Occam's Donkey at the end of the decade

Well, Occam's Donkey survived its second year and is set to enter the new decade. I have achieved my aim of blogging about once a week, although it must said that a number posts reflected "blogging light", being digests, or just paraphrasing other views. Be that as it may, I do believe that Occam's Donkey succeeded in raising important issues, especially regarding neuroscience and education. It was again gratifying to find that many posts from Occam's Donkey featured on the first page of Google searches on appropriate key words.

Look forward to more of the same in 2010, but with attempts to spend more time on critical thinking.

May 2010 bring for readers whatever you want.

Shooting down the strawman

Orac from Respectful Insolence is one of my favourite bloggers, but this time he shot himself in the foot. He placed the picture below under the caption "All I want for Christmas is ..., heavy duty firearms."


The picture seems posed and is not representative of parents who are gun owners at all, except maybe a few loons in the mountains between somewhere and nowhere. It turns out that it is a deliberate fake from Motifake, a website that deals in "fake motivational posters", although I accept that Orac may not have known of its origin.

Orac continues with this cryptic comment: "Somehow, I don't think we're in Hammond, Indiana anymore." It turns out that Hammond, Indiana refers to a movie in which a boy desires above all else a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.


While Orac is entitled to whatever his views on firearms may be, logical fallacies and suspect reasoning will not help his case. The picture is a typical strawman - it is a fake and misrepresents the views of mainstream gun owners. The link that Orac tries to draw between the supposed assault rifles in the picture and the Daisy Red Ryder from Hammond, Indiana is tenuous, a non-sequitur - the one idea just does not follow the other.

And why should we not still be in Hammond, Indiana? Why should a boy or girl, even in this day and age, not desire a Daisy Red Ryder for Christmas? I would not mind one myself. Why should a father or mother not give one, provided it is accompanied by responsible training and it is used only under adult supervision where the law allows? The values from Hammond, Indiana may be old-fashioned, but should they be?

This quote from Mike Venturino in the American Handgunner magazine says something about the gun culture I ascribe to:

"Also in my gun culture, people don't shoot up road signs, farmer's gates. rancher's cattle, or anything else that shouldn't be shot. People in my gun culture love to shoot, but they shoot at targets of paper or steel, or at legitimate game animals or varmints. Most people in my gun culture love competitions: not because they have to be top dog, but because competitions are their social events. People in my gun culture look forward to breaks in the games' action or the end of the days shooting so they can visit with others. Then they talk about such things as the width and depth of grease grooves in their bullets, or how many lands and grooves their barrels have or what's the best powder for such and such a caliber or gun."

OK, maybe that's a bit over the top, but you get the idea.

Full disclosure: I've been shooting for more than 40 years. I know the situation regarding firearms in South Africa, but based on my contact with American shooters, I surmise that the attitudes of mainstream gun owners are similar. My children have been introduced to responsible firearms use and safety from an early age.

Aide Memoire 7

From ScienceDaily: Dyslexia: Some very smart accomplished people cannot read well.

Jonah Lehrer from Frontal Cortex: ADHD and time.

Vaughan from Mind Hacks: Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth.

From ScienceDaily: Learning by imagining: How mental imagery training aids perceptual learning.

Steven Novella from Neurologica: Teaching how science works.

From ScienceDaily: CIMT may improve arm use in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy, report shows.

Michael McKinney from Leader Blog: Managers can (and should) be leaders.

From ScienceDaily: Young adults who exercise get higher IQ scores.

From ScienceDaily: Early intervention for toddlers with autism highly effective, study finds.

Respectful Insolence and Neurologica on Deepak Chopra in Deepak Chopra and his Choprawoo translated: "Skeptics, take my ill-informed speculations seriously!" and Chopra Attacks Skeptics.

ScienceDaily: Young Adults Who Exercise Get Higher IQ Scores

ScienceDaily: Early Intervention for Toddlers With Autism Highly Effective, Study Finds.

Bob Sutton: Mintzberg in the WSJ: Get Rid of Executive Bonuses.

Bob Sutton: Jeff Pfeffer on the Misguided Lust for Outside CEOs as Saviors.

Parasites and free will

Robert Sapolski in The Edge:

"The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. ...

In the endless sort of struggle that neurobiologists have — in terms of free will, determinism — my feeling has always been that there's not a whole lot of free will out there ...

And it's got to do with this utterly bizarre world of parasites manipulating our behavior. It turns out that this is not all that surprising. There are all sorts of parasites out there that get into some organism, and what they need to do is parasitize the organism and increase the likelihood that they, the parasite, will be fruitful and multiply, and in some cases they can manipulate the behavior of the host."

Much has been written on the dangers of Toxoplasmosis for pregnant women and the fetus. As usual, Wikipedia has a good rundown. While not exactly new information, Sapolski does a good job of spelling out the potential (but speculative at this stage) behavioural effects of Toxoplasmosis infections in mammals, more specifically humans. It turns out that the parasite, through a common evolutionary ancestor billions of years ago, is able to manipulate very specific circuits in the mammalian amygdala that control stress responses to predators. In the case of rats, their natural avoidance and fear reaction to cat urine is replaced by attraction and mild sexual stimulation. Oops ...!

Thinking of a number of tourists the last few years who stupidly (fatally) approached lions in South African game reserves, one wonders whether they were infected by Toxoplasmosis and actually died in sexual euphoria?! OK, maybe that's taking it a bit too far. The important issue remains that this is another possible factor that may be affecting our behaviour and makes free will an ever more elusive phenomenon.

Now, where's that damn cat?

AGW, wouldst thou have false positive or false negative?

Anthropogenic global warming, let me add my bit of hot air to the problem, literally in this case because this is the first post in which I shall use DragonDictate dictation software.

There is little question that global warming is real, the real issue is whether it is caused by human actions, or is just part of the natural climatic cycle. Notwithstanding the University of East Anglia debacle, scientific consensus is that global warming is in fact anthropogenic, caused by humans. I suspect that most AGW deniers are motivated by greed and self-interest, but it can also not be denied that there are credible scientists who question whether humans are the cause of global warming.

A graph with an excellent summary of the different points of view can be found at Information is Beautiful. Hat tip to Sean from Cosmic Variance for alerting me to the chart, which he has checked and believes to be accurate.

In previous posts I explored views that false positives (believing something to be true when it is not) have survival value. In this case less harm will be done if we wrongly believe and act as if global warming is caused by humans, than if believing and acting that it's not. Some corporate AGW deniers would have us believe that economic disaster will befall us if we acted to limit human influence on the environment. They often point to job losses as a likely consequence, yet whenever there is an economic downturn they are the first to retrench staff, citing all kinds of spurious reasons, when all they are interested in are profits, executive bonuses and shareholder value. In the case of AGW I suspect that's all they're interested in as well.

Someone has also mentioned Pascal's Wager in this regard. I believe it has some relevance, if in doubt play safe. If it turns out we were wrong about the anthropogenic part, less harm would have been done than the other way around. The physicist, Robert Park, made the same point about the population explosion, safer to all be Malthusians now.