Monthly Archive for August, 2010

From Nicholas Wade, The New York Times

Dr. Hauser is a leader in the field of animal and human cognition, and in 2006 wrote a well-received book, “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.” Harvard’s findings against him, if sustained, may cast a shadow over the broad field of scientific research that depended on the particular research technique often used in his experiments.

Harvard University said Friday that it had found a prominent researcher, Marc Hauser, “solely responsible” for eight instances of scientific misconduct.

Hours later, Dr. Hauser, a rising star for his explorations into cognition and morality, made his first public statement since news of the inquiry emerged last week, telling The New York Times, “I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes” and saying he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to my students, my colleagues and my university.”

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From Justin E.H. Smith

I recently spelled out some of the reasons why I remain doubtful about the prospects for transforming marriage, worldwide, into a gender-indifferent institution. (It is only the worldwide perspective that interests me.) I have not heard, in reply, any substantive arguments against the reasons I give for my doubts, and I have therefore decided that it might be a good idea to try one more time, and this time to make my call for serious engagement more explicit. I would sincerely like to know whether there is something I am missing.

I have been alarmed to see a sort of orthodoxy emerge as if out of nowhere over just the past few years (many of you will be old enough to remember when, in the not-so-distant past, Andrew Sullivan was condemned as a betrayer and a domesticator of the gay spirit for his powerful defense of same-sex marriage in Virtually Normal; I hope no one will try to tell me that everyone who condemned him at the time was, wittingly or un-, an enemy of human rights). This orthodoxy, like its opposite and indeed like all orthodoxies, presumes that any questioning of it amounts to hostility. There is no room in either of the prevailing orthodoxies that have formed around the controversy over same-sex marriage for someone like me: someone who supports marriage equality, but doubts, based on a thorough but admittedly incomplete reading of historical and anthropological scholarship, that the concept of marriage is in fact flexible enough to ever be transformed in such a way that marriage will cease to be heterosexual by presumption.

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From Daniel Gilbert, The New York Times

In 1650, Oliver Cromwell asked the Church of Scotland to reconsider its decision to side with the royalists instead of him. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” The church didn’t think it possible, of course, so Oliver’s army took Scotland.

According to Kathryn Schulz, each of us is our very own Church of Scotland — ­often mistaken, oddly oblivious and typically immune to a good beseeching. ­“Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” is an insightful and delightful discussion of the errors of our ways — why we make mistakes, why we don’t know we are making them and what we do when recognition dawns.

Schulz begins with a question that should puzzle us more than it does: Why do we love being right? After all, she writes, “unlike many of life’s other delights — chocolate, surfing, kissing — it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts.” Indeed, as she notes, “we can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything,” including that which we’d rather be wrong about, like “the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend’s relationship or the fact that at our spouse’s insistence, we just spent 15 minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.”

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