I almost forgot! I had a workshop at Skepticon

Oh, yeah, I did a workshop last Friday titled “Bad Evolution”. It was fun! Not quite as I anticipated, though.

It was a workshop. As I understand it, a workshop should involve audience participation, not just lecturing at them, and that’s what I prepared for. I had an exercise prepared, and I came with 50 handouts, just in case a lot of people showed up.

About 120 people showed up. Whoops. I might suggest that, in the future, Skepticon have some kind of workshop registration that allows us to set limits on the audience size, because that was too many, and it was kind of chaotic. Chaotic fun, rather than chaotic evil, so I guess it was OK, but it was still a little overwhelming.

Also, it was in a room with rows of chairs lined up, all facing straight ahead, which is also not conducive to workshopping. At least that was easily disrupted, and I had everyone destroying the tidy arrangement of the room.

Anyway, what we did is fairly simple. I talked for a bit, giving an overview of good strategies for handling discussions with creationists. I gave them this list of suggestions:

  1. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” Honesty is always a good idea.
  2. Go meta if you’re asked a difficult question. Do they know the answer? Why are they asking you? Is it a sincere question?
  3. If you have an answer, don’t let them dodge it. Follow up. Pursue a line of argument.
  4. Focus. It’s better to skip an opportunity for a good jab in order to build a strong story.
  5. Ask questions of them. You are not a passive oracle at their bidding.
  6. Question their assumptions. Be prepared to have your assumptions questioned.
  7. Demand sources. Science is built on the shoulders of giants, they must be acknowledged.
  8. Patience pays off. You’re not engaged to go in for a kill, you’re having a conversation.
  9. You will not convince the creationist, or “win”. Resign yourself to that.
  10. Keep your perspective and a sense of humor. These people are ridiculous.

I walked them through a couple of simple examples (“If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”), and then handed out a long list of much more difficult, more subtle creationist claims, and had one person in the group pretend to be a creationist, present one claim, and then let the others try to rebut them. The main point was to both cultivate a little empathy for the creationist argument, stupid as it might be, and to show that even someone on the side of science might be stymied fairly easily.

For example, here’s one question from my list (which was taken from a collection of bad arguments from the mindless pen of David Buckna):

Microsoft programmers utilized complex codes to create the Windows 95 software. The genetic code, which is more sophisticated, controls the physical processes of life and is accompanied by elaborate transmission and duplication systems. How does evolution, using natural processes and chance, solve the problem of complex information sequencing without intelligence?

The average person would have difficulty responding to that. I think it’s important for us to not take for granted that the answers are always obvious…even when I might find anyone question easy to answer.

Go ahead, try to answer it in the comments, but note that “You’re stupid” and “Citations to the peer-reviewed literature or GTFO” are not on my list of recommended strategies.

Creationists are outliers in another way

Popehat is looking for someone to defend yet another science blogger from a lawsuit.

Pepijn van Erp blogs about science and pseudoscience from the Netherlands. He praises good science and skewers and critiques the bad. Wait a minute. Is that the Jaws theme playing? Yes. Yes it is — because blogging about junk science is a great way to get threatened or sued. In my experience, purveyors of “non-mainstream” science are unusually litigious and sensitive to criticism. You’ve seen it here at Popehat with “atavistic” cancer theorists and vaccine truthers and naturopaths and fans of questionable cancer remedies and AIDS deniers. I blame the crystals.

He’s being sued by Ruggero Santilli, a physics crank. However, I realized something as I was reading about it. I’ve become something of an unwilling expert in this area — I’ve been threatened with lawsuits so many times that I’ve completely lost count. I now regard cease-and-desist letters as ho-hum, and getting told I’m going to be sued for over 2 million dollars just triggers an eye-roll. But you know what’s weird?

I’ve never been threatened with a lawsuit by a creationist.

Notice that they aren’t present in Popehat’s list, either. The people who get most indignant about criticism seem to be people who are trying hardest to gain undeserved credibility from mainstream science, and that includes certain skeptics and atheists. Creationists love to steal scientific cred whenever they can, but it’s for the purpose of suckering Christians and Muslims, not for winning the respect of the scientific community.

I’ve also pissed off Catholics, but even they didn’t threaten to sue me. They threatened to kill me and my family and destroy my life, and repeatedly told me I was going to burn in hell, but not a whisper of dragging me into court over maltreatment of a cracker.

I’m going to have to file this datum away in my head as a reference to use in determining which are the “safe” targets of criticism. Religious nuts may talk a loud game about bashing your skull in, but they don’t hire lawyers to harass you.

Not “gill slits” again!

stage14_human_embryo

Troy Britain got blocked from the Institute for Creation Research facebook page because he criticized this comment:

Shouldn’t students be skeptical when they’re told that evolutionists can simply look at folds in embryos and see gill slits? The truth is that these are only folds of tissue in the pharynx region of vertebrates during the pharyngula stage of development. For mammals, birds, and reptiles, they never develop into a structure that is in any way like fish gills.

Britain has a good rebuttal in his article about “gill slits”, but I just have to point out something.

I’m an “evolutionist”. I don’t think any creationist would argue with that.

I teach students. Again, that’s indisputable — that’s my day job.

Furthermore, I teach relevant subjects: developmental biology and evolution.

But despite the fact that I ought to be example #1 for this terrible crime the creationist is condemning, I have never taught that all vertebrates have “gill slits”. I don’t know anyone who has. I took comparative anatomy and physiology in the 1970s, ages ago, and my instructors were all very explicit about the function, development, and evolution of pharyngeal structures. I would have been dinged badly if I’d made the mistake of suggesting that the pharynx was primitively a respiratory structure, rather than a feeding specialization.

It is quite correct that in most tetrapods, pharynx structures don’t form gills — gills are specialized derivatives of pharyngeal pouches, just as are hyoid arches and jaws. No one knowledgeable claims that humans develop fish-like gills. “Gill slits” is a colloquialism, not a technical term.

I am amused by the dismissal that they are “only folds of tissue”. Yeah, right. Your brain was only a fold of tissue in the pharyngula, too. Your major organs were mere diverticula. Your eyes were just outpocketings of the neural tube. Mere, just, only. Let’s all dismiss fundamental developmental structures as silly piles of cells, since, as we all know, mere cells do nothing, unless we’re trying to argue that they’re so darned complex that only a god could have created them.

We are so screwed

I think what’s emerging from the aftermath of last week’s election is that we underestimated the breadth of American racism, and that we failed to realize how damaging the aloofness of the Democratic party establishment was. We should have realized from the strength of the Sanders campaign that something was rotten up top. I hope that establishment listens to Bernie Sanders and his recipe for reform.

In the coming days, I will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party. I believe strongly that the party must break loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor. We must open the doors of the party to welcome in the idealism and energy of young people and all Americans who are fighting for economic, social, racial and environmental justice. We must have the courage to take on the greed and power of Wall Street, the drug companies, the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry.

I have this fear that the Democrats will bunker up, keep doing the same old thing, and continue to treat Republicans gently and with civility (or, more likely, servility) and slide further into irrelevance, while the Republicans are now digging in deeper into lunacy.

Of course, if the electorate was rejecting the corporatization of the Democrats to go for an outsider, boy did they get conned.

An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. Who could possibly have predicted such a thing?

The answer is, anyone who was paying attention. Look at the people Trump is considering for his Cabinet, and you won’t find any outside-the-box thinkers burning to work for the little guy. It’s a collection of Republican politicians and corporate plutocrats — not much different from who you’d find in any Republican administration.

It’s going to be worse than we ever imagined. Stop deluding yourself. Stop pretending that Trump can’t possibly be serious about the stupidities he has promised — he is packing his administration with the worst possible people, because he is compounding his own incompetence with the fact that he is a terrible judge of character who is surrounding himself with terrible people.

Like this.

gormlessgoons

That just says it all, doesn’t it?

Skepticon highlights

#inappropriatefistpose

#inappropriatefistpose

I’m back from Skepticon, and I’m feeling good. This is the most relaxing conference around for me — it’s a gathering of non-believers, but of non-abrasive, open-minded non-believers who also think there’s a heck of a lot more to being an atheist than expunging “god” from our coinage. It was all good, but here are my favorite events:

  • Margee Kerr talked about the physiology and psychology of fear. She’s been checking spooky places, like Eastern State Penitentiary, to try and figure out what it is about these supposedly “haunted” places that triggers fearful reactions in people. It turns out that the fear is real, but ghosts are not.

  • Jennifer Raff analyzed some outlandish claims about genetics: that Peruvians are descended from Nephilim and white Europeans, and genetic astrology. There were some particularly effective bits in their where she contrasted the lengths she goes to to extract and isolate DNA without contamination, with the rather sloppy stuff people like LA Marzulli do.

  • Alix Jules discussed the reality of racism. It’s not just loud people with southern accents, pickup trucks, and confederate flags: casual racism is everywhere, and it just won some big elections.

There was lots of other good stuff: Rebecca Watson made a triumphant return to the stage, there were lots of conversations about the state of secular activism, there was a taco truck parked outside, and of course lots of happy socializing. I also had to miss the entire last day — I had to fly back and get ready to teach this morning — so I didn’t get to see Jerry DeWitt or Debbie Goddard or the other people who finished up the conference with a bang.

Skepticon 10 will be held on 10-12 November 2017, so clear your calendars now.

Hey, gang, I’m in Springfield

I know I said this was going to be my “self-care” weekend, but I could not help myself, and last night while I was stuck in an airport I engaged with some liberals who were very irritated that I dared to point out that voting for Trump meant you were racist. Don’t you know that some of them voted for Obama in the last election, so they can’t be racist? (This is going to be the new “I have a black friend” theme). Don’t you know that if you call white people racists they’ll be alienated and won’t vote for Democrats anymore? (But somehow they care so little about race issues they’ll vote for an openly racist/sexist pig who is endorsed by the KKK and Stormfront). But my favorite response is this one:

Shut up, in the name of Free Speech!

I’ve also gotten a few responses, echoing the sentiments of Obama and Clinton, that we’ve got to give the guy a chance, and gosh, maybe he won’t be as bad as we think. I’ve decided that liberals have become masters of delusional thinking, because no, he’s going to be worse than we can imagine. He is appointing a climate change denialists to head up his transition team for the EPA, he’s going to have a known hate group leader to run his immigration transition team, and another anti-gay hate group leader to run domestic policy. He wants to put Sarah Palin in his cabinet, possibly as secretary of the interior. If you think the election was a shitshow, wait until you see how he governs.

So no apologies. If you voted for Trump, you belong in the basket of deplorables, and there’s no excuse you can offer to get you out. Whining that it hurts your feelings when we mention that the man you voted for is ready to wreck the environment, discriminate against everyone but white people, and turn the whole nation into Brownback’s Kansas is not only the worst excuse ever, but it’s pathetic as well.

By the way, Iris and Caine share similar feelings. You don’t get to claim you were a nice, conscientious, thoughtful person if you voted for Trump. You were just an asshole.

This is what I call self-care

I’m flying off this afternoon to lovely Springfield, Missouri for Skepticon. I’m taking a break from distressed students to go hang out with distressed atheists and humanists. It’ll be good for me.

I’ll be teaching a workshop on explaining evolution to people who don’t understand it at all tomorrow, which might be fun. I hope. I’ve got a little bit of an outline of major points I’ll be telling attendees, but mainly I’m going to provide some challenging questions and making the participants do all the work. Yeah, that’ll draw them in — come to my workshop, I’ll make you do everything!

I suspect that there might also be spontaneous outbursts of planning and activism, since it’s that kind of crowd.

I also have dinosaur stickers to give away. I might end up giving them all away on the first day, so hit me up early if you want something decorative for your badge.