Author: Ophelia Benson

About Jytte Klausen’s book and the cartoons and other images of Mohammed that have been removed on the advice of various people who gave that advice.

Director of Yale Press John Donatich made the decision after consulting with a “couple dozen” diplomats, intelligence and academic experts. “I didn’t feel this was a censorship issue,” Donatich told AFP. “It had become a security issue,” he said, adding he was concerned for the safety of Yale Press employees.

Well, like it or not, it decidedly is a censorship issue, even if the motivation for the censorship is concern for security. The two can’t be separated when things are being removed from books because of real or perceived threats of violence. That is some heavy-duty censorship.

I listened to the BBC’s World Have Your Say on the subject on Monday, and Jytte Klausen there said that the people who gave their advice were all security experts or diplomats and they always advise against taking any risks. Apparently the advice Yale University Press got was distorted by the kind of people they decided to ask.

Klausen disputes the grounds for cutting out the cartoons. “Security experts were asked to provide advice without having the manuscript, without having the context in which these illustrations were going to be reprinted,” she said. “I think it’s very serious to suppress illustrations when not a single Muslim has protested the book and there were some Muslim reviewers.”

Exactly. This was what seemed to be about to happen with Does God Hate Women? – worries about projected Muslim reactions when not a single Muslim had protested the book – anticipatory silencing. Fortunately our publishers are stalwart and sensible, and the book went ahead, and no protests materialized – unless we count a laughable little Facebook group, which we don’t, any more than we count a Facebook group about Pluto.

Mona Eltahawy knows what’s what.

The controversy that many might recall as “Danish newspaper publishes cartoons of the prophet; Muslim world goes berserk” was actually much more complex. What occurred across many Muslim-majority countries in 2006 was a clear exercise in manufacturing outrage.

And now we’re stuck with it. What a horrible joke.

Italy’s drug regulation agency has authorized the use of RU-486 even though the Vatican says it will excommunicate doctors who prescribe the drug and patients who use it – so for one thing Italy’s drug regulation agency perhaps has the sense to realize that not all Italians are Catholics and thus not all Italians should be governed by what the Vatican threatens to do to Catholics. Well done Italy’s drug regulation agency.

The Vatican, which opposes all forms of abortion in the belief that human life is sacred from the point of conception, says the pill is no different from surgical abortion. “There will be excommunication for the doctor, the woman and anyone who encourages its use,” said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, emeritus president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and the pope’s top expert on bioethical issues.

Good old Vatican, doing its level best to mess up more people’s lives ‘in the belief that’ something completely meaningless mumble mumble. Grazie, Monsignor Sgreccia.

Sean Carroll has kissed Bloggingheads good-bye.

It’s important to understand exactly what the objections are…Namely: if BH.tv has something unique and special going for it, it’s the idea that it’s not just a shouting match, or mindless entertainment. It’s a place we can go to hear people with very different perspectives talk about issues about which they may strongly disagree, but with a presumption that both people are worth listening to. If the issue at hand is one with which I’m sufficiently familiar, I can judge for myself whether I think the speakers are respectable; but if it’s not, I have to go by my experience with other dialogues on the site.

What I objected to about the creationists was that they were not worthy opponents with whom I disagree; they’re just crackpots. Go to a biology conference, read a biology journal, spend time in a biology department; nobody is arguing about the possibility that an ill-specified supernatural “designer” is interfering at whim with the course of evolution. It’s not a serious idea. It may be out there in the public sphere as an idea that garners attention — but, as we all know, that holds true for all sorts of non-serious ideas. If I’m going to spend an hour of my life listening to two people have a discussion with each other, I want some confidence that they’re both serious people. Likewise, if I’m going to spend my own time and lend my own credibility to such an enterprise, I want to believe that serious discussions between respectable interlocutors are what the site is all about.

That’s why mixing respectable interlocutors with crackpots is so insidious and destructive – because the respectability bleeds into the crackpottery, lending it a veneer of seriousness that it can’t aquire on the merits. That is not a useful situation! (That’s why Michael Ruse never should have teamed up with William Dembski on that book and why Cambridge shouldn’t have published it.)

Carl Zimmer also said so long.

In my job as a science writer, I try my best to convey an accurate picture of where science is at the moment. That means I do not write about just anything. I write about research and ideas that have held up under scrutiny. Sometimes that means writing about an important new development in a line of research that has emerged from peer review. Sometimes that means writing about a fierce debate between scientists who all have made a lot of important discoveries on the topic. It doesn’t mean writing about creationism–or medical quackery, or any other non-science–in a way that implies it really has scientific merit. I have sometimes blogged about creationists, but chiefly to explain why scientists do not take them seriously.

I brought these standards from my writing to my work at Bloggingheads. So I was not happy to find a creationist holding forth there (and never even being challenged about a 6,000-year-old Earth).

More from Jerry Coyne.

Jerry Coyne took a look at a hypothesis that depression is an evolutionary adaptation.

in two new papers by Andrews and Thompson. In short, their “analytical rumination hypothesis” (ARH) proposes that the “malady” we call depression is actually an adaptive behavior built into our ancestors by natural selection. When facing difficult social problems, selection is said to have promoted behaviors that make individuals withdraw from life, ceasing to engage in formerly pleasurable activities like socializing, eating, and sex. This is all in the service of rumination: freed from other activities and commitments, the depressed individual is said to analyze the problems that led to depression in the first place, eventually solving them and re-entering society. This is “adaptive” because individuals who lacked the depressive syndrome would not be able to solve their life problems so easily, and would leave fewer offspring than individuals who shut down and ruminated.

Part of what’s so interesting about that is that it’s so strikingly implausible on the face of it. (There’s no surprise ending – Jerry doesn’t say aha but it’s more plausible than it seems, and commenters are nearly unanimous in being unconvinced.) It seems to be pretty common knowledge that depressed thinking is bad thinking – distorted in many ways, and monumentally unhelpful for any kind of functioning. (As Jerry points out, there is the little matter of suicide for instance.) Mind you, depressed people are better than non-depressed people at giving a realistic assessment of their odds of getting in a car crash and the like, and also at avoiding the Lake Wobegon effect – but that seems to be the only accuracy-enhancing payoff. Other than that…depressed thinking is crap! It’s not the kind of thinking that helps people analyze the problems that led to depression in the first place and then solve them. That kind of thinking depends on not being depressed. I’m aware of this just from common or garden bad moods, so I’m also aware the effect must be orders of magnitude worse in real depression. I’m also aware of that from having been around depressed people – they are not humming with useful rumination and problem-solving, to put it mildly.

All this seems too obvious to mention – like saying that rain makes things wet. So…it’s interesting that Andrews and Thompson think it isn’t.