It’s heresy all the way down

Uh-oh. Pat Robertson has been sniping at the Young Earth Creationists again, and Ken Ham is pissed off.

Well the secularists love Pat Robertson today! A number of them are posting a section from CBN’s "700 Club" program today (Tuesday) on YouTube and on various websites. They love it that Pat Robertson has once again used his "700 Club" program to engage in name-calling as he attacks those of us who take Genesis as literal history (as it is meant to be taken—as Jesus takes it).

Actually, no, none of us secularists love Pat Robertson. That he rejects one absurd tenet of far right Christianity does not mean he’s on our side — he’s still a mad theocrat.

But OK, let’s go through Ham’s rebuttal of Robertson’s denial of young earth creationism.

If you watch the CBN "700 Club" program from 37:50 to 40:56 on Tuesday (see link below), you will hear Pat Robertson:

1. … claim that: “The truth is, you have to be deaf, dumb and blind to think that this earth that we live in only has six thousand years of existence."

So, Robertson has called all of you who believe God’s Word as written in Genesis as “deaf, dumb and blind.”

Let’s get one thing out of the way: deaf, dumb, or blind people are quite smart enough to see through the bogosity of creationism. What he should have said is that you have to be in active denial of the evidence to be a creationist…a creationist of any kind, young earth, old earth, or intelligent design.

2. … express his utter ignorance of science as he equates radio carbon dating with millions of years! He just has no idea! Carbon dating has nothing to do with millions of years—he’s using the wrong dating method to even discuss millions of years. Yes, it’s his ignorance that abounds.

Ha ha! Yes, he got that wrong! He cited the wrong radiometric method for dating Mesozoic rocks. Radiocarbon dating is only good for about 50,000 years…oh, wait, Ken. It’s not good for millions of years, but it does date objects that are eight times older than the purported age of the Earth given by you Bible-wallopers.

You’re so concerned about citing the right technique, so I take it you should be fine with potassium-argon or uranium-lead or rubidium-strontium dating? Those do give us dates in the millions and billions of years.

You’re even goofier than Pat Robertson if you simply reject all those other methods. He made an error of range, but you make the error of outright rejecting all of physics.

3. … give an explanation of the first three days of creation that is, well, beyond ignorant! Frankly it is ridiculous.

Robertson said a Biblical day could be millions or billions of years long. The day-age excuse for Bible chronology is pretty silly, but even more so is demanding that the creation week actually involved 6 literal 24 hour days 6000 years ago.

4. … state that: “There was a point of time after the earth was created, after these things were done, after the universe was formed, after the asteroid hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, and after all that there was a point of time that, there was a particular human being that God touched. And that was the human that started the race that we are now part of. I think prior to that who knows what was here."

So, he appears to be saying there were other human beings before Adam, but only one that “God touched" who started the human race! He doesn’t know his Scripture! For instance, in I Corinthians 15:45 we are told Adam was the “first man.” There were no other men before him.

Your Scripture is incoherent mess that is not an accurate description of world history, so who cares? You are objecting to an interpretation of the book of Genesis that is different from yours — but you’re both interpreting and twisting and making a hash of the book. There are also an awful lot of Christians who interpret it like Robertson.

5. … state that “To deny the clear record that’s there before us makes us look silly.”

Sadly, it’s Pat Robertson who makes Christianity look silly, which is why the atheists love him today. What a travesty! This man uses his position on a major Christian TV program to help the atheists mock God’s Word!

Oh, stop that. We atheists don’t love Pat Robertson. I think you all make Christianity look silly.

And again, you have no evidence that this is “God’s word” — given that everyone seems to have a different understanding of “God’s word,” I’d have to say God seems to be a piss-poor communicator.

6. … claim: “There’s no way that all you have here took place in 6,000 years. It just couldn’t have been done. It couldn’t possibly have been done.”

Really Pat Robertson? You mean there is no way God, the infinite Creator, could not have created the universe in six days just six thousand years ago? God could have created everything in six seconds if He wanted too! And it’s not a matter of what you think anyway–it’s a matter of what God has clearly told us in His infallible WORD!

Pat Robertson illustrates one of the biggest problems we have today in the church—people like Robertson compromise the Word of God with the pagan ideas of fallible men! That’s why a big part of the AiG ministry is to call the church and culture back to the authority of the Word. Pat Robertson is not upholding the Word of God with his ridiculous statements — he is undermining the authority of the Word. And any attack on the WORD is an attack on the person of Jesus Christ, who IS THE WORD!

You’ve invented this magical all-purpose explanation called God — who can do anything you want. That is not an explanation. Just shouting louder and louder that your explanation is the only correct one is not at all convincing.

Nice to know, though, that every single Christian on the planet is a heretic, except for Ken Ham.

#PLOSGenetics: The Case for Junk DNA

This is the paper to read: Palazzo & Gregory’s The Case for Junk DNA. It clearly and logically lays out the complete argument from evidence and theory for the thesis that most of the genome is junk. It’s not revolutionary or radical, though: the whole story is based on very fundamental population genetics and molecular biology, and many decades of accumulated observations. And once you know a little bit of those disciplines — you don’t need to be a genius with a great depth of understanding — the conclusion is both obvious and in some ways, rather trivial.

Here’s that conclusion:

For decades, there has been considerable interest in determining what role, if any, the majority of the DNA in eukaryotic genomes plays in organismal development and physiology. The ENCODE data are only the most recent contribution to a long-standing research program that has sought to address this issue. However, evidence casting doubt that most of the human genome possesses a functional role has existed for some time. This is not to say that none of the nonprotein-coding majority of the genome is functional—examples of functional noncoding sequences have been known for more than half a century, and even the earliest proponents of “junk DNA” and “selfish DNA” predicted that further examples would be found. Nevertheless, they also pointed out that evolutionary considerations, information regarding genome size diversity, and knowledge about the origins and features of genomic components do not support the notion that all of the DNA must have a function by virtue of its mere existence. Nothing in the recent research or commentary on the subject has challenged these observations.

The whole ENCODE debacle, in which hundreds of millions of dollars was sunk into an effort to identify the function of every bit of the genome, was a PR disaster. Larry Moran asks how Nature magazine dealt with the errors; the answer seems to be with denial. Authors of the ENCODE report are claiming they were “misunderstood & misreported” and that they aren’t “backing away from anything”.

I’m not too dismayed that science journalists didn’t understand how the claims of ENCODE conflicted with evolutionary biology, since I don’t expect journalists to have the same focus on the science (this is not a knock on science journalism; I have a lot of respect for the good practitioners of the art, but just that they have different priorities than the working scientists who have to deal with the background details). But what really shocks me is that big-name genomics researchers, people who get awarded lots of money to study the structure of the genome, don’t understand the fundamentals laid out for them in the Palazzo & Gregory paper. It’s not that I expect every scientist to know the entirety of a gigantic field — heck, I get confused and lost every time I read a bioinformatics paper — but these are scientists paid in big money and prestige to study genome function who don’t have a grasp on the evolutionary constraints on genome function, which seems to be a rather critical omission. And these scientists without a clue get elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society.

How does that happen? I had this fantasy that science was a meritocracy and that great scientists advanced by having deep knowledge and doing great work, but it seems another way to succeed is leap into a new field and bamboozle everyone with technology.

I am so disillusioned.

What blessed drivel is this?

haploidchrist

Every once in a while, an obscure science journal somewhere just has to demolish their reputation by allowing their editors to publish garbage. Case in point: The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine, the official journal of the European Association of Perinatal Medicine, has published an editorial titled, “Can modern biology interpret the mystery of the birth of Christ?” It’s five pages of embarrassingly goofy nonsense. Nonsense from the very first paragraph:

With the advent of Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that challenged principles and views grounded in tradition and faith and affirmed that knowledge should be advanced through a scientific method, science and religion began to drift apart and today, they are often considered irreconcilable. We believe that, since both aim at finding the same truth, whether by evaluating natural processes or through revelation, a positive dialogue can and should be established.

And this article is apparently intended to demonstrate that they aren’t just considered irreconcilable, but are irreconcilable. That last sentence is just plain wrong. Science attempts to determine verifiable truths that can be objectively and independently examined and tested. Religion claims to have the truth already, in their musty dusty old books, and attempts to manipulate the evidence to make it fit their preconceptions. Their goals are contradictory, and since religion will always attempt to corrupt the evidence to reconcile it to their dogma, we should not establish a dialog at all — we should simply dismiss this theological bullshit.

For example, this article assumes that there existed a person named Jesus who was born of a virgin and a god; despite the fact that its conclusion is that nothing in biology can explain this phenomenal claim, it doesn’t reject the hypothesis. It can’t; it’s taken as a given. It blithely cites the Bible as reasonable evidence throughout (Hint: any science article that includes the Holy Bible (4 times!), the Catholic Catechism, the Catholic Encyclopedia, and CARM.org in its reference list, alongside articles from Cell and Nature, ought not to be trusted), and takes for granted the most ridiculous articles of the Christian faith.

There is some entertainment value, though. The review of the literature attempting to explain the Virgin Birth is amusing.

Aiming high within the field of reproductive biology, we decided to attempt a scientific analysis of the first, most miraculous and fundamental of all events described in the New Testament, that defined by John at the beginning of his Gospel: “And the Word became flesh”. We are definitely not the first to address this complex topic. For instance, Edward Kessel and Robert Berry have amply discussed fundamental aspects of the Incarnation and mentioned several mechanisms by which the virgin birth of a male child might have occurred. Kessel, in particular, held the opinion that “Jesus was not only conceived as a female but remained chromosomally such throughout life. Through the natural process of sex reversal Jesus became male, not instead of female but as well as female, assuming the phenotype of a man while retaining the chromosomal badge of a woman. Thus Jesus was born and lived as the androgynous Christ”. Berry, on the other hand, believes that “Some form of distinctiveness like a Virgin Birth is theologically required if Jesus is to be divine as well as human, and there are several mechanisms by which the virgin birth of a male child could occur”. In his opinion, “The reason for recognising these is not to suggest that God necessarily used any of them, but simply to point out that apparent scientific difficulty should not determine the acceptability of a theological concept”.

You know, when you have to resort to increasingly twisted and complicated rationalizations to explain an undemonstrated event, wouldn’t it be easier to simply declare the event unlikely to have occurred, especially when there is absolutely no evidence for it, other than a word-of-mouth claim? At least, that’s what a scientist would do.

These authors, after going over some of the basic facts of sex determination, have another source to fall back on, though. When evidence fails, yank some hokum out of the Bible.

Even theists consider the birth of Jesus a “double miracle”, in the sense that, even if parthenogenesis could be possible in humans, the offspring of such an event would be a female, not a male. In this respect, there is a somewhat obscure prophecy by Jeremiah, a Jewish prophet almost a contemporary of Isaiah. He wrote: “The Lord has created a new thing upon the earth: a woman shall compass a man”. This text has been interpreted in many opposing ways, but one intriguing option, put forward by Ewald is “a woman shall change into a man”. Although this interpretation has been considered hardly faithful to the original text, if correct, it would be a premonition of what might have occurred in the case of Jesus, a “parthenogenically” born man.

Yeah, try telling that to the Christians. Maybe they’d quit freaking out over transgender.

Really, the whole idea makes no biological sense at all. The only way this parthenogenesis thing could work is if Mary had a copy of SRY to pass along (but then she’d be male!), but then maybe she had androgen insensitivity syndrome too (but then she’d be sterile!) but then she’d pass that on to Jesus (who would be female!) unless he had a reversion mutation. It’s a long chain of malarkey.

To their credit, the authors also recognize that none of the explanations are worth a good god damn.

The reason we attempted a scientific analysis of this mystery was simply the hope that a review of present knowledge of parthenogenic mechanisms may stimulate a debate among theologians and advance the search for truth. Limiting ourselves to biology, the only conclusion we can reach is that – after reviewing present knowledge about parthenogenesis – we are unable to identify any known natural biological mechanism that can account for the virginal birth of Christ.

Very good. So why did you waste our time publishing this tedious codswallop?

Take the next step. Reject the hypothesis.

Benagiano G, Dallapiccola B (2014) Can modern biology interpret the mystery of the birth of Christ? J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med. Apr 30. [Epub ahead of print]

The hbd delusion

A confession: I have long disliked Nicholas Wade’s science journalism. He has often written about biology in the NY Times, and every time he seems to make a botch of the reporting, because he actually doesn’t understand biology very well. For example, in his very last article for the NYT, he described some work that identified 12 genes found on the Y chromosome that are globally expressed — they aren’t just involved in testis development, for instance. This is no surprise. There are genes required for sperm differentiation found on autosomes, for instance, and the Y chromosome is not a gentleman’s club with “No Girls Allowed” tacked on the door. But Wade turned it into a phenomenon that explained the differences between men and women.

Differences between male and female tissues are often attributed to the powerful influence of sex hormones. But now that the 12 regulatory genes are known to be active throughout the body, there is clearly an intrinsic difference in male and female cells even before the sex hormones are brought into play.

I can sort of see his thinking: if there are genes that are found only on the Y chromosome that are expressed in all the cells of the body, then maybe they confer a non-sexual difference on only male behavior and physiology.

But that’s all nonsense. Those genes aren’t found only on the Y chromosome: they have homologs on the X chromosome. They aren’t “male” genes at all! As Sarah Richardson explains:

The 12 genes residing on the Y chromosome exist to ensure sexual similarity. The genes are “dosage-sensitive,” meaning that two copies are needed for them to function properly. We’ve long known that those 12 genes exist on X chromosomes. Females have the 12 genes active on both of their X chromosomes. If males, who have just one X, didn’t have them on the Y, they would not have a sufficient dosage of those genes. Now we know they do. Just like women.

You see what I mean? I’ve never trusted Wade’s science reporting, because it’s always been grossly wrong on the subjects I know well. I wouldn’t want Wade defending evolution education, either, especially since he argues for an evolutionary ladder. I’m not very interested in his ideas about the origin of life, which are rather bogus.

So you can imagine how I groaned when I heard that Wade was coming out with a new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. Wade doesn’t understand genes, so now he’s going to misapply his incomprehension to a hot-button issue like race? Great. Expect all the ‘scientific racists’ to come out cheering. Steve Sailer, the racist ignoramus who likes to cloak himself in pseudoscience, considers it another shot in Wade’s long-running war with liberals. John Derbyshire, the guy who was too racist for the National Review because he wrote a grossly bigoted screed (published on the same site that published Sailer’s review!), who also serves up large dollops of sexism, thinks it is a significant step for race realism.

Oh, a hot tip: these new racists really hate being called racists, so they’ve been struggling for years to come up with a new label. “Scientific Racism” and “Academic Racism” didn’t test well; they’ve still got “racism” in the name. For a long time they called themselves “Race Realists”, which I always read as “really racist”. That’s gone by the wayside now, mostly. The term of art you’re looking for now is “Human Biodiversity”, or “hbd” for short. Notice — “race” isn’t in the label any more. But don’t be fooled, hbd really is just the slick new marketing term for modern racism.

A good (but too generous) review of Wade’s book by Andrew Gelman notes that racism never really seems to change — it’s just that the targets always shift to reflect current stereotypes.

I suspect that had this book been written 100 years ago, it would have featured strong views not on the genetic similarities but on the racial divides that explained the difference between the warlike Japanese and the decadent Chinese, as well as the differences between the German and French races. Nicholas Wade in 2014 includes Italy within the main European grouping, but the racial theorists of 100 years ago had strong opinions on the differences between northern and southern Europeans.

We don’t even have to go back a century — racial presuppositions have changed within my lifetime.

One of Wade’s key data points is the rapid economic growth of East Asia in the past half-century: “In the early 1950s Ghana and South Korea had similar economies and levels of gross national product per capita. Some 30 years later, South Korea had become the 14th largest economy in the world, exporting sophisticated manufactures. Ghana had stagnated.” Wade approvingly quotes political scientist Samuel Huntington’s statement, “South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline. Ghanaians had different values.” And Wade attributes these attitudes toward thrift, investment, etc., to the Koreans’ East Asian genes.

This all fits together and could well be true. But … what if Wade had been writing his book in 1954 rather than 2014? Would we still be hearing about the Korean values of thrift, organization, and discipline? A more logical position, given the economic history up to that time, would be to consider the poverty of East Asia to be never-changing, perhaps an inevitable result of their genes for conformity and the lack of useful evolution after thousands of years of relative peace. We might also be hearing a lot about Japan’s genetic exclusion from the rest of Asia, along with a patient explanation of why we should not expect China and Korea to attain any rapid economic success.

Isn’t that convenient? Somehow, the reality of race realists — excuse me, hbd proponents — always seems to mirror our prejudices. And most strangely, when asked for evidence, they always simply point to current trends or current sweeping characterizations of whole groups as supporting their contentions…never mind that we see rapid shifts in the overall behavior or status of those cultures that cannot be explained by genetics.

Noah Smith has an excellent explanation of the pseudo-scientific strategem of the hbd crowd. It’s all about overfitting.

Here’s how academic racism generally works. Suppose you see two groups that have an observable difference: for example, suppose you note that Hungary has a higher per capita income than Romania. Now you have a data point. To explain that data point, you come up with a theory: the Hungarian race is more industrious than the Romanian race. But suppose you notice that Romanians generally do better at gymnastics than Hungarians. To explain that second data point, you come up with a new piece of theory: The Romanian race must have some genes for gymnastics that the Hungarian race lacks.

You can keep doing this. Any time you see different average outcomes between two different groups, you can assume that there is a genetic basis for the difference. You can also tell "just-so stories" to back up each new assumption – for example, you might talk about how Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads who had to be industrious to survive, etc. etc. As new data arrive, you make more assumptions and more stories to explain them. Irish people used to be poor and are now rich? They must have been breeding for richness genes! Korea used to be poorer than Japan and is now just as rich? Their genes must be more suited to the modern economy! For every racial outcome, there is a just-so story about why it happened. Read an academic-racist blog, like Steve Sailer’s, and you will very quickly see that this kind of thinking is pervasive and rampant.

There’s just one little problem with this strategy. Each new assumption that you make adds a parameter to your model. You’re overfitting the data – building a theory that can explain everything but predict nothing. Another way to put this is that your model has a "K=N" problem – the number of parameters in your model is equal to the number of observations. If you use some sort of goodness-of-fit criterion that penalizes you for adding more parameters, you’ll find that your model is useless (no matter how true or false it happens to be!). This is one form of a more general scientific error known as "testing hypotheses suggested by the data", or "post-hoc reasoning". It’s a mistake that is by no means unique to academic racism, but instead is common in many scientific disciplines (cough cough, sociobiology, cough cough).

Wade continues in this fine tradition. I considered reading his book, just to tear it up, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort, from the reviews — it’s just another collection of anecdotes dressed up with Wade’s sloppy understanding of genes.

Things that correlate

Did you know that US crude oil imports from Norway correlate almost perfectly with drivers killed in collision with railway train? It’s true! Obviously, Norwegian oil magnates are murdering Americans with trains now.

It’s all from a little site called Things that correlate, which takes any one set of numbers you choose, and then dredges through a database of other numbers to find similar patterns. This is going to be useful next time I have to teach my genetics students a little basic statistics: correlation is not causation, and you can cherry pick data sets to find all kinds of meaningless patterns.

No rational reason

A judge in Arkansas struck down the gay marriage prohibition in that state.

A judge on Friday struck down Arkansas’ ban on same-sex marriage, saying the state has "no rational reason" for preventing gay couples from marrying.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza ruled that the 2004 voter-approved amendment to the state constitution violates the rights of same-sex couples. He didn’t put his ruling on hold as some judges have done in other states, opening the door for same-sex couples in Arkansas to begin seeking marriage licenses, though it was not clear whether that would happen before Monday.

Apparently, there’s a scramble on in Arkansas to find clerks who will let gay couples take advantage of the new legality. I find the justification fascinating, though: there is no rational reason to maintain a pattern of discrimination, as if reason were an important concept in the law.

Clearly, Arkansas bigots need to get together with Governor Steve Beshear of Kentucky. Beshear is the conservative Democrat who has also been pushing to get Ken Ham all kinds of tax breaks, and now also hires independent lawyers (the state attorney general refuses to support him) to defend Kentucky’s gay marriage ban. Strangely, U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II had struck down that ban because…”Kentucky had offered no rational basis for treating gay and lesbian couples differently” (it’s a trend!)

Gov. Steve Beshear’s lawyers say Kentucky’s ban on gay marriage should be retained because only "man-woman" couples can naturally procreate — and the state has an interest in ensuring that they do.

Wait — my wife and I are all done with that baby-making business. Does that mean my marriage is invalid while I’m in Kentucky? I’m also sensing a terrific tourism opportunity. “Kentucky: After you visit our Creation “Museum”, impregnate our women! We need the babies!”

Here’s the “reason” for banning gay marriage.

In the 32-page appeal, attorney Leigh Gross Latherow says Kentucky has an interest in maintaining birth rates, which, if allowed to fall, can induce economic crises because of the reduced demand for good and services, and the reduction of the work force. She cited recent dips in the economies of Germany and Japan tied to declines in birth rates.

I can see a problem with the logic here. So can anyone else.

The appeal doesn’t explain how allowing gays to marry would reduce the birth rate among heterosexual couples.

So Kentucky simultaneously has so many jobs that they’re worried that people will not make enough children to fill them, and is so desperate for new jobs that they’re giving Answers in Genesis massive tax breaks to build a religious theme park on the pretext that it will provide lots of employment opportunities. “Kentucky: Making babies, and making opportunities for babies to grow up to be carnies.”

As is common with the anti-gay crowd, their arguments are transparently phony.

The font of creationist idiocy continues to gush

I will say this for our latest creationist visitor, medic0506: he’s persistent. His foolishness has bloated up another thread to over 1200 comments, so I’m starting the conversation anew with this post.

One reason it’s going on and on is that he is full of shit and refuses to recognize that his ideas are ridiculous. He’s still babbling about the nature of light; if it’s bright enough, light is instantly teleported to your eye. He has some very curious explanations for how telescopes work. In response to a comment that if light behaved as he says it does, you wouldn’t be able to see more stars with a telescope than with the naked eye, he says:

On the contrary, if you think that through, you have it backwards. A telescope makes no sense under your theory of light travel, and can only work if my ideas or something very similar is true.

Under your theory, starlight has to physically travel and c remains a constant, telescopes should not be able to change any part of the equation. Light photons still have to reach all the way to earth and physically enter your eye. Likewise they also have to physically reach the earth in order to enter the telescope lens. Telescopes cannot in any way change the speed or distance in the equation and thus would become a useless middle-man.

Telescopes magnify, and magnification can only work if vision is the primary active mechanism, and works from the ground up.

It’s rather obvious he doesn’t have the slightest idea how light behaves or how telescopes work. C is not constant — it varies with the medium. We can use this property to refract light with a lens, or reflect it with a mirror, changing the direction. Telescopes are light collectors that gather photons falling on a large surface area and focus them on a smaller point. We design telescopes — light has mathematical properties that are accurately described by theories that are a few hundred years old — and modeling lenses on the assumption that eyes actively emit some kind of mysterious sensory rays, or whatever the hell he’s trying to suggest, doesn’t work and makes no sense at all.

And then, on top of the godawful ignorance, there’s his incredible arrogance.

…I have done my homework over the past couple years, and continue to do so. I have been researching information from both sides. I’d be willing to bet that I’ve read at least as many, if not more, scholarly articles from secular research journals, than many of the people on this site. Most of the information that people here post is old hat to me, and after researching the actual scientific arguments, links like Wikipedia and talkorigins aren’t the least bit helpful in making the case for evolution.

Without having done the amount of research that I have, I could not be as convinced as I am that it is false. It is that research that shows me that this theory should have been deemed falsified, and scrapped long ago. Every basic tenet of the theory has been falsified, or proven not to be sufficient to show what evolutionists claim that it shows. All anti-evolutionists know that to be true, whether they are creationists or not. It’s no longer a matter of trying to falsify the theory, that’s done, it’s a matter of persuading people to accept what the evidence shows. Proof and persuasion are two different things.

My god. This is a guy who still believes that visual perception is a product of extramission, claiming that he is a scholar of science, and that evolutionary theory has been falsified by the scientific literature. The man is astonishingly full of bullshit, and completely divorced from reality.

I’m happy to have him going on and on here, though: what a wonderful demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of creationists.

As has been explained in the comments, C is a constant; it’s the propagation of light through media that is variable.

I support the Freedom From Atheism Foundation

Despite the fact that they don’t understand atheism and are full of misconceptions, I have no problem with the Freedom From Atheism Foundation (well, they could have been a little more creative with the name).

This Easter the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) posted another offensive, and historically inaccurate, sign touting Jesus as "a myth." However, did you know an organization exists to counter the FFRF and other intolerant atheists? If you or someone you know has been the victim of militant, confrontational atheism then the place to turn is the Freedom From Atheism Foundation (FFAF).

It is not inaccurate to call Jesus a myth, and I do understand that many people would find that offensive. But aside from that, I am happy to agree that atheism should be kept out of the public square, if religion is also excluded.There’s this principle called secularism that I think is a good idea, and the only way to accommodate a religiously diverse community.

They are confused in another way, though. They keep insisting that atheism is a religion, which means that what they’re actually campaigning for is to exclude one specific religion from society. That makes them rather hypocritical when they claim the Freedom from Religion Foundation is an organization focused on restricting religious freedom in our society, because it seems that their goal is all about restricting religious freedom. It also mischaracterizes the FFRF, which supports your right to believe any silly thing you want, it’s just that you don’t get to impose your beliefs and practices on others.

But otherwise, sure, I think it’s just fine to ask that debates about ghosts and spirits and gods be kept out of public events which are trying to get practical, real-world tasks done.

Women are not machines controlled by the contents of their hips? Shocking news!

Years and years of studies by scientists trying to explain women’s behavior by their hormonal fluctuations are gradually falling apart. We’ve heard so many inconsistent, contradictory tales of how fertility/menstruation turns women into unconscious breeders or nurturing mothers, how women are driven to ‘hypogamy’ by their evolutionary instincts (that’s a big one with the MRAs), and how mate choices wobble from alpha to beta over the course of a month, and it’s all incoherent bunkum.

What do women want? Over the past two decades, scientists have endeavored to answer this question by bringing women into their labs, asking about their sexual preferences, and then monitoring their menstrual cycles to try to extract clues from the ebb and flow of hormones in their mysterious female bodies. In recent years, these researchers have told us that the status of our monthly cycle on Election Day can influence our decision to favor Mitt Romney’s chiseled individualism or Barack Obama’s maternal healthcare policies; that our periods determine whether we feel like nesting with our partners tonight or heading out to proposition a stranger; and that our cycle urges us to swing with Tarzan at our most fertile and cuddle up with Clay Aiken when that month’s egg is out of the picture. Last month, psychologists at the University of Southern California published a meta-analysis of 58 research experiments that tested whether a woman’s preferences for masculinity, dominance, symmetry, health, kindness, and testosterone levels in her male romantic partners actually fluctuate across her menstrual cycle. The answer: They do not.

The study, Meta-Analysis of Menstrual Cycle Effects on Women’s Mate Preferences, pretty thoroughly dismisses a lot of the obsessions of evolutionary psychology.

In evolutionary psychology predictions, women’s mate preferences shift between fertile and nonfertile times of the month to reflect ancestral fitness benefits. Our meta-analytic test involving 58 independent reports (13 unpublished, 45 published) was largely nonsupportive. Specifically, fertile women did not especially desire sex in short-term relationships with men purported to be of high genetic quality (i.e., high testosterone, masculinity, dominance, symmetry). The few significant preference shifts appeared to be research artifacts. The effects declined over time in published work, were limited to studies that used broader, less precise definitions of the fertile phase, and were found only in published research.

Typically, good science homes in on a stronger, clearer answer as it progresses, identifying confounding variables and fine-tuning the methodology. It’s a good sign that you’re chasing a non-effect when nothing you do improves your understanding of the phenomenon, and when other researchers struggle to find a measurement that agrees with yours; results that vary with who is producing them are something that fairly screams, “experimenter bias!”

Also telling: they looked at published and unpublished work, and any effect vanished in the unpublished papers. One could wave that away by claiming that those papers clearly did not meet the standard of quality required for publication, but let’s not ignore the file-drawer effect: one measure of “quality” is whether a paper is novel or fits a preconception well or is simply newsworthy (unsurprisingly, stories that proclaim a way to describe women’s sexual behavior are very popular). Look at the table of contents for Science or Nature any week and ask yourself whether those were selected for publication entirely because of their rigor and scientific merit. Anyone who reads the scientific literature to any degree will become aware quite quickly of the fads…and also the troubling preference for papers that use expensive instruments and reagents hawked in the advertising. (I do not think it a callously exploitive conscious bias, but more of a case of being more impressed by the shininess of the toys than the logic of the experiment.)

Purely anecdotal, but I’ve lived with a woman with hormones for going on 35 years, and I’m sorry, but except for the periodic physical consequences of menstruation, she’s basically the same human being every day, and there have been no magic psychological variations that make her prone to manipulation in different ways at different times of the month — and there were never any outward cues that would allow me to estimate where she was in her cycle. It seems to me that since women have minds and relationships can have strong consequences, it’s rather demeaning to suggest that their decision-making capabilities reside in their ovaries.

While I’m at it, I was totally shocked by a story in the Huffington post. The article had a stupid click-baity title, Wide-Hipped Women Have More Sex Partners, Controversial Study Shows, no doubt selected by the editor, but the story itself completely contradicts it. The paper does actually claim that hip width is correlated with how many men the women have sex with (the pick-up artists eyes lit up at that, I’m sure — now, to the bar to scan the clientele for broad hips!), but the content is substantial and actually takes strong exception to the claim. The paper tries to argue that sexual choosiness is correlated with an expectation of difficulty giving birth — that narrow-hipped women see sex as a greater risk.

"I honestly think there are some, I’m just going to say it, pretty shameful omissions in this paper," said Holly Dunsworth, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rhode Island.

The primary problem, Dunsworth told Live Science, is that the distance between iliac crests does not indicate the size of the birth canal, or the internal opening in the pelvis. Nor does the iliac measurement relate to efficiency at walking, Dunsworth added — for that, you’d want to know the distance between hip joints.

"I have an obstetrics textbook here on my desk and nowhere does it say or diagram how big the birth canal is by using bi-iliac breadth," she said. In fact, she said, bi-iliac breadth is the one measurement that is consistently larger in men, because it correlates to body mass.

"They don’t give you the body mass of the women or the height of the women," Dunsworth said.

A lack of gullibility in a HuffPo article? Unbelievable. If only they could get rid of the idiot management there, there actually are some intelligent writers working within that haven of woo.