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Perhaps ... but on the other hand, electric shocks work almost as well.

No, last I heard, electroshock aversion therapy had been found generally ineffective; while at onset the treatment is ineffective, over time the subject becomes habituated, requiring higher and higher negative stimulus levels. On the other hand, H. Keith Henson has speculated about how religion is able to use the same nervous system triggers as addictive drugs; his paper Sex, Drugs, and Cults notes that "Attention indicates status and is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins". It's been a successful method over a timescale sufficient for evolution to reinforce it genetically.

Besides, it's hard to find a quality cattle prod these days.

Well, this would be a good start:
http://www.human-nature.com/darwin/origin/contents .htm

If you wish to ask questions, it would help to study the subject first, yourself.

In the past, Steven Rose has promoted the view that there is more to evolutionary explanations of human behaviour than mere science. His co-authored book, Not in Our Genes,52 presented an explicitly Marxist critique of evolutionary biology; and his 1997 book, Lifelines, begins with the warning that "[t]he rise of the present enthusiasms for biologically determinist accounts of the human condition date back to the 1960s. They were not initiated by any specific advance in biological science, or powerful new theory, but harked back instead to an earlier tradition of eugenic thinking which . . . had been eclipsed and driven into intellectual and political disrepute in the aftermath of the war against Nazi Germany and its racially inspired Holocaust."53

Alas, Poor Darwin marks a complete reversal from this earlier position. Hilary Rose now concedes that evolutionary psychology eschews any notion of race, and that it is compatible with a wide variety of political viewpoints, such as Peter Singer's Darwinian Left, Matt Ridley's free marketeering, Helena Cronin's feminism, Francis Fukuyama's call for state intervention to tackle unemployment, and Darwin@LSE's collaborations with the left-leaning think-tank Demos.54 (She could have added also that John Maynard Smith FRS was a communist, and Robert Trivers was a member of the Black Panther Party.) Each of these researchers illustrate the point that facts and values can be kept separate; that one's political goals do not dictate one's science (or vice versa), but that once you've settled on your political or social objectives, science can help you achieve them.

Now, there's a distinction without a difference. Scientists shouldn't let politics guide science, but should first determine their politics and then use their science to support their political views? Be politically motivated at all times except while you're performing your experiments so you can more convincingly feign moral outrage when someone accuses your politics of guiding your science? Too many of us seem to buy into Curry's fantasy of the leftist scientist who can turn off her political motives where science is concerned. If you want to get into science, kids, be prepared to ditch political biases altogether, or no one except people with radical political viewpoints will

The fact is, HIV [sic] is the most daunting disease we have ever faced.

Which, of course, is not to deny that AIDS is daunting.

If it had hit even 50 years earlier we may very well have faced an epidemic on the order of the Black Death.

The attempt to humanize management theory in the work of Elton Mayo and his followers, [...], focused on the environment of work and reached the conclusion that environmental conditions and morale were as important as the behaviourist categories on which Taylor had concentrated.

If you redefine cognitive science to include any scientific data about human minds, I'll agree that the only scientific inputs linguistics is getting come from CogSci. But by that definition, most linguists are cognitive scientists.

I'd have to disagree there. Cognitive Science is a fairly well-defined (if multidisciplinary) field and it relies heavily on neuroanatomical studies. I contend that in CogSci, a psychological theory (including anything in Linguistics) without neuroanatomical evidence to support it, is just pure speculation.

I could argue that the data coming from computer science, while helpful, isn't science at all.

It'd be a weak argument. Computer science really is a science, in the sense that it is a study of the behaviour of real systems - both physical ones and abstract ones. It allows us to put the math into motion, so to speak. It comprises both theory and practical experimentation; results can be numerically quantified, predicted by theory and verified by experiment. There is no meaningful definition of "science" I know of, which doesn't include Computer Science. Maybe you're still thinking more in terms of the old notion of "Natural Philosophy".

More recently, it has become harder to be taken seriously as a young linguist without some knowledge of AI methods. (This doesn't apply to the hard-core Chomskyans, who don't believe in AI, as if that made any difference.)

That's truly excellent news. About time! I believe Chomsky is vastly overrated. It's probably because he had the whole field of theoretical linguistics mostly to himself for so long.

...[mini-resume]...

The science credentials you claim are certainly more than adequate. I'm glad to see that science is creeping into the curriculum in some places at least. Perhaps you're talking about Linguistics as currently taught in the US? Not that it should make much difference - but my most direct experience of the field comes from my sister who's now doing her Master's at the University of York in the UK. From what she tells me, the field is still mainly about descriptive theories which provide very little in the way of testable predictions. That, in my book, is not science.

my citation of Berlin and Kay is not inappropriate. If the strongest form of Sapir-Whorf were true, this experiment should not have turned out that way. It covers more ground than the neurology of vision processing, since it shows that the mental manipulation of visual signals is independent of the native language of the subject.

I won't argue with that; vision is much older than language and all the neurology involved is highly specialised and mostly physically remote and separate from the associative cortex and other structures (Broca's, Wernicke's) involved in language processing and abstract reasoning. I agree that language doesn't shape vision at least on a low level. It is silly to advance a theory that *every* single aspect of our experience is constrained by language. Nothing is ever so simple or clear cut in complex emergent systems like human minds. But even a misconstrued "Strong" Whorf hypothesis doesn't claim any such thing. And I don't believe anyone here is supporting the strong form (I might like to, but I wouldn't dare ;o)

I said your citation was inappropriate because I believed you were advancing it in support of the idea that language does not even partially constrain abstract thought. I hold that reports about the experience of simple visual stimuli are too limited in scope to have much to say on that subject. In any case, Berlin and Kay's conclusions in Basic Color Terms have been effectively disputed (and I for one fail to see how their results are supposed to *disprove* the dependence of subtle colour perception upon language), and Sapir and Whorf have been unjustly denounced most likely for sociopolitical reasons. It's just not done, these days, to suggest that culture or ethnicity could possibly have any deterministic effect on behaviour. Bah.

Still, thanks for the flame-free argument. I always enjoy debate when it's conducted on a civilised level. Kudos to you for that.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction