The Dallas Observer has published a profile of Roy Abraham Varghese, a wealthy computer and business consultant who funnels money into ‘spirituality’ nonsense, that is not only so stupid that it pained me to read it, but but was also poorly and confusingly written — the reporter is utterly credulous and gushes over Varghese like the most pathetic fanboy, but then every once in a while tosses in a paragraph that takes a critical stance, but reads as if he has just cribbed an argument “for balance” and stuck it in, like a lump of hard thought floating in a sea of New Agey, fuzzy religious porridge. It makes one wonder if an editor had tried to sharpen up the slop by telling the writer to throw in some random scientific paragraph. The goofy philosophy is bad enough, but the graceless prose and incoherent structure is agonizing.
You know this article is in trouble from the first paragraph.
For a quarter-century Roy Abraham Varghese has been assembling God proofs. Along the way he won over the world’s most influential atheist.
I am not impressed with god proofs, especially not “collections” of them. I will also not that in this entire long and rambling article, not one “god proof” is given, although there are plenty of assertions.
Who, you may wonder, was the world’s most influential atheist? Or maybe not; as everyone who’s been following the arguments knows, the instant Antony Flew became a deist, he was instantly promoted to being the most important atheist there ever was, despite the fact that he was virtually unknown to all but a few academics. I swear, if ever I want to become the most important biologist of the 21st century, all I have to do is reject the evidence for evolution and become a true believer in Jesus, and presto! The creationists will laud me with exaggerated glories!
Flew’s conversion was baffling and inconsequential. He was best known for his argument that religious claims were untestable; he was won over to a grudging admission of deism by his own ignorance, and led there by the lies of a creationist. Here’s one of Flew’s comments on the persuasive ‘evidence’ that prompted his conversion:
I am open to it [theistic revelation], but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.
Oh, please. Flew knows nothing about the science of origins, and he’s willing to believe a creationist’s claim that a couple of flimsy pages of a poetic myth stand up well against the detailed knowledge of physics and biology? This is the level of argument Flew has managed to muster since he flipped, and it’s not at all impressive—it’s the waffling of the clueless.
But it sways some people, like Roy Varghese.
Roy Abraham Varghese has a God equation. It is self-evident. He sees it in a grain of sand. He sees it in bees, especially bees. By rights, bees shouldn’t fly. The haphazard way in which they beat their wings simply shouldn’t haul their pot-bellied bodies aloft. But they fly, hovering and reversing over bluebonnets and bachelor buttons. Bees flout the laws of physics and aerodynamics, a puzzle that perplexed scientists for 70 years. “How is it that they can do that?” he asked in a 2005 interview at Perry’s Restaurant while smacking on bites of filet mignon. “The fact that these insects can do this…” Varghese trailed off.
He doesn’t understand how bees fly, therefore God exists. The ability to translate ignorance into a sense of wonder must be especially useful to creationists; the world must look like a supernova of wonder to them, with rainbows and dancing ponies and happy clowns doing pirouettes. Listen, people, here’s a word of advice: when you find your sense of wonder lighting up at what you don’t know instead of the cool stuff in reality that you do know, slap yourself, hard. What you don’t know should be a goad to make you try and find out, not an excuse to bliss out and sit drooling into your filet mignon.
OK, I haven’t even gotten past the heading and the first paragraph, and you can tell this article is a target-rich environment. I’m not even going to try and purge the blockages in this pipeful of sewage, but I’ll mention a few instances of nonsense. Here, for instance, is the Discovery Institute’s version of metazoan evolution in all its glory.
Then there is the bizarre spectacle of the Cambrian Explosion, the geological era beginning some 505 to 550 million years ago. In this evolutionary leap, virtually every major life form and all the basic body plans in existence today–intestinal structures, jointed limbs, gills, eyes with fully formed lenses–seemingly emerged fully formed from single-celled and other simple life forms without any apparent evolutionary antecedents. This explosion from single-celled simplicity to multicellular complexity occurred within a geological moment of 5 to 10 million years. Before the Cambrian discoveries, scientists believed well more than 100 million years of evolutionary incrementalism were necessary for the basic body plans of advanced life to develop from simple life forms, which loitered for 3 billion years before this biological boom.
Familiar slop, so forgive me if one thing jumped out at me: “intestinal structures”? What? Can this author even name an “intestinal structure” that originated in the Cambrian?
Overall, that account is all wrong. Before the Cambrian discoveries, scientists believed there was a long period of evolution, and after the discoveries, we still think that. Life didn’t “loiter” for 3 billion years — that was a period of constant, ongoing evolution. It’s another example of foolish ignorance to think bacteria are all the same, simple, single-celled and negligibly sophisticated organisms, and then poof, there were crabs and fish and clams, which are all somehow immensely more complicated than everything that came before. The molecular and genetic substrate for multicellularity was assembled in the long period before the Cambrian; we have evolutionary antecedents well before the Cambrian, and we can see the molecular precursors of plant and animal gene regulation in extant microorganisms.
One more item: the writer has a lengthy anecdotal jabber about yet another “authority” whose ideas are congruent with Varghese’s. It’s George Gilder. Watch out, you will get stupider reading Gilder’s mangling of information theory.
Canadian social theorist Marshall McLuhan famously stated “the medium is the message.” Techno-utopian writer and Discovery Institute senior fellow George Gilder, in the article “Evolution and Me” published in National Review (July 17, 2006), took McLuhan’s premise and flipped it on its ear: The medium is not the message. Gilder teases out a clash between information theory, a thing invented by Claude Shannon of MIT, and evolutionary theory. Stripped down to its bolts and nuts, information theory states that the transport channel of information—wires, fiber optic strands, satellite signals or the DNA molecule—is distinct from the source of the information. Content (girly jabber) is utterly divorced from its conduit (cell phone signals).
Gilder illustrates his thesis using a computer. Silicon microprocessors, carefully assembled in all their multibillion dollar precision, could never give rise to an operating system, such as Microsoft Windows. “In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate,” writes Gilder. “No possible knowledge of the computer’s materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations.”
Scientists, Gilder says, reflexively blur information and the physical structure of DNA molecules, implying life is biochemistry rather than information processing. “[T]he DNA program is discrete and digital, and its information is transferred through chemical carriers—but is not specified by chemical forces,” he writes.
Varghese concurs. “Information precedes its manifestation in matter,” he writes. Matter and energy are merely vehicles of all information in the known universe. “The next breakthrough is realizing that the foundation of it all is intelligence,” writes Varghese. “Implicit in all its phases of discovery is the greatest insight of modern science: Everything is intelligence.”
Gah. The information in a computer is the product of its physical state; the flow of current through a transistor, the pattern of holes on a disk, the pattern of signals from input devices. Gilder wants you to believe it’s some otherworldly essence, but it’s not, it’s all rooted firmly in the natural, physical world. Similarly, life is chemistry. We have a mechanism, natural selection, that sculpts chemistry into complicated patterns without intelligence. If there is a great insight in modern science, it’s the exact opposite of what Varghese claims: information can arise from matter and energy without any guiding agent.
These guys do not speak for science. They speak as part of a network of idiots.
The article concludes with a return to the mysterious bees mentioned in the introduction, and it hammers home my point: Varghese is unaware of what the actual science has been saying.
Still, it seems wise to remain open to the unexpected strangeness of science. Just two months after that 2005 lunch meeting at Perry’s where Varghese rhapsodized on the wonders and mysteries of hovering bees, researchers from the California Institute of Technology and University of Nevada Las Vegas announced a startling discovery based on evidence from high-speed digital photography and sophisticated robotics. After 70 years of confounding confusion, scientists had finally unraveled the secrets of bee flight.
Weis-Fogh. The clap-and-fling model of insect flight. From 1973, not 2005.
The ignorance of these people is no excuse.
This, for the lack of a more powerful expletive, idiot still believes that moronic wives’ tale about bumblebees not being able to fly according to the laws of physics?
I’m surprised he doesn’t need outside help in tying his shoe laces every day.
Either that or you could change your mind and back Matthew Nesbit’s stance against Dawkins.
Bdelloid Rotifers have higher I.Q.’s than these “wonder junkies.”
As a member of the press, I still never cease to rage at how often this happens. The financial fact is, faith sells. It doesn’t matter if it’s Deepak Chopra or Passion of the Christ or feel-good positivism like “The Secret” (that book was on -every- magazine cover here in Brazil last week). It sells and makes money and that alone will ensure that it gets a deferential treatment from the newsrooms every single time.
I don’t see it changing, really. The simple fact that CNN (itr wasn’t even Fox!) lured racist hate-monger Debbie Schlussel to an atheist-free panel on…atheism, proves that the media knows which side the bread is buttered on.
So we better just get some Dramamine and wait for the next breathless slurp-job of a magical-thinker.
‘Gah.’
That’s such a great word!
Speaking of bees, anyone else read/heard about the troubles they are having with Honeybees, and how that will impact agriculture?
I guess God just hates the evidence for him and has to kill them off.
Bdelloid Rotifers have higher I.Q.’s than these “wonder junkies.”
Yeah, but bdelloid rotifers don’t get to have sex. :-)
As for the bee-flight thing: My head just about exploded. Please don’t tell these people that male bees develop from unfertilized eggs, or they’ll start in on how “nobody knows” how this can happen. Or maybe they’d prefer a digression into how “nobody knows” how bdelloid rotifers can reproduce without sex.
It’s even worse than that. When it comes to DNA, the chemical properties of individual bases contribute to the function and information content of DNA in a way that floppy disks in a computer do not. You cannot separate the medium from the message. I gave an example in my take down of Gilder almost a year ago.
Not that it really matters anyway. It’s a non sequitur to begin with.
With bdelloid rotifers, it may be that they’re all born/hatched pregnant…
Another charming smack down. Reading this made my day.
Just because I’ve studied (on my own of course) the history of Windows, I’d like to play with his OS analogy.
Windows, is really a result of some SERIOUS evolution. Massive amounts of mutations, dead-ends, and vestigial features. What began as a text-based OS (like some cyanobacteria), slowly accumulated more information by trial and error. Most of it was purely unnecessary and much of if died off. There was even competition of various other text-based OSs, but since evolution is not directed to the more advanced OS, those other OSs met their dead-end.
Suddenly, the text-based OS gained a GUI, which was really just a mutation that required the existing programming just to work. As more ‘features’ were added to it, the program began to suffered from additional bugs. Then, as competing GUIs were developed, they again were superior, but unfortunately fell dead in the complexity of the natural environment. But the alternative mutations didn’t go extinct. They flowed over to MS’ environment and gave rise to a new OS, called “NT”. As this mutation slowly proliferated and because it had superior resistance in the increasingly hostile world of viruses and other environmental pressures, it gained supremacy in the world, while the old technology became extinct. The old text-based OS can still be found in the vestiges of the OS, but it no longer plays the significant role it used to. Most people could even do without it.
Of course, even today we can still find living fossils that closely resemble the original OSs, although they are quite different on the insides.
Yeah, A MS OS is a great example of ‘sudden appearance’ of ‘intelligent design’…;..NOT! =)
The Dallas Observer has published a profile of Roy Abraham Varghese, a wealthy computer and business consultant who funnels money into ‘spirituality’ nonsense, that is not only so stupid that it pained me to read it, but but was also poorly and confusingly written — the reporter is utterly credulous and gushes over Varghese like the most pathetic fanboy, but then every once in a while tosses in a paragraph that takes a critical stance, but reads as if he has just cribbed an argument “for balance” and stuck it in, like a lump of hard thought floating in a sea of New Agey, fuzzy religious porridge.
Good points, but the graceless prose and incoherent structure is agonizing.
I find new agey stuff is on its own little plane of irritating. Yes, I suppose, it’s probably far less directly hazardous to everyone’s health than such more focused monstrosities of thought as bloodthirsty fundamentalist monotheisms forged into nationalist ideologies, and taken as excuses to murder and/or subjugate unbelievers…
But the hazy ‘spirituality’ stuff is still such a messy, ugly, vapid muddle of willfully dumb, meaningless noise… It’s like the bubblegum pop/elevator music genre of superstition. The harm it does is mostly the time it wastes, the standards it lowers. I feel palpably dumber just standing too close to it. And filled with embarassment for my species.
Everybody’s a critic.
What’s with this ‘Science hasn’t explained something therefore it can’t’ argument? Rather inductive, isn’t it? And I thought we weren’t supposed to use inductive reasoning. Guess that means it’s only Science which is not allowed now. As to not knowing how bees fly:
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060110_bee_fight.html
Better luck next time.
In the sidebar is a photo of Victor Stenger with this caption:
Like tribbles?!
Oh joy, another waste of paper and ink on the way.
Uh, by definition?
Great!! Now my brain has melted. How am I supposed to teach a class now?
“Listen, people, here’s a word of advice: when you find your sense of wonder lighting up at what you don’t know instead of the cool stuff in reality that you do know, slap yourself, hard. What you don’t know should be a goad to make you try and find out, not an excuse to bliss out and sit drooling into your filet mignon.”
That’s quite some advice. It’s shocking how many people are ignorant, or even worse, ignorant and proud of it. What ever happened to the joy of learning? Where’s the joy in ignorance? I guess if it means never have to face reality…
But…but…
peanut butter.
PEANUT BUTTER!
Midgets and dwarves.
MIDGETS AND DWARVES!
By the way, the [i]Dallas Observer[/i] is not the paper of record in Dallas (that’s the [i]Morning News[/i]), but is instead the weekly tabloid-size paper that they give out for free in stands near sandwich shops.
His definition of information theory was complete and utter gibberish. The observation that “…content is manifestly independent of its material substrate…” is true in a certain sense (for example it doesn’t fundamentally matter if you read something in a newspaper, or hear it by word of mouth), but that much is obvious to anyone with an IQ in two or more figures. Presenting it as some great observation (and bastardising a truly great theory in the process) is completely reprehensible.
a) What does Varghese say when you ask, “Are bees supported by magic or God’s will?” Because either they stay aloft with physics or supernatural flight.
b) “The fact that these insects can do this…” Varghese trailed off. (what kind of lazy journalism is that, btw?) So when Varghese reads the article and learns that, gee, bees CAN fly using physics, and then reads this blog and finds that’s been known since 1973, what happens to his bee-based god belief?
Oh yeah, well sure information is “material” in the computer, but see everything in the computer has to be designed by the mind and it’s an incontrovertible fact that information in the mind is immaterial. Hell, every IDist knows that, and they also know that mind therefore couldn’t have evolved.
Frankly, I think that New Age bilge like the above paragraph is the entire “basis” of ID. The idea is that since the mind is magic and produces wonderful structures, biological structures must likewise have come from magic which is indistinguishable from mind and its magic. It really never leaves that solipsistic ghetto, which (along with intellectual dishonesty) accounts for the fact that they are impervious to science.
So another computer guy blabbing on about science via the New Age nonsense flashing around the internet, alongside and melding with the ID nonsense which likewise is so much easier than the study of science. Varghese sounds like DaveTard, but with enough commmand of the jargon to influence the equally lame Antony Flew (well, purportedly).
Gilder, Varghese, Gerald Schroeder, and Flew, exemplify the truth of that statement.
But of course Gilder has himself as an example that information (in the old sense) and computer operations need not coincide. In the old sense of information, what he writes (about science, at least) does not count as information at all, so that his computer-generated flim manages to avoid the designation of “information”.
That has nothing to do with Shannon information theory, naturally, any more than Gilder’s rantings do.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Funny that you start a criticism of a poor writing with a run-on sentence that gives run-on sentences a bad name. And talk about sycophants. There is not one single reasonable argument in your diatribe. It is simply more personal attacks. One after another. But you are very convincing. (sarcasm in case you didn’t get that) We should take your word over Nobel Prize winning scientists (including atheists like Penzias) who praise Varghese as a great thinker (and writer) over your personal attacks and lack of convincing debate on issues. And Antony Flew is a virtual unknown? Wow talk about revisionism. Then the fawning sycophants here line up to praise you like you’ve said something – anything! For lack of anything intelligent to say – attack them personally. Good strategy, poor excuse for meaningful thinking. Your religion is simply “I reject your reality and replace it with my own.”
If Penzias said the sky is made of purple french fries, should I believe him? Because he has a Nobel prize and all?
So it’s a personal attack to point out that Varghese’s belief that bumble bee flight cannot be explained by physics is out of date by over two decades? Sad, very sad.
Why don’t you read PZ’s post Alex.
It’s obvious you didn’t.
Devoutly to be wished:
A song that names all of these twerps, like the Tom Lehrer elements song.
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
There’s gilder, behe, varghese, schroeder, jonathan wells and egnor… [making it flow mellifluously will be the hard part]
We need a lyricist, a decent pianist, and someone who does an awesome Tom Lehrer imitation.
And just ten minutes ago I was just reading a New Scientist article about how robotics engineers are using the well-established scientific understanding of insect flight to design flying microrobots. Do you think these “Bees flying is a MIRACLE!!!” idiots will stop uttering such utterly stupid things when flying robotic “insects” are being mass-produced and used for a variety of purposes?
Probably not. They also believe that “Only God can make a tree,” ignoring the role of other trees, and often bees as well.
(And speaking of pollen and pollinators, can I politely request that the trees in my area cease and desist with their constant public sex? Their sperm keeps getting in my eyes and making them itch.)
Re Alex Samms
“We should take your word over Nobel Prize winning scientists (including atheists like Penzias) who praise Varghese as a great thinker (and writer)”
Let’s see here.
1. Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling claimed that vitamin C cured cancer
2. Nobel Prize winning physicist William Shockley claimed that black Americans were intellectually inferior to Caucasian Americans.
3. Nobel Prize winning Physicist Brian Josephson claims that ESP, PK and cold fusion are real phenomena.
Given the whackjob claims of the three gentleman mentioned above, somehow that mere fact that Prof. Penzias has a Nobel prize does not impress me as making him an expert on Varghese
Stupidity is stupidity no matter who utters it Alex. And PZ could speak in Greek run on sentences, that wouldn’t change the validity of his criticism that this particular journalist can’t write. As for Flew, yes, to the general public, before he slipped, he was virtually unknown. Much like the best phyisists today are unknown, while the everyone reads about Hawking. And lastly, your claim as to PZ’s religion is simply sad and shows that you have no concept of what the word actualy means.
None of your actual claims hold. It would seem that all you’re left doing is making a personal attack on PZ.
Wow. I wrote a little entry on my own blog called Probability Disproves Evolution, or Bees Can’t Fly. I was trying to make a point about understanding the assumptions that go into building theories, understanding the limitations of theories, and especially being over-confident in a theory to the point of ignoring evidence. But I guess that low Reynolds number, non-steady state aerodynamics is just an invention of us atheistic aerospace engineers to try to deny God’s glory.
Whoaaaa, PZ! “stuck it in, like a lump of hard thought floating in a sea of New Agey, fuzzy religious porridge.”
Porridge is good, your metaphor is crap.
You could’ve written, “stuck it in, like a lump of hard thought floating in a sea by an untreated sewer outlet, full of piss & turds & toilet paper, or the Dallas Observer”.
I suppose it’s part of the PZ schtick but this comment on Genesis is aesthetically tone-deaf:
“…a couple of flimsy pages of a poetic myth”
You don’t have to believe in poetic myth to appreciate the aesthetics contained within. Genesis isn’t a peer-reviewed paper, it’s a work of art and a damn good one.
There are more concise ways of tearing apart analogies between evolution and computers:
“Do computers reproduce?”
“No.”
“Then they’re not good analogies for living organisms.”
The end. Same thing works for jet engines.
Are you kidding? Genesis is not much of a work of art. There are passages in the Bible that can be considered art, and Genesis is not one of them. A hodgepodge of several different authors is not aesthetically pleasing.
I’m so tired of the Bible is great poetry/storytelling!
It’s too long, it’s inconsistent and it’s hardly applicable to modern life.
Plus the “hero” sucks.
I’d rather read some Carver or Chandler.
Alex Samms,
PZ’s first sentence is not tecnically a run-on. It might be unwieldy, but it doesn’t consist of independent clauses improperly joined. No, it consists of dependent clauses and independent clauses properly joined, so no dice, pal.
Steve_C: There are some pieces of nice poetry – along with misogyny, racism and, not to mention, some NC-17 gore and splatter. Judges is an excellent example: Look up Siserah who got a tent pole jammed through his head in chapter 4, or the gang-rape, murder and cutting-up of a concubine in chapter 19.
And then we haven’t even mentioned the whacky, angst-ridden acid trip of Revelations… say what you want about it’s litterary qualities, but at least it does throw in a few chocks for good measure.
Fine. I’ll give you that.
But a work of art? Hell no.
Antony Flew:
The elderly Flew admitted to Richard Carrier and to Stuart Wavell of the London Times and Duncan Crary of the Humanist Network News that he has not made any effort to check up on the current state of things in the relevant scientific field.
http://www.secweb.org/index.aspx?action=viewAsset&id=369
Good grief. I have heard mysterians argue something like “neurons and synapses carefully arranged in all their precision could never give rise to consciousness and a soul.” I think the argument is silly, but one sort of sees where it’s coming from – after all we don’t really understand what’s been called the hard problem of consciousness.
But this is remarkable:
“Silicon microprocessors, carefully assembled in all their multibillion dollar precision, could never give rise to an operating system, such as Microsoft Windows.”
Did this twit actually suggest that mere diodes, capacitors and transistors couldn’t ever give rise to the Windows Operating System (peace be upon it)? Can this man possibly have failed to notice that we make everything in a computer, understand precisely how it works and that there is no gap to be filled by magic woo? He sounds like he thinks Jesus runs around squirting soul-sauce into our pentiums to make them function. Wow.
It is in fact true that no computer scientist thinks only silicon integrated circuits can be used to make processing units. It takes a special kind of moron to go from there to the notion that the behavior of our processors cannot be explained in terms of the things they are made of.
What next? Maybe some creationist can wisely observe that since no heavier than air object can fly, God must be making jumbo jets.
Alex, just in case PZ hasn’t been clear enough about his religious beliefs, he is an a-the-ist!!! That means he does not have a religion; he disagrees with them all.
Come off it. I acknowledged that it was a poetic myth; I’m not the one who compares it to a scientific explanation. Blame that on Varghese.
I also disagree that it is a good work of art. It’s short, it’s silly, and it misleads.
Honey-bees fly.
They physically exist and they physically manage it. Somehow. (Well, evidently a lot less of them have been flying lately…I wonder if cell phones are the culprit).
But its in that appreciation of “somehow” that separates the (wo)men from the idiots: let’s just look in on two kinds of people looking at the SAME DAMNED THING, namely, a flying bee:
The first one is amazed at a contraption barely a few centimeters in length that can not only fly with exceptional dexterity but, upon further observation, notices that they can navigate between widely-spaced hive and nectar-targets AND accurately communicate the information (direction and range) to their cohorts back at the hive. This person is overwhelmed by this MYSTERY and receives a bolt of wonder out of the fact that there are physical phenomena employed by nature that this person has not been able to imagine beforehand. So this person takes a scientific approach to uncover more of the marvelously mysterious details…
The SECOND person observes the SAME bee and, just like the first person, doesn’t understand how the bee can accomplish these amazing feats. BUT, because this second person ALREADY professes a blanket “explanation” for ANYTHING (s)he encounters that is mysterious to their understanding, (s)he at once attributes the “mystery” to some “intelligent agency” smarter than they are. No attempt is made to discover any further details because it is sufficient for them to attribute such “impossible physics” to a superior being. End of story.
The “clap-fling” method of flight would have remained completely unknown to the second person. The “clap-fling” method of flight is evidently still unknown to such people because they ‘already know how things are done’: THEY DO NOT BOTHER TO READ ANY SCIENCE IN THE FIRST PLACE BECAUSE THEY THINK THEY ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER.
Obviously, from their peculiar behavior, not only do these jerks “believe” in God, they behave as if they are already invested with all of “His” knowledge.
If we want to understand what is knocking off our bees (for an alarmingly pressing example) would any of us ask the second person for their opinion?
The Bible is an anthology, pasted together from the work of many hands and redacted by many unknown editors whose motives were not always apparent. No wonder so many interpretations of it are possible. Parts of it are quite good, while other parts are dreck. What else should one expect? I recently rewrote part of it just for my own amusement. Everyone should write some holy scripture, just for the experience.
And don’t forget to put in somewhere that it is absolutely true, because then circular reasoning makes it so! (Or so lots of people seem to believe.)
CalGeorge:
Last I heard, Tom Lehrer was still alive and kicking. Why not ask him?
As for getting it to flow like honey (back to the bees, are we?), it seems to me that if you can make a list, break each name down into syllables, and mark the preferred syllable to put the accent on, the rest appears to reduce to the knapsack problem (or some variant).
Since the knapsack problem is known to be hard, the obvious approach is to use an evolutionary algorithm to solve it, which gives you bonus irony points.
PZ Myers:
“Listen, people, here’s a word of advice: when you find your sense of wonder lighting up at what you don’t know instead of the cool stuff in reality that you do know, slap yourself, hard. What you don’t know should be a goad to make you try and find out, not an excuse to bliss out and sit drooling into your filet mignon.” – P. Zizzy
PZ: I know you didn’t explicitly mention the word “mystery” in this great quote, but I have to say that its perfectly cool to understand that there is “cool stuff in reality” that we DON’T know about which may goad us into finding out what’s going on. (The situation is easily pictured in terms of a simple 2×2 matrix, details at eleven).
I know you don’t think that mystery isn’t a strong motivator for scientific inspiration (okay, so replace “inspiration” with “motivation” and vice versa, if you really must) but it would be more reassuring to see more unambiguous distinctions between how “mystery” is approached by scientists and by religious folks.
“Mystery” is a GOOD THING: we ALL encounter it. What we scientists DO NOT KNOW is tantamount in importance to our basic bread-and-butter when it comes to inspiration…errr, motivation. The conversion of mystery into knowledge (as in “solution” – for scientists ALWAYS on a provisional basis) is what makes us human; it is what must make ANY sentient beings that have evolved ANYWHERE “human”. If we have not yet understood that science (namely nature) is telling us that every emerging consciousness must necessarily start out IGNORANT and must LEARN about their environment, then we have a great deal more learning to do besides distracting ourselves on cultural exercises in consensus-building.
But we shouldn’t allow religious idiots to monopolize yet another basic human form of appreciation by letting on that “mystery” (that is, NOT KNOWING) is solely within the domain of the religiously-perplexed set. Grab what I mean?
I was with you until right after this:
PZ Myers:
As someone with a more than passing knowledge of the implications of things like Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism on information design and presentation, that Guilder passage made me wince, especially the part about “…content is manifestly independent of its material substrate…” No, no it is not. The constraints imposed on the content by the material substrate actually fundamentally affect the content’s form and presentation (and thereby the salience and significance of parts of the content). Incidentally, that’s pretty much what McLuhan meant in the first place, but he used fewer words.
Case in point, printed matter is good for making lengthy, factual arguments, and not as good for making crude emotional appeals. The best possible medium for making emotional appeals is television, because it relies on compelling visual information, it is dynamic, and, given the current structure of television programming, fast-moving and ultimately fairly superficial. The structures of television programming are largely a product of the constraints of the medium, as it’s fairly easy to see by studying the content of television since the 1930s. Those constraints are dictated physically.
Now, it is impossible to say what specific type of information you can find in any particular medium, but content is not completely amd “manifestly independent” of its physical medium, analogously to how human beings are not “manifestly independent” of their physical environment, no matter how individually different (or similar) they may be to each other.
Sheesh…
Well, at least Revelations had a point. The point was that Nero was a great big diseased dick. I think that’s a message we can all get behind.
Anyway, it’s insulting and misleading to try to classify the Revelation of St. John the Divine as an “angst-ridden acid trip”.
A better classification would be “John was thumbprinting LSD and huffing meth from a lightbulb at the same time“.
PZ, you warned me but I still read it and now, I’m pretty sure I’ma litle dumbr.
crp
“Are bees supported by magic or God’s will?” Because either they stay aloft with physics or supernatural flight.
Well, that explains it, then. The reason shit like the massacre at Va Tech, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc. happen is that God’s too busy moving the damned bees around all the time. He’s probably muttering “I should have made them able to fly on their own” the whole time he dies it, too.
Oops, “does it”. Of course, he does seem to be pretty happy with killing them all off at the moment, too.
PZ, these information theory arguments seem to rely upon a lack of understanding as to what information IS. People seem to have an inherent bias that equates information with intelligence, and attempts to explain why this is wrong in terms of math are not likely to prove effective with laypeople.
Tree rings, however, provide a simple counter-example that any person can understand. Everyone knows that a ring represents a season of growth and that a thicker ring means more favorable conditions for growth, such as precipitation. This is, of course, information and the source of the information is not some intelligence, but rather the environment itself.
Has this guy ever actually seen a bee, or just read about them in some creationist tract? Someone should release a swarm of angry (honey)bees in his office and ask if he thinks the “haphazardly” flying “pot-bellied” insects have trouble staying aloft.
Anyway, it’s a much more realistic assumption that God only levitates the bumblebees.
Let me tell you about the birds and the bees. Bumblebees included.
Yes.
That’s already wrong. Whose word it is doesn’t matter. What matters is how compatible it is with the evidence.
No wonder I agree with the following:
What???
That would be one large bee…
Oh, he seems to have been a lot better than his reputation. But keep in mind that the Number is 616, which is said to stand for Caligula. We have a winner.
:-D
Good point.
Let me tell you about the birds and the bees. Bumblebees included.
Yes.
That’s already wrong. Whose word it is doesn’t matter. What matters is how compatible it is with the evidence.
No wonder I agree with the following:
What???
That would be one large bee…
Oh, he seems to have been a lot better than his reputation. But keep in mind that the Number is 616, which is said to stand for Caligula. We have a winner.
:-D
Good point.
Dustin:
lol, that could do it as well. The British philologist John Marco Allegro hypothezized that early Christian & Helleno-Jewish cults used the fly agaric (Amanita Muscaria) as an entheogen (psychoactive drug used in religious context, peyote style), although this remains pure speculation.
On the other hand, drugs wouldn’t really be necessary to create a text like Revelations. Closer examination shows that it’s a rather shameless rip-off of earlier mid-testament apocalyptic litterature, not to mention the apocalyptic texts of the Old Testament (Ezekiel, Daniel, Zephaniah & so on). It is quite hard to find anything in Revelations which hasn’t been written before.
Mix that with a feverish religious fanaticism fueled by cruel persecution, heavy parousia expectation, the ever-present numerology of the antique world, a number of days of fasting in eager expectation for a vision, and well – there you have your book. Shamans in other antique religions probably didn’t have to work half as hard to recieve their visions.
But yes, I do believe we can agree that Nero was indeed one great big diseased dick.
Ouch! It hurts! Make it stop! You’re evil PZ. You knew I’d read it and suffer!
So an undergraduate walks into a mathematics conference with what he believes to be a new theorem. After presenting his proof, a professor says “There must be something wrong, I can think of a dozen counterexamples to your theorem!” The undergraduate says: “That’s ok, I brought three other proofs!”
*badumshhh!*
I’m here all week.
Are we sure this “George Gilder” isn’t Chopra in disguise?
You know what I’m thinking? I’m going to go argue with a few evangelical big-wigs. Then, once I’ve annoyed them enough that they remember my name, I’ll suddenly convert. After that happens, my name will make it into the apologetics as “Dustin: The Most Influential Athiest EVARxInfinity”, I’ll convert back to atheism and gloat.
Well, he didn’t stop there. He went on to say that all of the Bible is some kind of metaphor for a mushroom-cult. As Tim Callahan puts it in the last “Skeptic”:
He’s the Carlos Castaneda of mushrooms.
Oh, that’s a funny kind. I would definitely like to see that phallic mushroom god, though. That was one of his better inventions.
Hah, Anthony Flew.
*cough*over the cuckoo’s nest*cough*
Bad Pun of the Day brought to you by BIAS: Blithering Ignoramuses Against Science!
“Information precedes its manifestation in matter” — AARRGH, yet another modern platonist! Geez, can’t we invent any NEW metaphysical positions, at least?
As for Flew, he used to be a decent philosopher. I get the impression, however, that he’s gone a bit senile as of late.
Ginger Yellow: Unfortunately, idealism is a very common position …
That’s ridiculous. The light bulb wasn’t invented until about 1800 years later.
1. Pygmies
2. Dwarves
3. Bees ???
Q.E.D.
For those who don’t have time to read the entire thread, allow me to present these key takeaways:
1. Bees are actually faeries.
Enjoy your weekend.