I’ve also read, and passed on to my son, How Do You Know It’s True? by Hy Ruchlis which I thought was really good (like a Demon Haunted World for 8-14 year olds).

Daniel Loxton’s Evolution is pretty good as well (obviously on the single subject)

Dale Mcgowan’s two parenting books (Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising FreeThinkers) were both good for ME, and I did find a couple recommendations in them. “In The Beginning” does a good job of looking at creation myths from around the world (telling them in story format).

I also encouraged my eldest to read the This I Believe books so he can look inside how other people believe or don’t.

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook is a graphic novel (that was recommended by Boing Boing I think_ and had a nice science theme.

From TV and entertainment standpoint I like the Sid The Science Kid & Dinosaur Train shows on PBS (both Henson productions… and Sid I think does a great job with promoting scientific thinking and investigation).

This Week in Science (podcast of radio show) had an interview with the author of The Prometheus Project: Trapped and it had some good scientific thinking lessons worked into a story both of my son’s enjoyed.

I was looking that up (he must’ve been quoting someone, right?) and up popped this blog!

Anyway – great idea. Thanks.

Also, a starting point for thinking about morality as not involving categorical imperatives or intrinsic values is Philippa Foot’s classic article, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.”

I can see, and appreciate, the meme-virus metaphor, but I’m thinking that it isn’t necessarily the best in regards to how religion has functioned. I’m not outright rejecting the religion as meme-virus concept, just trying to consider alternatives which may offer a more complete explanation. The key for what I’m thinking of is that the selective benefit isn’t necessarily at the individual level, but it would be for the group level.

I’ve lost track of where I heard the theory (my guess is either Kevin Kelly’s Technium blog or Scott Adam’s Dilbert blog), but somebody has posited that humans have, especially in the digital age, moved into an almost hive like function, such that while we’re all individual organisms we’re also part of a larger humanity organism (which could be broken down into either smaller city-state groups or as inclusive as the sum of humanity). Unlike other hive organisms (bees, ants, etc) each of the individual organisms is much more autonomous obviously (this screams of Ender’s Game).

In this context the religious benefits could be measured differently than they otherwise would. If a religion promotes behavior that increases numbers (“no-contraceptives for you, the Pope says so!”, and “go ye unto all nations”), and in-group interaction (“beware the gentiles!”) it has helped create a scenario in which a group gets larger, which then can promote more specialization within the group (makes more sense to have some guys hunting, some guys farming, and some guys making tools than everybody doing everything… if you’ve got the numbers and the resources, and eventually with all that breeding and proselytizing you’ll have the numbers) which then promotes more leisure time which in turn promotes discovery, invention, and art. If the religion also promotes a “sacrifice yourself for your neighbor” philosophy then you’ve got a concept which benefits the group as a whole when it comes to conflicts with other groups. By benefiting the group as a whole you’re de-facto offering some benefit to the individual members of the group, even if some of those members pay the price to give the benefits to everybody else (I’m thinking in terms of schooling fish now, some get eaten, but your chance of getting eaten are less as part of the group than they are on your own).

While the religion may be parasitic in nature and offer few benefits to the individual (though I think the comfort received by knowing you’re “saved” would have to count as a benefit, the requisite guilt and other detracting factors would have to be weighed against any benefits), I think it’s more likely that the more malleable religions (see note) serve some sort of symbiotic relationship at the group level, and while they introduce problems they lower the risk to each individual.

To that end I think there’s probably an argument to be made about the democratic nation-state in the last couple hundred years having started to replace that group selective function more and more. The religion isn’t the only way of giving the group those benefits, but as it was a result of a naturally spawned behavior in humanity (the behavior being “find an explanation for what happened”) and it worked for many thousands of years, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is parasitic/virus-like just that it was the best adaptive function available at the time. While it may not be the best adaptive function now, part of the reason it has held on is likely because there needs to be a valid, group selective, behavior to replace it. I think there needs to be something more cohesive as a philosophy that replaces those religious functions without becoming a religion if religion is going to be replaced.

Religion has been a “good enough” adaptive behavior for so long that there will need to be a much more compelling alternative for religion to give way. The other part of the equation is that due to it having been around for so long, religion has built in means of meeting our social creature needs, and until the alternatives to religion do a good enough job at serving that function (right now I think too many of the atheist communities are based on, and led by, people who are self described individualists and until the atheist community can start to include the people who don’t think of themselves in that “I’m an individual” way they won’t gain as much traction as they could). For most of the population, the basic religious explanation is (with or without truth) good enough to get them through their day, let them forget about other things, and focus on their jobs, friends, and family.

Note: I’m thinking of a malleable religion in terms of Christianity (or at least variants of Christianity) which has changed views on various subject over the years (from slavery, to contraception, to burning witches), though I know that some variants on Islam and Buddhism also allow for some movement on certain subjects. The key factor is likely that a religion doesn’t promote activities which decrease numbers and attractiveness of the religion (human sacrifice on any sort of escalating scale doesn’t seem to work for very long).

The one thing I might disagree with a bit in the article is whether a religion without practical value can continue to exist. Unless the religion causes those who believe in it to have a significantly reduced survival rate, I don’t see natural selection eliminating it for that reason. The religion itself can survive, even if it is harmful to those believing it, just as a virus can survive even if it is harmful in all ways to its host.

I’ll probably hit some of those inflation and environmental impact issues in a near-future entry at SOB, by the way. At the moment, the working title for the essay idea percolating in the back of my brain is something like “Cold, Hard Cash”.

Currently most of the carbon involved in nuclear fuel production in the US is from isotopic purification. This has nothing to do with ore grade since it will be the same regardless of where the yellow cake came from. We will soon move from our 1950’s era diffusion plant to new centrifuge plants with state of the art European centrifuges that take 5% of the power compared to the one in Kentucky. This will drop the carbon cost of nuclear by a degree that will make any rise in mining cost get lost in measurement error.

Serious prospecting for Uranium has only just re-started in earnest of the last five to ten years due to the rise in uranium prices (due to decreased supply of weapons grade uranium). It is unclear that we have come very close to exhausting our known uranium reserves. As Rummy would put it, this is an known unknown.

Thorium is an emerging competitor with uranium as a fuel for nuclear power plants. Current PWR plants can burn fuel designs utilizing thorium with little retrofitting of the reactor core. At least two generation IV reactor designs utilize thorium even more efficiently. This would be truly exciting. Thorium is 4 times more abundant in the crust than uranium, and even though uranium’s chemical properties allow it to become concentrated in large high grade deposits, there are concentrated mineral deposits of thorium that could support the industry comfortably, such as mozerite sands in India and Brazil and the igneous formations in Idaho. There have got to be scores more, no one has seriously prospected for this metal, these were found more by chance. The US government just stored 3200 tons of pure Thorium nitrate in Nevada and thorium is a typical and normally unwanted bi-product of rare earth metal refinement. It is mildly radioactive so it can’t be disposed of and sits in yellow drums with rad waste labels. There is probably enough Thorium to power the planet’s fleet of PWRs for a few years and maybe decades already partially purified and sitting a such refiners of dump sites who may even love to get rid of it. Since it is already mined, this would dramatically cut costs. Since it is used in a LWR breeder cycle, it stays in the reactor between 9 and 14 years, with and estimated 100GW/kg burnup. When it is done, a grand majority of its products decay to background within 500 years. Once the first cooling phase is done, you could put the spent rods in a cask, fill it with concrete and then seal it. Given the short half lives involved, you could sink these to the bottom of the ocean of the bottom of a deep mine and forget about them. By the time the containment is compromised, the contents will be cold a back yard dirt. The only fly in the ointment is that the rods contain U233, which as some point you might want to recover to put in new thorium fuel pellets as a driver for the reaction in second generation fuel, so you may view the spent fuel as too valuable to throw away.

When I watched encounters of the third kind I thought I would probably be dyslexic in the tone/color language.

How about learning languages that are only auditory? Listen to any good humpback whale stories lately. Could it really be that we are generally dyslexic is whale language but someone who is not dyslexic in humpback be found.

All observations and evidence about dyslexia suggest that there is not a single cause for dyslexia. Different dyslexics have different problems as related to reading at least in English.
Chinese dyslexia problems are concentrated in the visual processing centers because in their written language images need to be learned rather that sounds of letters.

Only by beliving that dyslexia has one cause and is a single condition can the researchers say Chinese and English readers are different. That is not true. The genetic research that has found genes associated with dyslexia are studies of particular families with a high incidence of dyslexia. There is little evidence of widely spread genetic influences.

If two families can have different dyslexia genes and yet both families are dyslexic and express their dyslexia in different ways it is hard to argue the single cause od dyslexia position. All the fMRI studies conclude that they can see differences between groups of dyslexics and non dyslexics but can not identify individuals as dyslexic or not.

It is not that English dyslexics don’t have visual processing problems. It is that people with visual processing problems that are Chnese are concentrated into the dyslexic population because of the need for visual processing is more important to reading Chinese.

I suggest that English reading dyslexics have about a 25% incidence of visual image processing problems.

The incidence of Chinese having dyslexia is about 25% of the incidence of English dyslexics .

I suggest that the incidence of visual imaging processing problems that cause reading problems is the same in both English and Chinese general populations.

The higher rate of reading problems in English readers is due to having additional tasks to read each task can cause different problems that do not show up in China because different skills are needed to learn Chinese.

I see See Right Dyslexia Glasses that remove the problems of visual dyslexia at http://www.dyslexiaglasses.com and about 25% of English dyslexics can describe visual problems that make reading difficult.

Dyslexia is not caused by a single factor. It is a syndrome that affects different dyslexics differently.

Thanks

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