Shermer's Science Friction
Here's another title that I finished a couple of weeks ago: Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown., by Michael Shermer (New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2005). This, too, is a miscellaneous collection of essays, assembled under the general theme of skepticism and its central role in science. Some of the essays were better than others, but I found something of interest in each, and some I liked quite a bit, particularly the introductory essay, called "Science: Why Not Knowing". There's more, of course, at the Science Besieged Book Note.*
Here are two short paragraphs I wanted to make a note of. This first for its mention of the "Lake Wobegon effect", a common American delusion.
In recent decades experimental psychologists have discovered a number of cognitive biases that interfere with our understanding of ourselves and our world. The self-serving bias, for example, dictates that we tend to see ourselves in a more positive light than others see us: national surveys show that most businesspeople believe they are more moral than other businesspeople. In one College Entrance Examination Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, 0 percent rated themselves below average in "ability to get along with other," while 60 percent put themselves in the top 10 percent. This is also called the "Lake Wobegon effect," after the mythical town where everyone is above average. [p. xxi]
This second is to keep hand to respond to those irritating people who are always quoting the biblical book of Leviticus at me as though it fully justifies their homophobia. It's a little reminder that even fundamentalists typically don't observe all the instructions in their holy book.
From Deuteronomy 21:18-21 (Revised Standard Version):
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, "This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice: he is a glutton and a drunkard." Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
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*I'm sure the pattern is clear by now. When I finish a book that might be of interest to Science Besieged Book Note readers, I write about it there and then note here all those passages that I'd marked that I wanted to copy down but that didn't seem to fit into the note that I was writing. Therefore, in case you, my four regular readers, find the excerpts of interest, I cross reference the two because the excerpts are different in each.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Thursday, 19 April 2007 at 21.54
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I remember once reading a list of just such biblical remedies for various missteps and bad attitudes, each with its proper reference as to chapter and verse. It evoked such thoughts as "ridiculous," "barbaric," "cruel" and "ignorant,"
All of which is a long, long way from peace on Earth, goodwill toward men. It served to remind me how many people over the millennia have claimed to have a direct line to God or to be operating at his explicit direction, as his exclusive agent on Earth.
It also reminded me that for all the words in the Bible, not one was put to parchment or tablet by God. That left the job of writing the Bible to men, who, by definition, are fallible.