A while ago Abiola Lapite moved Foreign Dispatches to Typepad and something or other must have come up because I didn't adjust my RSS reader until the other day when I started selecting still-active blogs for the blogroll.
I wonder what I missed. This is what I didn't miss:
Worse than Useless
The agreement the European powers arrived at with Iran is looking so bad that surely no agreement at all would have been better.
Actually, it's pretty much in line with the non-proliferation treaty that the most of the rest of the world has signed onto. It doesn't forbid research or development, it just requires monitoring.
The Secular Founding Fathers
I've never been one for "founding fathers" idolatry, so the impact of this article on my beliefs is essentially nil, but it ought to make for very unpleasant reading for religious conservatives, who overwhelmingly combine a belief in the infallibility of the fathers of the nation with the conviction that America was founded on Christian principles; given what we know, however, both of these things can't simultaneously be true.
Head, meet wall. The past doesn't exist.
More Silliness on Heritability
This Telegraph article shows why reading the Ned Block essay I referred to yesterday is such a good idea; the claims made in it are almost certainly rubbish.
The tendency to be unfaithful, to divorce and to believe in a god are more likely to be inherited than major illnesses such as high blood pressure and cancer, according to a major study of twins published yesterday.
The discovery that we can inherit a propensity to believe and to betray has come from combining studies of identical and fraternal twins with the biggest survey of sexual and other behaviours of its kind in Britain, making it possible to unpick the contributions of genes and environment to important behaviours.
The propensity to believe in a god is likely "heritable" only in the sense that the number of toys a child has is "heritable" (to use an example given by Block), i.e, as a residual which remains after controlling for only those environmental variations we can identify; a trait can be highly heritable without having any direct underlying genetic causes whatsoever.
Just jealousy because I didn't find the articles under discussion first.
I Don't Get It
Why do the likes of Jack Straw feel entitled to cajole Israel to embrace the "roadmap to peace"? Would they think it was just dandy if it were Israel attempting to browbeat them into making a deal with, say, the IRA or ETA? Everybody in Europe seems to expect Israel to put up with a level of interference in its affairs that they would never tolerate in their own.
Not that I'm agreeing with him on everything obviously, but after the last month or so if politics I find intellect…refreshing.
