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Behold, the ongoing, increasingly startling research:
homosexual and bisexual behavior, it turns out, is rampant in the
animal kingdom. And by rampant, I mean proving to be damn near universal,
commonplace across all species everywhere, existing for myriad reasons
ranging from pure survival and procreative influence, right on over to
pure pleasure, co-parenting, giddy screeching multiple monkey orgasm,
even love, and a few dozen other potential explanations science hasn't
quite figured out yet. Imagine.

Are you thinking, why sure, everyone knows about those
sex-crazed dolphins and those superslut bonobo monkeys and the few
other godless creatures like them, the sea turtles and the weird sheep
and such, creatures who obviously haven't read Leviticus. But that's
about it, right? Most animals are devoutly hetero and straight and damn
happy about it, right?

Wrong.

New research
is revealing so many creatures and species that exhibit
homosexual/bisexual behavior of some kind, scientists are now saying
there are actually very few, if any, species in existence that don't
exhibit it in some way. It's everywhere: Bison. Giraffes. Ducks.
Hyenas. Lions and lambs, lizards and dragonflies, polecats and
elephants. Hetero sex. Anal sex. Partner swapping. The works.

we are going to move on now to the
second major section of the Bible. We have been discussing the Torah,
or Pentateuch, and now we are moving on to the section of the Bible
that is referred to as the Prophets. This section of the Bible is
divided into two parts we refer to as the "Former Prophets" and then
the "Latter Prophets." The Former Prophets will concern us for the next
few lectures. And the Former Prophets include the books of Joshua,
Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings. They read as a historical
narrative.

This material is a theologically oriented account of Israel's
history from the conquest of Canaan, or what is represented as the
conquest of Canaan, to the destruction of the state by the Babylonians
in 587-586 BCE. This material is therefore crucial background to
reading the Latter Prophets. Now the Latter Prophets is a collection of
books, each of which bears the name of the individual whose prophecies
it purports to contain. These prophets delivered their oracles at
critical junctures in Israel's history, in the nation's history, so
their words are only going to make sense to us if we first understand
the particular historical crises that they are addressing. And that
historical narrative that runs from Joshua through 2 Kings provides
that information. It tells us of the critical junctures in the nation's
history, and that will help us then slot the different prophets in.

The study showed that in 33% of the coastal states classified as low-income (commonly countries in Africa and Oceania) most fishing is carried out by foreign fleets from either the European Union, South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan or the United States. The only attribute in which poorer and wealthier countries overlapped significantly was their limited ability to convert scientific recommendations into policy. The mechanism for this pattern, however, was different. Poor countries reportedly struggle with the effects of corruption while wealthier countries often encounter more political or economical pressures.

Researchers spent a year approaching almost 14,000 fishery experts, including marine biologists, fishery managers and university professors around the globe, asking them to take an online survey in either English, French, Spanish, German or Portuguese about local fishing practices and policies. Almost 1,200 completed the survey from 243 countries and territories, including representatives from every country that borders the ocean. The survey asked the experts about their respective nations' scientific data about fish populations and ecosystems, and how they translated those scientific findings into regulations and enforcement.

The dismal results: Only 7 percent of coastal states did rigorous scientific assessments to generate fishing policies; a pitiful 1.4 percent have a participatory and transparent process for turning that science into policy; and fewer than 1 percent had strong mechanisms to insure enforcement with fishing policies.

"Perhaps the most striking result of our survey was that not a single country in the world was consistently good with respect to all these management attributes," says Camilo Mora, 34, a research biologist at Dalhousie University, who was one of the coauthors of the study. "So which countries are doing well, and which are not, is a question whose answer depends on the specific attribute you are looking at."

Do you think religions share certain core principles?

Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn't originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was not fundamentally about morality before the invention of agriculture. It was trying to figure out why bad things happen and increasing the frequency with which good things happen. Why do you sometimes get earthquakes, storms, disease and get slaughtered? But then sometimes you get nice weather, abundant game and you get to do the slaughtering. Those were the religious questions in the beginning.

Why did monotheism first develop?

My explanation for Abrahamic monotheism is different from the standard one. I believe it emerged later than most people think -- in the 6th century BCE, when Israelite elites were exiled by the Babylonians who conquered them. The spirit of monotheism was originally a lot less sunny and benign than people claim. Morally, it got better, but at its birth, monotheism was fundamentally about retribution.

Israel was a small nation in a bad neighborhood that got kicked around. This culminated in the exile, which was humiliating. It dispossessed the Israelites. It's not crazy to compare the mind-set of the Israelites then to the mind-set of today's Palestinians, who feel humiliated and dispossessed. This kind of mind-set brings out the belligerence in a religion. You see that in the Book of Isaiah, thought to be written by so-called Second Isaiah. These are the earliest scriptures in the Bible that are clearly monotheistic. You get the sense that monotheism is about punishing the various nations that have persecuted Israel.

So you see a connection between the political power of a people and the god they believed in?

In ancient times, there was always a close association between politics and gods. The victor of a war was always the nation whose god beat the other god. But the specific political dynamic that monotheism reflected at its birth was Israel's desire to punish other nations by denying the very existence of their gods, and also envisioning a day when Israel's god, Yahweh, would actually subjugate those nations.

Does Yahweh become a tool for Israelite kings to consolidate power?

You see that especially with King Josiah. Israel was polytheistic for a lot longer than most people think. A lot of things factored into its movement toward monotheism. One was a king who wanted to eliminate domestic political rivals. Those political rivals would have claimed access to various gods other than Yahweh, so King Josiah wanted to eliminate them. He killed some of them and also made it illegal to worship their gods. That gets you to the brink of monotheism. I think the exile pushes you over. You have a very belligerent, exclusive monotheism, whose very purpose is to exclude other nations from this privileged circle of God's most favored people.

The College Board favors the traditional "five paragraph essay" format taught to high school freshmen, and those who are going to succeed in college have generally mastered the format and picked up the various tricks that earn good scores on the essay. (One of Perelman's students, to show how the scoring favors quotations from famous people, accurate or not, took the test using various quotes that happened to be visible in the testing room, and attributed all of them to Lee Iacocca -- and she earned great scores.)

"The writing test is teaching students a lot of bad habits," said Perelman. "It's real predictive value, in terms of writing, is nil."

There are shining examples of interactive education, though. Dr. Maria
Terrell, who teaches calculus at Cornell University, used an interactive
method that's part of a program called "Good Questions," which
is funded by the National Science Foundation.



One strategy being used in this program is called just-in-time teaching;
it is a teaching and learning strategy that combines the benefits of
Web-based assignments and an active-learner classroom where courses are
customized to the particular needs of the class. Warm-up questions, written
by the students, are typically due a few hours before class, giving the
teacher an opportunity to adjust the lesson "just in time," so
that classroom time can be focused on the parts of the assignments that
students struggled with. Harvard professor Eric Mazur, who uses this
approach in his physics class, puts it this way:
"Education is so much more than the mere transfer of information.
The information has to be assimilated. Students have to connect the information
to what they already know, develop mental models, learn how to apply
the new knowledge, and how to adapt this knowledge to new and unfamiliar
situations.

This technique
produces real results. An evaluation study of 350 Cornell students
found that those who were asked "deep questions" (that elicit
higher-order thinking) with frequent peer discussion scored noticeably
higher on their math exams than students who were not asked deep questions
or who had little to no chance for peer discussion. Dr. Terrell explains: "It's
when the students talk about what they think is going on and why, that's
where the biggest learning occurs for them…. You can hear people sort
of saying, 'Oh I see, I get it.' … And then they're explaining to somebody
else … and there's an authentic understanding of what's going on. So
much better than what would happen if I, as the teacher person, explain
it. There's something that happens with this peer instruction."