I would be remiss if I did not point out that this is the best blogging under the TBND umbrella in a long while.

As if West Virginia hasn't been in the national news enough, now they're getting flack for using Dance Dance Revolution in the middle schools gym classes.

Thursday morning, Bill Littlefield had a commentary on Boston's public radio station WBUR criticizing the policy. He compared using video games in fitness to using junk food to get children to eat healthier. He said kids will run around and play games outside not because it's competitive, but because it's fun, like all you need is a playground and a ball to keep kids from getting obese.

Littlefield needs to leave skinny New England more often. There are playgrounds and balls all over the country, yet child obesity continues to rise. It's a major problem in rural areas, but the obesity epidemic is growing everywhere, as Bad Blood, the recent New York Times series on Diabetes makes clear. There's obviously a major problem, and Littlefield refuses to recognize that traditional methods aren't addressing it.

Read the rest of Monica taking Littlefield to task.

When Christmas rolled around last month, and my family wanted to know what to get me, I emailed them links to PZ Myers' Updated Book List for Evolutionists. As a result, I came home with copies of Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautifu and Andrew Brown's The Darwin Wars.

Myers describes The Darwin Wars as "a study of the sociology of evolutionary biology." In reality, it is little more than a blow-by-blow account of the 'war' between Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay Gould on the one hand, and E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett on the other. It is, here and there, a lot of fun. He describes the birth of Richard Dawkins as having been attended by a pair of fairies.

The good fairy gave him good looks, intelligence, charm, and a chair at Oxford specially endowed for him. The bad fairy studied him for a while and said: `Give him a gift for metaphor.'

Elsewhere, he quotes biologist John Maynard Smith descirbing a theory as "Absolute fucking crap," and the footnote attributes this to "Personal communication, walking back from the pub."

However, I was disappointed, because I expected to learn more about evolution from the book. The fact that he focuses on a relatively small subset of the researchers working to advance evolutionary understanding would be ok, if I felt that he did a particularly good job of explaining the views of the two camps. Unfortunately, I don't. He makes it clear that Gould believed that "natural selection 'is not the exclusive means of [genetic] modification.'" But he never says what else Gould thought was going on. He makes it clear that Gould objected strongly to Wilson's program of sociobiology, without ever explaining why anyone would believe in Wilson's argument.

And, because he has elected to focus only on this corner of the subject, he is forced to leave out much of interest. The rise in the last twenty five years of evolutionary developmental biology is left out entirely, while no less than two whole chapters are devoted to memes, which amount to a throwaway thought experiment in a book by Dawkins that was subsequently taken too far.

By contrast, I was surprised by how much I learned from Sean Carroll's slim volume. Endless Forms Most Beautiful describes the basic ideas and some of the history of evolutionary developmental biology. Dr. Carroll, a pioneer in the field, spends a good deal of time describing the effects of specific genes and proteins on the process of a fertilized egg growing into an organism. In a way that is refreshing for a popular science book, Carroll never skimps on the biology. At times when another author might have resorted to a metaphor, he buckles down and teaches a course on the logic of genetic switches.

In one of the most frustrating passages in The Darwin Wars, Brown quotes a full half of a page from an important paper on kin selection. The original author, William Hamilton, has just drawn the reader in when Brown breaks out of the quotation and ended the passage with "- and so on for two paragraphs of mathematics, after which he surfaced to say...." Brown seems to feel the need to shield the reader from the meat of this important work, as though he assumes the reader is either not interested or incapable of understanding.

Carroll, on the other hand, fills his work with detailed explanations and colorful photographs. As a good teacher must, he assumes his readers are both interested and capable, and is willing to hold our hands until we've made it through to the next chapter.

Another nice thing about Carroll is that, unlike Dawkins and Gould, he does not indulge in many just-so stories. There is much to be said for these, and I recommend that everyone read The Blind Watchmaker, which amounts to a collection of them. But there is precious little science to them. In Watchmaker. Dawkins discusses mimicry in butterflies, and attempts to come up with a plausible story for explaining how natural selection could take an organism which looks 5% like a dangerous cousin or 5% like a twig and, in a series of small steps, make the resemblance nearly perfect. Carroll, on the other hand, admits that this is a "mystery," but discusses the research avenues which may lead to clues, and the specific protein groups which probably play important roles in butterfly wing construction.

Carroll was not visited by the bad fairy at birth. He uses metaphor sparingly, and at times I wished that he had let himself go a bit more, that he had explained an idea a second or third time, with a bit more flourish. He is without other writers’ willingness to paint in bold strokes, and as a consequence Andrew Brown will probably never write a book about him. But he is full of ideas, and you will finish his book feeling smarter.

All in all, The Darwin Wars is worth picking up if you already understand both Gould and Dawkins, and you're interested in learning more about the characters themselves. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, on the otherhand, should be enjoyed by any lay person interested in biology.

If you were on any Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains or in any stations recently (which I certainly wasn't), you might have noticed some ads from a rather provocative campaign (via FindLaw):

The ads criticize Roe v. Wade and ask: "Abortion: Have we gone too far?" They also contain specific anti-abortion arguments, such as this one: "The Supreme Court says you can choose: after the heart starts beating, after its arms and legs appear, after all organs are present, after the sex is apparent, after it sucks its thumb, after it responds to sounds, after it could survive outside the womb."

Now, this raises quite a few interesting questions. The first one that comes to mind is, who thought this would fly in San Francisco of all places? But more importantly, what can be done about this outrage? And an outrage it is for people in the area:

Unsurprisingly, pro-abortion-rights groups are concerned about the ad campaign. Many activists have taken to defacing or destroying the posters. Indeed, the ads' backers have already exhausted their supply of replacements, and have had to order many additional prints. Some pro-Roe advocates blame BART officials for permitting the ads. As one organizer put it: "[E]very woman has noticed them. I couldn't believe BART would allow something like this. Why are they doing this?"

The author of the article (law professor Vikram David Amar) knows the right answer, of course. BART officials cannot constitutionally deny the political speech of one group just because they (or BART riders) don't agree with the opinions expressed.

This seems a pretty obvious conclusion, but I can understand why some will find it unsatisfactory. As Amar points out, the only way BART could suppress these political ads would be a remove all political ads from their trains and stations. But this is also problematic in light of the First Amendment precedent, which is used to protect generally against:

laws or policies that simply discriminate on the basis of "content" or "subject matter." A law banning political ads may be viewpoint-neutral in some sense, but it is certainly subject-matter-discriminatory, treating political speech less favorably than, say, commercial speech. And subject-matter-discriminatory laws are usually subjected to the same judicial skepticism as are viewpoint-based laws.

Amar's advice is that "the answer to what a person or community views as 'bad speech' is not 'no speech,' but rather 'more (and better) speech.'" But the course of action which this leaves open to pro-choice groups - mounting their own counter-campaign - doesn't sound so productive to me. Seeing as the current campaign served mostly to anger women and reproductive rights activists, plastering the subway with ads that anger conservative christians seems a surefire way to escalate the conflict. I would think letting the anti-abortion groups fire up the opposition is a much better strategy, but perhaps that's why I'm not in politics.

Anyway, while thinking about somewhat unpleasant consequences of the right to free speech, I also came across a piece on ALDaily, about David Irving's Austrian imprisonment. For those of you who don't remember, Irving is the British historian and Holocaust denier who famously sued an American historian, Deborah Lipstadt, for libel after she called him "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial" in her book, Denying the Holocaust. Anyway, now he's in jail "in Austria for two speeches he made in 1989, during which he allegedly claimed there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz." Interestingly, "Irving's lawyer said the historian no longer denies that gas chambers existed in Nazi death camps." What interests me about this is the seemingly implicit acceptance of speech act theory in this conviction. If you're guilty of perjury, you're under arrest for saying something, but specifically for saying something which, under those circumstances, constitutes a crime, i.e., lying under oath. Arresting Irving for making statements he now disagrees with suggests that it was the act of saying, at that time, which constitutes the crime. This view is not uncommon amongst people who talk about racist or sexist language, but it is a little surprising to see it in use in this way.

It also prompts another round of questions about how much freedom of speech is acceptable. Lipstadt herself is quoted in the article saying "I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens." She's willing to accept that the particular sensitivity of Germans and Austrians to claims like Irving's warrants their strict laws against Holocaust denial, but doesn't endorse them generally.

I don't find these laws efficacious. I think they turn Holocaust denial into forbidden fruit, and make it more attractive to people who want to toy with the system or challenge the system.

Which sounds reasonable to me (and similar to how I feel about the anti-abortion ads). She advises that we "let [Irving] go home and let him continue talking to six people in a basement. Let him fade into obscurity where he belongs." Maybe ignoring it won't make it go away, but trying to legislate against it is just going to create martyrs and win them supporters.