Would you rather be a good poet or an incompetent scientist?

One of those wacky Islamists took to pestering me on Twitter with a flurry of standard Allah-pologetics. They were embarrassingly stupid, and I finally had to block him. But I thought I’d share one example of his bad reasoning.

quranidiocy

This is a standard approach they take. Here’s some remark made by Mohammed, usually something short and lacking in detail; now here’s some modern scientific discovery that superficially agrees with Mohammed’s vague comment; therefore, Mohammed had some deep scientific insight of divine origin, proving that he was a true prophet.

So let’s look at the quote from the Qur’an.

Do they not travel through the land, so that their hearts may thus learn wisdom. 22:46

Does that sound like a scientific declaration to anyone? It’s a poetic metaphor, is all. It might also be a warmed-over vestige of Greek philosophy, although it has become such a common colloquialism that I wouldn’t use it to claim that Mohammed was a serious scholar of Greek thought (especially since that is another prong of Islamic ignorance: Mohammed was really badly educated and ignorant, they say, so anything he got right had to have been introduced into his head by magic). But yes, the Greeks had complex ideas about souls, with an appetitive soul situated in your gut, a rational soul in your head (but probably not your brain), and an emotional, spiritual soul in your heart. And now people will say “bless your heart” or say that someone is “kind-hearted” or talk about a kind and generous person as “big hearted”.

It is not and is never intended as a scientific claim, that such people have a large cognitive center in their chests that is advising their brain to be charitable or friendly or loving. That would be silly. It’s an expression not intended to be taken literally. I think it’s safe to assume that Mohammed is similarly using an expression in a colloquial way.

But not our Islamist kook! No, Mohammed is literally arguing that there is a brain located in your heart. It has to be true, because Mohammed never lied and knows everything. So he’s going to take this simple phrase and mangle science to make it support his belief.

Scientists discovered that the heart thinks, learns wisdom, and contains neurological centers that save data. Heart contains 40000 nerve cells that form a “real brain”!!

Nope.

There is nervous tissue throughout your body; it’s how you sense the world, know the position of your body parts, and regulate the activity of your organs. Your enteric nervous system contains about half a billion neurons lacing through your guts, and you’ve also got a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These do not mediate conscious thought. They do not “think” as we recognize it, and they don’t necessarily learn, especially not in a way that we’d call wisdom. The heart contains nervous tissue that generates a rhythm, and that responds to electrical and hormonal signals to modulate the heart rate. It does not sit there composing Valentine’s Day greetings or responding to scenery during traveling with passionate odes to lovely landscapes. It is not a brain. No one calls it a brain. This guy is just making it all up.

One clue about that is the phrase contains neurological centers that save data. Oh, bullshit. He’s just stringing together sciencey-sounding words to sound clever, when anyone who knows anything can read that and tell instantly that he’s pompously confabulating.

He’s doing something the fundamentalist Christians also do: making their prophets look like idiots by insisting on imposing narrow modern interpretations on their words. Mohammed is making a pleasant enough comment about how travel broadens the mind and increases our understanding, and that’s a sensible thing to say — it may be commonplace, but I’d have to agree that in the ordinary meaning of the phrases, Mohammed is saying something that is trivially true and reasonable. And then along comes @ahmdabdallah17, insisting that what Mohammed is doing is talking in a pretentious way about the anatomy and physiology of the heart, in which case he’s making Mohammed sound as ignorant and stupid as he is.

Ken Ham does the same thing when he requires a ‘literal’ interpretation of the Bible — it completely strips it of any literary quality, where the authors chose their language for poetry’s sake and for its emotional resonance, and turns it into a badly written, grossly erroneous engineering manual.

Why do these people despise their supposedly revered forebears so much?

Andrew “Boo Hoo” Wakefield complains

His fraudulent anti-vax film got kicked out of the Tribeca film festival, and rightly so. He’s unhappy about that.

To our dismay, we learned today about the Tribeca Film Festival’s decision to reverse the official selection of Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, opened a March 26th statement from the film’s Director Andrew Wakefield and Producer Del Bigtree.

Kavin Senapathy succinctly describes him.

Disgraced former gastroenterologist and researcher Andrew Wakefield, known for a fraudulent 1998 paper linking the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism, directs the movie which aims to reveal an alarming deception that has contributed to the skyrocketing increase of autism and potentially the most catastrophic epidemic of our lifetime.

I have to remember that line. I think Wakefield ought to have his name legally changed to Disgraced Former Gastroenterologist And Researcher Andrew Wakefield, Known For A Fraudulent 1998 Paper Linking The Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) Vaccine With Autism. I know, it’s kind of long, but we could just call him Disgraced for short.

Oh. It’s Easter.

That’s right, today is the most boring and unbelievable of the Christian holidays, when we’re supposed to be all reverent because people claim some dude came back from the dead a long time ago, on a date almost incomprehensibly difficult to calculate because it has something to do with the moon. We celebrate this unlikely event by wearing fancy clothes and going to church and making our children chase eggs, none of which is particularly pleasant or entertaining, or possessing any special appeal to anyone.

Until now.

This day is about some guy resurrecting, and now a lot of loony people want him to resurrect a second time. No one ever seems to ask whether we want some manic charismatic rabbi from the ancient Roman empire to come back and tell us what to do. What we need is some kind of Jesus repellent. Something that would totally repulse some sanctimonious geezer with a purity fetish.

Oglaf has come up with the celebration to drive religious redeemers away (totally not safe for work). As a bonus, it should also work on Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and other such obnoxious proselytizing intruders. It probably wouldn’t work on Ted Cruz, but then no method is perfectly fool-proof.

Creationism and evolution reconciled?

Michael Mamas thinks so, and he has published his thesis in that world-class journal, the HuffPo. He claims to have figured out how biology and religion are actually talking about exactly the same thing…which is to say, they should both agree with his New Age bullshit.

You will not be surprised to learn that the underlying secret of all existence is vibrations.

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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.

Yada will kill you with his detox

Right now, a lot of people are sitting around, jaws agape, at this fervent crackpot, YADA. I figure everyone’s mandibular condyle needs a good workout, so I’m sharing.

Beware of the BLACK devils!!!!!! Having a menstrual cycle is unhealthy and the only reason a woman has one is because her body is sick. The same people that told you about your menstrual cycle are the same ones that gave you your diet… Yada

Posted by YADA on Monday, March 7, 2016

Obviously, this is bad science and non-factual, despite the vehemence of his assertions.

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Social justice networks are metastasizing!

metastasis |məˈtastəsəs|
noun (pl. metastases |-ˌsēz| )
the development of secondary malignant growths at a distance from a primary site of cancer.
• a metastatic growth.

It’s true — Freethoughtblogs has divided, although I prefer to think of it as multiplying. A new network has sprung from our loins, The Orbit, which includes some popular bloggers formerly of FtB, including Aoife O’Riordan, Ashley Miller, Brianne Bilyeu, Dana Hunter, Greta Christina, Heina Dadabhoy, Miri Mogilevsky, and Zinnia Jones, and incorporating several new bloggers as well. Head on over there, say hello, and start adding them to your RSS feeds.

You can also help them fund their efforts by donating to their kickstarter.

We’re hoping the trolls will be confused. Suddenly, more sites that are opposing and mocking them are spawning? Aren’t we supposed to be collapsing and going away?

FtB is going hyperplastic!

hyperplasia |ˌhīpərˈplāZH(ē)ə|
noun
the enlargement of an organ or tissue caused by an increase in the reproduction rate of its cells, often as an initial stage in the development of cancer.

Get ready — we’re expanding. We’re launching a whole new army of bloggers at FtB this week, so it’s going to get hectic and confusing. Some are leaving, even more are being added, so expect to see strange new blogs popping up in the list on the left sidebar, and lots of “Hello, World!” articles appearing in the Recent Posts list. I’m doing the grunt work of installing the new blogs so I may not be saying much here for a while — once the dust is settled we’ll do proper introductions and try to acquaint you with all the new people.

Until then, feel free to welcome the new mob as they trickle in.

Swirling, twirling, birling, and going around and around again

fleuryskull

I haven’t been following Vincent Fleury’s escapades for some time. You may recall Fleury — he’s a woozily litigious crackpot who tries to explain all of development and evolution with swirling fluid vortices and claims that he has a hydrodynamic explanation of transiton from apes to humans, and threatened to sue me for criticizing his ludicrous scientific claims. I’ve heard through the grapevine that he’s also threatened to sue other people for pointing and laughing at his ideas, but he really has no grounds for a claim since he’s still employed at Paris-Diderot University, and doesn’t seem to have any problems getting his work out there.

He’s presenting at a conference today, in fact: La vie au fil de l’eau, Life Over Water, on Embryonic morphogenesis and dynamics of fluids. Some things never change.

If anybody is in Lille, France, and planning to go, let me know about it. It sounds very entertaining. Also on the program is Marc Henry, a quantum chemist, who’s going to talk about the physics of how water can retain a homeopathic memory, and Bernard Poitevin, a student of Bienveniste, who will explain the role of water in the process of realization of the homeopathic remedy, and Etienne Krencker, an anthroposophist. Those still exist? Wow.

Nope, no one’s ever going to suggest Fleury is part of a community of kooks, no sir.

I anticipate some more bluster and threats of lawsuits over pointing out his associations. He really doesn’t like me very much.