Sunday School JUN 24, 2012
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This week on Think Atheist Radio we have our interview with Dr. Bruce M. Hood. Dr. Hood is a Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society at the UK's University of Bristol and is the Director of that institution's Bristol Cognitive Development Centre. Born in Canada, his undergraduate work was in Psychology at the University of Dundee in Scotland from which he received both a Master of Arts and a Master of Philosophy. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1991, researching the development of the infant visual perception system. Before teaching at Bristol he held a visiting professorship at MIT and an associate professorship at Harvard. Among his recognitions Dr. 
Hood has been elected to fellow status of the American Psychological Association and he had the honor in 2011 of delivering the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture. His research interests include cognitive development from a neuroscience perspective and the origin of adult magical reasoning from children's natural intuitions. Previously the author of the excellent Supersense: Why We Believe The Unbelievable, we asked Dr. Hood to speak to us about his recently released book, The Self Illusion: How The Social Brain Creates Identity. He talked to us about the self, consciousness, memory, perception, cognitive biases, free will, and more. It's a fascinating conversation, the topic of which is ably, clearly, and compellingly discussed in this great new book.
Just a reminder that we're eagerly after your experiences with cancer– are you or a loved one fighting now? have you lost someone? are you or a loved one a survivor?– for our marathon charity drive later this year. We hope to have a selection of your experiences to read on the air. Our goal in this, as I've said, is to keep the focus on the real people's lives that have been impacted as there's a tendency to look on the goal of finding a cure for cancer as a sterile clinical problem for researchers in a laboratory. Help us please guys. Help us fight!
Earlier this year Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune memorialized "facts" upon what he believed was their death. Mike LaBossiere writes to ask if facts are really dead or if there's something else going on.
As America grows more polarized, conservatives increasingly reject science and rational thought.
Nevada Republicans have a strange notion of family values. 66% agree that brothels should be legal. But only 20% are in favor of gay marriage.
Turns out there's an unknown number of women who may perceive millions more colors than the rest of us.
Blogger Leah Libresco announced that she's gone and walked away from reality and adopted Catholicism. Adam Lee at Daylight Atheism has some questions. Christopher at TPA examined Libresco's argument and just can't even believe that this is what motivated her decision.
The "millennials" are certainly America's secular future.
The science behind how magicians trick us is instructive if what you want to do is think more rigorously and more clearly.
State funds in Louisiana are going to to a voucher program that sends kids to religious schools. But what are those kids actually learning? Have a look at what's in the textbooks in use there. PZ Myers provides a quick rundown of the outrageous claims to be found in these books.
A new study finds that kids raised by lesbian parents are unaffected by the lack of male i....
Lifehacker offered these tips on how to determine if a claim is likely to be scientifically ....
This is hilarious. Someone made this site that takes actual words from woo-meister Deepak Chopra's Twitter feed and puts them together in random combinations to generate completely stupid nonsensical statements that are indistinguishable from Chopra's actual statements.
A new method should allow us to see even further back to the earliest moments of our universe.
Rumors are that the Higgs may have been found. But some aren't pleased with the rumors. Whatever it is that's going on at CERN, they're announcing something on July 4th.
Maggie Koerth-Baker posted this incredibly brave and powerful piece about her decision whether to have an abortion.
Recently an advocacy organization released a list of the fruits and vegetables with the greatest amount of pesticides residue. But what does that mean? And should we care? Turns out. Not much. And, not really all that much.
Donations to religious organizations down again, even as donations in general creep up as the economy improves.
Science literacy is not what scientists think it is.
The numbers of nonreligious around the world continue to grow. That growth is reflected this time in new census data that show that the nonreligious now outnumber Anglicans in Australia for the first time.
Do mountains have a microbial origin? Turns out. A bit. Yeah. Cool.
The numbers of nonreligious continue to grow, yes, but atheists are still the most unelectable group in the US. (Though for the first time more than 50% would elect an atheist.)
Romney is still a Mormon. And there's still no one asking him about his support for a religion that included and includes fundamentally... regarding black people and Native Americans.
Another accomodationist refuses to acknowledge religion as the cause of cre....
A psychic has been accused of exploitation.
Jerry Coyne has decided to read the Bible and is finding it boring and insipid.
A newly discovered pair of exoplanets defies theories of planet formation in their weirdness.
Why won't the IRS crack down on churches that endorse political candidates in violation of the law?
In a first in the US, a Roman Catholic official has been convicted of child endangerment for his role in moving around known abusing priests to different parishes and concealing the reasons for the moves.
Is God's mercy to blame for crime?
What is wrong with our education system when half the country doesn't accept the evidence for evolution?
Do the religious give more to charity? What kind of charities? And what motivates their donation?
Last week I linked a new study that showed that smarter people are actually more susceptible to cognitive biases than less intelligent. This week saw some criticism of that study. Is the conclusion actually merited?
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Comment by Mabel on June 24, 2012 at 7:35am -
I couldn't get dropbox to download. Sorry.
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Comment by Reg The Fronkey Farmer on June 24, 2012 at 7:40am -
On the Leah Libresco “scandal”: All these “I am a former Atheist” stories are the same. I tend to dismiss them out of hand as they all offer piss weak reasons without any evidence for their conversions. However I must give credit to the Teapot Atheist who has done an excellent job on dismantling her story. She is nothing more than a storm in a …erm ..teacup! The paragraph about why moral claims need a god to become objective is well phrased to reuse in any future debates with theists.
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Comment by Gary Bergeron on June 24, 2012 at 8:39am -
Regarding the article, "State funds in Louisiana are going to to a voucher program that sends kids to religious schools.": The local papers are listing the religious schools signing up for this program as front page news, but not all is cozy for Gov. Jindal.
A group of teachers has issued a recall and are gathering signatures. www.recallbobbyjindal.com
Before the vouchers plan was passed, educators were barred from the committees, actually were blocked from entering the building where the committees were being held. Now, they're really pissed and I can't wait to put my signature bodly on the recall form.
If this sick system of education is allowed to endure, out new tourism slogan will be: Hey! Come on over to Louisiana! Take a trip back to the 13th century! Ride a dinosaur with Jesus, the pope and Bobby Jindal!
I'm so ashamed to be a Louisianian....
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Comment by Alejandro M on June 24, 2012 at 11:45am -
Er... on the "study confirms children raised by same-sex parents are as well-adjusted as children of male-female parents" bit, the "study" in question only had N=78. Meaning it's not statistically significant in any shape, way or form. I would.like to see a study with at least 600 children (300 for each type of child) to ensure the premise is valid. Despite being in favour of same-sex unions, I have my questions on this point, and a non-statistical study will not suffice to put them to bed.
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Comment by Nelson on June 24, 2012 at 11:59am -
Alejandro, there are any number of other studies bolstering this result. Children raised in same sex households experience no ill effects. It's not an open question. If this result existed all on its own then you might have something there. But it doesn't. Indeed, at least one study found that children raised in lesbian households even do better than children raised in heterosexual households on some measures.
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Comment by Cesar Deicide on June 24, 2012 at 1:27pm -
Nelson, have you tried using ubuntu one? It provides 5GB of free storage to start, you can also get a great Server OS for free.
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Comment by Nelson on June 24, 2012 at 6:53pm
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Hey Shay, the "Standard Model" is the working understanding of particle physics. It's a model that has been confirmed to fit with observation and experiment again and again so we think it reflects reality pretty well. Well. The "Higgs boson", as it's called (or simply "the Higgs"), is the last particle theorized to exist under the Standard Model. It is theorized to be what gives matter its mass.
It is at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (abbreviated as CERN owing to its actual name which is French: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) that, because of the huge energy of the collisions between particles produced at the facility, that we would see evidence of the Higgs. The recent rumors are that we have indeed found the particle but, they are just rumors at this point.Hope that helps!
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Comment by Karen Lollis on June 25, 2012 at 12:27am -
Aarrgh. That bit about Louisiana textbooks? I had to pour myself another vodka tonic to get through that.
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Comment by Karen Lollis on June 25, 2012 at 12:51am
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@Shay - when it comes to the Higgs Boson, there's no such thing a stupid question. I took physics in high school and college. And for the last 3 or 4 years, I've been on a physics kick - reading anything I can find that's written for us regular folk on astro- and particle-physics. And it's still kinda just magic to me.
To add to what @Nelson said about the Higgs boson being the thing that gives other things mass. Gravity was one of those things I thought we had pretty well figured out. Turns out, we've got a decent handle on how to calculate gravitational effects, but we're still figuring out what causes the gravitational pull. We know it has to do with the mass of the objects. But objects don't actually have mass. It turns out mass is a charge - something that can be imparted to the other particles, presumably by the Higgs field. Think of electro-magnetism, and how a magnet can pull on certain objects that have the right electro-magnetic properties. Gravity is a whole lot weaker, but kind of works sort of like that, in a way.
Well, that probably didn't help at all. And I'm sure there are people who will (please!) tell me what I got wrong.
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Comment by Reg The Fronkey Farmer on June 25, 2012 at 3:55pm
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A little more on Higgs
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