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3.05.2007

Cooking, Toxicity, Men's Fertility, Old People, Darwin, and God

In other words, everything but the kitchen sink.

Below is a list of interesting New York Times articles that I've read over the past few weeks. But first, here are lots of good Judaic sources, courtesy of the Charles River Beit Midrash.

I could write a whole post about most of these articles, but I don't have time. They are in chronological order.

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Comments:
You mean everything including the kitchen sink!
 
Good links, although I sure wish people would stop talking about "men's fertility" - I think the word they're looking for is virility...
 
David,

Hmmm... I had never really thought of that (fertility vs. virility) before. According to Merriam-Webster Online, one definition of fertile is "capable of breeding or reproducing." I'm fairly sure that medically speaking, it is a term that is used for both women and men. As for virility, I don't think that word would have made sense in this context. According to Merriam-Webster Online, virile means, among other things, "capable of functioning as a male in copulation." The article isn't talking about that. It's talking about the genetic mutations that acrue in male sperm over time, making older men more likely to produce children with detrimental genetic abnormalities.

So I'll grant you that maybe "fertility" was the wrong word, since, from what I recall, the article wasn't talking much about the ability of older men have children (i.e., their fertility), but the higher likelihood of such children having problems.

If you think these two words mean something different than that, let me know.
 
Re: Darwin's God. Haven't read it yet but this might interest you:

(cross posted by me with other thoughts as well at http://sweetrose.blogspot.com/2007/03/anthropological-look-at-religion.html#comments


I recently began reading Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer who shows how cognitive inference systems (that were necessary for our ancestors to cope with the challenges of life in bands, hunting for food, surviving drought, escaping enemies, forming alliances etc.) developed through evolution and have become part of how human minds work. These inference systems work in very specific ways and those ways coincidentally make it easier for the mind to accept religious, supernatural, or magical ideas (to different extents). This is different than the idea in Marc Hauser’s “book ‘Moral Minds’ that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules...” Boyer claims that there are universal mechanisms for processing information that would allow for moral rules to develop but NOT that there are specific mechanisms designed for this. IT IS A BY-PRODUCT.

Boyer stresses that people DO NOT suspend their reasoning and allow ideas of religion in their minds. Rather, our minds have developed systems that allow religion credible entry into our thoughts.

Just one example of an inference system is the agency-detection system allows us to ascribe ‘agency’ as the cause of a particular phenomenon. If we hear rustling of the leaves we immediately infer that there is some agent causing it. The first thing that occurs is that there is someone there, an animal, or predator. Upon further reflection we can ascribe its cause to the wind but our initial impulse is that there is someone out there doing something. This was beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint because you don’t get eaten by having too many false positives (overestimating the danger of there being a predator making noise in the leaves). There are a whole host of other inference systems that when looked at in totality combine to make a belief in a non-corporeal being the agent of action in our lives more believable.

[I haven’t gotten to far into the book so I can’t elaborate much more on this but it is an interesting read so far]. I’ll post a more total summary on my site in the future.
 
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