Are you going to Utah in the spring?

It’s not exactly a Mecca for atheists, but the American Atheists have announced their speakers for the 2014 National Convention in Salt Lake City. It looks good!

American Atheists revealed details on Wednesday about its 2014 national convention in Salt Lake City, announcing that speakers will include NFL Raiders punter Chris Kluwe, Survivor®: Philippines winner and sex therapist Denise Stapley, and Grammy®-nominated Spin Doctors bass player Mark White. The convention will also feature an art show, workshops, childcare, and a comedy show the weekend of April 17-20.

“We’re thrilled to bring so many great nontheists to our convention—some of whom have never addressed our movement before,” said American Atheists President David Silverman. “This is our 40th annual convention and it’s going to be stellar.”

Early bird tickets will go on sale Wednesday, August 7 on the American Atheists website at www.atheists.org. The convention will take place at the Hilton Salt Lake Center hotel & convention center in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

Salt Lake City is famous for being the seat of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. American Atheists chose Salt Lake City in order to better reach out to the sizable ex-Mormon population there.

“We want ex-Mormons to know that there is this entire community of people here for them,” said Public Relations Director Dave Muscato. “Often when people leave the Mormon church, they continue to base their identity in it because they don’t know any other community they can identify with. The 2014 American Atheists National Convention will be the place where ex-Mormons know that it’s okay to take that step and start saying, ‘I am an atheist.’”

Other speakers include the Reverend Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Maryam Namazie, Matt Dillahunty, Greta Christina, PZ Myers, Marsha Botzer of the Ingersoll Gender Center, Faisal Saeed al Mutar, Sikivu Hutchinson, Brian Keith Dalton also known as Mr. Deity, and Vickie Garrison.

Chris Kluwe, whom the New York Times called “The Most Interesting Man in the NFL,” is also a gaming enthusiast, author, LGBTQ equality activist, and musician. His book, Beautiful Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities, features personal essays about religion and the Pope, his family, guns, and many other topics.

Denise Stapley is the $1,000,000 grand prize winner of the 2012 CBS show Survivor®: Philippines. She is also a sex therapist and lives with her husband and 9-year-old daughter in Iowa.

Mark White is the bassist of the Grammy®-nominated alternative rock band Spin Doctors, known for their hits “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” He lives in Houston, Texas where he also teaches music privately.

I’m especially happy that they’re reaching out for speakers who aren’t on the usual roster of known atheists (although the ones they’ve got are good, no complaints there!). This is how we grow. I’ll be especially interested to hear Chris Kluwe talk.

ENCODE has its defenders!

You know I was really pissed off at the crap ENCODE was promoting, that the genome was at least 80% functional and that there was no such thing as junk DNA. And there have been a number of better qualified scientists (like W. Ford Doolittle and Dan Graur and many others) who have stood up and registered their vehement disagreement with that nonsense. But there are some who agree that the genome must be largely functional, like John Mattick. Larry Moran reminds me that Mattick is the author of this infamous chart, however, which is best known as the original Dog’s Ass Plot.

Worst evolution diagram ever

That is so misleadingly dishonest it takes my breath away — Mattick cherry-picked genome sizes to fit his curve. One of my cell biology labs involves teaching students how to properly construct a simple graph, and I think I’m going to include this figure as a bad example.

Well, Mattick has done it again. He has published a paper (how do these things get through peer review?) disputing the existence of large quantities of non-functional DNA, which is largely an attempted rebuttal of Graur’s paper. It’s a short paper, but painful in its contortions and extraordinarily poor arguments. Larry Moran has done an excellent job of tearing it apart — I think he needs to polish it up and get that published.

The worst part of the paper, though, is the concluding paragraph — you know, where most of us try to put the most important message of the work.

There may also be another factor motivating the Graur et al. and related articles (van Bakel et al. 2010; Scanlan 2012), which is suggested by the sources and selection of quotations used at the beginning of the article, as well as in the use of the phrase “evolution-free gospel” in its title (Graur et al. 2013): the argument of a largely non-functional genome is invoked by some evolutionary theorists in the debate against the proposition of intelligent design of life on earth, particularly with respect to the origin of humanity. In essence, the argument posits that the presence of non-protein-coding or so-called ‘junk DNA’ that comprises >90% of the human genome is evidence for the accumulation of evolutionary debris by blind Darwinian evolution, and argues against intelligent design, as an intelligent designer would presumably not fill the human genetic instruction set with meaningless information (Dawkins 1986; Collins 2006). This argument is threatened in the face of growing functional indices of noncoding regions of the genome, with the latter reciprocally used in support of the notion of intelligent design and to challenge the conception that natural selection accounts for the existence of complex organisms (Behe 2003; Wells 2011).

I’m sure the Discovery Institute staff are dancing in pirouettes of joy at getting a neutral or possibly favorable mention in a legitimate journal. It’s not clear exactly what Mattick is trying to do here (lack of clarity is also a sin in science writing, let me remind you): either he’s trying to pre-emptively slander his critics by impugning them with an ideological motive, or he’s granting credence to Intelligent Design creationism. I’m inclined to think it’s both; he’s clearly trying to argue with the motives of Graur and others, but also, he’s claiming, as the creationists do, that evidence of function for the highly variable component of our genome is a de facto argument for a purpose for that variation, and that evolutionary theory does not support the idea of a functional purpose for variation in the sequence of most satellite DNA, for instance.

But I would not argue that ubiquitious functionality is unlikely because it has consequences for our theories; it’s wrong because of all the evidence that has been marshaled that most DNA is not there to serve a specific, selectable purpose for us humans.

Trying to overcome my Male Pattern Blindness

The latest furor over Ben Radford triggered some bad memories. Has anyone sat down and actually compiled a list of that guy’s offenses against reason and science? He’s got a long history of making a mess.

Remember when he was distorting the conclusions of papers about women’s eating disorders? Or how about the time he was taking issue with a four-year-old who notices the cultural biases in toys? That was fun; it led to Radford arguing that dolls are all pink because girls like pink because dolls are pink, and then inventing evo psych nonsense about color preferences and women searching for pink berries. Then he was dismissing concerns about the frequency of sexual harassment in schools, and picking nits over sexual assault so that he could argue that rape wasn’t so horribly frequent, a claim which revealed that he was innumerate.

Say…do you notice something? Is there a pattern to Radford’s biases? I mean, he’s well regarded otherwise, has a popular podcast, and I don’t think he’s stupid — the majority of the things he writes about are OK, it’s just that every once in a while he plumbs the depths of idiocy with a piece that makes him look like a hyperskeptical dishonest twit. And I think…if I look real hard…if I wipe the Y-chromosome bearing floaties out of my eyes…I see a common thread.

Whenever Radford writes about gender issues, like sexual assault, cultural assumptions about gender roles, or media biases about women, he turns into a lying hyperskeptical denialist. He stops being skeptical and starts digging for evidence, and worse, making up evidence, to bolster his presuppositions that discrimination against women doesn’t exist. He’s a bad skeptic. And he has a long history of doing this.

Why does he even have a job?

I don’t know if you want to read read Ron Lindsay’s explanation, but here it is anyway.

And what is it CFI was supposed to rebut? Ben’s speculations about the hues of dolls’ faces? Presumably not. What appeared to bother some commenters was Ben’s alleged sexism.

OK. CFI denounces sexism. We always have and presumably always will. Stereotyping based on gender is wrong and policies and practices that promote such stereotyping should be condemned. Furthermore, attitudes that exhibit sexism are unacceptable, and we should work to eliminate such attitudes, including, to the extent they exist, such attitudes within secular/skeptical organizations.

The problem is I doubt that Ben would disagree with anything in the above paragraph, nor did I see anything in his posts to suggest he would. Therefore, I’m not sure it counts as a “rebuttal.”

I love that blithe “OK”. Yeah, CFI denounces sexism, and Radford says he does, too, so what have you little people got to complain about?

But wait…I think I see another pattern emerging through my testosterone-addled murk. Look what Karen Stollznow said about her work environment — they have a history, too, of diminishing the significance of a pattern of behavior.

Five months after I lodged my complaint I received a letter that was riddled with legalese but acknowledged the guilt of this individual. They had found evidence of “inappropriate communications” and “inappropriate” conduct at conferences. However, they greatly reduced the severity of my claims. When I asked for clarification and a copy of the report they treated me like a nuisance. In response to my unanswered phone calls they sent a second letter that refused to allow me to view the report because they couldn’t release it to “the public”. They assured me they were disciplining the harasser but this turned out to be a mere slap on the wrist. He was suspended, while he was on vacation overseas. They offered no apology, that would be an admission of guilt, but they thanked me for bringing this serious matter to their attention. Then they asked me to not discuss this with anyone. This confidentiality served me at first; I wanted to retain my dignity and remain professional. Then I realized that they are trying to silence me, and this silence only keeps up appearances for them and protects the harasser.

Serial harassers are really, really good at looking wounded at accusations and apologizing verbally — they can be socially slick and glibly slide through these storms, because that’s what enables their activities. What you have to do is look at their patterns of behavior, what they do, not what they say. And Radford clearly has a sexist modus operandi.

Nice cartoon:

Also, Rebecca Watson has a few words.

Sikivu, Ophelia, and Rebecca — who says atheism lacks women stars?

I just watched our very own Sikivu Hutchinson and Ophelia Benson, along with Rebecca Watson, brilliantly discuss this silly question, “Are women afraid of atheism?” I think this embed code below will work, but who knows…it was through the Huffington Post, and they have to make everything weird and difficult.

There was also a concurrent text stream, and wouldn’t you know it, all the usual dudebros were there to complain that there is no problem, women are all equally represented, atheism has no cultural relevance anyway so why are these women talking?

No, it could never happen to her!

This is what always blows my mind: that sexual harassment affects people I’d never imagine having to worry about it. Karen Stollznow is a big name, popular on the skeptic conference circuit, and has always given the impression of being strong, poised, and confident — which means that I cluelessly took it for granted that no one would ever mess with her. I was wrong. This is never a problem with the victims, but always in the nature of the perpetrators.

Stollznow has opened up about her years of harassment at work, and it’s shocking. It’s the usual combination of shame and peer pressure that keeps women silent (exactly as the abusers like it), and when they reveal that ugly history one begins to get an awareness of how ubiquitous the problem is.

I know who her abuser was…and I feel a weird combination of being appalled and being totally unsurprised. It’s another of those big name skeptics, popular with some on the lecture circuit, and also (the totally unsurprising part) with a history of belittling women’s concerns. I’ve talked with Stollznow a bit about revealing that name, and I’m holding off a bit because she was very circumspect in that article…but I’m of two minds about it, because the other thing we see over and over is that it’s the women who have the courage to step out and speak and face the usual torrent of disparagement and dismissal, and the abusers who get the privilege of lurking in the shadows.

Something strange happened after I posted this. People started emailing me. They all said the same thing: they knew exactly who the harasser was, and they named him, and eerily, they all named exactly the same name, and they were all 100% on the money. I’m starting to believe in psychic powers.

The accused harasser was Ben Radford.

Wait. Maybe it’s not psychic powers, it’s privileged ignorance. Almost all of the people writing to me are women, and some of them also tell tales of their husbands or boyfriends not believing them at first.

Is there such a thing as Male Pattern Blindness?

Surely, sexism is dead and feminism superfluous

But these stories keep coming, and I don’t understand it; there are these mobs of people constantly telling me that feminism is a sham, that True Skeptics™ would apply their critical faculties to it and see that sexism is not a real problem, and that it’s all just a bunch of hypersensitive weepy ladies with a victimhood mentality. So how do we explain what happened when a student created a feminist society at Altringham Girls Grammar School?

I decided to set up a feminist society at my school, which has previously been named one of "the best schools in the country", to try to tackle these issues. However, this was more difficult than I imagined as my all-girls school was hesitant to allow the society. After a year-long struggle, the feminist society was finally ratified.

What I hadn’t anticipated on setting up the feminist society was a massive backlash from the boys in my wider peer circle. They took to Twitter and started a campaign of abuse against me. I was called a "feminist bitch", accused of "feeding [girls] bullshit", and in a particularly racist comment was told "all this feminism bull won’t stop uncle Sanjit from marrying you when you leave school".

Our feminist society was derided with retorts such as, "FemSoc, is that for real? #DPMO" [don’t piss me off] and every attempt we made to start a serious debate was met with responses such as "feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring".

If it’s so tiring, why is the sap behind that comment making the effort to respond?

OK, that’s just dumb people being mocking and dismissive. But then it took the usual turn, and the boys started judging everything on the young women’s sexual potential.

The situation recently reached a crescendo when our feminist society decided to take part in a national project called Who Needs Feminism. We took photos of girls standing with a whiteboard on which they completed the sentence “I need feminism because…”, often delving into painful personal experiences to articulate why feminism was important to them.

When we posted these pictures online we were subject to a torrent of degrading and explicitly sexual comments.

We were told that our “militant vaginas” were “as dry as the Sahara desert”, girls who complained of sexual objectification in their photos were given ratings out of 10, details of the sex lives of some of the girls were posted beside their photos, and others were sent threatening messages warning them that things would soon “get personal”.

Boys will be boys, right? And adults will be contemptible enablers of vicious behavior. Look how the administrators of the school responded:

We, a group of 16-, 17- and 18-year-old girls, have made ourselves vulnerable by talking about our experiences of sexual and gender oppression only to elicit the wrath of our male peer group. Instead of our school taking action against such intimidating behaviour, it insisted that we remove the pictures. Without the support from our school, girls who had participated in the campaign were isolated, facing a great deal of verbal abuse with the full knowledge that there would be no repercussions for the perpetrators.

Gosh. I guess we can’t sit back and relax, misogyny beheaded and mounted as a trophy on our wall, just yet.

Maybe next week, you think?

For shame, Discovery Channel

It’s shark week. I’m not going to watch a bit of it; I’m actually boycotting the Discovery Channel for the indefinite future. The reason: An appalling violation of media ethics and outright scientific dishonesty. They opened the week with a special “documentary” on Megalodon, the awesome 60 foot long shark that went extinct a few million years ago…or at least, that’s what the science says. The show outright lied to suggest that Megalodon might still exist somewhere in the ocean.

None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents.

Though certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized, sightings of “Submarine” continue to this day.

Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant sharks persist all over the world. There is still a debate about what they may be.

There is no evidence of this species’ persistence, nor did they present any. They just made it all up; reality isn’t awesome enough, so they had to gild the giant shark story. They’ve gone the way of our other so-called “documentary” channels dedicated to fact-based education — the History channel, Animal Planet, TLC. Garbage rules.

This also makes me sad because I already have to deal with irrational loons telling me that since coelacanths exist, scientists are wrong and humans walked with dinosaurs. I await with gritted teeth the first creationist who tries to argue that the survival of the Megalodon to modern times means it’s perfectly plausible that medieval knights hunted dragons/dinosaurs.

Thanks, Discovery Channel. And screw you.

Prime snide kookrant

I was surprised when I read the excerpt from the sneering letter to the editor-in-chief of Science magazine — it’s someone patronizingly chiding the little woman with the big job at a science journal in decline. It’s bad enough that it’s so condescendingly goofy, but it’s also complaining that Science has foolishly jumped into the “debate” about global climate change. There is no debate; it’s happening, there is a substantial anthropogenic component, and the science is rather firmly settled, so what would be then inappropriate is refusing to address an important environmental issue.

But then I read the full letter, and learned two things that made it even more laughable: 1) it’s an open letter published on the wacky denialist website, What’s Up With That, which means it’s going to be instantly ignored by any credible scientist, as Marcia McNutt is, and 2) it goes on and on and on and on. It’s absurdly preachy and unprofessional, and tells me that the author has no idea what kind of letter would be published by the magazine.

Further, McNutt is a professor of marine geophysics at Stanford, and what impresses the kook who wrote that letter?

McNutt is a NAUI-certified scuba diver and she trained in underwater demolition and explosives handling with the U.S. Navy UDT and SEAL Team.

The comments are also delusional. People are opining that Science is a dying journal. Really?

Climate change denialists are just about as out-of-touch and clownish as evolution denialists.