Last prayer, or fat chance?

Al Gore, having won an Emmy, an Oscar and now the Nobel Peace Prize, is on a roll. There’s just one prize left that many would like to see him claim that has eluded him — one that he came within a hanging chad’s breadth of receiving in 2000. It’s a sign not only of his popularity but also of the rising sense of panic among Democrats that they seem destined for a ticket headed by Hillary Clinton. The [grumblings] in the lefty media about how to stop our gal from Illinois Arkansas New York began about the time that wunderkind Barack Obama started showing [signs of flagging] in his media-fueled race for the nomination. Suddenly [stories] about the nascent Draft Gore movement increased in frequency and, now with the Nobel win, have reached a fevered pace. CNN [reports] on the pressure on him to join the race (including a hilarious quote from Jimmy Carter, who has been badgering him for so long on the issue that Gore finally had to ask Carter to stop calling his house), while the Washington Post [raises questions] about whether he could successfully raise enough money this late in the primary run-up. That would certainly be a significant obstacle to overcome were he to decide to join the race, but I think there’s an even bigger factor weighing against him, so to speak: he’s too fat to be president.

The Presidential Body Mass Index (PBMI)

[Click to view] chart of US presidents ranked according to their Body Mass Index

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If it comes out of a lab it’s science, right?
In 2005, a political scientist at Northwestern [found] that one out of every five Americans believes that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Given this situation, when I wrote a piece on [genetic fundamentalism], I had no illusions about it making the slightest dent in the popular obsession with finding the “cause” of homosexuality. Even still, it’s disheartening to see the same uninformed debate play out [over] and [over]. Worse, even a respected magazine like New York trots out a puff piece (so to speak…) called [The Science of Gaydar] by David France that catalogs a string of meaningless correlations (Gay men’s cowlicks turn the wrong way!) that explain nothing because they don’t belong to any kind of rational theoretical framework. What is perhaps most disheartening is the profound ignorance of science and theory that makes any pseudo-scientific claptrap look reasonable not just to the general public, but to the editors of the piece.

The Medium is the (wrong) Message
Standing between the impenetrable opaqueness of the scientific academy and the man on the street are the science writers in the mass media who are playing an ever more important role in our society as translators and guides. In the gene piece I wrote I singled out a New York Times writer for contributing to the simplistic genes = culture meme that winds its way through our discourse. Well, over the weekend the NYT published [a story] on new understanding of the complexity of gene effects that implies refutation of some of the more breathless genetic coverage they’ve done in the past. Alas, those implications are not fleshed out in the article — out of scope perhaps. Too bad for readers who look to the Times to provide meaning to what they read. Is it too much to ask that writers for the most important newspaper in the country think about what their own paper has written in the past and place new findings in some context that will help their readers better understand the world?

Why is this man smiling?
Ultimately, the state of scientific literacy is a reflection of public policy priorities and political leadership. During the Cold War, when the Russians were breathing down our necks with a bazillion ICBMs and satellites floating over our heads, science education was a public priority — you better believe it was. One of the untoward outcomes of Cold Peace was the [relaxation] of science education priorities and [redirection of federal funding] from science programs. Coincidentally, conservative politicians came to rely on fundamentalist voting blocs who exert extraordinary influence over social policy. That helps explain the prominence of idiots like Senator Sam Brownback who, in a presidential debate, [brags his ignorance] of evolution theory and somehow doesn’t get laughed out of the building. In his case he probably believes the stupid things he says, other fellow-traveling ignoramuses are more likely pandering to their electorates when they backpedal on rationalist explanations of natural phenomena. And so the cycle of illiteracy is reinforced. Very disheartening, indeed.

Wouldn’t you know! It turns out Pastor Ted Haggard isn’t gay after all — he was just dealing with a particularly stressful period in his life by going down the old dirt road with a gay hooker while tweaked out on crank. Hasn’t this guy heard of Valium? Much easier on the hiney. And then, of course, there’s prayer as a way to relieve stress. Or golf. Oh well, to each his own.

Comic aspects aside (and who doesn’t notice the biologically determined resemblance to Paul Lynde..?) the absurd announcement that after 3 weeks of “counseling” Haggard is now “completely heterosexual” is only the most recent example of the tragic ignorance of sexuality that afflicts this society. Granted, in his case there are extenuating circumstances that require a rapid conversion: this joker was spiritual leader of 30 million evangelicals. The ministry had to do something dramatic to staunch the risk of defection by a disillusioned flock, hence the 3 week miracle. Not too much to ask of people who fiercely believe in miracles. Especially when they want to believe. Poof! (no pun intended), the problem disappears. But the real problem is ignorance.

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It’s still here.

Another World AIDS Day passes, in the twenty-fifth year of the plague, and these are the sad facts:

• 40 Million people in the world are infected
• 3 Million people died last year from AIDS
• In the US, to date 529,113 people have died. More than our battlefield casualties in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf war and Iraq combined
• While infection rates worldwide leveled off in the late 90’s there are pockets of resurgence: Uganda, the UK and among young gay men in the US

Fifteen years ago, when the plague was laying waste to a generation of gay men, the question was whether action could be taken in time to build a firewall around the epidemic until a vaccine or drug to eradicate the virus could be developed. Despite the profound and wrenching violence done to bodies, societies and sex itself, people still spoke of cures. We just had to be vigilant until the beast was destroyed. But we underestimated the threat from this pathogen and its infernal genius for destruction — a virus that doesn’t just lurk in the marrow of our bones, but also in the dark places in our brains where our deepest needs and desires are hidden from the earnest instructions of safe sex pamphlets.

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The New York Times has finally gone to the rats. Far be it for me, a guy who pretends to be an escapee from a lab maze, to complain, except an article they published [”Nice Rat, Nasty Rat”, link broken] — another in a seemingly endless series about genes and behavior — is a little more absurd than most. Somehow they go from a finding about genetic factors in animal domestication to suggested causes of “human domestication”. I think that used to be called… society. Presto! Ten thousand years of history, philosophy, politics and literature are reduced to the suggested impact of “a single gene that affects the timing of neural crest cell development”. Spare us.

In a [recent post] I wailed about those who try to reduce complex human characteristics and behaviors to simple genetic factors. Since I wrote, the New York State Court of Appeals [denied rights] to homosexual couples — their decision turning largely on a notion of essential qualities lacking in gay people (namely, ability to procreate and parent), and last week a [particularly bizarre] resurrection of the debate over whether people are born gay lit up the blogs. From hypothesized “God genes”, that give rise to religious experience, to genes that make us engineers or gamblers, the search is on for the keys to our nature. But it is the obsessive debate over genetic determinants of sexual identity, specifically homosexual attitudes and behavior, that is perhaps the most persistent example of the desire to reduce people to a fundamental biological essence. Not since the Nazi obsession with eugenics and its relation to the “Jewish problem” have we seen such obsessive attention to what determines the characteristics of a class of people. The difference is that, this time, it’s the Left that embraces the idea of essential difference — with the attendant risks — and it’s the Right that argues for a more inclusive anti-essentialism.

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Everytime you turn around, there’s a story in the news about a new study that is described as finding “biological” causes of behaviors and traits that, traditionally, were matters of individual inclination or moral suasion. Just in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed stories in [The New York Times] about genes for risk-taking, yet another “what-makes-them-gay” [article] suggesting birth order is the key — even one saying that [choice of occupation] may be at least partially determined by your genes. There seems no end to our appetite for stories that locate our essence in the laboratory. But at what risk?

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Dan Gilbert isn’t your typical Harvard egghead (though his balding pate does bear a striking resemblence to this morning’s hard-boiled breakfast…). His [website], which identifies him as the head of the Harvard Hedonic Psychology Lab, contains the expected lists of academic credentials and awards, but also links to a video entitled “The Hand Puppet Dance”; shows his impressive and august Curriculum Vitae, as well as a section on how to “Control A Man in A Chicken Suit.” As you may guess, Gilbert is exceptional in many ways, not least in that he can write — clearly and humorously — about very important things. Like Happiness.

If you stroll through Barnes & Noble you may find his book [Stumbling on Happiness] sitting uncomfortably in the Self Help section. It’s in the wrong place — this isn’t a Deepak Chopra exercise in better living through purple prose. Rather, like Freakonomics, this book belongs to that rare collection of popular science books that are so well-written and go down so easily you may not even realize your understanding of the world has changed profoundly until you finish the last sentence.

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A couple of scientists at the University of British Columbia have come up with some interesting [findings] about what kids find cool thesedays.

Apparently nice is the new snark. As described by surprisingly studly study director [Ilan Dar-Nimrod], “Just being nice and friendly and having talent — all the things your mom would love you to be — is the main part of how people perceive coolness now.” Dar-Nimrod sees the origins of the stereotypical cool rebel as arising from disempowered outgroups of the 1950s — blacks and youth — who wanted to resist the culture through personal expression. According to Dar-Nimrod’s colleague Ian Hansen, “open rebellion could get you killed, so a safer way to rebel would be ironic mockery of the dominant culture. Original coolness was a way of feeling like you were resisting oppression without actually doing what was necessary to throw it off.” Kids today are, apparently, not feeling very disgruntled about things and are more than happy to just get along. Exemplars of this trait are “cool”.

Of course, we can chalk a lot of this up to the general conservative vibe in the world and this study was, after all, conducted in Canada (sweet people, those Canadians), but it makes you wonder about who is consuming all the snarky too-ironic-by-half sludge that gets pumped from media outlets. Maybe not the next generation of media consumers. If I was Nick Denton I’d start wondering if I was really on the cutting edge of the next wave in publishing — or just pandering to the aging cynical wheezebags of the last generation.