A while ago, in the comments following this, I wrote:

It occurs to me that the implications of social construction can appeal to rather unsavoury motives. If a person’s tastes and disposition are primarily socially constructed, that person can also, presumably, be remade to suit society and its representatives. Such high-minded Agents of Society might even become “engineers of the human soul,” to borrow Stalin’s phrase. The idea of innate disposition and talent is in some circles quite contentious, not least with regard to intelligence and its unequal distribution. This seems to cause unease in ways that, say, the unequal distribution of musical or athletic talent does not. It also undermines many conceptions of egalitarianism, which is probably why it causes such a fuss.

And it does cause a fuss. It’s possible, for instance, to find people who are (or will be) employed precisely because of their well above average intelligence performing extraordinary contortions to deny the existence of the intelligence they possess. Some, like Joseph Kugelmass, an English graduate student at the University of California, say things like this:

The abstract personal definition of “intelligence,” reified in our minds thanks to IQ tests and their derivatives, is a source of social ills and should be abandoned. It impedes and confuses pedagogy, underwrites racism and sexism, inhibits culture, and trivializes political debate… To claim that intelligence exists as a phenomenon, but not as an inherent personal quality, is the same as arguing that race or gender exist as social phenomena but not as simple, natural facts. […] Intelligence, like all essentialism, is a technology of power. It reinforces privilege and hierarchizes speech. It cuts art and language off from its inspirations, aping capital by circulating language through a series of useless oppositions… and non-signifying refinements of craft.

Setting aside the tendentious postmodern framing, dutifully regurgitated, note how the objection to intelligence as a personal attribute is asserted rather than argued and is essentially political in origin.

With the above in mind, here’s a short TED lecture from 2003, in which Steven Pinker addresses the political appeal of the “blank slate” theory, its prevalence, and its shortcomings. Topics touched on include ideological taboos, experience versus theory, and the self-inflicted disrepute of literary criticism.

Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, is well worth reading.

Related: On Stalin’s dislike of genetics and the idea of human nature.

Time for another episode of the excellent documentary series The Planets, this time on the Sun. Titled Star, the episode captures the magnitude of several “Eureka!” moments, as when Angelo Secchi, the Vatican’s chief astronomer, realised the blinding disc in the daytime sky is another one of those points that twinkle at night. As with previous episodes, there’s plenty of rare footage and some interesting characters, not least Kristian Birkeland, who created laboratory auroras while wearing a fez to protect his brain from radiation.

Part 1:

Splitting light. Secchi’s discovery. A makeshift umbrella. Twisted magnetism.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Part 2:

Artificial auroras. Comets and clues. Force field. Heliopause. The stuff of life.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Related: Astronomical Odds, Craters, Freefall.  (h/t, The Thin Man.)

Helium, that is, and sulphur hexafluoride.

Via Centripetal Notion.

The comedic potential of academic feminism will not be unknown to regular readers of this site. Some of you may have fond memories of Dr Sandra Harding, an alleged “feminist philosopher of science,” who claims that Einstein’s theories of relativity are “gender-biased” and thus disreputable. Ms Harding famously described Newton’s Principia as a “rape manual” and claimed that rape and torture metaphors could be used to usefully describe its contents. Harding’s most famous “work” is essentially a pile of unsupported claims, false equivalences and comical non sequitur. That she’s employed in academia is, or should be, a minor scandal. Before you snigger too much, though, it seems Ms Harding’s worldview is not entirely without influence. Over at B&W, Ophelia Benson has been trawling through a Women’s Studies discussion group and unearthed the following gem:

Biology is a socially constructed concept too – dated. It categorizes and defines ‘organisms’ a certain way – not wholistically – and not the only way possible, I might add.

I am no science major,

A shock to us all.

but I know Einstein’s theories and physics has already proven most of the fundamentals of biology to be faulty.

Readers may be wondering how exactly the theories of General and Special Relativity – or some unspecified “physics” – have “proven most of the fundamentals of biology to be faulty.” Alas, our Women’s Studies devotee doesn’t seem to know and so, alas, nor will we. 

I admit, I am a science heretic. It is a belief system and I’ve confronted it’s [sic] limitations – quite soundly and concretely – for my own understandings…

This is a surprisingly popular assertion – that the scientific method is a “belief system” and thus, allegedly, no better or more deserving of “privilege” than whatever it is it suits one to believe. As, for instance, when the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting told her readers that “rationality is a social construction” while taking umbrage with the Enlightenment on grounds that it was now “being used against Islam.” This, one must suppose, is a very bad thing and to be avoided at all costs. To suggest that someone is wrong on points of fact or incoherent or amazingly credulous would be terribly unfair.

I was once told that “science is based on assumptions; an assumption is essentially a belief, so science is based on belief.” But the scientific method is actually based on the testing of formal hypotheses, as opposed to beliefs, which are not the same thing at all. Strictly speaking, a scientific hypothesis must be self-consistent, must explain existing observations and must predict new ones. These formal obligations and restraints are not comparable with the acceptance of erroneous or unverifiable assumptions as a priori truth. The scientific method is one of the best practical lessons in intellectual humility. As the mathematician Ian Stewart pointed out: “Science is the best defence against believing what we want to.” And the willingness to defer to evidence – as opposed to one’s own preferences – is the antithesis of fundamentalism, whether religious or political.

Brilliant Noise, by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, is a short film about the Sun. Not so much twinkling as seething, spitting and flaring.

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo

More. And.