Ray has a change in plans

Apparently, because people had plans to counter some of Ray Comfort’s Origin giveaway — which was announced to occur on the 19th — Comfort is giving them away today. I’ve been getting reports from various universities that his minions are at work right now, as in this photo from Oxford.

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Get out and grab yours now!

I’m going to stroll over to the UMM campus, although I’ll be very surprised if any were sent to our very small school.

Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron showed up at UCLA. It sounds like they flopped hard. I also got this email account from a UCLA student:

They showed up at UCLA today, the Banana Man himself. I am vice president of the
Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists. They definitely caught our club off balance.
Comfort chose a bad time to show up though, as the UC Regents are holding a high
tension conference, deciding whether to increase fees for all of UC for everyone. So
emotions were a bit taut already. Several people from BASS and freethinkers who came
out of the woodwork found a box and stood it directly across from the box on which
Comfort and friends chose to proselytize from. Their books disappeared really quickly,
but BASS has been vigilant about handing out the NCSE’s bookmarks and “Why Ray
Comfort is Wrong” flyers. I cannot believe that creationist idiot actually chose to come
to UCLA instead of UC Berkeley. Maybe he was afraid of a riot.

Makin’ ’em sweat

Poor Adnan Oktar. The New Humanist published an exposé, and he and his organization are clearly freaking out. I’ve been getting several near-hysterical emails a day from the Turkish creationist mouthpiece, Seda Aral, insisting in many different font colors that the accusations are baseless and are a sign that the humanist movement is melting down. They’ve also come out with these stilted videos where Oktar goes page by page through the New Humanist.

Man. That looks like a really good magazine.

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And then the creationists have produced a web page that claims to address criticisms of Oktar. For instance, you may recall that in his lavish creationist book, Atlas of Creation, he claims that organisms never change; the bulk of the book consists of plagiarized photos, pairing a picture of a modern organism with a fossil that shows relatively little change. The classic example of his sloppy methodology is that one of the pairs is of caddis flies, and the modern example is this one, an artificial lure, complete with fishhook.

Well, they have an explanation for that now: uh, yeah, they meant to do that. It was a model, yeah, that’s the ticket. They put that picture in the book intentionally, yeah, and they knew they’d catch Richard Dawkins. And then Adnan would get a date with Heather Locklear! Yeah, that’s the ticket!

The claim regarding the caddisfly: Dawkins highlighted the photograph of caddisfly in Adnan Oktar’s opus, Atlas of Creation as a great discovery. However this is the photograph of a model particularly put by the author in the book. Whether the photograph is of a model or not does not change the fact that this living being is still alive in our day. Desperate, speechless and bored in the face of the extraordinary evidences of Creation in the Atlas of Creation that invalidate evolution, Dawkins takes every opportunity to express this photograph of a model particularly put by the author in his book as a great discovery. By this attitude Dawkins, in fact, reveals the pathetic situation in which Darwinism finds itself. Caddisfly lives in our time with the same appearance its millions of years old fossil has. That is, it has not undergone any change. That is why Dawkins feels offended.

Yeah, evolution is pathetic, because they noticed that Adnan Oktar proudly and intentionally included a photo of a fake fly in his book! That doesn’t quite explain why the creationists have been purging the photos in their more recent work, however.

They’re very defensive about the Atlas of Creation, too. They insist that Oktar’s work is respected everywhere.

New Humanist seems to be in trouble probably due to the extraordinary, real and scientific evidence submitted by Mr. Adnan Oktar to Darwinism. Indeed, due to this trouble the magazine made a very interesting comment and claimed that Mr. Oktar’s claims are met with lampoon in the West. Yet the editorial board in question very well knows that Mr. Oktar provides precise and concrete evidence against Darwinism which is a theory that thoroughly lacks any evidence. Indeed for this very reason he is the one Creationist author whose views are most respected all around the world. Readers worldwide enjoy his books which are also downloaded in ample amounts on the Internet.

I hate to be the one to break the news to him, but the Atlas of Creation is widely regarded as a joke. I know quite a few scientists, and we’ve talked about it; receiving a copy of his book is an opportunity for mirth, and we kind of hope that he’ll send us one…to laugh over. I felt left out for a while when I didn’t get one, and a colleague gave me one out of sympathy—I’ve since felt some vindication, though, as they’ve sent me three more copies now, with different colors of covers.

They are a hoot. I should scan in some of the ridiculous arguments they make, sometime; the photoshopped skeletons to illustrate what evolutionists ought to find but haven’t makes me laugh every time.

Bill Maher makes a not-pology

Bill Maher struck precisely the wrong tone in his recent plea for ‘forgiveness’ for his anti-vax stand — it wasn’t an admission that he had been wrong, it was a rather smarmy, self-righteous claim that he has been the open-minded one who just wants to ask the hard questions . It reminded me of nothing other than the sniffy, sanctimonious tone creationists take when they try to claim they’re just interested in the free exchange of information on both sides of their issue. It’s just another attempt to put crank pseudoscience on a par with real science.

Orac is scathing in his assessment. Maher managed to make himself look even worse on this issue.

I get email

I wondered what the creationists were doing after last night’s debate, when all the godless rationalists were partying down. They were composing a condescending letter to rationalize away their defeat!

Here’s what Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association sent me and Mark Borrello and Jerry Bergman this morning.

Thank you all

Thanks to you all for keeping the debate on a courteous intellectual level.

Obviously not all the questions were addressed but the event illustrated that it can be extremely valuable to do so.

Dr. Myers, you have a unique position, with your immensely popular blog, to change the whole complexion of the discussion. Remember how you treated Dr. Bergman on your blog?

On Monday, 16 November, I’m going to be doing a debate. I hate debates, but I’ve been dragged into this one. It’s being promoted by the local creationist loons and CASH, and I’d like to see a good turnout from the sensible, scientific, godless community. I’ll be arguing with a loud clown, Jerry Bergman, on “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in the Schools?” I think you can guess which side I’m going to be on.

You can, by the power of example and occasional criticism of overzealous followers, turn the blog into an actual forum of ideas. It would be a great contribution to the intellectual world.

To be addressed is your claim that evolution adds information. That needs to be supported. Your closing remarks about evolutionary research into the beak changes of Darwin’s Finches need to be answered with the point that they are still finches and the changes cycle with changing environmental conditions. The only point at which the crowd got rowdy was with the mention of evolution’s influence on Hitler. Actually, that issue is not solved by shouting because there is a strong case that the desire to improve the race leads to eugenic and ethnic cleansing policies. Indeed, your claim that morality comes from our culture needs to answer the question, “What if my culture is the Mafia?” Other evolutionary apologists have candidly pointed out that the only morality that can come out of evolution is that I leave my genes, as many of them as possible, to the next generation. Also, a truly interactive academic blog would allow posting of the studies on the academic success of students exposed to both evolution and intelligent design. You have consistently claimed that those students who do not get pure evolution will fail, but without offering any experimental or observational data. And to claim that evidence against evolution does not represent evidence for intelligent design needs closer analysis. There is a logical dichotomy involved. Life either has a natural origin or not. If not, then the origin must come from outside natural mechanisms. You can claim that we just don’t know, but while waiting, need to entertain the possibility that there is a cause outside of nature. To say there can be no such thing is not a scientific statement or even a logical one but an a priori elimination of one whole field of inquiry. Your redefinition of vestigial organs as reduced function may get some traction but is not the way they were presented 100 years ago, but there is no doubt that “Junk DNA’ was clearly touted as evolutionary leftovers and delayed the search for function, which was predicted by Intelligent design.

Also, you have not only personally attacked Dr. Bergman, you have allowed your followers to misrepresent his qualifications by focusing on the institution granting one of his PhDs. Here is a CV:

M.P.H., Northwest Ohio Consortium for Public Health (Medical College of Ohio, Toledo, Ohio; University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio), 2001.
M.S. in biomedical science, Medical College of Ohio, Toledo, Ohio, 1999.
Ph.D. in human biology, Columbia Pacific University, San Rafael, California, 1992.
M.A. in social psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1986.
Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation, minor in psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1976.
M.Ed. in counseling and psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1971.
B.S., Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1970. Major area of study was sociology, biology, and psychology.
A.A. in Biology and Behavioral Science, Oakland Community College, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1967.

If your case is strong, students will be enriched by being allowed to see it interact with the opposition. And your call for punishment of those who reject the ruling paradigm conflicts with the view of science as growing and self correcting. How can purveyors of new ideas work hard to establish them if they are not allowed to do so? Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions pointed out that it is very difficult for those entrenched in the establishment to change and paradigm shifts come with generational revolutions by those whose life work and reputations are not tied to the current model.

Dr. Borrello, because you have participated in a debate with me, I know you are in favor of interactions and Dr. Bergman, I know you not only are in favor of dialogue but would be delighted to bring this to the next level. Because you have been willing to change in the past, you have demonstrated that data makes a difference to you and I dare say that you might even refine some of the arguments you made at the debate given the chance.

So, Dr. Myers, are you willing to take your debate persona and transplant it to the Blogosphere?

Ross Olson

Does he really think I treated Bergman’s ideas with less contempt in the debate than I do on the blog? Trust me, the reputation I have on the internet that I seem to rip off my enemies’ heads with my claws and slake my thirst at the spurting stump of their neck does not accord well with reality — I do the same thing here on the blog that I did last night, it’s just a little more obvious in person that there is a human being behind these words. Mr Olson really needs to face up to the fact that all that happened was that the paladin-for-hire he brought into my backyard to knock me off my high horse showed up in rusty armor, wielding a bladder-onna-stick, and got his ass kicked.

His long paragraph of creationist fallacies up there doesn’t save face for him, it merely makes him look ridiculous. I think I’ll take it apart later, but right now I’m trying to get caught up on other matters, and giving three talks over the course of this long weekend has left me a little fatigued. Have no fear, I’ll treat it appropriately, and my thirst will be slaked.

As for Bergman’s CV, it’s terrible. It’s a potted history of a dilettante striving for legitimacy with a random array of diplomas on his wall. I’m really unimpressed; I’m much more impressed with the single degree of a freshly-minted graduate student who has demonstrated some depth and fervor for an idea than that fuzzy flibbertigibbet’s list of hash.

And please don’t invoke Kuhn. Creationists are not the heralds of a coming paradigm shift; they are the rotting detritus of the old regime of unreason that has haunted the human race for far too long. There’s a difference between maintaining an open environment that encourages fresh new ideas to emerge and tolerating the sloppy housecleaning that allows moldy scum to flourish.

That Bergman-Myers debate

Well.

It was a strange event. Kittywhumpus and Greg Laden have good detailed breakdowns of the debate, so you can always read those for the audience perspective. As for me, I’ve learned that you can never prepare for a debate.

I tried. I had a focus — the topic, chosen by Bergman, was “Should Intelligent Design be taught in the schools” — and what I prepared for my side was a set of arguments on that point. I used my own experience teaching biology to lay down a few principles: to teach a subject as science, you need an explanatory mechanism or theory that provides a conceptual framework for understanding the data, and you need a body of evidence, real-world observations, measurements, and experiments that you incorporate as well as you can into the theory. I explained that Intelligent Design, in the estimation of scientists and by its proponents own admission, lacked both. Therefore, it didn’t belong in the science classroom. It is not enough for a science teacher to simply declare that “some people think an intelligent agent intervened at some point in the history of some species”, she needs specifics. She needs to be able to answer questions about how and when this intervention occurred, and how we know it. I explained that whenever IDists try to concretely define what they would teach in the classroom, it’s never about their theory or their evidence, because they have none, but that it’s always reduced to a laundry list of gripes about evolution…and I predicted that that’s all we’d hear from Bergman.

I thought it was a good argument, anyway. Too bad the other guy never addressed it.

Also, I read Bergman’s dreadful long book, Slaughter of the Dissidents. It’s entirely about how cruelly Intelligent Design creationists’ careers were cut short by a reactionary establishment that unfairly silences new ideas. It’s complete BS, but I prepared brief rebuttals of some of the major instances he wrote about, like the cases of Rodney LeVake and Carolyn Crocker and Guillermo Gonzalez and a few others, just in case. There was no just in case needed.

Fortunately, I’ve come off a couple of big science meetings, so I had at the tip of my brain several pro-science case studies, good examples of theory guiding science to produce productive information. This, also, was not needed.

There was a point in the debate where I did just throw a stack of my notes over my shoulder. They were pointless.

Bergman’s argument was bizarre and irrational. We got a long biographical introduction in which he described bouncing about from atheism to faith to a different faith, and how nobody liked him because he was an ideological pariah (I felt like mentioning that there might be other, more personal reasons people avoid the crazy person, but that would have been cruel). He made concessions and seemed to think I was right that ID lacks a strong theory, but that that wasn’t important — you don’t need theory. He teaches medical school, and he just teaches the facts.

There were two linchpins to his argument, neither of which addressed the topic at hand.

One is that he had scientifically proven that there were no such thing as vestigial organs, therefore evolution is false. How did he do this? By redefining “vestigial” to mean “having no function at all”, so all he had to do was demonstrate that it did or potentially did anything to make his case. One problem: that’s not the definition. Vestigial organs are those that are greatly reduced in one species relative to a homologous organ in another species. He kept returning to the appendix, like a dog to its vomit, all night long.

He did a lot of quirky redefinitions throughout the evening. Apparently, everything is religion, and he seemed to be on the verge of claiming that teaching science in the science classroom was a violation of the separation of church and state. He had this bizarre case of a teacher somewhere who was fired for posting the periodic table in his classroom. The periodic table was his religion, you see. I could not make sense of what he was saying, or understand how it related to the topic of the debate, and I asked for confirmable details and mentioned that I’d read his book, but didn’t remember that story anywhere in it…to which he replied that it was in volume II, and that the book was just the first in a 5-volume series. My brain briefly whited out at that revelation, and there was a moment or two in which, if I’d said anything, it would have been a chain of profanities. I kept my cool, never fear.

Oh, by the way, the periodic table is irreducibly complex. That’s also why the administration hated it.

That was his second key point: everything is irreducibly complex. He has this radical, dare I say insane, version of irreducible complexity in his head in which everything except sub-atomic particles are irreducibly complex. A carbon atom, for instance, has a specific number of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and if you change those, it is no longer a carbon atom, and therefore it fits Michael Behe’s definition of IC perfectly. Here’s Behe’s definition, if you need reminding.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.

Bergman claims that everything is IC. Which I suppose one could support with an exceptionally naive reading of the definition, in which case Behe’s argument that you need intelligent agents to create irreducibly complex systems is effectively refuted, since natural processes going on in the sun are producing irreducibly complex carbon right now. I expressed some incredulity at Bergman’s use of the term, and actually, horrendously, guiltily spent a moment defending Behe’s definition, which made me feel so dirty inside. I need a high colonic right now.

And that was it. That was his side of the debate. The only surprise left at the end was that yes, of course, Bergman puked out the “evolution leads to Hitler” argument, well past the time at which I could rip into that ugly lie. Talking to people afterwards, that seems to have been one of the most memorable moments, when Bergman briefly took off his cheerful loony yokel mask and revealed the ugly hater beneath.

Then we got a long parade of questions from both sides of the aisle (did I mention the joint was packed? It was one of the larger crowds I’ve had). Mark Borrello was a fabulous moderator — we didn’t work him too hard during the debate itself, since we both managed to hew fairly close to our allotted time slots, but he was an excellent enforcer in the Q&A, cutting short those long pronouncements we often get in these kinds of events. I did notice that he was practically choking himself after the Hitler bomb was dropped — as a historian of science himself, he would have been the perfect fellow to dismantle that nonsense, but then of course his neutrality as moderator would have been blown.

Afterwards, I joined a group from CASH and Minnesota Atheists to, I guess, celebrate. It was a total rout, I’m afraid. I have no idea what the creationists did.

And finally, we left the Twin Cities after midnight for the long drive home. I can tell I’m not going to be good for much of anything today.

(Oh, the inevitable question: yes, it was videotaped by the creationists. They said a DVD will be available. I don’t know when; somehow, I don’t think they’ll be in an enthusiastic rush to get this one out.)

You know what’s wrong with America?

Our problem is that we men don’t stand up when we pee. Obama probably sits down when he should pisseth against the wall.

This isn’t a joke. It’s what this guy seriously believes, and he’s very angry about it.

Somehow, I get the idea that Steven L. Anderson, the flaming anti-gay pastor, has these dreams in which he stands shoulder to shoulder with a long line of men, and they all unzip and flip out their penises and spray a mighty stream forth, together, with pride and joy…and he feels good about these dreams. Glory!

Aaargh, what have they done?

I know that Seed and SixApart have been busily tinkering with the comments section to “improve” things, but I don’t know exactly what they’re doing. It’s gotten weird, though, and many of you are sending me complaints that you can’t comment any more — I haven’t banned anyone recently, I swear.

It seems to be in a transitional state. Some of the problems may be a result of parts of the html or css being cached on your computer, and the server is getting confused. Try reloading/refreshing the page to force a full update; it might work. It might not. I was initially locked out myself, and it took a couple of forced reloads before it started functioning again.

Anyway, any anomalies are not at all personal, but are a result of the mechanics taking a sledgehammer to the undercarriage. All will be resolved eventually. I hope.

Vote on the Bad Faith awards

The New Humanist hands out a yearly slap-in-the-face to the most deserving noisy believer of the year — last year’s winner was Sarah Palin — and this year they have a full slate of worthy apologists for superstition. It’s an internet poll, but who should win this one isn’t at all obvious — they’re all contemptible. Here are the results so far:

Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya
94 (8%)

Anjem Choudary
72 (6%)

Anthony Bush
22 (1%)

British Chiropractic Association
197 (16%)

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor
51 (4%)

Dermot Aherne
84 (7%)

Damian Thompson
66 (5%)

Pope Benedict XVI
388 (33%)

Terry Eagleton & Karen Armstrong
57 (4%)

Tony Blair
128 (11%)

I think it’s sweet that the Pope is in the lead, since he is a traditional favorite and the Church has done such a good job of stepping in the malodorous mushy fecal slime of evil this year. I’m also fond of Cormac Murphy O’Connor for decreeing that atheists are “not fully human,” a state to which I aspire but am constantly foiled by my merely human genetics and physiology. My clicky finger was also drawn to Oktar, who is not only a creationist of the foulest, dumbest sort, but may even be clinically insane. I finally voted for Eagleton/Armstrong, simply because I think their brand of gooey, meaningless drivel is far more common than Christian or Islamic fanaticism, and they represent it so well.

But don’t use my choice as a guide! This is one of those polls where it wouldn’t be bad if it ended up in a 10-way tie.