Briefly, from Taranto's Best of the Web yesterday:
Undergraduates in cognitive science and psychology are rigorously and routinely instructed not to directly extrapolate behaviors from lower animals into evidence of cause in different animals, much less higher primate species. Al Gore is not a scientist, though -- he's a politician -- and we all know that Al Gore was advised to be more of an Alpha Male, and in his autobiography he explains his "Hypnotized Chicken Theory of Global Warming Consciousness Raising" -- a hypo. that, even with his disclaimer, would have gotten him laughed out of the Cognitive Science departments of our nation's universities if it was submitted as an academic paper. The fact that he included it in his book tells you what Al Gore really thinks of you, gives you some indication of the intellectual heft he carries, and provides some insight into why he partnered with Google on his Current TV venture.
"Sen. Barack Obama said Wednesday he would give Al Gore, a Nobel prize winner, a major role in an Obama administration to address the problem of global warming," the Associated Press reports from Wallingford, Pa...
...
Just one question: Has anyone actually read Gore's autobiography, "The Assault on Reason"? We've perused parts of it recently, and it is a weird, weird book. Gore is clearly a bright man, and he knows a little about a lot, and he ties together brain psychology, climate science, history, media criticism and who knows what other topics (we're only on Chapter 1) to produce a stream of consciousness that probably will appeal to partisan Democrats but to anyone else is just incredibly odd. Here's our favorite passage so far:
When I was a boy growing up on our family farm in the summers, I learned how to hypnotize chickens. You hold the chicken down and then circle your finger around its head, making sure that its eyes trace your hand movement. After a sufficient number of circles, the chicken will become entranced and completely immobile. There's a lot you can do with a hypnotized chicken. You can use it as a paperweight, or you can use it as a doorstop, and either way, the chicken will sit there motionless, staring blankly. (What you can't do is use it as a football. Something about being thrown through the air seemed to wake the chicken right up.)
It turns out that the immobility response in animals is an area that has received some scholarly attention, and here is one thing the scientists have found: The immobility response is strongly influenced by fear. A fear stimulus causes the chicken's amygdala to signal the release of neurochemicals, and controlled experiments show that they make immobility much more likely.
No, I'm not saying that television viewers are like hypnotized chickens. [Of course not! Why don't you tell us what you really think?] But there may be some lessons for us larger-brained humans in the experiences of barnyard hens.
And there you have it! From hypnotized chickens to An Inconvenient Truth, all in one tangled, self-congratulatory confabulation...Al Gore's got it covered. When Al Gore field-tested The Day After Tomorrow and its theory of hypersonic wind velocities from the troposphere, he was just trying to throw you up in the air and stimulate your amygdala, so that he could drop some Inconvenient Truth on all you allegorical hypnotized chickens!
Now Ted Turner has weighed in with his "Everyone Left Will Become Cannibals" corollary...but don't worry. Ted Turner himself will not eat you or your children. He'll have plenty of money. The rest of you will go the way of the sick chickens:
There are several hypotheses that attempt to explain the processes behind the development of cannibalism in laying hens. The most compelling hypothesis, however, relates cannibalistic behavior to misdirected foraging behavior. Several authors have stressed the close resemblance of feather pecking and cannibalism to foraging behavior. The physical manipulations of the beak during bouts of cannibalistic behavior mirror the manipulations employed in foraging behavior.
Hey, all of this constituted irrefutable evidence for noted climate scientiste Roger Ebert!
Recent comments