Adults who give children guns are as bad as adults who give children porn.

She also has a great recent post about being a woman and a composer of art music.

Taken at a gun rights rally in the USA

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Climate Change Is Cutting Humans’ Work Capacity – increased heat and humidity will require more work-breaks.

Giving a Gonski – Gillard unveils $1.1b school reading blitz.

What’s piqued your media interests lately?

As usual for media circus threads, please share your bouquets and brickbats for particular items in the mass media, or highlight cogent analysis or pointed twitterstorms etc in new media. Discuss any current sociopolitical issue (the theme of each edition is merely for discussion-starter purposes – all current news items are on topic!).

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Charles Darwin was born 204 years ago today, and the International Darwin Day Foundation uses February 12th each year to celebrate Darwin, Science and Humanity. It’s 154 years since the publication of his paradigm-shattering work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.


Wikipedia gives a summary of the book’s changing influence over the decades:

The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. As Darwin was an eminent scientist, his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T.H. Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularise science by promoting scientific naturalism. Within two decades there was widespread scientific agreement that evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. During the “eclipse of Darwinism” from the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit. With the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin’s concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to modern evolutionary theory, now the unifying concept of the life sciences.

A theory which many had thought was overblown and outdated 100 years ago came to receive a proper appreciation of its relevance and accuracy when new discoveries in genetics supported it, and kept on providing more and more supporting data by showing how natural selection actually worked. Every organism alive on the planet today is a mutant.

Congratulations, Charles Darwin, on your diligent observation, open-minded analysis and perspicacious insight. It’s not only scientists who can learn something from your example, as these examples of fun and games on the internet show:

Uncle Charles says… I WANT YOU TO SUPPORT SCIENCE AND REASON!

Very Gradual Change We Can Believe In

An asteroid didn’t kill the dinosaurs – Chuck Darwin scared them to death! #chuckdarwinfacts

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Rape prevention aimed at rapists does work looks at a successful anti-rape campaign in Canada, and unlike the rape prevention tipsmyths currently being passed around on Facebook, this education campaign offers useful information:

The “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign is a public service rape prevention campaign launched in Edmonton in 2010, and adopted by other cities in Canada, which took the radical step of aiming its message, not at potential rape victims, but at potential rapists. It took the radical step of educating potential rapists about what rape actually is. It recognized the role that alcohol commonly plays in rape — and it educates potential rapists that having sex with someone who doesn’t consent, or who is too drunk to consent, or who is passed out and therefore unable to consent, is rape.

The campaign didn’t target the stereotypical media image of rapists, the drooling psychopaths springing on suspects in a dark alley with a knife. It targeted ordinary folks, frat boys and partiers and bar-hoppers and folks who just like to toss a few back now and then… who have been brought up in a culture that teaches that drunkenness equals consent. It was influenced by a study out of the U.K. showing that 48 percent of men ages 18 to 25 did not consider it rape if the women was too drunk to know it was happening. And it teaches them that no: drunkenness does not equal consent, being stoned does not equal consent, being passed out does not equal consent. It had slogans like, “Just because she isn’t saying no… doesn’t mean she’s saying yes.” “Just because you help her home… doesn’t mean you get to help yourself.” “Just because she’s drunk doesn’t mean she wants to f**k.” It had slogans on every poster saying, “Sex without consent = sexual assault.”

And the campaign has been so successful, the number of reported sexual assaults in Vancouver fell by 10 per cent.

The first campaign focussed on male perpetrators and women. New campaigns will include same-sex scenarios. Other countries are expressing interest in adapting the campaign for their own communities.

Greta raises some typically cogent points in her introduction and her subsequent analysis. Read the whole thing.

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Rosie the Riveter

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Benjamin Preiss reports that the gender pay gap has doubled over the last year — with women, as usual, coming off worst in most professions. Meanwhile a few weeks ago, Josephine Tovey and Amy McNeilage reported that in New South Wales girls have outperformed boys in maths for the first time– though for many years, girls have outperformed boys in every other HSC subject.

There is always much hand-wringing when the HSC results are released, about how and why our education system is failing our boys (and quite often the blame is assigned to female teachers — especially if you read the comments), but I would suggest that our boys aren’t being failed at all. Priess paraphrases Professor Anne Bardoel, saying that “the findings [about the gender pay gap] were surprising given that female students often outperformed their male peers,” but I don’t find this surprising at all. I would hypothesise, quite simply, that boys don’t work as hard at their schoolwork because they don’t have to. Because they are still, in the vast majority of professions going to earn more than their female classmates. Because if they enter into a female dominated profession, such as primary teaching, they are far more likely to be promoted above their female peers. Meanwhile, boys have many more options with respect to entering trades — particularly well-paid ones — in comparison with girls.

Really, is it any wonder that high school boys don’t do as well as high school girls? Why in the world would they need to, when it seems that the old adage that women and girls have to work twice as hard to be thought half as good still has a lot of truth to it.

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Wolf Howling In The Snow | Image Credit: Retron, image released into public domain at Wikipedia

This post has been dusted off from the Drafts folder, which is full of half-written things.

I had a rather long post in the works during August regarding recent science that discredits the popular (mis)understanding of how certain dominance hierarchies are structured along the lines of alpha, beta and omega members of a social group. 

While I was procrastinating, John Scalzi tweeted the following:

Hey, dudes: If you spend any real time thinking about who’s an “Alpha Male” and who is not, YOU ARE NOT ONE. #FYI

— John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 17, 2012

Commentors dropped lots of Actual! Science! links on the related blog post, which led to some thoughtful discussion of the alpha myth.

Then David Futrelle of the ManBoobz blog added his scathing contribution: Yo, dudes: Alpha males are a myth, according to actual experts on wolves. The commentors there dropped even more links to actual science debunking simplistic alpha/beta myths, alongside mocking the stompy defenders of tautological question-begging pseudoscience (paraphrase: since I define alphas as those who get more sex than betas, so how can you possibly deny the scientific fact that alphas are more sexually successful than betas?)

I was going to link to lots of these substantive posts/articles but not finding the time is the reason why this post has been sitting around in my drafts folder since August. In summary, dealing with the science of how what we understand about various hierarchies in different animal species, including our own, debunks the simplistic self-help alpha/beta mythology which originated from a study of captive wolves in zoos (which the original scientists have long since repudiated as not having adequately considered the pathologies of non-related subjects in captivity versus the norms of family groups in the wild).  The same  scientists have updated the terminology so that  individuals once designated “alpha” are now designated “breeder”, and individuals once designated “beta” are now designated “offspring still cohabiting with their parents”:  the primary role of breeder males and females is the care and socialisation of their young, and once the offspring mature they strike out on their own to find a partner from a different pack with whom they will become the alphas of their own pack.

The linked posts above have many relevant links which point to the science of how dominance in most animal species is correlated with seniority and breeding status rather than the outcomes of aggressive/hostile incidents designating winners and losers. If you happen to have any relevant links bookmarked, please do share them in comments.

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By now, almost every policy-maker can acknowledge the returns to education as a social investment, but what they don’t always appreciate are the ways in which poor people find the path through education more difficult to navigate than do students from more wealthy families. Not because they’re somehow less canny, but because the institution is rigged against them. The concept of not being able to afford university fees is something most people can grasp, but the other kinds of barriers poor kids face in getting an education can easily look like disinterest, a lack of motivation, and mindless self-sabotage from the outside. This is dangerous when it comes to policy-making.

Reading that article by Jason DeParle I am struck by the number of times a lack of social capital (ie. inside knowledge and the prerogative to use it) disadvantages these three students as they try to succeed. Social capital is a type of capital that tends to get inherited and locked down by class. It can be difficult to observe because it won’t show up in a tax return. My own single-parent family lived below the poverty line while I was going through high school and university but we had one big advantage – my mother had come from a well-to-do family and she had the social capital from those beginnings to know how to navigate the system and to feel entitled to do so when push came to shove. I don’t want to down-play how difficult I found my time growing up in poverty or how lasting its effects have been for me, but social capital is a type of advantage I’ve seen up close and been gifted.. and  I will never under-estimate it.

Some of the big policy messages coming out of that article in the New York Times include:

• low-income kids lack social capital which would otherwise help them navigate educational institutions and their place in them;
• low-income kids need to earn money while also studying full-time;
• low-income kids often have to leave their community and family to go to a good university and therefore encounter emotional disadvantage;
• low-income kids often provide the unpaid care services their families require at the expense of their own education and needs (and low-income families are less able to pay for therapies they need and so rely more heavily on unpaid care work in their own families, plus, being poor is stressful and physically depleting);
• low-income kids try not to achieve too much academically in order to protect their families from further expenses and a sense of rejection;
• low-income kids are expected to adapt to the culture and lifestyle of high-income kids when they attend university;
• low-income kids are disadvantaged by not being able to afford the extra-curricula help that high-income kids receive with their education;
• low-income kids go into debt to pay off their education but with the risk of lower chances of graduating and consequently lower chances of gaining a high salary job to pay off their debt;
• low-income kids are more likely to see education as a ‘selfish’ pursuit on their part; and,
• low-income kids lack a safety net when things go wrong.

And here are some recent Australian examples where similar experiences are holding poor children back in education – “Children hide poverty to protect parents, study finds”:

”Their demands were incredibly modest,” the nation’s leading poverty researcher, Peter Saunders of the University of NSW, said.

The study is the first in Australia to hear children’s accounts of what it is like growing up poor. Almost 100 young people from 11 to 17 were interviewed, as well as teachers and parents.

The children’s tendency to deny wanting what other children ordinarily had was a way to ”protect themselves from the pain of missing out and their parents from the anguish of having to say no”, the report said…

… The children felt keenly that their parents were not respected by school staff. Many were bored by and disengaged from the curriculum, and they were frustrated with teachers who could not maintain discipline and didn’t seem to care. The children appreciated enthusiastic teachers and meaningful curriculum but ”this type of opportunity for learning was too often missing from young people’s accounts of school”.

The increasing trend for schools to impose ”user pays” levies for some activities was also detrimental. One parent reported her fury at the discovery, after four years, that the school had a fund to help. Professor Saunders said the schemes were not widely advertised for fear that demand would outstrip supply.

And, “Aussie school children left hungry report”:

Ms Chambers said some parents were keeping their children home from school on days they couldn’t afford to put food in their lunchbox, and often missed meals themselves to ensure their family was fed.

Cross-posted at blue milk.

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I am surprised that a secondary school teacher gives this advice:

No doubt, encouraging children to stay at school is enormously beneficial for the individual and society, but it also leads to some students continuing with school when they probably would have been better off leaving earlier and doing something else.

My question is: What else?

Even when I completed Year 10 in 1989 the competition was fierce for apprenticeships which were thin on the ground. Most of us went onto Yrs 11 and 12 because there weren’t a great number of other options. It became rarer for students to leave school in Yr 10 and go to TAFE. Many of us hung around until after Yr 12 and then went to TAFE. This meant that instead of being school leavers at 16 many of my friends completed Yr 12, did 12 months at TAFE and were able to move to larger centres or cities as adults with qualifications to find jobs which were few and far between in my home town, unless you wanted to serve beer at the pub or work at Woolies. There was, as there is now, a lack of options for kids needing to leave school because it doesn’t suit them. Most apprenticeships went to kids that the tradie already knew either through friendship or family connections.

When I returned to the classroom in 1999 if anything the options for kids needing to leave school in Yr 10 were even slimmer. Even then most of the traditional pathways to work from school were asking for an HSC or equivalent. Why would someone take on an apprentice who could only just apply for a license when they could get a Yr 12 graduate who might already have their license, perhaps even their own car if they had already been working part time? Someone more mature, or even just someone who could be sent to buy the beers when work finished for the day?

I also take exception to the suggestion that it is lower class kids who are the trouble makers. In my experience it was the kids who thought that Mum or Dad could or would get them out of trouble who caused the most. St John’s anyone? This is of course not a blanket rule, troublemakers come from all walks of life. It is any surprise that something like Schoolies week attracts these kids?

I understand why Schoolies scares a lot of people. It involves a lot of teenagers, hormones, alcohol and drugs which is never a good combination in large quantities. However, a large number of schoolies seem to come away unscathed with some lasting memories. Tragically one girl lost her life this year and there has been one reported (quite possibly a number gone unreported) rape. If this was the standard by which we shut events down then we probably wouldn’t have any large public events at all. Some people misbehaving is not a reason to shut down an event, nor it is a reason to smear a social class.

I would have expected a better argument from a teacher. I’m giving this an F.

*Chris could obviously be any gender, I have just gone with the “To Sir with Love” pun for the title.

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Anti-Darwin Evolution Cartoon responding to the publication of On The Origin of Species

Newly discovered gene could help explain how humans evolved from chimpanzees, says scientists

Researchers have discovered a new gene they say helps explain how humans evolved from chimpanzees.

Say what now? I really don’t think that’s what any scientists did say, actually. Poor show, Karrie Gillett: your high school science teacher must be hanging hir head in despair.

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