other: they simply serve different purposes and social classes, though, of course, inasmuch as proletarian science aims to serve society as a whole, in practice, it provides the model to be achieved." The existence of these three distinct positions is a problem for those wishing to characterise critiques of science, but I think we can begin to understand the belief of some social constructionists that no knowledge of science is necessary in order to produce shattering critcisms of scientific theories and practices. Obviously a simply familiarity with ideological variants and an eye for inappropriate analogy and metaphor is a sufficient tool-kit. The conviction that everything is ideologically motivated also helps to explain why simple activities such as the public understanding of science movement can be characterised as a sign of "moral panic; a breakdown of the social order" (Fuller, 1997) or why Robert M. Young can write "Whenever I hear or read certain phrases such as ‘the public understanding of science’ and ‘the image of science’ I want to be rude and scatological. I think of the people who work under their banners in the most unflattering terms — toadying and sycophantic, dupes and opportunists — even when they are friends and former students of mine. (Young, 1995) I suspect that most scientists fall into Webster's "moderate" camp composed of those eager to limit the abuses of science, whereas most in the social studies of science fall into the "radical" or "ultra-leftist" camps convinced that scientific theories are the embodiment of everything that decent people should oppose. Hence, although it can seem that a consensus has been reached on condemnation of a particularly bad scientist or bad piece of scientific work, no common ground actually exists between these different perspectives. Regards Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK References Dickson, D. (1984). The new politics of science. New York, NY: Pantheon. Elzinga, A. (1988). Bernalism, comintern and the sciences of science: Central science movements then and now. In J. Aneerstadt & A. Jamison (Eds.), From research policy to social intelligence. London: Macmillan. Fuller, S. (1997). Science. Buckingham: Open University Press. Ravetz, J.R. (1982). The social functions of science. Science and Public Policy, 9(5). Rose, H., & Rose, S. (1976). The political economy of science. London: Macmillan. Webster, A. (1991). Science, technology and society. London: Macmillan. Young, R.M. (1977). Science is social relations. Radical Science Journal, 5. Online at http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/sisr1.html Young, R.M. (1995). What scientists have to learn. Science as Culture, 5 Part 2(23), 167-80. Online at http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper31h.html ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 10:28:17 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ted Winslow Subject: Re: Bouchard In-Reply-To: <199808211154.HAA26702@comet.ccs.yorku.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Ian: You seem to have overlooked one of Val Dusek's claims. He wrote: > >Even now that Bouchard's group has published in respectable media, why have >they not produced their decade-long promised book which would give the kind of >documentation of the separateness of the twins, which is the crucial point of >contention (No one is claiming that his well-meaning grad students or postdocs >is faking blood-pressure tests Burt-style.) Bouchard claims he is not >responsible for the overwhelming popular media coverage of the twins >annecdotes. >He also claims he can't show his data to critics because of the laws on the >protection of human subjects. But obviously he could strip his biographies of >names and places or make up fictional ones as is often done in sociological or >anthropological research. > Pinker claims however that: >the work of Bouchard and other behavioral geneticists... has been >replicated >with many techniques in half-a-dozen countries Is the claim with respect to Bouchard true? Has the specific question Dusek raises in the case of Bouchard - "documentation of the separateness of the twins" - been answered by those who have replicated his work "with many techniques in half-a-dozen countries"? By the way, is it the case that, as they are understood within evolutionary psychology, emotional and political factors usually act to prevent cognition of obvious truths? I don't myself believe that a "machine" - i.e. an entity conceived in accordance with scientific materialist ontological premises - is capable of consciousness let alone cognition. I wonder however how a thinking machine whose emotional and cognitive functioning could be in conflict in this way could ever "know" that what it believed to be true was in fact true. How could it sort out which of its certainties were emotional in origin and which cognitive? If it could sort this out would the emotionally rooted certainties remain certainties? Ted Winslow Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW@YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. North York, Ont. CANADA M3J 1P3 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 05:05:12 +1200 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Alfred Harris Subject: Mead, Bouchard, ancedotes MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I have tried unsuccessfully, to keep up with this fascinating debate. Maybe a slight shift in direction would prove fruitful? How is it that, as a scientific community, we judge what is acceptable, and are our methods too much different from those used by eg a faith community? My personal view is that they are not. I always recall the work of Leon Croizat, kept out of the refereed scientific literature of the 50's and 60's because his view on biogeography directly challenged those of Mayr and others. This was never a question of data and objectivity but of power and ideology. Has anything really changed? Alfred Harris ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 10:11:12 -0700 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Stephen Straker Subject: Objectivity (and science studies) X-To: Ian Pitchford MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear SaC readers, I think Ian Pitchford's (and Andrew Webster's) characterization of "social studies of science" is too close to a caricature, even if it be granted that *some* social constructionists are carcicatures of themselves. The question rests ultimately on the fact of under-determination of theories by evidence: no finite set of observations or experimental results can uniquely determine a theory (or theories) which explain or predict those facts. (An oft-cited example: Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic theories of planetary motion as of, say, 1600.). If they are observationally equivalent, on what grounds to choose between them? Choices were made, but they could hardly have been grounded *just* on experiment or observation.) Consequently, "other things" must enter in: a Copernican preference for harmony or economy of explanation; a Tychonic agreement but also insisting on consistency with known physical "laws"; Ptolemaic preferences for their own notions of simplicity and adequacy. And beyond (or behind) these preferences perhaps more can be discerned. Why is Galileo a Copernican? At the end of long argument, I think there are good grounds for concluding that in the last analysis he is a Copernican because he judges Copernicanism to be the perfect vehicle for opposition to the, for him, bankrupt "philosophy of the schools". He doesn't particularly care about technical astronomy and its details. Now, it's not clear we should say that Galileo's preferences are simply "ideological" -- at least not in any senses that would make sense to him. But there are surely involved, for him, choices and preferences about matters that go way beyond any narrow concern with astronomical accuracy. As we all know, there is alot more at stake in the Copernican business. All right, having gone on much more than I intended, here are two questions I thought I would put to the "List" as one way to set about seeing what is "right" about "social studenties of science". (1) What do Ian Pitchford (and others) think of S.J. Gould's account of things in *The Mismeasure of Man*? Is Gould a "social constructionist" as characterized in Pitchford's post? Is his account wrong in any important ways? (2) What do you think of C.S. Lewis's observations -- quoted below?? Is he a "social constructionist"? Is he fundamentally wrong in any important way? ================================= from C.S. Lewis, "Epilogue," *The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature* (Cambridge U.P.: 1964): "The nineteenth century still held the belief that ... we could 'know' the ultimate physical reality more or less as, by maps, pictures, and travel-books, a man can 'know' a country he has not visited; and that in both cases the 'truth' would be a sort of mental replica of the thing itself. Philosophers might have disquieting comments to make on this conception; but scientists and plain men did not much attend to them. "Already, to be sure, mathematics were the idiom in which many of the sciences spoke. But I do not think it was doubted that there was a concrete reality *about* which the mathematics held good; distinguishable from the mathematics as a heap of apples is from the process of counting them... We should then have through mathematics a knowledge not merely mathematical. We should be like the man coming to know about a foreign country without visiting it. He learns about the mountains from carefully studying the contour lines on a map. But his knowledge is not a knowledge of contour lines. The real knowledge is achieved when these enable him to say 'That would be an easy ascent', This is a dangerous precipice,' 'A would be visible from B', 'These woods and waters must make a pleasant valley'. In going beyond the contour lines to such conclusions he is (if he knows how to read a map) getting nearer to the reality. "It would be very different if someone said to him (and was believed) 'But it is the contour lines themselves that are the fullest reality you can get. In turning away from them to these other statements you are getting further from the reality, not nearer. All those ideas about "real" rocks and slopes and views are merely a metaphor or a parable; a *pis aller*, permissible as a concession to the weakness of those who can't understand contour lines, but misleading if they are taken literally.' "And this, if I understand the situation, is just what has now happened as regards the physical sciences. The mathematics are now the nearest to the reality we can get. Anything imaginable, even anything that can be manipulated by ordinary (that is, non-mathematical) conceptions, far from being a further truth to which mathematics were the avenue, is a mere analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable modern physics speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as making 'models'... But these 'models' are not, like model ships, small-scale replicas of the reality. Sometimes they illustrate this or that aspect of it by an analogy. Sometimes they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the sayings of the mystics... "It would therefore be subtly misleading to say 'The medievals thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this'. Part of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, 'know what the universe is like' and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, 'like' it." [Lewis goes on to elaborate the idea that for us now] "what has been called 'a taste in universes' is not only pardonable but inevitable. We can no longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. [What Model prevails at a given time] reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age's knowledge. Hardly any battery of new evidence could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical. [When a new Model is adopted, that] "... new Model will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her. Here, as in the courts, the character of the evidence depends upon the shape of the examination, and a good cross-examiner can do wonders. He will not elicit falsehoods from an honest witness. But, in relation to the total truth in the witness's mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It determines how much of that total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest." A version of Lewis's view is also argued eloquently in E.A. Burtt's *Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science* (see the last chapter). Here are the *grounds*, if you will, for a "social studies of science". What is the problem? ================================================ best wishes, Stephen Straker ------------- Stephen Straker Department of History (604) 822-5195 / 822-2561 University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C. FAX: (604) 822-6658 CANADA V6T 1Z1 home: (604) 733-6638 / 734-4464 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 14:14:49 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Re: Objectivity (and science studies) In-Reply-To: <199808231723.NAA02817@u2.farm.idt.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sun, 23 Aug 1998, Stephen Straker wrote: > Dear SaC readers, > > I think Ian Pitchford's (and Andrew Webster's) characterization of "social > studies of science" is too close to a caricature, even if it be granted that > *some* social constructionists are carcicatures of themselves. > > The question rests ultimately on the fact of under-determination of theories > by evidence: no finite set of observations or experimental results can > uniquely determine a theory (or theories) which explain or predict those > facts. (An oft-cited example: Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic theories > of planetary motion as of, say, 1600.). If they are observationally > equivalent, on what grounds to choose between them? Choices were made, but > they could hardly have been grounded *just* on experiment or observation.) > Consequently, "other things" must enter in: a Copernican preference for > harmony or economy of explanation; a Tychonic agreement but also insisting on > consistency with known physical "laws"; Ptolemaic preferences for their own > notions of simplicity and adequacy. And beyond (or behind) these > preferences perhaps more can be discerned. "Underdetermination" is a highly overrated theoretical tool. Part of the problem is that the people who are eager to deploy it are so dreadfully mathematically underpowered. Historically, even Ptolemy knew that his theory was just an ad hoc algorithm, somewhat inconsitent with observational evidence. "Parsimony," "elegance" & "logical economy" are compelling evidence for explanatory schemes, and always have been. The fact that ad hoc patches can always be affixed to an existintg theory should not be taken to mean that theory choice, in particular, the abandonment of a clumsy old theory for an elegant new one, is arbitrary. What the "social constructionists" miss altogether, since, by and large, they are mathematically incompetent, is the way in which mathematical elegance and generality swamps the "social." Thus, the attempts to find "social" correlates of various Newtonian notions, say, drown in their own silliness if one has a sensitivity to the mathematical impulse that drives the model building. It might be objected that appeal to "elegance" is anti-empirical or even metaphysical. Perhaps, but so what? It certainly is empirical in the sense that from the historical point of view, theory-building that has been thus guided has been enormously successful in creating machinery that is not only powerfully explanatory, but also capable of generating utterly surprising predictions. A "locus classicus, e.g., is the "Principia's" prediction of the precession of the Earth's axis--this, from a theory originally generated in the search for a more economical grounding for Kepler's Laws. In short, underdetermination is a philosophical curio which should be kept on the shelf in all but a few, unrepresentative cases. > > Why is Galileo a Copernican? At the end of long argument, I think there are > good grounds for concluding that in the last analysis he is a Copernican > because he judges Copernicanism to be the perfect vehicle for opposition to > the, for him, bankrupt "philosophy of the schools". He doesn't particularly > care about technical astronomy and its details. The hell he doesn't!!! > > Now, it's not clear we should say that Galileo's preferences are simply > "ideological" -- at least not in any senses that would make sense to him. > But there are surely involved, for him, choices and preferences about matters > that go way beyond any narrow concern with astronomical accuracy. As we all > know, there is alot more at stake in the Copernican business. Galileo was a mathematician; enough said. > > All right, having gone on much more than I intended, here are two questions I > thought I would put to the "List" as one way to set about seeing what is > "right" about "social studenties of science". > > (1) What do Ian Pitchford (and others) think of S.J. Gould's account of > things in *The Mismeasure of Man*? Is Gould a "social constructionist" as > characterized in Pitchford's post? Is his account wrong in any important > ways? It says more about the social constructioin of Gould's popular books than anything else. But, in any case, Gould is not a social constructionist; he is an off-the-shelf convergent realist. He has some usefully cynical things to say about what can happen if one is not careful to control for one's biases (a lesson that might well be learned by Lewontin, e.g.) > > (2) What do you think of C.S. Lewis's observations -- quoted below?? Is he > a "social constructionist"? Is he fundamentally wrong in any important way? > > ================================= > > from C.S. Lewis, "Epilogue," *The Discarded Image: An Introduction to > Medieval and Renaissance Literature* (Cambridge U.P.: 1964): > > "The nineteenth century still held the belief that ... we could > 'know' the ultimate physical reality more or less as, by maps, pictures, and > travel-books, a man can 'know' a country he has not visited; and that in both > cases the 'truth' would be a sort of mental replica of the thing itself. > Philosophers might have disquieting comments to make on this conception; but > scientists and plain men did not much attend to them. > > "Already, to be sure, mathematics were the idiom in which many of the > sciences spoke. But I do not think it was doubted that there was a concrete > reality *about* which the mathematics held good; distinguishable from the > mathematics as a heap of apples is from the process of counting them... We > should then have through mathematics a knowledge not merely mathematical. We > should be like the man coming to know about a foreign country without > visiting it. He learns about the mountains from carefully studying the > contour lines on a map. But his knowledge is not a knowledge of contour > lines. The real knowledge is achieved when these enable him to say 'That > would be an easy ascent', This is a dangerous precipice,' 'A would be visible > from B', 'These woods and waters must make a pleasant valley'. In going > beyond the contour lines to such conclusions he is (if he knows how to read a > map) getting nearer to the reality. > > "It would be very different if someone said to him (and was believed) > 'But it is the contour lines themselves that are the fullest reality you can > get. In turning away from them to these other statements you are getting > further from the reality, not nearer. All those ideas about "real" rocks and > slopes and views are merely a metaphor or a parable; a *pis aller*, > permissible as a concession to the weakness of those who can't understand > contour lines, but misleading if they are taken literally.' > > "And this, if I understand the situation, is just what has now > happened as regards the physical sciences. The mathematics are now the > nearest to the reality we can get. Anything imaginable, even anything that > can be manipulated by ordinary (that is, non-mathematical) conceptions, far > from being a further truth to which mathematics were the avenue, is a mere > analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable modern physics > speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to > verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as making > 'models'... But these 'models' are not, like model ships, small-scale > replicas of the reality. Sometimes they illustrate this or that aspect of it > by an analogy. Sometimes they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the > sayings of the mystics... > > "It would therefore be subtly misleading to say 'The medievals > thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this'. Part > of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, 'know what the > universe is like' and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, > 'like' it." > > [Lewis goes on to elaborate the idea that for us now] "what has been called > 'a taste in universes' is not only pardonable but inevitable. We can no > longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to > truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere > fantasy. [What Model prevails at a given time] reflects the prevalent > psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age's > knowledge. Hardly any battery of new evidence could have persuaded a Greek > that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly > any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical. > > [When a new Model is adopted, that] "... new Model will not be set up > without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it > becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most > of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her. Here, as in the > courts, the character of the evidence depends upon the shape of the > examination, and a good cross-examiner can do wonders. He will not elicit > falsehoods from an honest witness. But, in relation to the total truth in > the witness's mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It > determines how much of that total truth will appear and what pattern it will > suggest." > > > ================================================ > > best wishes, > > Stephen Straker This is excellent evidence of the fact that Lewis was not the sort of fellow who makes a good mathematical physicist--as if more such were needed. It's also highly indicaative of why the poor guy got clobbered in the famous BBC debates over science and religion in the late '40's. To put it bluntly, any consideration of the ontological questions at the heart of the debates over contemporary physics needs an infinitely more nuanced notion of how "the real" might be construed than poor Lewis is capable of. As it happens, this requires, of the aspiring metaphysician, the ability to navigate easily through--I hate to say it again--deep mathematical waters. Otherwise, it's imposible to get more than the faintest, most distant glimmering of the issues involved. Norm Levitt ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 20:22:16 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: Bouchard MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ted Winslow, wrote: Is the claim with respect to Bouchard true? Has the specific question Dusek raises in the case of Bouchard - "documentation of the separateness of the twins" - been answered by those who have replicated his work "with many techniques in half-a-dozen countries"? __ REPLY: Pinker doesn't concentrate on twin studies in "How the Mind Works" - he cites five scientific papers and one popular article before reaching the unremarkable conclusion that genetic factors account for around fifty per cent of the variation in various personality attributes. There is an enormous literature on this subject independent of Bouchard (I have a small database containing 342 papers) so it's a mistake to get bogged down in anecdotes about his activities. Pinker's comment that work in behavioural genetics has been replicated "with many techniques in half-a-dozen countries" is likely to be an underestimate. My own interest in these matters is currently limited to the use to twin studies in schizophrenia in which the last three studies have put heritability in the region of 83%, with the remaining variance in liability been attributed to environmental factors not shared in common among co-twins. ______________ Ted Winslow continues: By the way, is it the case that, as they are understood within evolutionary psychology, emotional and political factors usually act to prevent cognition of obvious truths? ____ REPLY: Evolutionary psychology postulates domain-specific mechanisms which are species-specific devices underpinning our cognitive-emotional capacities. Individuals can suffer damage to these mechanisms, as in autism or blindsight, resulting in an inability to process information in the usual manner. One striking disorder that may be the result of a simple modular fault is Capgras delusion in which indviduals believe close relatives to have been replaced by exact doubles. Individuals with this disorder sometimes commit grotesquely violent acts. For example, in one recent case a man decapitated his father-in-law in order to reveal the wires and transistors. This delusion may result simply from an an excessive weighting of observational evidence in the absence of the affective input which forms a component in the recognition of a familiar face - in other words the ordinary facial recognition system has the logical structure of an AND gate. In this sense the absence of emotional input can prevent the cognition of an obvious truth. It's untrue to say that political factors need to be taken into consideration. _____________________ I don't myself believe that a "machine" - i.e. an entity conceived in accordance with scientific materialist ontological premises - is capable of consciousness let alone cognition. I wonder however how a thinking machine whose emotional and cognitive functioning could be in conflict in this way could ever "know" that what it believed to be true was in fact true. How could it sort out which of its certainties were emotional in origin and which cognitive? If it could sort this out would the emotionally rooted certainties remain certainties? ___ REPLY: As you indicate we are into the realm of personal belief here. I don't think there are any good reasons for thinking that anything other than the physical exists, so it's clear to me that physical systems are capable of consciousness and cognition, since such systems exist. Best wishes Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 13:43:54 -0700 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: clare spark Subject: Re: Objectivity (and science studies) In-Reply-To: <199808231825.LAA25281@ixmail5.ix.netcom.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" After having observed and participated (as auditor) in the history of science program at UCLA for many years (while in graduate school in history there) and having conducted archival research in the papers of some key academics who shaped that discipline, I can tell this list that the initial aims of the field were overtly antidemocratic, counter-revolutionary, and reactionary. In my view, they still are, though some adherents are rightly criticizing the institutional foundations of scientific research, without necessarily attacking scientific method itself. It is a sickening story. We are still fighting for the democratic aims of the radical Reformation and the American Revolution. Science and rationality and accountability have been and will always be the critical tools of choice for the majority, hitherto excluded from the formulation of public policy and always available as cannon fodder, killing toil, etc. Why should it surprise anyone that threatened elites, who have always, but always, held onto control of educational institutions, have not taught students about those collective intellectual and political processes that can and should curb destructive behavior? And does anyone not notice that the "mad scientist" stereotype is sub-textually the crazy Jew who thinks the world can be made better, that suffering can be alleviated, through science and technology? I would also like to say that I have not been silent about these views while at UCLA and afterwards when I had received my doctorate, specializing in antidemocratic propaganda since the seventeenth century. My objections and criticisms were met, with very few exceptions, with screaming, mockery, ridicule and the most childish behavior imaginable. But what else is new? Clare Spark, Ph.D. At 02:14 PM 8/23/98 -0400, Norman Levitt wrote: >On Sun, 23 Aug 1998, Stephen Straker wrote: > >> Dear SaC readers, >> >> I think Ian Pitchford's (and Andrew Webster's) characterization of "social >> studies of science" is too close to a caricature, even if it be granted that >> *some* social constructionists are carcicatures of themselves. >> >> The question rests ultimately on the fact of under-determination of theories >> by evidence: no finite set of observations or experimental results can >> uniquely determine a theory (or theories) which explain or predict those >> facts. (An oft-cited example: Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic theories >> of planetary motion as of, say, 1600.). If they are observationally >> equivalent, on what grounds to choose between them? Choices were made, but >> they could hardly have been grounded *just* on experiment or observation.) >> Consequently, "other things" must enter in: a Copernican preference for >> harmony or economy of explanation; a Tychonic agreement but also insisting on >> consistency with known physical "laws"; Ptolemaic preferences for their own >> notions of simplicity and adequacy. And beyond (or behind) these >> preferences perhaps more can be discerned. > >"Underdetermination" is a highly overrated theoretical tool. Part of the >problem is that the people who are eager to deploy it are so dreadfully >mathematically underpowered. Historically, even Ptolemy knew that his >theory was just an ad hoc algorithm, somewhat inconsitent with >observational evidence. "Parsimony," "elegance" & "logical economy" >are compelling evidence for explanatory schemes, and always have been. >The fact that ad hoc patches can always be affixed to an existintg theory >should not be taken to mean that theory choice, in particular, the >abandonment of a clumsy old theory for an elegant new one, is arbitrary. >What the "social constructionists" miss altogether, since, by and large, >they are mathematically incompetent, is the way in which mathematical >elegance and generality swamps the "social." Thus, the attempts to find >"social" correlates of various Newtonian notions, say, drown in their own >silliness if one has a sensitivity to the mathematical impulse that drives >the model building. > >It might be objected that appeal to "elegance" is anti-empirical or even >metaphysical. Perhaps, but so what? It certainly is empirical in the >sense that from the historical point of view, theory-building that has >been thus guided has been enormously successful in creating machinery that >is not only powerfully explanatory, but also capable of generating >utterly surprising predictions. A "locus classicus, e.g., is the >"Principia's" prediction of the precession of the Earth's axis--this, from >a theory originally generated in the search for a more economical >grounding for Kepler's Laws. > >In short, underdetermination is a philosophical curio which should be kept >on the shelf in all but a few, unrepresentative cases. > > > >> >> Why is Galileo a Copernican? At the end of long argument, I think there are >> good grounds for concluding that in the last analysis he is a Copernican >> because he judges Copernicanism to be the perfect vehicle for opposition to >> the, for him, bankrupt "philosophy of the schools". He doesn't particularly >> care about technical astronomy and its details. > >The hell he doesn't!!! > >> >> Now, it's not clear we should say that Galileo's preferences are simply >> "ideological" -- at least not in any senses that would make sense to him. >> But there are surely involved, for him, choices and preferences about matters >> that go way beyond any narrow concern with astronomical accuracy. As we all >> know, there is alot more at stake in the Copernican business. > >Galileo was a mathematician; enough said. > > >> >> All right, having gone on much more than I intended, here are two questions I >> thought I would put to the "List" as one way to set about seeing what is >> "right" about "social studenties of science". >> >> (1) What do Ian Pitchford (and others) think of S.J. Gould's account of >> things in *The Mismeasure of Man*? Is Gould a "social constructionist" as >> characterized in Pitchford's post? Is his account wrong in any important >> ways? > >It says more about the social constructioin of Gould's popular books >than anything else. But, in any case, Gould is not a social >constructionist; he is an off-the-shelf convergent realist. He has some >usefully cynical things to say about what can happen if one is not careful >to control for one's biases (a lesson that might well be learned by >Lewontin, e.g.) > >> >> (2) What do you think of C.S. Lewis's observations -- quoted below?? Is he >> a "social constructionist"? Is he fundamentally wrong in any important way? >> >> ================================= >> >> from C.S. Lewis, "Epilogue," *The Discarded Image: An Introduction to >> Medieval and Renaissance Literature* (Cambridge U.P.: 1964): >> >> "The nineteenth century still held the belief that ... we could >> 'know' the ultimate physical reality more or less as, by maps, pictures, and >> travel-books, a man can 'know' a country he has not visited; and that in both >> cases the 'truth' would be a sort of mental replica of the thing itself. >> Philosophers might have disquieting comments to make on this conception; but >> scientists and plain men did not much attend to them. >> >> "Already, to be sure, mathematics were the idiom in which many of the >> sciences spoke. But I do not think it was doubted that there was a concrete >> reality *about* which the mathematics held good; distinguishable from the >> mathematics as a heap of apples is from the process of counting them... We >> should then have through mathematics a knowledge not merely mathematical. We >> should be like the man coming to know about a foreign country without >> visiting it. He learns about the mountains from carefully studying the >> contour lines on a map. But his knowledge is not a knowledge of contour >> lines. The real knowledge is achieved when these enable him to say 'That >> would be an easy ascent', This is a dangerous precipice,' 'A would be visible >> from B', 'These woods and waters must make a pleasant valley'. In going >> beyond the contour lines to such conclusions he is (if he knows how to read a >> map) getting nearer to the reality. >> >> "It would be very different if someone said to him (and was believed) >> 'But it is the contour lines themselves that are the fullest reality you can >> get. In turning away from them to these other statements you are getting >> further from the reality, not nearer. All those ideas about "real" rocks and >> slopes and views are merely a metaphor or a parable; a *pis aller*, >> permissible as a concession to the weakness of those who can't understand >> contour lines, but misleading if they are taken literally.' >> >> "And this, if I understand the situation, is just what has now >> happened as regards the physical sciences. The mathematics are now the >> nearest to the reality we can get. Anything imaginable, even anything that >> can be manipulated by ordinary (that is, non-mathematical) conceptions, far >> from being a further truth to which mathematics were the avenue, is a mere >> analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable modern physics >> speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to >> verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as making >> 'models'... But these 'models' are not, like model ships, small-scale >> replicas of the reality. Sometimes they illustrate this or that aspect of it >> by an analogy. Sometimes they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the >> sayings of the mystics... >> >> "It would therefore be subtly misleading to say 'The medievals >> thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this'. Part >> of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, 'know what the >> universe is like' and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, >> 'like' it." >> >> [Lewis goes on to elaborate the idea that for us now] "what has been called >> 'a taste in universes' is not only pardonable but inevitable. We can no >> longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to >> truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere >> fantasy. [What Model prevails at a given time] reflects the prevalent >> psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age's >> knowledge. Hardly any battery of new evidence could have persuaded a Greek >> that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly >> any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical. >> >> [When a new Model is adopted, that] "... new Model will not be set up >> without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it >> becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most >> of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her. Here, as in the >> courts, the character of the evidence depends upon the shape of the >> examination, and a good cross-examiner can do wonders. He will not elicit >> falsehoods from an honest witness. But, in relation to the total truth in >> the witness's mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It >> determines how much of that total truth will appear and what pattern it will >> suggest." >> >> >> ================================================ >> >> best wishes, >> >> Stephen Straker > > >This is excellent evidence of the fact that Lewis was not the sort of >fellow who makes a good mathematical physicist--as if more such were >needed. It's also highly indicaative of why the poor guy got clobbered in >the famous BBC debates over science and religion in the late '40's. > >To put it bluntly, any consideration of the ontological questions at the >heart of the debates over contemporary physics needs an infinitely more >nuanced notion of how "the real" might be construed than poor Lewis is >capable of. As it happens, this requires, of the aspiring metaphysician, >the ability to navigate easily through--I hate to say it again--deep >mathematical waters. Otherwise, it's imposible to get more than the >faintest, most distant glimmering of the issues involved. > >Norm Levitt > > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 04:13:24 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Mead and Bouchard anecdotes X-cc: CHammer@aol.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I appreciate Ian's concern with getting run amuck in anedotes. But this list is Science as Culture, not the British Journal of Mathematical Psychology (once eminently edited by no other than Sir Cyril Burt.) History does involve, narration, stories, "anedotes" if you wish. This is true also of the history of science. As for philosophy of science I once heard Imre Lakatos say that "there are two methods in the philosophy of science, the method of logic and the method of gossip, and gossip is more fun." (Oops, sorry, I told an anecdote about anecdotes,--anecdote squared, meta-anecdote.) But seriously folks, talking about Freeman's motives is germane here because he did a lot of talking about Mead's motives in the press, and so did the bioanthropologists and journalists who took Freeman's side. They claimed she was just a 1920s "flapper," a kind of early Monica Lewinsky, who was biased by 1920s Boasian anthropological relativism and sexual freedom doctrine, while Freeman was the detatched, objective scientist with the God's eye view from nowhere, doing a purely objective Popperian falsification of Mead. This just ain't so. He had his ax to grind as well, and in field anthropology, as opposed to classical physics, the data and interviews are open to hermeneutic interpretation, as Ian, a fan of Sperber as am I, would grant. In the case of Bouchard, Bouchard himself his gained his fame on the basis of anecdotes. As I mentioned, he sometimes doesn't even bother to present his statistics or controls to scientific audiences, but just tells his own anecdotes about double toilet-flushing Nazi/Jewish twins and women who where seven rings and men whose spouses, dogs and streets have the same names. Thus is is relevant to mention that science Peer reviewers 1980-1990 rejected his work while Constance Holden praised it in the News and Views section of Science. That was reported by David Dixon in Nature. Ian asks for documentation of anecdotes (preferably not by left-wingers). Bouchard himself complains that NIH won't fund him in his grant application to the Pioneer Fund. Doubts about the total separateness of the Nazi/Jewish twins were raised by Leon Kamin, psychologist critic of twin studies, who found out that the California one was himself quite a story teller, and had appeared on talk shows so often he was forced to take out a California actor's union membership. He appeared not just as a Jewish/Nazi twin but as a spouse abuser and other trendy things that got you on Heraldo or Opra-type shows. Also Bazell's story about his experience as reporter is published in the New Republic, "Sins and Twins" 1987, I believe. Bazell, a mainstream NBC-TV reporter is no raving leftist. This isn't all based on word of mouth or personal communication. Ian wrote earlier <"This [incomplte] bibliography of publications by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. should assist anyone wishing to explore his work or Dusek's claim that "Bouchard successfully circumvented the peer review process through publishing in the popular media."> My point was that he gained his influence on the scientific community during the 1980-1987 period when he had tremendous popular media coverage but no peer reviewed publications (and few legitimate grants from genuinely scientific funding agencies such as NIH or NSF.) With racist Pioneer money and a brilliant media campaign as well as with help from Constance Holden in the news (but not the research article) part of Science magazine, he got across the impression to the scientific community, particular the genetic screening establishment that he was doing legitimate and (in terms of persuading the public of hereditarianism) valuable work. This itself, I believe, led to greater acceptance by peer reviewer. That is what I meant by "circumventing the peer review process." He gained his fame through the popular media, giving the appearance of having published in normal scientific outlets, and then by that part of the genetic screening university-industrial complex which desires the public to believe in its product's value to yield a key to the human essence (not merely to cure diseases), which in turn swayed the climate of opinion by making him respectableleading to more favorable views by peer reviewers. As for the Texas adoption study group, the story about the Mexican-American students paper report on Horn was reported first to Sarah Diamond by Dr. Uriarte, the teacher of the class whose paper was suppressed by the university for reporting the truth. Uriarte sent me a large packet of press clippings and correspondence, including local stuff from the Austin American Statesman and Daily Texan (the mainstream student newspaper) which I can did out of my basement. If you want more technical critiques of twin studies I recommend the article in the French popular science journal Recherche (once called the French equivalent of Scientific American, but now superior to it, with Sci. Am.'s dumbing down by Sci. Am.'s new publisher) , for July 1998 by Jon Beckwith and Joe Alper (respectively American Cancer Society Prof. of molecular biology at Harvard and physical chemist at U Mass Boston, entitled, I think "The false good ideas of twin studies." The mag. web address is http://www.larecherche.fr/ When I last checked it, the web link was screwed up for that article, and you got July 1997. They may have staightened that out by now. Kitcher's article on Science Studies was posted by them in its original English version, and I hope Beckwith's will be posted in its English original as well as the French translation. See also a Jon Beckwith, Paul Billings, Joe Alper article in English "Genetic Analysis of Human Behavior: A New Era?" in "Social Science and Medicine" 1992. There is the whole issue of how much the technical measure, heritability, the proportion of differences due (comparatively) to ennvironment and to genetics really measures heredity in the sense of popular and philosophical interest. Lewontin, of course, has written several articles on this, the "Heretability Hangup" is one, of which the briefest, simplest exposition I've seen is in a couple of page appendix to Paul Erhlich's book, "The Race Bomb" now out of print (unlike his population explosion and endangered species books, perhaps since more politically threatening to first-worlders). Leon Kamin has raised the issue of the separateness of the twins. Bouchard refuses to let Kamin see his raw data on separate environments (he published statistics of end results in the Science review article.) Sandra Scarr publically praised the quality of Bouchard's results. I assumed that she had seen his data. In fact Bouchard replied to me on SCIFRAUD in fall 1995 that he had showed that data to no-one because of concerns for protection of human subjects. But this rings hollow as lots of social science works give narrative accounts of subjects biographies without giving names, real dates, real cities, etc. Also some of the pairs of twins got tremendous media publicity, abetted by Bouchard to help recruit more twins, which certainly doesn't protect their privacy. As for Bouchard's groups numerous publications since 1987, a large number on things such as blood pressure, EEGs, EKGs etc. show that identical twins have physical similarities, not shocking to the most extreme cultural relativist. In fact I was surprised in perusing one of his early peer-reviewed publications how dis- similar EKG readings were for twins. If should have expected more similarity than in fact was found. Also his Pioneer Funding and behavior with respect to the popular media is still a fact, and raises suspicions despite his later, post-1990, peer-reviewed publications. I agree that Hiram Caton's point about Mead's denial of rape vs. Freeman's documentation of the frequency of rape is a devastating one. But note that Sanday for instance has documented the variability of rape in different societies, and characterized differences in social arrangements that make societies relatively "rape prone" and "rape free." I am not so sure about Caton's treatment of the effect Freeman's honorary chiefly status (something Freeman brags about at the beginning of the book) and on his interviews in general, in contrast to Mead's place in the society as a 23 yr. old female. Also the effects of the military base in later years. Life Magazine had an article on "Sex and Violence in Samoa" around the time of the controversy (with lots of juicey pictures of bloody noses, grubby bars, etc.) which might have something on this. I am off to Puerto Rico for a week and then to Spain to contemplate the group theoretical symmetry patterns of the Alhambra while attending the First International Ethnomathematics Conference. I will be away for two weeks, so won't be able to respond for a while. On return I shall more carefully reread Freeman's book and its critics to attempt to give further response to Caton's criticisms. On logomg on I see there's a substantial comment by Ed Remler, but I am leaving in a few minutes and cannot now devote to it the time it deserves. Best wishes. Val Dusek In a message dated 98-08-22 00:53:15 EDT, Ian writes: > Thanks to Val Dusek for forwarding some fascinating anecdotes, but I think we > are in danger of losing site of the issues. The weight of the evidence is that > Margaret Mead's study of Samoa is completely unreliable - if you take the > single fact that she described rape as "unthinkable" when in fact court > records > show it to have been the third most common offence at that time I think it's > reasonable to conclude that her report of events is not of an acceptable > standard. Stories about her motivation or that of those who have criticised her > work doesn't move us any further forward. I think we have also established > that Thomas Bouchard has published in an astonishingly wide range of peer- > reviewed journals and books with a large number of collaborators. To dismiss his >work, > and that of Freeman, Caton etc. on the basis of another set of (unreferenced) > anecdotes is meaningless. Are we to assume that only work produced by left- > wing > ideologues is authoritative? Do anecdotes count as evidence only when they > suggest that a scientist doesn't have a set of approved left-wing prejudices? > > Best wishes > > Ian ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 06:25:35 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Mead and Bouchard anecdotes X-cc: louisfors@aol.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Valdusek@AOL.COM wrote: > > I appreciate Ian's concern with getting run amuck in anedotes. But this list > is Science as Culture, not the British Journal of Mathematical Psychology > (once eminently edited by no other than Sir Cyril Burt.) History does > involve, narration, stories, "anedotes" if you wish. This is true also of the > history of science. As for philosophy of science I once heard Imre Lakatos say > that "there are two methods in the philosophy of science, the method of logic > and the method of gossip, and gossip is more fun." (Oops, sorry, I told an > anecdote about anecdotes,--anecdote squared, meta-anecdote.) But seriously > folks, talking about Freeman's motives is germane here because he did a lot of > talking about Mead's motives in the press, and so did the bioanthropologists > and journalists who took Freeman's side. They claimed she was just a 1920s > "flapper," a kind of early Monica Lewinsky, who was biased by 1920s Boasian > anthropological relativism and sexual freedom doctrine, while Freeman was the > detatched, objective scientist with the God's eye view from nowhere, doing a > purely objective Popperian falsification of Mead. This just ain't so. He had > his ax to grind as well, and in field anthropology, as opposed to classical > physics, the data and interviews are open to hermeneutic interpretation, as > Ian, a fan of Sperber as am I, would grant. [snip] Two points: (1) Why do human beings *do* science? Because it's *true*? I doubt it. Susanne Langer, in _Philosophy in a New Key_, wrote that science denudes life of meaning for most people ("the disenchantment of the world"), *and* that one of the reasons scientists find meaning in this meaning-destroying activity is that part of the *meaning* it destroys is the structure of repressive social institutions (e.g., The Roman Catholic Church) which have hurt them and the people they admire. In anything a person does, they are following out some story they have told themselves and which *appeals* to them (there can be no journey -- as opposed to drifting in a daze -- without *some* itinerary). The search for truth -- even in its, in my opinion, most noble Husserlian version -- *is* *a* story. Nazism was a story. Galileo looking through the telescope whereas his detractors refused to is a story (What else is "Eppus si move"?). I think the issue is how *rich* (or "thin"), how ennobling (or debasing), etc. our stories are. In this regard, Paolo Freire's _The Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ is a powerful pedagogical theory (and an inspiring story...).... (2) Re Samoa. I seem to recall that Mead's sometime husband, Gregory Bateson, said [drawing from my *very poor* memory...]: that the Samoan culture achieved an unusually high level of peace at the price of raising children in an even more than usually oppressively conformist-pressuring way (the material is in _Steps to an Ecology of Mind_). I don't know what Mead herself said, but clearly there was "critical thinking" on this issue "in the family", and not just among outsiders who may have felt holier-than-Margaret. \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 12:12:28 +0100 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Human Nature Subject: Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lifelines : Biology Beyond Determinism by Steven Rose http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195120353/darwinanddarwini/ Chapter One: Biology, Freedom, Determinism now available online at http://www.human-nature.com/books/lifelines.html "But to study, to interpret, to understand, to explain and to predict? These are the tasks of myth-makers, magicians and, above all today, of scientists, of biologists. I am of this last category. We seek not to lose the visions provided by writers and artists, but to add to them new visions which come from the ways of knowing that biology, the science of life, opens up. These ways can show beauty also below the surface of things: in the scanning electron microscope's view of the eye of a bluebottle as much as in the flowering of a camellia; in the biochemical mechanisms that generate usable energy in the minuscule sausage-shaped mitochondria that inhabit each of our body cells, as much as in the flowing muscles of the athlete who exploits these mechanisms. How are we to understand these multitudes of organisms, these orders-of-magnitude differences in space and time encompassed by the common definition of living forms? Humans are like, yet unlike, any other species on Earth. We have had to learn to adapt to, domesticate, subordinate, protect ourselves from or exist harmoniously with a goodly proportion of the other creatures with which we share our planet. And in doing so, to make theories about them. Every society that anthropologists have studied has developed its own theories and legends to account for life and our place within it, to interpret the great transitions that characterize our existence; the creation of new life at birth and its termination at death. In most societies' creation myths, a deity imposes order upon the confused mass of struggling life. Although our own society is no exception, we now phrase things differently, claiming to have transcended myth and replaced it with secure knowledge. For the last three hundred years, Western societies have built on and transcended their own creation myths by means of scientia, the organized investigation of the universe, made possible within the rules and by the experimental methods of natural science, and with the aid of powerful instruments designed to extend the human senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and sound." Human-Nature.com http://www.human-nature.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 12:13:25 +0100 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Human Nature Subject: How the Mind Works MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393045358/darwinanddarwini/ Chapter One: Standard Equipment Now available online at http://www.human-nature.com/books/mind.html "This is the best book ever written on the human mind. Here Darwin meets Turing - the theories of evolution and computation - and Steven Pinker effects the introduction with penetrating clarity, superb writing, and delicious wit. The science is authroitative, the style accessible, and the range astonishing. Reading this book and learning about the mind of our species, I was proud to be an owner of both." Helena Cronin, Author of The Ant and the Peacock Human-Nature.com http://www.human-nature.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 08:40:35 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Re: Mead and Bouchard anecdotes In-Reply-To: <199808240813.EAA01032@u2.farm.idt.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Mon, 24 Aug 1998 Valdusek@AOL.COM wrote: > I appreciate Ian's concern with getting run amuck in anedotes. But this list > is Science as Culture, not the British Journal of Mathematical Psychology > (once eminently edited by no other than Sir Cyril Burt.) History does > involve, narration, stories, "anedotes" if you wish. This is true also of the > history of science. As for philosophy of science I once heard Imre Lakatos say > that "there are two methods in the philosophy of science, the method of logic > and the method of gossip, and gossip is more fun." etc. I'm afraid Val rather misses the point of Freeman's (as yet uncontradicted) work on Mead. Freeman doesn't portray her as particularly light-minded, but as a theorist determined to vindicate the ideas of her mentor, Boas. There is less malice in Freeman on Boas than in Dusek on any number of people. Where Freeman does find amazing light-mindedness is in the community of anthropologists and sociologists, at least those who inclined to the left on sexual, as well as economic, matters, and who were determined to affirm the near-infinite plasticity of human nature as a function of social circumstance. It is these folk who used a single study--Mead's "Coming of Age in Somoa,"--as the "experimentum crucis" without ever inquiring into the methodological and evidential sufficiency of Mead's work, let alone trying to replicate it in Samoa or elsewhere. It became the central holy text of cultural determinism in book after book and was inevitably fed to generations of freshmen as incontrovertible proof that sexual jealousy and anxiety are culture-specific. It was, in other words, a continuation of the recurrent Western myth of theSouth Sea Island sexual paradise, as in Melville's "Typee" and countless other works of fiction and travellers tales, but with a solemn sociological spin. All unknowing, the deification of Mead was a consummate piece of cultural imperialism. This is a phenomenon that has often been replicated in academic life, thogh not often with the ubiquity and duribility of the mood that made "Coming of Age" a classic. The uncritical worship of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is another example (though the central text is much weightier); Kuhn was elevated into an incontrovertible sage by people who couldn't even understand the content of the "revolutions" he characterized, let alone trace out the intellectual lives of the people who made and championed those revolutions to check whether Kuhn's characterization held up under scrutiny. Thus Kuhn gets far more attention than, say, Holton's much more subtle and circumstantial work on the same themes. This is partly because Holton is so much more difficult to read for "amateurs"--you have to grasp the physics and mathematics. But it is principally because Kuhn, especially when vulgarized, turns into a useful stick with which to beat the idea that science makes progress and generates cumulaative knowledge, something that a generation of thoroughly disoriented "scholars" have been catchised into taking on faith. Kuhn has some interesting things to say--that is, he raises interesting questions and opens room for some useful discussions and lines of research (some of which refute him strongly)--but to make him the sage of a generation is ridiculous. A similar phenomenon is to be observed in, say, Shapin/Schaffer's "Leviathan" book, a highly Procrustean work of cut-and-paste "history" that completely obliterates context and disguises the motivations aqnd personalities of its principal players in order to make a minor squabble bear the weight of an enormously overwrought thesis. Thus, the book is solemnly accepted in sociological circles and among "Science studies" postulants as definitive "evidence" that the methodology of science, as well as content, is merely a refraction of cultural prejudices and social interests. People who have only the vaguest idea, if that, why "circle squaring," "angle trisection" and "cube duplication" are bywords for folly and loony self-deception, have no hesitation in citing "Leviathan.." as definitive authority for notions as crazy as Hobbes's "mathematics." We find, for instance, such as Steve Fuller--someone who has never evinced the slightest sign of being able to comprehend mathematics or physics or indeeed any science beyond the most rudimentary level--declaring that Shapin and Schaffer have "proved" that western physics would have turned out entirely differently if only the balance-of-power between Hobbes and the Royal Society been slightly different. It gets worse. Note, for instance, the degree to which the inanities of Harding or Latour have similarly been canonized as vital insights into the nature of science. But the grandmama of all such apotheoses is the reception of "Coming of Age.." If Val Dusek is so concerned about the tendency to make holy writ of questionable work because it is ideologially congenial, let him carefully ponder that example, and his own tendency to circle the wagons around Mead's reputation. Norm Levitt ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 18:13:58 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: How the Mind Works MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Human Nature wrote: > > How the Mind Works > by Steven Pinker > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393045358/darwinanddarwini/ > > Chapter One: Standard Equipment > Now available online at > http://www.human-nature.com/books/mind.html > > "This is the best book ever written on the human mind. Here Darwin meets > Turing - the theories of evolution and computation [snip] And do Darwin and Turing meet Husserl there, too? If *that's* the case, then the book might indeed be well worth reading. For there are persons who believe the best book ever written on the human mind comes from the tradition of critical self-reflection upon and interpretation of the first-person experiential act of scientific praxis (phenomenology and hermeneutics), not happenstance consequences of particular such acts turned toward the object domains of mathematics and zoology.. \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 16:33:12 +1000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: melanie lazarow Subject: nature? nuture? left? right? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Not all ideas are equal John Pilger in an important intervention about Clinton's attack on Sudan and Afghanistan said "It is time to stop "sniggering at the distractions of this rampant power and to recognise the truth about it, and to speak out". The same applies to any discussion of genetically determined behavior. The fact that this nature/nurture debate has brought more input to this list than any for quite some time says something about political sensitivities. (As an aside congratulations to Jennifer Wiebe, 17, and Tessa Lowinger 16, the high-school students who were instrumental in leading the organizing drive to give us the first unionized MacDonalds in North America.) Was their capacity to stand up for themselves and their fellow teenage workers genetically determined. NO. Are individual sentiments, thoughts, ideas biologically determined? NO. But there is much at stake in this debate. And keeping power in the "right" hands is central. This is not just a scientifically neutral discussion. The outcome has implications for women, workers, catagorized "schizophrenics", blacks, aboriginies Jews, Asians etc. If the genetic determinists are right, then what can we(empowered controllers) do but observe and "sympathize". Women are determined by their genetic make up. They are genetically *kinder* *softer* more *emotional*. Then it is "natural' that they get lower wages, stay at home and look after kids etc. There is an embedded ness of science in politics, however, we need to defend science against religion and superstition as better methodology. If things were as they appeared we would not need science. The obvious difficulty with biological determinism is that there are important features of human beings that make it impossible to see them as just vehicles for their genes' reproductive strategies. Innovation among other species typically takes the form of genetic mutation. A new adaptation which equips the organisms in question to cope better with their environment is a result of a random change in DNA codings. But humans' peculiar intellectual powers give them a far greater degree of flexibility. They can imagine new ways of acting on the world that depend on no genetic mutation but merely require some alteration of technology or of social organisation. Moreover, an innovation, once made, can be passed on by cultural means=ADour possession of language allows us to communicate new ideas not merely directly but, by means of oral tradition or writing, from one generation to another, thus ensuring that innovations become a permanent possession of the species, without any genetic change. Dennett is perfectly well aware of these facts, and of their implication=ADthat humans, thanks to their intellectual and linguistic powers (and, closely connected with these, their ability to co-operate socially through labour), can develop independently of their biological structures. This is where memes come in. They serve to patch up a potentially disastrous gap in sociobiology's genetic determinism by showing human cultural development operates in precisely the same way as biological evolution. Or rather they would play this role if the concept of the meme were defensible. But it isn't. To understand mind and consciousness as evolutionary in its wide application i.e the capacity to think wonder etc. is one thing. To get down to individual and cultural differences in evolutionary terms is eugenic. It was an achievement that with the end of the 2nd world war genetic and racist determinants of behavior were thoroughly discredited. It is not surprising that their modern more sanitized form is being taken up. Congratulations to Val Dusak for bravely standing up against the mainstream. Melanie Lazarow Information Literacy Librarian University of Melbourne Parkville Victoria 3052 Australia *************************************************** Phone 61 3 9344 5373 Fax 61 3 9348 1142 Email: m.lazarow@lib.unimelb.edu.au He who is yet alive, let him not say, Never. Brecht ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 16:33:46 +0800 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Fang Zaiqing Subject: Re: paper on the life and work of W. H. R. Rivers, anthropoligist, psychologist and psychiatrist (1864-1922) In-Reply-To: <9808211417.AA11536@net.tsinghua.edu.cn> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Please don't send any message to this address. I will leave this address for at least six months. Thanks. Zaiqing Fang On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Robert Maxwell Young wrote: > http://www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/whittle.html > I have added another paper to the Science as Culture web site concerned > with he 1898 Torres Strait Anthropological Expedition: > Paul Whittle, 'W. H. R. RIVERS: A FOUNDING FATHER WORTH REMEMBERING' > This is a talk given to the Zangwill Club at the Department of Experimental > Psychology, University of Cambridge. It provides an overview of the work > and influence of W.H.R. Rivers, anthropologist, psychologist and > psychiatrist, who has recently come to public attention in the wake of the > Regeneration trilogy of novels by Pat Barker, one of which won the > Booker Prize. > It complements two other papers from the recent conference aat St. Johns > College, Cambridge, on the Torres Strait Expedition: > Keith Hart, 'The place of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition > to the Torres Straits (CAETS) in the history of British social > anthropology' > Barbara Saunders, 'Revisiting Basic Colour Terms'|, plus a list of Barbara > Saunders' publications | > > > a > > __________________________________________ > In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young > Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk > 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 > 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for > Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and > writings: > http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html > Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ > 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 09:53:29 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Re: paper on the life and work of W. H. R. Rivers, anthropoligist, psychologist and psychiatrist (1864-1922) In-Reply-To: <904034125.1027079.0@maelstrom.stjohns.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To unsbscribe from science-as-culture Send a message to listserv@maelstrom.stjohns.edu Body of message:: unsubscribe science-as-culture >Please don't send any message to this address. I will leave this address >for at least six months. >Thanks. >Zaiqing Fang > >On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Robert Maxwell Young wrote: > >> http://www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/whittle.html >> I have added another paper to the Science as Culture web site concerned >> with he 1898 Torres Strait Anthropological Expedition: >> Paul Whittle, 'W. H. R. RIVERS: A FOUNDING FATHER WORTH REMEMBERING' >> This is a talk given to the Zangwill Club at the Department of Experimental >> Psychology, University of Cambridge. It provides an overview of the work >> and influence of W.H.R. Rivers, anthropologist, psychologist and >> psychiatrist, who has recently come to public attention in the wake of the >> Regeneration trilogy of novels by Pat Barker, one of which won the >> Booker Prize. >> It complements two other papers from the recent conference aat St. Johns >> College, Cambridge, on the Torres Strait Expedition: >> Keith Hart, 'The place of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition >> to the Torres Straits (CAETS) in the history of British social >> anthropology' >> Barbara Saunders, 'Revisiting Basic Colour Terms'|, plus a list of Barbara >> Saunders' publications | >> >> >> a >> >> __________________________________________ >> In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob >>Young >> Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk >> 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 >> 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for >> Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and >> writings: >> http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html >> Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ >> 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus >> __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 13:57:57 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: nature? nuture? left? right? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Melanie Lazarow wrote: John Pilger in an important intervention about Clinton's attack on Sudan and Afghanistan said "It is time to stop "sniggering at the distractions of this rampant power and to recognise the truth about it, and to speak out". The same applies to any discussion of genetically determined behavior. ____ REPLY: There is no such thing as "genetically determined behaviour". If there were biology would not need the two basic concepts of "genotype" and "phenotype" - the genotype is the particular alleles at specified loci present in an individual (the genetic constitution), whereas the phenotype is the observable characteristics of an organism as determined by the interaction of its genotype and its environment. For an evolutionary cogntive scientist language is a good example of a "genetically determined" characteristic, but no one learns "language" - only a particular language, given the appropriate cognitive predisposition and the appropriate socio-cultural milieu at the appropriate moment in ontogeny. The variation in language is itself good evidence for an evolved universal grammar underlying all languages. Talk of rigid genetic determinism or of variation as being proof that genetic factors are not relevant just mystifies evolutionary theorists. __________________ Congratulations to Val Dusek for bravely standing up against the mainstream. REPLY: And to hell with the truth? I think professional reputations, the validity of entire fields of knowledge, and the possibility of knowledge untainted by ideology is too important for that. Or do we just abandon everything in the blind pursiut of ideological ends in every sphere of human activity? Best wishes Ian Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 14:44:52 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Lundy Braun Subject: Re: nature? nuture? left? right? In-Reply-To: <199808250635.CAA05620@listserv.brown.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Not all ideas are equal > >John Pilger in an important intervention about Clinton's attack on Sudan >and Afghanistan said "It is time to stop "sniggering at the distractions >of this rampant power and to recognise the truth about it, and to speak >out". The same applies to any discussion of genetically determined behavior. > >The fact that this nature/nurture debate has brought more input to this list >than any for quite some time says something about political sensitivities. > >(As an aside congratulations to Jennifer Wiebe, 17, and Tessa Lowinger 16, >the high-school students who were instrumental in leading the organizing >drive to give us the first unionized MacDonalds in North America.) > >Was their capacity to stand up for themselves and their fellow teenage >workers genetically determined. NO. > >Are individual sentiments, thoughts, ideas biologically determined? NO. > >But there is much at stake in this debate. And keeping power in the "right" >hands is central. > > This is not just a scientifically neutral discussion. The outcome has >implications for women, workers, catagorized "schizophrenics", blacks, >aboriginies Jews, Asians etc. > >If the genetic determinists are right, then what can we(empowered >controllers) do but observe and "sympathize". Women are determined by their >genetic make up. They are genetically *kinder* *softer* more *emotional*. >Then it is "natural' that they get lower wages, stay at home and look after >kids etc. > >There is an embedded ness of science in politics, however, we need to >defend science against religion and superstition as better methodology. If >things were as they appeared we would not need science. > >The obvious difficulty with biological determinism is that there are >important features of human beings that make it impossible to see them as >just vehicles for their genes' reproductive strategies. Innovation among >other species typically takes the form of genetic mutation. A new >adaptation which equips the organisms in question to cope better with their >environment is a result of a random change in DNA codings. But humans' >peculiar intellectual powers give them a far greater degree of flexibility. >They can imagine new ways of acting on the world that depend on no >genetic mutation but merely require some alteration of technology or of >social organisation. Moreover, an innovation, once made, can be passed on >by cultural means=ADour possession of language allows us to communicate new >ideas not merely directly but, by means of oral tradition or writing, from >one generation to another, thus ensuring that innovations become a >permanent possession of the species, without any genetic change. Dennett is >perfectly well aware of these facts, and of their implication=ADthat humans, >thanks to their intellectual and linguistic powers (and, closely connected >with these, their ability to co-operate socially through labour), can >develop independently of their biological structures. > >This is where memes come in. They serve to patch up a potentially >disastrous gap in sociobiology's genetic determinism by showing human >cultural development operates in precisely the same way as biological >evolution. Or rather they would play this role if the concept of the meme >were defensible. But it isn't. > >To understand mind and consciousness as evolutionary in its wide >application i.e the capacity to think wonder etc. is one thing. To get down >to individual and cultural differences in evolutionary terms is eugenic. It >was an achievement that with the end of the 2nd world war genetic and >racist determinants of behavior were thoroughly discredited. It is not >surprising that their modern more sanitized form is being taken up. > >Congratulations to Val Dusak for bravely standing up against the mainstream. > >Melanie Lazarow >Information Literacy Librarian >University of Melbourne >Parkville Victoria 3052 Australia >*************************************************** >Phone 61 3 9344 5373 >Fax 61 3 9348 1142 >Email: m.lazarow@lib.unimelb.edu.au > >He who is yet alive, let him not say, Never. Brecht ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 09:33:33 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Jimmy Carter for President!!! MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII August 26, 1998 Who's Afraid of Genetic Engineering? By JIMMY CARTER A TLANTA -- I magine a country placing such rigid restrictions on imports that people could not get vaccines and insulin. And imagine those same restrictions being placed on food products as well as on laundry detergent and paper. As far-fetched as it sounds, many developing countries and some industrialized ones may do just that early next year. They are being misled into thinking that genetically modified organisms, everything from seeds to livestock, and products made from them are potential threats to the public health and the environment. ______________________________________________________________ New global rules may leave food rotting on the dock. ______________________________________________________________ The new import proposals are being drafted under the auspices of the biodiversity treaty, an agreement signed by 168 nations at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The treaty's main goal is to protect plants and animals from extinction. In 1996, nations ratifying the treaty asked an ad hoc team to determine whether genetically modified organisms could threaten biodiversity. Under pressure from environmentalists, and with no supporting data, the team decided that any such organism could potentially eliminate native plants and animals. The team, whose members mainly come from environmental agencies in more than 100 different governments, should complete its work within six months and present its final recommendation to all the nations (the United States is not among them) that ratified the treaty. If approved, these regulations would be included in a binding international agreement early next year. But the team has exceeded its mandate. Instead of limiting the agreement to genetic modifications that might threaten biodiversity, the members are also pushing to regulate shipments of all genetically modified organisms and the products made from them. This means that grain, fresh produce, vaccines, medicines, breakfast cereals, wine, vitamins -- the list is endless -- would require written approval by the importing nation before they could leave the dock. This approval could take months. Meanwhile, barge costs would mount and vaccines and food would spoil. How could regulations intended to protect species and conserve their genes have gotten so far off track? The main cause is anti-biotechnology environmental groups that exaggerate the risks of genetically modified organisms and ignore their benefits. Anti-biotechnology activists argue that genetic engineering is so new that its effects on the environment can't be predicted. This is misleading. In fact, for hundreds of years virtually all food has been improved genetically by plant breeders. Genetically altered antibiotics, vaccines and vitamins have improved our health, while enzyme-containing detergents and oil-eating bacteria have helped to protect the environment. In the past 40 years, farmers worldwide have genetically modified crops to be more nutritious as well as resistant to insects, diseases and herbicides. Scientific techniques developed in the 1980's and commonly referred to as genetic engineering allow us to give plants additional useful genes. Genetically engineered cotton, corn and soybean seeds became available in the United States in 1996, including those planted on my family farm. This growing season, more than one-third of American soybeans and one-fourth of our corn will be genetically modified. The number of acres devoted to genetically engineered crops in Argentina, Canada, Mexico and Australia increased tenfold from 1996 to 1997. The risks of modern genetic engineering have been studied by technical experts at the National Academy of Sciences and World Bank. They concluded that we can predict the environmental effects by reviewing past experiences with those plants and animals produced through selective breeding. None of these products of selective breeding have harmed either the environment or biodiversity. And their benefits are legion. By increasing crop yields, genetically modified organisms reduce the constant need to clear more land for growing food. Seeds designed to resist drought and pests are especially useful in tropical countries, where crop losses are often severe. Already, scientists in industrialized nations are working with individuals in developing countries to increase yields of staple crops, to improve the quality of current exports and to diversify economies by creating exports like genetically improved palm oil, which may someday replace gasoline. Other genetically modified organisms covered by the proposed regulations are essential research tools in medical, agricultural and environmental science. If imports like these are regulated unnecessarily, the real losers will be the developing nations. Instead of reaping the benefits of decades of discovery and research, people from Africa and Southeast Asia will remain prisoners of outdated technology. Their countries could suffer greatly for years to come. It is crucial that they reject the propaganda of extremist groups before it is too late. Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, is chairman of the nonprofit Carter Center. _________________________________________________________________ Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:16:16 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [2] From Thomas Bouchard MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I have for a while now refused to get into situations were I am asked confirm or deny facts reported by the twins to the press. This could put me in violation of our confidentiality agreements. Of course if the twins said something to the press and I know they said it and it was published, I have been willing to confirm this fact by supplying the reference to the newspaper story. The rules on these matters have tightened up considerably just since our study began and I am much more cautious today then I was previously. As for publication in peer reviewed journals, as pointed out above, anyone can write or E-mail me for a list of our publications and see where we have published. Sentence 5. Yes this is true. Most papers submitted to Science are rejected. Most active scientists experience numerous rejections, it goes with the territory. I do recall that at the time of submission our sample size was still quite small and the reviewers did not fail to comment on that fact. The twins in our study did not fall out of the blue. Accumulating our sample (a process we are still engaged in) has taken many years of work. In any event if having been rejected by Science disqualifies a study from being published elsewhere, a lot of laboratories in this country would have to shut down. Am I missing Dusek's point? The reader might note that had we published earlier with very small sample sizes it is likely (near certain) that we would have been subjected to criticism for this fact. Since our reared apart monozygotic and dizygotic samples are small, whenever possible we include other kinships (often twins reared together and consisting of large samples). The findings from monozygotic and dizygotic twins reared together could either refute or confirm the reared apart data (Popperian falsifiability). Some examples are (Betsworth, Bouchard, Cooper, Grotevant, Hansen, Scarr, et al., 1993; Hanson, McGue, Roitman-Johnson, Segal, Bouchard, & Blumenthal, 1991; Lykken, Bouchard, McGue, & Tellegen, 1993; Lykken, Iacono, Haroian, McGue, & Bouchard, 1988; Michalowicz, Aeppli, Kuba, Bereuter, Conry, Segal, et al., 1991a; Michalowicz, Aeppli, Virag, Klump, Hinrichs, Segal, et al., 1991b; Tellegen, Lykken, Bouchard, Wilcox, Segal, & Rich, 1988). Some of our findings do depend only on the twins reared apart. Such findings are therefore easily subject to refutation via the collection of additional empirical evidence. We welcome such studies (Bouchard, Arvey, Keller, & Segal, 1992). I do not see the relevance of news reports by Constance Holden. I might, however, note that she consulted with other researchers and traveled to Minnesota to observe a pair of twins undergo an assessment (with their permission). She also interviewed many members of the assessment team. Sentence 6. As anyone will note who has bothered to look at the credits at the end of our publications we did receive an NSF grant. We have also been funded by other peer reviewed sources. It is not difficult to understand why many standard agencies have been hesitant to fund MISTRA. We simply have never been able to assert with any confidence that we would locate any twins! This is one reason most of our funding has come from private foundations; they can take a greater risk. For those who have not examined any of our publications the study was initially funded by the University of Minnesota Graduate School. We have also obtained funding from The Seaver Institute, the Koch Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. Parts of MISTRA are currently funded by NIH (Periodontal Disease) and DHHS (Energy Regulation). We have also been funded by the Pioneer Fund, and they are acknowledged on all of the relevant papers. We make no apologies for this funding nor do we feel we have to. In addition, we are not responsible for anything else that they do. We will assert that most of the things claimed about the Pioneer Fund are grossly misleading at best, and are often simply untrue. We can assert that in their dealings with us they have been completely hands off and have never suggested what to study or what to publish. Our research program has been free of any constraints regarding study content or what to publish. The University of Minnesota requires adherence to such a policy and we adhere to it. We would not take funds from any source that restricted our freedom to publish our findings in whatever way we saw fit. Let me also repeat that when ever possible we compare our data with data gathered on twins reared together drawn from the Minnesota Twin Family Registry (Lykken, Bouchard, McGue, & Tellegen, 1990). That project has been supported by the National Institute of Health. We don't always use twins reared together from Minnesota for our comparison group. Our EEG data was analyzed in Zurich and compared to Swiss twins (Stassen, Lykken, & Bomben, 1988a; Stassen, Lykken, Propping, & Bomben, 1988b) and job satisfaction data with a national sample (Arvey, McCall, Bouchard, & Taubman, 1994). Sentence 7. We are pleased to find that our research has become respectable. We did not know that it had not been respectable previously. Or is Dusek trying to create an implication? I am surprised that Dusek knows why our work was accepted in Science, apparently he is able to read minds. Somehow or other we have gone within a few sentences from - obviously the research is bad as it has been refused publication in Science - to - the research is bad because it proves something Dusek does not like and has been published in Science. Again, am I missing something? What is the logic here? We did indeed publish some findings regarding genetic influences on social attitudes, confirming a finding previously published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Martin, Eaves, Heath, Jardine, Feingold, & Eysenck, 1986) and cited in our paper. We wish we could take credit for discovering this interesting finding but alas we cannot. Our even more interesting finding, genetic influence on individual differences in religiousness, was published in a peer review journal (Waller, Kojetin, Bouchard, Lykken, & Tellegen, 1990) prior to inclusion in the Science paper. I have, however, been unable to locate any paper that asserts that street names of residence are largely inherited. Perhaps this is a word processing error? I am also pleased to hear that Dusek thinks our work has been helpful in supporting publicity for the Human Genome Project, but I am afraid that the truth is that the Human Genome Project does not need any help from us. Sentence 8. We do not allege anything regarding Burt. Anyone who has bothered to look at our paper in Science (Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, 1990) will see that in Table 2 we compared our work to Newman, Freeman and Holzinger (Newman, et al., 1937), Juel-Nielsen (Juel-Nielsen, 1980), and Shields (Shields, 1962) but not Burt. A footnote indicates that Burt's figure falls within the range of these findings (four studies). We point out that his findings are questionable and have been omitted (our first footnote). We later cite both Hearnshaw (Hernshaw, 1979) and Joynson (Joynson, 1990), the two major books on the topic that had been published up to that date. It seemed mandatory to us to provide a citation to the Burt affair and had we not referred to it I am sure Dusek would have been the first to point out the omission. Again, you are dammed if you do and dammed if you don't (a colleague of mine in the law school is looking for the name of this sort of evidence - it works in either direction and is therefore uninformative (self-nullifying?) but it is virtually always brought to bear. Does any one know what it is called?). Since Dusek has raised the topic of replication one wonders why he does not tell the reader that the MZA findings reported in our Science paper, concerning the heritability of IQ, have now been replicated in an sample of MZA's by the Swedish Adoption Study of Aging (Pedersen, Plomin, Nesselroade, & McClearn, 1992).Their sample was selected in an entirely different manner and is older. He could also tell us that they obtained the same results using a twin reared together sample and that stability in IQ over a three year period appears to be genetically mediated (Plomin, Pedersen, Lichtenstein, & McClearn, 1994). Similar results have now been reported for a Minnesota sample of twins reared together and they have been compared to the Swedish twins reared together (Finkel, Pedersen, McGue, & McClearn, 1995). The Texas Adoption Study also has a paper in press reporting heritabilities in the same range based on an adult sample that does not include any twins [Loehlin, in press #1499]. Teasedale and Owens (Teasdale & Owen, 1984) also reported higher IQ heritabilities, based on full and half-siblings reared apart, than the MZA studies. They also found no similarity for unrelated individuals reared together. These studies all utilized better sampling strategies than MISTRA. Perhaps these findings are not consistent with Dusek's thesis so they are better omitted. A review of our publications will show that contrary to the impression created by our critics MISTRA is mostly about human characteristics other than IQ. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:17:25 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [3] From Thomas Bouchard MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Posting # 2 by Dusek. Dated Sunday Oct 1995, 14:58:12 -0400. Subject Gross on Bouchard. I only reproduce the first paragraph here as the remainder of the posting does not have anything to do with me. ________________________________ Paul R. Gross replies to my raising issues about the Minnesota Twin Project Bouchard's misrepresentation of publication status, misrepresenting separateness of twins allegedly reared apart, encouraging occultist and parapsychological claims about twins, etc., and being supported by the Pioneer Fund, which has racist and neo-Nazi connections by -- a ringing defense of Sandra Scarr. This is a red herring. I didn't say Scarr did anything wrong. I suppose I should reply in kind by an indignant defence of St. Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa, but this would be equally irrelevant. All I said is that the smoking gun is not available because Bouchard, though willing to show some of his data to Scarr won't show it to critics such as Leon Kamin, etc. I think Scarr is totally sincere and a rigorous researcher. (However, since Gross raises this issue, my one encounter with her suggested that she is naive and dogmatic about the --More-- nature-nurture debate. _________________________________ I will not reply to this posting on a sentence by sentence basis because it simply would be redundant with the previous reply. Unfortunately I fear that Dusek's constant guilt by association tactics (neo-Nazi, racist, occultist, etc.) will continue to do the work they were intended to do no matter how much we believe we can rationally discount them, so I simply point this fact out to the reader. Dusek's claim that I have shown some of our data to Sandra Scarr. I am not sure what he is talking about here. The only possibility that I am aware of is that Scarr, Weinberg, Hansen and I had a jointly funded project by the University of Minnesota Graduate School and a graduate student in the counseling program here at Minnesota carried out her dissertation using data from eight different kinship groups including data from MISTRA and the Scarr and Weinberg adoption study. That dissertation has now been published (Betsworth, et al., 1993). Other than that collaborative project we have not shared data with Sandra Scarr. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - -------------- Posting #3. I do not have the date and time on this posting. The following is Dusek's posting. _______________ In response to two inquiries here is some more information on the Bouchard Minnesota Twin Project and some reflections on whether there should be a suspicion of fraud or data massaging. There is a penumbra of suspicious circumstances around Bouchard's study. These included 1.) Bouchard's years-long misrepresentation of the publication status of his study to reporters. (See "Twins and Sins" New Republic, 1987, for one reporter, the NBC News Science correspondent, who learned he had been misled.) 2.) Bouchard's funding source for his first decade, which was the Pioneer Fund, which funded Schockley, anti bussing activists, anti-immigrant activities and neo-Nazis, and which originally had an explicitly racist mission statement (recently changed, long since Bouchard sought and gained their funding). True, biased funding sources don't prove research is --More-- fraudulent, there was accurate Nazi science on how people react to freezing water (recently used at U. of Minn.), and excellent Nazi physical science, but the fact that NIH and NSF reviewers rejected funding the project until recent years suggests some inadequacies. ( Bouchard blames this on "commies.") 3.) Bouchard's anecdotes about twins fed to the media have been shown in a number of cases to be stretching the truth or misrepresentations. In the case of the Jew & Nazi Twins, though raised physically apart they were raised by two close branches of the same family with similar German customs (even though one group emigrated to the Caribbean) It was claimed they never communicated, but their wives kept up a correspondence. They were claimed never to have spoken, but they did meet. The fact that one spoke Yiddish and the other German did not preclude communication, as was claimed, given the overlap of those spoke languages. The one who lives in the US is a member of the actor's union, because he has appeared on TV talk shows so often, not only as a twin, but as a wife-beater, pervert, etc., etc. 4.) Bouchard has lent credence to parapsychological claims about his twins, both in a popular book about twins and in his appearance on the TV show "Unsolved Mysteries," claiming the paranormal communications between twins are "b5.) Bouchard has misrepresented his ow n vita in minor ways. ______________________________________________ Again I will not reply to this posting on a sentence by sentence basis because it simply would be redundant with the previous replies. Regarding his point 1, Dusek now repeats his assertion that there has been a years-long misrepresentation of the publication status of our study to reporters. The New Republic article cited by Dusek in support of this claim was written by Robert Bazell the science correspondent for NBC news. While I do not agree with everything in the article I thought it was responsibly written. It does not support Dusek's claims. If anyone would like a copy drop me an E-mail message I will mail or FAX a copy immediately. You will note that the specific questions Bazell raised regarding selective placement and contact were specifically addressed in our Science article (Table 3.). Regarding point 2. I repeat the comment I made regarding the previous posting. "Unfortunately I fear that Dusek's constant guilt by association tactics (neo-Nazi, racist, occultist, etc.) will continue to do the work they were intended to do no matter how much we believe we can rationally discount them, so I simply point this fact out to the reader." Regarding point 3. Dusek accuses me of stretching the truth. As far as I can recall none of these assertions are true but they are such a mishmash that it is difficult to know what I am really being accused of. These twins have told their own stories to a number of newspapers a number of times, and I am sure that is where Dusek obtained his information. Dusek's name calling vis-a-vis one of the twins "as a wifebeater, pervert, etc., etc.," gives one a good sense of why the IRB's require that we keep out findings about specific individuals confidential. Just so there is no misunderstanding, Dusk has gathered this material from a story based on an interview with one of the twins published in the Los Angeles Times. It did not come from MISTRA. Dusek asserts that I have misrepresented my vita in minor ways. I take this as a serious charge. The evidence should be reported immediately to the chairperson of my department; Prof. Mark Snyder, Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Elliott Hall, 75 East River Rd. Minneapolis, MN 55455. Copies of faculty CV's are requested by the department of psychology in annual reviews and are archived. They are also bound in the 10-year reviews of the department. Any specific accusations by Dusek can easily be checked by Prof. Snyder. Dusek again repeats that I have shared data with Sandra Scarr but not Leon Kamin. I have responded to this charge above. Along with many other distortions I have read about myself (i.e., that I was trained by Arthur Jensen - also not true). Dusek's little distortion will, like the Jensen item, quickly become part of the false lore created by those who don't care much about the facts. Dusek discusses the effects of separation in previous studies. He is big on assertions, but thin on the facts. Anyone interested in this topic might be interested in reading my analysis of that data. The paper is entitled: Do environmental similarities explain the similarity in intelligence of identical twins reared apart? (Bouchard, 1983). The answer is no. I will send a reprint to any who requests a copy. I believe I have responded to all of Dusek's allegations. If I have left anything out please let me know. Anyone who has questions regarding the MISTRA or would like reprints, etc. can contact me via E-Mail or snail mail or FAX (612-626-2079). Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. Department of Psychology N249 Elliott Hall 75 East River Road University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455-0344 Phone (612) 626-8268 Fax (612) 626-2079 E-Mail bouch001@tc.umn.edu ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:19:00 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [4] From Thomas Bouchard MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Date: Thursday, August 27, 1998 4:43 PM Arvey, R. D., McCall, B., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & Taubman, P. (1994). Genetic influence on job satisfaction and work values. Personality and Individual Differences, 17, 21-33. Betsworth, D. G., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Cooper, C. R., Grotevant, H. D., Hansen, J. C., Scarr, S., & Weinberg, R. A. (1993). Genetic and environmental influences on vocational interests assessed using adoptive and biological families and twins reared apart and together. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 44, 263-278. Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1983). Do environmental similarities explain the similarity in intelligence of identical twins reared apart? Intelligence, 7, 175-184. Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Arvey, R. D., Keller, L. M., & Segal, N. L. (1992). Genetic influences on Job Satisfaction: A reply to Cropanzano and James. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77, 89-93. Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A. (1990). Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science, 250, 223-228. Finkel, D., Pedersen, N. L., McGue, M., & McClearn, G. E. (1995). Heritability of cognitive abilities in adult twins: Comparison of Minnesota and Swedish Data. Behavior Genetics, 25, 421-431. Hanson, B. R., McGue, M., Roitman-Johnson, Segal, N. L., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & Blumenthal, M. N. (1991). Atopic disease and immunoglobulin E in twins reared apart and together. American Journal of Human Genetics, 48, 873-879. Hernshaw, L. S. (1979). Cyril Burt: Psychologist. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Joynson, R. B. (1990). The Burt affair. New York: Academic Press. Juel-Nielsen, N. (1965). Individual and environment: A psychiatric-psychological investigation of MZ twins reared apart. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Juel-Nielsen, N. (1980). Individual and Environment: Monozygotic twins reared apart (revised edition of 1965 monograph). New York: International Universities Press. Kamin, L. J. (1974). The science and politics of IQ. Potomac, Md.: Erlbaum. Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., McGue, M., & Tellegen, A. (1990). The Minnesota twin family registry: Some initial findings. Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellogiae, 39, 35-70. Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., McGue, M., & Tellegen, A. (1993). Heritability of interests: A twin study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 649-661. Lykken, D. T., Iacono, W. G., Haroian, K., McGue, M., & Bouchard, T. J. J. (1988). Habituation of the skin conductance response to strong stimuli: A twin study. Psychophysiology, 25, 4-15. Martin, N. G., Eaves, L. J., Heath, A. C., Jardine, R., Feingold, L. M., & Eysenck, H. J. (1986). Transmission of social attitudes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 83, 4364-4368. Michalowicz, B. S., Aeppli, D. P., Kuba, R. K., Bereuter, J. E., Conry, J. P., Segal, N. L., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1991a). A twin study of genetic variation in proportional radiographic alveolar bone height. Journal of Dental Research, 70, 1431-1435. Michalowicz, B. S., Aeppli, D. P., Virag, J. G., Klump, D. G., Hinrichs, J. E., Segal, N. L., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & Pihlstrom, B. L. (1991b). Periodontal findings in adult twins. Journal of Periodontology, 62, 292-299. Newman, H. H., Freeman, F. N., & Holzinger, K. J. (1937). Twins: A study of heredity and environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pedersen, N., L., Plomin, R., Nesselroade, J. R., & McClearn, G. E. (1992). A quantitative genetic analysis of cognitive abilities during the second half of the life span. Psychological Science, 3, 346-353. Plomin, R., Pedersen, N. L., Lichtenstein, P., & McClearn, G. E. (1994). Variability and stability in cognitive abilities are largely genetic later in life. Behavior Genetics, 24, 207-215. Shields, J. (1962). Monozygotic twins: Brought up apart and brought up together. London: Oxford University Press. Silva, P. A. (1990). The Dunedin multidisciplinary health and development study: A 15 year longitudinal study. Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, 4, 96-127. Stassen, H. H., Lykken, D. T., & Bomben, G. (1988a). The within-pair EEG similarity of twins reared apart. European Archives of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences, 237, 244-252. Stassen, H. H., Lykken, D. T., Propping, P., & Bomben, G. (1988b). Genetic determination of the human EEG: Survey of recent results on twins reared together and apart. Human Genetics, 80, 165-176. Teasdale, T. W., & Owen, D. R. (1984). Heritability and familial environment in intelligence and educational level-a sibling study. Nature, 309, 620-622. Tellegen, A., Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Wilcox, K. J., Segal, N. L., & Rich, S. (1988). Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1031-1039. Waller, N. G., Kojetin, B. A., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Lykken, D. T., & Tellegen, A. (1990). Genetic and environmental influences on religious interests, attitudes, and values: A study of twins reared apart and together. Psychological Science, 1(2), 1-5. Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. Department of Psychology N249 Elliott Hall 75 East River Road University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455-0344 Phone (612) 626-8268 Fax (612) 626-2079 E-Mail bouch001@tc.umn.edu ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:15:03 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [1] From Thomas Bouchard MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Date: Thursday, August 27, 1998 4:42 PM Subject: Re: Mead and Bouchard anecdotes Ian Thanks for the Dusek stuff. I don't plan to read it as I do not have time for him. I don't even know who he is. I have added below some stuff he put on the SCIFRAUD net a few years ago and my reply. This version may have a reference missing as I use a bibliography program and apprently one reference was changed. If you need anything more let me know. Also I will be sending the bibliography seperately as my E-Mail will not hold the entire document. I am sorry that I do not have the dates on this E-Mail exchange as I clean my files out periodcally and I had this copy in another file. I will also be sending you our recent list of publications. I recently received five postings from the SCIFRAUD net. I was unaware of this net and I do not know any of the correspondents. I am disturbed by the fact that postings of this sort are circulated throughout the world (I was first alerted by colleagues in Australia and Canada) without being simultaneously forwarded to the subject of the discussion so that he or she can respond in a timely manner. I have been on the Net for about a week to get a sense of its mission before posting a response. I will be signing off after this posting so if anyone would like to reach me they will have to do so directly. Some of my collaborators have suggested that I not respond Dusek's posting, but the claims about the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA) constitute such serious misrepresentations that I have taken the time to reply. My format will be to list each posting and follow it with a specific reply. The first Posting is arranged by sentence (I have not made any corrections to the spelling, etc., this is an exact copy of the version sent to me, paragraph markers and all. My copy did not contain the date and time.): ________________________________________ 1. I have investigated some suspicious circumstances around the Minnesota Twin Studies of Prof. Bouchard et al. 2. Although Bouchard et al won't show their data to critics such as Leon Kamin they have received huge media coverage in all the newsmagazines, popular science magazines and many major papers and TV shows, including occultist bit on Unsolved Mysteries. 3. However, Bouchard misled people (especially reporters) for ten years about the fact that his work was not published in peer reviewed journals. 4. He also misrepresented annecdotes about various striking twin couples (most notably the Jew-Nazi twins who flush the toilet twice, but also others). 5. While his works were refused publication in Science Magazine as methodologically inadaquate, the popular news section of Science through Constance Holden trumpeted his results. 6. Because NIH and NSF refused to fund him during the first ten years, he was funded by the Pioneer Fund which funds research attempting to prove --More-- the inferiority of blacks, which started by distributing Nazi eugenics films, later suppported seqregation, anti-busing activities, and several neo-Nazi figures. 7. More recently Bouchard's work has become more respectable and gotten publication in Science, because his "proof" that IQ and personality traits (as well as political attitudes, street names of residence, etc.) are largely inherited has been helpful in supporting the publicity for the Human Genome Project. 8. So Science published a review article by Bouchard reviewing research that Science itself had earlier rejected in its research section, as part of an issue on the Human Genome. Given that Bouchard alledges to show that Burt's fraudulent work of the 1950's and 1960's in fact had the right results, one writer has noted the mysterious way in which "nature has imitated art" in his work, i.e. that Bouchard's empirical results replicate Burt's fraudulent ones. --Val Dusek, U. of. N.H. _________________________________________________ Sentence 1. I certainly would like to know what the "suspicious circumstances" are. Could Dusek supply me with some specifics? His investigation did not go so far as to include calling me or any other member of the MISTRA team. Sentence 2 - part 1. Anyone in the United States doing research with human beings should be fully aware that all research protocols must be extensively reviewed by a Human Subject Committee or an Internal Review Board (IRB). Informed consent MUST be obtained and the confidentiality of information about the participants must be protected. It would be in violation of our IRB agreement if we were to supply information, gathered in the course of our study about our twins that could identify them without their written permission. We have been refused permission to release information by some twins and other have asked for complete confidentiality. Anyone interested in checking on this rule might contact their own IRB or they may contact the administrator of the Human Subject Committee at the University of Minnesota. Numerous twin pairs have participated in the study under the stipulation that their confidentiality be protected. I have turned down a request for data from Prof. Kamin on the grounds stated above, but I have offered him data, used in published papers, that aggregate at any level that preserves the confidentiality of individuals. He has requested such data, and I am in the processes of downloading it for him. Confidentiality is not a problem when participants cannot be identified. but it is a serious issue in many studies. I believe the Swedish Twin and Adoption Study is under similar constraints. I recently visited the Dunedin Longitudinal Study and found that their participants, who belong to a single cohort, are readily identifiable and, consequently, the data base cannot be made part of the public record (Silva, 1990). Early in our study we naively expected to be able to publish the raw data, but were quickly disabused of that belief. During a visit to Minneapolis I discussed this issue in great detail with Juel-Nielsen. He pointed out to me that had he carried out his study in the 1970's and 1980's it would have been impossible to publish the raw data he presented in his monograph (Juel-Nielsen, 1965). Danish regulations regarding human participants in research would have precluded it. Research participants and patients (our participants are both as they are formally registered as outpatients at the University of Minnesota Hospitals and spend about half their time while participating in our study in that setting - the IQ tests are in fact administered as part of the hospital procedures by the staff of the Neuropsychology Laboratory, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation) are protected by stringent rules. The sensitivity of research participants to public knowledge about their test scores is well known. One of the pairs of twins in the Newman, Freeman, and Holzinger study of twins reared apart (Newman, Freeman, & Holzinger, 1937) threatened to sue the investigators over comments regarding their IQ scores, and this fact is even discussed in Prof. Kamin's book, The Science and Politics of IQ (Kamin, 1974). Does anyone think current study participants have become less sensitive to such issues? It is worth mentioning that one of those Newman, Freeman, and Holzinger twins contacted me about the matter of their IQ scores almost 50 years later. The MISTRA is an ongoing study and has a longitudinal component. The twins return for a follow-up assessment approximately 10 years after their initial assessment. Violation of our confidentiality agreement would make such a program impossible to conduct and would be unethical. Sentence 2, Part 2 (media coverage) MISTRA has in fact received considerable media coverage. Being fully aware of the charges against the study conducted by Burt (among others no documentation of the existence of the twins), when our study began, we choose to cooperate fully with media requests to contact twins. Of course any contact was contingent on the approval of the twins. The wide publicity that some of the twins have received is, of course, a double-edged sword as it also makes them easily identified in a data base on the basis of age, sex, social background, age of separation, degree of separation, etc. It does seem to us that an interesting question to ask is; What would Dusek claim if we refused the media access to the twins and declined to cooperate with them? It takes little imagination to realize that we would be accused of being secretive and perhaps fraudulent. When one can draw the same conclusions in the face of precisely the opposite facts one has to worry about the logic of the analysis. Since we are dependent, in part, on the media and colleagues to locate twins for us (we make no claims that this is a random or systematic sample, it must stand on its own based on the descriptive statistics), cooperation is of course to our benefit. In any event many interested parties, the press, colleagues, interested citizens, even a US congressmen, have visited our laboratory during assessments (when the twins have no objection) and between assessments, and they have always been welcome. We have regularly mailed out up-to-date listings of our publications and provided a small sample of published papers free of charge to anyone who requests them. Requests for this listing can be made via E-mail. Any colleagues interested in visiting our laboratory need only arrange an appointment. Unsolved Mysteries and the association with occultism raises an interesting question. Who do you speak with and who don't you speak with? I have collaborated with this program because they provide help to twins and adoptees searching for biological relatives. Anyone who has ever appeared on a TV program knows very well that they have no control over what the producers chose to do with the material. Nevertheless, I do admit to great distaste for this program. Regarding contact with the press I believe that I have answered virtually every question that has ever been posed to me about the study by the media. I believe the only exceptions involve questions regarding information about twins that would violate their confidentiality. Sentence 3. This is a specific charge: that I have willfully misled numerous people. What is Dusek's evidence for this charge? Does he have evidence? We have been mailing out and handing out our publication list for many years. Does he know anyone to whom we have claimed publications that do not exist? Sentence 4. These twins have spoken to the press repeatedly and many stories have been published about them based on their interviews with reporters. I am not aware of any misrepresentations to the press on my part, and Dusek doesn't present any. Any thoughtful person knows that stories in the press are often abbreviated, sometimes exaggerated and often designed to titillate. I would add the comment that some of the stories that have appeared are excellent and reflect journalism at its best. The twin stories are often very interesting and there is no reason why they should not be part of the public record. I once asked Juel-Nielsen if he had heard such stories from his twins and he replied that he had. I then asked why none of them appeared in his book. He replied that "nobody would believe them". I told him that I thought self-censorship was a bad thing and that data of this sort could serve to generate hypotheses that would help us understand the roots of human behavior. Gordon Allport called such data "idiographic". Idiographic data and case studies have a long tradition in psychology. Nevertheless, I don't write these stories. I have always believed that it would be counterproductive for me to try to tell reporters what to write. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:27:18 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [5] From Thomas Bouchard MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Selected Scientific Papers from the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research: July 1998 Only papers after 1990 are available as reprints. Copies of up to 3 of these publications can be obtained free of charge by writing to: Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research, Department of Psychology, Elliott Hall, 75 East River Rd., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455. The cost of each article above 3 is $2.00 per article. Please make checks payable to Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. ______________________________________________________________________ 1981 Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1981). The study of mental ability using twin and adoption designs. In Gedda, L., Parisi, P., & Nance, W. (Eds.), Twin Research 3: Part B. Intelli-gence, Personality, and Development. New York: Alan R. Liss, Inc, 21-23. Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Heston, L., Eckert, E., Keys, M., & Resnick, S. (1981). The Minnesota study of twins reared apart: Project description and sample results in the develop-ment domain. In Gedda, L., Parisi, P., & Nance, W. (Eds.), Twin Research 3: Part B. Intelligence, Personality and Development. New York: Alan R. Liss, Inc, 227-233. Eckert, E. D., Heston, L. L., Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1981). MZ Twins reared apart: Preliminary find-ings of psychiatric disturbances and traits. In Gedda, L., Parisi, P., & Nance, W. (Eds.), Twin Research 3: Part B. Intelligence, Personality, and Development. New York: Alan R. Liss, Inc, 179-188. 1982 Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1982). Twins: Nature's Twice-told tale. 1983 Yearbook of science and the future. Encyclopedia Britanica, 68-81. Hankins, D., Drage, C., Zamel, N., & Kronenberg, R. (1982). Pulmonary function in identical twins raised apart. American Review of Respiratory Disease, 125, 119-121. Lykken, D. T. (1982). Research with twins: The concept of emergenesis. Psychophysiology, 19, 361-373. 1983 Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1983). Do environmental similarities explain the similarity in intelligence of identical twins reared apart? Intelligence, 7, 175-184. Lykken, D. T., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1983/1984). Genetische aspektemen-schlicher individualitat. Mannheimer Forum, 79-117. 1984 Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1984). Twins reared together and apart: What they tell us about human diver-sity. In S. W. Fox (Ed.), The Chemical and Biological Bases of Individuality. New York: Plenum, 147-178. Hanson, B. R., Halberg, F., Tuna, N., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Lykken, D. T., Cornelissen, G., & Heston, L. L. (1984). Rhythmometry reveals heritability of circadian characteristics of heart rate of human twins reared apart. Italian Journal of Cardiology, 29, 267-282. McGue, M., & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1984b). Information processing abilities in twins reared apart. Intelligence, 8, 239-250. McGue, M., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1984a). Adjustment of twin data for the effects of age and sex. Behavior Genetics, 14, 325-343. Segal, N. L., Dysken, M. W., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Pedersen, N. L., Eckert, E. D., & Heston, L. L. (1990). Tourette syndrome in reared apart triplets: Genetic and Environmental influences. American Journal of Psychiatry, 147, 196-199. 1985 Knobloch, W. H., Leavenworth, N. M., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Eckert, E. D. (1985) Eye findings in twins reared apart. Ophthalmic Paediatrics and Genetics, 5, 59-66. Kohler, P. F., Rivera, V. J., Eckert, E. D., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & Heston, L. L. (1985). Genetic regulation of immunoglobulin and spe-cific antibody levels in twins reared apart. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 75, 883-888. 1986 Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Lykken, D. T., Segal, N. L., Wilcox, K J. (1986). Development in twins reared apart: A test of the chronogenetic hypoth-esis. In A. Demirjian (Ed.) Human Growth: A multidisciplinary review. London: Taylor & Francis, 299-310. Eckert, E. D., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Bohlen, J., & Heston, L. L. (1986). Homosexuality in twins reared apart. British Journal of Psychiatry, 148, 421-425. 1987 Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1987). Diversity, develop-ment and determinism: A re-port on identi-cal twins reared apart. In M. Amelang (Ed.) Proceedings of the meetings of the Ger-man Psychological Association - 1986. Heidelberg; Germany. Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1987). Reply to Plomin: Where are we going? How do we get there? In S. Modgil, & C. Modgil (Eds.) Arthur Jensen: Consensus and controversy. London: Falmer International, 72-75. Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1987). The hereditarian re-search program: triumphs and tribulations. In S. Modgil, & C. Modgil (Eds.) Arthur Jensen: Consensus and controversy. London: Falmer International, 55-70. 1988 Borass, J. C., Messer, L. B., & Till, M. J. (1988). A genetic contribution to dental caries, occlusion, and morphology as demonstrated by twins reared apart. Journal of Dental Research, 67, 1150-1155. Lykken, D. T., Iacono, W. G., Haroian, K., McGue, M., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1988). Habituation of the skin conductance response to strong stimuli: A twin study. Psy-chophysiology, 25, 4-15. Stassen, H. H., Lykken, D. T., and Bomben, G. (1988). The within pairs EEG similarity of twins reared apart. European Archives of Psychiatry and Neurological Science, 237, 244-252. Stassen, H. H., Lykken, D. T., Propping, P., & Bomben, G. (1988). Genetic determination of the human EEG. Human Genetics, 80, 165-176. Tellegen, A., Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Wilcox, K. J., Segal, N. L., & Rich, S. (1988). Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1031-1039. 1989 Arvey, R. D., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Segal, N. L., & Abraham, L. M. (1989). Job satisfaction: Environmental and genetic components. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74, 187-192. Hanson, B., Tuna, N., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Heston, L., Eckert, E., Lykken, D. T., Segal, N. L. and Rich, S. (1989). Genetic factors in the electrocardiogram and heart rate: A study of twins reared apart and together. Journal of Cardiology, 63, 606-609. McGue, M., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1989). Genetic and environmental determinants of in-formation processing and special mental abili-ties: A twin analysis. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.). Advances in the Psychology of Human Intelligence (Vol. 5), 7-45. 1990 Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & McGue, M. (1990). Genetic and rearing environ-mental in-flu-ences on adult personality: An analysis of adopted twins reared apart. Journal of Personality, 58, 263-292. Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A, (1990). Sources of human psychological difference: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science, 250, 223-228. Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A, (1990). When kin correlations are not squared. Science, 250, 1498. [Response to critics] Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Segal, N. L., & Lykken, D. T. (1990). Genetic and environmental influences on special mental abilities in a sample of twins reared apart. Twin Research, 39, 193-206. Grove, W. M., Eckert, E. D., Heston, L., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Segal, N. L., & Lykken, D. T. (1990). Heritability of substance abuse and antisocial behavior: A study of monozygotic twins reared apart. Biological Psychiatry, 27, 1293-1304. Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & Tellegen, A. (1990). Does contact lead to similarity or similarity to contact? Behavior Genetics, 20, 547-561. Lykken, D.T., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., McGue, M., & Tellegen, A. (1990). The Minnesota Twin Registry: Some initial findings. Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae, 39, 35-70. Segal, N. L., Eckert, E. D.. Grove, W. M. Bouchard, T. J. Jr., & Heston, L. L. (1990). A summary of psychiatric and psychological find-ings from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. In E. Kringlen, N. J. Lavik & S. Torgersen (Eds.) Etiology of mental dis-or-der: Proceedings of the World Psychiatric Association Regional Symposium. Department of Psychiatry, Vinderen, Norway. Waller, N. G., Kojetin, B. A., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Lykken, D. T., & Tellegen, A. (1990). Genetic and environmental influences on religious interests, attitudes and values: A study of twins reared apart and together. Psychological Science, 1, 138-142. 1991 Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1991). A twice told tale: Twins reared apart. In W. Grove & D. Ciccehetti (Eds.), Thinking clearly about psychol-ogy: Essays in honor of Paul Everett Meehl. Volume 2, Personality and Psychopathology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bouchard, T. J., Jr., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A, (1991). IQ and Heredity. Science, 252, 191-192. [Response to critics] Hanson, B., McGue, M., Roitman-Johnson, Segal, N. L., Bouchard, T. J. Jr. & Blumenthal, M. N. (1991). Atopic disease and immunoglobu-lin E in twins reared apart and together. American Journal of Human Genetics, 48, 873-879. McGue, M., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., Lykken, D. T., & Finkel, D. (1991). On genes, environment, and experience. Behavior and Brain Sciences, 14, 400-401. Michalowicz, B. S., Aeppli, D. P., Kuba, R. K., Bereuter, J. E., Conry, J. P., Segal, N. L., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., & Pihlstrom, B. L. (1991). A twin study of genetic variation in proportional radiographic alveolar bone height. Journal of Dental Research, 70, 1431-1435. Michalowicz, B. S., Aeppli, D. P., Virag, J. G., Klump, D. G., Hinrichs, J. E., Segal, N. L., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., & Pihlstrom, B. L. (1991). Periodontal findings in adult twins. Journal of Periodontology, 62, 293-299. Moloney, D. P., Bouchard, T. J. Jr. & Segal, N. L. (1991). A Genetic and Environmental Analysis of the Vocational Interests of Monozygotic and Dizygotic Twins Reared Apart. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 39, 76-109. Segal, N. L., Grove, W. M., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1991). Psychiatric investiga-tions and findings from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. In M. Tsuang, K. Kendler & M. Lyons (Eds.) Genetic issues in psychosocial epi-demiology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:28:25 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [6] From Thomas Bouchard MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Selected Scientific Papers from the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research: July 1998 - Only papers after 1990 are available as reprints. Copies of up to 3 of these publications can be obtained free of charge by writing to: Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research, Department of Psychology, Elliott Hall, 75 East River Rd., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455. The cost of each article above 3 is $2.00 per article. Please make checks payable to Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. ______________________________________________________________________ 1992 Bouchard, T. J. Jr., Arvey, R., Keller, L. M., Segal, N. L. (1992). Genetic Influences on Job Satisfaction: A Reply to Cropanzano and James. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77, 89-93. Keller, L. M., Arvey, R. D., Bouchard, T. J. Jr. & Segal, N. L. (1992). Work values: Genetic and environmental influences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77, 79-88. Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Tellegen, A., Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1992). Emergenesis: Traits that do not run in families. American Psychologist, 47, 1565-1577. 1993 Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1993). Twins: NatureÕs twice told tale. In T. J. Bouchard, Jr. & Propping, P. (Eds.) Twins as a tool of behavior genetics. Chichester, England: Wiley & Sons Ltd. Bouchard, T. J. Jr., (1993). Genetic and Environmental Influences on Adult Personality: Evaluating the Evidence. In J. Hettema & I. Deary (Eds.) Basic Issues in personality: EuropeanÐAmerican Expert Workshop on Biological and Social Approaches to Individuality. Dordecht: Kluwer. Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1993). The genetic archi-tecture of human intelligence. In P. E. Vernon (Ed.) Biological approaches in the study of human intelligence. Plenum Publishing Co. Conry, J. P., Messer, L. B., Boraas, J. C., Aeppli, D. P. & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1993). Dental caries and treatment characteristics in twins reared apart. Archives of Oral Biology, 38, 937-943. Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., McGue, M., & Tellegen, A. T. (1993). The heritability of interests: A twin study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 649-661. McGue, M., Bouchard. T. J. Jr., Iacono, W. G. & Lykken, D. T. (1993). Behavioral genetics of cognitive ability: A life-span perspective. In R. Plomin & G. McClearn (Eds.) Nature, nurture and psychology. American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C. Segal, N. L. & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1993). Grief intensity following the loss of a twin and other close relatives: Test of kinship-genetic hypotheses. Human Biology, 65, 87-105. Waller, N. G., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., Lykken, D. T., Tellegen, A., Blacker, D. M. (1993). Creativity, heritability, familiarity: Which word does not belong? Psychological Inquiry, 4, 235-237. 1994 Arvey, R. D. & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1994). Genetics, twins, and organizational behavior. In B. A. Staw & L. L. Cummings (Eds.). Research in organizational behavior, Vol. 16. (pp. 47-82). Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1994) Genes, environment and personality. Science, 264, 1700-1701. Arvey, R. D., McCall, B., Bouchard, T. J. Jr. & Taubman, P., Cavanaugh, M. A. (1994). Genetic influence on job satisfaction and work values. Personality and Individual Differences, 17, 21-33. Betsworth, D., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., Cooper, C., Grotevant, H., Hansen, J. Scarr, S., & Weinberg, R. (1994). Genetic and environmental influences on vocational interests assessed using adoptive and biological families and twins reared apart and together. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 44, 263-278. 1995 Hur, Y. & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1995) Genetic influence on perceptions of childhood family environment: A reared apart twin study. Child Development, 66, 330-345. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1995) Longitudinal studies of personality and intelligence: A behavior genetic and evolutionary psychology perspective. In D. H. Saklofske & Zeidner, M. (Eds.) International handbook of personality and intelligence. New York: Plenum. Segal, N. L., Wilson, S. M., Bouchard, T. J. Jr. & Gitlin, D. G. (1995) Comparative grief experiences of bereaved twins and other bereaved relatives. Personality and Individual Differences, 18, 511-524. 1996 Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., Boykin, A. W., Brody, N., Ceci, S. J., Halpern, D. F., Loehlin, J. C. Perloff, R., Sternberg, R. J., Urbina, S. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American Psychologist, 51, 77-101 DiLalla, D.L., Carey, G., Gottesman, I.I., & Bouchard, T.J. (1996). Heritability of MMPI Personality Indicators of Psychopathology in Twins Reared Apart. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105, 491-499. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1996) Behavior Genetic Studies of Intelligence, Yesterday and Today: The long journey from Plausibility to Proof. Journal of Biosocial Science, 28, 527-555. Fox, P. W., Hershberger, S. L. & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1996) Genetic and environmental contributions to the acquisition of a psychomotor skill. Nature, 384, 356-358. Bouchard, T. J. Jr., Lykken, D. T., Tellegen, A. & McGue, M. (1996). Genes. drives, environment and experience: EPD TheoryÐRevised. In Benbow, C. P. & Lubinski, D. (Eds.) Intelectual Talent: Psychometric and social issues (pp. 5-43). Baltimore: John Hopkins Universit Press. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1996). Genetics and evolution: Implications for personality theories. In Newman, J. (Ed.) Measures of the Five Factor Model and Psychological Type: A Major Convergence of Research and Theory. Gainseville, FL. Center for the Applications of Psychological Type. 1997 Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1997). The genetics of personality. In Blum, K. & Noble, E. P. (Eds.) Handbook of Psychiatric Genetics. Boca Raton, Fl., CRC Press. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1997). IQ Similarity in Twins Reared Apart: Findings and Responses to Critics. In Sternberg. R. J. & Grigorenko, E. L. Intelligence: Heredity and Environment. New York, Cambridge University Press. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1997). Genetic Influence on Mental Abilities, Personality, Vocational Interests, and Work Attitudes. in: I. T. Robertson & C. L. Cooper (Eds.) International review of industrial and organizational psychology: 1997, Vol 12. (pp. 373-395 ). New York & London: Wiley. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1997). Experience producing drive theory: How Genes drive experience and shape personality. Acta Paediatrica, 86, 65-68. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1997). Twin Studies of Behavior: New and Old Findings. In Schmitt, A., Atzwanger, K., Grammer, K. & Sch fer, K. (Eds.) New aspects of human ethology. (pp. 121-140). New York: Plenum. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1997). Whenever the twain shall meet. The Sciences, 37, 52-57. Hur, Y. & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1997). Genetic influence on impulsivity and sensation-seeking. Behavior Genetics, 27, 455-463. 1998 McGue, M. & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (in press). Genetic and environmental influences on human behavioral differences. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 21, 1-24. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1998). Genetic and Environmental Influences on Intelligence and Special Mental Abilities. American Journal of Human Biology, 70, 253-275. Bouchard, T. J. Jr. & Hur, Y. (1998) Genetic and Environmental Influences on the Continuous Scales of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: An Analysis Based on Twins Reared Apart. Journal of Personality, 66, 135-149. Newman, D, L., Tellegen, A. & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (1998) Individual differences in adult ego development: Sources of influence in twins reared apart. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 985-995. Note: Since 1984, Dr. Nancy L. Segal, former Assistant Director of the Center, has been a regular contributor to Twins magazine on a wide range of topics of interest to twins. You can write Dr. Segal directly at Department of Psychology, California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California 92834 Two Recent Books about the Minnesota Studies of Twins Wright, L. (1997) Twins: What they tells us about who we are. New York: Wiley. Wright, W. (1998) Born that way: Genes, behavior, Personality. New York: Knopf. Some Other Books of Particular Interest Bryan, E. M. (1992). Twins and higher multiple births: A guide to their nature and nurture. London, Edward Arnold. [An excel-lent general introduction - highly recommended] Bouchard, T. J. Jr., & Propping, P. (Eds.). (1993). Twins as a tool of behavior genetics. Chichester, England: Wiley & Sons Ltd. Bulmer, M. G. (1970). The Biology of Twining in Man. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. [A technical source - considered a classic] Cassill, Kay (1982). Twins: Nature's Amazing Mystery. New York: Atheneum Press. [Fun to read - Kay Cassill is a twin and the founder of the Twins Foundation] Cole, J., & Edmonson, M. (1972). Twins: The Story of Multiple Births. New York: Morrow Press. Day, Ella J. (1932). The development of language in twins. Baltimore: Gaddis, V., & Gaddis, M. (1972). The Curious World of Twins. Hawthorne Books, Inc. Gedda, L. (1961). Twins in History and Science. Springfield, Ill,: Charles C. Thomas. [Now a little old but this is the all time classic book on twins] Twins and who found each other. New York: Morrow Press. MacGillivray, I., Campbell, D. M., & Thompson, B. (Eds.) (1988). Twining and twins. New York: Wiley. [An excellent techni-cal report by a highly respected team of investi-gators] Scheinfeld, A. (1967). Twins and Supertwins. Philadelphia: Lippincott. [Another classic] Wallace, M. (1986). The Silent Twins. New York: Prentice Hall. Twins Organizations Center for the Study of Multiple Birth, Suite 476, 333 E. Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60611 (312) 266-9093. The Twins Foundation, P.O. Box 9487, Providence, RI 02940-9487. International Twins Association, c/o Judy Stillwagon and Julie Kirk, 114 North Lafayette, Muncie, IN 47303. Twin Cities Twin Club, Lori Stewart & Lynn Long, 6898 Channel Road N.E., Fridley, MN 55432, (612) 571-3022. Minnesota Mothers of Multiples, Sylvia A. Jensen, 1223 Buchanan St. N.E., Minneapolis, MN 55413, (612) 789-8561. Twin Topics, Inc., Joan Donahue, 9871 Cromwell Drive, Eden Prairie, MN 55344, (612) 941-7538 Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. Department of Psychology N249 Elliott Hall 75 East River Road University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455-0344 Phone (612) 626-8268 Fax (612) 626-2079 E-Mail bouch001@tc.umn.edu ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 12:41:00 +1000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: melanie lazarow Subject: Bouchard vs social change Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" A flood of Bouchard does not prove him correct. Ian Pitchford stated earlier there is no such thing as genetically determined behaviour" Yet he enlists Bouchard to patently defend genetically determined I.Q. I said It is time to stop "sniggering at the distractions of this rampant power and to recognize the truth about it, and to speak out". The same applies to any discussion of genetically determined behavior. His REPLY: There is no such thing as "genetically determined behaviour". If there were biology would not need the two basic concepts of "genotype" and "phenotype" - the genotype is the particular alleles at specified loci present in an individual (the genetic constitution) NOW Ian uses Bouchard to support IQ. Bouchard says: "concerning the heritability of IQ, have now been replicated in an sample of MZA's by the Swedish Adoption Study of Aging" We are clearly back in the past talking about the heritability of something called I.Q. If we examine what I.Q. is we recognize that it is the outcome of a test. Now we may quibble about what "behavior" is but within a broad definition,responding to IQ questions is behaviour. The behaviour is in fact "answering questions or doing tasks." Twin studies are implicitly designed to measure genetic determination. Therefore any idea that IQ can be measured is a measure of "genetically determined behaviour" Lewontin, Rose and Karmin expose how the illusion of a metric measurement is imposed by a scale which is constructed giving the illusion of ranking. The scientific fraud of twin study or heritable intelligence can easily be exposed. I will provide a progressive anti IQ bibliography when I can. I am not interested in the question of peer review or journal acceptance. It is a secondary point. After all Sir Cyril Burt was canonized and accepted by the leading scientific journals. The necessity of having some explanation in terms of access to education, power, privilege and wealth will need the Bouchards, Burts and their defenders,until the system is fundamentally changed. Those of us interested in change will need to take on this academic battle. Melanie Lazarow Information Literacy Librarian University of Melbourne Parkville Victoria 3052 Australia *************************************************** Phone 61 3 9344 5373 Fax 61 3 9348 1142 Email: m.lazarow@lib.unimelb.edu.au He who is yet alive, let him not say, Never. Brecht ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 12:56:23 +1000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: melanie lazarow Subject: Bouchard vs change Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" A flood of Bouchard does not prove him correct. Ian Pitchford stated earlier there is no such thing as genetically determined behaviour" Yet he enlists Bouchard to patently defend genetically determined I.Q. I said It is time to stop "sniggering at the distractions of this rampant power and to recognize the truth about it, and to speak out". The same applies to any discussion of genetically determined behavior. His REPLY: There is no such thing as "genetically determined behaviour". If there were biology would not need the two basic concepts of "genotype" and "phenotype" - the genotype is the particular alleles at specified loci present in an individual (the genetic constitution) NOW Ian uses Bouchard to support IQ. Bouchard says: "concerning the heritability of IQ, have now been replicated in an sample of MZA's by the Swedish Adoption Study of Aging" We are clearly back in the past talking about the heritability of something called I.Q. If we examine what I.Q. is we recognize that it is the outcome of a test. Now we may quibble about what "behavior" is but within a broad definition,responding to IQ questions is behaviour. The behaviour is in fact "answering questions or doing tasks." Twin studies are implicitly designed to measure genetic determination. Therefore any idea that IQ can be measured is a measure of "genetically determined behaviour" Lewontin, Rose and Karmin expose how the illusion of a metric measurement is imposed by a scale which is constructed giving the illusion of ranking. The scientific fraud of twin study or heritable intelligence can easily be exposed. I will provide a progressive anti IQ bibliography when I can. I am not interested in the question of peer review or journal acceptance. It is a secondary point. After all Sir Cyril Burt was canonized and accepted by the leading scientific journals. The necessity of having some explanation in terms of access to education, power, privilege and wealth will need the Bouchards, Burts and their defenders,until the system is fundamentally changed. Those of us interested in change will need to take on this academic battle. Melanie Lazarow Information Literacy Librarian University of Melbourne Parkville Victoria 3052 Australia *************************************************** Phone 61 3 9344 5373 Fax 61 3 9348 1142 Email: m.lazarow@lib.unimelb.edu.au He who is yet alive, let him not say, Never. Brecht Melanie Lazarow Information Literacy Librarian University of Melbourne Parkville Victoria 3052 Australia *************************************************** Phone 61 3 9344 5373 Fax 61 3 9348 1142 Email: m.lazarow@lib.unimelb.edu.au He who is yet alive, let him not say, Never. Brecht ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 08:20:35 +0100 Reply-To: Ian Pitchford Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Re: Bouchard vs change MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit melanie lazarow Ian Pitchford stated earlier there is no such thing as genetically determined behaviour" Yet he enlists Bouchard to patently defend genetically determined I.Q. ___ REPLY: I do no such thing, and how does letting an individual speak for himself against charges sufficiently serious to undermine his whole career amount to a crime against justice? I'm all for robust debate, but this flood of accusations against Bouchard without any attempt to grasp the issues really is completely beyond the pale. You don't even appear to have read the material he presents in his defence. Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:12:25 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: paranoid mathematics MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Below, another contribution of B. Rosenthal, amidst some other oddities from the 1996 meeting of Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Mathematics. The remarks of Mr. Griffiths on Fermat's Theorem are clearly psychotic. I hasten to add that these are fortunately unrepresentative--most of the abstracts seem quite sane and interesting. NL ---------- Forwarded message ---------- CSHPM 1996 Annual Meeting: General Session Abstracts Thursday, 30 May 9:00 - 9:30: Peter L. Griffiths, 'Fermat's Last Theorem' Fermat's theorem that there is no integer solution to a^n+b^n=c^n (with n>2) has not hitherto been clearly and convincingly proved (except by hearsay) because mathematicians have focused attention on the various values for n instead of on the relationships between a, b, and c. They have also failed to distinguish between nil possibility and infinitesimal possibility. A mistake has been made of initially assuming c to be an integer, when the whole question concerns the probabilities of c being an integer when a, b, and n (>2) are integers. Mathematicians have triumphantly inserted and removed all common factors from a, b and c, when all that is required is to remove the common factors from a and b, so that at least initially c is not an integer. An important but little noticed special case of this arises when a=b. The general conclusion is that the correctness or incorrectness of Fermat's Theorem depends on three conditions: 1. If a^n is low (for example 1) then a^n+b^n cannot equal c^n so under this condition Fermat's Theorem is correct. 2. If a^n increases to just below b^n then there is an infinitesimal possibility that a^n+b^n=c^n, so that under this condition there is an infinitesimal possibility that Fermat's Theorem could be wrong. 3. If a^n=b^n, then Fermat's condition will be correct if n is finite, but is incorrect if n is infinite. Fermat's Theorem is therefore mostly correct unless n the power is infinite, and a=b. The equality of a and b has a considerable effect on the integer relationship of a and b to c. 9:30 - 10:00: Elaine Howes and Bill Rosenthal, Less than Zeno For the past two years, we have been engaged in a study of conceptions, constructions, and constrictions of mathematical infinity. Beginning with our own fascinations with and fears of the infinite, we first set out to develop from a feminist poststructuralist perspective a re-vision of the abstract, eerily disembodies discipline of Mathematics, utilizing the experiences, perceptions, and critical faculties of one who has been successful scaling its slopes (Bill) and one who has chosen to avoid the climb (Elaine). We have explored the canonical contrivances of infinity; intersected and contrasted mathematicians' tamings of the infinite with our (inter- and intra-) personal ideations, senses, and sensibilities; disinterred infinities that have been marginalized, forgotten, and scorned by (100-epsilon)% of Mathematical historians, philosophers, historiographers, anthropologists and sociologists, psychologists, and cultural critics. Our research findings defy and comprehensible summary, much less a comprehensive listing. Nevertheless, we offer some clips from the highlight film. * Contrary to unanimous historical consensus, mathematical infinity didn't begin with Zeno. * There exists a plethoric panoply of conceptualizations of infinity -- Mathematical, poetic, and personal - neglected by the lion's share of philosophical and historical scholarship, as well as the popular accounts dependent on them. * The roots of the mathematical infinite (a) grew in the same soild from which sprang the dichotomies that soon became the canonical basis for Western thought, particularly and especially the subordinations of the body to the mind and the feminine to the masculine; (b) are correlated with and possibly causally related to the suppression of paganism and the development of monotheistic male God worship. * We submit that the discenible fear of the infinite running through mathematics maps onto the woman-hating and terror of women's 'uncontrollable' and 'omnivorous' sexuality so evident in the post-Socratic social order. 10:00 - 10:30: Tracy A. Glenn, Local Mathematics I argue that universal truths in mathematics and physics aren't just expressions subsuming a variety of interpretations and concrete applications, but rather what is often taken as a single law or a single theory really represents a constellation of slightly different models with terms modified, added or dropped out to fit the local context. I support the position taken by Joseph Rouse in his essay "Local Knowledge," that what is thought to be a process of abstraction or extraction of some essential truth from nature is actually a process of making a series of tradeoffs among the demands and constraints of local conditions. While Rouse spoke generally about theories in physics, I extend his arguments to show that even mathematical theories are shaped by local practices and physical circumstances, and so cannot be considered to be decontextualized knowledge. Various traditions, norms and standards specific to a particular branch of mathematics shape a theory just as much as physical circumstances do in more concrete disciplines. Requirements that a theory be formally proved or that it be axiomatized may result in assumptions and modifications that move it farther away from both universality and truth. Adherence to such norms in mathematics then often contributes to the creation of esoteric local knowledge rather than universal truths. It is more accurate to say that there is a tradeoff between different types of standards and rigor involved in formulating and 'abstract' theory. While formal demands increase when aw thoery is moved into the context of pure mathematics, other more empirical demands may be relaxed. Thus, theories are neither 'decontextualized' nor necessarily made made more universal when they are appropriated by mathematicians. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:13:08 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Ultrafilters in Wonderland MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Below, just for the hell of it, one of the sane and interesting papers from the CSPHM 96 conference--of particular interest to scholars of Victorian literature. (There is a misprint: it should read "Robinson's notion of non-standard numbers.") NL ---------- Forwarded message ---------- 11:00 - 11:30: Francine Abeles, Infinitesimals are Numbers The idea that a number system can include infinitesimal and infinite numbers belongs to Gottfried Leibniz; its realization was constructed by Abraham Robinson some 300 years later. This extended number system has, among its many applications, hyperbolic gemoetry which is based numerically on non-Archimedean fields. In an obscure book published in 1888, Charles L. Dodgson presents geometrical arguments relating the non-Archimedean property with the ordering of infinitesimals in which he foreshadows Robinson's notion of standard numbers. In this talk I will sketch the main historical points with particular emphasis on the background to Dodgson's work. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:23:34 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: How Not to Prove the Poincare Conjecture (II) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE =20 The subject matter of courses such as TE 950 is typically described as the epistemology of mathematics. Yet since ideas and beliefs about ways and means of knowing presuppose that there is some-thing (or some-idea) to know, there can be no discussion of mathematical epistemology without a concurrent, coincident, concomitant treatment of the ontology of our discipline. The equation =20 Knowing =3D Knowing and Being =20 may not hold according to any formal mathematical model. But, outside the axiomatic Definition-Theorem-Proof world, it makes a great deal of sense to me.... =20 A nice example of the kind of issue I plan for us to study is afforded by George Gherveghese Joseph's comment-question about the idiosyncratic work of the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan. Joseph writes: =20 Ramanujan's work also raises questions about what constitutes mathematics. Is there a need to conform to a particular method of presentation before something is recognizable as mathematics? (1991, p. xiii) =20 Back in 1919, when Ramanujan died at the age of 32, Ramanujan's work was celebrated in some quarters as not only mathematics, but brilliant mathematics. Others scorned it as na=EFve, informal, unrigourous, and eminently unmathematical. How did the Ramanujan-believers and the sceptics differ in their conceptions of `what constitutes mathematics' and what `particular method[s] of presentation' are required `before something is recognizable as mathematics'? Why, many many years after his death, did Ramanujan's singular brand of thinking, doing, and writing come to be graced with the honorific of great, great mathematics? =20 The domain of these questions -- about `the similarities and differences of the mathematics birthed by the millions and millions of identifiable human social groups that have populated the Earth,' I mean -- isn't restricted to ontology and epistemology. These two 'ologies are usually thought of as subsets of philosophy. Paul Ernest (1991) describes the philosophy of mathematics as `the branch of philosophy whose task is to reflect on, and account for the nature of mathematics' (p. 3). Some folks believe that the `nature' of the mathematics created, transmitted, accepted, and used by a cultural group has more than a little something to do with matters that most folks consider distinct from philosophy: political arrangements, social relations, historical conditions, anthropological perspectives, psychological circumstances, linguistic factors, ... . I'm one of these folks. (Are you?) So our pan-cultural peregrinations through mathematical ways of knowing will carry us into the intellectual are(n)as of politics, sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, et possibly others, as well as philosophy. =20 So that's the, umm, vision thing for TE 950, Fall 1996. A deep, wide, broad investigation of any and all issues pertinent to what a cultural group =20 -- particular groups, a generic group -- counts or counted as mathematics. Especially prominent in my field of vision: what internal and external influences condition and constrain the group's mathematical processes and products; what criteria the group has for deciding when someone knows something the group honours as `mathematical'; and how and why the group has come to know mathematics as it does (or appears to). A course in mathematical being and knowing from a pan-cultural perspective. Yeah -- that's the ticket! =20 2. Organisation and Infrastructure =20 I envision the conceptual organisation of our class to be modelled by a three-dimensional co=F6rdinate system. If my spatial-visualisation prowess equalled that of an average 6-year-old, I'd draw this for your entertainment. But, being the case that I'd have trouble passing Stick Figure Drawing 101, better to keep to a word(y) description.... =20 The x-co=F6rdinate: The (pan-)cultural co=F6rdinate. At each point in ti= me throughout our course, we'll focus on exploring the mathematical ways of knowing of one or more cultural groups. The first half (or so) of the semester will highlight ways of knowing mathematics that are, for lack of better terms, mainstream and Western. Then, when autumn leaves start to fall and turn colour in earnest, we'll turn to investigating mathematical ways of knowing that are non-mainstream or non-Western. =20 Although I've set up a couple of distinct dualisms here (mainstream/non-mainstream, Western/non-Western), I don't mean to suggest that (mainstream and non-mainstream) and (Western and non-Western) mathematics are pairs of mutually exclusive categories -- and I certainly don't intend to suggest that these living corpora of knowledge should be simplistically opposed to one another. Dualisms and dichotomies (which, by the way, some people believe to be the underpinnings of mainstream and Western mathematical philosophies), can be useful means of organising the study of a complex phenomenon embodying differences and distinctions. Mathematics is such a phenomenon. Since there's compelling evidence of a dominant mode of knowing mathematics descended from Western civilisation, and also mathematical modes of being and doing that flow in different and distinct ways, the mainstream and Western/non-mainstream or non-Western division seems an appropriate component of a conceptual framework for our course. =20 The y-co=F6rdinate: The thematic co=F6rdinate. I think of this axis as t= he one that embodies the themes that arise throughout the lifetime of our course. My trusty American Heritage Dictionary (Second College Edition) has `a topic of discourse or discussion' as its principal definition of a theme (p. 126). I'd love for us to interpret this meaning of a theme as expansively as possible so as to include questions, issues, questions, ideas, questions, concerns, questions, critiques, questions, problems, questions, dilemmas, questions, conumdrums, and, of course, questions. Some of the theme-questions in which I'm most interested appear on that flyer I wrote to advertise our course last spring. I encourage you to formulate and bring to our discourse and discussions some of your own. As I mentioned above, our themes will be -- well, can be -- perceived and studied from not only a philosophical and cultural perspectives, but (simultaneously) seen, heard, and touched politically, sociologically, psychologically, linguistically, and other-ally. =20 The z-co=F6rdinate: The personal co=F6rdinate. Identifying, clarifying, and exploring your beliefs about what mathematics is, your desires for what mathematics should be, and your ways of knowing mathematics. An axis that runs through our course from before its beginning to after it will end: sometimes this line (curve?) will be a more prominent and explicit focus of your attention; during other time intervals, your personal epistemological perspectives will evolve implicitly, perhaps unconsciously. But they'll always be there, continuously changing as a function of time, reading, writing, discussion, reflection, and who knows what else.... =20 Indeed, one of my objectives for our class is that each 950er, myself included, emerge with a far clearer conscious appreciation of her/his own personal epistemology of mathematics. After all, a self-respecting `deep, wide, broad investigation of any and all issues pertinent to what a cultural group...counts or counted as mathematics' shouldn't exclude a group consisting in an individual. So I believe. I imagine that anthropologists, who tend to frown upon speaking of culture in non-social terms, would gasp and wheeze at the thought of a cultural group of one. Western mathematicians also might scorn at the possibility of a group containing but a lone element. This cultural group (Western mathematicians) does allow one-thing sets to belong to the club whose members they have named `groups.' However, such singletons are banished to the lowest caste of this club, called trivial groups. (Western mathematicians are great at inventing names expressing how they feel about mathematical objects.) =20 On solider ground, albeit still anthropologically arguable, is the notion of our class as a cultural group. It would be foolish to pass up the chance to explore mathematical ways of knowing from a pan-cultural perspective by zooming in on the mathematical ways of knowing of this cultural collective. And it seems senseless to do so only in the abstract, at a remove from our communal mathematical knowing-being-doing, by merely talking about our personal philosophies of mathematics, locating their conjunctions and disjunctions, and hashing out an epistemological manifesto we can all sign our names to. No, far more potentially productive is to DO mathematics in the real-time and real-space we shall share, and by so DOING to precipitate out our processes and standards for knowing mathematics. Hence a hefty hunk of TE 950 will be wiled away in active engagement with mathematical questions and phenomena. =20 Finally, mathematical educators we all are. Cognizant of this existential fact, I shudder a bit to think of the ethereal, highfalutin' tone and tenor of some of our readings. Mathematical philosophers often like to sequester themselves in a galaxy light-years removed from children's `Why won't you just tell us the answer?' and math-injured adults' tears of frustration at having to try, try again to pass algebra to get the job that will get them off welfare. There are likely to be moments, even lengthy intervals of linear time, when TE 950 leaves you wondering how the heck this can help improve anyone's practice as a mathematics educator. All the more likely due to my dubious decision to delay until late in the semester our turning the spotlight on the intersection betwixt epistemology and education. =20 I ask us each and all to be both trusting and vigilant. Trusting that old Ren=E9 Thom got the right answer when he averred that `all mathematical pedagogy, even if scarcely coherent, rests on a philosophy of mathematics.' Vigilant in being fully wide-awake to see and hear and identify educational relevance in all that we do, especially when the surface phenomena of our discourse mask any apparent connexion to anyone's real-life practice.... =20 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:26:07 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: How Not to Prove the Poincare Conjecture (III MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE 3. Assignments and Requirements =20 a?? Attendance and involvement =20 You know, the usual spiel. Like the paragraph below, which, save for minor editorial emendations, appears on the syllabus that MSU philosophy and women's studies professor Marilyn Frye wrote for the WS 401 (Feminist Theory) course she taught in the spring of 1994. =20 You are expected to attend regularly. A great deal is gained by everyone by having everyone's contribution to the discussions. Attend even if you haven't been able to read the whole assignment for the day (and even if you can't read the whole assignment, read some of it). Any time you are going to miss class, tell someone (another member of the class, or me) that you will not be there and why; this, to make sure there is a reason for missing which you can stand behind, which you can claim with integrity. If something like illness or employment or family problems is keeping you away from class, please contact me with a note or phone message, or call or phone during office hours, to let me know you haven't just lost interest and gone away. And if you are losing interest and thinking of going away, please let's talk about it before so that we can try to make things better. =20 Oh, by the way....in my personal dictionary, involvement includes much, much, much (i.e., much3) more than `talking in class,' and there are many, many ways to show that you're involved without publicly opening your mouth. The idea of `involvement' is different from and means more than `class participation,' especially when the latter equated with the number of times you speak in class. Involvement is qualitative as well as quantitative; it can occur and be shown in many different ways. Similarly, merely talking in class doesn't necessarily mean by itself that you're deeply involved in the stuff of our course. =20 ?? Special preparation(s) =20 This too I have borrowed from Marilyn Frye. Once again, I quote from her Spring 1994 WS 401 syllabus. =20 On days when the class begins discussion of each of the readings, two or more students will have been assigned to be "especially well prepared" on that day's reading. This does not excuse other students from being very well prepared for every class, of course. =20 What it means to be `especially well prepared' is...what you accomplish any time you have adequate time and keen interest in an assignment. E.g., you have read the material not once but two or even three times, studying it thoroughly, perhaps tracking down some of the references in the footnotes if they seem particularly important, looking up unfamiliar terms in dictionaries, taking notes. An especially well-prepared student is able to tell another person, clearly and succinctly (and accurately) what is going on in that article [or articles]; she has thought deliberately and critically about what she thinks of the author's positions and views, and is able to explain these thoughts clearly and persuasively to others who have read the material but are not as well prepared on it. She has probably focussed in on some particular part or aspect of the selection that seems particularly significant or controversial or otherwise worthy of attention. When an instructor invites class discussion by asking some opening question like "Well, what do you think of this article?" (or some other such banality), a specially well-prepared student is not shy, inarticulate, or embarrassedly looking around to see what fool is going to speak up; she is ready, confident, engaged, and has opinions, questions, comments, and reasons for them, which she is interested in others' reactions to. Specially prepared students tend to be informal leaders in the discussions of the material, and may be permitted to have their concerns dominate the discussion. =20 Being specially prepared does not mean being prepared to give, or giving, a class presentation. It means being prepared to take the initiative in a discussion to which you are going to make an interesting and useful contribution which has roots in your own critical reflection and background knowledge. =20 Again following Dr Frye's ideas, I'll ask you write and hand in an 1-2 page (double-spaced) `Topics and Issues Memo' on the reading or readings for which you are `especially well prepared.' =20 This lists the topics/issues/problems/questions you think it would be important to address in the discussion of the essay[(s)] you are dealing with, and includes some explanation/elaboration of each topic or issue and why it is important. [Please] arrive in class with this neatly and thoughtfully prepared and hand it in at the end of class. [Make good use of it during class, too!] =20 Students assigned to [or who choose] the same essay[(s)] may work together to define topics/issues/problems/questions for discussion, and may jointly compose and submit a "Topics and Issues Memo." This Memo would cover more ground...than a Memo done by just one student, reflecting the ideas and experiences of more than one person. You may, however, work independently, if you wish. =20 In the near future, we shall work out the schedule for special preparations and deal with any ambiguities and indeterminancies appertaining thereupon. =20 =20 =20 S???Q?????W? Humongous Course Project =20 Sorry, but I'm not going to tell you exactly what you'd like to do for this. No can do. See, I'd like you to do something that you'd like to do, but it's kind of silly for one person to tell another person what she or he would like to do. So it's going to be up to you to create your own humongous course project (HCP). Lest this sound too radically open-beginninged, let the word now go forth that although I can't and won't tell you exactly what to do for and with your HCP, I do have some possibilities and general guidelines. =20 HCP Possibilities =20 This list of possible possibilities is not meant to be exhaustive, nor are its items mutually exclusive. =20 -- (Adapted from the ideas of Deborah Ball and Dan Chazan.) A case-based exploration of mathematical ways of knowing. Some possibilities within this possibility: You might epistemologically study (observe, interview, and otherwise interact with) an individual, e.g. a K-12 student, a college student, a preschooler, a carpenter, a homemaker, a homeless person, a research Mathematician, an elementary or secondary teacher, a student in TE 401, a teacher educator, a yourself. You could explore the mathematical ways of knowing and being of not one, but two or more human beings. You could analyse a math-ed reform manifesto or a set of curriculum materials for the kinds of mathematical knowing they promote (and militate against). You may be itching to do an ethnographic study of a mathematics classroom, a mathematics lecture hall, an elementary classroom, a mathematics-`methods' classroom, a TE-950 classroom. And you could very well have ideas of other `cases' that I am utterly incapable of thinking of; =20 -- An in-more-depth research project of an issue or some issues we take up in our course; =20 -- An in-depth research project of an issue or some issues we don't take up (or take up in too cursorily for your satisfaction) in our course; =20 -- A critical literature/research review; =20 -- A brand-new philosophy of mathematics; =20 -- A course-related critical study of a mathematical topic; =20 -- ??????? =20 HCP Guidelines =20 -- Whatever you choose to do and however you choose to do it need to be done from the principal viewpoint of our course (mathematical being and knowing from a [pan-]cultural perspective); =20 -- Whatever you choose to do and however you choose to do it need to draw upon our course readings and, I hope and suggest, billions and billions of other sources; =20 -- Whatever you choose to do and however you choose to do it need to (this is getting monotonous) eventuate in two `products': =20 (1) An oral (or multi-media) seminar to occur during the last few weeks of class; =20 (2) A paper. More explicitly, a paper that is extensive in scope and detail; critical, analytical, and synthetic; carefully and lovingly thought through; scholarly; elegantly written; grammatically, lexicographically, and typographically perfect; an utter pleasure for all of us to read; and potentially publishable. In order to promote this last goal, I'd like you to `pitch' your paper toward a particular publication. You make the call as to which journal. The principal purview of the journal you choose can but doesn't have to be mathematics or mathematics education; other disciplinary possibilities are curriculum theory, teacher education, cultural studies, philosophy, and sociology. It isn't a course requirement that you submit your HCP paper for publication. But it sure would be nice....; =20 -- An HCP proposal (approximately 1-2 double-spaced pages, unless you'd like it to be longer or shorter) is due in my paws or mailslot at or before 5 p.m. EDT on Monday, 9 September. Please be prepared to tell our class about your plans on Wednesday, the 11th; =20 -- An HCP in-progress report (approximately 1=BD-2=BD double-spaced page= s, unless...) is due in my paws or mailslot at or before 4 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, 9 October. This should include a briefing on (in the vernacular) where you're at; also, please say some words about any difficulties you're having, unresolved questions and dilemmae, and your plans for a successful climax to your HCP; =20 -- Asking me to read and respond to a preliminary draft of your HCP paper is not required, but is a good idea; =20 -- The final and last draft of your HCP paper is due in my paws or mailslot at or before 5 p.m. EST on Tuesday, 10 December; =20 -- Your HCP can be either an individual or collaborative effort; =20 -- My appropriation (once again) Dan Chazan's and Deborah Ball's pedagogical wisdom provides some specific form to the seminars at which you and our classmates will present the fruits of your HCP. This form involves two further assignments deserving of their own sub-section: ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:27:20 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: How Not to Prove the Poincare Conjecture (IV) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Seminar-Related Assignments =20 Each HCP will have attached to it one or more discussants -- a person or persons whose responsibility is to summarise the project presentation, prepare some questions for the presenter(s), and co=F6rdinate the whole-class discussion. Each HCP will also be graced with a respondent -- someone(s) who'll critique the project and its presentation in writing in terms of both what was done and suggestions for future work. =20 You'll need to get a draft of your paper to the discussant(s) at least a few days before your seminar. This need not be the final version, just the best you can produce at that point in time. =20 We'll discuss further details and complications of the HCP and the seminars as they arise, which they are certain to do.... =20 =20 =20 ?. That necessary evil: Grading ? =20 `Subjective, objective -- what's the difference?' William S. Burroughs =20 On the left hand, I certainly don't want you to worry about grading, especially if your concerns were to diminish your experience in our class. But on the right, I'm not comfortable just saying, `Everyone gets a 4.0 if she does all the work on time and there's nothing terribly troublesome about it.' Tried this once. BIG mistake. Sigh. =20 So here's the deal. Please try not to worry about grading. If you like, use the fact that we're institutionally beholden to do grades as a secondary incentive to read and write and think and discuss and feel and experience and reflect and learn as much and as well as you can in TE 950. =20 So here's more of the deal. In a course that's intended to be a paramount intellectual experience for doctoral students, it seems a bit undignified to have you collect `points' for your grade. I'm also not hot on assigning a weight (percentage) to each piece that counts toward the course grade, then computing the latter as a weighted average of the little pieces. To do so would be to attest that I believe in `mathematically' analysing those delightfully unmeasurable qualities we call knowledge and understanding. Well, my personal mathematical ontology excludes partitioning human consciousness into mutually exclusive components, then feeding the chunks to an algorithm. Holistic grading suits me much better, thank you. =20 For a most general evaluative guideline, I'll again draw on one of our colleagues, this time my buddy Eliot Singer. Here's his grading criterion for doctoral courses: =20 4.0 means active intellectual involvement in class and learning a [tremendous amount], presumably with quality written work. 3.5 means doing all the work adequately and taken class seriously. 3.0 means barely present but not flunkable. =20 Of course, such terms as `tremendous amount,' `quality,' `adequately,' and `seriously' are unavoidably subjective. All anyone can do is do her best to perceive amount of learning, the adequacy of work, and the seriousness with which someone else goes about her business. If you'd like to combine your subjective determinations with my own, let me know and we'll talk. I am opposed to requiring any person to evaluate herself. But I'm equally opposed to depriving doctoral students (whose professional experience and proficiency often exceed my own) of the opportunity to participate in your own evaluation. That is, consider yourself invited to help grade yourself. =20 Finally (for now), two further open invitations.... =20 a> You are cordially invited to suggest modifications and alternatives to these modest proposals concerning grading in our seminar. =20 b> You are continually invited to requisition an up-to-the-moment status report from me, either in writing, per ora, or both. =20 Post-finally, I'll (re)assure you that there are no grade quotas or any other such nonsense in our course. I hope that everyone earns a 4.0. I want everyone to earn a 4.0. And that's the name of that tune. =20 4. Readings =20 One whole book is required. To buy, that is; we probably won't read all of it as a class. You can purchase this whole entire book at the MSU Bookstore, the SBS, the College Store, and Ned's. =20 Ernest, Paul. (1991). The philosophy of mathematics education. London: Falmer Press. =20 There's also a required coursepack available from the Michigan Document Service, located in the Brookfield Shopping Plaza near the intersection of Grand River and Hagadorn. Please pick this up immediately (or sooner). =20 The reading list to follow is MOST approximate! A whole slew of factors (the most prominent are library lackings, indecision, and a whole slew of viruses) have prevented me from obtaining all the readings I'd like to use from here to early December. So I expect to assign some pieces not in our coursepack. Inversely, the probability is at least 99.999...% that I won't assign all coursepack-included articles. Nevertheless (and everthemore), please sleep assured that every reading you're shelling out righteous $$$ to own is valuable and highly recommended for your attention at some point of your life's journey. (One approach to the too-many-readings problem is to have some of y'all read some pieces that the others don't. What do you think?) =20 The spare bedroom of my ramshackle, disheveled, dilapidated house contains a gigantic pile of articles, chapters, excerpts, and manuscripts that didn't make the 'pack but significantly intersect the subject matter of our course. Many of these pieces could be relevant to your HCP -- and your non-950 interests and projects as well. Please don't be shy in asking me to suggest readings and resources. (If I get the time and energy, I'll compile a list of what's in my gigantic pile, but please don't hold your breath.) You'll find trillions of other life-changing articles, chapters, and books in the reference lists and bibliographies of our readings, too. =20 Lastly, I robustly invite YOU to nominate readings with which you are familiar.... =20 5. TENTATIVE Anticipated Schedule =20 Please note: The week-by-week topics below are no more and no less than names for the anticipated foci of our attention at particular junctures of our course. I expect that each topic will surface both before and after its Wednesday or two in the Sun. (As will myriads of other topics, themes, concerns, and questions.) =20 Part One: Exploring Ways of Getting Started =20 Week 1 (28 August)....Exploring our notions of exploring, mathematical, ways, knowing, and all conceivable and perceptible unions and intersections of these terms =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 What do WE think, believe, feel, sense, intuit, and know about what mathematics is and how mathematics is known? Defend our answer. =20 Week 2 (4 September)....Exploring a pan-cultural approach to mathematical ways of knowing =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 What is common to mathematical being and knowing amongst all cultural groups? What characteristics of what mathematics is and how mathematics is known can differ? How so? And just what is epistemology, anyway? =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Bill, (Mr). (1996, Fall). Syllabus for TE 950. Unpublished. =20 Bishop, Alan J. (1988). Towards a way of knowing. From Mathematical enculturation: A cultural perspective on mathematics education (pp. 1-19). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publications. =20 Bishop, Alan J. (1988). Environmental activities and mathematical culture. From Mathematical enculturation: A cultural perspective on mathematics education (pp. 20-59). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publications. =20 Joseph, George Gheverghese. (1991). Preface. From The crest of the peacock: Non-European roots of mathematics (pp. x-xv). London: Penguin Books, 1992. =20 Joseph, George Gheverghese. (1991). The history of mathematics: Alternative perspectives. From The crest of the peacock: Non-European roots of mathematics (pp. 1-22). London: Penguin Books, 1992. =20 Kitcher, Philip. (1983). Excerpt from "Epistemological preliminaries." From The nature of mathematical knowledge (pp. 13-22). New York: Oxford University Press. =20 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:30:46 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: How Not to Prove the Poincare Conjecture (V) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE =20 Part Deux: Exploring Mainstream and Western Mathematical Ways of Knowing =20 Weeks 3 & 4 (11 & 18 September)....Exploring the traditional traditions of mathematical ways of knowing =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 Can we cover all of the canonical mathematical philosophies of mathematics in just two sessions? What are the defining and definitive values and characteristics of mathematics-as-we-know-it? How the heck did the most important philosopher of the 20th Century take 200+ pages to add 1 and 1? What is natural about mathematics? What does it mean to claim ` a mathematical object’ in the Western world? What can we learn about the Western worldview from Western mathematics -- and vice versa? =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Benacerraf, Paul, & Putnam, Hilary. (1964). Introduction to Philosophy of mathematics: Selected readings (pp. 1-27). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice =20 -Hall, Inc. =20 Chihara, Charles. (1990). The problem of existence in mathematics. From Constructibility and mathematical existence (pp. 3-23). New York: Oxford University Press. =20 Davis, Philip J., & Hersh, Reuben. (1980). From The mathematical experience (pp. 318-322, 339-359). Boston: Birkh=E4user. =20 Ernest, The philosophy of mathematics education. Introduction (pp. xi-xiv) and Part I: Chapters 1-5 (pp. 1-108). =20 Hirsch, Morris W. (1995). Review of Penelope Maddy (1993), Realism in mathematics (London: Oxford University Press.) Bulletin (New Series) of the American Mathematical Society, 32(1), 137-148. =20 =20 =20 Weeks 5 & 6 (25 September & 2 October)....Exploring `the logic of discovery and the logic of proof' =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 How is mathematical knowledge REALLY generated? How are discovery and proof connected in mainstream and Western mathematics? What role does each play in knowledge and knowing? Why has the late Imre Lakatos become the James Dean of mathematical philosophers? What WILL our class do with (Mr.) Bill off at a conference in Tennessee on 2 October? =20 a? Exploring that kwazy quasi-empiricism! =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Davis, Philip J., & Hersh, Reuben. (1980). Lakatos and the philosophy of dubitability. From The mathematical experience (pp. 345-359). Boston: Birkh=E4user. =20 Lakatos, Imre. (1976). From Proofs and refutations: The logic of mathematical discovery (pp. 1-23). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. =20 ?? Exploring discovery and proof in mainstream and Western mathematics =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Davis, Philip J., & Hersh, Reuben. (1980). Proof. From The mathematical experience (pp. 147-151). Boston: Birkh=E4user. =20 Epstein, David, & Levy, Silvio. (1995). Experimentation and proof in mathematics. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 42(6), 670-674. =20 Krantz, Steven G. (1994). The immortality of proof. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 41(1), 10-13. =20 P=F3lya, George. (1954). Preface. From Induction and analogy in mathematics, Volume I: Of mathematics and plausible reasoning (pp. v-viii). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. =20 P=F3lya, George. (1954). Induction. From Induction and analogy in mathematics, Volume I: Of mathematics and plausible reasoning (pp. 3-11). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. =20 P=F3lya, George. (1950). On plausible reasoning. In Gian-Carlo Rota (Ed.), George P=F3lya: Collected papers, Volume IV: Probability; combinatorics; teaching and learning in mathematics (pp. 512-520). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984. =20 Steiner, Mark. (1975). Proof and mathematical knowledge. From Mathematical knowledge (pp. 93-108). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. =20 Week 7 (9 October)....Exploring political and sociological perspectives on mathematical ways of knowing =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 What is the nature/culture of mathematicians' (anti)social relations? What connexions are there between mathematicians’ as societies (and cultures) and the nature-culture of mathematics itself? =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Restivo, Sal. (1993). The social life of mathematics. In Sal Restivo, Jean Paul Van Bendegem, & Roland Fischer, (Eds.). Math worlds: Philosophical and social studies of mathematics and mathematics education (pp. 247-278). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. =20 Struik, Dirk J. (1942). On the sociology of mathematics. Science and Society, 6(1), 58-70. =20 Struik, Dirk J. (1986). The sociology of mathematics revisited: A personal note. In Maths Education Project, Is mathematics teaching neutral? (Volume 2) (pp. 68-81). Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town, 1988. =20 Thurston, William P. (1994). On proof and progress in mathematics. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 30(2), 161-177. =20 =BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB= =BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB =20 =20 =20 Part p? Exploring Non-Mainstream or non-Western Mathematical Ways of Knowing =20 Weeks 8 & 9 (16 & 23 October)....Exploring non-Western mathematical ways of knowing =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 What are the defining and definitive values and characteristics of mathematics-as-we-DON’T-know-it? What is natural about mathematics? What does it mean for a mathematical object to exist in the non-Western world? What’s ethnomathematics? Multicultural mathematics? The difference between ‘em? What can a cultural group’s mathematics tell us about their worldview, and vice versa? Do some indigneous peoples REALLY count "one, two, many"? So what if they do? =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Denny, J. Peter. (1986). Cultural ecology of mathematics. In Michael P. Closs (Ed.), Native American mathematics (pp. 129-180). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. =20 Frankenstein, Marilyn, & Powell, Arthur. (1994). Toward liberatory mathematics: Paulo Freire's epistemology and ethnomathematics. In Peter L. =20 McLaren & Colin Lankshear (Eds.), Politics of liberation: Paths from Freire (pp. 74-99). New York: Routledge. =20 Pinxten, Rik, van Dooren, Ingrid, & Harvey, Frank. (1983). The natural philosophy of Navajo language and world view. From Anthropology of space: Explorations into the natural philosophy and semantics of the Navajo (pp. 8-25). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. =20 Pinxten, Rik, van Dooren, Ingrid, & Harvey, Frank. (1983). Applications in the teaching of mathematics and the sciences. From Anthropology of space: Explorations into the natural philosophy and semantics of the Navajo (pp. 155-175). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. =20 Thomas, Robert. (1996). Proto-mathematics and/or real mathematics. For the Learning of Mathematics, 16(2), 11-18. =20 Zaslavsky, Claudia. (1973). African mathematics? From Africa counts: Number and pattern in African culture (pp. 2-16). Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1979. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:32:10 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: How Not to Prove the Poincare Conjecture (VI) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Week 10 (30 October)....Exploring women's (?)/feminist mathematical ways of knowing =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 What is feminist epistemology? Can there be a feminist mathematics? Should there be a feminist mathematics? Are women a cultural group? Can epistemology solve the `girl problem in mathematics’? Can we get through this class without yelling and screaming? =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Becker, Joanne Rossi. (1995). Women's ways of knowing in mathematics. In Pat Rogers & Gabriele Kaiser (Eds.), Equity in mathematics education: Influences of feminism and culture (pp. 163-174). London: Falmer Press. =20 Belenky, Mary Field, Clinchy-Vicker, Blythe M., Goldberger, Nancy R., & Tarule, Jill M. (1986). To the other side of silence. From Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and mind (pp. 3-20). New York: Basic Books. =20 Damarin, Suzanne K. (1995). Gender and mathematics from a feminist standpoint. In Walter G. Secada, Elizabeth Fennema, & Lisa Byrd Adajian (Eds.), New directions for equity in mathematics education (pp. 242-257). New York: Cambridge University Press. =20 Harding, Sandra. (1991). What is feminist epistemology? From Whose science? Whose knowledge?: Thinking from women's lives (pp. 105-137). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. =20 Harding, Sandra. (1986). Pure mathematics. Excerpt from "Gender and science." From The science question in feminism (pp. 48-52). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. =20 Irigaray, Luce. (1987). Is the subject of science sexed? In Nancy Tuana (Ed.), Feminism and science (pp. 58-68). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. =20 Jackson, Allyn. (1989). Feminist critiques of science. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 36(6), 669-672. =20 Roitman, Judy. (1993). Review of Whose science? Whose knowledge: Thinking from women's lives. Association for Women in Mathematics Newsletter, 23(1), 14-15. =20 =20 =20 Week 11 (6 November)....Exploring `everyday' mathematical ways of knowing =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 How the heck can a street kid in Rio make change in her head yet not be able to subtract two-digit numbers correctly? Does a phenomenon have to occur every day to be called `everyday’? f I were a carpenter and you were a traditional Western mathematician, would we be able to find common epistemological ground? =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Millroy, Wendy Lesley. (1992). From An ethnographic study of the mathematical ideas of a group of carpenters. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education Monograph Number 5 (pp. ii-ix, 1-51). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. =20 Nunes, Terezinha, Schliemann, Analucia Dias, & Carraher, David William. (1993). What is street mathematics? From Street mathematics and school mathematics (pp. 1-27). New York: Cambridge University Press. =20 Weeks 12 & 13 (13 November & 20 November)....Exploring students' mathematical ways of knowing; Exploring mathematical ways of knowing pedagogically and curricularly =20 Potentially possible anticipated questions to ponder =20 What have we already learned about how mathematical philosophy overlaps mathematics education? Does it make sense to talk about `students’ mathematical ways of knowing’? Should your typical 8-year-old REALLY tussle with philosophical disagreements? What the heck is `authentic school mathematics’? How can our newly heighted epistemological consciousnesses help our students of mathematics and mathematics education? Why the heck did (Mr) Bill put this credibly important topic at the end of the course? =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Buerk, Dorothy. (1988, December). Mathematical metaphors from advanced placement students. Humanistic Mathematics Network Newsletter #1. Unpaginated. =20 Casey, Nancy, & Fellows, Mike. (1993). Welcome to the Hotel Infinity! In This is MEGA-Mathematics!: Stories and activities for mathematical thinking, problem solving and communication (pp. 92-109). Los Alamos, New Mexico: The Los Alamos National Laboratories. =20 Chazan, Daniel. (19??). Instructional implications of a research project on students' understandings of the differences between empirical verification and mathematical proof. =20 Ernest, The philosophy of mathematics education. Chapter 6 (pp. 111-136); Chapters 12 & 13 (pp. 259-296). =20 Henderson, David W. (1990). The masquerade of formal mathematics and how it damages the human spirit. In R. Noss, A. Brown, P. Drake, P. Dowling, M. Harris, C. Hoyles, & S. Mellin-Olsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the First International Conference: Political Dimensions of Mathematics Education: Action and critique (pp. 115-118). London: Institute of Education, University of London. =20 Lampert, Magdalene. (1993). Practices and problems in teaching authentic mathematics. In David K. Cohen, Milbrey W. McLaughlin, & Joan E. Talbert (Eds.), Teaching for understanding: Challenges for policy and practice (pp. 295-314). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. =20 Pinxten, Rik. (1994). Anthropology in the mathematics classroom? In Stephen Lerman (Ed.), Cultural perspectives on the mathematics classroom (pp. 85-97). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publications. =20 EXTRA! Late addition as this syllabus went to press!!.... =20 Psychology, particularly constructivism, intersects epistemology!! =20 Of potential especial interest to the CEPSE people!! And we don’t have to wait until it snows to begin taking up the ? of psychological and epistemological issues vis-a-vis mathematics!!! =20 Potentially possible anticipated question to ponder =20 How is the buzzterm `constructivism’ used, misused, abused? Can Jack Smith help clear the cobwebs from (Mr) Bill’s mind on the nexus between constructivism and epistemology? =20 Potentially possible anticipated readings =20 Goldin, Gerald A. (1990). Epistemology, constructivism, and discovery learning in mathematics. In Robert B. Davis, Carolyn A. Maher, & Nel Noddings (Eds.), Constructivist Views on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics (pp. 31-47). Journal for Research in Mathematics Education Monograph Number 4. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. =20 Noddings, Nel. (1990). Constructivism in mathematics education. In Robert B. Davis, Carolyn A. Maher, & Nel Noddings (Eds.), Constructivist Views on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics (pp. 7-18). Journal for Research in Mathematics Education Monograph Number 4. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. =20 ...and... =20 =20 =20 (Maybe something from) Mimica, Jadran. (1988). Intimations of infinity. London: Berg. =20 (Probably something from) Piaget, Jean. (1970). Genetic epistemology. (Translated by Eleanor Duckworth.) New York: Columbia University Press. =20 (And I imagine something from) von Glaserfeld, Ernst. (1995). Some excerpt from Radical constructivism: A way of knowing and learning. London: Falmer Press. =20 =BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB= =BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB=BB =20 Parts W, ?, ?1, and ...: Exploring Our Explorations of Mathematical Ways of Knowing =20 Potentially possible question to ponder =20 How the heck can we wait all semester for THIS?!$%*!! =20 Weeks ? 13-15 (20 November, 4 December, & 11 December)....Seminars on HCPs References =20 Bishop, Alan J. (1988). Mathematical enculturation: A cultural perspective on mathematics education. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publications. =20 D'Ambrosio, Ubiratan. (1985). Ethnomathematics and its place in the history and pedagogy of mathematics. For the Learning of Mathematics, 5(1), 44-48. =20 Ernest, Paul. (1991). The philosophy of mathematics education. London: Falmer Press. =20 Joseph, George Gheverghese. (1991). The crest of the peacock: Non-European roots of mathematics. London: Penguin Books, 1992. =20 Millroy, Wendy Lesley. (1992). From An ethnographic study of the mathematical ideas of a group of carpenters. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education Monograph Number 5 (pp. ii-ix, 1-51). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:34:18 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: How Not to Prove the Poincare Conjecture (I) (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Sorry that this--part I of a 6-part forwarding-- went astray initially NL ---------- Forwarded message ---------- A course listing in the Graduate School of Education, Michigan State. It stimulates me to re-think my position on capital punishment. Thanks to L. Gomez for pasing this on. Norm Levitt ---------- Forwarded message ---------- TE 950 Exploring Mathematical Ways of Knowing=20 =20 Fall 1996 =20 All the people we used to know They're an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians Some are carpenters' wives Don't know how it all got started I don't know what they're doin' with their lives. =20 Bob Dylan =20 In fact, whether one wishes it or not, all mathematical pedagogy, even if scarcely coherent, rests on a philosophy of mathematics. =20 Ren=E9 Thom =20 Mathematics is a pan-cultural phenomenon....[T]he mathematics which is exemplified by [Morris] Kline's Mathematics in Western Culture is a particular variant of mathematics. =20 Alan J. Bishop =20 When we play tennis or walk downstairs, we are actually solving whole pages of differential equations, quickly, easily, and without thinking about it, using the analogue computer which we keep in our minds. What we find difficult about mathematics is the formal, symbolic presentation of the subject by pedagogues with a taste for dogma, sadism, and incomprehensible squiggles. =20 J E Gordon =20 Semi-Vital statistics =20 Class meetings.....Wednesdays, 4 - 6:50 p.m. in C207 Wells Hall Instructor.........(Mr.) Bill Rosenthal Office.............A completely inaccessible nook of Erickson Hall Mailbox............251 Erickson, open 8 a.m. - 5 p.m., Monday - Friday. =20 Anything you need to leave for me should be left here. =20 Office phone.......(43)2-1503 (Try me here first during the day!) E-mail address: mrbill@msu.edu=20 Home phone.........(517)349-5471 (Beware the weird message on the answering machine!) Office hours.......By appointment, WHENEVER you need or want and I can do it =20 =20 =20 About the instructor Age =3D 41+ solar years Birthplace =3D New York City Uncorrected vision =3D 20/1600 in left eye, 20/800 in right eye Religion =3D ? Last entire book read =3D Ernst von Glaserfeld’s Radical constructivism: A way of knowing and learning Latest achievements =3D a) Writing this syllabus; b) Reading Ernst von Glaserfeld’s Radical constructivism: A way of knowing and learning in its entirety; c) Drinking a quadruple espresso at Beaner’s and living to tell the tale. =20 1. Ideology and Superstructure =20 Comparison and contrast of philosophical, cultural, political, societal, psychological, and historical perspectives on knowing in mathematics as a discipline, in school and nonschool settings =20 [says the catalogue] =20 --or-- =20 A lot of the things you've always wanted to discuss and critique about mathematical epistemology (the study of how people know mathematics) and mathematical ontology (the study of what mathematics is), but weren't allowed to ask. =20 {sez (Mr.) Bill} =20 I intend our course to be a pan-cultural exploration of ways of knowing mathematics. The sense in which I intend `cultural' and `culture' here is an expansive one that is a combination of the ideas of two of the writers we'll soon be reading. Ubiratan D'Ambrosio (1985) speaks of culture as =20 the "jargons, codes, symbols, myths, and even specific ways of reasoning and inferring" of identifiable social groups (p. 45). =20 Since mathematics involves jargons, codes, symbols, myths, and specific ways of reasoning and inferring (especially jargons?), our discipline can be thought of as a cultural phenomenon. This theorem holds with respect to Wendy Millroy's (1992) description of culture (heavily edited!): =20 Culture consists in the "patterns and groups of significant symbols that people [create and use to] make sense of the events in their lives. These symbol systems are constructed historically and are maintained through social interactions among individuals....[C]ulture is more than the expression of that which grows out of the experiences of people in their daily social and working roles....[C]ommunities share a culture defined not only by the system of symbols [they] develop historically...; political and socioeconomic factors also play a significant part in shaping the culture of a group" (pp. 28-29). =20 =20 =20 Surely, mathematics entails patterns and groups of symbols that people create, use to make sense of their lives, and are historically constructed and maintained through social interactions. To what degree and in what sense these patterns and symbols are significant are issues we'll be discussing in some depth. Ditto the alleged r=F4le of political and socioeconomic factors in shaping the symbol systems that have come to be called mathematical. =20 Alan Bishop's claim that mathematics is a pan-cultural phenomenon comprises (at least) two (2, II, niizh, ?) subclaims. First is an affirmative answer to his question `Do all cultures develop mathematics?' (1988, p. 22). This combines nicely with D'Ambriosio's simple-yet-powerful avowal that `different modes of thoughts may lead to different forms of mathematics.' The union of these two lemmas -- that all cultures develop mathematics and that different cultures may develop different forms of mathematics -- leads to billions and billions of questions concerning the similarities and differences of the mathematics birthed by the millions and millions of identifiable human social groups that have populated the Earth. =20 These questions are both ontological and epistemological. Roughly and reductively speaking, ontology refers to the study of being and existence, epistemology to knowledge and knowing, and belief and truth. Ontology deals with `is' questions: What is life? Is there a God? (Or, Does God exist?) What is mathematical? In contrast, epistemological issues involve the stances toward, instances of, and circumstances surrounding, knowing and knowledge that a group of sentient beings adopts and creates for themselves and others. Some epistemological questions: What criteria are there for knowing that one is living a good life? How does a Jew come to know that God exists? What conditions do Bahais have for a believer to know God? What does it mean to know that the Pythagorean Theorem is true? Who in the `mathematical community' got to decide that Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem works well enough for this long-unproven theorem to be accepted as mathematical knowledge? What kind of evidence is required before a Fields Medal-winning mathematician will accept the claim of an MSU mathematics major that she knows the process of integration? What ways of knowing the concept of area are acceptable to i) 5-year-olds in Sarajevo; ii) a 4th-grade class at Spartan Village; iii) 10th graders taking geometry at Lansing Christian High School; iv) Navajos? To what knowledge tests will the members of TE 950 Fall 1996 subject our mathematical discoveries?!? ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:34:14 -0700 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Michael Gregory, NEXA/H-NEXA" Subject: Re: Bouchard vs change Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 08:20:35 +0100 From: Ian Pitchford melanie lazarow[:] Ian Pitchford stated earlier ["]there is no such thing as genetically determined behaviour" Yet he enlists Bouchard to patently defend genetically determined I.Q. ___ REPLY: I do no such thing, and how does letting an individual speak for himself against charges sufficiently serious to undermine his whole career amount to a crime against justice? I'm all for robust debate, but this flood of accusations against Bouchard without any attempt to grasp the issues really is completely beyond the pale. You don't even appear to have read the material he presents in his defence. Ian Pitchford Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 19:56:41 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: new book on psychoanalytic institutes Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Human-Nature.com is delighted to announce that a major new study of the institutional dynamics of psychoanalytic institutes has been placed on our web site. This book will be published soon by Process Press, who have made the entire text available on-line http://www.human-nature.com/kirsner/index.html UNFREE ASSOCIATIONS INSIDE PSYCHOANALYTIC INSTITUTES by Douglas Kirsner This book provides a detailed and massively well-informed insight into four of the leading psychoanalytic institutes in America: New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. The author conducted scores of interviews and transcribed a mass of oral history - about a million words. Many of the analysts interviewed were prominent in psychoanalysis as established leaders, and were quite often protagonists in the stories of their institutes. He also consulted a mountain of material in libraries and archives and attended institute meetings and conferences. The result is a uniquely textured set of pictures of free-standing institutions - their organisations, their cultures, their conflicts and their ways of mediating conflict and surviving, sometimes after splits which led to the founding of new institutes. Each of his four case studies focuses on basic problems - the role of immigrant analysts; dubious links between senior analysts and patients and ex-patients who become trustees; the vexed question of succession and choosing training analysts by merit rather than personal patronage and even nepotism; doctrinal disputes which, in the case of the Los Angeles institute, nearly led to the American Psychoanalytic Association closing them down if they did not purge Kleinians and Kleinianism from their programme. The book also sheds light on the question of why psychoanalysis is in such crisis and decline today. While external factors have played their part, psychoanalysts have generally disregarded their own crucial role. Their politics have, on the whole, been inward-looking, while their attitudes toward theoretical differences and innovation have too often been deeply conservative. Another perspective which the author investigates is the problems of a basically humanistic discipline that has conceived and touted itself as a positivist science while organising itself institutionally as a religion. One can view these issues and conflicts as scandals, which, in some cases, they clearly were. But there is another perspective which Douglas Kirsner is careful to stress. Each of these disputes was resolved, and the institutions have carried on and have done so with constructive relationships with the breakaway institutes and with the theoretical orientations with which they were, for a time, locked in seemingly irresolvable conflict. However, in the author's view, these changes were achieved despite intrinsic problems that remain at the heart of psychoanalysis and its institutions. Through these histories the author identifies fundamental, underlying problems that need to be addressed if the field is to advance from its parlous state. Interest in this study should not be confined to psychoanalysts. It is also a rich set of case studies in group relations - the psychological and social dynamics of independent professional organisations, with the ironic twist that the members of these organisations profess to have special insight into human nature and how people can and should get along with one another. Douglas Kirsner is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and History of Ideas at Deakin University, Australia. He has taught and researched in the areas of psychoanalysis and social institutions for nearly thirty years. In 1977 he founded the annual Deakin University Freud Conference, which he directed for twenty years. He is the author of '_The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R. D. Laing_, edited collections, and numerous articles and book chapters, mainly concerned with psychoanalysis. Unfree Associations is the result of a decade's work, including many trips to the United States to conduct interviews and archival research. Some comments on Unfree Associations: 'Douglas Kirsner has produced a pioneering study of the operations of psychoanalytic Institutes. _Unfree Associations_ traces the consequences of various organisational arrangements on their vital functions. It also presents a veritable nosology of the ills that beset analytic education. Kirsner's case studies are focused on four of the most influential Institutes in North America. The data base he has collected is both convincing and astonishing. His conclusions transcend the problems of psychoanalytic education, for they are equally relevant to the fate of psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge.' - John E. Gedo MD, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalytic Thought, University of Chicago, author of _Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents_ and co-editor of _Psychoanalysis: The Vital Issues_. 'A brilliant & original feat of historical reconstruction, synthesizing innumerable details, from dozens of interviews and mountains of documentation, to create a scholarly & yet intensely readable chronicle of "splits" in American psychoanalytic institutes. Each institute had different characteristics, but these differences contribute to an understanding of the general phenomenon. 'As a survivor of a paradigmatic split (Boston 1973), I can attest to Prof Kirsner's sensitivity & precision, in collecting many accounts of these traumatic events. He has recorded dozens of sympathetic interviews, in which each informant reports his or her own version of what happened, & he has reviewed hundreds of documents. From these conflicting & complex details, he has woven a seamless web that is both scholarly & extremely readable. 'From this brilliant historical reconstruction, the general as well as the scholarly reader will learn how complex & easily forgotten are the details of relatively recent events. As a sympathetic interviewer of the analysts who survived these traumatic experiences, each with a different view of what happened, Prof Kirsner has created a unified narrative that makes lively & dramatic reading. Historians of psychoanalysis will also be grateful for the wealth of factual detail he has preserved.' - Sanford Gifford MD, Chair of the History and Archives Division of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 'It is a work of scholarship that is unparalleled in its field - a truly _magnum opus_.' - Charles Brenner, MD, author of _An Elementray Textbook of Psychoanalysis_ and _The Mind in Conflict_. Have a look at the other documents archived at the web site of human-nature.com: and join in the discussions which this web site was created to serve. http://www,human-nature.com __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 09:33:45 +1000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: melanie lazarow Subject: Institute for the Study of Academic Racism: Bibliography Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Thanks to Barry Mehler for this useful bibliography: >You might be interested in the bibliographies on my web site: > >Institute for the Study of Academic Racism >http:/www.ferris.edu/isar > Also: >BTW you might be interested in a editorial based on my work. It appeared >in todays Detroit Free Press and is available at: > >http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/qcole29.htm > Melanie Lazarow Information Literacy Librarian University of Melbourne Parkville Victoria 3052 Australia *************************************************** Phone 61 3 9344 5373 Fax 61 3 9348 1142 Email: m.lazarow@lib.unimelb.edu.au He who is yet alive, let him not say, Never. Brecht ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 08:14:37 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: The internet is depressing; its use is increasing X-To: psa-public-sphere@sheffield.ac.uk, hraj@maelstrom.stjohns.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" New York Times August 30, 1998 Researchers Find Sad, Lonely World in Cyberspace By AMY HARMON In the first concentrated study of the social and psychological effects of Internet use at home, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found that people who spend even a few hours a week online experience higher levels of depression and loneliness than they would have if they used the computer network less frequently. Those participants who were lonelier and more depressed at the start of the two-year study, as determined by a standard questionnaire administered to all the subjects, were not more likely to use the Internet. Instead, Internet use itself appeared to cause a decline in psychological well-being, the researchers said. The results of the $1.5 million project ran completely contrary to expectations of the social scientists who designed it and to many of the organizations that financed the study. These included technology companies like Intel Corp., Hewlett Packard, AT&T Research and Apple Computer, as well as the National Science Foundation. "We were shocked by the findings, because they are counterintuitive to what we know about how socially the Internet is being used," said Robert Kraut, a social psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute. "We are not talking here about the extremes. These were normal adults and their families, and on average, for those who used the Internet most, things got worse." The Internet has been praised as superior to television and other "passive" media because it allows users to choose the kind of information they want to receive, and often, to respond actively to it in the form of e-mail exchanges with other users, chat rooms or electronic bulletin board postings. Research on the effects of watching television indicates that it tends to reduce social involvement. But the new study, titled "HomeNet," suggests that the interactive medium may be no more socially healthy than older mass media. It also raises troubling questions about the nature of "virtual" communication and the disembodied relationships that are often formed in the vacuum of cyberspace. Participants in the study used inherently social features like e-mail and Internet chat more than they used passive information gathering like reading or watching videos. But they reported a decline in interaction with family members and a reduction in their circles of friends that directly corresponded to the amount of time they spent online. At the beginning and end of the two-year study, the subjects were asked to agree or disagree with statements like "I felt everything I did was an effort," and "I enjoyed life" and "I can find companionship when I want it." They were also asked to estimate how many minutes each day they spent with each member of their family and to quantify their social circle. Many of these are standard questions in tests used to determine psychological health. For the duration of the study, the subjects' use of the Internet was recorded. For the purposes of this study, depression and loneliness were measured independently, and each subject was rated on a subjective scale. In measuring depression, the responses were plotted on a scale of 0 to 3, with 0 being the least depressed and 3 being the most depressed. Loneliness was plotted on a scale of 1 to 5. By the end of the study, the researchers found that one hour a week on the Internet led, on average, to an increase of .03, or 1 percent, on the depression scale, a loss of 2.7 members of the subject's social circle, which averaged 66 people, and an increase of .02, or four-tenths of 1 percent, on the loneliness scale. The subjects exhibited wide variations in all three measured effects, and while the net effects were not large, they were statistically significant in demonstrating deterioration of social and psychological life, Kraut said. Based on these data, the researchers hypothesize that relationships maintained over long distances without face-to-face contact ultimately do not provide the kind of support and reciprocity that typically contribute to a sense of psychological security and happiness, like being available to baby-sit in a pinch for a friend, or to grab a cup of coffee. "Our hypothesis is there are more cases where you're building shallow relationships, leading to an overall decline in feeling of connection to other people," Kraut said. The study tracked the behavior of 169 participants in the Pittsburgh area who were selected from four schools and community groups. Half the group was measured through two years of Internet use, and the other half for one year. The findings will be published this week by The American Psychologist, the peer-reviewed monthly journal of the American Psychological Association. Because the study participants were not randomly selected, it is unclear how the findings apply to the general population. It is also conceivable that some unmeasured factor caused simultaneous increases in use of the Internet and decline in normal levels of social involvement. Moreover, the effect of Internet use varied depending on an individual's life patterns and type of use. Researchers said that people who were isolated because of their geography or work shifts might have benefited socially from Internet use. Even so, several social scientists familiar with the study vouched for its credibility and predicted that the findings would probably touch off a national debate over how public policy on the Internet should evolve and how the technology itself might be shaped to yield more beneficial effects. "They did an extremely careful scientific study, and it's not a result that's easily ignored," said Tora Bikson, a senior scientist at Rand, the research institution. Based in part on previous studies that focused on how local communities like Santa Monica, Calif., used computer networks to enhance civic participation, Rand has recommended that the federal government provide e-mail access to all Americans. "It's not clear what the underlying psychological explanation is," Ms. Bikson said of the study. "Is it because people give up day-to-day contact and then find themselves depressed? Or are they exposed to the broader world of Internet and then wonder, 'What am I doing here in Pittsburgh?' Maybe your comparison standard changes. I'd like to see this replicated on a larger scale. Then I'd really worry." Christine Riley, a psychologist at Intel Corp., the giant chip manufacturer that was among the sponsors of the study, said she was surprised by the results but did not consider the research definitive. "For us, the point is there was really no information on this before," Ms. Riley said. "But it's important to remember this is not about the technology, per se; it's about how it is used. It really points to the need for considering social factors in terms of how you design applications and services for technology." The Carnegie Mellon team -- which included Sara Kiesler, a social psychologist who helped pioneer the study of human interaction over computer networks; Tridas Mukophadhyay, a professor at the graduate business school who has examined computer mediated communication in the workplace; and William Scherlis, a research scientist in computer science -- stressed that the negative effects of Internet use that they found were not inevitable. For example, the main focus of Internet use in schools has been gathering information and getting in touch with people from far-away places. But the research suggests that maintaining social ties with people in close physical proximity could be more psychologically healthy. "More intense development and deployment of services that support pre-existing communities and strong relationships should be encouraged," the researchers write in their forthcoming article. "Government efforts to wire the nation's schools, for example, should consider online homework sessions for students rather than just online reference works." At a time when Internet use is expanding rapidly -- nearly 70 million adult Americans are on line, according to Nielsen Media Research -- social critics say the technology could exacerbate the fragmentation of U.S. society or help to fuse it, depending on how it is used. "There are two things the Internet can turn out to be, and we don't know yet which it's going to be," said Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University whose forthcoming book, "Bowling Alone," which is to be published next year by Simon & Schuster, chronicles the alienation of Americans from each other since the 1960s. "The fact that I'm able to communicate daily with my collaborators in Germany and Japan makes me more efficient, but there are a lot of things it can't do, like bring me chicken soup." Putnam added, "The question is how can you push computer mediated communication in a direction that would make it more community friendly." Perhaps paradoxically, several participants in the Internet study expressed surprise when they were informed of the study's conclusions by a reporter. "For me it's been the opposite of depression; it's been a way of being connected," said Rabbi Alvin Berkun, who used the Internet for a few hours a week to read The Jerusalem Post and communicate with other rabbis across the country. But Berkun said his wife did not share his enthusiasm for the medium. "She does sometimes resent when I go and hook up," he said, adding after a pause, "I guess I am away from where my family is while I'm on the computer." Another possibility is that the natural human preference for face-to-face communication may provide a self-correcting mechanism to the technology that tries to cross it. The rabbi's daughter, Rebecca, 17, said she had spent a fair amount of time in teen-age chat rooms at the beginning of the survey in 1995. "I can see how people would get depressed," Ms. Berkun said. "When we first got it, I would be on for an hour a day or more. But I found it was the same type of people, the same type of things being said. It got kind of old." ********************************** August 26, 1998 Study Says 70 Million American Adults Use the Internet By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON More than one-third of Americans over 16 use the Internet, an increase of more than 18 million people in nine months, according to a new survey released Tuesday of online use. The study by Nielsen Media Research and CommerceNet estimates 70.2 million adult Americans use the Internet, with the largest increases among blacks and American Indians and among young adults and women over 50 in the nine months through June 1998. The study also estimated that 44 million Americans -- almost twice as many men than women -- use the Web to make purchases or compare products. One researcher speculated that new types of products for sale across the Internet are driving electronic commerce, along with falling personal computer prices and technology that's easier to use. "A couple years ago, when you went shopping, the primary things you would find online were computers, hardware and software -- things for the techno-elite," said Loel McPhee, research director at CommerceNet. "Now you can send flowers and all sorts of things." The 70.2 million figure represents 35 percent of Americans over 16; the same study in September 1997 counted 52 million adult Americans online. The study estimated 40.1 million American men and 30.1 million women use the Internet and said percentage growth among men and women overall during the nine-month period was about equal. "Last fall, we thought there might be a slight leveling off," said McPhee. "This isn't the case with the numbers we're seeing now. My guess is we'll continue to grow until we hit the 50 percent mark." McPhee predicted 50 percent of adults in America and Canada will use the Internet by late 1999 or early 2000. Detailed figures from Tuesday's study showed the largest gains in Internet use among some minority groups -- especially blacks and American Indians -- and among young adults and women over 50. The report estimated 5.6 million U.S. blacks use the Internet, an increase of 53 percent from nine months earlier, and 868,000 American Indians online, an increase of 70 percent. It also showed gains of 46 percent among people ages 16-24, and an increase of 50 percent in the number of women over 50 using the Internet. The Nielsen-CommerceNet study was based in part on randomly dialed telephone interviews with 4,042 people in the United States during June 1998. The September study was based in part on telephone interviews with 7,157 Americans. People who had used any part of the Internet -- e-mail, the Web, FTP, telnet, chat rooms or discussion groups -- during the past month were counted as Internet users. A summary of the report is available on the Web at www.commerce.net/research. The full report costs $5,000. __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus