Just read “E.T. and God,” an article by Paul Davies in the current Atlantic Monthly about what would happen to religion if extraterrestrial life of any sort were discovered. The author tends to slide about between that question and the narrower issue of what would happen to the theologies of the major world religions, especially Christianity. As Davies himself notes, the discovery of E.T. would do all kinds of things for groups like the Raelians. (Funny how their clone story dropped off the map, by the way. Whatever happened to the allegedy respectable science journalist who was going to verify their claims, I wonder?)

Davies shows a marked weakness for the argument from design, and in particular its “anthropic principle” subgenus:

bq. If life is found to be widespread in the universe, the new argument goes, then it must emerge rather easily from nonliving chemical mixtures, and thus the laws of nature must be cunningly contrived to unleash this remarkable and very special state of matter, which in turn is a conduit to an even more remarkable and special state: mind.

He also paraphrases a biologist:

bq. Simon Conway Morris, of Cambridge University, makes his own case for a “ladder of progress,” invoking the phenomenon of convergent evolution — the tendency of similar-looking [sic] organisms to evolve independently in similar ecological niches … Conway Morris maintains that the “humanlike niche” is likely to be filled on other planets that have advanced life. He even goes so far as to argue that extraterrestrials would have a humanoid form. It is not a great leap from this conclusion to the belief that extraterrestrials would sin, have consciences, struggle with ethical questions, and fear death.

Hey, why stop there? I bet they also have homologues to non-fat vanilla lattes, frat parties and New Labour. I remember seeing a standup comic do a routine where he said he was an alien from a distant galaxy, where life was wholly different from Earth. “We have no concept of love, and no death,” he said, “and a different-shaped gearstick on the Honda Civic.”

As for the anthropic principle — the idea that the fundamental physical constants of the universe are so tightly calibrated that life could not have happened if any of them were a tiny bit different, and hence that the Universe was waiting for, e.g., Orange County to emerge — well, it’s always seemed like a lot of badly-reasoned old cobblers to me. It’s a bit like wondering how eggs know what shape eggcups are, or feeling pleased that God has organized things in such a way that the sun rises in the morning, just when people are ready to go to work.

“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000662.html points to this developing “story”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059479073692&p=1012571727102 in the FT as an important test case for the EU. Under the “Growth and Stability Pact,” which lays down the rules for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), all participating EU member states have to fulfil certain criteria in their national macroeconomic policies. Among other things, they’re not supposed to run a budget deficit over 3% of GDP, except in situations of dire emergency. It now appears that Germany is going to exceed this limit for the third year in a row. Ironically, it was Germany that pushed for tough rules on budget deficits in the first place – the German central bank was terrified that Italy and other ‘less responsible’ member states would go on spending sprees after they joined the EMU club.

The European Commission is making noises about keelhauling the Germans for their bad behavior, which Dan sees as a key test case for EU integration theory. International relations scholars who study the EU have traditionally been divided into two camps – those who believe that the EU is a standard international organization, with no independent power to do anything that its more powerful member states don’t want it to do, and ‘supranationalists’ who believe that it’s something more than the sum of its members. Dan is sympathetic to the former point of view; I tend to adhere to the latter. Dan thinks that the Commission is likely to back down on its threats, so that Germany, which is the most powerful member state, prevails – he believes that this will provide powerful evidence that the supranationalists are dead wrong. I think Dan’s prediction as to the likely empirical outcome is right – but I don’t think that this tells us very much about the bigger theoretical questions that Dan (and I) are interested in.

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Via both CalPundit and Mark Kleiman comes the news that Trotsky’s great-grand-daughter has a high-profile position in US administations as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She seems to have an odd line on the incompatibility of science and politics. An interesting nugget of historical gossip, anyway.

I missed the beginning of the Hutton Inquiry and I’m only just beginning to catch up. The details of yesterday’s evidence have been pushed down the headlines by the bigger news from Iraq and Israel, but it seems to me at least that yesterday’s evidence marks a major shift in favour of the government and against the BBC. Campbell performed well, but the really important revelation was Andrew Gilligan’s email to an aide of Liberal Democrat MP David Chidgey (Original email here). Gilligan – himself an “unsatisfactory witness” to the same select committee – is revealed both to have planted (if that’s not too strong a word) some of the questions that put David Kelly under so much pressure, and (despite having huffed and puffed about the need for journalists to protect sources) effectively “outed” Kelly as the source for his colleague Susan Watts. No wonder the BBC’s support for Gilligan seems to be fading, with their reaction limited to an anodyne “We are looking at this e-mail and will deal with it in the context of the Hutton inquiry.”

We shouldn’t forget, of course, that the government deliberately focused on the narrow issue of Campbell’s role in their row with the BBC in order to deflect attention from the big issue of whether the WMD case for war was deliberately exaggerated. But as far as the immediate political battle goes, the BBC looks to be on the ropes.

When I first saw this line on the new Bush campaign website, I thought it must be another parody.

bq. Ruth supports President Bush because… of his work for job creation and economic growth.

You know, if my job creation record looked like this, I think I would be trying to pretend I’d had other priorities the last 30 months or so.

I was a little puzzled by something Kos said in discussing the latest polling from New Hampshire. The poll has Dean at 28% and Kerry at 21%, among a sample of 600 voters. The poll officially has a margin of error of 4%, so Kos was unwilling to call it a clear lead for Dean. This policy strikes me as rather conservative.

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“Philosophy Talk”, a new public radio show hosted by two esteemed Stanford philosophers, John Perry and Ken Taylor, pilots tomorrow on KALW. The show is at 1pm Pacific Time (that’s 4pm in New York, 9pm in London and 6am in Melbourne, if I’ve done my sums correctly) and if the technology is working should be available in live streaming. The show tomorrow is on lying, with Tamar Shapiro (also from Stanford philosophy) and Paul Ekman, the world’s foremost authority on emotions and facial expressions, among the guests. It should be fun, and it should certainly be better than what passes for ‘talk’ radio in this country. If you want more info about the show, this puff piece from the Stanford Reporter gives John Perry a lot of space to set out what he wants to do with the show.

A trawl around the blogosphere finds Lance Knobel in agreement with a piece by Will Hutton in the Observer on the MMR vaccine and media reporting of science. Hutton’s main point is that although most (British) doctors believe the vaccine is safe and that there is no link to autism, the media report the debate to give a completely different impression.

bq. The dissident, so-called whistleblower, however dodgy the research on which his or her ‘evidence’ is based, is afforded massive attention; it is taken as axiomatic that the mainstream, evidence-based government-endorsed view will be self-serving and wrong. More than half of us believe the medical profession is divided over the health risks of MMR; in fact, it is more or less united that there is no risk.

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For me, one of the interesting things about visiting another country is the slight strangeness of the everyday. In France, for example, everything is slightly different from England: light fittings, electrical sockets, window catches and openings, the fact that they don’t use kettles, the typography on signs etc etc. Having lived in France for a while, I really really enjoy films like Polanski’s The Tenant and Depardieu’s Loulou for the way in which they get the detail of French life. Ireland just isn’t weird like this. Everything is the same as back home … or so it seems. Then, having been lulled into complacency by the apparent familiarity of everyday objects one is pulled up short by something that just isn’t how an English brain expects it to be.

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From the “curriculum vitae”:http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/downloads/curriculum_vitae/ct135.pdf of renowned Columbia sociologist, Chuck Tilly.

bq. Among his negative distinctions he prizes 1) never having held office in a professional association, 2) never having chaired a university department or served as a dean, 3) never having been an associate professor, 4) rejection every single time he has been screened as a prospective juror. He had also hoped never to publish a book with a subtitle, but subtitles somehow slipped into two of his co-authored books.

Pauline and I are just back from a ten-day holiday in Ireland. It was our first time there and we were impressed. It also turned out to be a pretty smart place to visit given the prevailing weather conditions: untypically there was hardly a drop of rain, but the temperatures were comfortable rather than lethally hot (as they were elswhere in Europe).

I may opine further on the country over the coming days, but given CT’s numerous Irish contingent, I’m sure to get slapped down by those with greater expertise. Without them, though, the holiday probably wouldn’t have happened and certainly wouldn’t have taken the form it did. Thanks first to Henry (and family), whom we were lucky enough to meet up with and enjoy a wonderful lunch of Killorglin smoked salmon provided by his mum, which we followed by an exciting drive across the Kerry mountains. Here’s a partial Crooked Timber team photo in Kerry (Henry is the tall, handsome one).

And thanks to Kieran, whose post last year about Newgrange set me thinking about visiting Ireland. Newgrange is a remarkable and magical place which puts Stonehenge in the shade. 5200 years old, perfectly aligned with the sun for the winter solstice, and absolutely dry inside after five millennia. What an achievement.

Actually, more like Conference Rock’n’Roll. The American Sociological Association’s annual meeting got off to a decent start last night, with a performance in the main ballroom by a band called Thin Vita. It’s made up of, amongst others, John Sutton (guitar/vocals) and current ASA President Bill Bielby (bass). So I think Bill easily tops the list of Heads of Social Science Associations That You’d Want To Have A Beer With. Towards the end of the night, my Ph.D adviser Paul DiMaggio appeared onstage as guest vocalist. Bielby and Sutton are at UCSB, which is a pretty relaxed place, and I’ve seen Paul perform before. But I have to say I got a fresh perspective on the Midwestern tradition of occupational mobility and stratification studies by watching Bob Hauser and other Wisconsinites tear up the dance floor.

Now it’s time to consult the brick of a program and figure out what sessions I’m going to go to.

One of my favorite silly science fiction novels from the 1960s, Fred Hoyle’s _Ossian’s Ride_, has long descriptions of the remote part of Ireland where I’m staying. Hoyle was Britain’s Astronomer Royal, and the main proponent of the now unfashionable Steady State theory of the universe’s origins (or, more precisely, lack of origins). He also wrote a few bad sf novels; _Ossian’s Ride_ is probably the worst of them. However, it’s interesting for what it says about attitudes to Ireland in the period when it was written.

_Ossian’s Ride_ presents an Ireland which has been transformed by a new industrial revolution. Irish firms have suddenly and mysteriously started to manufacture new super-light, super-strong materials, and the world wants to know how they’re doing it. But Irish authorities have declared large parts of the countryside off limits to foreigners. The hero of the novel (who’s British, if I remember correctly), goes through a series of sub-39 Steps adventures before finding his way to the Ring of Kerry, where he discovers that aliens have landed beside Caragh Lake, and have been giving the locals a helping hand.

For all of the novel’s hokey plotting, it’s fun to read if you know the places that Hoyle is writing about – he gets the geography right, so I imagine that he took a few holidays around here himself. And it’s interesting to note that a 1960’s UK scientist thought that a tech-savvy Ireland was a suitably outrageous starting point for a sf thriller. And that he presumed that the Irish would need help from space aliens to do anything about it. Ireland was then regarded (with some justification) as a bucolic, pre-industrial backwater. Of course, Ireland has since developed a world-class technology manufacturing and software sector, skipping past the industrial revolution without any alien intervention worth talking about (unless Bill Gates is from outer space).

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/kerry.jpg!
Insert alien manufactory here

In my neighborhood, power was out for less than an hour. A few blocks away, it didn’t go out at all. In parts of New York City, it’s still not back. This morning, New York governor George Pataki said: “If you have power now, in addition to looking out for your neighbors, making sure everyone is OK, conserve energy. Don’t turn on the dishwasher, don’t use the air conditioner unless it’s absolutely essential.”

Now I’m all in favor of conserving energy, and pitching in to do one’s share is certainly a good thing, especially during a crisis. But I can’t help feeling some resentment, here. After all, we’ve decided to rely on market mechanisms and profit-making corporations to supply electricity. I’m not necessarily opposed to deregulation – frankly, I don’t know enough to say either way. But once that decision has been made, I do resent being told that my civic duty requires certain market behavior. After all, in this case, it’s the power companies that are not living up to their end of the bargain, not the consumers. It’s not that they are now making a windfall profit from the blackout – they’ve already done that by sticking with an “old and antiquated” infrastructure and not investing in the necessary upgrades that would have prevented this in the first place.

Instead of admonishing consumers to modify their behavior, why not force the power companies to adopt a market-based solution? When the power companies are unable to meet demand, force them to offer consumers an incentive to conserve – say, a voucher for each kilowatt hour they use below their average that can be redeemed for free power when the crisis is over. Otherwise, appeals to one’s civic duty smack of being just another marketing ploy.