I saw this in one of the comments here and thought it was sweet.
(Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,843 entries with 1,458,229 comments.)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I saw this in one of the comments here and thought it was sweet.
(Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,843 entries with 1,458,229 comments.)
Newt Gingrich has 1,325,842 followers on twitter.
Who cares, you might be asking. The criteria for being popular on twitter are rather different than the criteria for being a competent statesman; if twitter mattered in that way, Ashton Kucher would be president. It’s irrelevant. But Gingrich is unhappy because his vast appeal is unappreciated by the media: “I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn’t count because if it counted I’d still be a candidate; since I can’t be a candidate that can’t count.”
Wow. Gingrich believes having lots of twitter followers gives him credibility? That’s pathetic.
But wait, that’s not pathetic. This is pathetic: he bought most of those followers!
About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various “follow agencies,” another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt’s profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn’t follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you’ll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated. Pathetic, isn’t it?
That’s just sad.
(Pssst. By the way, to the hundred thousand readers who aren’t my sockpuppets: I’ll get the paychecks to you later. We’re having a little cash flow problem, what with the transition to a new site and all that.)
Newt Gingrich has 1,325,842 followers on twitter.
Who cares, you might be asking. The criteria for being popular on twitter are rather different than the criteria for being a competent statesman; if twitter mattered in that way, Ashton Kucher would be president. It’s irrelevant. But Gingrich is unhappy because his vast appeal is unappreciated by the media: “I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn’t count because if it counted I’d still be a candidate; since I can’t be a candidate that can’t count.”
Wow. Gingrich believes having lots of twitter followers gives him credibility? That’s pathetic.
But wait, that’s not pathetic. This is pathetic: he bought most of those followers!
About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various “follow agencies,” another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt’s profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn’t follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you’ll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated. Pathetic, isn’t it?
That’s just sad.
(Pssst. By the way, to the hundred thousand readers who aren’t my sockpuppets: I’ll get the paychecks to you later. We’re having a little cash flow problem, what with the transition to a new site and all that.)
I told you all the batty creationists were crawling out of the woodwork to crow over Xiaotingia‘s redefinition of Archaeopteryx‘s status as a victory for their ideology, when it really isn’t. Now another has joined the fray: Vox Day, creationist and right-wing lunatic. He makes a lot of crazy, ignorant claims in this short passage that I’ll answer one by one.
Precisely when has any evolutionist reconsidered either a) the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection1 or b) the corollary and requisite hypothesis that life evolved from non-life2, as a result of the falsity of one, ten, or even a hundred predictions that relied upon one or both of them? If it weren’t for DNA, which was not discovered or developed with any assistance from evolutionary theory3, evolutionary biology would already be openly recognized by every intelligent, rational, science-literate individual as being about as useful as phrenology and astrology.4
Darwinian biologists are very much like Keynesian economists. It doesn’t matter how many times their predictions fail5. It doesn’t matter how often their models are proven to be wildly wrong6. It doesn’t matter how many times they have been wrong in the past even with the benefit of margins of error consisting of millions of years7. They continue to insist that their position is based on evidence even when the evidence demonstrates precisely the opposite of what they have been claiming8.
First, the details:
1Of course biologists have considered alternate mechanisms! Coyne argues for selection as a mechanism of speciation (by pleiotropic side effects of genes that are selected for other functions), and Futuyma argues for speciation by drift.
2Similarly, mechanisms of abiogenesis have been proposed that suggest selection, but also chance or as a necessary outcome of the physico-chemical properties.
3The structure of DNA was analyzed by its chemistry, not it’s evolutionary history, obviously, but as this paragraph even concedes, the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution.
4Nope. Structure of DNA was determined in 1953; the neo-Darwinian synthesis occurred in the 1930s-1940s with the integration of genetics into evolutionary biology. It was genetics (especially population genetics) that established evolution as the only reasonable explanation for the history of life on earth.
5The precise taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx was not a specific prediction of evolutionary theory. Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs strengthens the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs.
6If you examine the family tree of Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia, what you should see is that the taxonomic re-evaluation of Archeopteryx merely moves it from the Paraves branch to the nearby Deinonychosaurian branch…hardly a “wildly wrong” model.
7Vox Day has not described anything yet which shows evolution being wrong. Adjusting the precise timing of evolutionary events by millions of years is a reasonable response to new data which does not falsify the underlying hypotheses of relatedness.
8Again, this discovery does not demonstrate the opposite of what evolutionary biologists have been claiming, and actually makes for a better fit with other data about ancient bird ancestors; moving Archaeopteryx from a first cousin to a second cousin of the ancestor of modern birds isn’t a radical idea that invalidates evolutionary biology.
The big picture is even more damning for Vox Day. Of course we have huge volumes of information supporting the theory of evolution, that suite of mechanisms and principles that describe the broad course of evolutionary history, including common descent and descent with modification. And also there are a multitude of details that aren’t completely known — we have millions of species on this planet, and only a fraction have been studied in depth. The theory of evolution does not hang on the exact lineage of any two species out of those millions…it hangs on the fact that there is a lineage.
Vox Day is quite the poseur — he pretends to know better than real scientists, when he can’t even tell the difference between hypothesis and data.
I told you all the batty creationists were crawling out of the woodwork to crow over Xiaotingia‘s redefinition of Archaeopteryx‘s status as a victory for their ideology, when it really isn’t. Now another has joined the fray: Vox Day, creationist and right-wing lunatic. He makes a lot of crazy, ignorant claims in this short passage that I’ll answer one by one.
These are the rules of Pharyngula. Abide by them when you comment here.
The first law: This is PZ Myers’ blog, I am the ultimate overlord, and I can be a poopyhead if I want to. Posting here is a privilege granted by me, not a right, and posting privileges can be rescinded at my whim. Do not annoy me, and worst of all, don’t bore me, and we’ll get along fine.
The second law: There is no second law.
What we do have is mores. We have mores out the wazoo! This blog has been around for about 8 years and has a horde of active commenters, and the whole bloody mob has shaped expectations for what is in-group behavior and what is out-group behavior. Pay attention to the culture here.
We’ve discovered the problem that has flattened freethoughtblogs.com: our hosting company can’t do it, despite what they told us. What we need is something that can handle hundreds of thousands of page loads per day and a good chunk of storage space, and these guys are throttling our bandwidth and strangling access right now…and they don’t offer a more capacious option.
What you can do to help is give us concrete recommendations for a better situation, either a Virtual Private Server or a dedicated host. Leave info, links, phone numbers, whatever in the comments, or email me so we can work out a deal fast. We want professional hosting, and we’re willing to pay for it, so don’t bother telling us about the el-cheapo deal through your brother-in-law, OK?
OK, that launch fizzled.
You know what’s really annoying? I can’t shake my fist towards the mysterious Blog Overlords and curse them for their incompetence, because we are the blog overlords. Dang. Freethoughtblogs.com is not holding up well under the morning traffic load. The tech slave is unconscious right now — he whimpered something about working all night and not getting any sleep over this thing — but once we stab him in the heart with a syringe full of adrenalin, and with a little hearty application of the whip, we’ll bring it back up someday.
The new site went live sometime late last night, and our technical help slaved away to try and get everything working, if not beautiful. Check out Freethoughtblogs some time today, and say what you think. I’ve created a thread to collect suggestions and criticisms as we shake out the bugs, fine-tune everything, and eventually, make it pretty.
A new blog network is hitting the web on August 1. Led by two of the most prominent and widely read secular-minded blogs in the country – PZ Myers’ Pharyngula and Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars – Freethoughtblogs.com will, we hope, quickly become and important gathering place for atheists, humanists, skeptics and freethinkers in the blogosphere.
Freethoughtblogs will be more than just a place for people to read the opinions of their favorite bloggers. It will be a community of like-minded people exchanging ideas and joining forces to advocate for a more secular and rational world.
The network will launch Aug. 1 with a handful of blogs with many more to be added after the first three months of operation. Here are the six blogs that will lead the way:
Pharyngula. PZ Myers has built one of the most popular atheist blogs in the world. Never one to shy away from controversy, Myers has built an astonishing following over the last few years and has traveled around the world speaking to skeptical audiences. As a PhD biologist he is the scourge of creationists everywhere but he takes on a wide range of subjects in his blogging, including religious criticism, women’s rights and progressive politics.
Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Ed Brayton was raised by a Pentecostal and an atheist, sealing his fate forever as someone who is endlessly fascinated by how religion intersects with other subject, particularly science, law, history and politics. He is a popular speaker for secular organizations around the country, has appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and is pretty certain he’s the only person who has ever made fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.
The Digital Cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are shy and elusive creatures; when necessary, they hide in their own ink. This particular cuttlefish has chosen as its habitat the comment threads of science, religion, and news sites, where it feeds on the opinions of those who are emboldened by the cloak of internet anonymity. Cuttlefish is an atheist, a skeptic, and is madly, passionately in love with science. The Digital Cuttlefish has, since October of 2007, been a repository of commentary and satire, usually (but not exclusively) in verse and now moves to Freethoughtblogs.
This Week in Christian Nationalism. Chris Rodda is the author of “Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History.” Since the release of her book in 2006, Chris has been blogging at Talk2Action.org and Huffington Post about the use of historical revisionism in everything from education to legislation. Chris is now launching her own blog on Freethoughtblogs.com that will accompany her weekly podcast, This Week in Christian Nationalism.
Zingularity. Steven “DarkSyde” Andrew is a 40 something former stock and bond trader and one time moderate conservative. He grew up in the Southwest and has long been fascinated by science, particularly evolutionary biology, physics, and astronomy. He is a frequest contributor to the popular progressive website Daily Kos and now blogs at Zingularity, where legit science disappears forever down an event horizon of petty snark and cynicism.
Comradde PhysioProffe. The pseudonymous PhysioProffe is, as the name suggests, a physiology professor at a private medical school who blogs about politics, academia, food, booze and sports. Not necessarily in that order.
This is only the beginning. Over the next few months we will add many more blogs to the network, including Greta Christina’s brilliant blog, a new companion to the award winning Reasonable Doubts podcast and many others.
Many more blogs will be added — we’ve got a list. We haven’t asked for them, but I’ve also got people already asking to join up…we’ll see. We’re planning on controlled, sensible growth, so look forward to incremental improvements.
