Godless goals, godless progress

Debbie Goddard has a most excellent post on Skepchick (she should write more!), declaring that the atheist movement should care about poverty.

Unless we address the classism and broaden the elitist culture of the atheist movement, the underprivileged students in the Philadelphia public school classrooms that I’m familiar with and in the South Los Angeles classrooms that Sikivu Hutchinson works in will continue to be marginalized and will never have access to the “enlightened” educational opportunities that the movement too often takes for granted.

Some would say it’s not the movement’s responsibility to address poverty and public education. I disagree. This is a movement; we want the world to be a better place than it is now. We want to reduce suffering and foster a just society. If we agree there’s no cosmic justice system and there’s no reward for suffering after we die, we need to effect change here, now, in this life, in this world, for as many people as we can reach. Education is key for change to occur.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I agree completely, and that education is an excellent priority for atheist communities to pursue. She cites the Black Skeptics article I mentioned earlier today, in which they are looking for donations for their First in the Family Humanist Scholarship. It’s a worthy cause, and I donated…you should too, if you can.

Every effort to improve human knowledge is a contribution to atheism, so anything you can do will help; teach a child, donate books to your local library, volunteer at your elementary school. It’s our cunning godless scheme to make the world a better place.

O’Reilly and the talking fetus opposition to abortion

Blowhard Bill has a bizarre argument against abortion. He’s speaking for the babies, he claims, and knows what the babies would say.

There comes a time when a human being has to either face evil or admit to allowing it. Abortion is legal in the United States, but it should not be celebrated or used as a political tool. Viable babies are human beings. If they could talk, they would tell Williams and other pro-choice zealots that their lives should not be marginalized by someone who thinks she’s the boss. That’s what the babies would say.

Gosh, well, my shoes were talking to me the other day, or they would have if they had voices, and they told me they’d really like to kick Bill O’Reilly’s ass. Aghast, I told them that violence was never the answer. Then my dining room table spoke up and said it agreed with me, but O’Reilly was still an odious human being. And then there was a regular cacophony as all of my furniture and appliances and even the cockroaches under the floorboards had to chime in and groan about that horrible creature, and then my television had the final say and wanted to refuse to every tune in to Fox News ever again, because it made her circuits itch. Then she told me that all the other televisions on our cable system were saying the same thing, and that we ought to abort “The O’Reilly Factor”.

That’s what they would have said, if they could talk, that is. And I think I’m the authority on what inanimate objects in my house would say.

New vistas in digital quackery

Apparently, computer-based diagnostic algorithms provided cheaply via a smartphone aren’t reliable. Who would have guessed? There’s a slew of new apps available that allow you to take a picture of your weird mole or mysterious skin lesion, and they’ll then scan it and tell you whether you’ve got melanoma or not. You should be wary. When real doctors actually test their competence, the dermatology apps fail miserably.

Dermatologists are less than thrilled. In fact, they say, the apps are worthless. Writing in JAMA Dermatology, a team of physicians from the University of Pittsburgh put four melanoma apps to the test against 188 clinical images—pictures they’d taken of patients’ skin lesions and later determined, via biopsy, to be malignant or benign. How would a machine stack up against a board-certified dermatologist?

Not so well. Of the three auto-diagnosing apps, the best program missed malignant growths 30 percent of the time; a second performed only slightly better than flipping a coin.

One app, instead of using an algorithm, simply forwarded the photo to an accredited dermatologist, who responded with his considered opinion 24 hours later. At five dollars per lesion, this was the most expensive program, though the e-doctor misdiagnosed just one in 53 melanomas.

They’ve got testimonials from users praising the results, which makes me wonder…if your phone told you you didn’t have cancer, how the hell would you know if it was right or not?

It’s the oldest principle of quackery: tell the patient what they want to hear, and they’ll reward you with agreement.

Only a bird

Another feathered dinosaur has been found in China, prompting Ken Ham to dig in his heels and issue denials.

Yet another supposed “feathered dinosaur” fossil has come to light, again in China. (Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, AiG–U.S., reported on another Chinese fossil of a supposed feathered dinosaur in April 2012) Now, one headline described the fossil as “almost birdlike,” and the authors of the report in Nature Communications note many features the fossil shares with living birds, particularly those that live on the ground. In fact, Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell and Dr. David Menton (AiG–U.S.) both examined the photos of the fossil and the criteria the authors used in classifying the fossil as a dinosaur. They agreed that it is a bird, not a feathered dinosaur.

Oh, really? It’s just a bird? Take a look at this image of Eosinopteryx, and you tell me.

eosinopteryx2

Notice a few things about this animal: it’s got teeth. The forelimbs have clawed digits. It has a long bony tail. It lacks the bony keel that anchors breast muscles in modern birds.

The only thing that might cause you to question its dinosaur nature (and it’s a criterion that’s proving more and more inappropriate) is that lovely gray fringe of feather impressions that surround the whole fossil. And look at those forelimbs! It looks like it has stubby wings. It does not, however, have the skeletal and muscular structure to allow for extended flapping flight, and the wings are way too short for it to have been an adequate flyer.

But Mitchell and Menton and Ham looked at that and said ‘ALL BIRD’. They’re idiots.

Ham goes on: there are no transitional forms, he squeaks, there can be no transitional forms, transitional forms don’t exist…all while looking at a winged, feathered reptile with teeth and claws and a bony tail.

The fossil record doesn’t reveal any kind of dinosaur-to-bird evolution—and it certainly does not show a molecules-to-man evolution. We have no proof of transitional forms, and we won’t. God’s Word says clearly that He created animals and plants according to their kinds (Genesis 1). Through genetic loss and other factors, new species have emerged over time—but birds are still birds and apes are still apes. Nothing in the history of biology has legitimately shown that dinosaurs could develop the genetic information to evolve into birds.

Pitiful. Pathetic. I’d like to see a creationist sit down in front of me with that illustration and try to defend the claim that it’s only a bird.

Godefroit P, Demuynck H, Dyke G, Hu D, Escuillie F, Claeys P (2013) Reduced plumage and flight ability of a new Jurassic paravian theropod from China. Nature Communications 4, 1394. doi: 10.1038/ncomms2389

Aryan Jesus

This isn’t Thor, it’s Jesus.

aryanjesus

There is a lot of cheesy Christian art that looks like this, and I get the same message from all of it. At worst, it’s freaking racist — these are people trying to draw the Ideal Man, and every time they fit him into the western, north European mold. Most charitably and at the very least, it tells me that Jesus isn’t a historical figure to these people, his reality isn’t a concern, and they need make no effort to put him in a place and time and people. He’s a legend, and so he’s a plastic figure with no strong attachment to history…but he can be freely warped to fit the ideology of the individual.

Either way, I feel no need or desire to worship or even respect a cartoon.

(via Zeno)

Oh, the things you’ll learn about “Science” from the interwebs!

Far right wing talk show host Kevin Swanson has a few things to say about birth control.

I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

I am astonished at the specificity of that citation: “some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists”. If anybody can track down the scientific paper in which that was published, I’ll not only post the verification, but I’ll reproduced the illustrations of the uteruses with the little tiny baby graveyards in them.

For now, this is the best I can do. I’ve taught histology, we even have slides of sections of uteruses (which, unfortunately, do not have the information about whether the source was a godless fornicator on the label), and this is what they look like.

Uterus

What Swanson said wasn’t science. It’s something different. I think the technical term is making shit up.

Another really stupid argument from William Lane Craig

Craig is not one of the clever ones. He’s one of the glib, superficial ones, and he impresses a lot of superficial people. Here’s one of his latest, the Argument for God from Intentionality.

God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness in the world. Philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality. Intentionality is the property of being about something or of something. It’s signifies the object directedness of our thoughts.

For example, I can think about my summer vacation or I can think of my wife. No physical object has this sort of intentionality. A chair or a stone or a glob of tissue like the one like the brain is not about or of something else. Only mental states or states of consciousness are about other things. As a materialist, Dr. Rosenberg [the interlocutor] recognizes that and so concludes that on atheism there really are no intentional states.

Dr. Rosenberg boldly claims that we never really think about anything. But this seems incredible. Obviously I am thinking about Dr. Rosenberg’s argument. This seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of atheism. By contrast, on theism because God is a mind it’s hardly surprising that there should be finite minds. Thus intentional states fit comfortably into a theistic worldview.

So we may argue:

1. If God did not exist, [then] intentional states of consciousness would not exist.

2. But intentional states of consciousness do exist!

3. Therefore, God exists.

The link is to a philosopher’s debunking, pointing out the obvious fallacies and some of the more subtle arguments against it from serious, non-superficial philosophers. It doesn’t bring up the first counter-argument that came to my mind, though.

We know what the physical nature of intentional states are; they are patterns of electrical activity in a network of cells with specific physical properties. We don’t know how to read that pattern precisely, but we can measure and observe them: stick someone in an MRI and ask them to think about different things or engage in different cognitive tasks, and presto, blood flows shift in the brain and different areas light up with different levels of activity. These are properties not seen in chairs or stones, which lack the neuronal substrates that generate these patterns.

Intentional states are ultimately entirely physical states; they are dependent on organized brain matter burning energy actively and responsively in different patterns. There is no evidence that they require supernatural input, so Craig’s first premise that these could not exist without supernatural input is not demonstrated.

Atheists are skeptics

There is hope! Steven Novella has replied to my reply to his original disagreement (making this a reply to a reply to a reply to a blog article…I take it back, maybe there is no hope.) But no, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I don’t have to be as long-winded as last time. Let’s jump right to his new conclusion:

I think it would be helpful to critically examine our own narratives about what the rationalist, skeptical, and atheists movements are, what different groups believe, and what motivates them. I see many straw men that persist despite the evidence and despite numerous attempts at correction.

Exactly! That’s what I’ve been saying! Now in my last post, I provided lots of evidence that my characterization of a skeptical movement rife with bias and stereotypes against atheists and other non-traditional (for skeptics) causes was valid; now I just have to ask Novella one more time to critically examine his own narrative, and because he’s a good guy dedicated to the evidence, he’ll recognize the problem. And what do you know, his argument is based on kicking the stuffing out of a straw man atheist.

[Read more…]

Whoa, Missouri…you’re not going to let this one pass, are you?

Have you seen Missourie House Bill 291? Wow, it’s pushing intelligent design, um, boldly. Like a gibbon that just sat down in a pool of sriracha sauce in a big tub of feces, that kind of “boldly”.

It starts by defining evolution in one paragraph, and by evolution we mean just common descent. It says nothing specific about mechanisms or evidence, and is most concerned that evolution denies “operation of any intelligence, supernatural event, God or theistic figure”. And then we get 12 paragraphs defining Intelligent Design, which consist mainly of pointing to biological processes and phenomena and claiming that they are the result of intelligence.

I only point out the disparity in the length of the treatments to contrast it with one of the major demands of this law: equal treatment.

(6) “Equal treatment”, the approximate equal teaching of each specified viewpoint for a single course of instruction in course textbooks as follows:

(a) Course textbooks contain approximately an equal number of pages of relevant material teaching each viewpoint. Textbook materials include text, pictures, illustrations, graphs, tables, questions, discussion items, student exercises, teacher support material and other material supplied with the textbook, with freedom allowed the textbook publishers to arrange, substitute, or size material to provide an approximately equal teaching of each viewpoint for a specific textbook;

(b) In the absence of course textbooks which provide equal treatment, written interim material may provide alternate viewpoints, with interim textbook material developed pursuant to subsection 6 of this section as a recommended source;

No credible science textbook on the planet meets those requirements, and they’re just plain silly. Even setting aside the content, the scientific community is churning out hundreds of papers on evolutionary biology every week, we have a million scientists in biology, while Intelligent Design creationism is a fringe idea producing virtually no results of any worth, virtually no publications (and most of what they’ve got are in house journals, hothouse environments set up to protect their work from criticism), no data, no signficant complexity that needs careful pedagogical explanation—yet they’re demanding equal page counts in our textbooks?

I’m looking at our current introductory biology textbook, Life, by Sadava, Hillis, Hiller, and Berenbaum. Not counting the appendices and index, it’s 1259 pages long, it’s saturated with evolutionary biology, and it doesn’t say anything at all about intelligent design. So those authors had better get to work and make it 2518 pages long, half of it fluff, to satisfy a Missouri crackpot? Who gains from that? (Well, the textbook publishers would, I suppose.)

Their demands are also contradictory. Here’s their definition of “standard science”, which must be taught:

3. All science taught in Missouri public elementary and secondary schools, including material concerning physics, chemistry, biology, health, physiology, genetics, astronomy, cosmology, geology, paleontology, anthropology, ecology, climatology, or other science topics shall be standard science. All standard science course materials and instruction shall meet the following criteria:

(1) If empirical data is taught, only such data which has been verified or is currently capable of being verified by observation or experimentation shall be taught. Data with the appearance of empirical data which has never been verified and is currently incapable of being verified shall be identified as nonverifiable when taught orally or in writing;

(2) If scientific law is taught, written textbooks statements identified as scientific law shall have no known exceptions of verified empirical data;

(3) If scientific theory is taught, the theory shall be identified as theory when taught orally or in writing. Empirical data and conjecture may be presented to support taught theory where considered instructive. As used in this subsection, the term “theory” shall mean theory or hypothesis;

(a) If a scientific theory concerning origin or destiny is taught without the teaching of opposing scientific theory, the taught theory may be criticized by the teaching of conflicting empirical data where considered instructive;

(b) If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught in a course of study, biological evolution and biological intelligent design shall be taught. Other scientific theory or theories of origin may be taught. If biological intelligent design is taught, any proposed identity of the intelligence responsible for earth’s biology shall be verifiable by present-day observation or experimentation and teachers shall not question, survey, or otherwise influence student belief in a nonverifiable identity within a science course;

(c) If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught in a textbook, the textbook shall give equal treatment to biological evolution and biological intelligent design. Other scientific theory or theories of origin may be taught;

(4) If an event previous to written history is taught, the event shall be supported by physical evidence. Physical evidence and data concerning the event may be taught where considered instructive. Conjecture concerning an event previous to written history as to the occurrence of the event, cause of the event, date of the event, length of time for the event to occur, subsequent effects of the event, or other speculative details shall be taught as theory or hypothesis as specified in subdivision (3) of this subsection;

(5) If a naturalistic process previous to written history is taught, the naturalistic process shall be duplicated by an analogous naturalistic process. Details of the analogous naturalistic process may be taught where considered instructive. Conjecture concerning a naturalistic process previous to written history as to the occurrence of the process, cause of the process, date of the process, length of time for the process to occur, process conditions, process mechanisms, process materials, or other speculative details shall be taught as theory or hypothesis as specified in subdivision (3) of this subsection;

(6) If a scientific theory or hypothesis proven to be false is taught for historical, illustrative, or other reasons, the theory or hypothesis shall be identified as false when taught orally or in writing.

So half of the pages of the textbooks must be dedicated to intelligent design, and all the pages must contain only material backed up by evidence. But intelligent design lacks evidence. If this were entered into a computer on Star Trek, it would blow up.

Pay special attention to this very interesting clause.

If biological intelligent design is taught, any proposed identity of the intelligence responsible for earth’s biology shall be verifiable by present-day observation or experimentation and teachers shall not question, survey, or otherwise influence student belief in a nonverifiable identity within a science course;

Think that through. So if you’re going to teach intelligent design, you’re either going to have to be totally silent about the identity of the designer, or you’re going to have to back up that identification with evidence. So either you’re going to teach this stuff as supported by evidence while avoiding any suggestions about how it was done by this designer, or you’re going to have teachers turning the science classroom into a Bible studies class while they trot out tired theological arguments about the nature of God.

But catch that cunning last bit: you’re also not allowed to use evidence to question the students’ faith in a nonverifiable being — an entity without evidence or contradicted by the evidence.

There isn’t going to be a single textbook on the market anywhere that meets these criteria. But they have an out: they’re going to put together a committee that will provide supplemental material on creationism of equal weight to the textbooks. And that’s where the state of Missouri will throw a big chunk of their education budget…into authoring and publishing a creationist textbook that will be given to all of their schoolkids, written by a select team of “nine individuals who are knowledgeable of science and intelligent design and reside in Missouri.”

There is another problem there. All of the people who are knowledgeable about both, who actually understand how science works, will also know that intelligent design creationism is bunk.

I notice the bill was introduced in August, and the last action was to refer it to the elementary and secondary ed committee; there are no hearings scheduled, and it’s not on the House calendar. I suspect that means it’s going to die the slow silent death of neglect. That’s good, but how about if you Missourians take the next step and make sure the author of the bill, Rick Brattin, and his partner in crime, Andrew Koenig, don’t get elected anymore?