Word salad, with math

I guess most of us missed a bizarre poster at the Evolution 2008 meetings tonight. It was basically a paper titled The Evidently Imminent Phyletic Transition of Homo sapiens into Homo militarensis (the military hominid), by Richard H. Lambertsen. It’s garbage from the first page, I’m afraid, in which the author tries to demonstrate that there must be direction and intent in the evolution of life, and that “Earth’s largest blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
swimming at peak velocity most precisely represents the
central tendency of evolution.” This is followed by many pages of oddball math in which the author cites Einstein, Feynman, and himself quite often.

And then it gets weird.

The science of LAMBERTSEN and HINTZ
(2004) and LAMBERTSEN (2007) holds that the
key morphological innovation enabling maximization of free will in the organic domain was a
novel craniomandibular articulation (the MMA).
The MMA trigger enables high dEk/dt events to
be accomplished with precision. Furthermore,
the cosmological constraint confirmed implies
that maximization of free will by means of trigger
action will lead to self-destruction.

Get that? A novel jaw mechanism in whales is the pinnacle of free will.

And then it gets weirder.

Noting the apparent chiral kinematical
symmetry between the MMA and the specialized
trapeziometacarpal, or “saddle” joint of the
hominid thumb, LAMBERTSEN (2007) therefore
warned…

“[In view of that apparent chiral] symmetry we now
must expect trigger actions referable to extremely
powerful individuals that do not lead to self-
destruction, but instead cause the wanton
destruction of others. This is to say that there has
been a paradigm shift in the realization of individual
power. The means to that power is different. The
direction of evolutionary change is not. It thus is to
be expected that aged individuals suffering the
effects of senescence will use the more vigorous
young to achieve their base intention… that mentally
adept if egregious individuals of age will exploit
skillfully the combined naiveté and strength of near
juveniles.”

Because there is a resemblance in the shape of hominid thumbs and whale jaw joints, people are going to do bad things. This is then confirmed by Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

This is literally insane stuff. That interpretation is confirmed by the end of the paper, which contains a series of questions addressed to George W. Bush, including a demand to know if he was the one who sent a sniper to his house at 2:00pm on 28 January, and whether he personally stole Lambertsen’s driver’s license. There was also a bizarre incident in which Lambertsen was arrested for disrupting a flight.

This is just sad. Lambertsen actually does have some scientific qualifications, and has published respectable papers on baleen whales, and you can see buried in this one a foundation of serious work on whale anatomy and physiology. He clearly needs psychiatric help now, though.

Alas, it just goes to show that having something presented at a science conference does not necessarily imply that it is scientific, or even sensible. Keep this in mind when you see the creationists striving to get a single paper published…

And please, I hope somebody gets Lambertsen the help he needs. He isn’t an evil man or a stupid man — he’s got something organically wrong with his brain, I fear, and needs psychiatric intervention.

Pointless poll or serious survey?

I’m going to give you a choice today.

  • If you’ve only got a moment and want to click a button and be done with something fairly trivial, vote on whether to impeach Bush.

  • For a change, if you’ve got a half hour or so and would like to contribute data to serious research, take Elisabeth Cornwell’s research survey. I think we could add a large dollop of godless attitudes to her work.

(Hmmm…I should do a poll on who would rather crash a poll vs. take a serious survey!)

Good luck, Dave!

It’s the end of our semester, and there’s another transition here: one of our colleagues, Dave Hoppe, is retiring, to our regret but to his happy progress. We all got together for a retirement dinner yesterday, so here’s the happy crew, the entire UMM biology discipline.

i-79f21871ee740af2c07b6244f22e9167-biologists.jpg
From left to right: Chris Cole, Tracey Anderson, Margaret Kuchenreuther, Dave Hoppe, PZ Myers, Timna Wyckoff, Pete Wyckoff, Van Gooch

We hope Dave can still drag himself away from his lakefront home to say hello to us all now and then!

California public schools require teachers to sign a loyalty oath?

And it’s actually enforced? Two teachers have been fired for refusing to take an oath…an oath that was put in place during the McCarthy witch hunts. Apparently they just left it on the books, but now it’s a hook that can be used to eject troublemakers.

You know, like those rabble-rousing, dangerous Quakers.

The most incredibly ironic thing about this whole controversy is that non-citizens are not required to sign it. Says Marianne Kearney-Brown, one of the fired teachers, “The way it’s laid out, a noncitizen member of Al Qaeda could work for the university, but not a citizen Quaker.”

That’s America for you: the important things are the superficial, meaningless expressions in service of great ideals, and if it means throwing away the actual implementation of those important ideas like civil rights, freedom of expression and conscience, and a faith quietly and sincerely held in order to promote noisy but meaningless demonstrations of loyalty, so be it.

Last week of classes!

We are entering into the final week of classes here at UMM, when all of the administrative work for me reaches a horrible, cataclysmic crescendo with piles of exams and papers pouring in starting today. This would be a very poor time for a creationist spammer to try to cause trouble, because I’m going to be very pissy for a while, and blood might be spilled.

One cheery bit of news that means I might not be quite as vicious as I would otherwise: I’ve been invited to take a cruise to the Galapagos! Of course I’m going. It will be a fine tonic before I start next year’s classes. And there are actually three cabins still available on the trip, so if you want to join us in an educational jaunt, and if you have a large bucket of disposable cash, you can come with us!

Wheaton is a weird place

Wheaton has a good academic reputation, but man, it’s the little things that make it frightening. I would not want to live in the theocratic world it represents. Hank Fox has a couple of stories about Wheaton.

The first is the blog of a recent graduate of Wheaton who determined halfway through his undergraduate education that he was an atheist. It sounds like it was rough. He’s ended the blog, though, with a statement that “…now that I’m slightly closer to the real world, I just don’t think it’s that important whether you’re an atheist or a Christian” — which is true. The differences are accentuated when you’re wrapped up in a culture that makes religious belief central to everything; when Christians back off and don’t make their ridiculous superstitions a prerequisite to participation in politics and everyday life, they are entirely tolerable. I think the anonymous student is a little bit optimistic in his confidence that religion won’t intrude on him as much in wider American culture, but perhaps compared to Wheaton, that’s also true.

The second is more disturbing. A professor of English at Wheaton got a divorce from his wife — which the university considers grounds for firing him. The college actually has staff people who assess faculty divorces to determine whether they meet “Biblical standards,” and if they don’t, pffft, you’re gone. This isn’t a guy who was doing substandard work, nor, as his comments reveal, did he abandon Christianity. Other faculty have lost their job for converting to Catholicism. This is just plain freaky: “Wheaton requires faculty and staff to sign a faith statement and adhere to standards of conduct in areas including marriage.”

Has anyone noticed that our evil secular universities do not monitor the personal beliefs of their faculty, and do not consider going to the church of your choice grounds for dismissal? We even let our students believe whatever they want!

Pseudonymity ≠ anonymity

Another minor blog skirmish has erupted over a perennial issue in the blogosphere: the wickedness of anonymous commenters/bloggers/whatever. I’m going to sort of take the side of Greg Laden.

I despise anonymous commenters. It’s pretty much a sure sign that anything the person is going to say is worthless noise if they aren’t willing to sign a name to it.

That said, though, I consider a consistent pseudonym to be a name. I’ve gotten to know lots of people on the web via their chosen pseudonym, and that pseudonym acquires its own authority on the merits of the writing behind it. You don’t need to reveal your full, legal name to be known on the web — it’s good enough to have a handle so we can recognize you. Note that of the 17 Molly award winners here, 10 are using pseudonyms, and that’s just fine.

There are some people who use their own names who are effectively anonymous, and I’ve been getting lots of email from them this week (I may post some of them later — most are short and angry). If your name is Tom Smith, and you send me a one-shot email that is littered with expletives, I’ve never heard of you before and you certainly haven’t explained your position well. You are effectively anonymous. I don’t regard your contributions at all highly.

I also have to comment on something from Drugmonkey. Note, first of all, that “Drugmonkey” is a pseudonym for a person who has a nice consistent voice on the web — I have a clear picture of who “Drugmonkey” is from his writing, which may or may not align well with the person, but that doesn’t matter. And usually I enjoy what he writes, but not this bit.

A final comment on the special SuperDuperz occupational hazard of the teaching college professor. Now, I love you all, really I do. And I once aspired to be one of y’all. Heck, I may eventually be one of you. For full disclosure I’ll further admit that I spent a considerable number of my formative years in rather close proximity to one of you. Here’s the thing. Your whole professional life is predicated on you as the Authority. In the classroom, you have all the knowledge and the students have relatively little. They are explicitly seeking you out for your authority. Even within most “teaching departments” you are the sole expert in not just a narrow area but in several subfields, are you not? And…c’mon, ‘fess up. It goes to your head after awhile doesn’t it? And even more pernicious…do you teach at a small college in the middle of nowhere? Plopped down amongst the local rubes? So you are more worldly and informed on many topics than most of your neighbors? Which makes you…an authoritah? On oh-so-many things?

Well, it’s nice that he aspired to be one of us, but he clearly didn’t make the cut, and I can guess why. His assumptions are faulty. In my classroom, I’m an authority only by accident of birth — I’ve got a thirty year head start on my students. However, my whole goal is to get these students to start questioning and challenging me, and finding out new stuff that I didn’t know before. I even like it when the creationists in class start raising objections. If Drugmonkey thinks a college classroom is a place where the best teaching is done by imposing his views on a roomful of students, he’s not going to make it to that exalted position of The Teaching College Professor, because he won’t be teaching.