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It's pretty much taken as an assumption these days that human beings are 'natural-born believers'. Ask a cognitive scientist who specializes in religion, and they will tell you that our brains are predisposed to all sorts of supernatural concepts.
One consequence of this consensus is a vast outpouring of articles and books pondering over what the evolutionary advantages of religion are. A lot of these explanations are pretty tendentious, and to me it has never seemed likely that this was the whole story.
One popular way to investigate the 'naturalness' of religion problem is to see if supernatural concepts are hardwired into children - as you would expect if religious ideas are intuitive and naturalistic ideas have to be learned. Perhaps surprisingly there are very few studies to support this idea - the same 'classic' studies keep getting recycled in each new article or book.
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All the stories illustrated a 'difficult to explain' event.
For example, one featured a guy who steals a little money regularly, until he has enough money to buy a really fast car - which he promptly crashes. Another featured a terminal cancer patient whose cancer went away 'miraculously'. And another featured a woman who jogged regularly, and yet on her wedding day she tripped and hurt her leg badly - thus making her miss her wedding and also stopped her running. The stories were designed to illustrate events that could be ascribed to moral justice, divine intervention, or luck/fate.
So they read these stories and then asked the listener how the event could be explained. The surprising thing was that the kids hardly ever offered up supernatural explanations. Instead, they would say that maybe the cancer patient slept a lot, which helped her get better. Or, for the athletic woman who tripped on her wedding day, “because she tripped over a rock while she was walking. People usually trip over stuff and fall.” -
Adults, on the other hand, readily offered up supernatural explanations. There was a clear trend, too, as you can see in the graph - the older the child, the more likely they were to explain these strange happenings by recourse to the supernatural
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First, there are plenty of practitioners and manufacturers of alternative medicine out there who market themselves to parents. There are also plenty of parents who are suspicious enough of conventional medicine that they will seek out alternatives. Too often, they seek out CAM in lieu of treatments known to work. Also too often, practitioners and parents will defend their choices insisting that they are the ones with the child’s best interest in mind, and that they have the right to make the choice anyway, evidence notwithstanding. As this is happening, children’s rights and needs are pushed aside.
Who advocates for the child when parents are bombarded by misinformation, are marketed to vigorously, and the agencies charged with protecting consumers are unable or unwilling to intervene? I don’t know, but I’d like to start the conversation. I will suggest that we all begin to pay closer attention to when the pseudoscience we’re dealing with affects children disproportionally. It’s not just about the science, it’s also, and more importantly perhaps, about the victims.
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Here’s what commenter “Anon” contributed:
“Every person on this earth has choices, and that Mom has EVERY right to choose for her child, because it is her child! Not the drug companies child, not your child! Gain some research under your belt before you start trashing a mother who chooses not to put vaccinations in her kids arms”.
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people easily conflate the ability to make a choice for their children with the nonexistent right to make whatever choice they want. Children are not chattel. The choices that are made by a parent for their children are best described as responsibilities. You have the responsibility to make choices for your children, and these choices are reasonably limited by various laws in place to protect children from the harms that result from bad parental choices, among other things.
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More sexism you won't see AWARE protesting: single men cannot adopt girls
Text of Adoption of Children Act: Restrictions on making adoption orders.
"An adoption order shall not be made in any case where the sole applicant is a male and the infant in respect of whom the application is made is a female unless the court is satisfied that there are special circumstances which justify as an exceptional measure the making of an adoption order."
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I don't see why AWARE should prioritize minor forms of discrimination against men when the vast majority of gender discrimination is not directed at men.
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B: ah, but what "use" do single men have for girls anyway?
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The Supreme Court has struck down a California law that would have banned selling "violent" video games to children, a case balancing free speech rights with consumer protection.
The 7-2 ruling Monday is a victory for video game makers and sellers, who said the ban -- which had yet to go into effect -- would extend too far. They say the existing nationwide, industry-imposed, voluntary rating system is an adequate screen for parents to judge the appropriateness of computer game content.
The state says it has a legal obligation to protect children from graphic interactive images when the industry has failed to do so.
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"The First Amendment does not disable government from helping parents make such a choice here -- a choice not to have their children buy extremely violent, interactive games," he wrote.
At issue is how far constitutional protections of free speech and expression, as well as due process, can be applied to youngsters.
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Justice Clarence Thomas also dissented, saying the law's requirement of having parents purchase the games for their underage children was reasonable. "The freedom of speech as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors, without going through the minors' parents or guardians," he said.
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The study involved two experiments performed with 83 toddlers, focused on the operation of toys. In the first, the researchers had three toys that were identical except in terms of color. The researcher pressed a button on a green one, which triggered a short bit of music. Either the same green toy or a yellow one were then handed to the toddler, while the red one was placed a short distance away; in either case, when the child pressed the same button, nothing happened, leaving them faced with the question of whether the issue was them (operator error) or the toy.
When handed the green one, which had just played music, they tended to assume it was them. About two-thirds of these toddlers changed the operator by handing the toy to their parents. In contrast, when given the yellow one, they assumed the toy was broken; 80 percent of them reached for the red toy, presumably because they felt it would be a working replacement.
Do children have an innate pre-disposition to make certain sorts of moral judgement? Is there such a think as a universal moral grammar? John Mikhail of Georgetown University suspects that there is an innate basis to our morality analogous to Noam Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device. He explains why in conversation with David Edmonds.
Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy
Listen to John Mikhail on Universal Moral Grammar
Free Will: Children and the Scientific Worldview
How kids know the monster under the bed isn’t real (06:22)
Experiments probe causal thinking in children (09:05)
Do scientists have more in common with kids than other adults? (06:30)
Are morality and causality intertwined for ordinary people? (14:23)
4-year-olds’ value-laden perspective on others’ intentions (07:40)
Are Pinker and Chomsky dead-wrong about child development? (03:41)
Contrary to AWARE's claims, in Singapore feminism has actually decreased the birth rate - and more feminism will just depress it even more. This is not to say that is necessarily a bad thing, but just that they are divorced from reality; it is one thing to say that feminism, while depressing the birth rate, is still a good thing (even if contentious depending on definitions, this is defendable). It is quite another to say that feminism boosts the birth rate.
Actually, this is not the most insane of their recent flights of fancy. In the world they live in, beauty is subjective and has no connection to a woman's remarriage; the use of the keyword "normative" should set off alarm bells, and the case is splendidly demolished ("Railing against the objective definition of beauty is like saying that America's Next Top Model is bunk; it is futile and makes everyone suspect that the person doing the complaining is ugly"). Again, it is one thing to say that maintenance payments should not be linked to looks (putting aside the fact of how similar quibbles could be made about "lifetime earnings", but they are commonly used to calculate, for example, divorce settlements [SPOING!])
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"When it comes to looking for a potential spouse, the top criterion for Singaporean women is a man’s social status. Next on the list is kindness, followed by a lively personality. In contrast, American women value kindness the most, followed by looks, then a man’s social standing... ‘Maybe Singaporean women are just being realistic. Here, you need a lot of money to survive and afford an affluent lifestyle. Maybe they are just being practical’...
The study found no major differences when it comes to men: Both American and Singaporean men went for looks first. The second most important trait in a spouse for men was kindness and the third was a lively personality... -
By and large, he noted, wealthier countries tend to have lower birth rates. Yet ’significant differences’ still occur among countries which enjoy similar levels of economic development,
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In nature, the balance of males and females is maintained by natural selection acting on parents. As Sir Ronald Fisher brilliantly pointed out in 1930, a surplus of one sex will be redressed by selection in favour of rearing the other sex, up to the point where it is no longer the minority. It isn’t quite as simple as that. You have to take into account the relative economic costs of rearing one sex rather than the other. If, say, it costs twice as much to rear a son to maturity as a daughter (e.g. because males are bigger than females), the true choice facing a parent is not “Shall I rear a son or a daughter?” but “Shall I rear a son or two daughters?” So, Fisher concluded, what is equlibrated by natural selection is not the total numbers of sons and daughters born in the population, but the total parental expenditure on sons versus daughters. In practice, this usually amounts to an approximately equal ratio of males to females in the population at the end of the period of parental expenditure.
Note that the word ‘decision’ doesn’t mean conscious decision: we employ the usual ‘selfish gene’ metaphorical reasoning, in which natural selection favours genes that produce behaviour ‘as if’ decisions are being made.
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what if we are dealing with a human society in which cultural traditions over-ride the genetic imperatives (yet another example, this time not necessarily a benign one, of ‘rebelling against the selfish genes’). What if the religion of a country fosters a deep-rooted undervaluing of women? What if there is an ancient culture of despising women, whether for religious or otherwise traditional or economic reasons? In past centuries such cultures might have fostered selective infanticide of newborn girls. But now, what if scientific culture makes it possible to know the sex of a fetus, say by amniocentesis or ultrasound scanning? There is then an obvious temptation selectively to abort female embryos, which could have far-reaching and probably pernicious social consequences. I'll refrain from gloating over the possibility of Taliban-inspired woman-hating societies going extinct for lack of women.
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The Guardian has a report today on ‘sex selection of babies’, which is described as a ‘scourge’ of the developing world.
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KOLKATA, India, 27 April 2011 - Salim Sheikh, 13, and his friends are putting their sprawling Kolkata slum on the map – literally. For a year now, they’ve been gathering data about the people, small brick huts, crowded alleys, scattered temples, trees, water pumps and other facts that identify Rishi Aurobindo Colony in eastern Kolkata.
With the support of UNICEF and local non-governmental organization Prayasam, they’ve created a colourful, hand-drawn map of their community. Soon, they will also upload much of the information onto Google Earth, one of the world’s best-known computer mapping systems. When they do, Salim says he will finally feel secure in his bustling universe.
“With this map, everyone in the world will know we are here. We are a community with many issues and ideas, just like anybody,” he says.
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After data were collected, the children drew the map’s first draft on a big sheet of paper. It clearly labelled and colour-coded each detail, from houses to street lamps.
Now, the map and survey – which identified 71 sources of water but not one clean enough for drinking – can also be used as a powerful advocacy tool.
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Ms. Das says improvements have already been made. Pointing to a lamp post in her crowded alley, she observes, “Things are already better. We have more light here.” The children also use survey data to target households during polio immunization campaigns.
In teams armed with handmade paper megaphones and signs, they regularly march about shouting: “Shunun, shunun (listen),” imploring neighbours to bring children for polio drops. They also take toddlers to polio booths themselves.
The children also mobilize for malaria information drives, to check on children who drop out of school, or to teach proper hand washing techniques. They tackle tough topics, like child marriage and human trafficking, with puppets and street plays at each community festival.
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Feminists (and I'm generalising here) tend towards the conclusion that women who don't sign up are simply hostages to the tyranny of the patriarchy, whose feeble personal consciousnesses have refused to be raised.
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The fundamental and rather serious problem is the blunt and somewhat stubborn emphasis on "equality", difficult enough in a society deeply divided by economic inequality generally, even without the added complication that it's the people with care of children, whatever their sex, whose economic freedom is most compromised the world over.
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Deborah Orr looks at why some women still don’t adopt feminism or call themselves feminists. She starts by saying that there is a myth that women reject feminism simply because it has a bad image. A kind of 80s dyke image. I agree with her point in relation to that myth, that:
‘The very fact that some feminists are so willing to accept that women don’t want the label for such superficial reasons, rather than crediting women with more profound intellectual discomfort, is an indication that even feminist attitudes can sometimes be dismissive of women and their legitimate concerns.’
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‘Feminists (and I’m generalising here) tend towards the conclusion that women who don’t sign up are simply hostages to the tyranny of the patriarchy, whose feeble personal consciousnesses have refused to be raised.’
And, her belief that women reject feminism for more complex and thought-out reasons than mere ‘false consciousness’.
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Are you likely to have more kids if you are rich or poor? Or to put this in econo-jargon: Are kids normal or inferior goods? (Reminder: When you get rich you buy more of a “normal good,” and less of an “inferior good.” And yes, the language of economics can be a bit cold.)
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In a related paper, Alice Schoonbroodt and Michele Tertilt say that, “There is overwhelming empirical evidence that fertility is negatively related to income in most countries at most times.” They are right. Whether you cut the data across countries, through time, or across people at a point in time, the same fact arises: The richer you get, the fewer kids you have.
church leaders said they were protected by the First Amendment's separation of church and state from having to surrender personnel files, victims' complaints or other documents.
Attorneys representing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints argued its records were protected by clergy-penitent privilege and the First Amendment's protection of the "free exercise" of religion.
Though the case was eventually settled in 2001, journalist Lisa Davis says the case represents a profound misuse -- and misunderstanding -- of the freedoms afforded to religious institutions under the Constitution.
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Legal scholars say church bodies -- from Catholic dioceses to entire denominations -- often try to use the First Amendment to block victims' attorneys from accessing internal documents. In a case now headed for the U.S. Supreme Court, a religious school has tried to use the First Amendment to stave off an employment discrimination suit filed by a teacher.
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Up until about 20 years ago, most states assumed the First Amendment barred anyone from bringing a claim against clergy, said Hamilton, the New York scholar.
"That theory was ... you could not go after the church because of one bad apple," she said. "But the more we've learned about clergy abuse cases, the more we're learning about the role the churches have played in covering up abuse and furthering that abuse."
"As the courts have become more educated, they have come to understand that religious institutions have to be held liable, and that the First Amendment was never intended as a protection for this kind of behavior."
This idea that we are powerless against a cultural tsunami – come on! Once late teenage hits, many parents learn the hard way about powerlessness, but not in the age range under discussion here. As the mother of an eight-year-old, I'm finding it easy to keep her away from padded bikinis, Nuts, internet porn, violent video games and sexy music videos. I did think The X Factor routines were too much for "little eyes", but it wasn't difficult to flick the channel over for a few minutes. It wasn't as if I was trapped, Dr Who-style, in a child-sexualised force field, unable to reach the TV remote.
Indeed, as much as David Cameron seems to be enjoying waltzing around, looking all gung ho and "concerned father-ish", he must know that, without hands-on parental involvement, there is only so much the coalition can achieve. Popular culture does not exist to babysit our children. As always, parents have to step in where appropriate, too. So let's stop the sub-McCarthyist hysteria about child sexualisation and get some perspective – no one is going to steal your child's childhood, unless you let them. "Porn star" knickers for children are creepy, but they can't jump into underwear drawers all by themselves.
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you’ve no doubt gotten wind of the controversy caused by two Toronto parents who decided not to tell the world the gender of their new baby, Storm. The story jumped from our national press across the 49th parallel, where the hosts of ABC’s The View had this to say:
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The Blonde One To Whoopi’s Left: I don’t get it, it’s like when the baby was born they said, “Congratulations, it’s an It?” What did they say?
What Not-Whoopi is getting at here is that something just doesn’t feel right about not being able to identify a child’s gender. It’s such a key piece of how we categorize the world — a simple, binary classification. In fact, I suspect, given gender’s importance in reproduction, that it’s often the first distinction we make on encountering someone.
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What is objectivism?
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"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." As a little kid I interpreted this to mean: Love yourself.
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Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" is the antidote to Amy Chua's best seller, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." Whereas Ms. Chua insists that parents should have few children and then drive them relentlessly toward perfection, Mr. Caplan argues that people should have more children; that they are cheaper than we think; that parenting is less important than we imagine; and that kids can basically raise themselves.
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Analyzing scads of research on the effects of nature and nurture in child-rearing, he determines that, as a matter of both time and money, "children cost far less than parents pay, because parents overcharge themselves." Parents take it upon themselves to constantly entertain and "enrich" their kids with a course-catalog of activities (Capoeira, violin, Mandarin lessons) in a desperate effort to give them "the best" and set them on the path to a triumphant adulthood. But it turns out that parenting has almost no effect on children's life expectancy, intelligence, happiness or success.
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Comparing the outcomes of twins raised together in a family with those of twins raised apart, these studies conclude that nature matters far more than nurture. In terms of the person you become once you've grown up, what genes you inherited matter a lot more than how you were raised.
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Are kids slipping through the cracks in Facebook's just-ask age screening approach?
The social networking site kicks off around 20,000 underage users per day, its chief privacy adviser, Mozelle Thompson, told Australia's parliament this week.
He admitted that the site's way of weeding out those who don't meet the 13-and-up age requirement -- essentially a user-entry honor system -- is "not perfect," because there's no mechanism for detecting kids who simply enter a false age.
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A recent Pew study found that nearly half of all U.S. 12-year-olds use social networking sites -- and privacy concerns in regard to Facebook's younger members have been growing of late. This month, Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) to argue for reforms in the site's privacy measures. "Under Facebook's policy, 13 million users under the age of 18 may be allowed to share their personal information just like adult users," Franken wrote. "These younger users are the most vulnerable to predators on Facebook and the rest of the Internet and it should be impossible for them to inadvertently share their phone numbers and home addresses with anyone."
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But Franken's figures don't factor in the unknown number of Facebook users under 13.
Other sites that are popular with kids handle the issue in differing ways. MySpace also requires users to be at least 13, but like Facebook, it has no practical way to verify that information. Disney.com allows children 12 and under to surf the site, and collects some personal information from them before they're eligible to participate in competitions, for example. Yahoo! doesn't allow kids 12 and under to register without the consent of a parent. Like Disney, it collects some limited idenifying information for participation in competitions and similar interactive features.
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The idea that young people take a decade to grow up, in the meantime inhabiting a space called “young adulthood,” is rather new in American culture. A bit older is the idea of “adolescence,” the idea that there is a stage between childhood and (young) adulthood that is characterized by immaturity and capriciousness: the teenage years. Before these ideas were invented, children were expected to take on adult roles as soon as they were able, apprenticing their parents and transitioning to adulthood with puberty. Shifts in ideas about life stages is a wonderful example of the social constructedness of age.
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Documenting the rise of the notion of adolescence, Philip Cohen searched Google Books for the term, tracing its rise at the turn of the 20th century till today:
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