Wasn’t Ron Lindsay just pinin’ for the days of the Accommodation Wars?

Yes, he was. We could happily bring them back, though, because Nicholas Wade is still writing for the NY Times, as Jerry Coyne mentions today.

Wade’s column is practically an exercise in nostalgia, harking all the way back to 2005. He’s very concerned that people are bashing poor Marco Rubio for not understanding that there is no confusion about the age of the earth — it’s 4½ billion, not 6000, years old. Wade is almost Mooneyesque in his tribute to the old tropes. Look here:

The inevitable clash with science, particularly in the teaching of evolution, has continued to this day. Militant atheists like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins beat the believers about the head, accomplishing nothing; fundamentalist Christians naturally defend their religion and values to the hilt, whatever science may say.

There’s Richard Dawkins! He’s militant! He’s beating up the Christians, who are all just meekly defending themselves!

I swear, I thought we fought our way past those old stereotypes years ago — only the terminally clueless still refer unironically to “militant atheists”. But have no fear, Wade has a solution to the conflict between scientists and creationists: all we need to do is admit that evolution is a theory.

By allowing that evolution is a theory, scientists would hand fundamentalists the fig leaf they need to insist, at least among themselves, that the majestic words of the first chapter of Genesis are literal, not metaphorical, truths. They in return should make no objection to the teaching of evolution in science classes as a theory, which indeed it is.

It’s like one of the oldest creationist misconceptions in the book! Of course it’s a theory, but it’s a scientific theory, which means that it is a broad explanation that encompasses all the available evidence and has excellent predictive power to guide research. It’s not going to console creationists, unless we plan to also encourage them to continue believing that it means “just a guess”. And seriously, Wade believes that that’s enough to make all the creationists in the world simply fold up shop and go back to church, blissful and happy in a world full of singing angels and magic spun sugar fairy-tale castles? That is quite possibly the dumbest resolution of a chronic problem in the conflict between science and religion that I’ve ever read.

Hey, I’ve got an idea: we can solve all the problems in the Middle East by just getting the Jews and Christians and Moslems to admit that they’re all worshipping the same god. Presto! The fighting ends! (Sorry, I just felt my own words were a challenge and had to come up with an even dumber idea.)

And please, if you’ve ever read the Book of Genesis, practically the last word you’d ever apply to it is “majestic”. Petty, tribal, vicious, demented, small-minded, violent, bizarre…those are better words. And the first chapter isn’t really great poetry, I’m sorry to say — if you think otherwise, you’ve been brainwashed by the repetition. I’m really not prepared to abandon a commitment to scientific evidence just so some dim bumpkin can cling to his cherished belief that a poem saying a magic man poofed everything into existence is a deep insight.

I save the worst for last.

A scientific statesman, if there were such a person, would try to defuse the situation by professing respect for all religions and making a grand yet also trivial concession about the status of evolution.

I’m no statesman, but…you will never catch me lying and saying that I respect all religions. I do not, sir. Religions are systematic collections of threats and cajoling lies intended to bully a population into living in fear and supporting a parasitic priestly caste. They do not deserve respect. What they need is dismantling.

You will also not catch me making concessions about science simply to appease pious politicians. I will state the strengths and limitations without regard for the sensibilities of ignorant charlatans.

Damn, I really am not a statesman. But if that’s what a statesman does, you shouldn’t be able to find a scientist so willing to compromise on their principles to be one.

What I really want to see is the DNA sequence of an alien Grey

Dr Melba S. Ketchum has made press release of an astonishing discovery: she has sequenced Bigfoot DNA, she claims.

“Our study has sequenced 20 whole mitochondrial genomes and utilized next generation sequencing to obtain 3 whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatch samples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species. Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.

Hominins are members of the taxonomic grouping Hominini, which includes all members of the genus Homo. Genetic testing has already ruled out Homo neanderthalis and the Denisova hominin as contributors to Sasquatch mtDNA or nuDNA. “The male progenitor that contributed the unknown sequence to this hybrid is unique as its DNA is more distantly removed from humans than other recently discovered hominins like the Denisovan individual,” explains Ketchum.

“Sasquatch nuclear DNA is incredibly novel and not at all what we had expected. While it has human nuclear DNA within its genome, there are also distinctly non-human, non-archaic hominin, and non-ape sequences. We describe it as a mosaic of human and novel non-human sequence. Further study is needed and is ongoing to better characterize and understand Sasquatch nuclear DNA.”

Wait. Fully human mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from your mother, so she assumes that all Sasquatches had human women as relatively recent ancestors, but at the same time, the nuclear DNA is some bizarre mish-mash that includes non-ape sequences? That makes no sense at all.

Well, there’s one way it makes sense: it’s the result of sloppy lab work and high levels of contamination, and a complete lack of discrimination on the part of the investigators. No details have been released yet, but I imagine that what they’re sequencing are from hair samples turned in by Bigfoot investigators: dirty, grimy hair samples collected by a mix of charlatans and naive, deluded hunters. I wonder if there are raccoon and possum genes in their sequences…

The paper has not been published, and I don’t see how making a press release about a paper in peer review would help. I expect that no reputable journal will touch it, and it will sink unpublished…except that the myth that Bigfoot DNA has been examined and found to be unique will live on.

But here’s what really bugs me: it’s from a DNA lab called DNA Diagnostics, Inc. They do forensics, paternity testing, and consulting/expert witnessing in the court system in Texas. Would you trust results from that lab? How many other labs doing forensic DNA testing are run by people who think they can identify Bigfoot in a sample? If Ketchum has dealt with any criminal cases, I foresee grounds for future court challenges in her future.

Scary, scary radio waves

When I started cob-logging here a couple months ago I made a stray reference to conflicts I’ve experienced in having been a skeptically oriented person in the environmental activist sphere. A few of you suggested you’d like to hear more about that. I found an example today, one of probably several hundred of this particular phenomenon I’ve seen in the last 20 years or so.

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Creationist distortions of science

Answers in Genesis, that awful creationist organization, has a couple of tactics that they use to argue that they’re doing Real Science and the real scientists aren’t.

  1. They set up a dichotomy: you have to choose between God’s word and Man’s reason. God’s word is obviously perfect (because they say it is), while Man’s reason is flawed and prone to error. Therefore, all true accounts of the history of the world will take into account the “primary evidence” found in the Bible. This is a theme throughout their museum: they present two views, one derived from the book of Genesis and the other from scientific research, and tell you you have to choose. I imagine it works for the usual yokels whose brains short-circuit at the idea of questioning God, but for me, it just confirmed that the Bible is bullshit — I choose reason and evidence every time.

  2. They claim that all science involves interpreting the data, and that they use the exact same data that all scientists use — they just interpret it through the lens of a biblical worldview, while secular scientists interpret it through the lens of an evil, fallen, Satanic worldview. So which do you choose? Of course, they’re lying: the creationists throw away 99% of the evidence — everything that contradicts their predetermined conclusion — and the only bits of scientific observation they actually use are those where there is some ambiguity or potential for willful misinterpretation.

  3. They claim that there are two kinds of science: observational and historical science. The only respectable kind of science, they say, is observational: where an eyewitness is present to actually see the results. Anything where you try to interpret past events is not subject to repeatable observations, therefore it can’t be determined, and should be rejected in favor of eyewitness accounts — especially God’s eyewitness account from the Bible.

Every one of those arguments is complete crap. But they do love to state them with definite authority, as if these are actual fixed laws of the universe that must be accounted for in any science, rather than post hoc rationalizations by charlatans trying desperately to put a false front of reason over their superstitions.

I want to address their third argument, though, because Ken Ham has been throwing it around lately.

Ham quotes Jerry Coyne dismissing the value of theologians in determining scientific truths (as Ham usually does, though, he declines to actually link to the article he’s supposedly rebutting — at least he does Coyne the courtesy of naming him, I’m usually just referred to as some “atheist professor from Minnesota”). And there it is, in flaming great display, the creationists’ peculiar understanding of how science works.

Coyne’s comment raises a couple of issues that are common with secularists, and I thought it would be good to address them. First, he confuses observational (or operational) science and historical (or origins) science. By claiming that only scientists can determine the origin of the universe, he is implying that it can be discovered through repeatable, testable methods—but it cannot.

No, Coyne isn’t confused at all. Scientists are fully aware of the difference between studying, for instance, changing allele frequencies in a population of fruit flies right now, and using historical evidence to infer changes in allele frequencies (actually, phenotypes) in extinct populations. What we deny, though, is that we can’t study those through repeatable, testable methods. Every lagerstätte is a sample of the species of an ancient world, and paleontologists are constantly making hypotheses, testing them against existing data, and seeking out new data to confirm or disprove their ideas. Physicists can aim their instruments at a series of stars and test their ideas about their makeup and history. These creationist kooks want to pretend that in the absence of scientific tools to study the past, they are therefore free to make up any story they want, and it’s just as valid as one founded on hard-earned evidence.

But if they reject the idea that we can know anything about the past by observing the present, what’s the alternative? Ken Ham continues:

Historical science is really just the process of trying to figure out what really happened in the past based on evidence existing in the present—or based on primary source of information. And you know, the best place to start is with an eyewitness account, or our assumptions may lead us in the wrong direction. Coyne’s assumptions are evolutionary, and he clearly does not see Genesis—the only record of an eyewitness account of our origin—as authoritative.

Right. The only stuff that counts is eyewitness accounts. “Were you there?” is their mantra, and it reflects a terribly naive understanding of science.

First of all, eyewitness accounts are the worst kind of evidence. What real scientists prefer is measurement or the collection of recorded data via known, well-calibrated instruments. I assure you, the scientists at the LHC aren’t putting on goggles and standing at a window looking at protons colliding — they’re storing many terabytes of measurements via sensitive instruments from every event. Even in my admittedly mushier work where I do use my eyes directly to watch developmental events, everything is recorded and stashed on a hard drive so I can later extract precise timings and measure intensities of probes.

Secondly, everything, not just the historical sciences, are inferential. All of our senses are flawed and impose biases on our observations — you may think seeing is believing, but ask any psychologist, and they’ll tell you that your brain is very easily tricked, and that any memory you might have of an event is largely a reconstruction. Ask any physiologist, and they’ll explain to you that your eyes are not cameras, but elaborate processing devices that filter visual information and pass it back to a cortex that further deconstructs and reassembles the patterns of light that fell on the retina into a model of the world around us. We repeat observations using multiple modes precisely because you can’t trust what your eyes tell you to be an accurate model of the external world.

Thirdly, and most obviously, why should we believe Genesis is an eyewitness account of our origin? Were you there, Ken Ham, when God wrote the book? What reason do you have for believing that a god wrote it, rather than teams of Jewish scribes…scribes who weren’t witnesses of the creation? You can bet Coyne doesn’t see the Bible as an authoritative account, nor do I; those of us who have studied the history of the Bible know that it was the product of humans, that it evolved over time as additions and revisions were made, that we can look at the text and see evidence of multiple authors in multiple eras, that its translations differ, that it contradicts itself in many places, and that the accumulated weight of objective evidence demonstrates that it was not poofed into existence by a supernatural being, but has a much more prosaic and earthy origin.

But, oh yeah, I forgot: Ken Ham rejects all historical sciences, even history itself, by claiming that they cannot determine anything. This is a belief he needs to hold in order to cling to his fatuous idea that the Bible was written directly by a myth wiggling the hands of the prophets.

I just wish he’d be consistent and admit that he believes the Bible is true in every word because he has faith, rather than trying to abuse science and redefine it to accommodate his preconceptions. He just lacks that much faith.

Eulogy for a lost mind

As some of you may know, both Aron Ra and I cut our teeth together in the creation/evolution battles that raged on the usenet newsgroup, talk.origins, back in the 1990s. One of our colleagues-in-arms was a fellow named Glenn Morton, a petroleum geologist, who brought his expertise to bear in debates with young earth creationists. Morton is a Christian, but he thought it was disgraceful how creationists brought his faith into disrepute with their flouting of the evidence.

One of the concepts he crystallized, in addition, was the idea of Morton’s Demon. One of the notable things about arguments with creationists (perhaps you’ve noticed this too) is how they can stand there slack-jawed and dead-eyed while you explain an uncomfortable fact to them, and how they’ll suddenly leap into action when you say some word or phrase that cues a creationist script — you can be describing how the chemistry of the cell works, for instance, and if you mention “thermodynamics” suddenly you’ll get “The second law of thermodynamics proves that everything trends towards disorder, and is proof of a Fallen World!”…followed by slack passivity as you explain that no, it does no such thing. Morton’s Demon is the mental game creationists have going: they selectively shut out evidence against their pet theories and only allow in ideas their pastor has assured them are completely wrong.

Aron has now made me very sad. It turns out Morton’s Demon was an especially appropriate name for the concept, because Glenn Morton is severely afflicted with one. He escaped the Young Earth Creationist trap because his work exposed him to the counter-evidence every day, hammering the YEC-demon into submission…but I mentioned that he was a Christian. It turns out that he’s a right-wing conservative Christian, with a fully functioning filter tuned to select out anything from any source other than Limbaughesque talk radio.

Glenn Morton has torn down the entirety of his web archive — years worth of articles and explanations refuting young earth creationism. Why?

Because it turns out he was less interested in addressing the truth than he was in defending Christianity. Atheists and agnostics had been using his evidence to argue not only against Biblical literalists and religious extremists, but against the entirety of Christianity. Arguing against religion is bigotry, you see, and he got tired of all those liberal leftist godless bullies who have taken over his country.

It’s an epic, rambling, incoherent, angry rant.

The powers that be think that everyone MUST be forced to pay for contraception for the YES, slutty life style of Sandra Fluck who gave a speech at the Democratic convention bemoaning that we don’t pay for her contraception. (Rush Limbaugh got in lots of trouble for saying she is a slut, yet it is Sandra who wants to live a life of sex where everyone else pays to keep her from getting pregnant). Why must I as a Christian, who thinks such behavior abysmal, sinful and self destructive pay for her to have sexcapades without consequences? Why must my taxes be used to support what I view as her responsibility? Why does she have a right to pick the money in my pocket when she didn’t earn it? But, it seems, if you question this simple fact in today’s world, everyone will cluck their tongues at you, making you out to be the evil one. Why is it that they think that everyone MUST be forced to believe that what Sandra does is OK AND PAY FOR HER TO HAVE PLEASURE WITHOUT WORRY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES???? She can do what she wants, but don’t ask me to pay for it and don’t force me to approve of her behavior. The modern political left, and make no doubt, most anti-YEC folk are from the political left, want to enforce their conformity upon us because we can not be allowed to actually have an independent view of Sandra Fluck’s behavior or anything else, including anything they deem to be wrong. That is not to be allowed. Enforced conformity is what they want. I must smile while I give Sandra my money to pay for her sexcapades.

I think he means Sandra Fluke. Her speech wasn’t about paying for her hedonistic pleasure, but that the omission of contraception from her school’s insurance plan was a selective disadvantage to low-income students, and she talked about a friend whose contraceptive prescription was necessary to manage polycystic ovary syndrome. But Morton’s Demon won’t let him hear that…all that gets through is “sexcapades.”

He also rages against the expectation that Catholic organizations should cover birth control and abortions in their hospitals — it’s abhorrent to them, you know, and therefore their personal opinions should be allowed to dictate how non-Catholics live their lives. Chick-Fil-A should have the freedom of speech to hate gays…but their customers should not, apparently, be allowed to choose where they eat. The religious ought to be allowed to put up monuments in the public square, because removing them is a theological view.

And apparently the Democrats are a “leftist party” that hates god.

I watched the leftist party vote 3 times to drop God and Jerusalem and then watched their leaders steal that election on national TV and everyone knows that election was stolen. but then I watched delegates of the convention saying church goers weren’t welcome in their party.

Do follow that last link. It doesn’t say what Morton says it does — it’s about some Democrats expressing contempt for red-necked Teabaggers, not church goers (which would be very odd, given we just elected a church goer to the presidency). Morton’s Demon strikes again.

He goes on and on. He’s all for teaching young earth creationism and racism in the classroom despite disagreeing with them and recognizing that they’re built on lies, but gosh darn it all to heck, he’s absolutely committed to freedom. He has shut down all of his evidence-based arguments against young earth creationism because he’s a freedom fighter. And he really, really hates atheists.

I no longer want to worry about what a YEC believes. I no longer wish to be used to destroy my religion. The American Indians lost because the tribes hated each other more than the English and they couldn’t join together to beat them. The Scots lost to the English for the same reason. I do not intend to make the same mistake with the atheist war on religion. It doesn’t matter one whit that someone is a YEC and I am not, it does not matter a whit if I am protestant and someone else is Catholic, or Mormon. I urge all religious peoples to cease bickering about such trifles, when the wolf is at our door. We are in danger of losing our religious freedom, I will NOT argue inconsequential stuff with my co-religionists, ignoring the real danger to our religion, you, the religious bigot and Christophobe. YEC is a trifle; a mere philosophical debate. Freedom is dear; and you, the religious bigot, are a danger to my freedom.

I will note the irony of his signature, which has included this comment for a long, long time:

Banned forever by the Amer. Scientific Affiliation, a Christian Scientific Group, for the crime of discussing the ethics of ignoring scientific data.

Apparently it’s not unethical to ignore the scientific data if it contradicts the teaching of your church. Morton’s Demon strikes again!

Unfortunately for Morton’s goals, his diatribe simply reaffirms to me that religion poisons the mind…or that minds poisoned by an information deficit are more receptive to religion. Either way, it’s a shame.


In case you’re wondering what got him kicked out of the ASA, it’s buried in a thread here. It was a fight over Morton’s climate change denialism, and I notice that he announced his resignation.

Another ugly example of the abuse of Evolutionary Psychology

I have to take one more slash at evolutionary psychology, and then I’ll stop for the day. But first, maybe I should give you the tells I use to recognize good evopsych from bad evopsych (oh, dear, I just admitted that there’s some respectable evopsych out there…).

Here’s an easy indicator. If it’s a paper that presumes to tell you the evolutionary basis of differences between the sexes or races, it’s bullshit. That means the author is going to trot out some prejudice about how sexes or races differ before building some feeble case from a collection of poorly designed surveys or sloppily analyzed statistics to make up a story. Unsurprisingly, those differences always fit some bigoted preconception, and always have, from Galton’s determination of the ‘objective’ degrees of feminine beauty between races to Kanazawa’s, ummm, determination of the ‘objective’ degrees of feminine beauty between races. There really hasn’t been a lot of creativity in this subfield.

If it’s a paper that compares the behavioral psychology or cognitive abilities of different species, there’s a chance it might have something interesting to say. At least there’s a possibility that the crude kinds of essays for examining the workings of the brain might be able to detect a difference of that magnitude. But don’t forget that 90% of everything is crap, so don’t assume that just because the author is discussing chimpanzees vs. humans that it’s necessarily good work.

But now, here’s the ravingly awful side of evopsych, magnified even more because it’s not a scientist trying to make an argument: it’s a floridly batty pick-up artist trying to claim that evopsych supports his hatred of women. His deserved hatred of women, I should say, because he really regards them as little more than hideously deformed animals. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Heartiste, explaining why women hate evolutionary psychology. (Warning! You may want a bucket and damp cloth handy, to clean up any vomit. Below the fold because, well, this guy is a fucking abusive moron.)

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It must be “Let’s all beat up Evo Psych” Day!

Earlier, when I was writing up that criticism of Rybicki and Stangroom, I read through that article on shopping and foraging and evolution that he had cited in defense of his views. There was something in it that drove me to distraction and made me want to find a match and light the whole paper on fire (a bit of indulgent exorcism of annoying work that is getting increasingly difficult to do; I was reading it on my iPad). It’s something that afflicts almost all of the evo-psych work on the evolution of sex differences, and it rankles. So let me try to purge my irritation in a way other than incinerating an expensive bit of electronics. Let me instead pretend to be an evolutionary psychologist.

First, let me stipulate that everything is a product of selection; that the only interesting features in human evolution are adaptive ones. This one really, really hurts, because I’m by no means a panadaptationist, and think a lot of features are far easier to explain as a product of pure chance rather than having to come up with an elaborate just-so story to rationalize them. But have no fear, I’ll return to a pluralist view at the end.

Second, the paper included this nice chart on the differences in roles in hunter-gatherer societies (it’s relevance to a paper on shopping preferences in 19 year old American college students is still in question).

I will stipulate that every single cell in that table is true. I’ll go further and stipulate that the correlation with the sexes is absolute and perfect: in all hunter-gatherer societies, women never hunt and use those hunting skills, and men never gather and use those gathering skills. I’m not an anthropologist, so that table could be totally crackers and there could be a thousand exceptions, but I’m not going to worry about it; we’re stacking the odds to favor the evo-psych hypotheses as much as possible right now.

Further, I will stipulate that many of those skills are biologically based and founded on genetically determined cognitive abilities, and that they have no overlap. That is, for instance, hunters need a theory of mind that is built on an elaborate cortical substrate in order to more efficiently predict the behavior of prey; this ability is not used by gatherers when they’re searching for tubers. Gatherers, on the other hand, need very precise sensitivities to color and nuances of shape to assist in pattern-matching while searching, abilities that hunters do not use.

I will also stipulate that these specific cognitive and perceptual abilities have no utility outside hunting or gathering. There are no social circumstances, for instance, in which these abilities might be an exaptation.

Finally, I stipulate that the circumstances that produce these adaptations are still relevant today, and that 95,000 years of human evolution in hunter-gatherer societies completely dominates and makes irrelevant the last 5,000 years of evolution in agricultural and urban societies; we can ignore any processes that might have undone prior adaptations.

Is that enough yet? Have I given enough of the store away? ‘Cause I’m really feeling a little psychic stress here, since giving up some of those premises makes me want to claw them back and stab them a few times, until they’re bleeding and dead. But I’m playing the game, let’s give evo-psych every possible advantage, and grant them every assumption they make as a default.

Now here’s the part that infuriates me when reading these sex difference papers. They almost always act as if they’re discussing two independent breeding populations facing different selection pressures.

But…

Every hunting man had a gatherer mother; every gathering woman had a hunting father.

Seriously, it’s this feeling that I have to remind them that they’re not dealing with two species, Man and Woman, or even two populations, the man-tribe and the woman-tribe, but one goddamned species, obligately breeding within themselves. If there is a ‘spatial navigating gene’, both men and women have it. If there is a gene that grants us the color sensitivity to distinguish puce from plum, we all carry it. With the exception of a minuscule number of genes involved in sex-specific trait determination on the Y chromosome, we’re sharing everything.

Wait, the naive among you are wondering, does that mean men are carrying genes for large breasts, wide hips, and ovaries, while women are carrying genes for baldness, baggy scrotums, and testicles? Yes, we are. All shared. But these genes are also regulated so that they are expressed or repressed differently in the different sexes. You have to think of each one as a Gene Plus: a gene plus an added switch to turn it on or off differently in different sexes (commonly, they’re regulated differently by the presence or absence of testosterone.)

In most of these reproductively relevant sex differences, it’s easy to understand what maintains the Plus; a man whose testes did not see the signal to make male-specific gonads and instead produced some very confused ovaries would be a reproductive failure. Some of the secondary characteristics are only weakly maintained — breast size, for instance, doesn’t seem to be a major factor in reproductive success, and we see a large variation in that parameter…but there are stronger pressures that have maintained lactation, and so that function is more reliable (but not invariant!)

This is the problem for the evolutionary psychology of sex differences: for each trait that you want to claim is a product of selection for a behavior that is different between sexes, you have to postulate a Plus that restricts its expression to a single sex.

You can’t simply have a just-so story that Woman evolved ability X to cope with gathering berries; you have to also have a just-so story that explains why Man evolved a repressor to shut off X for better hunting. And vice-versa for ability Y that aids in hunting.

So, sure, tell me that humans evolved cognitive mechanisms to aid in navigating by landmarks for better fruit and tuber searching, and I might well believe it to be reasonable; now tell me why you think it would only operate in women, and how it would be actively suppressed by genetic mechanisms in men. Then you can tell me why navigating by distance and direction is actively shut off in women. You’re the ones who like purely adaptive explanations: why would there be an advantage to individuals having each only half the suite of potential genetic navigation tools switched on?

And then you can go through each line in the table up above and explain how confining each of those abilities to only one sex or another led to more babies being made than if both had it, and how having that trait in an ‘inappropriate’ sex would be culled by death or reduced fertility…because you know that’s how evolution works, right?

Right about then, my inner pluralist will come roaring back to life, and I’ll have to point out that your feeble rationalizations, even if I were to accept them, can only represent tiny fitness effects, and that in small populations of humans drift is going to dominate over small fitness coefficients, and selection won’t even see your hypothetical advantages. And maybe you don’t understand how evolution works, after all.

I think a better answer is that there are evolved human traits that are shared among every individual in the population without regard to sex, and that culture acts as the repressor/enabler of particular attributes in particular individuals. That ought to be the default assumption, with exceptions requiring exceptional evidence beyond just reading the cultural codes. Change the culture, and all those fully human abilities can be expressed in everyone, not just the ones permitted by convention.

Anything else is a betrayal of our potential.

The Stangroom Experience

So this odd tweet flies by me:

Jeremy Stangroom
Ed Rybicki speaks out about the consequences of the vile bullying he received at FtB: http://bit.ly/TT9CWz #FTBullies

8:52 AM – 23 Nov 12

“Vile bullying” here at FtB? “Consequences”? Really? And who the heck is Ed Rybicki? I don’t remember him. So I did a little digging.

Oh, yeah. Ed Rybicki — he’s the guy that wrote that “Womanspace” short story that parroted goofy evopsych myths.

At this point I must digress, and mention, for those who are not aware, the profound differences in strategy between Men Going Shopping and Women Going Shopping. In any general shopping situation, men hunt: that is, they go into a complex environment with a few clear objectives, achieve those, and leave. Women, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish.

It was a not-very-good piece that relied on sexist stereotypes for a crutch. It gets a very thorough going over in the comments section there — a great many people were appalled that such a “tongue-in-cheek” exercise in perpetuating falsehoods about women could get published, even as fiction, in a science journal. It also got slapped down by Jacquelyn Gill, who compiled a huge list of negative responses, such as this one by Anne Jefferson. This wasn’t an FtB-led rejection — it was a massive, science-internet-wide gag reflex that puked all over poor Ed Rybicki’s story. Dana Hunter was our local huntress spearing the wild Rybicki, with follow-ups that included Ophelia Benson.

But to claim it was “bullying” or that FtB was responsible…well, that’s typical Jeremy Stangroom, not letting the evidence cloud his hatred of everything on this network.

But I’m happy to join in now, because I read Rybicki’s awful whine. He doubled down on some truly egregiously bad research in an attempt to salvage his story and credibility.

Oh, by the way, nowhere in his excuse-making does Rybicki mention anything about consequences to himself or his career. That’s another Stangroomism, I’m afraid, and should be completely discounted. Along with everything else he claims. It’s also a year old; I guess Stangroom just wanted to revive an old argument that he saw as damaging to FtB (alas, he’s wrong on all counts.)

But oh, gob, the excuses. They’re embarrassingly bad. Rybicki has to settle on one strategy, first of all. He tries to claim that it was just a fictional story, a little exercise in what-if, and that no one should be offended. But he also tries to cite a whole bunch of articles to show that his hypothetical sex difference in shopping vs. hunting is actually reasonable and true, and therefore no one should be offended because he’s just using the facts.

Look, guy: you could possibly try to make a case for either of those, but you can’t do both: they’re mutually incompatible arguments. Especially when you announce your intent to pursue the evidence like this:

Being a scientist, however, I have been trained to demand evidence, to either support or disprove a hypothesis.

And then what he proceeds to do is cite a series of papers with complete credulity. About a paper titled “Evolved foraging psychology underlies sex differences in shopping experiences and behaviors” he writes:

So: a reasonably respectable gathering, then, of respected academics, reporting academic work? One has to assume so – and that this paper is in good standing, otherwise it would never have been published? Again, a reasonable assumption – so to quote from said article could possibly come under the heading of scientific reportage, rather than sexist assumptions based only on gender bias? If the chain of logic holds, then what I will write now cannot be held as evidence of my innate gender bias – can it?

Good grief, the man is a trained academic at a university, and he hasn’t yet figured out that a horrific amount of crap gets through peer review and manages to get published? How could he read the 15 pages of bloated speculation in that paper, all built on the results of a survey of the shopping habits of students enrolled in an American college introductory psychology course, and not see the flaws?

No, all that matters is…

Right: so it went through an Ethics Committee, then? Evidently – it being a large, respectable US university, and all.

I don’t know. At this point it’s hard to believe this guy is being serious: none of those are grounds to trust a paper’s results. But then he claims that the study has been confirmed by two other papers!

I give you “‘Men Buy, Women Shop’: The Sexes Have Different Priorities When Walking Down the Aisles” – from “researchers at Wharton’s Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative and the Verde Group, a Toronto consulting firm”.

Gosh, when I grow up I want to study evolutionary biology at the Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative. And this is the source for the other confirming study:

The study was commissioned by PayPal, meaning again, big $$$ are involved.

I give up. Really, Stangroom? This is the basis of your accusation that FtB is a place of “vile bullying”? That some of us, at least, are willing to call out bad science?

By the way, I’m sure Ed Rybicki will be grateful to you for resurrecting his shamelessly bad story out of the blue like that. I suspect he’s actually been hoping everyone would just forget it after that net-wide panning it received the first time through.


Oh, wait. In the pile of links I dug up to figure this out, I lost track of the main one Stangroom was pointing out: Ed Rybicki himself has brought it up recently. It’s still true, though, that there were no consequences to Rybicki.

While I received next to no personal communications, other than replies to blog comments, I was vilified at my place of work in what amounted to a systematic campaign – despite never having used a Departmental or institutional affiliation anywhere, and having written and published the thing in my private capacity – to the extent that the principal and a DVC of my university actually asked if we could have a public debate on the issue. I told the DVC he HAD to be joking; getting abused in print was one thing, but public attacks would be another thing entirely. I advised our hierarchy that it would blow over – and you know, it did? Quite quickly, too.

So where am I, now? Well, pretty much in the same place I was in prior to early November, 2011, because I have stopped reading Hatespace: that’s right; I no longer bother to check in on the circle-jerk that FtB had obviously become. I also got good news which completely distracted me from the bullshit: my long-shot effort at getting my 30-year dream project funded struck gold, and yes, the wonderful person who walked into my office and asked “Does anyone here know anything about viruses?” and I will be exploring oceanic viromes (thank you, Maya!).

So – all I can say is that I am wiser (but not sadder); that while as an atheist, humanist and liberal, the FtB blogs would look like they were made for me – they can Fuck. Right. Off.

So he’s had no adverse affects on his career, recently got a grant funded (I presume), and the only effect on his life is that he now blames freethoughtblogs for all the criticisms he received over his petty little story. He hasn’t learned one single damned thing.

FtB was not made for him. Scientists who can’t recognize pseudo-science and who use it to defend sexism aren’t quite our audience.

Aaargh! Physicists! Again!

A while back, two physicists, Paul Davies and Charles Lineweaver, announced their explanation for cancer with a novel theory, which is theirs, that cancers are atavisms recapitulating in a Haeckelian reverse double backflip their premetazoan ancestry. They seemed very proud of their idea.

I was aghast, as you might guess. They even claimed that human embryos go through a fish/amphibian stage with gills, webbed feet, and tails in a pattern of Haeckelian development. They do not understand evolution, development, or cancer, facts that were apparent even in the absence of their admission that they had no prior knowledge, and it was freaking embarrassing to see two smart guys with a measure of legitimate prestige in their own specialties charging off into another discipline with such crackpot notions.

Now they’ve done it again, repeating the same claims all over again. And worse, they’ve now published it in the journal Physical Biology, under the title “Cancer tumors as Metazoa 1.0: tapping genes of ancient ancestors”.

[Read more…]