I am also guilty

I promptly put up a post about the Brussels attacks, but I didn’t say anything about the Ankara attacks. I have excuses: when Turks are attacked by terrorists, my various social network feeds don’t start screaming in panic when Muslims die. But it’s all part of the same phenomenon, our intrinsic tribalism, in which we all reinforce each other in our belief that our people, defined narrowly in a way that excludes much of humanity, are important, and those other people are nobody important. And, unfortunately, as a very privileged American, we have a tendency to not look very far past our own noses.

I don’t know what to do about it, either. If I weep every time someone somewhere within the great mass of humanity commits an evil against another someone in the great mass of humanity, I’d drown in my own tears. So we struggle.

One small thing we’ve done here on FtB is to try and enlist diverse writers, so that maybe as a whole we can fill in the gaps in our individual humanity. And I’m also trying to be more aware and conscious of the entirety of the human experience. But I’ll fail and continue to fail.

That’s no excuse to not try, though.

Brussels attacked

There has been another terrorist attack in Europe, in Brussels.

A series of deadly terrorist attacks struck Brussels on Tuesday, with two explosions at the city’s main international airport and a third in a subway station at the heart of the city, near the headquarters complex of the European Union.

At least 11 people were killed at the airport, according to news agencies, and the city’s transit agency said 15 were killed in the subway bombing. More than 130 others were reported wounded. At least one of the two airport explosions was touched off by a suicide bomber, officials said.

…

The attacks, a vivid illustration of the continued threat to Europe, occurred four days after the capture on Friday of Europe’s most wanted man, Salah Abdeslam. He is the sole survivor of the 10 men believed to have been directly involved in the attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris on Nov. 13.

The death toll is still going up; I’ve just heard that 20 were killed on the subway, and 14 in the airport explosion.

This is a horrific attack, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were connected to Abdeslam’s gang of fanatics, since he was captured in Brussels. The people responsible must be tracked down and arrested, but I would hope that we can all retain the civilized values that the terrorists are trying to destroy. That means not abandoning the law — Donald Trump is already advocating more torture. It means focusing on the perpetrators, and not tormenting the innocent.

I fear already that this event will be used to excuse doing great harm to Muslims who were not involved and deplore the bombings as much as I do.

Spring break is OVER

Aaaaaaaargh.

I have to go back to work, and oh boy, is there a pile of new stuff I have to deal with. My students are coming back to thousands and thousands of flies that need to be scored, so they’re probably going to be grumpy, too.

Now it’s time for me to straggle in and buckle down and dig out from under labors deferred.

A creationist’s very silly laundry list

my-god-its-full-of-stupid

I was reading the comments on Moran’s post, and there’s a creationist there challenging people to come to his youtube channel, where he has apparently refuted all of evolution. So I did. It was…pathetic. You can suffer through it if you want, but let me spare you some time with a summary of the entirety of the content.

This ignorant fellow, Tommy Hall, declares that he’s going to present a list of the failed predictions of evolution. Right away, there’s a conceptual problem: science makes failed predictions all the time. It’s how it works. We’re supposed to make predictions, and test them, and if none of them were to fail, what would be the point of testing them? So sure, I could put together a long and accurate list of failed predictions, and how we progressed from testing them.

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A suggestion for debaters

Science is big. Really big. Most of us who are trained in science are actually trained in a relatively narrow discipline — and as we progress through our training, our scope gets narrower and narrower. What that means is that there are a lot of questions about science that any one scientist doesn’t know the answer to, so the phrase “I don’t know” really ought to be a common part of our lexicon.

Lawrence Krauss, a physicist, got into a debate with Stephen Meyer, a creationist, as Larry Moran describes. Meyer cunningly got the debate unto the track of molecular biology and the human genome — a subject in which Krauss is far from familiar, and which Meyer doesn’t understand either (either that, or he maliciously misprepresents it). Krauss got stuff wrong and conceded some major points to Meyer.

I’ve been in these situations. I’ve mentioned before that when I get into arguments with creationists, when they discover that I’m a biologist, suddenly they switch gears and start confronting me with all this stuff about physics, or geology, or astronomy — the last thing they want to do is talk to me about stuff I know inside and out. And here’s what I do.

“I don’t know,” I’ll say. I might have some general knowledge and know a source, so if they’re asking me about, say, cosmology, I’ll add, “but I’ve read this book by Lawrence Krauss or Sean Carroll or Vic Stenger, maybe you should go read it, too.”

And then I’ll suggest that, since I know a fair bit about evolutionary biology or development or neurobiology, maybe we should focus on those areas…unless, of course, they’re conceding that they have no disagreement with the consensus in those fields.

I have my debate requirements, and I’ll refer you to point number 3:

The question to be debated must be specific: none of this “Does god exist?” crap. Come up with an addressable topic that can be adequately covered in an hour of back-and-forth.

And point number 4:

The question ought to be one I’m competent to answer: I’m a biologist, not a physicist, so don’t bother asking me to debate the implications of dark matter or the age of the earth (actually, that last one would be stupid no matter who you ask: it’s a settled issue.) Get someone else in the appropriate field.

Krauss apparently walked into a debate titled “What’s Behind It All: God, Science, and the Universe”*, which was stupid to begin with — and then he let Meyer steer it into subjects that Krauss knew little about, but which Meyer was an expert in pretending that he did.

Don’t do that.

Krauss is a good, enthusiastic speaker and I’ve found him informative and entertaining when he’s talking about his area of expertise — cosmology. He should stick to that. I have approximately zero interest in hearing him lecture about biology, or philosophy, or Russian literature, and I think any of those would be a painful experience. Unless he’s got some secret passion for Dostoevsky, maybe.

*Actually, I’d also like to know how Meyer got away with focusing on the human genome, which really isn’t exactly “the Universe”, and why he would be talking about an object, “God”, which the Discovery Institute claims to have no opinion on.

Slimy balls rolling around in my skull!

eyeballs

Peter Watts has this short short story about a brain interface technology that allows people to merge their consciousness with other organisms — and in this one, “Colony Creature”, someone experiences what it is like to be an octopus, and is horrified by it.

“Those arms.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Those fucking crawly arms. You know, that thing they call the brain— it’s nothing, really. Ring of neurons around the esophagus, basically just a router. Most of the nervous system’s in the arms, and those arms… every one of them is awake…”

It’s a good story, and I’m not knocking it. I think it’s also important to recognize that the experience of being a non-human organism is probably fundamentally different than being a human.

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