The movie this week was…Ralph Breaks the Internet

I must protest. The movie Ralph Breaks the Internet is totally wrong. That is not how the internet works, with little people zipping around inside the cable. Also, the product placement was excessive, with all kinds of internet companies represented with big signs in your face all the time. Wasn’t this one of the many problems with The Emoji Movie?

But still, it was a sweet movie with a nice message. I also liked how all these little kids in the audience got up and danced in front of the screen during the closing credits. They were terrible dancers, but they were enthusiastic.

How adorable

Every year, American Atheists has their annual convention on Easter weekend — it’s smart, because this is one group that won’t have conflicts with religious holidays. This year, it’s in Cincinnati, which has Answers in Genesis concerned, because that’s real close to their odious little theme park for the gullible, so they’ve decided to have their own conference at the same time! I really don’t think there will be many attendees who will be conflicted about which conference to see, so that’s also a smart move. These are two events with nearly perfect 0% overlap.

AiG seems to think it’s all about them, though.

Recently, the group American Atheists announced they are bringing their annual conference to Cincinnati during Easter 2019! And from what we’ve heard from reliable sources, they particularly want to be in our area because this is where Answers in Genesis, the Ark Encounter, and the Creation Museum are located.

We’ve also heard about some of the possible things the atheists might be planning in their attempts to oppose our creation-gospel ministry. So while the atheists are running their conference, we’ve decided to hold our own conference. Titled “Answering Atheists—an AiG Easter Conference,” this four-day event will be held at the Ark Encounter’s new Answers Center. We will equip Christians to answer the skeptics and to effectively share the truth of God’s Word and its life-changing gospel message.

How odd. I haven’t heard anything about any focus on AiG at the atheist conference. They haven’t announced any speakers yet, but they have put out a call for proposals.

Past proposals that have been selected include presentations on: activism and organizing; politics, public policy, and advocacy; community building; personal experiences with leaving religion; science, technology, and education; communications and marketing; and litigation and constitutional rights.

Musicians, comedians, poets, artists, and other performers are also invited to submit proposals.

Hmm. Nothing in there about “cunning ways to fuck over AiG”. Nothing specific about the Ark Park or the Creation “Museum”. I suspect there will be people discouraging everyone from bothering to visit the over-priced novelty show in Kentucky, although some might slip away out of curiosity to check it out, so if anything, they might get a few additional skeptical visitors, which will bump up their declining attendance very slightly.

Also, we always oppose the anti-scientific bullshit AiG peddles, 365 days a year, so this will be nothing new.

On the other hand, the AiG conference seems to be full of anti-atheist nonsense from all the usual, tired suspects. Ray Comfort is the keynote speaker, if that tells you anything. Like that it’s going to be a load of tiresome baloney. He’s going to be talking about “keys to reaching atheists”, which is amusing, since Comfort is one of the worst people at reaching atheists, which really says something, since all the AiG clowns and Living Waters bozos are all totally unconvincing to anyone who doesn’t accept the authority of the Bible.

I do notice that the registration for AiG’s event is set at $50 less than the full price of the AA conference. I expect, though, that the AA speakers will be more substantial and numerous than the 3-4 droning preachers per day that AiG has lined up. (I qualify for discounts that would make the atheist conference cheaper than the bible-thumpers conference, anyway).

I won’t be holding my breath waiting for AiG to extend a speaking invitation to me, to pad out their thin lineup, even though I’d probably add a little excitement to their schedule. Since I’m persona non grata with atheism right now, I guess I won’t wait for one from AA, either. My family doesn’t do Easter, so it looks like me and the spiders hanging out and mocking the holiday this year. They’re better company than Christian zealots, anyway.

Happy Spider Report: Vera was preggers!

It’s all good news. All the spiders are thriving right now, chowing down on flies. Vera produced a very pretty egg sac — I’m thinking the 14/10 light/dark cycle may have something to do with it — and has shrunk to about half her previous size. I’m planning to open up the sac on Sunday as part of my devotional, just to check on the health of her embryos. Although I’m low on adults, the next generation is coming along, and with any luck I’ll have a swarm of spiderlings this time next week.

The Sentinelese are not uncontacted primitives

Everywhere I go, there is news about the missionary who was recently killed on North Sentinel Island, a remote speck in the Indian Ocean. Generally, I agree with the sentiment: the man was a sanctimonious fool who wanted to bring Jesus to a people who have, over the years, made it absolutely clear that they want nothing to do with outsiders. The missionary didn’t even speak their language — no outsiders do! — so how he expected to teach them weird biblical theology is a mystery.

But another theme is that the natives of that island are totally isolated and haven’t had much exchange with Western culture, so it’s not surprising that they reacted barbarically to a naive visitor. As it turns out, that isn’t even close to true: there have been multiple visits, including by a nasty little colonial administrator for the British Empire, who landed on the island in 1880. He was not killed. The inhabitants didn’t automatically start fling spears at strangers. That behavior was learned.

Portman spent most of his time in the greater Andaman Islands, but in 1880, he landed on North Sentinel. The natives fled, and his party ventured inland to find a settlement which had been abandoned in haste.
But they located an elderly couple and a few children they were able to abduct. The couple quickly died, likely from ailments to which they had no immunity.
The children spent a few weeks with Portman doing god knows what, after which he returned them to the island. Portman returned on a couple occasions, but the Sentinelese hid from him each time.
The story related by the children was certainly passed down among the 100 or so inhabitants of the island, and even today, Portman’s fatal kidnapping is just beyond a human lifetime.

They also looted a grounded cargo ship in the 1980s — they now have metal tools. There were visits from anthropologists and Indian government officials, shown in a video at the above link. The inhabitants are a handsome and healthy-looking people, and it’s not clear what we could possibly do to improve their happiness. Bringing them Christianity doesn’t count.

But most importantly, these aren’t some brutal, primitive tribe.

And their aggressiveness is not the mark of savagery. It just that their conception of outsiders is mostly framed by some foot-faced English pervert who murdered some old people and did weird things to their kids. So let’s do them a favor and leave them alone.

The real enemies of good science

I’m still tuned in to the basal level of creationism in this country, and still keep an eye on the fools who are still making noise. But yesterday I was alerted to this new video by “Dr” Grady McMurtry titled 25 proofs the Earth is young, and I couldn’t believe it. The guy is a buffoon, he was pompously declaring the same old crap creationists have been squirting out since George Mcready Price, and I just didn’t care. Flood geology, from a guy who knows less geology than I do, are you fucking kidding me? In 2018?

The world has moved on. Those ideas are so dead that they rely entirely on surprising the media with how stupid they are to get any attention — the flat-earthers are the same way. What anti-science fantasy can we come up with that is so knuckle-draggingly idiotic, so irrelevant to the way the world works, that television crews will flock to us to put us on cable, that we’ll get mentioned in the New York Times, that will get us a big feature in an online magazine?

Sure, there are people who deeply believe — the piety of yokels is still inflating the gas-bag of creationism, and a few frauds are making bank off all kinds of absurd claims. Yeah, you can rake in the bucks and the media attention if you build a big building with a boat-like facade and claim to have the evidence for Noah’s Ark, and we should continue fighting against that (it is necessary that the religious con artists not think they can get a free pass despite lying to the public), but at the same time we should be aware that these are just the flamboyant excrescences of a rot that has a deeper and more dangerous core.

Holly Dunsworth cuts to the chase (I’ve been noticing that a lot of anthropologists are coming to the forefront in the battle against evolutionary ignorance):

Evolution educators—even if sticking to E. coli, fruit flies, or sticklebacks—must confront the ways that evolutionary science has implicitly undergirded and explicitly promoted or has naively inspired so many racist, sexist, and otherwise harmful beliefs and actions. We can no longer arm students with the ideas that have had harmful sociocultural consequences without addressing them explicitly because our failure to do so effectively is the primary reason these horrible consequences exist. The worst of all being a human origins that refuses humanity.

So many of us are still thinking and teaching from the charged tradition of demonstrating that evolution is true. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, it is undeniably true. Now we must go beyond this habit of reacting to creationism and instead react to a problem that is just as old but is far more urgent because it actually affects human well-being.

Bad evolutionary thinking and its siblings, genetic determinism and genetic essentialism, are used to justify civil rights restrictions, human rights violations, white supremacy, and the patriarchy. As a result, evolution is avoided and unclaimed by scholars, students, and their communities who know this all too well.

I still think religion is a major driver of bad science in this country, but it’s also become obvious that non-religious people — some of the atheists I used to hang out with — have found a way to become assnuggets who are just as deplorable as Christian fanatics, and the path they’ve taken to turn into corrupters of culture and science is exactly what Dunsworth describes: genetic determinism and genetic essentialism. They’ve gone from using the Bible to justify misunderstanding evolution, to using their misconceptions about genetics to justify misunderstanding evolution, and along the way, they’re revitalizing bigotry and nationalism and revisionist history. In some ways, they’re worse than creationists. Creationism is a joke, its religious underpinnings are simply too obvious. When you promote a more subtle (usually) racism and misogyny while donning the mantle of Science™, you’re more effective at fooling the moderately well-educated.

YouTube is the most obvious example of the decay in full flower. You can find plenty of delusional know-nothings like Grady McMurtry babbling away, but far more influential are the swarms of alt-right/classical liberal/centrist/whatever-the-fuck-they-call-themselves atheists and so-called skeptics who preach a purely secular version of contempt for races and sexes, while claiming they have the imprimatur of evolution. They don’t. They’re little more than 19th century bigots pretending to be scientists, busily tainting good science with fascism and Victorian nonsense.

That looks to be the next big fight, not against the dopey inheritors of Seventh Day Adventist mythology, but against the unthinking champions of 200+ year old pseudo-scientific racialist ideas.

@MrPeterLMorris demands that I explain gender and all of biology to him!

Yesterday, I was just trying to gather a fragment of family for Thanksgiving — my kids are all so dispersed that we need to make a long drive to collect the one, my oldest, who is still living somewhere in the state of Minnesota — when someone popped up to portentiously declare to me (and a gaggle of other science twitter people) that Nature magazine has decreed that biology has no foundation in science. Oh, really?

So I gave the article a quick read. It turns out that no, it hadn’t said that at all, but what it did say was that the consensus of biologists was that a cherished opinion he held was wrong, and since Mr Peter Leslie Morris knows more about biology than biologists, Nature had abandoned all reason and was denying True Biology, his version of biology. I gave him a quick reply, and then charged off to St Cloud to scoop up my wee liddle child for Thanksgiving (except he’s all growed up now and taller than I am, but he’ll still always be my baby).

But now I’m back home. The baby is sleeping in on the couch, and someone is wrong on the internet.

Here’s the article he claims is wrong and denies all biology. My indignant interlocutor is a TERF. It’s a sensible article that, as I said, shows a better understanding of the breadth and depth of biology than some random pompous code-bro on Twitter. Surprising, I know.

According to a draft memo leaked to The New York Times, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on the genitals they are born with. Genetic testing, it says, could be used to resolve any ambiguity about external appearance. The move would make it easier for institutions receiving federal funds, such as universities and health programmes, to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender identity.

The memo claims that processes for deciding the sex on a birth certificate will be “clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable”.

The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour. Worse, it would undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.

Yes, exactly. External sexual characteristics, like genitalia, or even genetic characters, like the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, are not adequate proxies for gender. You can’t look inside someone’s pants and determine what’s going on inside their brain, which is a disturbing thought to the dedicated devotees of gender essentialism. What the article is saying is that sex and specifically gender is a heck of a lot more complex than a rigid binary, where all the various traits — biological, psychological, and cultural — do not fall into two tightly concordant categories. Which one would hope that here in the 21st century everyone would recognize as obvious. One thing we’ve learned, though, is that even in our enlightened age there are a huge number of benighted twits who want to deny reality.

I had asked the pretentious bro-grammer whether he’d actually read the article for comprehension, because of the plain English in this bit.

Even more scientifically complex is a mismatch between gender and the sex on a person’s birth certificate. Some evidence suggests that transgender identity has genetic or hormonal roots, but its exact biological correlates are unclear. Whatever the cause, organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics advise physicians to treat people according to their preferred gender, regardless of appearance or genetics.

The research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female, and gender as a spectrum that includes transgender people and those who identify as neither male nor female. The US administration’s proposal would ignore that expert consensus.

As you can easily see, the article plainly states that gender is a spectrum, and that there is a mismatch in some cases between the physical attributes we record at birth, and the preferred gender of the individual. Having a penis isn’t an absolute cognitive determinant.

So he tells me he did too read the whole article, and now he wants me to tell him what the absolute cognitive determinant is. Repeatedly.

The whole point of the article is that there is no biological evidence that will make classification possible. The Trump plan is unworkable. There is no objective scientific test that definitively determines what thoughts, attitudes, and preferences are percolating inside someone’s cranium, and yet they want to insist that being a penis-haver or Y-chromosome-haver is the conclusive, ultimate determinant that one is culturally and psychologically male.

That last one is a real give-away. There is something physical that must determine one’s gender, and anything else is a delusion. This understanding of reality would imply that your thoughts are all delusions. How would he prove that he was a man, if penises and Y chromosomes were not sufficient reassurance? Maybe his concept of manhood is the real delusion. The Western cultural ideal of masculinity trembles on the brink of collapse into fantasy if he can’t simply prove that he is a real man by pulling down his pants…if manhood is simply a shared belief in how one should behave and think as a man, a fixed star that everyone with a Y chromosome must follow by some precious inner biological compulsion.

Here is the truth: this is a political attempt to ostracize people they don’t like.

Political attempts to pigeonhole people have nothing to do with science and everything to do with stripping away rights and recognition from those whose identity does not correspond with outdated ideas of sex and gender. It is an easy way for the Trump administration to rally its supporters, many of whom oppose equality for people from sexual and gender minorities. It is unsurprising that it appeared just weeks before the midterm elections.

Of course, there is also no known biological correlate to ideology, therefore it must be a delusion. Republicans don’t really exist, unless perhaps they can show some Satan’s mark somewhere on their body. Maybe we should strip search all Republicans before they’re allowed to vote?

Mr Peter L Morris went back and forth with other people throughout the day while I was blissfully cruising down I94. I guess he was feeling the heat, because he decided to call in reinforcements.

MICHAEL LAIDLAW? Really? TERFiness confirmed. When you think Michael Laidlaw, ideological endocrinologist, is a legitimate source, maybe we do have an objective criterion for a certain range of thoughts.

I’d rather not get deeply into Laidlaw’s crackpot biology, but fortunately, Zinnia Jones has already ripped into that gomer. Just read that. I cannot resist this direct quote from Laidlaw, though: just so much bad biology.

If gender identity is determined only by genes, then we would expect that identical twins would profess having the same gender identity nearly 100 percent of the time. This is not the case. In fact, the largest transexual twin study ever conducted included seventy-four pairs of identical twins. They were studied to determine in how many cases both twins would grow up to identify as transgender. In only twenty-one of the seventy-four pairs (28 percent) did both identical twins identify as transgender. This is consistent with the fact that multiple factors play a role in determining gender identity, including psychological and social factors. This study in fact shows that those factors are more important than any potential genetic contribution. Furthermore, no genetic studies have ever identified a transgender gene or genes.

No one believes that gender identity is determined only by genes. I repeat what the Nature article says:

Some evidence suggests that transgender identity has genetic or hormonal roots, but its exact biological correlates are unclear.

Laidlaw has a cartoon version of genetics in his head, where everything is absolutely Mendelian. Genes are responsive to the environment, so he simply ignores an important contributor to gender. It’s genes or nothing! Meanwhile, any competent geneticists would look at the data he cites, even just the summary he makes, and tell you that it suggest that there may be a heritable component to gender.

Or if you just want the short summary, read that Nature article. It’s accurate and good biology, unlike anything you’ll hear from Michael Laidlaw MD, or Peter L Morris, Microsoft .NET developer.

OOPARTS

I haven’t heard about OOPARTS in ages — they’re a fad that seems to have faded. Pierre Stromberg sent me a note that he has rediscovered an OOPART, the notorious Coso Artifact, and I hadn’t heard about that in years, either.

OOPARTS are “Out Of Place ARTifactS”, and there was a time, back when the Ancient Astronauts craze was producing all kinds of crackpot books and magazine articles, unearthing and bizarrely interpreting artifacts that they couldn’t explain — so they resorted to a) claiming that aliens brought them to earth, or b) they were evidence that ancient humans were advanced, as the Bible shows(?), and that we’ve been in decline since the Fall. Watch this amusing little video from 2004 in which Donald Chittick mocks the von Dänikenites for thinking there were astronauts from outer space instead of God’s people here on Earth.

(Note: You can hear the weird consonants and cadences of Kent Hovind in Donald Chittick — it’s like these old school creationists are clones of each other. He also goes on and on about “man’s opinions” and different “interpretations” of science, just like Ken Ham.)

(Also amusing: the bit where he shows off a Homo erectus skull with a bullet hole, which he proves by running a metal rod through it to reveal the larger exit hole…the foramen magnum.)

Among the favorite pieces of garbage creationists trotted out as proof that ancient people were technologically sophisticated was a peculiar object that they claimed was found in a geode (which would make it very old, except…it wasn’t a geode), made of ceramic and metal rods.

Unfortunately for the whole delusion of OOPARTS, it turned out to be … a spark plug from a 1920s Model T, imbedded in some hardened muck. It then disappeared, and the creationists all stopped talking about it, and OOPARTS kind of shamefacedly disappeared from the lexicon.

Stromberg wrote to tell me, though, that it has been rediscovered! He has updated his article on the Coso Artifact, and has “arranged for Seattle’s Pacific Science Center to display the artifact starting December 1st as part of their new exhibition titled, ‘What Is Reality’.” So now you know where to go if you want to see another piece of creationist evidence.

Check out the Chittick video. It’s amazing how many off-the-wall crazy ideas he throws out one after the other, almost all of which creationists have discarded out of embarrassment.