I’m reading a delightful history of chess, The Immortal Game, by David Shenk, and got to the chapter dealing with the dark side of chess: the fact that a small but significant number of top players throughout history have gone off the deep end -- including the famous American world champion Bobby Fisher.

As is usual with correlations (playing chess <=> your brain goes bonk), it is not clear which way the causality goes, if at all. It could be that playing chess at the highest levels affects the mind in negative ways; it may be that abnormal minds are more likely than others to be attracted by the game; or it could simply be that the correlation is spurious, i.e. non-causal.

Shenk does not take sides on this debate, but he does report the pronouncements of a number of Freudian psychoanalysts on the matter. For instance, Ernest Jones (Freud’s biographer and protege), confidently stated that “It is plain that the unconscious motive activating [chess] players is not the mere love of pugnacity characteristic of all competitive games, but the grimmer one of father murder.” What?? That’s right, it’s the good ‘ol Oedipus complex -- itself rooted in the all-encompassing Freudian explanation for human behavior, sex drives -- that pushes players to protect their Queen (=mother) and checkmate the King (=father). Here is some more nonsense from Jones (p. 147 of Shenk’s):

My colleague at the University of California-Irvine, Francisco Ayala, has been interviewed recently by the New York Times about his views on science and religion. Ayala is particularly suitable for the task, being a former Dominican priest and one of the world’s best known evolutionary biologists. I happen to agree with much of what Ayala said in the interview, but of course I will be focusing here on where I depart from his positions.

Here we go again, just this morning the Florida House of Representatives passed a bill that directs teachers to engage in “critical analysis” of evolution in public schools. The bill’s chief sponsor, Republican Alan Hays of Umatilla, says that evolution “has holes in it,” and that “no one has any record -- no fossils have been found.” That will come as a big shock to the thousands of natural history museums around the world, displaying hundreds of thousands of fossils.

But of course factual truth has never been the forte of creationists. Nor has honesty. The bill is ironically called “The Evolution Academic Freedom Act,” and who would possibly want to be against academic freedom? The bill aims at protecting teachers who wish to be critical of evolution teaching in public schools, except for the minor detail that there doesn’t seem to be a record of any teacher filing a complaint on the matter (I guess they are all truly scared out of their wits by the evolution police).

The Florida Senate has already passed a similar bill, which would prohibit school officials from penalizing teachers that challenge evolution based on “scientific information.” I wonder where these teachers would get such information. Oh, right, from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the so-called think tank that actually drafted the “model” legislation on which the bill is based.

Maybe I’ve had elevators on my mind because the one in our building has gone through endless repairs of late, none of which apparently improved its speed or reliability. Or perhaps you simply cannot live in New York City without taking into account elevators as a major component of your life. But then my wife pointed out to me this snippet from an article published recently in The New Yorker (every self-respecting newyorker reads The New Yorker while in the subway):

I have taken issue before (here and here) with the writings of Stanley Fish in the New York Times, and I’m about to do it again. Fish is a professor of law at Florida State University, and often writes reasonably on a variety of topics in the NYT, but there is a streak of deconstruction running through some of his columns, that brings him to espouse pretty questionable positions when it comes to science, religion or philosophy.

In his April 6 column, Fish delights in announcing the publication of a book by Francois Cusset entitled “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Delouze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.” I have not read the book, so I will confine myself to questioning Fish’s comments, though it is no secret that I have a very low opinion of Foucault, Derrida and co. to begin with.

Skeptic Society’s mastermind and author Michael Shermer is about to release a review of the latest nonsense entry in the evolution-creation wars: Ben Stein’s movie entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” Shermer is in an excellent position to criticize creationism, having been a fundamentalist himself, one who rejected the theory of evolution not out of understanding, but simply because his preacher told him to. Today Michael is that rare find in America, a professional skeptic who devotes his life to the betterment of society through critical thinking. Stein, on the other hand, is an egregious example of the worst kind of ideologue, one who not only manifestly does not understand the target of his criticisms, but is not averse to resorting to the malicious deception of his audience to advance his cause.

For instance, Shermer points out that the opening scene of the movie is a fraud. It purports to show Mr. Stein giving a lecture to an adoring crowd of students at Pepperdine University (ironically, from where Shermer graduated). But a little investigation showed that the production company for the movie literally bought the audience: there were very few students there, the audience having been created from what is known in Hollywood jargon as “extras.” What a way to start a “documentary” the purpose of which is to unmask the deceptions and conspiracies of the “Darwinists.”

Common sense says that we are happier when we get more money to spend on ourselves. At least, that’s what passes for commonsense in modern capitalistic societies, from the United States to China.  Indeed, when Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and at Harvard Business School asked a bunch of their students (the usual subjects in social science studies), that’s exactly what they found: students thought they would be happier getting $20 than $5, and that they would be happier spending the money on themselves than on others.

Turns out, the students were spectacularly wrong.

Research over the past several years has steadily contradicted the capitalistic assumption about human nature. For instance, it is well known that there is only a weak correlation between income level and self-reported happiness across the globe, with the relationship plateauing (meaning that additional money does not increase happiness) at surprisingly low levels of income. And yet, people keep playing the lottery, or its white collar equivalent, the stock market. Why?

If one didn’t wish to do something productive with one’s life, creationists would be a perennial source of amusement.

Florida creationists, in this particular case. A new set of science standards has just been approved by the Board of Education of the orange juice and hanging chads State, and both sides are claiming victory, according to an article in Science dated 4 March 2008.

How can that be?

The news keeps coming in, and examples of how real science works (as opposed to make believe creationism or so-called intelligent design) are beginning to get so numerous that it is hard to imagine people capable of reading newspaper articles are still capable of denying evolution.

Last month, for instance, a spectacular discovery was published in Nature magazine, a finding that has resolved a long-standing question about the evolution of bats. Darwin listed the problem as one of the great mysteries of evolution he was not able to address in “The Origin of Species”: how did bats originate from terrestrial ancestors?

The modern version of the conundrum hinged, until last month, on whether flight or echolocation (the amazing ability of bats to generate a sonar-like pulse to orient themselves and locate preys) came first. For decades biologists have been arguing in favor of either the flight-first or the echolocation-first hypothesis.