A Small Rhetoric on Race:

There are those who cannot imagine that, little more than a hundred years ago, the majority of American caucasians were in agreement about the inferiority of blacks as a race. Is it that we are more sensitive now as a nation, more compassionate, more tolerant? Or are we essentially the same people as before, with only subtle shifts in ideologies and environments?

A key aspect that determines our prejudices and stereotypes is the limitations of what we experience. In the South during the nineteenth century, if one was raised to believe that blacks are stubborn, dull-witted, and slow, and if one was exposed only to a small contingent of poorly-kept slaves throughout life, then the affirmation of prejudice will usually supercede any other intervening ideology. Without negative evidence -- evidence that can be seen and felt and experienced first-hand -- and with similarly minded people reinforcing racism, there is little to be done to convince that Southerner that his persuasions are incorrect.

Yet in the modern day, we have unprecedent exposure to information and ease of access. We have only to turn on the television to watch an intelligent black citizen such as Colin Powell uphold our own assumptions: that blacks are equal and capable of success. We have only to turn the corner in America's college campuses to find a minority worthy of the bounds of human integrity. Certainly, there are damaging stereotypes as well, and also confirmations of degeneracy in projects and ghettos, but an intelligent modern American should be able to discern in that demographic continuum the innate qualities of the human race. A foolish white man does not represent his race, nor does a foolish black man.

In the end, it is perhaps a little of both. We are certainly raised to be more tolerant and respectful these days: to find equality where we may otherwise assume none and to realize the ridiculousness of unseen limitations. We also experience life in a radically different form and method than two centuries ago, where now a greater array of human contact can provide sufficient and realistic evidence for us to judge the validity of our prejudices. May we continue to use the blessings of progress wisely.  ¶ 11:00 PM

  More Online IQ Tests:

www.intelligencetest.com is a little better put together than the rest. Intended as a quick IQ test, the answers are in true/false format with short questions. They're designed to probe your logic and spatial skills, with a little math thrown in to mix it up. Here's one of the more interesting ones:

"Sam received $0.41 change from a purchase. If he received 6 coins 3 of the coins had to be dimes."

Now that takes quite a bit of mental acrobatics, trying out the most obvious permutations (you don't need to try all of them). You're not supposed to use pencil and paper, which makes it even harder. It's also timed. They even give you a nice summary of what the score distribution is, complete with a bell curve. The cap on getting them all right is 162, which varies with my older scores. Unfortunately, quite a few are just new versions of old brain-teasers, which made them feel like retreads. For example:

"A rancher is building a fence by stringing wire between posts 20 feet apart. If the fence is 100 feet long the rancher should use 5 posts."

In any case, I don't trust this test, exactly because it's too simply designed. Although the resultant bell curve and standard deviations look nice, there's just too much leeway: not enough data points (questions) to construct a meaningful number. Furthermore, the true/false format doesn't account as well for guessing as multiple choice does. Although competently made, it lacks the rigor of a more well-defined test.

Number of tests: 1 Number of questions: 30 Time limit: 10 mins Answers provided? No.  ¶ 12:15 PM

  Every shout, every rumble, every siren seems so amplified now. It feels like anything could happen again, though I have faith that the American people will not allow a second day of terror. I know these twinging fears will fade, but in this time of transition, I can only try and remain calm.  ¶ 1:04 PM

  I wouldn't say that I've been selfish these past few years, or even taking too much for granted. But I have been concerned so much with my own world -- college and grad school, science, skepticism, my family and friends -- and, though I don't think we're expected to know or think much outside these worlds of ours, it does seem so odd now. My former consciousness has been torn somehow, flapping in the breeze like so much other debris in the path of yesterday's desctruction. Yes, there will be rebuilding, as with all things human. Yet that world of peace I once reveled in is humbled now, as if family, friends, and science were all connected through the twin towers as their communal foundations were shaken. I can only wonder how long it will take before I can turn my thoughts once more to my theorizing and philosophizing: things now that seem so negligible. But normality has a very strong beck and call; whether it is its tenuous comfort or its appeal to sanity, I have every confidence it will overtake me again.  ¶ 8:33 AM

  Human Adaption: A Personal Story

It is the adaptibility of the human consciousness that permits us survival in disparate circumstances. I offer a slight example of my own to illustrate this point; though the situation was far from desperate, yet I was surprised by my own reactions.

In 2000, as I studied in Beijing for a month, I was assigned an old, though somewhat stately dorm room. Squalid to be sure -- with a shower and toilet sharing the same floorspace -- but air conditioned and furnished. None of this bothered me. No, what bothered me were the cockroaches: a dozen of them at a time invading my television, desk, and mini-fridge. I remember well my first thought: "I'm going to be staying here for five whole weeks?"

My first couple nights were spent with an empty bottle of iced tea and a flashlight, waiting for the little bastards to come out for me to dispatch them. I slept very poorly those first few nights, especially with mosquitos constantly buzzing in my ears. I finally bought a can of Raid and declared utter war on my Insectae foes. I dared them, even yelled at them, and killed them. But early in the second week, the thought of them began to fade, even as they stubbornly survived. And gradually, the room became my home. Though I still sprayed the cockroaches, they were merely an afterthought by the end of the term.

I lay amazed one of those last nights at the stark contrast between my first reaction and my final adaptation. A pessimist may say that I simply settled for less, but my optimism finds otherwise: that a man may make the best of his situation by accepting his limits as well as reaching out to them. Only if one is passive and grudging in one's acceptance is the pessimist verified. Humanity, then, has hope in its basic behaviors -- its cockroach-like instincts of survival -- if they are realized and put to use.  ¶ 5:11 PM

  More on Gump

Someone must have mentioned it before, but there is a distinct resemblance between Gump's mode of speech and that of Huckleberry Finn's. Perhaps that's why both tales succeed as great American fiction, for simple and old-fashioned American common sense bubbles beneath the minute observations. There is also that unwavering sense of boyish wonder, an appreciation for beauty normally bogged down by the cynicism of age. Yet both heroes succeed despite their naivete, Huck through cleverness and Forrest through determination, but both also by sheer luck.

In fact, there are several more in-depth treatments of this comparison on the web, as I've found out. They may be worth a read, just search for them.  ¶ 8:19 PM

  Just an Incidental Note:

[Warning: possible spoilers here for the movie Forrest Gump.]

Perhaps I'm in a peculiar state of mind, but there seems a strange coincidence in my watching Forrest Gump for the first time and also reading Wonderful Life. At the end of the movie, sitting pensively at the school bus stop, Forrest reflects:

"Jenny, I don't know if Momma was right or if, if it's Lieutenant Dan. I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time."

Destiny and accidental-like, the consilience of which is the central theme of Gould's book. It takes a wonderful metaphor -- and I really enjoyed the movie -- to make the concept take root. Say what you will of fate and determinism; the perception of chance and luck are the mediums through which we learn to appreciate life's peaks and troughs. We can't all possess Forrest's innocence and candor, but we can learn to take things easy and not overanalyze our experiences. For some things are out of our control, be it from the inevitable or from the unpredictable.  ¶ 11:29 PM

  Wonderful Life: In Retrospect

Now that I've finished Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life, I must reflect back on my earlier statements. I had said that Gould appeared condescending and that he unfairly attributed mistaken beliefs to large sections of the populace. Although this tone is certainly still there later in the book, the progress of logic made me reconsider concerning the state of biology education over the last decade. Since the book came out in 1989, upheavals in evolution theory took place that made themselves felt even in high schools.

As I took advanced biology in 1996, it was already commonly held in our classroom that contingency and natural selection shared an equal hold on evolutionary history. This, the focal point of Gould's book, is the theory that order of physical laws is not enough to explain life as we know it, that randomness plays its part as well. I think that I felt insulted by Gould's statements only because I had been educated in an environment that was already receptive to his and his colleagues' thoughts. That is, since his book fights the "iconography of the cone" and the "ladder of increasing complexity" -- which were already quite discarded in our classroom -- it seems to me in 2001 that his arguments are petty. But it was quite relevant in 1989 (and, admittedly, still is in much of the world). It's still a quite a testament to the infuence of his work.  ¶ 7:03 PM

  On Why Science Isn't (Necessarily) a Religion

My friend Neil once told me that he believes science is a religion. He asserted that scientists, by their nature, must accept on faith the material nature of the world. Such faith would then constitute the same type of faith more generally associated with religion. In essence, reality is not definitive and thus, by association, neither is science. Although I did not give him a rebuttal at the time, the notion intrigued me. I now believe that science may be a religion for some scientists, but not for most. In other words, science is not necessarily a religion.

The beauty of science is as a descriptive and predictive mechanism rather than as a philosophy of reality. Martin Gardner likes to talk about the "phaneron," which is the assumed material world of each individual: that which each person can sense as their own universe. The job of science, then, is simply to make the phaneron understandable and predictable for the purposes of survival and, hopefully, progress. Science says nothing about the nature of the phaneron itself: whether it is really "real" or just an imagination. Those who believe in the latter are called solipsists. For them, their phaneron is created by their own minds; Shirley Maclaine has said that she believes she creates everything and everyone in her world. But even in this dreamworld mindset, science is applicable, not as an explanation of our existence so much as a language within which we may ask and answer questions about things we experience in the phaneron.

Simply worded, science does not ask its practitioners to believe that its set of assumptions about the materialistic world are true. A scientist can perform his work entirely independent of the notion that science is "right," "real," or ever will be. Science is intimately associated with the phaneron; that is, it is meant to be compatible with simply our five senses. No buy-in is needed, no leap of materialistic faith. A man can believe that nothing is real, yet still be able to appreciate the predictive value of the deduced laws of nature. He can say that balls do not exist, that gravity does not exist, and that the ground does not exist; but he may say that what he perceives to be a ball will probably fall at 9.8m/s/s and hit what he perceives to be the ground because that’s the way it’s happened countless millions of time before.

But we also must keep in mind what David Hume warned: that causality is not necessarily true. Because the sun has risen every day does not mean it will definitely rise again tomorrow. But it means that it most likely will. We can thus see that science is a creature of probabilities, not of certainies: it can never tell us everything, nor can it always be right. Science is a product of humans, as are our individual phanerons: none of the above of which are perfect. As Carl Sagan liked to point out, science approaches the truth asymptotically. It comes ever nearer, but succeeds only so far as human ability is able to take us.

There is no need then, to have any faith in the foundations of science: namely, that our universe is real and follows set laws, constants, and axioms. Yet we ought to embrace science nonetheless because it has proved itself through time. The daily weather forecast, the next fly-by of Haley’s comet, the minimum tensile strength required to haul a piano up five flights of stairs: all these show the basic predictive applications of science. Science is a religion only to those willing to take the leap of faith and claim that the phaneron is real, though it cannot be proven empirically. For others like myself, science is merely a tool and a language, a spawn of human cognition, whereas religion is -- theoretically -- a product of the supernatural.  ¶ 2:19 AM