Spleen venting, or the inadequacy of twitter

For the last few days, my twitter account has been getting spammed by some twit named @lettlander; he seems to be one of those Christians who is infatuated with the First Cause argument. Here’s a small sampling:

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta something appearing out of nothing isn’t just scientifically impossible – it’s logically self-refuting.

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta The ONLY way the problem of an infinite regress can be solved is the postulation of an extra-natural element

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta Besides, you’re perfectly fine with scientifically asserting the universe was uncaused, right? Why not “God”?

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta Since science and philosophy lead us to a concept of a contingent universe, a non-contingent element must exist

Don’t you just love how these guys pompously dress themselves up as philosophers and scientists to defend the silly notion of a god? But let’s go through those one by one.

1. Something appearing out of nothing is impossible? Tell that to Lawrence Krauss and other physicists. Not only can it theoretically happen, it happens all the time. We must be done already — he’s simply wrong.

2. Since I don’t accept the premise that simple causation is present at all levels, microscopic and macroscopic, no, I don’t have to postulate an “extra-natural element”. The initial cause could have been a quantum fluctuation in nothingness, nothing more. I certainly don’t have to postulate a grand, intelligent cosmic being.

3. Caused, uncaused, it doesn’t matter — show me the evidence for an intelligent agent at the beginning of the universe. I’m not a physicist, though, so I’m neither an authority nor a committed proponent of any particular model of origins, and I’ll heed instead what people like Krauss and Hawking and Stenger say…and they all argue that god is an unnecessary hypothesis.

Why not “god”? Why not a purple space gerbil? Why not snot from the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure? Even if @lettlander were correct and there was a reasonable logical argument for a necessary first cause, it wouldn’t mean Jesus was the one.

4. On the large visible scale, the scale that we perceive and operate under, it is true that we see a pattern of contingency, where one event leads to another. But on the quantum scale, that is no longer true: science and philosophy lead us to a completely different, unintuitive understanding of how the universe works, and the naive and silly guesses of theologians do not apply.

And isn’t it cute how these kooks blithely reduce their omnipotent, omniscient god to “non-contingent element”? It’s as if they expect that if we acknowledge the possibility of a spontaneous accident, a fleck, a speck and spatter of a singular dot of existence that is not the product of a causal chain, then they’ve proven the existence of the Christian God, the truth of the Bible, and the veracity of their own personal dogma.

Sorry about all that. I couldn’t fit that all in a tweet — although I suppose I could have reduced it to a simple accusation of “bullshit!” It’s just that these presumptuous pseudoscientists who claim science supports their cult leave me cold and contemptuous.

No one should be embarrassed to speak the truth

Peter Higgs, the physicist, has spoken out against Richard Dawkins’ views.

“What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists,” Higgs said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind.”

You know, whenever I see people babbling ignorantly like this, I have this urge to strap them down Clockwork Orange style and force them to watch an hour of James Dobson or Tony Perkins or Ken Ham or Bryan Fischer, and then ask them, “Do you still think Dawkins is a fundamentalist?” The only way you can make this ridiculous comparison is by cultivating a near-total ignorance of what fundamentalists are actually like. But then I have to confess that forcing someone to correct their folly and putting them to the question is exactly what a fundamentalist would do, so I can’t. (I notice in the article that Dawkins simply refused to respond to Higgs.)

He agreed with some of Dawkins’ thoughts on the unfortunate consequences that have resulted from religious belief, but he was unhappy with the evolutionary biologist’s approach to dealing with believers and said he agreed with those who found Dawkins’ approach “embarrassing”.

Higgs is an atheist. He agrees with Dawkins that religion has lead to some ugly outcomes. But speaking out about them? Actually saying out loud in public that religion is wrong, faith is a delusion, and that there is no god? Oh dearie me, how embarrassing. Not the thing a proper gentleman would do at all.

And that’s really the problem. Society has so thoroughly beaten the default assumption of respect for religious lies into our heads that even many atheists are made deeply uncomfortable at the prospect of openly rejecting faith-based nonsense. But criticizing fellow atheists? That’s easy. That’s thoroughly sanctioned by culture. You can freely make stupid accusations against atheists without suffering the pushback you’d get if you made honest statements of fact about priests.

What I learned from this interview is mainly that Peter Higgs is an intellectual coward who retreats from his convictions in the face of potential social disapproval, and will cheerfully join in the mob in kicking a fellow atheist. He should be…embarrassed.

Fishing for meaning in a dictionary of genes

I’ve constricted my anus 100 times, and it isn’t helping! I’m still feeling extremely cranky about this story from the NY Times.

Scientists intend to sequence Adam Lanza’s DNA. They’re looking for genetic markers for mass murder. Why? Because some scientists are stupid.

Some researchers, like Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them.

“We can’t afford not to do this research,” Dr. Beaudet said.

There must be genetic changes underlying this specific behavior? There is no reason at all to assume that. Furthermore, this isn’t “off the charts of normal behavior” — there have been 62 mass murder events in the US in the last 30 years. There are witch-burnings going on in Africa right now. European Americans casually exterminated the native population of the Americas, and now pens the remnant population in reservations where they are kept in poverty. We had entire nations worth of people involved in the mass murder of 6 million Jews in the last century. Hey, shall we round up a bunch of Germans and take DNA swabs so we can figure out what there is that’s unique to their genes that allows them to commit genocide? (I better be clear here: I’m being sarcastic. I really don’t think Germans have a biological predilection for racism or murder, any more than any other people.)

I would ask whether there is any reason to assume that this behavior is a heritable trait. Is there a familial history of mass murder? Are we really going to assume that the diverse individuals who have committed these horrific crimes are all related, or all carry some common marker that isn’t found in people who don’t commit murder?

I can predict exactly what will be found when they look at Adam Lanza’s DNA. It will be human. There will be tens of thousands of little nucleotide variations from reference standards scattered throughout the genome, because all of us carry these kinds of differences. The scientists will have no idea what 99% of the differences do. They will make dubious associations — for example, they might find a novel nucleotide in a gene that has other variants correlated with schizophrenia — and in the absence of any causal link at all, they’ll publish garbage papers that try to impute a signal to common genetic noise. Some idiot will make noise about screening for an obscure mutation that Lanza carried, just because it’s something different.

I wonder if there are neurologists poking around in his brain, looking for differences, too. It’s the same issue; we don’t understand the majority of the functional consequences of individual variations in connectivity in the brain, and we have a population with large amounts of random variation. So how are you going to recognize what’s special and unique and causal about Lanza’s brain (or Einstein’s brain, or my brain, or yours)?

Fortunately, there are some sensible people out there.

“It is almost inconceivable that there is a common genetic factor” to be found in mass murders, said Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist and neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “I think it says more about us that we wish there was something like this. We wish there was an explanation.”

I suspect the explanation is going to be more a consequence of individual experience, although of course biology is going to shape how we respond to circumstance. But to go rifling about in a genome we don’t understand to find a simple cause is ridiculous and futile. Sure, freeze some cells down and store them away; maybe some day we’ll understand more and there will be a legitimate and specific hypothesis that can be tested by examining killers’ genetics…but a fishing expedition is pointless and dumb, and at this state of our understanding, only opens the door to misconceptions and ethics abuses.

An insider’s perspective on Dover

Via Ron Sullivan, who posted a link on the Great Blue Evil, an amusing story about a visit to Big Bend National Park in which the ranger in residence turns out not to be from around there:

Bob Hamilton 65, is a retired biology teacher and high school principal from Carlisle, Pa. He works six months a year in Big Bend and five more in Yellowstone.
I ask him where he was principal. He says York. I ask what school. He says Dover.
My eyes must’ve been wide as dinner plates. My insides roiled with barely contained glee.
My unexpressed response: No shit!
What I say: “The infamous Dover High School?”

That’s this Dover, the school district in Pennsylvania where creationists pressured the local Board of Education to introduce “Intelligent Design” into the high school biology curriculum in January 2005. Parents sued the Board, which subsequently got its collective ass handed to it in court. The judge’s 139-page opinion on the case called the change in curriculum “breathtakingly inane,” for instance.

Apparently, the inanity was taking people’s breaths for a few years before 2005:

Hamilton, who retired as principal of Dover High School in 2002, stood on the ground floor of Dover’s Intelligent Design era. He saw the storm brewing.
“Don’t quote me on this, but I knew that board was going to get us in trouble,” he said.
There was no doubt I was going to quote him on this. I think he realized this. I hope so, anyway.
“There are great kids in the community,” he says. “The kids in the community in no way reflect the ideas coming out of that school board. None of those people had any connection to the kids.”
According to Hamilton, then-school board president Donald “Daddy” Bonsell used to haunt his office and harangue him on behalf of the burgeoning wingnut conspiracy. Bonsell badgered Hamilton to do his part to get Intelligent Design into the Dover curriculum.
“He came in one day, and finally I told him, ‘OK, I’ll put Intelligent Design into the curriculum … if you start a petition and get all the local ministers in the community to sign it saying they’ll allow the teaching of evolution in Sunday school,’” Hamilton says.

I like the fact that this guy “retired” by continuing to teach kids about science on the National Park Service’s dime. Good for him.

Learning

Once upon a time, confident in my knowledge of biology, I was certain that creationists were stupid. But then I read some of their articles and listened to some of their talks, and learned that some of them (not all of them! Some really did prove to be incredibly stupid) were extremely intelligent and well-educated — they were just profoundly wrong, and were using their minds to build elaborate rationalizations to shelter their errors from correction.

And then I discovered that a lot of scientists didn’t understand evolution very well either, and that many atheists were even more ignorant of science than their creationist opponents. So I’ve been learning that some very stupid ideas may be held by intelligent people, and vice versa.

Also once upon a time, content in my privilege of being a person of equanimity with few mental instabilities to trouble me, I was certain that the people who held those bad ideas, if not stupid, were surely insane. How could you believe the earth was 6000 years old or that gods existed or that prayer and UFOs and Bigfoot were real, all crazy ideas without a doubt, if you weren’t crazy yourself? And then, of course, it sunk in that most of the inhabitants of this country believe fervently in a god, so it would require a peculiar definition of insanity to argue that a majority of fully functioning, prospering individuals were all mad. They’ve got some crazy ideas, sure, but that doesn’t mean that the entirety of their behavior can be dismissed as the product of a damaged brain.

And then I met a great many smart, disciplined, hard-working, successful atheists and scientists who admitted to suffering from mental illness…and they were good people! “Crazy” isn’t grounds for rejection of individuals.

Don’t get me wrong: there really are lots of stupid, crazy ideas floating around with dangerous levels of popularity. But you can’t reject them with pat dismissals of their promoters as obviously stupid and disturbed.

So yes, I’ll think twice before concluding that someone with a crazy stupid idea is necessarily mentally ill.

It needs to be said

David Hone has a good piece on what constitutes an appropriate subject for debate, and how the media fails.

The truth however, is near inevitably that there is only a very small minority making a disproportionate noise about their case. There is no debate over evolution, or the dinosaurian origin of birds, or that HIV leads to AIDS, or that climate is changing, or a great many others. That there are real, accredited scientists who do not think this is the case is not in doubt (sadly). But that this represents a real schism in the scientific community, that large numbers of researchers take these positions and that it occupies a significant amount of scientific research, or that there is good evidence for that position is certainly incorrect. One or two people arguing a point (and often doing so primarily in the media) does not make a debate.

…

This for me seems like the opposite of what good journalism should be. Surely the point is to provide a representation of the true state of affairs rather than spin (even if unintentionally) the fact that there is disagreement as something that is effectively 50:50, when it’s 99.9:00.1 or less. This can be humorous from an insider’s position when one sees the media triumph a paper as ‘reigniting the debate over x’ when in truth the researchers have looked at the paper, noted an obvious flaw or that it simply rehashes old and incorrect arguments or data, and carried on. The flipside of this is where there really is a scientific debate, in which case the debate is not reignited at all, but merely still going on, it has merely come to the attention of the press and public again which is not the same thing at all.

At least I have noticed over the years a decreasing tendency for newspapers to try to couple every discovery about evolution with a quote from some creationist somewhere, so I think the situation is slowly improving.

The Gumby Gambit

Tom Bethell is a fellow traveller with the Intelligent Design creationists of the Discovery Institute; he often publishes on their website, and he’s the author of quite a few books questioning the dogma of science. He also thinks he’s a polymath: he wrote Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, which claims that Einstein was wrong, and he also wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, which claims that radiation is good for you, there is no global climate change going on, Shakespeare didn’t write those plays, and evolution is bunk, among many other remarkable assertions.

He’s a gumbyesque crackpot, in other words.

His latest effort is a rant on l’affaire greenscreen in which he explains natural selection to us. Read on; you will be in awe as Mr Gumby bellows out his definitions and explanations. He gets everything absolutely backwards.

An analogous situation arises with varieties of bacteria that are immune to antibiotics. The immune varieties are suddenly “fit” and so they survive. But the word “adaptation” is misleading because the immune varieties have to appear first. They don’t “adapt,” or reshape themselves in recognition of the suddenly hostile environment. They are not like people who “adapt” to cold weather by putting on overcoats. They are like people who accidentally had overcoats on before the cold snap came.

NS is not supposed to be an explanation of how we get more of something; a dark moth, for example. It’s supposed to show how the moth itself arose. And that is what the Darwinists have never been able to demonstrate; not just with moths but with anything else. That’s why I hesitate to call NS “real.” Well, I guess it is, as long as it’s defined narrowly enough.

Read that last paragraph again. It’s a marvel. Tom Bethell doesn’t have even a basic understanding of the principle of natural selection; he doesn’t even understand it as well as Darwin, who wrote it up in 1859.

Natural selection is an explanation of how we get more (or less) of something; it describes one mode of change in the frequency of a trait in a population over multiple generations. It is not about physiological adaptation, but about changes in allele frequency. That’s all biologists have claimed for the concept, ever; it’s one of the things population geneticists have lots of math to describe.

Natural selection is not an explanation for how evolutionary novelties arise in the first place. For that, we have to look at mutations and subtler enabling changes that facilitate the emergence of new phenotypes, like recombination and genetic accommodation. The idea that variation in the environment can induce appropriate changes in heritable traits of organisms is the discarded notion of Lamarckian inheritance — we don’t see evidence of that.

He gets it all completely wrong. Even more remarkably, he gets it wrong after giving a useful analogy with his overcoat example.

Yes, natural selection works exactly like “people who accidentally had overcoats on before the cold snap came.” That’s Darwin’s key insight and Bethell’s key failure: natural selection isn’t about how individuals adapt, it’s about how populations adapt by winnowing out less fit individuals (those who don’t have an overcoat) and promoting the more fit individuals (those who happened to have an overcoat, and will pass it on to their children).

I really don’t understand how someone could write a whole book with chapters about evolution and not grasp that beautiful, simple, elegant idea. I suppose it’s the same way someone with no understanding of physics could write a whole book with no math in it disproving Einstein.

Isn’t it revealing, though, how the Discovery Institute promotes people like Bethell and Gauger who have no understanding of the field they aim to disprove? It’s as if the only people they can find who share their goals are all incompetents with delusions of understanding the science about as well as a reasonable high school student.

Which god, I wonder?

Hmm. Apparently, Donald Vroon thinks music is evidence of god, and he cites his emotional response to Easter music to back up his claim.

That’s right — a guy thinks that because his favorite music makes him burst into tears, his emotional experience is a sign that a god exists.

I can counter that, though. My son is home for the holidays, and I’ve been hearing a lot of death metal in the car and wafting down from the upstairs bedroom. I wonder if we threw Mr Vroon into the mosh pit at a Cradle of Filth concert, if he’d relate to the ecstatic experience of their fans? Would he burst into tears? What god would that demonstrate, I wonder?

moshpit
Rapture and ecstasy always indicate the presence of a deity, obviously.