Remember Carl Sagan? He was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator who died in 1996. During his lifetime, he published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books, according to the Wikipedia page on him.

In his works, he advocated skeptical inquiry and the scientific method.

The reason I share it here today is to shed some light on our recent discussion on science, religion and politics.

I thought a lot of science was fairly well settled back in the 1990s, including the facts about evolution and climate change due to human induced global warming. But we still have some politicians in this country who are clearly willing to exploit the lack of “belief” about these issues on the part of certain segments of the undereducated public.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

It is way too pretty on the porch this morning to be mad at anything or anyone. No matter who happens to occupy the White House or the governor’s mansion, or what morons serve in Congress or the state legislature, I have a roof over my head and food to eat, a little gas in the van, and I’m not in the path of Hurricane Irene making a fool out of myself on TeeVee.

On the other hand, I refuse to allow a few moments of quiet solitude to distract me from the mission at hand. The county I live in is in big financial trouble, and the state is not much better off. This country is reeling from one human catastrophe to another. And even though the U.S. is no longer rated triple A, the world still depends upon leadership from us.

But like a lot of commentators, I wonder if we are any longer up to the task. We seem to be a mixed up people now, so oblivious to the cause and effect of our problems as to defy our ability to craft solutions.

A couple of nights ago, I got a friend request on Facebook from someone in Brazil, who sent me a nice note and asked how things were going in the U.S. I jokingly told him all my friends were searching the world over on the Internet for somewhere to move when the shit goes down.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our Ultimate Fate May Depend Upon It

by Glynn Wilson

The very fate of our human species, yes, and your state too — as well as this country and the earth — may well depend on a compromise between science and religion.

Yes, you read that correctly. Not that I ever wanted to admit it before.

This will be a precarious journey with no guarantee of success like the fate of all life itself, from the beginning into the infinite future.

A top American scientist from Alabama writes that religion and science “are the two most powerful forces in the world today, including especially the United States.” That is from Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, which he wrote to Southern Baptist preachers who hold sway over millions of votes that could have a positive, or negative, impact on all kinds of government policies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Are you feeling the effects of the BP spill?

Did the BP spill cause you unwelcome stress?

Here is the link to participate in a 15 minute, anonymous questionnaire measuring how coastal residents, tourism workers, commercial/recreational fishermen, marine workers and clean-up workers are coping with the effects of the BP oil spill.

This research is being conducted to help give a voice to the industry/communities that have been hit hard emotionally by the spill. The results will be propagated widely to spread the word about mental health in the Gulf and how we can help our communities post-spill.

Read the rest of this entry »

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages.

Guest Column
by Gordy Slack

Richard Dawkins is the world’s most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world’s most controversial evolutionary biologist.

Publication of his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely “gene survival machines,” he asserted in the book.

Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow and Climbing Mount Improbable. His recent work, The Ancestor’s Tale, traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.

Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right’s Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn’t shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, “You, sir, are an ignorant bigot.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Locust Fork News-Journal editor and publisher Glynn Wilson was interviewed Thursday by the OpEd News on the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency and the subject of change.

Here’s the blurb and link.

It’s only been a year since we got rid of Bush. Y’all remember W, the worst president in history, right? So yeah, we got change. We got rid of the corporate Republican cabal running the country into the ground. Is Obama moving fast enough on all fronts to satisfy every liberal groups’ demands and all the promises of the campaign? No, of course not. Remember, it took 8 years for Clinton-Gore to balance the budget and get our economy back on track. Remember the “peace dividend?”

OpEdNews Interviews Glynn Wilson on Obama and Change

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I once tried to goad newspaper reporters in Alabama to pick up the story that if basketball star Charles Barkley ran for governor of Alabama as a Republican, then the Democrats should recruit E. O. Wilson.

The campaign headline could be: Brains v. Brawn!

Beneath his gentle manner and Southern charm, Dr. E.O. Wilson, an Alabama native who made Time magazine’s list of the top 100 minds of the 20th century, is a “scrapper.”

According to a story recounted in the New York Times science section on Tuesday, where Wilson grew up the local custom with respect to fistfights was this: prevail or get knocked out. There was no third option.

“I never picked a fight,” he wrote in Naturalist, his autobiography. “But once started I never quit, even when losing, until the other boy gave up or an adult mercifully pulled us apart.”

Dr. Wilson wasn’t picking a fight when he published Sociobiology in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior in which he set out the theoretical groundwork for a genetic basis to human behavior, expanding Darwinian evolutionary natural selection to multi-level group influence on genes and behavior, over time of course. A lot of time.

In the debate between nature vs. nurture, in other words, he made a quantitative argument for nature.

Behavior is not only learned. It evolves.

Convinced even more by new data mapping the genetics of ant colonies, he says human behavior, such as people trading favors, develops through natural selection on many levels. Groups, such as tribal or church groups, evolve strategies for survival that influence their genetic development over long periods of time.

Many social scientists picked a fight with him in the ’70s. They were of course influenced by the philosophies of Karl Marx as well as Sigmund Freud, as all academics are, since they are among the top five thinkers in history, along with Albert Einstein and others. I would not call them political Marxists, as the Times reporter uses the term, although I suppose when it comes right down to it, they ended up on the political left.

Hard scientists at his own university, Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, also came after him, since their life’s work rested on the simpler idea that natural selection acts only on one level, the genetic level.

Richard Dawkins, who wrote The Selfish Gene, was in Gould’s anti-Wilson camp.

But he fought them off. And now he is picking this new fight because of the new, hard information.

It is through multilevel or group-level selection – favoring the survival of one group of organisms over another – that evolution has in Dr. Wilson’s view brought into being the many essential genes that benefit the group at the individual’s expense. In humans, these may include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior. Such traits are difficult to account for, though not impossible, on the view that natural selection favors only behaviors that help the individual to survive and leave more children.

“I believe that deep in their heart everyone working on social insects is aware that the selection that created them is multilevel selection,” Dr. Wilson said.

He and David Sloan Wilson, a longtime advocate of group-level selection, laid out a theoretical basis for this view last year in an article in the Quarterly Review of Biology, evoking an angry response from Dr. Dawkins in New Scientist; he accused them of lying on a minor point and demanded an apology.

Proposing an idea heretical to many evolutionary biologists is one of the smaller skirmishes Dr. Wilson has set off, according to the Times. In his 1998 book Consilience, he proposed an overarching theory for bringing together the social and natural sciences on many questions from economics to ethics and morality, where progress has been slow.

“It is an astonishing circumstance that the study of ethics has advanced so little since the 19th century,” he said, a jab at a century of work by “moral philosophers,” as the Times calls them. His insight has been supported by the recent emergence of a new school of evolutionary psychologists who are constructing an evolutionary explanation of morality.

There is another reason to come to Wilson’s aid in this fight.

While ants may be Dr. Wilson’s first and lasting love, he has become one of the world’s most renowned biologists through two other passions, his urge to create large syntheses of knowledge and his gift for science writing. He has two Pulitzers on his belt, and through the power of his words, he champions the world’s biodiversity and international conservation measures.

He also recently made a swing through the South trying to get Southern Baptists aboard his campaign to document and save the world’s species biodiversity, if not on the basis of science, then on the Biblical demand that God’s creatures should be protected on a moral basis.

I would relish the thought of Wilson coming home to Alabama after retiring in his 80′s in a few years, he’s now 79, and whipping up on old Charles Barkley. But now that Barkley says he is going to run as a Democrat, since Bush and the Republicans have messed things up so much in the world with Iraq and “the economy stupid,” we may just have to put them both in the primary and see what wins out: Brain Power or Brawn.

Not that Barkley ain’t smart or anything, it’s just that we get the feeling Wilson is a bit more evolved in the head, if not in body, and might do his home state some good. As everyone knows, Alabama suffers a certain brain-drain syndrome, in that a lot of genetically smart, culturally educated young people tend to get the hell out as soon as they can.

Read that last part again and notice how I slipped nature vs. nurture in there again. From my own studies in this area, it’s pretty obvious that it’s both.

For the record, and to head off any possible confusion here, both Wilson and Barkley are evolutionary anomalies. They are both off the charts as humans go, several standard deviations above the mean, if you know what I mean : )

But perhaps a little brainy infusion might give the good people of this state a little evolutionary boost – in about a million years or so : )

Now, for more discussion of this, including a great example of science blogging, check this out: E. O. Wilson, Neville Chamberlain Controversialist?

I love the way this kid ends the discussion, and check this out for an interesting example of a comments policy on a science blog. I’m thinking about adopting part of it…

Comments that I feel do not edify this forum will be deleted without warning or explanation. Just as I will not accept arguments in favor of geocentrism, I will not accept Creationist-Intelligent Design talking points. My interest in that topic is limited to political and sociological implications in terms of its cultural impact, not its non-existent scientific validity. You can extrapolate from this what the general comments policy is.

Now don’t get us wrong. We have a modicum of respect for Albert Brewer, especially since that dirty, racist 1970 George Wallace campaign against his run for governor was recently named Number One on the Most Negative Campaigns of All Time.

But Mr. Brewer’s recent decision to recruit and hire Andrew Westmoreland away from Ouachita Baptist University in Little Rock, Arkansas – even after he admitted lying about praying about taking the job – raises all kinds of questions about religion, ethics, politics and education.

Baptist Samford U. Hires President Who Admits Lying About Praying

Photo by Glynn Wilson

Speaking of connecting with nature, after a couple of springs of trying we now have blue birds breeding in the backyard. I managed to get a decent shot of one a couple of days ago after returning from the trek to New Orleans.

Meanwhile, the breaking news this morning that the wife of a charismatic Church of Christ minister slain in Tennessee was arrested and charged with the murder when she turned up in Orange Beach, Alabama, raises even more questions about what’s going on in the so-called “faith-based community.”

Slain Tennessee Minister’s Wife to Be Charged with Murder

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Can we please stop the religious crusades and jihads and get on with the business of saving the world and savoring life?

If you find yourself saying, “The world has gone crazy,” then think about this. You don’t hear a lot these days about pot smoking, beer drinking, nature loving hippies causing the world a lot of trouble.

What the world needs more of are canoes on top of vans and a reconnection with nature. Alabama native and Harvard scholar E.O. Wilson called it biophilia, and it may be more important to our mental health than any words that could ever be uttered from a pulpit.

So forget the preachers and the religious educators who lie about prayer. It’s beginning to look like a beautiful spring around here, even if it is still a bit cool. Get out of the house and try to enjoy the outdoors.

And if you really feel like you must, say a “thank you” to whichever god you worship. We tend to find more value in the Gia theory, and believe when the founding fathers of our country talked about “natural rights,” they were thinking more about the laws of nature than the laws of Judge Roy Moore’s Old Testament Ten Commandments.

Think about it…

In the first of three daylong hearings characterized here as the direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, the New York Times reports a parade of Ph.D.’s testified about the flaws they find in Darwin’s theory of evolution, transforming a small auditorium in Topeka, Kansas, into a forum on one of the most controversial questions in education and politics: How to teach about the origin of life?

. . . the debate was as much about religion and politics as science and education, with attorney Pedro Irigonegaray pressing witnesses to find mentions of the theories they were denouncing, like humanism and naturalism, in the state standards, and asking whether they believe all scientists are atheists.

“These people are going to obfuscate about these definitions,” complained Jack Krebs, vice president of the pro-evolution Kansas Citizens for Science, whose members, wearing “I support strong science education” buttons, filled many of the 180 auditorium seats not taken by journalists from as far away as France. “They have created a straw man. They are trying to make science stand for atheism, so they can fight atheism.”

While we are on the subject of the Religious Right, you should read the May issue of Harper’s magazine. While the Locust Fork server was down this afternoon, I walked to the library and read it. Unfortunately, it is not free online, although the site is still pretty cool and at least you can find out the contents.

The strongest piece in the magazine is editor Lewis H. Lapham’s “The Wrath of the Lamb.” He eviscerates the faithful. Trust me. Or don’t. Get to a library or a newsstand and judge for yourself.