Mating strategies: "Unless it is essential to know a partner’s sex, why bother?"

When the facts change, do you change your mind?

A new theory argues same-sex sexual behaviour is an evolutionary norm (The Economist)

Unless it is essential to know a partner’s sex, why bother?

When it comes to sexual behaviour, the animal kingdom is a broad church. Its members indulge in a wide variety of activities, including with creatures of the same sex. Flying foxes gather in all-male clusters to lick each other’s erect penises. Male Humboldt squid have been found with sperm-containing sacs implanted in and around their sexual organs in similar quantities to female squid. Female snow macaques often pair off to form temporary sexual relationships that includes mounting and pelvic thrusting. Same-sex sexual behaviour has been recorded in some 1,500 animal species.

The mainstream explanations in evolutionary biology for these behaviours are many and varied. Yet they all contain a common assumption: that sexual behaviours involving members of the same sex are a paradox that does indeed need explaining. Reproduction requires mating with a creature of the opposite sex, so why does same-sex mating happen at all?

A paper just published in Nature Ecology and Evolution offers a different approach. Instead of regarding same-sex behaviour as an evolutionary oddity emerging from a normal baseline of different-sex behaviour, the authors suggest that it has been a norm since the first animals came into being. The common ancestor of all animals alive today, humans included, did not, they posit, have the biological equipment needed to discern the sex of others of its species. Rather, it would have exhibited indiscriminate sexual behaviour—and this would have been good enough to transmit its genes to the next generation ...

Yep, Kruse (mind) Kontrol again: "Creationism would be taught in Indiana public schools, indoctrinating students with biblical literalism, if Senate Bill 373 becomes law."

The giant anus to which Dan refers:

The sponsor of the bill, Dennis Kruse (R-District 14), has a long history of sponsoring anti-evolution legislation.

Ah, the joys of Hoosierness.

---

INDIANA ANTI-EVOLUTION BILL WOULD INDOCTRINATE STUDENTS IN CREATIONISM (Center for Inquiry)

Creationism would be taught in Indiana public schools, indoctrinating students with biblical literalism, if Senate Bill 373 becomes law. The Center for Inquiry (CFI)—which advocates for reason, science, and secularism—has promised to take all necessary legal measures to oppose the bill’s passage or implementation.

Senate Bill 373 would permit Indiana public schools to teach “creation science” as an alternative to the scientific theory of evolution. Creation science is a purely religious teaching that is unsupported by actual science. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause protects public school students from indoctrination in religious ideas such as creation science.

“The children of Indiana deserve a high-quality science education. It is their right to be properly taught the fundamentals of biology,” said Bertha Vazquez, director of CFI’s Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science. “How else will they be able to compete in an increasingly competitive college entrance process and the national job market? The parents of Indiana should be outraged that their own children will be subjected to the willful ignorance of a few legislators.”

SB 373 also requires public schools to display a poster stating “In God We Trust” in each classroom and library.

This is similar to model legislation promoted by the Christian nationalist Project Blitz, an effort by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation to impose Christianity on Americans through operation of law. The Project Blitz manual encourages religious Right lobbyists to advocate for Christian nationalist legislation in their home states beginning with symbolic “In God We Trust” bills. Additional legislative initiatives would allow religious discrimination against women seeking reproductive health care, same-sex couples, transgender people, and other marginalized groups. CFI stands with our secular and interfaith partners who oppose the goals and methods of Project Blitz. We see it as a full-on assault on one of the nation’s founding principles: that religion and government shall be separate.

“Secular education promotes critical thinking and religious freedom,” said Robyn Blumner, CFI’s president and CEO. “Students deserve instruction in real science, without taxpayer money being used to proselytize a narrow version of Christianity that subscribes to unscientific notions of how the universe came to be. If parents want to give their children this type of religious instruction, they are certainly free to do so, but they need to do it on their own time and their own dime, not paid for from the public purse.”

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a nonprofit educational, advocacy, and research organization headquartered in Amherst, New York, with executive offices in Washington, D.C. It is also home to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and the Council for Secular Humanism. The Center for Inquiry strives to foster a secular society based on reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. Visit CFI on the web at centerforinquiry.org.

Yuval Noah Harari: "Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights."

The topic is writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the book Sapiens. Those with an hour and a half to devote to this Sam Harris conversation with Harari are urged to do so.

Reality and the Imagination: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari (Sam Harris)

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about meditation, the need for stories, the power of technology to erase the boundary between fact and fiction, wealth inequality, the problem of finding meaning in a world without work, religion as a virtual reality game, the difference between pain and suffering, the future of globalism, and other topics.

Harari's web site dives straight into it.

SAPIENS

Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights.

Starting from this provocative idea, Sapiens goes on to retell the history of our species from a completely fresh perspective. It explains that money is the most pluralistic system of mutual trust ever devised; that capitalism is the most successful religion ever invented; that the treatment of animals in modern agriculture is probably the worst crime in history; and that even though we are far more powerful than our ancient ancestors, we aren’t much happier.

By combining profound insights with a remarkably vivid language, Sapiens has already acquired almost cultic status among diverse audiences, captivating teenagers as well as university professors, animal rights activists alongside government ministers. It is currently being translated into close to thirty languages.

Some of the questions here are thought-provoking.

Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so’, by Andrew Anthony (The Guardian)

The visionary historian, author of two dazzling bestsellers on the state of mankind, takes questions from Lucy Prebble, Arianna Huffington, Esther Rantzen and a selection of our readers

Last week, on his Radio 2 breakfast show, Chris Evans read out the first page of Sapiens, the book by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Given that radio audiences at that time in the morning are not known for their appetite for intellectual engagement – the previous segment had dealt with Gary Barlow’s new tour – it was an unusual gesture. But as Evans said, “the first page is the most stunning first page of any book”.

If DJs are prone to mindless hyperbole, this was an honourable exception. The subtitle of Sapiens, in an echo of Stephen Hawking’s great work, is A Brief History of Humankind. In grippingly lucid prose, Harari sets out on that first page a condensed history of the universe, followed by a summary of the book’s thesis: how the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution and the scientific revolution have affected humans and their fellow organisms.

It is a dazzlingly bold introduction, which the remainder of the book lives up to on almost every page. Although Sapiens has been widely and loudly praised, some critics have suggested that it is too sweeping. Perhaps, but it is an intellectual joy to be swept along.

In closing, a review that explores "deep history" more ... well, deeply.

70,000 Years of Human History in 400 Pages, by Michael Saler (The Nation)

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and the rise of Deep History

... But those who dismiss Sapiens as just another installment of “History for Dummies” would be mistaken. Harari’s synthesis is hard-won: He has read widely, even if his citations don’t always reveal this, and his occasional glibness is a calculated strategy. Many of his grand pronouncements are followed by some reassuring version of “In fact, things were never quite that simple.” He intends to entertain, while posing serious questions worth entertaining. Sapiens will fascinate teenagers and adults alike, and it may be one of the few nonfiction books to have the crossover appeal of much of today’s “YA” fiction. (There is plenty of adolescent humor: Harari illustrates a point about how culture can trump biology by captioning a picture of Pope Francis, “The Catholic alpha male abstains from sexual intercourse and raising a family, even though there is no genetic or ecological reason for him to do so.”)

On language, it's Wolfe versus Chomsky and Darwin. Pass the popcorn, and perhaps a martini.

Evolution, or Elton John?

Has Donald Trump taken a position? What about Jeff Gahan?

Bonfire of the theories: Wolfe battles Chomsky over roots of language, by Edward Helmore (The Guardian)

The arcane study of language has a new literary entrant: the famed New Journalism author Tom Wolfe. Never one to back away from a fight, Wolfe, 85, has picked two disputes in his new book, The Kingdom of Speech – one with Charles Darwin and a second with linguist Noam Chomsky, 87, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

... “The more I thought about it, the less Darwin’s doctrine held, up in my opinion,” he said. Evolutionary development of Homo sapiens, in particular, “drifts into periods where there is no evidence”. Those doubts segued into doubts about the origin of language – man’s singular gift – that he believes was not the product of evolution but a man-made tool.

“My contention is that language is not the result of evolution but essentially a verbal trick that was invented by human beings. It’s a memory aid – a mnemonic – that enables human beings to store away a piece of information and compare it to a new piece of information and draw conclusions.” No other species has a similar ability, making it the secret of our dominance as a species and Wolfe writes: “Humans are pretty pathetic physically. If you weigh 150 pounds and you come up against a 150-pound butterfly in battle, you’re done for. It must be 10 feet tall. But, with planning, humans control every animal on Earth. We’re very generous – we even create animal preserves where wild animals can live. But, oh boy, if they cross the line of the reserve, they’re done for.”

Wolfe then moves on to Chomsky ...

Cats keep rodents in check -- well, except for this one.

And then there were two.

Since 20011, the oldest and youngest house cats have departed for that great litter box in the sky, leaving Hugo (below; the No Tolls Kitty) and Nadia (above). At roughly 12 and 11 years of age, respectively, they've both raced past me, into their sixties. Nadia is noticeable graying. As the missus often has pointed out, it's gratifying to share in their life spans; both were rescued at a tender age, and they're part of the family.

The article here resonates because of its reference to evolution in the form of reward for feline work performed v.v. rodents. In all the time Nadia's been with us, she's managed to kill exactly one mouse. In fairness, we haven't had many mice over the years, but lately, she's been particularly inept. She seems to be playing with the mouse, not making a sincere effort to dispatch it.

We've concluded that the one and only successful kill was no kill at all. It must have been accidental homicide.

Why cats never became man’s best friend, by Gwynn Guilford (Quartz)

Dog lovers will find it baffling that cats are the world’s most popular pet. After all, they’re passive-aggressive, emotionally unavailable, and known for their chilly independence—traits that at most qualify felines for the role of “man’s best frenemy.”

It turns out, though, there’s an evolutionary reason for this tense relationship. That is, cats are in many ways still wild.

“Cats, unlike dogs, are really only semi-domesticated,” says Wes Warren, professor of genetics Washington University and co-author of the first complete mapping (paywall) of the house cat genome—specifically, that of an Abyssinian named Cinnamon.

Comparing the DNA differences between house cats and wild cats, Warren and his colleagues found that where the genes of domesticated kitties and wild cats diverge has to do with fur patterns, grace, and docility. The latter are the genes that influence behaviors such as reward-seeking and response to fear.

The divergence likely began some 9,000 years ago, after humans had made the shift to agriculture. Drawn to the teeming rodent populations that gathered during grain harvests, wild cats began interacting with humans. And because cats kept rodents in check, the researchers hypothesize, humans likely encouraged them to stay by offering them food scraps as a reward. These early farmers eventually kept cats that stuck around.

“Selection for docility, as a result of becoming accustomed to humans for food rewards,” write the researchers, “was most likely the major force that altered the first domesticated cat genomes.” In other words, the ones that stuck around were the cats with those genes that encouraged interaction with humans, thereby making those traits prevalent in what became the global domestic cat population.
As intriguing, though, is what didn’t change in human-friendly cats during those nine millennia. House cats still have the broadest hearing range among carnivores, which allows them to detect their prey’s movement. They also retain their night-vision abilities and the ability to digest high-protein, high-fat diets. This implies that, unlike those of dogs, their genes haven’t evolved to make cats dependent on humans for food.
This indicates only a modest influence of domestication on cat genes, compared with dogs, say the researchers. In fact, according to recent research on canine genomes, dogs became man’s best friend back when humans were still hunting and gathering—between 11,000 and 16,000 years ago. Their typically more omnivorous diets evolved as human lifestyle shifted toward agrarian living.
So why have kitties stayed wilder? The genome-mappers theorize it’s because house cat populations have continued to interbreed with wild cats. Also, humans’ “cat fancy”—meaning, our fanaticism about creating weird cat breeds—only began in the last 200 or so years.
They came for the mice, stayed for the food scraps, and whenever it suited, kept cuddly with the cats from the other side of the granary. In other words, not only are cats still mostly wild, but they pretty much tamed themselves. Maybe that means humans are “cats’ best friend.”

Harvest Homecoming is back. Will it ever evolve of its own accord?

Some of these thoughts were first published here on September 24, 2012. Updates have been made. On Sunday, there was a good Facebook discussion of these issues.

My personal position on Harvest Homecoming has remained fairly consistent, and so at the risk of offending the swill walk’s perennial night crawlers, let’s recap the argument.

First and foremost, no offense is intended toward Harvest Homecoming’s many volunteers. They're lifers. They believe. They work hard year-round, and their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable. None of us want Harvest Homecoming to disappear. We merely want it to begin marching in step with changing times, so as to better incorporate today's evolving New Albany into the festival's design.

Fact: Harvest Homecoming has gone as far as it possibly can while retaining an operational model built for the 1970s and 80’s, when downtown was utterly deserted and no one much cared either way. Back then, downtown was withering, but now it is returning to life -- entrepreneurs are doing something with it -- and the yearly clash of demographic priorities can only become more starkly evident as years pass. This will become even more of a problem as downtown apartments and condos come into existence and are occupied by residents expecting a certain ... that's right: Quality of life.

Today’s Harvest Homecoming must be persuaded, cajoled, prodded and/or threatened into commencing a reinvention of itself and a subsequent evolution into the sort of annual civic event better representing where and what the city is now, and in conceptual terms, a civic event that both passively mirrors and actively enhances the ongoing revitalization of downtown New Albany. Currently, it does neither.

A Facebook discussion participant explained it very clearly.

I grew up in California, so I speak as one who attended a lot of wine and art events. I think it might be time for our HHC officials to look around the United States and see what works as far as festivals. HHC is a good event, but I think it could be a signature event which combines the old with the new. I also think the art at this festival should be of high quality invited artists rather than the mundane. We should be celebrating all that is the best quality in Southern Indiana rather than settling for vendors who specialize in merchandise that is there for the short sale. I would not even mind high quality food coming over from Kentucky or even Ohio, if it improved the quality of our lives. We excel at beer, goat cheese and new restaurants. It seems to me we should be reveling in it.

The festival no longer should be permitted to be the short-term tail wagging an entire city’s 7/24/365 dog by advocating restrictive terms of downtown engagement, and in pursuing a plan of operation that routinely scuffles downtown’s fragile seedlings, whether planted in the dirt, or located behind those previously unoccupied storefronts.

Yes, it is true that progress has been made on this score, but not quickly enough. For so long as those downtown businesses located on Harvest Homecoming’s core street grid – businesses investing in the city and operating in the city year-round – must continue to fight for the simple right to have access to their own front doors during the festival’s booth days, and furthermore, be compelled to pay Harvest Homecoming a rental fee for a clear pathway to their own place of business, then something’s still awry in Come Pay City.

This begs the first of many questions, as hinted at yesterday:

How can the Board of Public Works countenance this pay-to-stay-open scheme?

Which precedent allows a four-day-yearly festival unattached to the city to charge for frontage on the city’s own streets and sidewalks?

Aren’t these businesses already paying taxes for this access?

Has anyone ever thought to ask them other stakeholders if they'd like to play, too?

More thoughts tomorrow.

Stop the presses: Pat Robertson enticingly close to reasonable in rejecting Ken Ham's 6,000-year-old planet.

There's something almost epochal about Robertson, who has been batshit goofy in so many bizarre pronouncements for so very long, waxing quite near coherence on the topic of dinosaur bones and rock formations.

Of course, it all remains rooted in the doctrine of necessary mover, linked by theists with unverifiable notions of a supreme being. At least Robertson accepts scientific tenets of evolution. The net effect is to render Ken Ham and his drone followers more laughable than before ... and how is that possible?

Pat Robertson implores creationist Ken Ham to shut up: ‘Let’s not make a joke of ourselves’, by Scott Kaufman (The Raw Story)

Pat Robertson responded to the recent debate between Young Earth creationist Ken Ham and Bill Nye, a.k.a. “The Science Guy,” by reiterating his disagreement with Ham’s form of creationism.

“Let’s face it,” Robertson said, “there was a Bishop [Ussher] who added up the dates listed in Genesis and he came up with the world had been around for 6,000 years.”

“There ain’t no way that’s possible,” he continued. “To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible.”

Creationism, its museum, and Idiot America.

You may have heard the news.

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” will debate founder of Creation Museum in Kentucky, by Irving DeJohn (New York Daily News)

Nye will argue merits of evolution with Ken Ham, museum’s founder. Ham argued once in a YouTube video that Nye ‘really doesn’t understand science.’

Coincidentally, many thanks to my pen pal DE, who has chimed in at precisely the right moment with a link to a snippet from the righteous and inimitable Charles P. Pierce's book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

I've discovered a book which purports to define the American mind (there's only one?) or mindset, whatever.

In this excerpt, a visit to the Creation Museum is described.

These were impolite questions. Nobody asked them here by the cool pond tucked into the gentle hillside. Increasingly, amazingly, nobody asked them outside the gates, either. It was impolite to wonder why our parents had sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants had sweated and bled so that their children could be educated, if not so that one day we would feel confident enough to look at a museum full of dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Aqueduct and make the not unreasonable point that it was batshit crazy, and that anyone who believed this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and their own money. Instead, people go to court over this kind of thing.

Harvest Homecoming 2013, Part One: More evolution, less fear.

These thoughts were first published here on September 24, 2012. See also: A message to Harvest Homecoming food vendors ... and your PourGate update for Monday, September 30.

My personal position on Harvest Homecoming has remained fairly consistent, and so at the risk of offending the swill walk’s perennial night crawlers, let’s recap the argument.

First and foremost, no offense is intended toward Harvest Homecoming’s many volunteers. They're lifers. They believe. They work hard year-round, and their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable.

None of us want Harvest Homecoming to go entirely away. We merely want it to begin marching in step with the times, so as to better incorporate today's changing New Albany into their plan.

Harvest Homecoming has gone as far as it can go by retaining an operational model built for the 1980’s, when downtown was utterly deserted, and no one much cared either way. Back then, downtown wasn’t being used, but now it is, and the yearly clash of demographic priorities can only become more starkly evident as years pass.

Today’s Harvest Homecoming must be persuaded, cajoled, prodded and/or threatened into commencing a reinvention of itself and a subsequent evolution into the sort of annual civic event better representing where and what the city is now, and in conceptual terms, a civic event that both passively mirrors and actively enhances the ongoing revitalization of downtown New Albany. Currently, it does neither.

The festival no longer should be permitted to be the short-term tail wagging an entire city’s 7/24/365 dog by advocating restrictive terms of downtown engagement, and in pursuing a plan of operation that routinely scuffles downtown’s fragile seedlings, whether planted in the dirt, or located behind those previously unoccupied storefronts.

Yes, it is true that progress has been made on this score, but not quickly enough. For so long as those downtown businesses located on Harvest Homecoming’s core street grid – businesses investing in the city and operating in the city year-round – must continue to fight for the simple right to have access to their own front doors during the festival’s booth days, and furthermore, be compelled to pay Harvest Homecoming a rental fee for a clear pathway to their own place of business, then something’s still awry in Come Pay City.

This begs the first of many questions, as hinted at yesterday:

How can the Board of Public Works countenance this pay-to-stay-open scheme?

Which precedent allows a four-day-yearly festival unattached to the city to charge for frontage on the city’s own streets and sidewalks?

Aren’t these businesses already paying taxes for this access?

And so on. More thoughts tomorrow.

2 - More bad news for New Albany's troglodytes: You're not getting any brighter.

Mitt Romney's 14 percentage point margin of victory in Floyd County indicates that the southward slide (how's THAT for appropriate imagery) is devolving more quickly here. Note that our neighbors to the west, Perry County, went for Barack Obama by 12 points. Note also the conclusion: Education makes the inexorable plunge more tolerable. Someone best send a memo to Tony Bennett, who is about to leave his heart in Indianapolis.

Is pampered humanity getting steadily less intelligent? Humans reached a peak of intelligence more than 2,000 years ago and it's been downhill ever since, a scientist speculates, by Ian Sample, science correspondent at The Guardian

Since modern humans emerged from the evolutionary brambles of our ancient ancestry, our bodies and minds have been transforming under the pressures of natural and sexual selection. But what of human intelligence? Has our cognitive ability risen steadily since our forebears knapped the first stone tools? Or are our smartest days behind us?

Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford University in California, bets on the latter. He believes that if an average Greek from 1,000 BC were transported to modern times, he or she would be one of the brightest among us. Our intellectual prowess has probably been sliding south since the invention of farming and the rise of high-density living that it allowed, he claims.

Harvest Homecoming: Do the evolution, don't fear the competition.

My personal position on Harvest Homecoming has remained fairly consistent, and so at the risk of offending the swill walk’s perennial night crawlers, let’s recap the argument.

First and foremost, no offense is intended toward Harvest Homecoming’s many volunteers. They're lifers. They believe. They work hard year-round, and their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable.

None of us want Harvest Homecoming to go away. We merely want it to begin marching in step with the times, so as to better incorporate today's changing New Albany into their plan.

Harvest Homecoming has gone as far as it can go by retaining an operational model built for the 1980’s, when downtown was utterly deserted, and no one much cared either way. Back then, downtown wasn’t being used, but now it is, and the yearly clash of demographic priorities can only become more starkly evident as years pass.

Today’s Harvest Homecoming must be persuaded, cajoled, prodded and/or threatened into commencing a reinvention of itself and a subsequent evolution into the sort of annual civic event better representing where and what the city is now, and in conceptual terms, a civic event that both passively mirrors and actively enhances the ongoing revitalization of downtown New Albany. Currently, it does neither.

The festival no longer should be permitted to be the short-term tail wagging an entire city’s 7/24/365 dog by advocating restrictive terms of downtown engagement, and in pursuing a plan of operation that routinely scuffles downtown’s  fragile seedlings, whether planted in the dirt, or located behind those previously unoccupied storefronts.

Yes, it is true that progress has been made on this score, but not quickly enough. For so long as those downtown businesses located on Harvest Homecoming’s core street grid – businesses investing in the city and operating in the city year-round – must continue to fight for the simple right to have access to their own front doors during the festival’s booth days, and furthermore, be compelled to pay Harvest Homecoming a rental fee for a clear pathway to their own place of business, then something’s still awry in Come Pay City.

This begs the first of many questions:

How can the Board of Public Works countenance this pay-to-stay-open scheme?

Which precedent allows a four-day-yearly festival unattached to the city to charge for frontage on the city’s own streets and sidewalks?

Aren’t these businesses already paying taxes for this access?

And so on.

Readers, please think about these and other issues, and I’ll be back at various points this week to expand upon the conversation, and to ask other questions, like this one:

When Wick’s Pizza, a full-time, year-round centerpiece of downtown business, asks to be allowed to assume all the expense, risk and liability entailed by the operation of a temporary beer garden during Harvest Homecoming, and with a proportion of its profits (if any) being earmarked for a very good cause, then how can it interfere with Harvest Homecoming ... and why is the Wick's offer being rejected?

Bill Nye: "We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future."

Bill Nye offers the perfect antidote to the pervasive superstition and sheer doltery parading sans intellectual clothing in Tampa.

Bill Nye Isn't Dead, He's Gone Viral (bigthink.com)

In the video, Nye says that while everybody is entitled to his/her own opinion, creationism is unequivocally wrong, and that people who still believe it -- or more importantly, insist it is taught to their children -- hold society back for everybody. Nye argues we need a scientifically literate and educated population.

In his words: "I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems."

"The Future of Manufacturing Is Local."

Encouraging stuff from a week or so ago in The Future of Manufacturing Is Local, by Allison Arieff, from the Opinionator (New York Times).

“Manufacturing isn’t dead and doesn’t need to be preserved,” (Kate Sofis) says. “Let’s stop fixating on what’s lost. Let’s see what we have here, what’s doing well, and let’s help those folks do better.”

Manfacturing evolution ... what a concept.

As Mark Dwight, who started SFMade in 2010, explains, “For decades we have developed a culture of disposability — from consumer goods to medical instruments and machine tools. To fuel economic growth, marketers replaced longevity with planned obsolescence — and our mastery of technology has given birth to ever-accelerating unplanned obsolescence. I think there is increasing awareness that this is no longer sustainable on the scale we have developed.”

Nutjobbery off the legislative agenda in Kentucky, at least for now.

Thanks to the Louisville Area Skeptics for this timely notice.

Antievolution bill in Kentucky dies, from the web site of the National Center for Science Education.

When the Kentucky legislature adjourned sine die on April 15, 2010, House Bill 397, the Kentucky Science Education and Intellectual Freedom Act, died in committee.