UFOs coming right up

lego-guardian

I spent my morning at the Mall of America.

Don’t judge me. We’ve made this a kind of Big City Weekend Holiday, and my wife and I are hanging out here with a couple of responsibilities: I have to monitor the weirdness at the Paradigm Symposium, and Mary is shopping for the stuff she needs to be presentable at the wedding of her son in South Korea next week. Who knew there was preparation involved? I just put on clean pants and I’m good to go.

Anyway, I’m done soaking in unrepentant loud capitalism now, and have to head out to listen to an afternoon of UFOlogy. First up is Peter Robbins, a pal of the notorious Bud Hopkins. I expect to hear the latest poop on anal probings.

After that, it’s Travis Walton…the Travis Walton, who was the subject of a hollywood movie, who wrote a book called The Walton Experience, and who has a new movie out called Travis: The True Story of Travis Walton. I guess he’s fearfully terrified that you might forget his name. I expect to hear all about his dubious claims of being kidnapped by the saucer people. It should be entertaining, but not entertaining enough to make me want to hang around for the Travis Walton movie screening afterwards.

I’ve got to be back to the hotel early to write up my experiences with the UFO people.

#ParadigmSymposium: the saltatory illogic of Rita Louise

notsayingaliens

Shortly after I arrived at the Paradigm Symposium this afternoon, the organizers announced that all the toilets at the venue were backed up. I think there’s a metaphor somewhere in there.

I got to hear Rita Louise talk about “Genetic Engineering in Antiquity” anyway. It was an amazing parade of non sequiturs and irrational leaps, all built on the bizarre premise that aliens had to have guided all of evolution. I say “premise” specifically, because it was not a conclusion from the evidence, but rather a presupposition that she pretended the evidence supported. It was also strange because the entirety of the evidence she presented was conventional scientific observations that support evolution.

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Yep, somebody is definitely trying to kill me with outrage

I’ve been sent a link to a video about the BX Protocol. It’s appalling. The BX Protocol isn’t actually a protocol — there’s nothing that seems to be at all specific about it. It’s a collection of quack cures for everything, daubed with sciencey language to make it sound authentic. If you want to see what I mean, watch this con artist try to bamboozle his audience with his version of molecular genetics.

Ow. That hurts.

First, I’m always suspicious when someone invokes the name of St Tesla. He may have been a clever guy, but he was an inventor, not a scientist, and no, he did not invent a cure for cancer. He’s rightly famous for an engineering solution to the problem of transmitting electricity long distances. But the fannishness surrounding him sounds palpably religious.

But this guy’s explanation of transcription factors is flippin’ nonsense. He claims they “oscillate” and that cancer interferes with the “vibration” of p53, and that the mode of action of transcription factors is dependent on their “frequency”. His treatment for cancer is to basically aim a radar gun at the patient, tuned to wavelengths that will make transcription factors wiggle in such a way that they’ll stop cancer growth.

Nope. Nope nope noppity nope. All lies.

This is going to be a difficult weekend. Maybe you should all pray for me, or vibrate in my general direction, or something.

Can you die of a bogosity overdose?

notsayingaliens

I’m getting worried. This is going to be a weekend heavy on bullshit: I’m bouncing straight from a week of smart students mastering basic science to the Paradigm Symposium, and the shock might kill me. I’m heading off to Minneapolis shortly, and my plan is to ease myself in with one talk today: Rita Louise (should I mention the typo in the itinerary that names her “Rita Lousie”, that sorta messed up my google searches for background?), and she’s going to be talking about “Genetic Engineering in Antiquity”. How could I miss that?

Bestselling author Dr. Rita Louise is the founder of the Institute of Applied Energetics and the host of Just Energy Radio.

She is a Naturopathic Physician and a 20-year veteran in the Human Potential Field. Her unique gift as a medical intuitive and clairvoyant illuminates and enlivens her work.

Rita is the author of the books Man-Made: The Chronicles Of Our Extraterrestrial Gods , Avoiding The Cosmic 2X4 , Dark Angels: An Insider’s Guide To Ghosts, Spirits & Attached Entities and The Power Within.

She actually is a doctor. She graduated from the Berkeley Psychic Institute and has degrees in Naturopathy and Natural Health Counseling, and is also the chair of the International Association of Medical Intuitives. Whew. I am totally outranked.

You might be wondering who was doing this genetic engineering in antiquity. Would you be shocked to learn that it was…ALIENS? She says she has evidence of alien intervention. Her “evidence” seems to be allopolyploidy. Should I tell her that that happens naturally and doesn’t require aliens?

Watch this video and notice a common technique: questions. Did aliens intervene in human evolution?, not “Aliens intervened in human evolution.” I guess it’s supposed to sound more reasonable if you’re Just Asking Questions, rather than making outright claims.

If I survive or avoid lapsing into a coma, I’ll try to report back what I learn about aliens jiggering our crops in prehistory later this evening.

That’s sorted, then

I did nothing but grade, grade, grade all morning and early afternoon, and it looks like I’ve completed all the exams and papers for this semester, tallied up the grades, and even submitted everything to the registrar. I think. I worry that I’ve forgotten something, like the student who showed up to take the final this morning, and it was the first and only time I’ve seen them, including the fact that they never bothered to take the 3 previous exams or turn in any homework. They did manage to get 15% of the questions on the final correct, though, so I’ll use that to give them a letter grade.

If they could forget to attend class for 15 weeks, it makes me wonder what I might have forgotten to do now.

But otherwise, yay!

It’s still crank science if a teenager does it

You generally want to encourage young people to engage with science, but sometimes that means telling them that their ideas are bad. Take this Canadian boy who was in all the news, for instance: he was claiming to have discovered a method for finding Mayan ruins by basically using Google maps, aligning a star map with the terrestrial map and claiming to find that the Mayans built everything according to the layout of the constellations.

I was suspicious for a couple of reasons.

  • It made no sense. Yes, religion/astrology can persuade people to do foolish things, but you can’t claim that all the cities in the Yucatan peninsula were mapped out by lining them up with constellations. People also do things, like the massive resource investment involved in putting up a city made of stone, for pragmatic reasons.

  • The stars represent a random pattern of dots — and a pretty dense one, at that. Settlements in Mexico were also densely sprinkled about. This sounds like classic pareidolia, fitting noise to an expected pattern.

  • I have a little more respect for anthropology/archaeology than to think you can do it effectively in your armchair in Quebec without ever putting your butt on the ground at the study site.

Then the news reported that using his star hypothesis and satellite imagery, he had found a new ‘lost city’. That sounds like good science — hypothesis testing and all that.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t found a city. He’d found an abandoned cornfield, which, in a densely populated part of the world like that, isn’t at all unusual. His search criteria were so loose and poorly informed that he’s pretty much guaranteed to find a match somewhere near any random spot on the map, which means he’s ‘testing’ a hypothesis with a procedure guaranteed to generate false positives everywhere.

The sad part is that science has some standards for rigor, and everyone is going to tell this teenager that his method doesn’t work. Meanwhile, pseudoscientists have no standards at all, and will be telling this teenager that he’s brilliant and clever and is making a true contribution to their pseudohistory. He’s going to be denied by one and tempted by the other. Which one will he follow?

I’ll be curious to see if he gets mentioned at the Paradigm Symposium this weekend. This is exactly the kind of baloney they love…but then, the kid was smart enough to not say anything about alien astronauts, so maybe it won’t be on their radar.

The sure-fire, simple way to tell if an article about epigenetics is full of crap

It’s easy. If it uses the word “Lamarckian” without boldly prefixing it with “not“, you can just stop reading. Likewise if the word is prefixed with “pseudo-“, “semi-“, or “quasi-“. Just skip it. It’s too confused to bother with.

Epigenetics is in the news again, and in fact, it’s newsworthiness seems to be rising at a fantastic rate. Eight years ago, would you believe, I wrote a short summary of what epigenetics is, driven largely by the fact that a lot of people were writing about epigenetics without acknowledging that it was a grab-bag of mundane regulatory processes. It’s gotten worse. I had to explain the obvious: epigenetics ain’t magic. I tried to explain it last year again, that people have a lot of misconceptions about epigenetics. It’s frustrating because epigenetics encompasses a lot of cool and important stuff — genetic switches and gene regulation and plasticity and environmental responsiveness — but all the popular press wants to talk about is this weird idea that it’s a way break the tyranny of genetics and evolution and modify your genes for future generations, which is just plain wrong.

What it tells me is that there is still a lot of uneasiness about the implications of evolutionary theory. Not among most evolutionary biologists, of course, but in the general population. They wish for a way to believe that their progeny (and themselves) can be enhanced by an act of will, and they think that a poorly understood phenomenon like epigenetics provides a loophole. The whole idea that evolution is a statistical property of populations rather than something they can game to their advantage as individuals leaves them queasy. So they noodle around with the idea that somehow, by practice, they can change their whole genetic legacy using the buzzword “epigenetics”, not even realizing that epigenetic phenomena are a consequence of the properties of proteins, coded by genes, and regulatory sequences imbedded in their DNA, and that even short term cytoplasmic responses in the cell are ultimately derived from information in their genome.

People who use epigenetics as something that is anti-evolutionary remind me of Perry Marshall, the creationist who thinks Barbara McClintock’s work rebuts Darwinism, because he wrongly thinks somehow that it refutes the role of chance in evolution. They hate the whole idea of chance-driven processes, and want a way to shape genetics by an act of will, instead. It’s painful to see the contortions they put themselves through to run away from the implications of evolution and genetics.

Stop! Turn back!

This story about feathered dinosaurs is really good, and it also included the video below.

As the little man was strolling along past the dinosaurs that were getting bigger and bigger, I felt the urge to tell him to stop…starting about 30 seconds in.

It really should have ended with something huge stepping on him. The suspense was building up and up and was not released.