Irrational humans

I really have a hard time wrapping my mind around the strategies of anti-choice activists. I’ve encountered a few, and I’ve browsed some of their websites, and am so unimpressed with their tactics…but they seem to work effectively with some people.

We’re all familiar with their favorite choice of signage: preferably something with lots of blood splatters and body parts. This is quite blatantly an attempt to inspire aversion to what goes on beneath our skin, and encourage people to ignore the messiness of reality. It’s ugly but it works, to a degree (it also leads to desensitization; I notice that those sign-waving picketers aren’t prostrate with grief, as you’d expect if they were really feeling the message of their signs).

Their message could be whipped around and applied directly to, for instance, surgeons and oncologists. They also do bloody messy things, and they lop off parts and scar living, adult people. Shall we demand an end to surgery?

And then there’s the Big Lie. I have yet to meet a single anti-choice advocate with a shred of honesty and principle; the ones I’ve talked to are even more nauseating than creationists. They have a party line, and they stick to it…reason doesn’t even exist for these people, just blind, fawning adoration of babies, which they imagine to be sleeping inside the blood and meat of a living woman. So they say things like this without a stirring of conscience:

That’s just bizarre. What biologist has ever claimed that an oocyte was not alive? Of course it’s alive: sperm and egg are perfectly healthy, normal living haploid cells, the fertilized egg is a living cell, the immature oogonia and spermatogonia in the gonad are living cells, the primordial germ cells in the developing gonad are alive.

The argument is never about whether some state is alive or not. Your appendix and tonsils are great masses of living cells, but if the organ becomes inflamed, doctors will cut them out and throw them away. Every time you poop, about a third of that mass that you excrete and flush away consists of living bacterial cells, yet no one hesitates and feels regret at the tragic loss of life when their hand is on the handle.

The argument is about whether that living thing is a person requiring extensive legal and moral protection, and it’s entirely clear that “life” is not a sufficient criterion, or people would be lobbying for the protection of turds and tonsils. We are not absolutists about protecting all life; we can’t be.

Even the anti-choicers know that. That’s why, if you look at the awful site that image came from, you discover their other argument: it’s a baby. It’s got fingers and toes and a face and its heart beats. This is a purely emotional argument, trying to compel you to empathize with something on the most superficial grounds. This is the motivation behind all those intrusive ultrasound laws — you are supposed to surrender reason and decide that because something has a face and hands and heartbeat, it is exactly the same as a teenage girl who wants to go to college, or the young woman who discovers her much-hoped-for pregnancy has gone awry and the fetus is lethally deformed. It’s demeaning to real human beings.

But here, here’s a living creature with a face and hands and a heartbeat.

It’s even got far more autonomy and functionality than a twelve-week fetus, and is adorably cute. Shall we also declare that women and newts are morally, socially, and legally equivalent? It seems to be the way we’re going.

Why I am an atheist – Nick Harding

Richard Dawkins likes to compare openness about one’s atheism with coming out of the closet, but in my case they were even more closely related.

Like so many kids I repressed my homosexuality out of religious (in my case, Christian) compunction and social phobia. But once I finally begrudged myself some sex in college, I knew intuitively that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I reacted against the idea of the victimless crime, described as sin by the Bible. But while I had shed my denominational identity, I remained stuck in a kind of anachronistic deism. Indeed, having jettisoned the doctrine of original sin, I probably overcompensated with an overly optimistic view of nature and its presumbaly benevolent creator.

So I was in for a shock when some of my friends started coming down with, and dying from, AIDS (this was the early nineties). Of course I knew about it from reading the newspaper and watching television, but I had put off revising my worldview until now. How to explain AIDS? Of course I already knew that it wasn’t divine punishment because there was nothing wrong with sex and, anyway, it had spared many “fornicators” including myself. But it didn’t exactly accord with my new-model deism either. I was experiencing a crisis that was as much intellectual as emotional.

Resolution beckoned in the form of evolution, which I had learned in high school but never related to my daily life in that hiatus between polio and AIDS. With its frequent mutations in response to medication, HIV was (and still is) the poster child for evolution. I began to take a more jaundiced view of nature, which seemed increasingly like a struggle for existence. But I found reassurance in the thought that all this took place without reference to morality or values, instead deriving from the virus’s need to replicate and adapt to its environment.

I suppose plenty of people going back to Asa Gray have been able to reconcile evolution with their religious beliefs. But as I was seeing it in its cruelest guise, I could not. To me, evolution was an irrational and wasteful process that was fundamentally incompatible with any definition of creation. And if you take away creation, what is left for a god to do?

So it was my experience as a gay man, specifically of religious homophobia and the AIDS epidemic, that brought me to atheism. At first glance, those seem to have little in common besides their coincidental effect on the gay community. But in accepting my sexuality and recognizing the true nature of AIDS, I embraced what is rather than what cannot be. To me, atheism is the “reality-based community” of journalists’ dreams.

Nick Harding

An ugh-ick poll

Time Magazine is running a poll to determine who should be in their Top 100 of 2012, and you get to vote whether you like or detest someone. I don’t trust Time in the slightest; I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up having categories for most hated and most polarized, so no matter how you vote, you might end up making the subject newsworthy.

Anyway, that smug Catholic scumbag Timothy Dolan is on the list. Let ’em know what you think.

Should Timothy Dolan be on the list?

Definitely 62.85%

No Way 37.15%

It never ends — Bemidji is afflicted with the toxin of creationism

So this past weekend, we had the Midwest Science of Origins conference here in Morris, Minnesota. At precisely the same time, about 190 miles north-north-east of us, in Bemidji, Minnesota, a team of lying clowns from the Institute for Creation Research were repeating the same bullshit that provoked our students to organize our conference. I hope the Bemidji State biology faculty were paying attention, and that their students are right now planning some remedial education for the community; I’d be happy to help if they want to contact me.

It was a seminar titled “Rebuilding the Foundation: Demolishing the Pillars of Evolution”, and it was held in Bemidji High School. How embarrassing for Bemidji. How typical of creationists, though.

The seminar, consisting of six hour-long presentations, was presented by the Institute of Creation Research out of Texas and led by John Morris and Nathaniel Jeanson.

This is just weird, but they’re always doing it, and I don’t get it. It was the same thing last year here in Morris; Terry Mortenson of AiG showed up and did these back-to-back lectures, while refusing to answer questions (he claimed to have a sore throat…which didn’t interfere with 7 hour long lectures).

I see we missed an opportunity. We should have just told Neil Shubin to come here and spend all day talking. Unfortunately, when you’re talking science, it’s actually hard work and you have to back up everything with evidence and demonstrate some rigor and care; when you’re a creationist, it’s easier because all you have to do is make stuff up non-stop.

You might be wondering who these two guys are.

Morris has a doctorate of geological engineering and has led 13 expeditions to Mt. Ararat in search of Noah’s ark. Jeanson has a Ph.D. in cell and development biology from Harvard Medical School.

First, when your most notable contribution to “science” is haring off to chase down myths, you ought to be laughed off the stage. Morris is a deluded charlatan.

And Jeanson…he’s an embarrassment to Harvard. I’ve described Jeanson’s competence before — he’s a guy with an undergraduate degree in bioinformatics, who lectures creationists on genomics, who knew nothing about how the chimpanzee genome sequence was acquired or how it compared to the human sequence.

Students generally are taught evolution theory in early high school, Cairns [Steve Cairns is the superintendent of schools!] said.

“But it is expressed as a fact,” Penni Cairns said. She said students raised on Creationism concepts can be confused and frustrated with evolution theory teachings because their beliefs are shot down by teachers following educational guidelines.

Yes, I’m sure that is frustrating to have your superstitions constantly shot down by reality.

“There are so many unexplained aspects of evolution, such as the missing links,” he said.

In Morris’ morning session, “The Fossil Record: A Problem for Evolution,” he showed images of fossils that mirrored the images of the animals that exist today: A 200-million-year-old crocodile is still a crocodile, a 300-million-year-old dragonfly is still a dragonfly, a 65-million-year-old bat is still a bat.

Cairns keeps trumpeting his ignorance in this article. Why is he superintendent of schools again?

Harun Yahya also makes this argument — it’s about the only thing he says over and over again. Let’s show a picture of a fossil and a contemporary organism to someone who wouldn’t know a femur from a cercal bristle, and they’ll happily say that they look exactly the same. Meanwhile, someone who actually knows some systematics and anatomy will look at the 200-million-year-old crocodile and immediately spot the differences that make it a unique species.

And yes, it certainly is true that there were dragonflies 300 million years ago, and there are dragonflies today; it’s a successful form. It doesn’t follow that organisms separated by a third of a billion years of time are indistinguishable from one another, or that we ought to be surprised about it. What matters is that we have change over time: there were no T. rexes in the Triassic, and there are no T. rexes today, but there were T. rexes in the Cretaceous. The existence of successful taxa that span that range of years does not negate the reality of change.

He also showed pictures of actual fossils that show, in his interpretation, how animals died catastrophic, sudden deaths. Fish died in sediment-filled waters; land-dwelling animals drowned. He showed pictures of dinosaurs fossilized with their heads arched backward and up, saying they were struggling to find air, but were drowning.

“Every dinosaur fossil is like that,” he said.

No, they’re not…but it’s true that a lot are. It is silly to claim that opisthotonus (the arched neck in those fossils) is always a consequence of drowning; there are multiple possible mechanisms behind it. But it’s even sillier to claim that all of the dinosaurs not only died of the same cause, but died in the same cataclysmic event over the course of one year. It’s like noting that some human skeletons show evidence of fatal cuts, bludgeoning, or gunshots, therefore they all died in the American Civil War, which was global and explains all violent deaths in all of history.

But of course, Henry Morris is an idiot.

He also argued against evolution by saying that there is no hard evidence that shows one creature evolving into another. If a fish did turn into an amphibian, there would be a “missing link” or transitional fossils proving such steps. Yet none exist.

At the very same time that Morris was making that stupid claim, Neil Shubin was pulling out a cast of Tiktaalik, a transitional form in the process of fish evolving into amphibians, and showing it to a room of 200 people in Morris.

“Yet none exist.” Lying dumbass.

But OK, world. Any students out there shopping for colleges right now? Are you looking at Bemidji State University vs. University of Minnesota Morris? I think the smart choice is crystal clear.

But then, I expect someone at the university will soon come roaring back with a strong response. I’m looking forward to it.

P.S. One other odd thing about that article. It keeps touting “Intelligent Design”, and Cairns is promoting the inclusion of Intelligent Design creationism in public schools. Yet the talks are by the ICR, a specifically young-earth-creationist organization that believes the earth is less than ten thousand years old and that all of geology can be explained by a global flood, patently religious claims that the Discovery Institute tries mightily to sweep under the carpet in their pretense of being a secular, scientific organization. Somebody has apparently looked at the claims of both and can’t tell the difference. Which is not surprising.

(Also on Sb)

It turns out there is a letter from a Bemidji State University professor in that newspaper. It’s not what I expected.

Although I don’t work in the lab, I am the local professor who teaches epidemiology to undergraduate and graduate students throughout the state. In this capacity, I know of no one doubting the mutative action of skin-invading bacteria. But that’s a far cry from going from nothing to everything. Macro-evolution appears unable to explain the Irreducible Complexity of life as we observe it.

This conference, Saturday at the BHS auditorium, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., presents a wonderful opportunity to engage in civil and respectful discourse on a very foundational subject.

An epidemiologist who doesn’t understand evolution and thinks young earth creationism is reasonable — how strange and unfortunate. It’s not surprising at all that Karl Salscheider emphasizes civility and respect in his letter, though; when you’ve got nothin’ of any substance, pound that drum demanding respect for your superstition equal to that given to hard-won science.

Oh, I hate it when that happens

You go off to give a talk on hedgehog gene expression in teratomas, or something similarly scientific. You put the memory stick in the auditorium display projector, the A/V guy pushes a button, and all of a sudden, the audience gets a brief glimpse of that unholy quantity of squid close-up photography you keep around for personal reasons. Now it’s never happened to me, personally — I’m competent with a computer, and much more careful — but here’s a story of a man who ‘accidentally’ showed the wrong powerpoint presentation.

In this case, the man was a Catholic priest (oooh, now you know exactly what happened next, right?)

And it wasn’t a zoology exercise on display. It was, as they delicately put it, “indecent images of men”.

I’m confused by one thing. On the one hand, they say the flustered priest quickly removed the memory stick and fled the room; on the other, the parents and children present report quite specifically that there were 16 pictures shown. I’m thinking it must have been a particularly vivid montage. Although the parents found it impressively memorable, the priest, Martin McVeigh, said he had no knowledge of it. Hmmm.

I am a little amused by what happened afterwards.

Twenty minutes later he returned, he continued with the meeting and wrapped up by saying that the children get lots of money for their Holy Communion and should consider giving some of it to the church.

That’s so typical of a Catholic priest: first they waggle a pile of penises at your kids, then they ask you to fill their coffers. Those priests better look like Chippendales dancers, or they shouldn’t get a penny.

I haven’t found any reports on how persuasive the audience found the presentation.

Why I am an atheist – Ben Ehrmann

I suspect that there are a variety of origins and influences that flowered our reasoning processes or otherwise led us to connect with our sense of rational thinking, and by extension, to our atheism.

For me, the seeds were started in early youth; a fascination with how things work, a desire for understanding, a love for experimentation, tinkering and measurement,… a burgeoning appreciation of science as a tool for discovery and truth, an envy and respect for all the groundbreaking scientists with their efforts and trials throughout history, as well as a strong respect I had for my older brother whom I looked up to for his extensive reading and desire to know what is ‘real’ in the world, especially its mysteries.

Much of what I’ve seen over the past three decades has been disconcerting, as youth seemingly lack a desire to be instilled and inspired with the wonder of science and the freedom of rational thought.

There are some freethinkers (and theists of various persuasions) feel a desire to ‘coexist’ (as the artistically clever bumper sticker expresses) with others of different beliefs, or simply feel that the dogmas inherent in the belief systems of others are just not ‘on the radar’ and don’t pose much in the way of cultural or intellectual threat. Personally, I started to get a worried sense about the shift in cultural and social attitudes as we entered the 1980’s and began, as a country, a gradual ‘creep’ to the political right, with its associated disregard for–even hostility toward– certain areas of education (especially science), art ( with a penchant for censorship), media ( the ‘ liberal “elite” ‘). Some, like Newt Gingrich and others, lament the ‘decline’ of Western culture and values, as they ironically fail to pay even lip service to some of the foundational blocks of Western culture–free thought, logic and reason– while espousing and defending the virtues of the religiously devout (which they themselves often conveniently ignore). Yes, religion is an essential tool in the toolbox of the political right; manipulating and harnessing the dogmas of the devout for political gain (and presumably personal gain), reciprocally, as the vociferous devout among us flex the political muscle of right wing politicians to further their narrow, religiously ideological agendas.

These issues are central to my disdain for religious belief and many of its practitioners, stemming strongly from this insidious marriage of religious belief and political power and the danger it poses. Increasing religious influence in our political systems presents a potential for long range threat to the material and social structures of our national and international cultures, with its most corrosive influence on the most essential tool for cultural advancement and continuing understanding of the universe we’re immersed in: the minds of future generations and how they evaluate, discover and accept what is real,… and what is reliable about how we explore our world.

I believe this corrosion needs to be widely understood, exposed and actively countered in the United States in particular. It’s hopeful to see there are many notables with influence and reputation in the scientific, philosophical and educational communities who are standing up and working hard to build a strong front. I certainly hope to continue to learn, understand and support, in my own way and time, what may turn out to be a new Enlightenment,..or perhaps a Re-Enlightenment.

Ben Ehrmann

This link is not safe for work

No no no. It is not. If you’re home alone, in a shuttered room, with a taser to use on any one who crashes in through the window to catch you looking…maybe not even then. Behold…The Squildo. I think just the name ought to give you enough of a hint of what’s on the other side.

OMG, it’s only $15. Why am I tempted? Why?

Oh, wait, no. That’s the shipping cost. It’s $138; suddenly, much, much less tempted.