atwill and his thesis dissected...,

freethoughtblogs/carrier | Atwill is the one dude I get asked about most often.[*] And now apparently even Dawkins is tweeting about Atwill, thanks to his upcoming venture into England later this month to sell his weird Roman Conspiracy variety of Jesus mythicism. To get the gist you can check out his PR puff piece. Thomas Verenna has already written a deconstruction of that. Notably even Acharya S (D.M. Murdock) doesn’t buy Atwill’s thesis, declaring that she does “not concur with Atwill’s Josephus/Flavian thesis” and that “the Flavians, including Josephus, did not compose the canonical gospels as we have them.” Robert Price has similarly soundly debunked his book, even after strongly wanting to like it.

Atwill is best known as the author of Caesar’s Messiah (subtitle: “The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus,” Roman meaning the Roman imperial family…yeah). In this Atwill argues “Jesus [is] the invention of a Roman emperor” and that the entire (?) New Testament was written by “the first-century historian Flavius Josephus” who left clues to his scheme by littering secret hidden coded “parallels” in his book The Jewish War. Atwill claims to prove “the Romans directed the writing of both” the JW and the NT, in order “to offer a vision of a ‘peaceful Messiah’ who would serve as an alternative to the revolutionary leaders who were rocking first-century Israel and threatening Rome,” and also (apparently) as a laughing joke on the Jews (Atwill variously admits or denies he argues the latter, but it became clear in our correspondence, which I will reproduce below…it’s weird because making fun of the Jews kind of contradicts the supposedly serious aim of persuading the Jews, yet Atwill seems to want the imperial goal to have simultaneously been both).

Notice his theory entails a massive and weirdly erudite conspiracy of truly bizarre scope and pedigree, to achieve a truly Quixotic aim that hardly makes sense coming from any half-intelligent elite of the era (even after adjusting for the Flynn effect), all to posit that the entire Christian religion was created by the Romans (and then immediately opposed by it?), who somehow got hundreds of Jews (?) to abandon their religion and join a cult that simply appeared suddenly without explanation on the Palestinian (?) book market without endorsement.

I honestly shouldn’t have to explain why this is absurd. But I’ll hit some highlights. Then I’ll reveal the reasons why I think Atwill is a total crank, and his work should be ignored, indeed everywhere warned against as among the worst of mythicism, not representative of any serious argument that Jesus didn’t exist. And that’s coming from me, someone who believes Jesus didn’t exist.

Historically, Atwill’s thesis is more or less a retooled version of the old Pisonian Conspiracy Theory, by which is not meant the actual Pisonian conspiracy (to assassinate Nero), but a wildly fictitious one in which the Piso family invented Christianity (and fabricated all its documents) through its contacts with the Flavian family, and thence Josephus (who was indeed adopted into that family after tricking his officer corps into committing suicide and then surrendering to the Romans during the War…oh, and conveniently declaring Vespasian the Messiah).

This pseudo-historical nonsense is over a century old by now, first having been proposed (so far as I know) by Bruno Bauer in Christ and the Caesars in 1877 (Christus und Caesaren). It has been revamped a dozen times since. Atwill is simply the latest iteration (or almost–there is a bonkers Rabbi still going around with an even wilder version). Atwill’s is very much like Bible Code crankery, where he looks for all kinds of multiple comparisons fallacies and sees conspiracies in all of them, rather than the inevitable coincidences (or often outright non-correspondences) that they really are. Everything confirms his thesis, because nothing could ever fail to. Classic nonfalsifiability. He just cherry picks and interprets anything to fit, any way he wants.

the great library at Alexandria was destroyed by budget cuts, not fire...,

io9 | Though it seems fitting that the destruction of so mythic an institution as the Great Library of Alexandria must have required some cataclysmic event . . . in reality, the fortunes of the Great Library waxed and waned with those of Alexandria itself. Much of its downfall was gradual, often bureaucratic, and by comparison to our cultural imaginings, somewhat petty. For example, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus suspended the revenues of the Mouseion, abolishing the members’ stipends and expelling all foreign scholars. Alexandria was also the site of numerous persecutions and military actions, which, though few were reported to have done any great harm to the Mouseion or the Serapeum, could not help but have damaged them. At the very least, what institution could hope to attract and keep scholars of the first eminence when its city was continually the site of battle and strife?

What's interesting here is Phillips' emphasis on how the decline of the library rested as much on its reputation as a learning center as it did on the number of books in its collection. What made the Museum and its daughter branch great were its scholars. And when the Emperor abolished their stipends, and forbade foreign scholars from coming to the library, he effectively shut down operations. Those scrolls and books were nothing without people to care for them, study them, and share what they learned far and wide.

The last historical references to the library's contents meeting their final end come in stories about the events of 639 CE, when Arab troops under the rule of Caliph Omar conquered Alexandria.

Luciano Canfora has written one of the most complete histories of the library, based on primary source material — documents written by people who knew and worked in the library. In The Vanished Library, he describes what the library at Alexandria had been reduced to by the time of its ultimate destruction in 639:

The Serapeum had been destroyed in the attack on the pagan temples in 391. The last famous figure associated with the Museum had been Theon, father of the celebrated Hypatia who studied geometry and musicology and whom the Christians, convinced in their ignorance that she was a heretic, barbarously murdered in 415 . . . Naturally, the city's books had changed, too; and not only in their content. The delicate scrolls of old had gone. Their last remnants had been cast out as refuse or buried in the sand, and they had been replaced by more substantial parchment, elegantly made and bound into thick codices - and crawling with errors, for Greek was increasingly a forgotten language. The texts now consisted chiefly of patristic writings, Acts of Councils, and 'sacred literature' in general.

This was not Ptolemy's great collection, nor was it the center of scholarship in what was then the modern world. It was a broken-down remnant of its former self, neglected for centuries. The collection was mostly stocked with materials that reflected what Judeo-Christian bureaucrats would have considered important; these materials did not reflect the Greek ideal of universal knowledge that had birthed the library in the first place.

In the end, it was only this diminished version of the library that was burned on the orders of Caliph Omar when Emir Amrou Ibn el-Ass took the city.

the entheogen theory of religion and ego death

egodeath | Vertical, Timeless Determinism -  In late antiquity, consciousness was centered around the doctrine and mystic-state experience of the pre-setness of future thoughts and occurrences. The central thematic concern of religions in the Hellenistic era was Heimarmene (Martin 1987), which means fatedness, Necessity, or timeless cosmic determinism. Modern thought considers some related issues, though only in a single cognitive state. For example, Philosophical Metaphysics investigates the related issues of tenseless time, fatedness, agent movement through space and time, and controller agents (Oaklander & Smith 1995). 

The future is unchangeable and pre-set because of the static relation of control to the time dimension, and because it is largely an illusion that a person is a continuant agent who exercises power while moving through time. 

Modern science introduces clockwork determinism and thereby reduces the person to an automaton; in reaction, Copenhagenist quantum mechanics aims to provide an emancipating alternative to the hidden-variables determinism of Einstein and Bohm. However, modern conceptions of determinism and causality are limited to intellectual speculation based in the ordinary cognitive state, so they habitually tend to envision time as a sequential flow.

Transcending Determinism Requires Two Jumps - Determinism is both a praised goal and a disparaged trap to escape, due to determinism-awareness being the intermediate but not final goal of religious mental transformation. Valentinian Gnosticism affirmed cosmic determinism but also transcended it, and formulated two contrasting schemes of thinking about moral culpability (Pagels 1992). 

Simplified 2-stage initiation themes actually reflect a 3-stage progression that is centered around determinism. Mystic metaphor both endorses and disparages the realization of determinism, because determinism is only an intermediate destination on the path to salvific regeneration. The first demon or stage of egoic delusion to be cast out is the assumption of simple independent self-command and freewill. The second demon to be overcome is the mental model of cosmic determinism or fatedness, a model which is rationally coherent but raises the practical problem of control instability.

plundering the planet

cassandralegacy | Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be here and my task today is to tell you about something that stands at the basis of everything we do: mineral resources. It it is the subject of a book that is the result of a research program sponsored by the Club of Rome and that has involved me and 16 co-authors.

For the time being we have only the German version, we are working at the English one, but that will take some time - a few months. In any case, the title should be clear to you even if you don't speak German and you can notice that we say "The Plundered Planet;" not "The Improved Planet", or "The Developed Planet". No, this is the concept: plundering. We have been acting with mineral resources as if we were pirates looting a captured galleon: grabbing everything we can, as fast as we can. 

 

Now, of course, there is a problem with the idea of plundering planet Earth. It is how long we can go on plundering. At the basic level, it is a question of common sense: we know that once we have burned oil, it is gone. We know that after we have dispersed copper in tiny bits all over we can't recover it any more. We know that diamonds are forever, perhaps, but also that once we have taken them out of a mine, then there are no more diamonds in there. Mineral resources are not infinite. 

 

So, there is this nagging question: how long can we go on mining? It is a question that started being asked in the 19th century and the answer is both easy and difficult. It is easy to say "not forever," but it is difficult to say for how long, exactly. So, what form will take depletion? How is it going to be felt on the economy. And, since we see ourselves as very smart, can we find some trick to avoid, or at least delay, the problem?

 

The first study that attempted to quantify these question was a report that was sponsored by the club of Rome back in 1972. You have surely heard about it: here is the cover of that book.

 

 

Now, you have probably also heard that this study was "wrong," that is, that it had made wrong predictions, that it was based on bad data and flawed models, and similar accusations. That was the result of a wave of criticism, a true tsunami I'd say, that engulfed the book and its authors after the study was published. The authors were accused of being not just wrong, but part of a global conspiracy aimed at enslaving humankind and exterminating the colored races (I am not kidding, that was said several times).

However, if there was such a harsh reaction to the book, it was also because it went to the core of some of the basic assumptions of our society, of our deeply held belief that, somehow, not only growth is always good, but that we can keep growing forever. But the book said that it wasn't possible. And it didn't say just that, it said that the limits to growth were to appear in a time span that was not of centuries, but just of decades. Below, you can see the main results of the 1972 study, the run that was called the "base case" (or "standard run"). The calculations were redone in 2004, finding similar results.

roman christianity a psy-op?

covertmessiah | The origin of the Christian religion has been a subject steeped in mystery for nearly 2000 years. Who was Jesus? Is he an historical character? Who wrote the Gospels? Why are they written in Greek? Why did they have a pro-Roman and anti-semitic perspective? Why was the religion headquartered in Rome? Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus is a documentary based on the best‐selling religious studies book by Joseph Atwill. Atwill is one of a number of scholars today from all around the world, who are questioning the historic facts behind these mysterious origins of Christianity. When examining the actual history of this era, many of the answers provided by the Church do not hold up to rigorous scrutiny. No doubt, Christianity has done a lot of good for the world, but a lot of bad has come from its most dogmatic believers, who create wars, hatred, and other harm under the disguise of religion. In studying how Christianity emerged, the seven controversial Bible scholars featured in this film agree that it was used as a political tool to control the masses of the day, and is still being used this way today. For example, support for the wars in the Middle East is preached to Evangelical Christians as a way to speed up the coming of the End of Days. Maybe we need to expand the possible answers about how Christianity originated, and deeper questions need to be asked. Maybe we need to examine what political motives were behind the formation of the Christian religion?

The documentary begins with a brief history of the political and religious climate of Judea in the first century CE – the era during which Christianity emerged. Judea was occupied by the Roman Empire, which required them to worship Caesar as a god. The Jews found this blasphemous, and they waged constant rebellions against the Empire. Their religious scriptures prophesied that a militaristic warrior Messiah would defeat the Romans and lead the Jews to liberation. A string of numerous Messiahs presented themselves to lead the people in war against Rome, only to be defeated and crucified – a customary Roman punishment for insurgents of the day. However, the Roman government was growing weaker from over a century of increasingly corrupt rule by the Julio‐Claudian dynasty — the last emperor of this lineage being Nero, who was bankrupting the Empire with his self‐indulgence. In their greatest victory, the messianic Jews finally succeeded in burning Rome and driving the Romans out of Judea. This caused Nero to call upon his best military men, the Flavians – Vespasian and his son Titus — to crush the rebellion for good. The Flavians succeeded not only in destroying the Jewish towns of Galilee and their temple in Jerusalem, but after Nero was deposed and committed suicide, they seized the throne through a military coup and took over reign of the Roman Empire itself. Under the Flavians, the Empire flourished, and many great monuments were built including the famous Coliseum. In order to pacify the Jewish rebellion, they captured and burned all the Jews’ scriptures. It is around this time that a new literature emerged with the story of a very different Jewish Messiah – one who preached “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, “turn the other cheek”, and “love your enemy”.

Kenneth Humphreys on the historicity of Jesus: "[It's] a dilemma for those who believe in him. Because on the one hand he supposedly overturned the world, it turned the world upside-down and triggered off this massive movement, but on the other hand he leaves no trace in historical record."

The second half of the documentary focuses on the documents the Flavians left behind which prove their authorship of the Gospels. The Bible scholars deconstruct the Gospels and the character Jesus, showing that they are based on archetypes found in the ancient pagan mystery schools and in earlier Jewish literature. Much of the teachings of Christianity are traced back to the writings of Philo of Alexandria — who was combining Jewish scripture with Greek pagan beliefs — and Stoicism, a philosophy promoted by the Flavians. When the Flavians seized control of the Roman Empire, they needed to legitimise their rule, so they had their Jewish court historian Josephus (originally Yosef ben Matityahu who adopted the name Titus Flavius Josephus) create a large body of work which became the only official history we have of the Jewish-Roman War. Fist tap Dale.

how new religions are made

religiondispatches | What inspired you to write Chosen People? What sparked your interest?

When I was in college I was interested in the similarities between Jewish and Black nationalisms, and began to learn Jewish and African American histories at Stanford University with Clayborne Carson, George Fredrickson, Sylvia Wynter, Mark Mancall, Arnie Eisen, and Tudor Parfitt.

A chance encounter led me to visit the Original Hebrew Israelites of Dimona, Israel, and the experience was so powerful that I set out to study the antecedents of Black Israelite movements. At that time, Shlomo Levy, a Columbia University graduate student who was himself the son of one of the leading figures of the New York Israelite community, had begun to work with the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library to collect papers from a dozen or so Black Israelite synagogues. I wrote an honors thesis on a small part of that collection, and then returned in graduate school to use the rest.

Working towards my doctorate at UCLA I was fortunate enough to study Black Atlantic religions with Donald Cosentino, and African American and West Indian histories with Brenda Stevenson, Gary Nash, and Bobby Hill. I was also inspired by seminars I took with Carlo Ginzburg, Peg Jacob, Lynn Hunt, Henry Yu, and others. I wanted to thickly describe African American Judaism from microhistorical, Black Atlantic, and African American Studies perspectives.

The question of "authenticity" that had dominated the accounts of so many white Jews was of little interest to me. What had gone missing in the limited literature on the topics was an attempt to tell the story of Black Israelites as an instance of African American history (in the hemispheric sense, including the West Indies), and an attempt to write Black Israelites into the larger stories of American religion and of Black Atlantic religions.

You describe a variety of fascinating (and largely unknown) figures in American religious history. Which one of them fascinated you the most?

Prophet William Saunders Crowdy stars in two chapters and is a largely unknown but remarkable figure who deserves to be on a postage stamp for the impact he had on U.S. religion and culture. But without a doubt, I was most fascinated by Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew. That is because I had access to sources at the Schomburg and in newspapers over half a century that allowed me to clearly see Rabbi Matthew's religious evolution, and his polycultural bricolage of his own Israelite tradition combining Holiness-based Israelite churches, Judaism, conjuring, West Indian festivals, Central European occult practices, and freemasonry. Although Matthew tried his best to hide this religious bricolage, his papers offer a rare opportunity to see how new religions are made.

Is there anything you had to leave out?

Tons. I came to see Black Israelites as being very closely related to Black Muslims. Not only was there overlap between the groups' memberships, but it was not uncommon for groups to blend elements of both Judaism and Islam in the 1920s, as in the 1970s.

I think African American adoption of both religions are variants of Black thought about "the East," and deserve to be thought of as Black forms of Orientalism—not in a pejorative sense, but in an affirmative and romantic sense. So at one point the book was at least twice as long, before I decided that the Islam/Orientalism piece needed to be a book of its own.

Even then, the Black Israelites book continued for five more chapters concerning interactions and race relations between white and Black Jews during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Thankfully, Oxford University Press' readers reined me in, and I was left with the much more compact, and much more readable text as it stands today, which focuses on the period from the nineteenth century to the 1930s.

about those europeans who invaded and currently occupy palestine...,

physorg | Professor Martin Richards, of the Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield, has published a paper uncovering new information about how Ashkenazi Jewish men moved into Europe from the Middle East, and their marriage practices with European women. 

The origins of Ashkenazi Jews – that is, Jews with recent ancestry in central and Eastern Europe – is a long-standing controversy. It is usually assumed that their ancestors migrated into Europe from Palestine in the first century AD, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, with some intermarriage with Europeans later on. But some have argued that they have a mainly European ancestry, and arose by conversion to Judaism of indigenous Europeans, especially in Italy. Others have even argued that they were largely assimilated in the North Caucasus during the time of the Khazar Empire, whose rulers turned to Judaism around of the tenth century AD. 

Archaeogenetics can help to resolve this dispute. Y-chromosome studies have shown that the male line of descent does indeed seem to trace back to the Middle East. But the female line, which can be illuminated by studies of mitochondrial DNA has until now proved more difficult to interpret. This would be especially intriguing because Judaism has been inherited maternally for about 2000 years.

We have settled this issue by looking at large numbers of whole mitochondrial genomes – sequencing the full 16,568 bases of the molecule – in many people from across Europe, the Caucasus and the Middle East. We have found that, in the vast majority of cases, Ashkenazi lineages are most closely related to southern and western European lineages – and that these lineages have been present in Europe for many thousands of years.

This means that, even though Jewish men may indeed have migrated into Europe from Palestine around 2000 years ago, they brought few or no wives with them. They seem to have married with European women, firstly along the Mediterranean, especially in Italy, and later (but probably to a lesser extent) in western and central Europe. This suggests that, in the early years of the Diaspora, Judaism took in many converts from amongst the European population, but they were mainly recruited from amongst women. Thus, on the female line of descent, the Ashkenazim primarily trace their ancestry neither to Palestine nor to Khazaria, but to southern and western Europe.

Explore further: New study sheds light on the origin of the European Jewish population

More information: You can read more about the work of the Archeogenetics Research group at: www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchcentres/targ/

Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN)

TechnologyReview | On a beautiful April morning, chemist Paul Weiss is darting across the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, in red-framed Wayfarer sunglasses and a suit. He’s on his way to make himself an espresso, but even with a caffeine deficit he’s tough to keep up with. Weiss put the coffee machine in his students’ office instead of his own, to create more opportunities to check in with them and run into colleagues.

Weiss, who heads the California Nanosystems Institute, a state-sponsored research hub for all things nano, is a specialist in developing new ways of probing single molecules like neurotransmitters and those that make up the active layer in solar panels. However, with caffeine in his system, what he wants to talk about is not chemistry but community. For Weiss, 53, chemistry is a social science. "It’s about making a connection," he says. To be able to do something useful, he says, you have to connect to other people within and outside your field, know what problems other fields like neuroscience or energy will be facing in 10 years, and start building the necessary tools today.

As far as he’s concerned, one of the most important goals for the next decade is to understand the human brain. To meet that challenge, biologists need help from chemists, physicists, engineers, and other toolmakers like him, he says. The brain has nearly 100 billion neurons networked together by an estimated 100 trillion electrical and chemical connections. How all these interactions combine to enable us to walk, talk, learn, form memories, create—and how things go wrong in diseases like Parkinson’s—is pretty much a mystery. Weiss hopes to create new tools for probing the nanoscale chemical and electrical activity of thousands to millions of neurons at once. "If we want to understand what a memory is, how we learn—this is where we think the sweet spot is," he says.

For years, Weiss has been recruiting researchers from apparently distant fields to work on the problem—helping organize meetings of scientists to talk about it, trying to bridge the gap between neuroscientists and physical scientists. This organizing work has now borne fruit. In April, President Obama requested $100 million in federal funding for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Private research institutions are also chipping in. The Kavli Foundation, a nonprofit in Oxnard, California, has pledged $40 million over the next 10 years. "His profound understanding of the whole field of nanotechnology made a huge difference," says the Kavli Foundation’s vice president of science programs, Miyoung Chun, who helped coördinate the project that became the BRAIN Initiative.

Researchers working in relative isolation have already made progress on developing tools for studying the brain, including arrays of nanoscale electrodes for probing neurons and computer programs for analyzing the onslaught of data these kinds of measurements are expected to generate. By working together, Weiss believes, researchers from different fields can now accelerate advances by developing common, widely available tools.

behavioral genetics is pseudo-science

ScientificAmerican | Last spring, I kicked up a kerfuffle by proposing that research on race and intelligence, given its potential for exacerbating discrimination, should be banned. Now Nature has expanded this debate with “Taboo Genetics.” The article “looks at four controversial areas of behavioral genetics”—intelligence, race, violence and sexuality—”to find out why each field has been a flashpoint, and whether there are sound scientific reasons for pursuing such studies.”

The essay provides a solid overview, including input from both defenders of behavioral genetics and critics. The author, Erika Check Hayden, quotes me saying that research on race and intelligence too often bolsters “racist ideas about the inferiority of certain groups, which plays into racist policies.”

I only wish that Hayden had repeated my broader complaint against behavioral genetics, which attempts to explain human behavior in genetic terms. The field, which I’ve been following since the late 1980s, has a horrendous track record. My concerns about the potential for abuse of behavioral genetics are directly related to its history of widely publicized, erroneous claims.

I like to call behavioral genetics “gene whiz science,” because “advances” so often conform to the same pattern. Researchers, or gene-whizzers, announce: There’s a gene that makes you gay! That makes you super-smart! That makes you believe in God! That makes you vote for Barney Frank! The media and the public collectively exclaim, “Gee whiz!”

Follow-up studies that fail to corroborate the initial claim receive little or no attention, leaving the public with the mistaken impression that the initial report was accurate—and, more broadly, that genes determine who we are.

Over the past 25 years or so, gene-whizzers have discovered “genes for” high IQ, gambling, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia, alcoholism, heroin addiction, extroversion, introversion, anxiety, anorexia nervosa, seasonal affective disorder, violent aggression—and so on. So far, not one of these claims has been consistently confirmed by follow-up studies.

These failures should not be surprising, because all these complex traits and disorders are almost certainly caused by many different genes interacting with many different environmental factors. Moreover, the methodology of behavioral geneticists is highly susceptible to false positives. Researchers select a group of people who share a trait and then start searching for a gene that occurs not universally and exclusively but simply more often in this group than in a control group. If you look at enough genes, you will almost inevitably find one that meets these criteria simply through chance. Those who insist that these random correlations are significant have succumbed to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

To get a sense of just how shoddy behavioral genetics is, check out my posts on the “liberal gene,” “gay gene” and God gene” (the latter two “discovered” by Dean Hamer, whose record as a gene-whizzer is especially abysmal); and on the MAOA-L gene, also known as the “warrior gene.” Also see this post, where I challenge defenders of behavioral genetics to cite a single example of a solid, replicated finding.

Ever since I first hammered behavioral genetics in my 1993 Scientific American article “Eugenics Revisited,” critics have faulted me for treating the field so harshly. But over the last 20 years, the field has performed even more poorly than I expected. At this point, I don’t know why anyone takes gene-whiz science seriously.

taboo "genetics"

Nature | Growing up in the college town of Ames, Iowa, during the 1970s, Stephen Hsu was surrounded by the precocious sons and daughters of professors. Around 2010, after years of work as a theoretical physicist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Hsu thought that DNA-sequencing technology might finally have advanced enough to help to explain what made those kids so smart. He was hardly the first to consider the genetics of intelligence, but with the help of the Chinese sequencing powerhouse BGI in Shenzhen, he planned one of the largest studies of its kind, aiming to sequence DNA from 2,000 people, most of whom had IQs of more than 150.

He hadn't really considered how negative the public reaction might be until one of the study's participants, New York University psychologist Geoffrey Miller, made some inflammatory remarks to the press. Miller predicted that once the project turned up intelligence genes, the Chinese might begin testing embryos to find the most desirable ones. One article painted the venture as a state-endorsed experiment, selecting for genius kids, and Hsu and his colleagues soon found that their project, which had barely begun, was the target of fierce criticism.

There were scientific qualms over the value of Hsu's work (see Nature 497, 297–299; 2013). As with other controversial fields of behavioural genetics, the influence of heredity on intelligence probably acts through myriad genes that each exert only a tiny effect, and these are difficult to find in small studies. But that was only part of the reason for the outrage. For decades, scientists have trodden carefully in certain areas of genetic study for social or political reasons.

At the root of this caution is the widespread but antiquated idea that genetics is destiny — that someone's genes can accurately predict complex behaviours and traits regardless of their environment. The public and many scientists have continued to misinterpret modern findings on the basis of this — fearing that the work will lead to a new age of eugenics, preemptive imprisonment and discrimination against already marginalized groups.

“People can take science and assume it is far more determinative than it is — and, by making that assumption, make choices that we will come to regret as a society,” says Nita Farahany, a philosopher and lawyer at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina.

But trying to forestall such poor choices by drawing red lines around certain areas subverts science, says Christopher Chabris of Union College in Schenectady, New York. Funding for research in some areas dries up and researchers are dissuaded from entering promising fields. “Any time there's a taboo or norm against studying something for anything other than good scientific reasons, it distorts researchers' priorities and can harm the understanding of related topics,” he says. “It's not just that we've ripped this page out of the book of science; it causes mistakes and distortions to appear in other areas as well.”

Here, Nature looks at four controversial areas of behavioural genetics to find out why each field has been a flashpoint, and whether there are sound scientific reasons for pursuing such studies.

narcissism of minor differences: profound behavioral reinforcement for status-seeking?

NYTimes | Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.

These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States.

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.

Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.

Mr. Keltner suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.

While Mr. Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.

This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap. As political scientists have noted, redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.

shake and bake baby!!!

HuffPo | The multimillion-dollar superlab of "Breaking Bad" may be gone, but thousands of meth labs around the country remain. The midwestern states tend to see the most incidents involving meth labs, and Missouri outranks all others with 1,825 busts and seizures in 2012, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis of Drug Enforcement Administration data.

Moreover, an increasingly popular crude cooking method known as "shake and bake" has put meth production in addicts' hands, eliminating the need for an RV or even chemistry know-how.

It takes about 15 minutes to "shake and bake" a batch of meth in a plastic bottle using ingredients you may already have lying around the house. Sometimes the bottle explodes, badly burning the often uninsured meth cook and anyone else in the line of fire.

Meth use cost the U.S. economy around $23.4 billion in 2005, according to a RAND Corporation study. While incidents involving meth labs have tapered somewhat in recent years, thanks to the rise of "shake and bake" hospitals have noticed an uptick in meth burn cases. It costs around $230,000 to treat a meth lab burn victim, Mother Jones reported. The most common age of these victims: under 4 years old. 

Oregon and Mississippi have figured out how to curb these accidents by making the key meth ingredient pseudoephedrine prescription-only. Other states keep the common cold medicine behind the counter under a 2006 federal law, but when Oregon and Mississippi implemented prescription legislation, meth lab incidents immediately plummeted. Dozens of other states have tried to follow their lead, but the pharmaceutical industry isn't having it. 

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wanted to make Oregon's success story a national reality, announcing legislation in 2010 for federal prescription regulation of pseudoephedrine. But according to Mother Jones, he never introduced the bill in Congress, in part because of "heavy industry spending."  Fist tap Dale.

near fukushima, a human crisis quietly unfolds...,

NYTimes | Every month, Hiroko Watabe, 74, returns for a few hours to her abandoned house near the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant to engage in her own small act of defiance against fate. She dons a surgical mask, hangs two radiation-measuring devices around her neck and crouches down to pull weeds. 

She is desperate to keep her small yard clean to prove she has not given up on her home, which she and her family evacuated two years ago after a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami devastated the plant five miles away. Not all her neighbors are willing to take the risk; chest-high weeds now block the doorways of their once-tidy homes. 

“In my heart, I know we can never live here again,” said Ms. Watabe, who drove here with her husband from Koriyama, the city an hour away where they have lived since the disaster. “But doing this gives us a purpose. We are saying that this is still our home.” 

While the continuing environmental disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has grabbed world headlines — with hundreds of tons of contaminated water flowing into the Pacific Ocean daily — a human crisis has been quietly unfolding. Two and a half years after the plant belched plumes of radioactive materials over northeast Japan, the almost 83,000 nuclear refugees evacuated from the worst-hit areas are still unable to go home. Some have moved on, reluctantly, but tens of thousands remain in a legal and emotional limbo while the government holds out hope that they can one day return. 

As they wait, many are growing bitter. Most have supported the official goal of decontaminating the towns so that people can return to homes that some families inhabited for generations. Now they suspect the government knows that the unprecedented cleanup will take years, if not decades longer than promised, as a growing chorus of independent experts have warned, but will not admit it for fear of dooming plans to restart Japan’s other nuclear plants. 

That has left the people of Namie and many of the 10 other evacuated towns with few good choices. They can continue to live in cramped temporary housing and collect relatively meager monthly compensation from the government. Or they can try to build a new life elsewhere, a near impossibility for many unless the government admits defeat and fully compensates them for their lost homes and livelihoods. 

“The national government orders us to go back, but then orders us to just wait and wait,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of this town of 20,000 people that was hastily evacuated when explosions began to rock the plant. “The bureaucrats want to avoid taking responsibility for everything that has happened, and we commoners pay the price.”

led to the logic gates of slaughter in pursuit of the latest version of happiness...,

led to the logic gates of slaughter in pursuit of the latest version of happiness...,

peer-to-peer science and fukushima's century-long challenge to humanity

fpip | More than two years after an earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc on a Japanese power plant, the Fukushima nuclear disaster is one of the most serious threats to public health in the Asia-Pacific, and the worst case of nuclear contamination the world has ever seen. Radiation continues to leak from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi site into groundwater, threatening to contaminate the entire Pacific Ocean. The cleanup will require an unprecedented global effort.

Initially, the leaked radioactive materials consisted of cesium-137 and 134, and to a lesser degree iodine-131. Of these, the real long-term threat comes from cesium-137, which is easily absorbed into bodily tissue—and its half-life of 30 years means it will be a threat for decades to come. Recent measurements indicate that escaping water also has increasing levels of strontium-90, a far more dangerous radioactive material than cesium. Strontium-90 mimics calcium and is readily absorbed into the bones of humans and animals.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) recently announced that it lacks the expertise to effectively control the flow of radiation into groundwater and seawater and is seeking help from the Japanese government. TEPCO has proposed setting up a subterranean barrier around the plant by freezing the ground, thereby preventing radioactive water from eventually leaking into the ocean—an approach that has never before been attempted in a case of massive radiation leakage. TEPCO has also proposed erecting additional walls now that the existing wall has been overwhelmed by the approximately 400 tons per day of water flowing into the power plant.

But even if these proposals were to succeed, they would not constitute a long-term solution.

A New Space Race

Solving the Fukushima Daiichi crisis needs to be considered a challenge akin to putting a person on the moon in the 1960s. This complex technological feat will require focused attention and the concentration of tremendous resources over decades. But this time the effort must be international, as the situation potentially puts the health of hundreds of millions at risk. The long-term solution to this crisis deserves at least as much attention from government and industry as do nuclear proliferation, terrorism, the economy, and crime.

To solve the Fukushima Daiichi problem will require enlisting the best and the brightest to come up with a long-term plan to be implemented over the next century. Experts from around the world need to contribute their insights and ideas. They should come from diverse fields—engineering, biology, demographics, agriculture, philosophy, history, art, urban design, and more. They will need to work together at multiple levels to develop a comprehensive assessment of how to rebuild communities, resettle people, control the leakage of radiation, dispose safely of the contaminated water and soil, and contain the radiation. They will also need to find ways to completely dismantle the damaged reactor, although that challenge may require technologies not available until decades from now.

Such a plan will require the development of unprecedented technologies, such as robots that can function in highly radioactive environments. This project might capture the imagination of innovators in the robotics world and give a civilian application to existing military technology. Improved robot technology would prevent the tragic scenes of old people and others volunteering to enter into the reactors at the risk of their own wellbeing.

The Fukushima disaster is a crisis for all of humanity, but it is a crisis that can serve as an opportunity to construct global networks for unprecedented collaboration. Groups or teams aided by sophisticated computer technology can start to break down into workable pieces the immense problems resulting from the ongoing spillage. Then experts can come back with the best recommendations and a concrete plan for action. The effort can draw on the precedents of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it must go far further.

In his book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Michael Nielsen describes principles of networked science that can be applied on an unprecedented scale. The breakthroughs that come from this effort can also be used for other long-term programs such as the cleanup of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the global response to climate change. The collaborative research regarding Fukushima should take place on a very large scale, larger than the sequencing of the human genome or the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider.

Finally, there is an opportunity to entirely reinvent the field of public diplomacy in response to this crisis. Public diplomacy can move from a somewhat ambiguous effort by national governments to repackage their messaging to a serious forum for debate and action on international issues. As public diplomacy matures through the experience of Fukushima, we can devise new strategies for bringing together hundreds of thousands of people around the world to respond to mutual threats. Taking a clue from networked science, public diplomacy could serve as a platform for serious, long-term international collaboration on critical topics such as poverty, renewable energy, and pollution control.

how hunter gatherers maintained their egalitarian ways...,

psychologytoday | I'm taking a little break from my series on "The Human Nature of Teaching" in order to respond to questions about hunter-gatherer life in general, which were raised by my last post. As regular readers of this blog know, I have in previous posts commented on hunter-gatherers' playfulness; their playful religious practices; their playful approach toward productive work; their non-directive childrearing methods; and their children's playful ways of educating themselves. In all of those posts I emphasized the egalitarian, non-hierarchical nature of hunter-gatherer society. In today's post I present three theories as to how hunter-gatherers maintained the egalitarian ethos for which they are justly famous. I think all three of the theories are correct. They are complementary theories, not competing ones; and they are all theories about culture, not about genes.

First, before I get to the three theories, I must address this question: Is it true that hunter-gatherers were peaceful egalitarians? The answer is yes.

During the twentieth century, anthropologists discovered and studied dozens of different hunter-gatherer societies, in various remote parts of the world, who had been nearly untouched by modern influences. Wherever they were found--in Africa, Asia, South America, or elsewhere; in deserts or in jungles--these societies had many characteristics in common. The people lived in small bands, of about 20 to 50 persons (including children) per band, who moved from camp to camp within a relatively circumscribed area to follow the available game and edible vegetation. The people had friends and relatives in neighboring bands and maintained peaceful relationships with neighboring bands. Warfare was unknown to most of these societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with warlike groups of people who were not hunter-gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals.

We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions. It meant that even parents didn't have the right to order their children around; hence the non-directive childrearing methods that I have discussed in previous posts. It meant that group decisions had to be made by consensus; hence no boss, "big man," or chief. Fist tap Ken.

civilization is created by the "others"

uio | What does it mean to be a civilized person? A civilized nation? How are these notions changing over time? And from one country to another? In the recently concluded project Civility, Virtue and Emotions in Europe and Asia, researchers from several different countries and disciplines have studied these questions. One of the initiators is Professor Helge Jordheim, Academic Director for the inter-faculty research programme KULTRANS.

Jordheim and his colleagues have studied what was considered to be civilized behaviour in Europe and Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

– Western identity and mores were formed by the encounter with non-Western cultures, Jordheim states.

The period studied by the researchers was one characterized by imperialism. In light of this, the relationship between “the West and the rest” is particularly interesting, Jordheim claims.

– In Western Europe, the prevailing notion was “civilization, that’s us”. Even in Asia, the idea that standards were defined by the West tended to prevail. Implicitly, the objective was: how can we catch up with the West?

A boost in self-confidence 

At the same time, there was a clear perception in Asia about not just mimicking the West, Jordheim emphasizes. The Asian countries were concerned with “finding their own path”.

– A challenge for the entire project has consisted in avoiding the pitfall of thinking that all influence emanated from Western Europe. It’s not as simple as that. For example, we can see that there was a widespread exchange of ideas between the Ottoman Empire and the Arabic and Persian cultures, which also had an impact on the Urdu-speaking population of India. Thus, the influence appears to be far less homogenous than we have previously assumed, Jordheim says.

He believes that the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20th century was a key event for the Asian civilizing process.

– This was the first time that Asia defeated the West. It resulted in a real boost in self-confidence, and had an impact on the kinds of ideas that were nurtured, Jordheim says.

Similarly, the researchers have been interested in how the civilizing influence to some extent ran in the opposite direction – from East to West.

about that westgate shopping mall psyop....,

globalresearch | Beyond the twin objectives of countering Iran and controlling African petroleum output, Israeli policymakers harbor a third ambition of a visionary nature: to establish a Hamitic-controlled region stretching from the Horn at Somalia across Ethiopia and agriculture-rich Uganda and into the mineral resources of Central Africa.

No nation on Earth is today more race-conscious than Israel , which seeks to establish an alliance of so-called Lost Tribes and descendants of Ham, the country cousins of the Semitic people. Whenever an expansionist power conjures up ancient ancestral memories, it is a sure-fire formula for aggression and massacres. Africa , be warned.

The Old Testament myth of Noah’s sons – Seth, founder of the Semites; Ham, of related peoples in Africa; and Japhet in Asia – is being used as a mirror image of the Aryan beliefs of another modern racial-obsessed cult. DNA studies of questionable authenticity are being used by Israeli geneticists to justify political footholds in Judeo-Christian Ethiopia and to churn out propaganda support for the “superior” herding Tutsi versus the “inferior” peasant Hutu in Rwanda and Eastern Africa. By stressing a common heritage, intelligence agents assigned to Jewish-funded charities for Somali, Iraqi and Afghan refugees in, say, Minnesota , London or Marseilles can selectively recruit naïve young Muslim immigrants for penetrating Islamist movements.

Just months before the Kenyan mall attack, according to a Guardian report by Simon Tisdall, a hardline faction led by Ahmed Abdi Godane assassinated the founders of Al Shabaab known by the noms de guerre Al-Afghani and Burhan. By design and certainly not accident, all Israelis inside the Westgate Mall were allowed to leave unharmed – while even Kenyans of Muslim faith were butchered. In the Syrian conflict, too, the more brutal foreign fighters are closely cooperating with the Israeli Defense Force against moderate rivals.

The Westgate Mall hostage crisis was a overblown spectacle in the vein of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or a Quentin Tarantino blood-fest. The so-called White Widow, so reminiscent of Patty Hearst, is a clone of the vengeful female assassins from “Kill Bill” and “Inglorious Bastards”. The initial 30 assailants are now whittled down to eight suspects, with the remainder mysteriously gone as in “Ocean’s Eleven” or “Mission Impossible”. The smokescreen caused by bombs that collapsed the parking garage, and the gallons of red liquid on the floors were Hollywood special effects, as if blood never coagulates nor change color. Every detail from the siege demands forensic reexamination for slip-ups in fakery. Westgate was not West End . Nairobi was a bad show, poorly scripted, sloppily directed and clumsily acted. A much more convincing performance should be expected from the CIA and Mossad. It would be a slapstick comedy if not for the fact that so many innocent bit actors were murdered in cold blood by the intelligence services.

A Hard Road to Peace

On the road to development and cooperation, the weak link has been the lack of a security arrangement between the African Union and Asia ’s regional groupings, including SAARC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN. Western military advisory groups and intelligence agencies, which create more terrorism and conflict than they can ever suppress, must be uprooted from every inch of Africa . In their stead, competent and professional law enforcement and security forces should be financed and trained under a cross-continent program to protect the resources of Africa for the benefit of African people and to carry forth the worldwide struggle against the systemic deprivation that causes impoverishment and injustice.

Today the only viable path ahead, against the incessant wars, horrendous crimes and dirty tricks perpetrated by the Western neocolonialists and their Zionist allies, is to remain faithful to the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference, as reaffirmed at 2005 Bandung 2 with the drafting of the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership (NAASP). Those past promises must be transformed from mere words on paper into real deeds on the soil, seas and skies of Mother Africa.

glenn greenwald demolishes some gubmint proxies on bbc newsnight..,

grown folks talking - high-status context that opens a "poor" scientist's nostrils wide?

mansfieldfdn | The U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group is an independent, bi-national group of experts that has been convened to examine the broader strategic implications of the Fukushima accident. As reflected in the group’s diverse makeup and sponsorship, the group as a whole neither discourages nor advocates for nuclear energy. Nor does the group seek to duplicate the many high quality studies of the causes and immediate lessons of the Fukushima accident. Rather, the group seeks to understand, articulate, and advocate for the broader, bilaterally shared strategic interests that stand to be impacted, positively or negatively, through changes to Japan’s nuclear energy paradigm. The U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group Program is the product of a partnership between the Mansfield Foundation, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

To develop a fuller understanding of the circumstances and implications of Japan’s fast-evolving energy policy situation, the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group has held discussions with opinion leaders and policymakers in Japan, the United States, and the global nuclear governance community in Vienna, Austria. Over the course of four meetings, the group has met individuals including members of Japan’s cabinet and ministries, editorial writers for Japan’s major newspapers, leaders in Japan’s anti-nuclear movement, Japanese nuclear industry officials, Japan’s mission to UN agencies in Vienna, American diplomats in Japan and Vienna, prominent individuals in the Washington, D.C. and Vienna foreign policy, nonproliferation, and disarmament communities, and key staff at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), including the director general. 

Reflecting its discussions over the past twelve months, in April 2013, the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group released a report of its findings and recommendations entitled: Statement on Shared Strategic Priorities in the Aftermath of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident. 

In May 2013 the group will discuss its report with members of the Washington, D.C. policy community.  The following autumn, members of the group will engage in a similar outreach effort with Japan’s policy community. The group will also engage the Japanese public through public seminars in Tokyo, Osaka, and Hiroshima, with details for the event made available on the main page of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation website in the preceding weeks.

The group’s activities have been made possible primarily through the support of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, the Federation of American Scientists, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation. Generous in-kind support was provided by All Nippon Airways, and supplementary, unrestricted grants were received from Hitachi, Toshiba, Mitsubishi and the Chubu Electric Power Company. Several of the group’s members have funded their own participation.