Dean's World

As expected, Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, along with the entire UN Intergivernmental Panel on Climate Change. Reportedly, Gore will donate his half of the $1.5 million prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

Of course, as Christopher Hitchens also noted a few weeks ago, this event puts the question of whether Gore will run for President into renewed focus.

and, in case my own preferences aren't obvious, RUN, AL, RUN!

That's one of the questions this book (via Glenn) asks — and their answer probably isn't something Robert Spencer would like any more than Muslims, or that the Christian religious Right would approve of.

The authors, who are evolutionary psychologists, assert that the correlation is actually the result of just two lines in the Koran — the one permitting polygamy and the one promising 72 virgins — while the rest is just a product of how our evolved psychology reacts to the situation of polygamy.

The authors find evidence that polygamy (at least, the many women for one man version) causes young men to be far more violent in all societies in which it occurs. Why? Because it forces so many men to be total reproductive losers by ensuring the high-status men monopolize the available wives (as opposed to monogamous societies, where there is generally one woman available for every man), beacuse the resulting competition is so violent, and because successful reproduction reduces men's tendency to be violent.

Interestingly, there is considerable evidence polygamy is man's natural state, and societies probably devised monogamy as a means to reduce violent competition.

The authors make the point that a man with even one real-world wife is unlikely to trade her for 72 in the afterlife, but in a situation where no women are available, it starts to sound a lot better. This makes sense to me. Guys, think about having 72 hot virgins — really think about it (you know what I mean). If you had little prospect of finding a real woman, that fantasy might quickly become obsession.

But are they right? I don't know for sure, but it seems persuasive. Anyways, it's a fun read, since evolutionary psychology is all about sex. Some of their conclusions seem overstated, but they draw a lot of sensible conclusions about why humans behave the way they do, based on who we are descended from (successful reproducers) and who we are not descended from (reproductive losers).

Computer programmers and engineers of other complex systems are very familiar with the concept of a "cascading failure," which is when a failure in one place causes a surprising failure somewhere else, which in turn causes a whole host of failures in a bunch of other places at once.

It's a ubiquitous phenomenon, really. You see the same thing when a small crack in a dam eventually results in collapse of the whole system.

A few years ago the Esmay household found itself in the middle of the Northeast Blackout of 2003 that took down most of the electrical grid in large parts of the United States and Canada. We remember it very well: we were days without power in the middle of a hot summer, and it was all caused, according to reports, because ultimately, a single generating plant in Eastland, Ohio went down, which happened because the company that owned it failed to trim trees properly in their area over a short period of time. The result was over 100 power plants shut down, about 10 million Canadians without power, and about 1 out of 7 Americans without power--for days.

It's long been my contention that the peer-reviewed funding system run by the U.S. Federal government and many international agencies has suffered from this problem in numerous areas, most especially because of failure to admit the possibility of this problem ever occurring. Thus when someone questions current scientific consensus on any of a wide variety of subjects, they are portrayed as believing in "conspiracies" or of "attacking science" or "attacking medical professionals" or "denialism" any of a host of other counterproductive defensive reactions.

Take, for example, a recent book by Gary Taubes, a correspondent for Sciencem Magazine magazine (one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals on Earth). Taubes has recently published a book: Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. Taubes is not the first to rise up and say that most of what we've been told about dietary fat causing heart disease, obesity, and cancer is bunk, but he's maybe one of the most prestigious so far. I fully expect him to be thoroughly attacked, but I am also pretty damned sure he's correct. Lowering the amount of fat in your diet is very unlikely, in most people, to reduce risk of obesity, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Trans-fats, maybe. But regular natural fats? Not very likely at all.

By the way, I've been saying this for more than a decade, even back when I had my blog-before-blogs and published hand-html-coded articles on my personal web site that I've preserved from those days. See The World's Biggest Fad Diet (which I have it on good authority thoroughly pi**ed off Dean Ornish and his sycophantic vegan-worshipping supporters, by the way), and also The Low Fat, Low Cholesterol Diet Is Ineffective, which I got permission ten years ago personally from Dr. Laura Corr to publish on the web, and I've kept online ever since.

Fat is good for you. You need it to be healthy. And yes, saturated fats like you get in things like butter and bacon and cheese are needed in a healthy diet. After decades of study, no one has ever shown that a reduced fat, or reduced (natural, not trans-) saturated fat diet reduces heart disease or overall mortality. Indeed, while there is some minor evidence that it might be peripherally helpful, there's also some evidence that such diets are actually harmful.

Yet watch the fury that comes pouring out of some people when you say that. I've experienced it firsthand, and it's almost frightening to behold.

You tell people this and they tell you you want to kill people, particularly old people or those with heart disease. They'll tell you you're attacking the medical profession. Doctors and nurses. Heroic researchers. Science itself. And of course, you must believe in "conspiracy theories." Cascading failure. It's not that hard to understand. It only requires admitting that there may be a problem and instituting needed reform in how we fund scientific research.