Author: bill

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If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural – washingtonpost.com

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Source: If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural – washingtonpost.com

A few weeks ago I saw a PBS program on Dogs. In the first episode they discussed the impact of breeding tameness into foxes and its relationship to the diversity of dog breeds. Within ten generations the foxes started showing changes that are somewhat difficult to explain. Here is an excerpt from the transcript.

NARRATOR: Traits like coat color, or the way a dog carries its ears or tail, are determined by its genes. Genes are pieces of DNA, and they often come in subtly different versions. Every dog gets one copy of every gene from mom and one from dad. These genes can be mixed and matched in countless ways, but if the parents don’t have it, the pup can’t get it.

And that’s what makes curly tails and patchy coats in dogs so mysterious. Wolves don’t have them. It took a remarkable experiment in a most unlikely place, to solve this mystery. The place was the middle of nowhere, Siberia. And the experimenter was an out-of-favor Russian geneticist named Dmitri Belyaev.

Local fox farmers had asked Belyaev for help in breeding a less vicious animal. Belyaev began with the tamest foxes he could find. From their offspring, and for many generations thereafter, he chose only the tamest for breeding. He’d expected that each new generation would be a little less vicious, a little more tame. But by the tenth generation, he was seeing things he’d never expected.

RAY COPPINGER: All of a sudden his fox ears started down, his fox tails started up, they started to bark, which is not characteristic of foxes. They started to have different coats, all these little features that you can’t imagine being in the wild type. I mean it’s not a matter of selecting for, because they’re not there to be selected for””that variation isn’t there.

Later on they hypothesize that human kindness created the diversity in dog breeds. Our interaction with dogs has been the stimulus for changes normally explained by genes.

The strong relationship of kindness with evolutionary change is what fascinated me. Biologist may prefer the “natural selection” phrase but “survival of the fittest” is the phrase most often associated with evolutionary theory because it epitomizes the struggle for life. It is not a big stretch for biologists to add kindness to the natural selection process but it is a new and foreign territory. Kindness is one of seven holy virtues and one of the more visible traits of successful religions. Kindness and theology have stood the test of time. Combining evolutionary theory with kindness seems like an unholy alliance and new fodder in the “Does God exist” debate.

  1. An atheist or agnostic will look at these facts as an explanation for the large number of people who believe in a God. Atheists have always had a tough time explaining why so many people believe in God and the emotional attachment people have with this unseen God. Now they can say that humans are hard-wired to feel good about helping others and that humans have confused feeling good about helping others with the existence of God.
  2. An apologist on the other hand will probably look at these diverse facts and see the truth that they always saw as self-evident has been verified in science. It is more natural for an apologist to presume that we are hard-wired for kindness and that kindness is just one of the traits God is trying to develop in us. Apologists believe in evolution. It is just a different theory than the one used by biologists. If we are hard-wired to feel good about helping others and our kindness has an evolutionary impact on dogs, what do you suppose this same kindness will do to the evolution of humans? What if the most important evolutionary change to humans was not when we learned to walk upright or that we have opposing thumbs but when we embraced kindness. We have seen that within a short period of time kindness can cause enormous changes in dogs. If kindness can be such a powerful evolutionary influence can the other virtues be far behind with their impact? The most amazing fact about kindness is that all animals can exhibit this trait but it is only humans who have been successful with it. Maybe we have just begun to see the breadcrumbs of God’s plan for us.
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Portabello & Sausage French Bread Pizza: Recipe

Portobello and Sausage French Bread Pizza
Last week on the Epicurious blog Tanya Steel wrote about serving a Proscuitto and Taleggio macaroni and cheese to a friend who it turned out, preferred the blue boxed verson. When I was little I enjoyed that mac and cheese that comes in a box too. But years later when I tried it again, I realized it wasn’t very good. The sauce made from powder was artificial tasting and the macaroni was pasty. As an adult there is no question, my tastes had changed.

The other packaged food I remember liking way back when, was Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza. I still remember how tasty that crunchy pizza was. Of course, if I tried it now I would probably not be as impressed, but as a 13 year old babysitter, it seemed like a very delicious treat.

I’d rather recreate what I loved about those french bread pizzas than be disappointed trying the original version. This recipe took a couple of tries to get right. It’s a little messy but also savory, crisp and cheesy. In other words, delicious! Once you have the technique down, you could probably make other versions too. I developed this recipe to go with an Argentinean Malbec.

Portabello & Sausage French Bread Pizza

4 to 6 Servings

1 loaf French bread
3 Italian sausages, hot or mild
1 Tablespoon flour
1/4 cup red wine (Malbec is perfect)
2 large Portabello mushrooms
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
8 slices Provolone cheese, about 8 ounces

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Slice the bread lengthwise and in half so you have four equal portions. Place on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for about five minutes then remove while preparing the topping. Meanwhile prepare the mushrooms by wiping clean with a paper towel and removing the stem. Thinly slice the mushrooms and set aside.

Remove casing from sausages and crumble into a large skillet. Cook over medium heat until no longer pink, about 5 minutes. Add the flour and continue cooking for another minute or two. Add the wine and stir the mixture then add the mushrooms. Cook, stirring frequently and scraping up the bottom of the pan. Mushrooms will release their juices and turn brown. Cook another few minutes until mushrooms are cooked through. Take skillet off the heat and mix in the Parmesan cheese.

Spread the sausage and mushroom mixture evenly on top of the bread halves. Cut each slice of cheese in half and place on top. Bake for five to ten minutes or until cheese is melted. Cut each piece in thirds to serve.

Enjoy!

Link to Portabello & Sausage French Bread Pizza: Recipe

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A Link to a Debate about the Future of Newspapers and Journalism

WHICH NEWSPAPER WILL BE THE FIRST TO DIE? Bob McChesney and I address this question in today’s Los Angeles Times. You’ll never guess which one is my pick . . . .

Link to Instapundit

Considering my last post I had to include this debate about the future of journalism that appears on the LA Times Opinion page. Glenn Reynolds and Bob McChesney share with us their views on the problems facing journalism and traditional media. I recommend you read all three days.

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Re: How to Sink a Newspaper

In response to an article written in the Opinion Journal I wrote:

In the 1980’s I stopped subscribing to the local newspaper because I only read the Sunday paper for the comics and the sports page. Many of the articles in the newspaper that I would be interested in came from sources other than the local paper. Television and radio typically recognized the good stories of the day and repeated them on the air. A few of the stories were local news stories but many stories came from sources other than the local journalists(e.g Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal). As a result the “news” in the newspaper was typically old news. There was little value added by reading the local newspaper. My fill of local news was handled adequately by watching television or listening to the radio.

In the 1990’s I replaced my paper subscription to the WSJ with the online edition. WSJ was still a leader in creating good stories about business but the competition was fierce. WSJ was rapidly losing their position as the source of the good business stories. Increasingly I found that other sources were creating the good business stories of the day and I could read them from my Yahoo page for free. As an experiment I dropped my online subscription to see how often I missed the WSJ content. For me at least I found that I did not miss the content often enough to subscribe again.

Now I am confronted with the dilemma. I have enjoyed my free ride reading quality journalism paid by others. At the same time I am disappointed with what appears to be an increasing trend in journalism to print the story and let the bloggers check the facts. As a fan of objective journalism and the good that journalism can provide to the community, there is a price I am willing to pay. As a potential customer I haven’t seen the business model I am willing to accept but I remain hopeful. Your business model is a step in the right direction but I do not think it goes far enough to draw customers like me in. There needs to be something special going on in a local newspaper. In the early 1980’s in a MBA class on competitive strategies our team predicted the demise of the newspapers. The competitive pressures on the newspaper industry were in place well before the rise of the Internet. Somehow newspapers adapted and survived. I think they can do it again but the clock is ticking. The customers for journalism are changing, too.

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Pensive Charles

Pensive CharlesI took this picture of my son today in a restaurant. He was waiting for us to finish our meal. He wanted to go. I took the picture because of the look on his face and the fact that he did not move when I raised the camera. I was surprised he let me take the shot. The color of the photo was not planned but I like the effect.

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Ben Witherington: Was Lazarus the Beloved Disciple?

If you want to cause Biblical scholars to get their knickers in a knot there are two sure fire ways to accomplish that end: 1) you can skewer a sacred cow whether a liberal or conservative one; 2) you can propose a theory that requires one to believe in the possibility of the miraculous to even entertain the thesis. If you can accomplish both with one theory, well, you’ve created a Mallox moment! I seem to accomplished this at the last SBL meeting in November when I gave the following lecture. I’ll let you decide whether you find it illuminating or inflammatory. Flame On!

Read More …

Source: Ben Witherington: Was Lazarus the Beloved Disciple?

I was browsing Ben’s blog when I ran accross this interesting theory that Lazarus was the Beloved Disciple. This theory still believes that John wrote the Gospel but that Lazarus was probably a major source to John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel has always been a bit of a puzzle and this theory explains how Lazarus could be the missing piece. A commentor mentioned another online source, The Name of the Beloved Disciple, who also makes the same arguement. Both of these links are worth reading!

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Digg – Blog: China Will Pass U.S. As Polluter

China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gasses this year, an official with the International Energy Agency was quoted as saying. China had been forecast to surpass the U.S. in 2010, but its sizzling economic growth has pushed the date forward, the IEA’s chief economist…

Source: Digg – Blog: China Will Pass U.S. As Polluter

I guess I am surprised. I thought the US was well out in front. China’s rapid increase in the production of greenhouse gasses complicates the global warming issue but it does not detract from the fact that it is in the best interest of the US to invoke energy policies that encourage energy efficiency and independence from foreign oil imports while at the sametime reducing greenhouse gasses.

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Thinking about Earth Day

I must admit that I was inspired to take a close look at our energy consumption and estimated CO2 emissions after reading this Popular Mechanics article, Energy Family Part Four: Power Pioneers – Popular Mechanics. Since I am engineer I had to have some calculations. So I went over to the EPA site and pulled down their green house gas spreadsheet. The key information was the utility cost so I gathered up the electric bills for the last year. The results were not surprising. Most of our green house gas emissions, 84%, come from our use of electricity. In particular our electric bills are 50% higher for the months of December, January, and February.

So what can I do about this. There are three viable options:

  1. Geothermal heat pump
  2. Wind Power
  3. Solar Power

The geothermal heat pump is probably the most cost effective solution since we have the land available. The savings are between 25% to 50% over conventional systems.

The wind and solar power are distant second places. Wind power is generally cost effective while solar power would be a very nice solution for us if it wasn’t so darn expensive. My mother-in-law would flip out if we put a wind turbine on the property so I think it is out of the question. We have an arena roof that faces the southern sky and the prices for solar panels are dropping but it is still too expensive. My first choice is obviously the geothermal heat pump.