a biological rationale for musical scales

plos one | Scales are collections of tones that divide octaves into specific intervals used to create music. Since humans can distinguish about 240 different pitches over an octave in the mid-range of hearing [1], in principle a very large number of tone combinations could have been used for this purpose. Nonetheless, compositions in Western classical, folk and popular music as well as in many other musical traditions are based on a relatively small number of scales that typically comprise only five to seven tones [2]–[6]. Why humans employ only a few of the enormous number of possible tone combinations to create music is not known. Here we show that the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest overall spectral similarity to a harmonic series. These findings suggest that humans prefer tone combinations that reflect the spectral characteristics of conspecific vocalizations. The analysis also highlights the spectral similarity among the scales used by different cultures.

collapse - an msm review

Suntimes | BY ROGER EBERT / December 9, 2009 If this man is correct, then you may be reading the most important story in today's paper.

I have no way of assuring you that the bleak version of the future outlined by Michael Ruppert in Chris Smith's "Collapse" is accurate. I can only tell you I have a pretty good built-in B.S. detector, and its needle never bounced off zero while I watched this film. There is controversy over Ruppert, and he has many critics. But one simple fact at the center of his argument is obviously true, and it terrifies me.

That fact: We have passed the peak of global oil resources. There are only so many known oil reserves. We have used up more than half of them. Remaining reserves are growing smaller, and the demand is growing larger. It took about a century to use up the first half. That usage was much accelerated in the most recent 50 years. Now the oil demands of giant economies like India and China are exploding. They represent more than half the global population, and until recent decades had small energy consumption.

If the supply is finite, and usage is potentially doubling, you do the math. We will face a global oil crisis, not in the distant future, but within the lives of many now alive. They may well see a world without significant oil.

Oh, I grow so impatient with those who prattle about our untapped resources in Alaska, yada yada yada. There seems to be only enough oil in Alaska to power the United States for a matter of months. The world's great oil reserves have been discovered.

Saudi Arabia sits atop the largest oil reservoir ever found. For years, the Saudis have refused to disclose any figures at all about their reserves. If those reserves are vast and easy to tap by drilling straight down through the desert, then ask yourself this question: Why are the Saudis spending billions of dollars to develop offshore drilling platforms?

Ruppert is a man ordinary in appearance, on the downhill slope of middle age, a chain smoker with a mustache. He is not all worked up. He speaks reasonably and very clearly. "Collapse" involves what he has to say, illustrated with news footage and a few charts, the most striking of which is a bell-shaped curve. It takes a lot of effort to climb a bell-shaped curve, but the descent is steep and dangerous.

He recites facts I knew, vaguely. Many things are made from oil. Everything plastic. Paint. There are eight gallons of oil in every auto tire. Oil supplies the energy to convert itself into those byproducts. No oil, no plastic, no tires, no gas to run cars, no machines to build them. No coal mines, except those operated by men and horses.

14 days to seal history's judgement on this generation

Guardian | Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

the people speak story

History Channel | Premiering Sunday December 13, 8/7c - Author, historian, teacher, activist, and now television producer Dr. HowardZinn is a man on a mission. He wants Americans to recognize the power of protest in shaping their country's history. Along with executive producers Matt Damon, Chris Moore, Josh Brolin, and Anthony Arnove, he is moving his message from high schools and college campuses to film and, later this year, to HISTORY.

Zinn, 87, has been a history professor for most of his professional career, and in the lecture hall and in his writings, particularly his very popular A People's History of the United States, he espouses history "from the ground up" in an articulate and engaging way. If our textbooks present the story of America only through the eyes of its generals and presidents, Zinn argues, it gives "a distorted view of the past." Certainly he provides a powerful counterbalance to the hero-centric approach of traditional textbooks. In 2004 Zinn joined with Dr. Anthony Arnove to publish a collection of primary source documents titled Voices of a People's History of the United States, an academic bestseller on college and high school campuses. The materials range across the length of American history and feature letters, petitions, poems, speeches, and songs from "women and slaves, immigrants and youth, soldiers and students."

Zinn and Arnove began to organize public performances of selections from Voices in 2003, before its official release, when A People's History of the United States sold its 1 millionth copy (it has now surpassed the 2 million mark). Today, Voices brings alive the words and emotions of the past with songs and dramatic readings performed by well-established artists. At a presentation this past May celebrating the publication of A Young People's History of the United States in New York City, seven performers gave new life to the words of famous dissenters — such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. — and lesser known, but equally stirring, voices from the past.

climate change, peak oil, limits to growth - belief systems

The Oil Drum | Many of the issues discussed on this bandwidth are large, long term, and threatening. Consider the three primary society-wide topics of analysis and discourse: climate, energy and the economy. It is my belief these 3 are linked by an underlying cultural growth/debt imperative running into a planet with finite sources and sinks. But within each category you have, still, despite the same access to facts and considerable passage of time, widely disparate and strongly held opinions. E.g. climate change is largely anthropogenic/climate change is largely naturally forced; peak oil is past/ peak oil is decades away; the financial crisis is passed/ government handouts have made the financial peril even greater etc. If you find yourself in a debate about any of these issues you'll find apathy or you'll find cognitive biases underlying a polarized opinion.

This post will address some social and psychological reasons why the urgency of our resource situation may not be being addressed on an individual level and only at a snails pace on the governmental level. Among the phenomena we will explore are a) why we have beliefs and how they are changed, b) our propensity to believe in authority figures, c) our penchant for optimism, d) cognitive load theory, e) relative fitness, f) the recency effect, and several others.

not in the labor force

ASPO | Some of us think America is in Big Trouble. The often sarcastic way I cast doubt on government unemployment statistics today may strike you as negative in the extreme, and in a way it is. But the real dilemma we face is simple: are we going to address deep structural problems in our economy? Or are we going to keep lying to ourselves about those problems? How long are we going to pretend they don’t exist?

President Obama has proposed another band-aid stimulus to create jobs. Rather than level with the American people about the extraordinary difficulties we will have in getting people back to work over the next decade, the President would rather pretend that throwing another dollop of borrowed money at the jobs problem will somehow fix it.

I believe Americans have to own up to the difficulties they face to have any chance of fixing them. Bear this in mind as I reveal the extraordinary lengths we go to to put an optimistic spin on a truly ugly jobs situation. Looking on the bright side, I don’t think we have to worry about a resurgence of oil demand in the United States for a very, very long time.

copenhagen - prelude to extinction?

FCNP | As the Copenhagen meeting on climate change opens, we are getting mixed signals. At one extreme are the "disbelievers," who say that serious consequences from global warming, if it is really happening, are still decades away so why should people be saddled with higher energy costs now. If the polls are correct the disbelievers now constitute a majority of the American electorate.

At the other extreme are the climate scientists who are telling every media outlet that will listen that the proposals being discussed at Copenhagen are nowhere near enough to save mankind from destruction. Some are saying that a five degree Centigrade increase in the average global temperature may be enough to do in mankind. Food will no longer grow in sufficient quantity to keep all 8 billion of us fed. Rising sea levels and more violent storms will make coastal cities - even Washington - largely uninhabitable. A recent survey of 3,000 climate scientists indicates that 82 percent agree that human activity is making a significant contribution to global warming. Of the 77 climate scientists who are actively studying and publishing about global warming, 97 percent say that human activity is involved.

The message here is simple. If the scientists watching this are right, and there is no reason to believe they are not, in 100 or 200 years there will not be many (or any) people left. We already have precedents for higher forms of life on earth being wiped out by meteors and really big volcanoes. Remember the dinosaurs?

Unlike the previous extinctions, it seems that the next one will be caused by people, not Mother Nature. We understand the problem (too much carbon going into the air) and how to solve it (stop putting so much carbon into the air). The problem is that for most of the world current lifestyles and prospects for a better life all involve using more fossil fuels. Nobody wants to give up what they have or the prospects for a better future. The situation is further complicated by the huge disparities in the per capita consumption of fossil fuels and populations.

While the richer European countries can see their way to major reductions in fossil fuel consumption, very few other developed countries can. In the United States which has until very recently enjoyed 300 years of nearly continuous economic prosperity, giving up our current lifestyle is unthinkable for many (perhaps most). Thus they prefer to listen to false prophets who tell them all will be well.

america without a middle-class?

AlterNet | America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.

u.n.'s future scenarios for climate are pure fantasy

Aleklett | In the year 2000, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published 40 different future scenarios in which emissions from oil, natural gas and coal were specified. In the past 9 years these scenarios have been the guiding star for the world’s climate researchers. The IPCC has described why these researchers should follow them. The scenarios “are built as descriptions of possible, rather than preferred, developments. They represent pertinent, plausible, alternative futures”. Despite the fact that emissions from fossil fuels vary widely between the scenarios, the IPCC regarded all the scenarios as equally likely.

Among these scenarios exist the future horror stories that people such as Al Gore have warned us about. These go by the name of “Business As Usual”. Climate calculations that are based on these emission levels give an average temperature increase of 3.5 °C above 1990 levels by 2100. Some of these scenarios exceed +6 °C.

Globally, human activity generates greenhouse gasses and emissions increase at the same rate as the population increases. Today, 57% of greenhouse gasses come from fossil fuel. The big issue in Copenhagen is future emissions from these fossil fuels. I have a different view of the situation than the IPCC and my view is based on scientific publications from the Global Energy Systems research group at Uppsala University, Sweden. We can now show that almost all of the IPCC emissions scenarios are improbable and that those scenarios described as “Business as Usual” are completely unrealistic. (Ten publications relevant to this article can be accessed from the home page of Global Energy Systems, www.fysast.uu.se/ges)

In May 2007 the Debate column of Dagens Nyheter [Sweden’s most widely read broadsheet newspaper] published my article on climate titled, “Severe climate change unlikely before we run out of fossil fuel”. An article with the title, “The Peak of the Oil Age” has recently been published in the scientific journal Energy Policy. From the research reported in that paper we can now state that there will be insufficient oil in future since production will decline. Therefore, emissions from use of oil will decline by at least 10% by 2030. This reduction will be even greater if the global economy is negatively affected.

The climate change negotiators main question should therefore be, “How will we use coal in the future?”.

Today’s coal production – hard coal and brown coal – is approximately 3000 million “tonne of oil equivalent” (toe). For the “Business as Usual” scenarios coal production must increase seven-fold by 2100. That is an increase of 600%. In the last 20 years, global coal reserves have been revised downwards by 25%. The most recent case was India that halved its declared reserves. The USA is the “Saudi Arabia of coal” with 29% of global reserves. The former Soviet Union has 27%, China 14%, Australia 9%, India 7% and South Africa 4% of global reserves. That means that 90% of the fossil coal reserves exist in these six nations. We can also assert that the same six nations today produce 86% of the world’s coal.

If emissions from coal are to increase by 600 percent this cannot occur without the USA – that has the world’s largest coal finds – increasing its coal production by the same amount. In an article published in May 2009 in the International Journal of Coal Geology we have studied the historical trends and future possible production of coal in the USA. The production of high-grade anthracite is decreasing while the production of brown coal in Wyoming is increasing. Future coal production is completely dependent on new coal mining in the state of Montana. According to the constitution of the USA, federal authorities cannot force Montana to produce coal. In Montana they do not want to produce coal since the mining will destroy the environment and large areas of agricultural land. If the constitution is changed and mining of coal in Montana does occur it is possible for the USA to increase its coal production by 40% but not by 100%. An increase of 600% is pure fantasy.

Today, the world’s largest coal producer is China. Its reserves of coal are half the size of the USA’s and China has no possibility of increasing its coal production by 100%. A 600% increase there is also pure fantasy. Russia, with the world’s second largest coal reserves, can increase its production significantly but the untouched Russian coal reserves lie in central Siberia in an area without infrastructure. Russia is not dependent on this coal for its own energy needs but if mining did begin there some time after 2050 it could only ever be equivalent to a small fraction of today’s global production. Therefore, it is impossible for global coal production to increase by 100% and 600% is, once again, pure fantasy.

In the spring of 2008 I discussed the climate question with the USA’s then ambassador to Sweden Michael Wood who was interested in our research. My suggestion for a partial solution was that the presidents of the USA and Russia should sign a bilateral treaty in which they guarantee that half of the remaining reserves of coal in each nation would remain unused. The people in Montana would celebrate and Russia’s future would not be affected. The agreement would mean that 25% of possible future emissions of carbon dioxide from coal would disappear.

Our conclusion is that the assumptions of coal use that the IPCC recommended that climate researchers refer to in calculating their future horror scenarios are completely unrealistic. The question is why at all these gigantic volumes of carbon dioxide emission are to be found among the possible scenarios. The IPCC bears a great responsibility for the fact that thousands of climate researchers around the world have dedicated years of research to calculating temperature increases for scenarios that are completely unrealistic. The consequence is that very large research resources have been wasted to little benefit for us all.

That fossil fuel reserves are insufficient to support the IPCC’s horror scenarios may alleviate somewhat our concerns about future climate. On the other hand, we must be even more concerned about future resource shortages. The shortage of oil can, for example, place even greater pressure on the rainforests through increased production of biodiesel from palm oil. The fact that the fossil fuel energy required until 2100 for the “Business as Usual” scenarios does not exist means that the world’s growing population needs a global crisis package to create new energy solutions. We must now – and with immediate effect – change the global energy system.

we live in revolutionary times

Land Institute | Central to the problems we face is our reluctance to see them as anything more than temporary downturns in the usual up and down cycles of economics and climate. They are not. World production of oil in the past three years has remained steady—85 million barrels per day— while the price has more than doubled in that time, and in early July had reached as high as $145 per barrel. A human slave, on the other hand—of which there are now approximately 27 million in the world, more than at any other time in history—can be purchased for a mere $40. Add another 3 billion people to the planet in 40 years while simultaneously trying to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent. Find livelihoods, food, fresh water and shelter, as well as education, health care and stable governments for these numbers without causing species extinction, soil degradation, civil wars, nuclear wars and mass migrations. Try running any of the world’s major cities—their subways, waste water plants, transportation, lighting and heating—for even a few days on low density solar and wind power.

...We live in revolutionary times brought by substantial and sustained failures of current worldviews and global systems to provide everyday people with lives of health and freedom from want and fear, and with prospect of similar lives for their children. These failures are the self-evident truths of our time: that billions were promised improved lives only to see them degraded; mass extinctions of species; overheated climate; and unprecedented running down of the ecosphere on which all life depends.

The worldviews and systems responsible for these failures go by many names: individualism, capitalism, scientism, materialism, corporatism and globalism, to name a few. What they are called is not important. Important is that they share two bedrock beliefs that have become the intellectual DNA of our modern minds: first, that the natural world is without limit in energy and materials, and its sinks for wastes and pollution; and second, that the human intellect is sufficient to understand, control and operate Earth as a luxury-machine for the exclusive material happiness of human beings, again, without limit.

It is now necessary to overturn these false and dangerous beliefs, to limit the power of their many adherents, and to usher in a new way of thinking and living in the world. This is our revolutionary moment...

...To state unequivocally, “These are revolutionary times!” is recognition that the world is changing in ways that we would not necessarily choose; that it must change even if it goes against what we would otherwise choose; and that we can no longer choose to resist it.

It is so much easier to hope for a miracle. But our best and most realistic hope lies in embracing the revolution before us. With vigor and creativity we must help create the conceptual scaffolding necessary to build a new worldview—in the words of the American founder John Adams, “to start some new thinking that will surprise the world.” Every category of human thought needs reorientation to recognize the boundaries of our sun-powered ecosphere. We need ecospheric science, spirituality and economics, ecospheric politics, education and technology, ecospheric justice, history and architecture, ecospheric engineering, agriculture and philosophy, and ecospheric conceptions of rights, property and happiness.

potus' lip poked out...,

The Hill | President Barack Obama recently called Rep. John Conyers Jr. to express his frustrations with the Judiciary Committee chairman’s criticism.

In an interview with The Hill, Conyers said his opinions of Obama’s policies on healthcare reform and the war in Afghanistan have not sat well with the president.

According to the lawmaker, the president picked up the phone several weeks ago to find out why Conyers was “demeaning” him.

Obama’s decision to challenge Conyers highlights a sensitivity to criticism the president has taken on the left. Conyers’s critical remarks, many of which have been reported on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post, appear to have irritated the president, known for his calm demeanor.

Conyers, the second-longest-serving member of the House, said, “[Obama] called me and told me that he heard that I was demeaning him and I had to explain to him that it wasn’t anything personal, it was an honest difference on the issues. And he said, ‘Well, let’s talk about it.’”

Sitting in the Judiciary Committee’s conference room two days after Obama delivered his speech on Afghanistan, the 23-term lawmaker said he wasn’t in the mood to “chat.”

Obama’s move to send in 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by the summer of 2010 has clearly disappointed Conyers.

He said he intends to press his case in writing soon.

“I want something so serious that he has to respond in writing, like I am responding in writing to him,” he said.

“Calling in generals and admirals to discuss troop strength is like me taking my youngest to McDonald’s to ask if he likes french fries,” Conyers said.

Many on the left have argued that military leaders routinely respond to crises by calling for more troops.

“I’ve been saying I don’t agree with him on Afghanistan, I think he screwed up on healthcare reform, on Guantánamo and kicking Greg off,” Conyers said, referring to the departure of former White House counsel Greg Craig.

Craig was a leading proponent in the White House of closing the terrorist detention center at Guantánamo Bay and releasing photos of detainees undergoing torture. Closing the military prison has proven to be politically difficult, and Obama reversed field on the photos, opting not to make them publicly available.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The liberal Conyers has been an outspoken proponent of a single-payer healthcare system and a critic of U.S. involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He has also been at odds with White House policy on extending expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, crafting legislation that is to the left of the Senate’s version.

Obama and Conyers have a complicated and nuanced relationship.

time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss

TED | Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change.

why there's no sign of a climate conspiracy in hacked emails

NewScientist | The leaking of emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK, has led to a media and political storm. The affair is being portrayed as a scandal that undermines the science behind climate change. It is no such thing, and here's why.

We can be 100 per cent sure the world is getting warmer

Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you'll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.

You can't fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.

None of these observations by themselves prove the world is warming; they could simply be regional effects, for instance. But put all the data from around the world together, and you have overwhelming evidence of a long-term warming trend.

a beginners guide to evolutionary religious studies

Binghamton | Here are some quick answers to questions that are frequently asked about evolutionary theory in relation to religion and other aspects of human behavior.

Why is the field of evolutionary religious studies so new?
From the very beginning, Darwin and his colleagues were keenly interested in studying all aspects of humanity from an evolutionary perspective, including religion. However, this inquiry led in directions that can be recognized as false in retrospect. Cultural evolution was envisioned as a linear progression from “savagery” to “civilization,” with European societies most advanced. Herbert Spencer and others used evolution to justify a hierarchical society (“Social Darwinism”). Janet Browne’s magnificent 2-volume biography of Darwin and his times (Voyaging and The Power of Place) suggest that these views were inevitable against the background of Victorian culture. Instead of challenging the support that evolutionary theory lent to these views, the theory as a whole became off-limits for many human-related disciplines during most of the 20th century. The controversy surrounding the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975 illustrates the tenor of the times. The modern study of humans from an evolutionary perspective represents a “fresh start” that is based on a much more sophisticated body of theory and knowledge from the biological sciences and bears almost no resemblance to earlier “evolutionary” theories. The field of evolutionary religious studies is part of this broader trend.

How can something as cultural as religion be studied from an evolutionary perspective?
It is typical to portray terms such as “culture” and “learning” as alternatives to terms such as “evolution” and “biology.” According to this formulation, evolutionary theory can explain other species and certain aspects of humans, such as our desire to eat and mate, but not other aspects, such as our rich cultural diversity. This formulation makes little sense from a modern evolutionary perspective. Culture and learning are manifestly important in our species, but they need to be understood from an evolutionary perspective rather than being regarded as an alternative. The capacities for learning and culture require an elaborate architecture that evolved by genetic evolution. Moreover, learning and cultural change can be regarded as fast-paced evolutionary processes in their own right. The bottom line is that evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding cultural diversity in addition to biological diversity.

If cultural evolution refers to any kind of cultural change, doesn’t it explain nothing by explaining everything?
Consider an analogy with genetic evolution, which is defined as any kind of genetic change, whether by mutation, selection, drift, linkage disequilibrium, and so on. It is important for the definition to include everything to provide a complete accounting system for genetic change. The definition is not empty because specific categories of change are determined on a case-by-case. Thus, we might decide that guppy spots (and their associated genes) evolve primarily by selection, that mitochondrial genes evolve primarily by drift, and so on. Similarly, it is important for the definition of cultural evolution to be all-inclusive to provide a complete accounting system. What saves it from being empty is a number of meaningful sub-categories that can be determined on a case-by-case basis.

What is the relationship between evolutionary theory and other theoretical perspectives, such as Marxism, rational choice theory, or functionalism?
Most scholars and scientists who study religion are not young-earth creationists. They expect religion to be natural phenomenon that can be explained without invoking supernatural agents. They fully accept the theory of evolution, including humans as a product of evolution. Thus, they implicitly assume that their particular theoretical framework is consistent with evolutionary theory, without requiring much knowledge about evolutionary theory. For example, rational choice theory assumes that human behavior can be explained in terms of individual utility maximization. When pressed for an explanation, a rational choice theorist would presumably say that utility maximization evolved as a genetic or cultural adaptation—those who failed to maximize their utilities were not among our ancestors. In this fashion, when the axioms of any given naturalistic perspective are questioned, they involve assumptions about evolution. Unsurprisingly (at least in retrospect) these assumptions can be improved by a sophisticated knowledge of current evolutionary theory. In this fashion, other theoretical perspectives become integrated into evolutionary theory rather than providing an alternative. Virtually all naturalistic theories of religion that were developed without using the E-word can be given a formulation within evolutionary theory, enabling them to be compared with each other more productively than before.

epa says greenhouse gases imperil health

NYTimes | The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday issued a final ruling that greenhouse gases posed a danger to human health and the environment, paving the way for regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, power plants, factories, refineries and other major sources.

The announcement was timed to coincide with the opening of the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, strengthening President Obama’s hand as more than 190 nations struggle to reach a global accord.

The E.P.A.’s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said that a 2007 decision by the Supreme Court required the agency to weigh whether carbon dioxide and five other climate-altering gases threatened human health and welfare and, if so, to take steps to regulate them.

She said Monday that the finding was driven by the weight of scientific evidence that the planet was warming and that human activity was largely responsible.

“There have and continue to be debates about how and how quickly climate change will happen if we fail to act,” Ms. Jackson said at a news conference at the E.P.A.’s headquarters. “But the overwhelming amounts of scientific study show that the threat is real.”

Industry groups quickly criticized the decision, saying that the regulation of carbon dioxide, a near-ubiquitous substance, would be legally and technically complex and would impose huge costs across the economy.

from the mind of apple daily....,

americans waste 40% of available food supply

LiveScience | U.S. residents are wasting food like never before. While many Americans feast on turkey and all the fixings, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year.

The study finds that about 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States is tossed out.

Meanwhile, while some have plenty of food to spare, a recent report by the Department of Agriculture finds the number of U.S. homes lacking "food security," meaning their eating habits were disrupted for lack of money, rose from 4.7 million in 2007 to 6.7 million last year.

About 1 billion people worldwide don't have enough to eat, according to the World Food Program.

Growing problem
The new estimate of food waste, published in the journal PLoS ONE, is a relatively straightforward calculation: It's the difference between the U.S. food supply and what's actually eaten, which was estimated by using a model of human metabolism and known body weights.

The result, from Kevin Hall and colleagues at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, is about 25 percent higher than similar estimates made in recent years.

Last year, an international group estimated that up to 30 percent of food — worth about $48.3 billion — is wasted each year in the United States. That report concluded that despite food shortages in many countries, plenty of food is available to feed the world, it just doesn't get where it needs to go.

Previous calculations were typically based on interviews with people and inspections of garbage, which Hall's team figures underestimates the waste.

reserves are bunk

ResourceInsights |The claims that the United States has 100 years of recoverable natural gas as a result of the newly accessible shale basins has no meaning without attaching a price to it. The fact that major shale gas producers have trimmed their active drilling fleets to a fraction of what they were during the 2008 boom in natural gas prices proves that price is a critical factor in determining whether to drill. And, where there is no drilling, there are no additions to reserves. The natural gas market has shown itself to be highly volatile which has not surprisingly led to wide swings in natural gas drilling. The notion that somehow there will be a consistent accretion of natural gas reserves from year to year or that all discoveries from previous years will still be considered reserves in a low-price environment is pure bunkum. The same logic applies to oil discoveries. But these days no one is claiming the United States has enough oil left to supply the entire country for 100 years. And, so hype about oil reserves is less of an issue.

The upshot is that expected cash flow determines what areas will be drilled, not the size of potential reserves. Most companies won't drill a prospect unless they believe they can get their money back within two to three years, Doyle says. If it takes four or five years, the prospect is not very attractive. Cash flow is king.

It turns out that the NPV of the first three years of cash flow from my hypothetical well mentioned above is $1,556,112, only about half of the initial investment. Most companies would or should pass on such a prospect, and it would therefore never become part of anyone's reserves, he explains. Part of the hype over shale gas has to do with the claim that the wells may be very long-lived, he adds. Even if that turns out to be true--not a certainty as of now--the low flow rates expected after the initial burst of production and the distant payoffs would actually work against any decision to drill such wells. No wells, no reserves.

Doyle says that given modern technology, oil and natural gas are easier to find than ever before. But he doesn't believe that in North America at least, there is that much more to find. He thinks that shale gas in North America my indeed prove to be plentiful. But it will not be both plentiful and cheap.

And, of course, if we succeed at expanding natural gas production to meet the needs of a new natural gas-powered vehicle fleet--an idea advocated by one of the leading producers of shale gas--and expand other current uses such as the generation of electricity, we can expect that natural gas prices will soar. That may provide the necessary incentive (i.e. cash flow) to extract the shale gas that lies below the American landscape. But it will also certainly mean that the 100 years of supply that has been so frequently touted in the media will rapidly shrink to perhaps 30 or 40, and that the peak in production will come much sooner.

A peak in natural gas production in, say, 20 years would not exactly be a useful talking point for those advocating the wholesale conversion of key parts of the U. S. economy to run on natural gas. Just as we would be finishing such a conversion, we could find ourselves on the downslope of the natural gas production curve and faced with the urgent need to adapt our costly and newly completed natural gas infrastructure to run on some other energy source.

police tapped sprint gps data 8 million times this year

TPM | Under a new system set up by Sprint, law enforcement agencies have gotten GPS data from the company about its wireless customers 8 million times in about a year, raising a host of questions about consumer privacy, transparency, and oversight of how police obtain location data.

What this means -- and what many wireless customers no doubt do not realize -- is that with a few keystrokes, police can determine in real time the location of a cell phone user through automated systems set up by the phone companies.

And while a Sprint spokesman told us customers can shield themselves from surveillance by simply switching off the GPS function of their phones, one expert told TPM that the company and other carriers almost certainly have the power to remotely switch the function back on.

To be clear, you can think of there being two types of GPS (global positioning system). One is the handy software on your mobile device that tells you where you are and helps give driving directions. But there's also GPS capability in all cell phones sold today, required by a federal regulation so if you dial 911 from an unknown location, authorities can find you.

Sprint says the 8 million requests represent "thousands" of individual customers -- it won't say how many exactly -- and that the company follows the law. It's not clear, however, if warrants are always needed, or whether they have been obtained by police for all the cases.

that climate change email

NYTimes | The theft of thousands of private e-mail messages and files from computer servers at a leading British climate research center has been a political windfall for skeptics who claim the documents prove that mainstream scientists have conspired to overstate the case for human influence on climate change.

They are using the e-mail to blast the Obama administration’s climate policies. And they clearly hope that the e-mail will undermine negotiations for a new climate change treaty that begin in Copenhagen this week.

No one should be misled by all the noise. The e-mail messages represent years’ worth of exchanges among prominent American and British climatologists. Some are mean-spirited, others intemperate. But they don’t change the underlying scientific facts about climate change.

One describes climate skeptics as “idiots,” another describes papers written by climate contrarians as “garbage” and “fraud.” Still another suggests that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose 2007 report concluded that humans were the dominant force behind global warming, should pay no attention to contrarian opinions.

Another quotes an exasperated Phil Jones — director of the climate center at the University of East Anglia, from which the e-mail was stolen — as expressing the hope that climate change would occur “regardless of the consequences” so “the science could be proved right.”

However, most of the e-mail messages — judging by those that have seen the light of day — appear to deal with the painstaking and difficult task of reconstructing historical temperatures, and the problems scientists encounter along the way. Despite what the skeptics say, they demonstrate just how rigorously scientists have worked to figure out whether global warming is real and the true role that human activities play.

The controversy isn’t over. James Inhofe, the Senate’s leading skeptic, has asked for an inquiry into what some are calling “Climategate.” And on Friday, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations’ intergovernmental panel, announced that he would conduct his own investigation.

It is important that scientists behave professionally and openly. It is also important not to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action, in Washington and in Copenhagen.