Scientological syncretism

Nobody will be surprised by this at all: L. Ron Hubbard cobbled together Scientology from various bits of old pseudoscience, as well as by inventing things out of thin air.

The source calls them “lies”. This is an ongoing problem: we don’t have a good word for what these people (scientologists, creationists, Christians, Muslims, whatever) are doing. They are making stuff up, they are telling things about the nature of the world that are not only false but contrary to all the available evidence, yet they often fervently believe it all; even the scam artists have to half-convince themselves that they’re doing good. And if we call it lies, some pedant will start complaining that it lacks the element of intent.

So what’s a good word for malicious mind-fuckery backed by devout good intentions? I struggle with this all the time.

Shermer’s false equivalencies

Nicely done! Rebecca Watson rebuts a recent article by Michael Shermer that tried to claim there was a liberal war on science. It was a very silly article; it’s not that I would ever claim that the liberal side is flawless — antivaxxers and proponents of quackery are found on both sides of the aisle , we had Tom Harkin throwing money down the drain of ‘alternative medicine’, and there are New Age notions of ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ that defy reason — but the pathology isn’t usually a matter of policy on the left, where it is on the right.

And Shermer does such a poor job of supporting his claim! He repeatedly does a sneaky switch of throwing out statistics about the ignorance of the rank and file on science on both sides, and then pretending that these views reflect what the leadership is doing. In the US, we have a general problem of widespread ignorance of science; every party, every subgroup is going to be afflicted with a large number of clueless people. The real question is whether the ignorant people are effective in shaping policy. In the case of the Republicans, they are: the religious right and the Tea Party have had a profound influence on their representatives. Look at the House Subcommittee on the Environment and the Economy, for instance; it’s chaired by Republican John Shimkus, a born-again evangelical Christian who fervently believes that global climate change is a hoax. Can you name a comparably deluded Democrat who is undermining serious scientific concerns?

We liberals do not have a Broun, or an Inhofe, or an Akin, or a Jindal in our ranks. Republicans do, and even take them seriously as potential presidents.

Or look at the last roster of Republican presidential candidates. Fortunately, the least anti-science of the bunch, Mitt Romney, got the nomination…but look look at the rest of those bozos, evolution deniers and anti-environmentalists everywhere. Democrats tend to be almost as pro-corporate as Republicans, but you simply don’t see those fringe anti-science beliefs making as much headway among them. Furthermore, Democrats tend to favor pro-education policy more than Republicans — they at least do not express a desire to destroy public education.

Among the worst of the presidential candidates, though, was Ron Paul, who was one of those who does not accept evolution and also desires the elimination of the Department of Education.

Maybe Mr Shermer’s next article should be about the Libertarian war on science and reason? Now there’s a mob of delusional idiots who deserve a serious dressing down.

Around FtB

Imagine all these people in the same room. It would be a madhouse, I tell you!

  • Stephanie is cringing at some very bad acting.

  • Avicenna is inviting gays to a dating site.

  • Aron is mystified by the Texas educational system. Aren’t you?

  • Ashley is playing the ukulele.

  • Heicart doesn’t think it makes sense.

  • Hank is being operated on by a robot.

  • Ophelia is going around in circles.

  • Ed is outraged that everyone is outraged at the wrong stuff.

  • Dana is laughing at men in agony. Laughing! Oh, these feminists.

  • Greta is arguing about the harm done to atheists by prejudice.

  • Jason is mangling text on the web.

  • Reasonabledoubts is not preoccupied with sex, no sir.

  • Mano is marveling at people’s excellent gun-handling skills.

  • Darksyde is bragging about how his heart attack was bigger than yours.

Houston Cancer Quack gets a message

A campaign to raise donations for real cancer research on a Houston Cancer Quack’s birthday has resulted in a $13,000 donation.

This morning, a group calling itself Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients (SPCP) has delivered controversial cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski a birthday present: a $13,000 donation in his honor to St. Jude Children’s Research hospital. The SPCP says that St. Jude’s is a well-respected, compassionate institution that does real research into childhood cancers, unlike the Burzynski Clinic, which has never produced the results of a single large scale peer-reviewed clinical trial in a reputable journal in over 30 years, despite apparently having treated thousands of patients with so-called “antineoplastons”.

They’ve now asked Burzynski to match that donation.

Unfortunately, Burzynski bilks so much money from his victims, hundreds of thousands of dollars from each, that he’s going to be able to lift a butt cheek and fart out that much money. The question is whether he’ll even bother to exert himself that much.

I’m predicting he won’t, since that would involve actually acknowledging the rebuke, not because he’s unable to afford that much.

You’ve all been slacking!

People sometimes wonder where all the Kristian and Kreationist Kooks have gone — they only rarely pop their little pinheads up here anymore. Well, I can tell you: since most of the commenters have decamped from my old scienceblogs site to frolic here on freethoughtblogs, the kooks have moved in unopposed over at Sb. For example, look at the Creationism and racism article that I crossposted to both networks: there they are! There’s good huntin’ over there nowadays.

Of course, one thing I’ve learned from this is that they aren’t afraid of me, but they’re terrified of you all.

Methinks it is like a sauropsid

Eugene McCarthy, the author of that crackpot stabilization theory, has discovered my review and is now making a noise on twitter. He’s gone from thanking me profusely for mentioning him, to whining that I stole his figures, to complaining that I don’t understand his theory at all, all in the last 24 hours.

But here’s the fun part. Recall that one of his bizarre claims is that whales did not evolve from terrestrial artiodactyls, but from mosasaurs, mesozoic marine reptiles, instead. But the anatomy shows that mosasaurs are derived squamates, reptiles, with a completely different skeletal organization than a mammal. This has attracted the attention of Darren Naish and Tom Holtz, fully qualified comparative anatomists and paleontologists, who actually know a great deal about the structure of these animals, and are giving him a spectacular ass-whooping. Browse it on Twitter.

The basis of his claim is that mosasaur teeth “look like” sperm whale teeth. That’s not a good criterion, and it’s not true; as has been pointed out to him, basal mosasaurs are pleurodont (that is, the teeth are fused to the inner side of the jaw bone), not socketed as are sperm whale teeth. He’s also now claiming that mosasaurs swam by vertical motions of their tails, like whales…but he’s citing articles with poor comprehension. The cited articles show evidence that mosasaurs propelled themselves with axial motions of the tail, which is a far more general statement; they moved by sweeping their tails like oars, but it says nothing about vertical vs. horizontal undulations.

So I went back to McCarthy’s book to see how he backed up this ridiculous claim. He doesn’t. He cites Pieter Camper, an 18th century anatomist, as proposing the idea that whales are related to mosasaurs. His critics are citing contemporary and detailed papers. This, however, is really the totality of McCarthy’s argument:

The varanid theory was based on Adriaan Gilles’ assertion that certain skeletal characters found in mosasaurs are not found in modern whales. However, a glance at figures 9.4 and 9.5, will convince most readers that mosasaurs have much in common with early whales. Certainly, they have far more in common with whales than does the late Cretaceous terrestrial insectivore traditional theory posits as the common ancestor of whales and all other placental mammals (it should be emphasized that all of the various forms classified as mosasaurs, too, are of late Cretaceous age). They are also far more similar to whales than is Pakicetus. One would not expect the ancient ancestors of whales to have every characteristic of modern whales. Their dissimilarity with respect to a few minor bony traits should not be allowed to obscure the well established fact that mosasaurs were huge, whalelike, air-breathing animals with whalelike teeth and that they had the same sort of prey as modern whales.

The referenced figures are grainy, low resolution images that do not do an adequate job of displaying the structures. The “dissimilarity with respect to a few minor bony traits” is trivialized; these are actually substantial differences in the arrangement and number of bones in the skull, where the mosasaur displays a fairly standard reptilian pattern and the whales show a mammalian pattern. They only look alike if you don’t look at all closely. How can you say that the jaw joint or the auditory complex of a whale look anything like that of a reptile? Only by not looking.

His other argument is that it would take fewer evolutionary changes to transform a mosasaur into a whale, than a shrew into a whale. This is nonsense. Turning a reptile into a mammal requires a major reorganization of the bones of the skull, and further, requires that those shifts exactly mimic the pattern found in other mammals. There is no reasonable way to accomplish that. Again, the basis of his entire argument is a complete ignorance about the anatomy!

This is the well-supported pattern of whale evolution. Notice: no mosasaurs.

whale_evo