A little more than a month ago I came across a BBC program on the subject of fasting. You can watch the whole thing here.

If you don’t have a whole hour to watch I recommend picking up around the 36 minute mark where they start discussing intermittent fasting, or alternate day fasting. The basic concept is to alternate between fasting days and “feasting” days. A fast day consists of 400-500 calories for women or 500-600 calories for men. (You are encouraged to drink all the water you want on fast days). On the feed/feast days you eat whatever you want.

What are purported benefits of alternate day fasting? All sorts of things according to the researchers interviewed. Here are some mentioned in the documentary:

1. Weight loss. It turns out that people doing this intermittent fasting don’t normally eat double their daily recommended calories on feed days. They are more likely to eat about 110% of recommended caloric intake so there is a net calorie deficit every week and that means steady weight loss.
2. Reduced blood sugar levels. Warding off diabetes is always a good thing, right?
3. Reduced levels of triglycerides, bad cholesterol, and blood pressure. They say this is a good thing. Reportedly reduces risk of heart disease and whatnot.
4. Improved brain function. Mice on intermittent fasting remain mentally sharp far longer than the mice that were fed well daily. The theory is that humans see similar benefits. Fasting reportedly causes brains to grow new brain cells. Researchers interviewed for the piece think that this is an evolutionary survival mechanism; as we fast our brains quickly get stronger to give us better odds of wrangling up some food to stay alive. (I’ve been told that other studies indicate fasting has been shown to improve student test scores as well.)

(more…)

Let me lay some cards on the table, if only to provide a bit of context for what I want to say.  I am a strong and unequivocal evolutionist who places Darwin at the very core of my philosophical mindset.  My relationship to religion, on the other had, is …. complicated.  I don’t think any of the standard categories unambiguously matches up with what I think and feel, and I’m somewhat okay with that.  I just hope that these confessions serve to clarify rather than obstruct the conversation I hope to have.  (more…)

In my last post – which fell stillborn from the wordpress – I articulated my position as a Darwinian Anti-intellectualist. Briefly – and somewhat differently – I rejected the practice of construing all beliefs as if they were automatically answers to some question or another, the premises or conclusions to some argument. The two stalking horses in this project of mine have come to be Socrates and Descartes with their respective question/answer dialectic and methodological skepticism. In this post I will roughly follow Aladair MacIntyre in framing my own de-conversion from Mormonism in terms of a (mistaken) Cartesian framework. (more…)

One popular website running around on Favebook is Isidewith.com. It’s a website which asks you a few questions, then tells you how the candidates answered the same questions. One question is whether you believe in evolution. After you take the survey, you get to see how you align with the candidates. Just to make R. Gary’s head explode, here is Mitt’s response.

Question #1- What does that even mean?
Question #2- Should I be offended that it tells me I should vote Green Party?

A great deal of my thought surrounding the nature of (R)eligious, (S)cientific and (P)ragmatic (or pre-modern, modern and post-modern) approaches to truth is based in the premise that rule-following is the only path to truth.  Empirical observation, logical deduction and everything in between only get us anywhere inasmuch as they are normatively constrained by rules of various kinds.  In this post I would like to briefly unpack this position in terms of a familiar metaphor. (more…)

If I were to be stranded on an island with nothing but three books to keep me company there is no doubt that two of them would be Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Godel, Escher, Bach.  When taken together, these two books provide almost the entire thrust behind this post-scientistic, neo-pragmatic mind-set in which I currently find myself. (more…)

(Love ya, Gary!)

It’s not terribly difficult to guess ahead of time which bloggernacle threads Gary (of NDBF fame) will comment in and roughly what his position will be therein.  This is due to a number of factors:  his overall consistency, the forthright, no-nonsense articulation of his views and (most of all) his staunch adherence to positions which tend to drive intellectuals crazy.  Gary is by no means alone in proudly flaunting these traits as a badge of honor but to me he serves as the perfect poster-boy for all Iron-Rodders if only because he is one of the most patient and likeable of the bunch.

First, I’ll give a little history regarding our interactions in the ‘nacle.  Those who have known me for a while are well aware that I take science fairly seriously and have always had a particular interest in Darwinian evolution.  I’m sure you are also well aware that Gary has always been quite unimpressed by both, to put it mildly.  After many frustrating exchanges between us in which I frequently allowed sarcasm and mockery to take the place of patience and charity I finally thought that I had figured out what Gary’s core argument really was.  (more…)

(This is part 2/9 of the series, “Paradigms Lost”)

“And now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field … and he sought also to beguile [Adam and] Eve, for he knew not the mind of God.”

S: Well, Adam, you have a new world here.

A: Yes, but I know almost nothing of this world.

S: Oh, I see, your eyes are not yet opened.  You must have some of the fruit of this tree in order to gain such knowledge.

A: And what knowledge is that?

S: Knowledge concerning this world and everything in it, what it is made of, how it came to be and how it continues to exist… For example, in the beginning this world was populated by nothing except unorganized matter in meaningless motion.  And yet, after a great deal of time there arose certain patterns in the matter that tended to reliably replicate themselves when in the stable presence of the appropriate energy and materials. (more…)

I have discussed the problem of evil in the past[1], and what I feel is the Church’s unique position on how the atonement itself acts as a theodicy, God responding with everything he can to our suffering. I still stand by the general premise of that post, that the universe is governed by eternal laws independent of God [2] and that man has free agency and thus God is not accountable for him. [3] I also still hold that through the Atonement of Christ, God is doing all he can to alleviate our suffering.

I’d like to speculate a little bit more about why God isn’t doing more to alleviate suffering. Here is where some theories associated with evolution come in. [4] (more…)

Stephen Finlan, Author of “Options on Atonement in Christian Thought”[1] ends his book with a modest proposal. It is that our understanding of divine revelation is subject to a form of evolution. Finlan Suggests that “God always seeks to deepen and expand the revelation of truth, but we humans (including the biblical authors) only perceive a part of the message. We adapt and domesticate new ideas to old and familiar ways of thinking. We always pour new wine into old wineskins, but the new wine expands and bursts open our containers (Mark 2:22), our old ways of thinking.” [2] Finlan calls this “progressive development in religious conceptualization”. (more…)

Continued from here.

For those of you who are new, click here for the entire series.

Seeing as the more free of commentary on my charts I am, the less crazy the comments on the post are, I am going “commentary lite” on this one. (more…)

Continued from here.

For those who are new, click here for all parts.

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet.
(more…)

Continued from here
(more…)

I am going to do another Survey soon, but as I have no peers with which to review my question set, I thought I’d pass them by any readers out there for thoughts on the phrasing of the statements.

Each statement will be answers with a Likert scale ranking from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Statements will be as follows:

There is no contradiction between the theory of evolution and my religious beliefs
(more…)

The claim by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa is that “men do everything they do in order to get laid”. Although Kanazawa is clearly going for some shock value with his claim, I must admit that I find his arguments compelling.

Kanazawa’s most recent in the series of blog posts supporting his claim is this post discussing the Tiger Woods sex scandal. Here are a few quotes that summarize the theory:

In the very short time since I have been a “blogger” at Psychology Today, since February 2008, there have been numerous sex scandals of politicians, athletes, and other celebrities: Eliot Spitzer; Silvio Berlusconi; David Paterson; John Edwards; Mark Sanford; David Letterman, and now Tiger Woods. This is nothing new. The only puzzle is that some of them had to pay for the sex. … (more…)