My deepest regrets to the people of the United Kingdom

Apparently, your antiquated monarchy is going to continue, and the birth of a child of extraordinary privilege warrants far more attention than the birth of thousands who will live in poverty. I hope you get over it soon, and I hope it doesn’t infect my country; despite fighting a revolution to get out from under a king, there are a lot of conservatives with a bizarre sentimental attachment to the idea of a hereditary aristocracy.

I think I follow far too many Brits on twitter than is good for me, as my feed is currently inundated with #royalbaby nonsense. I think it’s a sign that I shouldn’t bother trying to tune in the television news for a few days.

A short argument against immortality

This weekend, I got into an argument with Eneasz Brodski, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and David Brin about immortality. We each took a few minutes to state our position, and I prepared my remarks ahead of time, so here they are, more or less.

First, let me say that I’m all in favor of research on aging, and I think science has great potential to prolong healthy lives…and I’m all for that. But I think immortality, or even a close approximation to it, is both impossible and undesirable.

Why is it impossible? I’ll cite the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy rules. There is no escaping it. When we’re looking for ways to prolong life indefinitely, I don’t think there’s enough appreciation of the inevitability of information loss in any system in dynamic equilibrium, which is what life is — a chemical process in dynamic equilibrium. What that means is that our existence isn’t static at all, but involves constant turnover, growth, and renewal.

We already have a potent defense against death put in place by evolution: it’s called more death. That sounds contradictory, I know, but that’s the way it works. Every cell replication has a probability of corruption and error, and our defense against that is to constrain every subpopulation of cells and tissues with a limited lifespan, with replacement by a slow-growing population of stem cells (which also accumulates error, but at a slower rate). We permit virtual immortality of a lineage by periodic total resets: reproduction is a process that expands a small population of stem cells into a larger population of gametes that are then winnowed by selection to remove nonviable errors…but all of the progeny carry “errors” or differences from the parent.

In all the readings from transhumanists about immortality that I’ve read, none have adequately addressed this simple physical problem of the nature of life, and all have had a naively static view of the nature of our existence.

The undesirability of immortality derives from the proponents’ emphasis on what is good for the individual over what is good for the population. There’s a kind of selfish appeal to perpetuating oneself forever, but from the perspective of a population, such individuals have an analog: they are cancers. That’s exactly what a cancer is: a unit of the organism, a liver cell or skin cell, that has successfully shed the governors on its mortality and achieved immortality…and grows selfishly, at the expense of the organism.

Of course, it then all spun on from that and much more was said on all sides.

The transhumanists certainly had an ambitious vision for the future — they talked rather blithely about living for billions of years or more, but just their idea of individuals living for 10,000 years seemed naive and unsupportable to me. I don’t think it’s even meaningful to talk about “me”, an organic being living in a limited anthropoid form, getting translated into a “me” existing in silico with a swarm of AIs sharing my new ecosystem. That’s a transition so great that my current identity is irrelevant, so why seek to perpetuate the self?

What atheist church?

Hey! I don’t know about this arrangement — Salon ran an article I really wanted to rip into, and while I was distracted, Chris Clarke snatched it away from me, and made all the good points. Now I’m left with the dregs.

It was an article that asked “Where are the women of New Atheism?”, while weirdly and obliquely citing a number of prominent woman atheists and putting pictures of atheist men at the top. I felt like screaming, “They’re everywhere! But lazy media always makes the story about the men!” But Chris already said all that.

So, dregs. That story actually annoyed me from the very first paragraph.

“New Atheism” is old news. Enter “New, New Atheism”: the next generation, with its more spiritual brand of non-belief, and its ambition to build an atheist church. It is an important moment for the faithless.

Say what? The author really is trying to build up her bizarre misperceptions into a reality. I see no significant effort to incorporate “spirituality” (whatever the hell that is) into atheism, or to mimic the trappings of institutional religion. There are a few scattered individuals who are doing that — atheism is diverse and unregimented, so of course there are varieties of exploration of the implementation — but no one I know is interested in building atheist “churches”. I have seen no shift in the newer atheists towards the spiritual — if anything, the young atheists I know are more likely to take for granted that spirituality is meaningless. The new, new atheism is about taking material action.

I really wonder if the author has had any experience with atheists at all, because this was more of an outsider’s warped view of struggles within the atheist movement (we are all trying to end discrimination against women and broaden our reach), distorted into her preconceptions about what it should be like.

Another horrible world

Read this interview of Dr Jen Gunter by Maggie Koerth-Baker on the consequences of illegal abortions. The nightmare of blood and death for women is what religious conservatives want, apparently.

But there’s hope, and it’s so simple and easy — we could make everyone happy with one solution.

Study after study after study shows that when women have access to long-acting contraception like IUDs, and when they don’t have financial or access barriers, their risk of abortion just plummets. The irony is that this is all just posturing. Because the answer is right there. If you actually wanted to make abortion very rare, the answer is there. It’s long-acting, reversible contraception.

The only catch is that the religious right also hates contraception.

Scenes of violence and horror

Think about what you’re seeing in this video of the floor of the Sea of Japan: through most of it, small animals are getting gouged and shredded and dragged down into sarlacc pits and chewed up alive or swallowed whole. When the cephalopods show up, it’s a relief — they’re just looking pretty onscreen (or in the case of the baby cuttles, looking adorable).

The Seas Strangest Square Mile. from Shark Bay Films on Vimeo.

OK, and the orange frogfish with her hopeful suitor toddling along was also nonviolent. But it’s mostly a horrible world!

FtBCON is over at last

We did have one final session, but it was mainly us getting punchy and giggling, so you can skip it.

Although, if you did attend FtBCON, you can do one more thing for us: fill out our survey. It’ll help us plan FtBCON 2: Electric Boogaloo, or whatever the heck we’re going to call it.

P.S. If you express an interest in volunteering for a panel in the survey, be sure to include contact information!

Lazy writer is lazy

Salon’s Katie Engelhart has a perplexing question: Where are the Women of new Atheism?

Where were the women?

Why, they were right there: stolidly leading people away from the fold. They were irreverent bloggers and institution founders. And scholars. Around the time that the Dawkins–Hitchens–Harris tripartite published its big wave of Atheist critique, historian Jennifer Michael Hecht published “Doubt” and journalist Susan Jacoby published “Freethinkers“—both critically acclaimed. And yet, these women, and many others, failed to emerge as public figures, household names. “Nobody talked about [Doubt] as a ‘phenomenon,’” Hecht has noted. “They just talked about the book.” What gives?

Credit where due: At least Engelhart links to Jen McCreight, Skepchick, Secular Woman and the Amazon page for one of Ophelia Benson’s books. Without mentioning any of the individual women involved by name, other than Hecht and Jacoby as above.

And without a single mention of the misogynist campaign within New Atheism to silence women through constant harassment and occasional worse behavior. It’s as if Engelhart’s wrote a piece asking the question “Why Do So Many People Have Bullet Wounds?” with no mention whatsoever of people who commit assaults, or even of guns.

Those of us who’ve been in the blog world for a while might be excused for feeling a sense of déjà vu.

Nope, it’s not that the women in the movement have persevered in the face of outrageous contempt that eats up time and emotional energy they could be spending getting shit done. It’s because they have “failed to emerge as public figures, household names.”

I expect Engelhart had the best of intentions. But her article did whatever the opposite of “helping” is.

There are of course other aspects of the article that could be profitably dissected. Help yourself to the chum, oh fair denizens of the shark tank.

This atheist t-shirt is perfect

The RDF is selling this t-shirt, and I really, really like it. I have this design on my grocery bags right now, but I’m clearly going to have to get it as apparel.

Religion_t-shirt_pro_artwork_2_large

It says, “Religion: Together we can find the cure.” Why is it so good?

Because, first of all, it’s not garish. I can stroll down to the store every day carrying it, and it’s not like I’m slapping all the passers-by in the face. It’s subtle. It’s also simple — a good message has to be brief and thought-provoking to be effective.

But despite being subtle, it’s strong and unambiguous in expressing the atheist position on faith. Most of the time, people don’t even notice when I’m carrying it…but every once in a while I get this wonderfully rewarding double-take as people notice what it says, and it sinks in and they realize what I’m saying. That’s the real payoff.

I criticize American Atheists for their billboards every year — it’s because I love, David Silverman — but I wouldn’t be able to carp if AA and the RDF teamed up this year to put that kind of simple message up. Hint, hint.

Recovering from FtBCON

Hey, this FtBCON thing is fun and all, but it sort of sucked yesterday away from me — I’ve been on this cycle of an hour of moderating, an hour off (a chunk of which is taken up with setting up the next session), and then another hour of moderating. And it continues today, a little more lightly this time. Here’s a reprise of the events I managed.

Our first evening’s introduction:

The Right Way to be Wrong, with Kim Rippere and Monette Richards of Secular Woman:

Science Communication, with Bora Zivkovic:

Creationism, with Aron Ra and Lilandra:

Skepticon, with Lauren Lane, Micah Weiss, and Floyd Zamarippa:

Immigrants’ Rights and Social Justice, with Chris Schmidt, David Neale, Esteleth Squidly, and Jadehawk:

Science, Skepticism, and Environmental Activism with Chris Clarke, Jennifer Campbell-Smith (+bird), and Madhusudan Katti from coyot.es:

Today I’m moderating David Silverman again at 9am Central, the Immortality Debate at 2pm with Eneasz Brodski, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and David Brin, Neurodivergence and Skepticism at 5pm with representatives from Atheism+, and our closing event at 8pm.

I’ve been going back and cleaning up the video comments a bit. I left them on just to give the youtube commentariat another chance, and because I wanted to see if youtubers left useful input during the conversations (yes, I was watching the hangout window, the youtube comments window, and the IRC chat room window during every panel).

They were worthless.

We got a couple of categories of responses. Some were complimentary; thanks very much. There were a lot that were sneering variations of “I can’t comment on your videos, I hate you.” There were mindless eructations: “GAY!” “SHIT!” etc. And then, weirdly, a lot of trolls were obsessed with my hair color, accusing me of dyeing it. Apparently, dyeing it between sessions. Say what?

Anyway, lesson learned: I’ve now made disabling youtube comments the default on all my videos.

And here’s Dave Silverman on blasphemy:

Here’s me, Eneasz Brodski, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and David Brin talking about immortality. This was great fun, and even after we ended the recording we kept talking for another half hour.

The neurodivergence and skepticism panel with Grimalkin and Kassiane: