I had to make a video when the blog was down.

Transcript below the fold.

I’ve been disconnected from the usual online arguments that are avenues for attacking modern science, because my website has been down (I hope it will be reactivated today), and it has also been our fall break — a four day weekend which allows us to catch up on class work. That means my perspective has been blissfully warped away from the usual popular ignorance. It’s been refreshing, although I’m also looking forward to getting back in the fray, and to return to the classroom, where we’re talking about DNA replication.

It’s been useful to step back from the usual evolution vs. creationism debate and think about what my fellow scientists are discussing, and how they are talking about it. Reality is a whole different universe from what you might think, if you are soaking in the delusions of the internet. In particular, there is a peculiar battery of weird obsessions that are constantly brought up in my email that have no connection at all to what actually interests or concerns scientists. We poorly represent the actual discourse within the scientific community when we try to communicate with the general public, because the general public has some strange ideas about how science works, and on this medium popularity is valued and we are basically pandering to stupidity for attention.

I’ve been listening to some of these call-in debate shows, and I have to say that they’re generally in a steep dive into demented lunacy. This is not a criticism of the hosts of those kinds of shows; they’re generally knowledgeable and often witty, but the kinds of people who call in … what are they thinking? These shows don’t value sober, intelligent discussion — what draws in the viewers is watching some loud deranged fanatic crash out spectacularly, and there’s no shortage of those. But I do wonder if there is some bias in the representation, and I hope the general public isn’t quite this lost. I also wonder if there isn’t some significant intrusion of trolls who know they can get a lot of attention by being extreme and crazy.

I have encountered these kinds of people in the real world, so they’re not uncommon, and I do think it’s worthwhile to expose the ugly depths of the public misunderstanding of science, I just worry that it’s fueling further misconceptions, and that I have also contributed to it. When I go to a scientific meeting or just generally converse with fellow scientists about the questions that interest us, the topics that come up aren’t even close to what I get asked by the public — our citizens aren’t scientifically informed at all, and the ideas that get them worked up are not at all what the nerds in white coats care about. It’s actually a bit discombobulating to contrast what gets people excited about on YouTube with what gets actual, practicing scientists excited about at a scientific conference…or at the bar after a meeting.

I’m telling you what should be obvious: this is YouTube. It’s not a scientific venue. The scientists making videos are often addressing bad science that otherwise should not be given the time of day. I hope no one is getting inspired by science videos to get an advanced degree and finally prove that evolution is true, because that’s already been done, and no one is going to hire you to rehash what everyone in the scientific community already knows. There are still a million great, interesting questions to pursue, but those grandiose cosmic questions are not among them. The grand outline of space and time has been settled, and we’re all trying to resolve all the details and fit together the smaller pieces of the puzzle.

So let me list for you a few of the popular topics I am asked about. These are things that make me roll my eyes, no matter how sincere the questioner might be, and often they are not at all sincere. These are topics you’d be better off going to your local public library and checking out a good book, rather than trying to play gotcha with some random person on the internet, hoping that they will validate your ignorance.

First on my list is the Big Bang. To be fair, I’m a biologist, and this the domain of physicists and cosmologists, so just the fact that you are asking me about it calls your motives into question. There is no doubt among the scientists I know that, 13.8 billion years ago, the universe expanded from a hot dense singularity; you can ask how that happened, or what the singularity was or where it came from, but those are questions for physicists, not biologists, and it’s purest folly to ask whether it occurred or not — that expansion is an indisputable fact. It’s even more insane for you to use your ignorance (and mine) of the cosmological reality to advance your unfounded and often supernatural hypotheses about the origin of the Big Bang.

Where it becomes somewhat more relevant to a biologist is the process of nucleosynthesis, in which the nuclear reactions within stars that produce the heavier elements, beyond hydrogen and helium, on which organic chemistry depends. No one asks me about that, though. Almost 14 billion years of observable, predictable nuclear reactions that we can witness astronomically, that we can measure and model and describe in detail, and they go running to more ancient uncertainties to try and find something they can attribute to whatever weird biases they already hold. That’s telling. There are true wonders in the stars, in science and physics, and the science is not an obstacle, it’s the path.

Another common topic is the age of the Earth. The Earth is 4½ billion years old; this is another of those facts that doesn’t warrant doubt, like the fact that the Earth is roughly spherical or that the moon is roughly 380,000 kilometers away. There is no cause to substantially question these facts, except that certain faiths, which were established thousands of years before people had the ability to measure deep time, assert that it’s only a few thousand years old. Rather than questioning dogma, and learning new, better ways of seeing the world, they prefer denial. This is not a good reason to doubt.

I have witnessed many debates about the age of events and things, and many of them are unresoved to a high degree of resolution. These arguments are important and interesting, because we are trying to place events in the context of history. But you know how we answer those questions? With data. Not legends. Not theology. Not wishful thinking. Often, when the opinionated internet mob is asking about chronology it’s not to learn what scientists genuinely think, but to find ways to shoehorn the facts into their dogma, or to dispute those facts with fairy tales.

Another popular objection to evolution, which isn’t actually about evolution, are misunderstandings about abiogenesis. If you want to claim there are problems in abiogenesis, then I would expect you to understand some basic chemistry and biochemistry, and most of the questioners do not. The only problem for them is that abiogenesis is a fact. We live in a world that, as soon as it cooled, was rich with complex molecules that spontaneously form; that we’ve found on rocks and clouds of gas in space. This is a world of chemistry, lots and lots of chemistry. At some point, about 4 billion years ago, living cells arose, constituted of those same chemicals, organized to allow for propagation and growth. This was not a major qualitative change: life is chemistry, it’s still composed of those natural organic chemicals. So chemicals underwent chemistry to form cells that are made of chemicals and persist by carrying out natural chemical processes.

So what’s the big deal?

I work with chemists and biochemists all the time. Except for those people who specifically study the chemistry of abiogenesis, it’s not a problem that engages much discussion, and isn’t particularly questioned. It’s only on the internet that I find much debate about abiogenesis because this is again a fact of our existence that can only be resolved with data, and it’s definitely not an issue that compels anyone to question evolution. The only people raising concerns about abiogenesis are those have a prior religious commitment to opposing evolution.

OK, one last topic that comes up in my email all the time: god. That’s unsurprising, I’m a vocal atheist, so of course people are going to argue with me about that. However, it never ever comes up in a scientific context. There are lots of scientists who are believers, but they don’t show up to present at meetings to claim that their hypothesis is supported because God; no one raises their hand to object because God. That style of argumentation is only found in church and on the internet. Scientists, because they are scientists, tend to be aware that any idea requires more solid substantiation that.

There are exceptions, of course–James Tour comes to mind, but even Michael Behe, who is clearly motivated by an irrational Catholic belief, knows that he has to have secular evidence to support his claims. He’s just not any good at assembling it.

So here’s my partial list of pointless topics to discuss on youtube:
The Big Bang
The age of the Earth
Abiogenesis
God

This is not to say that these are bad ideas to discuss, but the typical YouTube discussion consists of an uniformed yokel yelling that science is demonic at someone who actually knows something about the topic, all motivated by an ignorant opposition to evolution, which they lack any counterevidence to oppose. I’ve had enough of those.

Although I will admit that the crashouts are entertaining. Vox Day’s ongoing meltdown is a bright spot in the history of the internet. But did I learn anything from it? Not a thing. And I don’t need any more multi-hour analyses of his terrible pseudoscience to figure that out.