Mediaite
Mother Thanks Atheist Group for Saving Christmas After 'Shockingly Bad' Church ...
Mediaite
One Oklahoma woman is thanking a local atheist group for making her Christmas an enjoyable one after she had a “shockingly bad” run-in with workers at a church's toy giveaway on Christmas morning. Tiffany Wait tried to get her infant child a gift, but ...
Mother says atheist group saved her ChristmasPlattsburgh Press Republican
Atheist group saves Chickasha woman from Christmas nightmareChickasha Express Star
Atheist group saves Christmas for Oklahoma family claiming poor treatment by ...Raw Story

all 18 news articles »

Texas Pastor John Hagee Tells Atheists To Get On A Plane, 'Leave The Country'
Huffington Post
In a sermon on Sunday, Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee advised atheists and humanists to “take your Walkman and stuff it into your ears” or just “leave the country” if they don't like hearing "Merry Christmas" or carols like "Joy to the World ...

and more »

The Testimony of Atheist: "Life is not Rational"
Christian Post (blog)
As an atheist his rationality was challenged by prostitutes and drug addicts. Arnade has photographed drug addicts in South Bronx, New York for a project titled Faces of Addiction. (More information is available on his Flickr profile page.) Before ...

Need $3000? Atheists hope 3rd try at gift succeeds
Chicago Tribune
But after both the Park District and public library in Morton Grove declined to accept the $3,000 he raised, high school math teacher and atheist blogger Hemant Mehta is hoping he and fellow atheists can find a home for their contribution with a local ...

Raw Story
Atheist group saves Christmas for Oklahoma family claiming poor treatment by ...
Raw Story
Tiffany Wait said she and her husband went to Bible Baptist Church's Toy Shop on Christmas morning to get gifts for their 7-month-old son but were turned away when she declined to hand over the baby for a volunteer to hold. “I am poor and would not be ...
Mother says atheist group saved her ChristmasThe Tribune-Democrat
Atheist group saves Chickasha woman from Christmas nightmareChickasha Express Star
Mother Thanks Atheist Group for Saving Christmas After 'Shockingly Bad' Church ...Mediaite

all 25 news articles »

Raw Story
Mother says atheist group saved her Christmas
Plattsburgh Press Republican
CHICKASHA, Okla. — A mother who claimed she was turned away from a church's toy giveaway because she wouldn't let volunteers hold her baby says her Christmas was saved by an Oklahoma atheist group. Tiffany Wait said she, her husband and their ...
Atheist group saves Christmas for Oklahoma family claiming poor treatment by ...Raw Story
Atheist group saves Chickasha woman from Christmas nightmareChickasha Express Star

all 13 news articles »

What does it take to get Carl Zimmer to review your research in the New York Times?

I suppose it helps to be at Harvard. It also helps to have a combination of subjects — evolution and the human brain — that Zimmer has written about in the past. It helps to have a paper with lots of very pretty diagrams — the authors’ hypothesis is professionally illustrated. It’s also a good idea to have a vast sweeping explanation for the exceptionalism of the human brain. In this case, they call it the Tethering Hypothesis, and it’s supposed to explain how humans evolved all these remarkable cognitive abilities.

The human cerebral cortex is vastly expanded relative to other primates and disproportionately occupied by distributed association regions. Here we offer a hypothesis about how association networks evolved their prominence and came to possess circuit properties vital to human cognition. The rapid expansion of the cortical mantle may have untethered large portions of the cortex from strong constraints of molecular gradients and early activity cascades that lead to sensory hierarchies. What fill the gaps between these hierarchies are densely interconnected networks that widely span the cortex and mature late into development. Limitations of the tethering hypothesis are discussed as well as its broad implications for understanding critical features of the human brain as a byproduct of size scaling.

You know what you don’t need? Data, or a hypothesis that makes sense.

The paper is largely a review of neuroanatomy, describing features of the human brain that we’ve known about for a long, long time…except now we can illustrate them with lovely color diagrams and fMRI scans. Here’s an illustration of the problem in human evolution:

There are areas of the brain that we know what they do: in red, for instance, is the primary somatosensory cortex, which is a map of muscles and sensory areas on our skins, while blue is the primary visual cortex, which is where information from our eyes is processed. In between these known areas are great beige unknowns — regions of the brain called association cortex, which integrate information from various other regions in complex ways. Our primary somatosensory and visual cortices aren’t much bigger than those of a chimpanzee, which makes logical sense, since there isn’t much difference in surface area or visual acuity between us, and most of the growth has occurred in the association cortex.

All well and good. The question is, what made our association cortex expand in our evolution, and how is that expansion related to specific human intellectual capacities? Those are good questions, and I’d be curious to see them answered. Too bad this paper doesn’t.

One problem is that it is a review paper and really doesn’t test anything — it catalogs some existing knowledge about brain organization and then throws out this Tethering Hypothesis to explain it all, which it doesn’t. I do like the fact that it suggests that most of our abilities are spandrels, not explainable as adaptations, and that what it proposes is that novel abilities arose from regions of the brain that were not constrained by ancestral functional requirements. I just don’t see how their mechanism explains that.

Here’s one short paragraph from the paper that neatly summarizes their hypothesis.

The idea of some form of radiation outward from core organizing centers is appealing because the hominin cerebral cortex vastly expanded in a short time. It seems implausible that molecular gradients could emerge fast enough to specify new cortical areas, although developmental expression patterns have clearly been modified. Building from Rosa and colleagues’ ideas about visual cortex organization, we propose a more general tethering hypothesis to explain how new features of cortical organization might have emerged during the rapid evolutionary expansion of the cerebral mantle. The word ‘tether’ is used to emphasize that the expanding cortical plate is tethered to gradients that initially evolved in a cortex with a far smaller surface area. Much as taffy, being pulled apart, thins until it breaks in the middle, the expanding cortical zones far from the strong constraints of developmental gradients and sensory input may become untethered from the canonical sensory–motor hierarchies.

OK, that begs the question: why did the hominin cerebral cortex expand in the first place? They keep talking about this “expanding cortical plate”, but not why it was expanding or why it necessitates new organizing centers. The taffy metaphor is also telling; why are they talking about things being pulled apart, when expansion of the brain is not caused by external forces pulling on it, but on internal forces of growth generating more tissue between known cortical zones?

I’m also put on edge by the phrase “It seems implausible that…”, especially when applied to something that doesn’t seem implausible at all. Why balk at a timescale of several million years to evolve a use for a bit of extra brain matter?

But even worse, nervous systems growing bigger is what I study. My Ph.D. research was on connectivity in the developing spinal cord of zebrafish, for instance.

The first neurons in the zebrafish embryo emerge at about 18 hours after fertilization, at a time when the nascent spinal cord is about 2mm long, in total. Cells in the hindbrain send axons all that distance (2mm is a long way in an embryo!), and as they grow, they make a little knot of synapses every 40-50µm with cells called primary motoneurons.

That’s in the embryo. In the adult, the spinal cord is roughly 4cm long — there’s been a 20-fold expansion in size. What do you think happened to that earlier array of cells? Did the system stretch and break?

No, it grew. In the adult, the same hindbrain neurons are still present, and their axons still reach all the way back to the tailtip. And the same motoneurons are still present, they’re just spread out more to be separated by 1-1.5mm, and they still retain the same synapses.

I also did research on the earliest neurons to differentiate in the grasshopper nervous system. I studied Q1, a neuron that established one of the commissures in the grasshopper ganglion. That story is a little different: Q1 doesn’t seem to have any function in the adult, and in fact looks to be abandoned and gone. But what it does is send the first slender thread across on a specific pathway; it pioneers a route across the nervous system, and then other axons pile on and follow it across. It’s like sending a kite string across a chasm, then using the string to pull a rope across, and then using the rope to pull a cable across, and pretty soon you’ve got a bridge — and it’s doing this as the chasm is widening, because like the zebrafish, the grasshopper is also growing substantially during these events.

Growth is an integral process in the development of the nervous system. Without specific evidence that these developmental mechanisms break down during growth (which seems implausible to me…), why would you postulate that a failure of developmental processes was an essential element of human evolution? A tripling of brain size from the human-chimpanzee common ancestor to the modern human seems like a small shift relative to the much larger expansion of the human fetal brain to the adult brain.

What I’d like to see, and did not find in this paper, are comparative developmental studies. When these various cortical regions of the brain are specified or establishing connectivity, how far apart are they in different species? Compare mouse and rat, for instance, or rhesus monkey and human. I suspect that in early embryos, the distances, and their relative differences, will be minuscule, and that signaling centers will be close enough that it will seem silly to argue that broad patterns of connectivity would be unable to form in the biggest brains, leaving gaps that need to be filled in by novel mechanisms and structures.

But again, the paper doesn’t look at any of that at all. I found one paragraph that briefly discusses other observations that association cortex matures later than other regions of the brain, and that’s about it — it is definitely not sufficient information to argue that association cortex is out of reach of intrinsic signaling gradients in the early brain.

At least the first subtitle in the paper is “A Speculative Hypothesis,” which is entirely accurate. I don’t see how it justifies the praise it was given in Carl Zimmer’s article.

Dr. Sherwood, the George Washington University expert, praised the hypothesis for being “fairly frugal.” The emergence of the human mind might not have been a result of a vast number of mutations that altered the fine structure of the brain. Instead, a simple increase in the growth of neurons could have untethered them from their evolutionary anchors, creating the opportunity for the human mind to emerge.

Oh, wait. When the best thing you can say about a hypothesis is that it is “fairly frugal”, that’s not much praise at all.

Buckner RL, Krienen FM (2013) The evolution of distributed association networks in the human brain. Trends Cogn Sci 17(12):648-65.

The Guardian
Atheist presents alternative Thought for the Day, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee
The Guardian
The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has won a partial victory against the BBC by getting it to let an atheist present an alternative Thought for the Day on its flagship radio news programme – but not at the usual time. As guest ...
Sir Tim Berners-Lee banned from having atheist on Radio 4's Thought for the DayTelegraph.co.uk
BBC denies atheist traditional Thought for Day slotGladstone Observer

all 8 news articles »

Atheist group saves woman from Christmas nightmare
Norman Transcript
CHICKASHA — A group of local atheists saved Christmas for a Chickasha woman after she and her baby were allegedly put through the ringer at a church's toy give away. Tiffany Wait said she, her husband and their 7-month-old baby went to Bible Baptist ...
Mother says atheist group saved her ChristmasEnid News & Eagle

all 12 news articles »

Telegraph.co.uk
Sir Tim Berners-Lee banned from having atheist on Radio 4's Thought for the Day
Telegraph.co.uk
The BBC has banned Sir Tim Berners-Lee from having an atheist deliver Thought for the Day as he guest edited Radio 4's Today programme, saying it must be spoken by a believer. Sir Tim, who was invited to edit the flagship news programme on Boxing Day ...

Pope's Christmas Atheist Outreach Invokes Religious Right Fears of One World ...
PoliticusUSA
He said that people of other religions were also praying for peace, and – departing from his prepared text – he urged atheists to join forces with believers. “I invite even non-believers to desire peace. (Join us) with your desire, a desire that widens ...

DigitalJournal.com
Op-Ed: Top 5 Atheist Books of 2013
DigitalJournal.com
Book number 4 is a big departure from most atheist, humanist or secular books as it is fiction. Kylie's Heel by Susan K. Perry is an amazing story about a mother who overcomes tragedy and hardship all without relying on a god or religion. Picking ...

Relax tonight. Start getting stuff together for spring semester tomorrow.

I beat the deadline by a whole six hours!

From an atheist married to a Christian
Patheos (blog)
Hence, marriage expert. My first marriage was to a lovely woman of like-spirituality. We were both humanists (which is a fancy term for do-gooder atheists) of Jewish descent. That marriage failed when she realized that she didn't love me. ME! How could ...

Mother says atheist group saved her Christmas
Mankato Free Press
A mother who claimed she was turned away from a church's toy giveaway because she wouldn't let volunteers hold her baby says her Christmas was saved by an Oklahoma atheist group. Tiffany Wait said she, her husband and their 7-month-old baby went to ...

This will be useful shorthand. You may recall that Alec Baldwin lost his show for calling a photographer a “cocksucking faggot” — now Geraldo Rivera weighs in on the phrase.

SKLAR: When I heard about what Alec Baldwin – Alec Baldwin had a history of making these homophobic slurs.

RIVERA: That wasn’t a homophobic slur.

SKLAR: Okay –

RIVERA: I mean if you grew up where we grew up –

SKYLAR: And yet he is no longer on the network, right?

RIVERA: Sean, Baldwin and I all grew up within ten miles of each other and when we were growing up, in my year especially, those comments were commonplace.

Remember that next time someone strolls in and starts flinging the “cunt” insult around, and tries to excuse it because it was commonplace when they were growing up in Australia or England or New Jersey or wherever. Just let them know they’re using Geraldo Logic, and with any luck they’ll feel a twinge of shame.

Nah, they won’t. We know from long experience that they won’t.

Headlines & Global News
Pope Francis' off-script Christmas nod to atheists is part of a pattern
Washington Post
When Pope Francis left his script Christmas morning to ad-lib an invitation to atheists to join the prayerful in “desiring peace,” it may have been the first time an “Urbi et Orbi” Christmas address — an annual message “to the city and the world ...
Pope, Off Script, Nods to Atheists in Holiday Call for World PeaceNew York Times
Pope Francis Reaches Out To Atheists In Pontiff's First Christmas Day Message ...Huffington Post
Atheists Get Shout Out From Pope Francis In Christmas Address (VIDEO)Headlines & Global News

all 1,069 news articles »

Atheist group saves Chickasha woman from Christmas nightmare
Chickasha Express Star
CHICKASHA — A group of local atheists saved Christmas for a Chickasha woman after she and her baby were allegedly put through the ringer at a church's toy give away. Tiffany Wait said she, her husband and their 7-month-old baby went to Bible Baptist ...

and more »

New York Daily News
Chicago-area library declines donation from atheist, saying he represents ...
New York Daily News
... dollars, saying he represents a “hate group.” The Morton Grove Library voted last week to decline “Friendly Atheist” blogger Hemant Mehta's $3,000 donation, citing comments on his Facebook page such as “F--k God,” the Morton Grove Champion reported.
Need $3000? Atheists hope 3rd try at gift succeedsChicago Tribune
'Friendly Atheist' Tries Giving $3K to Food Pantry After Library, Park ...Christian Post
Library, park department refuse to cash $3000 check from atheistKRMG

all 11 news articles »

An interesting philosophy paper: ‘That Man Behind the Curtain’: Atheism and Belief in The Wizard of Oz. I don’t think the movie The Wizard of Oz is exactly an atheist movie, but represents the current transition we’re experiencing, where the old-fashioned beliefs are becoming increasingly untenable and unsupported by the culture as a whole, while people are still largely uncomfortable with abandoning the traditional big guy in the sky.

This decaffeinated belief—this belief without belief—is everywhere in The Wizard of Oz, even in the film’s conclusion. When Dorothy finds herself back in Kansas, she tries to tell her family about her voyage, but Aunt Em silences her, saying, ‘You just had a bad dream.’ Dorothy replies, ‘But it wasn’t a dream. It was a place.’ When she tells the farmhands and Professor Marvel that they were all there, they laugh. Aunt Em tries once more to convince Dorothy that she has been dreaming, but Dorothy protests: ‘No, Aunt Em. This was a real, truly live place.’ As she continues to describe her experience, she is again met with laughter. But when she indignantly asks the central question—‘Doesn’t anybody believe me?’—Uncle Henry responds by saying, ‘Of course we believe you, Dorothy.’ Her family and friends offer a kind of ‘decaffeinated belief’. They do not really believe her, of course, but they do not wish to shake her faith. Believing in belief, they allow her to maintain her delusional inner conviction that Oz is real.

It is worth noting that ‘decaffeinated belief’ has likely been around as long as belief itself; similarly, belief in abstract (rather than anthropomorphic) deities certainly pre-dates the modern era. (One thinks of the connection made between God and the Word in the opening verse of John, for example; or later, Spinoza’s move toward a kind of pantheism.) Nevertheless, Žižek and Dennett are correct to suggest that various forms of diluted belief have taken on special force in modern times. It has been difficult for many (particularly in the especially religious United States) to come to terms with the serious challenges to the supernatural offered by Darwin, Marx, and Freud. When Hegel and Nietzsche declared the death of God, believers scrambled to put God on life support, re-defining ‘God’ in abstract ways to make belief seem more defensible. Few intellectuals could still argue for traditional conceptions of God in the post-Darwin era (for example, God as a divine watchmaker, pace William Paley), but belief itself refused to become extinct; God mutated into more arcane, abstract notions in order to survive the skeptical spirit of modernism. It is this simultaneous loss of belief and maintenance of belief in the modern era that is captured perfectly in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz.

There are lots of little bits throughout the movie that give the game away — which never really jumped out at me because I take their attitude for granted. Now I might just have to watch the whole thing again sometime to look for them. Also, flying monkeys are just cool.