But what about the baaaaabies?

Nicotine is a teratogen — it’s known to have all kinds of interesting effects on the developing fetus. It’s very strongly associated with low birth weight, increases the likelihood of premature placental detachment, and it also causes deficiencies in lung development. You shouldn’t smoke during pregnancy (or use nicotine patches or any of the other alternatives for nicotine delivery), and if you really, really care about babies, you shouldn’t encourage other people to use nicotine during pregnancy.

Isn’t Jenny McCarthy supposed to be really passionate about protecting children? I recall her getting rather shrill about those wicked vaccines with their traces of propylene glycol used as a preservative.

Forget that, though, when money is on the line. Jenny McCarthy is now shilling for e-cigarettes…which use propylene glycol as part of a delivery system for nicotine.

So…in Jenny McCarthy’s mind, vaccines, which have been proven safe and even better, prevent serious diseases, are evil; e-cigarettes which give you a jolt of a known teratogen and toxin are sexy and fun.

As a reward for her hypocrisy and child-killing opinions, she gets a cushy job on broadcast television.

Fascinating logic

Manboobz finds an explanation for the shortage of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. It’s because women are inferior, of course. It’s written by a guy going by the name “IHaveALargePenis”, which just screams academic authority.

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So what’s the problem for women? Many jobs require discipline and stamina.

Many fields have horrible deadlines and any person not finishing their work on time can slow an entire project and become the weakest link. When you’re holding up something that thousands of people are working on, relying on, etc and they’re all waiting for you, not fun. Additionally you’ll be pushed to do overtime, heavy overtime. When it comes to software development for example, in the last few months leading up to release, you’ll be better off bringing extra clothes and a sleeping bag to work. This can apply to virtually all other fields in different ways for different reasons.

OK, that’s nice. As someone who teaches in a STEM field, however, my experience has been that the women, in general, are more likely to be responsible and get their work done on time than men (this is a broad generalization, of course: some women are slackers, some men are meticulous and focused). Somehow IHaveALargePenis thinks the demands of a field predispose it to favor men, when I’d suggest the opposite is true.

But then, men must be just plain smarter than women?

Women and men study differently. Women are great and memorizing but don’t focus on understanding. This is why there’s a relatively equal amount of girls/boys in STEM the first year, but then it significantly favors the boys as time passes. The problem is that women do great on tests, but don’t bother to understand that knowledge, which is fairly important later on and everything you learn will be used in the future (as you move from first to 4th year). This is why girls have been doing better (or so it seems) ever since standardized tests.

Errm, I don’t do standardized tests. In fact, quite the opposite: as students progress from the multiple choice/short answer tests I give to first year students to their senior year, I rely increasingly on open-ended essay tests and take-home exams so that I can better evaluate their deeper understanding. Women do just fine on such exams. In fact, my upper level courses are packed with women, they’re always the majority, and when I look at my grade distributions, women sort out towards the top of the class.

I’m a little confused, though: IHaveALargePenis first claims that STEM curricula favor men over women, but that women are favored by the standardized tests he claims are in use. Which is it?

At this point, IHaveALargePenis’s neurons must have been exhausted, because he lapses into even more degenerate idiocy.

What exactly is there to attack? There’s 50% more women in college than men. Women have infiltrated every major out there outside of STEM. Do you know how HUGE STEM is? Let me tell you how huge it is. Go look up any non STEM focused University out there (MIT or Standord) and check the faculty for STEM or other majors. You’ll find out quickly that the entire STEM curriculum has fewer faculty than a single major like business.

So the source of his argument for the inferiority of women in STEM is basically that there are more men than women in the field, therefore women must have less aptitude. But now he claims that there are many more women in college than men (although I think his 50% is off; my university is a liberal arts college, which historically tends to attract more women, and we have roughly a 60:40 distribution of women:men). Doesn’t that imply by his own reasoning that women must be smarter than men?

I hate to inform IHaveALargePenis of a fact that might cause some shrinkage for him, but we also have more women than men in our biology and chemistry disciplines, although physics and math are still male-dominated; computer science here is interesting because we have more women than men on the faculty. The trends are all going in a way that IHaveALargePenis is going to find very uncomfortable: enrollments by women in STEM are going up, relatively. If I thought like IHaveALargePenis does, I’d have to conclude that men are dumber than women, and getting dumber year by year (fortunately, I don’t think like he does).

I don’t even understand his last point — it makes no sense at all. Since when are MIT and “Standord” [sic] non-STEM focused? What does the size of the faculty in different disciplines have to do with his issues? I can tell you that the math discipline at my university has more faculty than the psychology discipline does, but far fewer majors…and that’s because math has to teach service courses that provide classes to students across many disciplines.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more business than science faculty at some universities — business is a popular major. So? What does that have to do with the relative merits of men’s and women’s brains?

I’m afraid that IHaveALargePenis must learn to focus on understanding, rather than spewing words on a page. Perhaps the fact that he has a penis indicates that he also has some mental deficiencies? I’m going to give his paper an F.

Last call, Minnesotans

The fun and informative Minnesota Regional Atheists conference is over for another year, but there’s a little tiny bit more. After Atheist Talk radio this morning, Annie Laurie Gaylor and Greta Christina will be joining us for brunch at Q Cumbers — an open event. So if you weren’t able to make it to the conference, but you’d still like to meet some of the guest speakers, this is your chance.

Deja vu…accommodation vs. confrontation, again

Tonight at the Minnesota Atheists Regional Conference I’m participating in a panel discussion on “Atheism and Religion: Confrontation or Accommodation“. Sound familiar? Interestingly, they had a hard time finding panelists who are openly in favor of pure accommodationism, although I’m sure there will be nuances between us that will give us lots to talk about. I think that sort of tells you who won the Great Accommodationism Wars that raged on the blogs a few years ago.

Anyway, it’s a panel, so I didn’t have to prepare a talk, but I did put together an introductory statement that I can use to lay out my position. This will be familiar ground to many of you, but seeing as I’ve been neglecting the blog all day, I thought I’d at least throw it online. And here’s what I plan to say:

Let me first strike a note of harmony and unity: we’re all atheists. Those of us who are activists for atheism share a common passion for the cause — the reason why we are activists is that we care very deeply about this cause.

But there are differences. Not just in how we operate, but within our motivations — atheists are a diverse lot.

For instance, for some of us, the passion might be for reconciling our godless communities with the religious default in our society: how can we help people realize that we are people too, and that we can work together?

Others might be driven to correct the deep inequities favored by religion. They don’t want to make friends, they want to see injustices resolved. If that means tearing down institutions that others cherish, then so be it.

Some of us are committed to identifying truths. When we see intellectual laziness and outright lies, we’re appalled. Before we can be friends, they have to realize that what the religious are saying is completely wrong. Don’t ask me to grit my teeth and get along with creationists, for instance: I am constitutionally incapable of allowing that nonsense to pass.

These differences between accommodationists and confrontationists are real. They represent the fact that this isn’t a group of cookie-cutter atheists whose every goal is identical; we share the broader purpose but have different foci and strengths within it. The only way to resolve these differences is to allow individuals to follow their different strategies. You will not catch me telling the kinder, gentler wing of atheism to do exactly as I do; I can see the value in their approach and encourage them to go to it. But you will also not catch me responding well to someone telling me to soften my righteous anger — I do what I do because it achieves MY goals, because it is effective FOR ME, and uses my strengths.

Working together as atheists does not mean that we subordinate the favored tactics of individuals to follow a single line of attack. The accommodationists must accommodate themselves to diversity.

First, baseball. Next…the world!

I’m out at Midway Field with the Minnesota Atheists, and as you can see, we have seized control of the local baseball team.

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It’s the start of the fourth inning, and the score is 0-0. I think the problem is that Amanda Knief and Greta Christina are not cheering the team on — they were lured away to the concession stand by the siren call of fried cheese curds.

The atheists must win!

Around FtB

I’ve got another busy morning in the lab followed by some travelin’ to the Big City, so I’ll help you find some other stuff to read.

Scientology’s views on evolution

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I had a conversation with Tony Ortega about L. Ron Hubbard’s book, A History of Man: Antediluvian Technology. He is the author of a blog, Tony Ortega on Scientology, and he had cruelly sent me a copy Hubbard’s book specifically to inflame my already enlarged outrage gland.

The post there emphasizes everything Hubbard got wrong about evolution, but let me tell you: there isn’t much evolution or history of Man in History of Man. The bulk of this book, written in the preening style of a pretentious fourth-grader, weebles on and on about his tech and how it can cure cancer, illuminated with little anecdotes about sending gullible victims back along their history track to the time when they were clams. It was appalling drivel, like all religious stories.

The most revealing moment for me was when he confidently announced that he had seen his ideas confirmed by medical science in their best source…Reader’s Digest. That’s L. Ron Hubbard’s mind in a nutshell.