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In the comments to Pro-choice and pregnant, Robert said

Oh, and congratulations on the baby. I’m glad you’ve decided not to kill it.

Ignoring for the moment the question of whether that was intended as deliberate provocation, I wanted to address the question of whether it’s even accurate. I’m not sure it is.

“Decided not to…” implies that the possibility has been given some consideration, however fleeting; I might say, for example, “I thought about buying the Kaiser Chiefs album but decided not to.” If the option hasn’t been consciously considered and rejected, it doesn’t really make sense to imply a decision has been made. I wouldn’t say that I’ve decided not to move to Milton Keynes, become a chartered accountant or take up underwater basketweaving, and nor would I say that I’ve decided not to terminate this pregnancy.

Before I became pregnant, I spent a long time considering the possibility of having a baby. I passionately wanted a family, and although I don’t believe there’s anything special about biological, as opposed to adoptive, parenthood, I decided the simplest way to have a baby of my own was to give birth to one. So to say that I “decided not to adopt” is completely reasonable: I considered the possibility and rejected it.

The decision to become pregnant was less positive: the timing never seemed to be quite right and I wasn’t sure I had the right to inflict myself on a child. I hesitated, and circumstances came together to help me decide. I had the opportunity to have unprotected sex at the appropriate time of the month. I took it, and three nervous weeks later a blood test confirmed my pregnancy.

Abortion never entered my mind as a possibility. Pregnancy was something I’ve longed for, hoped for and occasionally put myself at risk in search of for most of my adult life. Now that I finally have what I always wanted, why should I consider throwing it away? If the pregnancy had been especially difficult or scans had revealed a problem with the fetus, I might have had to examine the option, but so far everything has gone smoothly and I’ve had no reason to consider abortion.

So why does Robert think I “decided not to kill” my baby? Does he believe that every woman, pro-life or pro-choice, who sees a pregnancy through to the end has decided not to have an abortion? If it’s unreasonable to say that a woman at the farthest extreme of “fetuses are people too” pro-life philosophy has decided not to kill her baby, what makes it more reasonable to say it about someone who made a deliberate choice to become pregnant but respects the choice of other women to avoid pregnancy?

There’s another distinction to be made here, as important as the one between a wanted and an unwanted fetus: the distinction between wanting to do something yourself and supporting the right of others to do it. I am pro-SSM, but I wouldn’t even consider marrying a woman. I believe in free speech, even speech that I personally consider repugnant. And I am pro-choice, despite the fact that my choice was made long ago.

Why do I support a right I have zero desire to exercise for myself? All sorts of reasons. People I care about may well make a different choice, and I want it to be open to them if they need it. I don’t want to live in the kind of world where women can be forced to sustain a pregnancy against their will to satisfy someone else’s idea of morality. I want the world to know that I’m having this baby because I deeply and passionately want it, not because I couldn’t get rid of it.

Being pro-choice doesn’t mean you think abortion is wonderful. It doesn’t mean that when the doctor’s receptionist confirms a very much wanted pregnancy you immediately think “of course, I could always have an abortion”. It simply means you believe the decision whether to become pregnant or the decision whether to continue with a pregnancy is the woman’s to make as she sees fit.

• Hermit shells face a housing shortage. A proposed solution: artificial shells for Hermit crabs. I can’t decide if this is parody or not. Via Majikthise.
• Excellent letter to Paul Krugman regarding his recent anti-fat editorial. Via Big Fat Blog.
• Federal Immigration Officers think up a policy guaranteed to kill immigrants - a sting operation disguised as an OSHA (occupational safety and health administration) meeting, putting the lie to decades of effort by OSHA to convince illegal immigrants that they can talk to OSHA without fear. These racist, evil fucks deserve to be shot - no, to be buried alive in an industrial accident - but since the Bush administration is in charge, probably they’ll be given raises.
• Reseach study ironically shows that one-third of all research studies are wrong.
• “I understand that you’re upset,” one officer said, “but there’s no ramp, so you shouldn’t be in here, and the restaurant has the right not to serve you.”
• Often, the self-proclaimed nice guy wants special credit for just for being nice. It’s as if he wants you to exclaim, “Oh, you poor fellow. What a burden it must be to treat women as you’d like to be treated. Above and beyond, old chap. Above and beyond!” I’m all for niceness, but I consider it a basic moral requirement for all humans, not a special bonus feature.
• A propos of yesterday’s female genital mutilation vs. plastic surgery thread, I bring you, courtesy of Knotted Knickers, the jaw-droppingly sadistic Designer Laser Vaginoplasty. I invite you to scrutinize the countenance of the gynecologist/pyschopath who performs these mutilations, and ask yourself, “is this the face of a man who should be anywhere near my pussy with a laser?”
• I remember being young and naive and truly shocked at how girls who were just harassing me with a tenacity that would get them promoted in the SS could turn around and demure and flutter around popular boys like they were born to toady. And you find yourself thinking, “Man, if those guys only knew…” And from that moment, you can see how sexism perpetuates itself. Because if the boys didn’t know consciously, they knew subconsciously. Girls who show immense ruthlessness and power to the nerds and geeks and then toady to the jocks are reinforcing the power of the jocks. That they can expect their lessers to enforce the status quo for them is the jock privilege.
• Should a temporary majority of 50.7 percent have control over the entire United States government? Should 49.3 percent of Americans have no influence over the nation’s trajectory for the next generation? Those are the stakes in the coming fight over the next Supreme Court justice. The much-maligned “outside groups” preparing for battle over President Bush’s choice deserve credit for openly acknowledging this struggle for power.
• The trouble with being stuck with the whole “women want to be equal” instead of “let’s revolutionize this society so it’s better for everybody,” is that you get stuck, again, with “male” being the norm. So instead of revolutionizing the workplace so we’ve got onsite childcare, or better, can have kids hanging out acting as interns at the workplace and functioning as members of society instead of subordinates, we just figure, hey, the parents will work and just hire somebody to take care of the kid, like a wife.
• In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays.

In The American Conservative, a former Bush speechwriter, Matthew Scully, argues that animal rights - and, in particular, fighting the modern, super-cruel factory farms - should be a conservative cause.

I just used the phrase “animal rights,” but that’s actually a phrase Scully would have problems with. He argues that the left is mistaken to put the issue in terms of animal “rights”; instead, he argues, the issue should be seen in terms of human obligations to animals, without getting mired down in a discussion of rights.

…We are told to look away and think about more serious things. Human beings simply have far bigger problems to worry about than the well being of farm animals, and surely all of this zeal would be better directed at causes of human welfare.

You wouldn’t think that men who are unwilling to grant even a few extra inches in cage space, so that a pig can turn around, would be in any position to fault others for pettiness. Why are small acts of kindness beneath us, but not small acts of cruelty? The larger problem with this appeal to moral priority, however, is that we are dealing with suffering that occurs through human agency. Whether it’s miserliness here, carelessness there, or greed throughout, the result is rank cruelty for which particular people must answer.

Since refraining from cruelty is an obligation of justice, moreover, there is no avoiding the implications. All the goods invoked in defense of factory farming, from the efficiency and higher profits of the system to the lower costs of the products, are false goods unjustly derived. No matter what right and praiseworthy things we are doing elsewhere in life, when we live off a cruel and disgraceful thing like factory farming, we are to that extent living unjustly, and that is hardly a trivial problem. […]

I have to admit that my reflexive reaction to this is to say “forget it, Conservatives would never, ever, ever endorse fighting cruelty if that meant going against the interests of profit.” Indeed, the author himself pegs this response, although he says it’s an unfair stereotype:

I am asked sometimes how a conservative could possibly care about animal suffering in factory farms, but the question is premised on a liberal caricature of conservatism…the assumption that, for all of our fine talk about moral values, “compassionate conservatism” and the like, everything we really care about can be counted in dollars. In the case of factory farming, and the conservative’s blithe tolerance of it, the caricature is too close to the truth.

He proposes new federal laws mandating decent treatment of animals in factory farms:

We need our conservative values voters to get behind a Humane Farming Act so that we can all quit averting our eyes. This reform, a set of explicit federal cruelty statutes with enforcement funding to back it up, would leave us with farms we could imagine without wincing, photograph without prosecution, and explain without excuses.

The law would uphold not only the elementary standards of animal husbandry but also of veterinary ethics, following no more complicated a principle than that pigs and cows should be able to walk and turn around, fowl to move about and spread their wings, and all creatures to know the feel of soil and grass and the warmth of the sun. No need for labels saying “free-range” or “humanely raised.” They will all be raised that way. They all get to be treated like animals and not as unfeeling machines.

This is an issue in which both Democrats and Republicans, like the larger society, have favored averting eyes rather than addressing the issues.

I’d certainly favor the law Scully suggests - but how many politicians, of either party, would? This law would almost certainly piss off voters suddenly facing a huge inflation in meat prices, and pissing off voters isn’t how successful politicians usually operate. (Full disclosure: I eat cheap meat from supermarkets. But I’d gladly pay more for meat, if in return I got assurance that the meat industry as a whole was being reformed as Scully suggests.)

I also wonder how much traction his arguments will find among libertarian conservatives. A new federal law, and using the government to tell farmers how to run their own farms, seems to me exactly the sort of thing that pisses off a significant portion of the conservative base.

I think that Scully is right to make it clear that factory farming is a justice issue. But there’s a curious lack in his article, as well; a text search shows that the word “capitalism” doesn’t appear once in the article. Neither does the word “market.” What’s driving factory farms isn’t the inherently cruel nature of some humans (although you might think so, reading Scully’s account). What’s driving factory farms is the free market; and his unwillingness to address this obvious fact is part of what makes Scully’s argument so “conservative.”

Nonetheless, I hope his approach is more successful than PETA’s has been.

Via Ambivablog.

UPDATE JULY 13, 2005:

While it’s unclear whether this means another vacancy will occur in the Supreme Court, it’s evident that Rehnquist’s days are numbered, at least with regards to his service. This comes as a frightening, while not unexpected blow to liberals around the country.

For obvious reasons, a concurrent vacancy with O’Connor’s is filled with concern and ‘what if’s with regards to the appointments that are to take place. News has been released that late last night Rehnquist was rushed to the hospital for a spiked fever, likely relating to the thyroid cancer.

July 13 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who is fighting thyroid cancer, was admitted to the hospital last night with a fever, the Supreme Court said.

Rehnquist, 80, was taken by ambulance for observation and tests to Arlington Hospital in Virginia and remains there today, court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said.

In another blog article earlier this month I created a liberal ‘cheat sheet’ for the potential nominee’s. This news has come along with more SCOTUS nominee gossip that First Lady Laura Bush has been urging the president to consider another female nominee since they are confident of their hispanic base. The name bandied about is Judge Edith Brown Clement of the 5th Circuit Court. This particular bit of SCOTUS gossip also implies that Alberto Gonzales is not in the running.

It is unclear how seriously the president ever regarded Gonzales as a potential court choice or if he was steered away from Gonzales at the urging of conservatives who want Bush to move the court to the right in its judicial philosophy.

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As you may recall, this cartoon was written with considerable help from “Alas” readers. I originally had nine lines written and was hoping to get “Alas” readers to help me out with the last one; but your suggestions were so good, I ended up using only five lines of my own.

I apologize for not crediting folks whose lines I used; to tell you the truth, I was so tired by the time I finished drawing this, I couldn’t even concieve of trying to go through all the posts to try and figure out who wrote which line. So I just sent it out without any credit at all, not even my usual credit line.

But now I’m more awake. So: Thanks to everyone who contributed a line, whether or not I used it. And thanks in particular to the folks who wrote the five lines I used: Thank you, Yami. Thank you, Richard Bellamy. Thank you, Omegapet. Thank you, Barbara Preuninger. And thank you, Steven Pierce.

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There are some cells in my uterus at the moment that aren’t usually there. I call these cells “my baby”, and spend much of my time planning the future that they may have, once they’ve finished developing into a human being. Other women, with similar cells, plan how to remove the cells as quickly and painlessly as possible.

A favourite pro-life argument is to seize gleefully on the similarities between the two groups of cells and demand how you can possibly justify the vastly different ways of treating them. If the fetus has no value, they ask, why do pregnant women often feel a close bond with their unborn babies? If it’s nothing more than a bunch of cells, why can a miscarriage be so devastating? Tempting as it is to dismiss this as so much irrelevance, it’s worth exploring the apparent contradiction for the insights it can offer into what pro-choice really means.

My baby is not yet a human being. Even with special care, it is very unlikely to be capable of surviving on its own if it were removed from my body. It needs my bloodstream and my uterus to have even a chance of becoming a human being. Although it’s genetically distinct from me, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to view it as a part of my body. A part that could, given the right conditions, become a separate person, but until that happens a part of me.

We all see our bodies differently, and we all give different values to different parts. Some people welcome body hair because of the cultural value it has; others remove it for much the same reasons. A transsexual man could be delighted at the removal of his breasts; a woman with breast cancer is more likely to feel mutilated. The same body parts, but very different reactions.

The cells inside the uterus are just another example. I give mine a very high value and watch their development with delight; other women give theirs a low value and can’t wait to be rid of them. The belief that we both have the right to assign value to our own bodies for ourselves is the essence of being pro-choice. If a woman places a high value on her fetus, removing it against her will is just as unacceptable as forcing a woman to retain, against her will, a fetus she gives a low value to.

This is partly why miscarriage can be so devastating. A woman who anticipates with joy the time when her fetus becomes a fully-fledged human being invests those cells with a great deal of value. If they are destroyed, she’s lost a part of herself that she loved and welcomed, and will naturally feel a degree of grief. The pain could well be made worse by the attitude that women are walking incubators, but that’s another question entirely.

The contradiction turns out to be no contradiction at all. I care passionately about my baby; every sign of movement brings me a little extra joy. But it wouldn’t bring joy to every woman, and those for whom it would mean nothing but discomfort should be able to make a different choice.

There’s a lot to disagree with in Paul Krugman’s recent anti-fat column, but I was particularly annoyed by his opening:

The obvious model for those hoping to reverse the fattening of America is the campaign against smoking. Before the surgeon general officially condemned smoking in 1964, rising cigarette consumption seemed an unstoppable trend; since then, consumption per capita has fallen more than 50 percent.

But it may be hard to match that success when it comes to obesity. I’m not talking about the inherent difficulty of the task - getting people to consume fewer calories and/or exercise more may be harder than getting people to stop smoking, but we won’t know until we try.

So it’s Krugman’s view that we haven’t tried yet?

Holy shit!

I mean, the Feds have been speaking out against America’s expanding waistbands, in increasing tones of panic, for decades. Even as Americans get fatter and fatter and live longer and longer, each successive surgeon general has task forced and press released and new programmed and blue-ribbon scientific committeed against the growing fat menace.

And Krugman thinks they haven’t even started yet. I guess that’s better than admitting that yelling and nagging and guilting and kvetching and scolding and sneering and moralizing and chiding and the-sad-fact-is-ing and reproaching at fat people doesn’t actually turn fat people thin.

And the federal government could (and probably will) try it for another few generations, and you know what? It still won’t turn fat people thin. And we’ll keep on getting fatter. And living longer.

Krugman concludes “that the history of government interventions on behalf of public health, from the construction of sewer systems to the campaign against smoking, is one of consistent, life-enhancing success.” That’s only true, of course, if you ignore decades of failed government interventions to make Americans thinner.

P.S. There’s also some anti-corporate rhetoric in Krugman’s article, which I generally agree with. But why - apart from anti-fat ideology - is only the fast food industry criticized? Krugman not only fails to criticize the huge diet and medical corporations which put their weight behind the anti-fat campaign, he mindlessly repeats their party line.

It’s been a fairly open secret for years that some colleges give a preference to men in admissions, but as far as I know it’s never been shown in an empirical study before. From the Montreal Gazette:

Men appear to be given preference in admissions as university applicant pools become more female, a provocative new study has found.

Raising the spectre of affirmative action for a group not historically disadvantaged but increasingly under-represented in undergraduate classes, the study examined admissions data from 13 liberal arts colleges in the United States and estimated a tipping point for male preference kicks in when the female applicant pool reaches between 53 and 62 per cent. The study found “clear evidence” of a preference for men in historically female U.S. colleges.

There, being a male applicant raises the probability of acceptance by 6.5 to nine per cent.

“Schools can certainly have more than 50 per cent females and not give preference. But at some point, if females become too dominant, they do seem to give preference to males,” lead author Sandy Baum said in an interview.

Results of the study, completed by economists from New York’s Skidmore College and Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, will be published in a coming edition of the journal Economics of Education Review.

There are thousands of unspoken “affirmative actions” to help men in our society, helping some men into the good job tracks, the positions of authority, the better gallery shows, etc. I’d argue that our entire “Father Knows Best” economy is a covert form of AA that helps men in the job market. Things like this happen all the time.

What’s reported on in this article actually seems like one of the least harmful forms of AA for men. The resource in question - admission to college - is essentially unlimited; the very few unlucky female students who might not get admitted to college X because of this sort of policy will get into college Y instead.

But I’m curious: Why do colleges feel the need to do this? From a “diversity” perspective, there’s really not a significant difference between a student body that’s 50% male and one that’s 40% male; neither one can really be said to be lacking male perspectives in their student population. I presume that tuition money from women spends just as easily as tuition money from men. So what’s so scary about a female-majority campus?

Elsewhere in the article, it mentions that an admissions committee at McGill University suggested that good grades are overemphasized as a measure of student achievement, and might be biased against men:

The committee [discussed]… a more qualitative and less grade-driven admission process. “The application of grades as the sole measure of academic merit may not, in fact, be without an inherent bias,” state the minutes of the admissions committee…

That’s an interesting contrast with a comment made about the “are men better at math” question by Harvard professor Elizabeth Spelke:

Books are devoted to this question, with much debate, but there seems to be a consensus on one point: The only way to come up with a test that’s fair is to develop an independent understanding of what mathematical aptitude is and how it’s distributed between men and women. But in that case, we can’t use performance on the SAT to give us that understanding. We’ve got to get that understanding in some other way. So how are we going to get it? […]

I suggest the following experiment. We should take a large number of male students and a large number of female students who have equal educational backgrounds, and present them with the kinds of tasks that real mathematicians face. We should give them new mathematical material that they have not yet mastered, and allow them to learn it over an extended period of time: the kind of time scale that real mathematicians work on. We should ask, how well do the students master this material? The good news is, this experiment is done all the time. It’s called high school and college.

Here’s the outcome. In high school, girls and boys now take equally many math classes, including the most advanced ones, and girls get better grades.

So apparently the ability to do well in classes is a false, biased measure of the ability to go to college and… do well in classes. Huh.

I could buy that if we were talking about a group that was substantially disadvantaged - denied access to decent textbooks, AP classes, a reasonably good school, or whatever. If you told me that the grades of the students at the poorest high schools in the USA weren’t a fair reflection of their abilities, for example, I’d be inclined to agree. But I don’t think that boys in general are given less resources for learning than girls in general.

Thanks to “Alas” reader Mel for the tip.

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here in montreal we have this big mountain/parc called the mount-royal. think of it as central parc as mountain. and every sunday for the past 20-something years thousands of hippies converge and play tam tams for hours. over the years all sort of other things started happening. most people just lay in the grass and smoke some pot while the cops turn a blind eye. people sell bracelets and piantings while some DnD nerds fights with big duct-tape swords.

thats what we were interested in. what would happen if an army of zombies came out of the woods and attacked the duct-tape fighters?

Go read the whole story. It sounds like a pretty damn glorious day - and like fun for everyone, including the D&D nerds. Plus, there are some pictures.

UPDATE (July 11, 2005):

So it would seem that O’Donnell was on target with the revelation of Karl Rove being the ’source’ that threw Valerie Plame to the press, however, the spin surrounding it is nauseating. So here’s what the lawyers and the spin-doctors are saying via the LATimes:

According to Newsweek, Cooper and Rove discussed Wilson’s wife in the context of who at the CIA had been responsible for the trip. Cooper noted in the e-mail that Rove was trying to raise concerns about the credibility of Wilson’s report.

Cooper wrote his bosses that Rove offered him a “big warning” not to “get too far out on Wilson,” saying that the trip had not been authorized by senior officials.

Rather, “it was, KR said, [W]ilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip,” the e-mail stated, according to Newsweek.

Luskin, Rove’s attorney, declined to confirm or deny the contents of the e-mail.

But Luskin said in an interview Monday that Rove never identified Plame by name and never intended to reveal her identity. He said Wilson’s wife came up as an afterthought in a conversation that Cooper had initiated, primarily for a story about welfare reform.[…]

At the same time, Luskin declined to say whether Rove knew that Plame was a covert agent, even if he did not know her name, which analysts said was a crucial factor in determining whether the law was broken.

They also said that although Rove asserted he did not intend to disclose her identity, a jury might find otherwise based on other factors, such as whether he discussed Plame, even anonymously, with other reporters.

So lets recap on this. Apparently in this day of information and technology when you can Yahoo or Google the phone number of someone in a foreign country, national media would find the reference ‘Wilson’s wife’ to be unclear and are so incompetent as to not be able to find out her name? Who’s buying this nonsense?

How about the spin that she wasn’t ‘covert’? So now we spend millions of taxpayers dollars on issues that could have been answered without a grand jury, simply by stating that she wasn’t covert? Why bother with a grand jury at all if this was the case? Well, in a nutshell, because she was covert and this is all about spinning at this point.

The whole ordeal has left me so angry and outraged. I’m just hopeful that people won’t let this one slide under the rug, like the rest of the nasty things that have occurred with this administration. It’s time for some accountability.

Fresh off the press, it seems that political bombshells may well outshine the fireworks on the 4th of July. In the past few weeks, liberals and progressives have concluded Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor had a big mouth - but just how big seems to be the new political bombshell looming on the horizon.

Word has it that Lawrence O’Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst claimed tonight on the syndicated show, McLaughlin Group, that the source behind the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame is none other than the president’s right hand man, Rove.

“What we’re going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper’s e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury, the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

“And I know I’m going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of…for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine’s going to do with the grand jury.”

So what will happen to Rove, should this statement by O’Donnell be proven true, considering revealing the identity of a CIA agent is a federal crime? Perjury charges? Treason charges? A Bush pardon and business as usual?

Interestingly enough, Joseph Wilson, former ambassador and husband to Ms. Plame named Rove as the source who leaked his wife’s name to the press from the beginning, was met with cynicism, disbelief and relative silence from that oh so ‘liberal’ (tongue in cheek!) press of ours. If Cooper does indeed name Rove as the source to the Grand Jury, I will be watching with fascination as to how the administration will wiggle out of this one.

Oh, by the way Karl, Pope Boniface VIII left a message for you:

“Silence is the genius of fools and one of the virtues of the wise.”

From a Spanish blog post (the link’s down right now, but I’m including it just in case it comes back), translated by Nia, and via Knotted Knickers and The Un-Apologetic Athiest.

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Chronology:

1) An article on The New Republic’s website embarrasses some conservatives by printing the unsurprising truth that many conservative pundits don’t believe in evolution, or are followers of intelligent design, or hedge on the matter.

2) Todd Zywicki, of the Volokh Conspiracy, suggests that lefties would be just as embarrassed by questions such as “Are differences between men’s and women’s aptitudes solely a result of society and culture, or is there an evolutionary basis for some of those distinctions?”

3) PZ at Pharyngula responds to Zywicki. Here’s a taste:

He’s making the old, tired nature/nurture distinction, and it drives me nuts. It’s a false dichotomy that is perpetuated by an antiquated misconception about how development and biology works. Genes don’t work alone, they always interact with their environment, and the outcome of developmental processes is always contingent upon both genetic and non-genetic factors. There is nothing for which this is more true than the development of the mind: the brain is a structure which is incredibly plastic and responsive to input, since that is its job, to respond in sophisticated ways to complex situations.

4) Not for the first time, anti-feminists invade Pharyngula, get their asses kicked, and - in a distinctive, almost dadaesque touch - declare victory.

* * *

Regarding Todd’s point, like a lot of other folks who have commented, I think he’s comparing incomparables. The extent to which biology makes differences in behavior between the sexes inevitable and predictable is hotly debated within the scientific community. No one I know of argues that evolution has no effect on behavior, or has no effect on sex differences; however, some folks (myself included) argue that because biology always interacts with culture and nuture, there is no “female behavior” or “male behavior” that is biologically immutable among humans, apart from obvious reproductive behaviors like “giving birth.” While right-wing partisans may consider this view ridiculous, it’s not out of the bounds of reasonable scientific discourse.

On the other hand, not believing in evolution - or thinking that “intelligent design” ought be taught as science - is a genuinely ridiculous position, far outside the bounds of reasonable scientific discourse.

* * *

Along the way, I was reminded of this excellent Brian Leiter post on why Larry Summers’ academic freedom was never under attack. And another excellent Leiter post against civility, which I’m linking because I might want to discuss it later.

Has anyone else been getting a lot of flattering spam messages in their comments lately?:

I dont even remember how i reached your site but it doesnt matter, cause i’m so happy i found it, it really made me think, keep up the good work

I’ve deleted dozens of anonymous comments along those lines this week. I don’t know what the benefit to spammers is (there’s no URL in the comment), but I have a theory: They’re trying to get around the WordPress 1.5 spam-blocking system, and similar systems like it. In these systems, the first post by a new comment-writer must be approved by the blogger, but future posts by that same writer are automatically approved. The goal is to get me to approve a few of these anonymous, adoring comments; and then in a month or two hit me with hundreds of Texas hold’em spam or whatever.

That’s my theory, anyway.