Road trip, end of July

Here’s a little good news: Skepticon 14 is happening on 29-31 July.

I’m experiencing a little trepidation about attending an in-person meeting, but these are smart skeptics, they’ll all be practicing good hygiene and will wear masks, right? I know I will be.

What also tempts me is that I plan on driving there, slowly, with frequent stops, and maybe a couple of overnight stays en route. I intend to couple the trip to a spidering expedition in Iowa and Missouri. The farther south I go, the greater the likelihood of finding black widows somewhere, which would be cool.

Is it weird that I’m more comfortable with finding large venomous spiders than I am with meeting people?

Impressively straight-faced…until now.

He even looks like a prankster.

The people behind the silly “birds aren’t real” have always been very serious about their cause, and I’ve been impressed at how straight-faced they’ve been, but the facade cracked open on 60 Minutes, and they confessed that it’s all a pretense, but a pretense with a serious meaning.

With that, he finally broke character, and we met the real Peter McIndoe.

Sharyn Alfonsi: You’re the person that I’ve been hearing about but haven’t seen.

Peter McIndoe: Okay, great. Well, wonderful to meet you.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Yeah, nice to meet you too.

Mcindoe, the 24 -year-old college dropout behind Birds Aren’t Real, is fortunately, nothing like the megaphone carrying character under the cowboy hat.

He told us it’s all a parody, and it’s spread to billboards, bumper stickers and popped up at halftime during the NCAA men’s basketball national championship game last month.

Sharyn Alfonsi: What’s the purpose of all of this?

Peter McIndoe: So it’s taking this concept of misinformation and almost building a little safe space to come together within it and laugh at it, rather than be scared by it. And accept the lunacy of it all and be a bird truther for a moment in time when everything’s so crazy.

Peter McIndoe: The vision was creating something that reflected the absurdity through the eyes of the most confused archetype…

McIndoe at rally: People, when they make fun of me, don’t realize people also made fun of the founding fathers, you know, before they stormed the British gates and took over…

The humor is meant to be apolitical. McIndoe’s co-conspirators: Claire Chronis, Cameron Kasky and Connor Gaydos, say it’s become an outlet for a generation that’s been surrounded by conspiracy theories.

Connor Gaydos: It’s an opportunity for I think our generation to laugh, to make fun, to kind of be like, look, here’s like a laundry list of things that haven’t come true.

Cameron Kasky: You’ve been lying to us so we’re gonna lie to you back, and we’re gonna do it in a way that really is funny.

Wait, you’re telling me they’ve just been mocking and laughing at my generation all this time?

Good. Keep that in mind next time you see a Trump rally on TV. The kids are laughing at those clowns.

Who wants to break the news to them?

I consider this a clear case of pathological skepticism. Or perhaps more charitably, naive skepticism. A professional 747 pilot has set up a kickstarter to charter a passenger jet to fly from Rio de Janeiro to Perth, passing over Antarctica, to prove to flat-earthers that the Earth is spherically, or at least, that Antarctica isn’t an ice wall surrounding the rim of a disc-shaped earth. Why would you think that this, on top of all the far easier to obtain evidence, is the final clincher to convince a tiny group of delusional ranters that they are wrong?

It’s going to cost $1.5 million dollars to book this 16 hour flight, and it’s all supposedly for the benefit of educating flat earthers. Buy them a good introductory physics book instead. It’s less flashy, but probably more likely to work, given that this isn’t going to work at all.

Skeptics ought to be familiar with studies of the end-of-the-world cults, in which a prophet predicts armageddon or the rapture or some such nonsense to occur on a specific date, and the cultists gather and pray and wait and…nothing happens. It turns out that they don’t instantly drop their beliefs, which were socially expensive to acquire — getting ostracized by the out-group hurts — and which gave them the benefit of being valued by the in-group. Instead, they rationalized (that is, made excuses) and believed even more firmly. The flat-earthers are also a gang of conspiracy theorists who will invent various subterfuges that were made to undermine the truth by the pilot, who is obviously part of the plot.

It’s apparent that the flat-earthers don’t believe in their delusion because they’ve used science, so why would you imagine science would get them to think otherwise? Also, even a glance at most flat-earth literature will reveal that it’s all paranoid religious gobbledy-gook, and they aren’t going to be dissuaded by an airplane ride.

There is a documentary, Behind the Curve, about these fanatics. They are repeatedly shown evidence that demonstrate they are wrong, and they even design their own experiments to prove the earth is flat which consistently fail. They don’t change their minds. This is more of the same, only with a $1.5 million price tag, and it’s going to be another exercise in futility.

Kent Hovind whacked off to me again

Explain this, bozo.

Also to Jerry Coyne. Now there’s a fantasy trio that ought to send shivers of revulsion down your spine! Anyway, I was once again featured on Hovind’s “Whack-An-Atheist” series, and he once again avoided my challenge.

Way back in January, after repeated demands that I debate him, I offered a different alternative: that Kent Hovind should read a book. I even suggested one, Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True, because it’s a good general overview of the evidence for evolution, and would give him something actually said by an evolutionary biologist to sink his teeth into.

He responded by…not reading a book, but just regurgitating the same tired, false points he’s been making for decades. Come on, Kent, at the very least I expected this would compel him to get some new material! But nope, it was same ol’ same ol’.

Then he did it again yesterday. Still not reading a book, but instead digging up a YouTube video of Coyne presenting a summary of some of the concepts in the book, and whining about that with the very same slides he’s been using for years.

My god, but Kent Hovind is the laziest creationist on the circuits. It’s not a thick book, it’s written for a popular audience, it’s a relatively easy read. Reading it might have spared him from making a few ludicrous errors.

What Hovind did was focus on a tiny part of the story, which is generally a good idea, but he clearly picked the part where he thought he had a good gotcha. He drilled down into Haeckel. Coyne talked about how some embryonic features reveal their evolutionary history, like the presence of hind limb buds in dolphin embryos — retention of conserved features in development is evidence of evolution. Hovind, though, went on a familiar tirade about Ernst Haeckel, and his discredited theory of evolutionary recapitulation from the 19th century.

It’s totally irrelevant. That a scientist advanced a wrong theory about evolution 150 years ago does not change the fact that embryonic similarities are observed, that they make no sense in terms of modern function, but do make sense in the light of evolution as relics of their ancestry. It would be a bit like me attacking Hovind’s interpretation of the Bible by citing the Book of Mormon at him; I don’t think Hovind considers Joseph Smith to be a significant contributor to his ideas. Going on and on about the invalid Biogenetic Law to refute Coyne’s discussion of embryonic atavisms is basically the Wookie Defense.

Now if he’d actually read Coyne’s book, he’d have known that trying to attack him via Haeckel was inappropriate. Coyne also rejects the Biogenetic Law, as he explains in chapter 3:

This “adding new stuff onto old” principle also explains why the sequence of developmental change mirrors the evolutionay sequence of organisms. As one group evolves from another, it often adds its developmental program on top of the old one.
Noting this principle, Ernst Haeckel, a German evolutionist and Darwin’s contemporary, formulated a “biogenetic law” in 1866, famously summarized as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This means that the development of an organism simply replays its evolutionary history. But this notion is true in only a limited sense. Embryonic stages don’t look like the adult forms of their ancestors, as Haeckel claimed, but like the embryonic forms of ancestors. Human fetuses, for example, never resemble adult fish or reptiles, but in certain ways they do resemble embryonic fish and reptiles. Also, the recapitulation is neither strict nor inevitable: not every feature of ancestor’s embryo appears in its descendant, nor do all stages of development unfold in a strict evolutionary order. Further, some species, like plants, have dispensed nearly all traces of their ancestry during development. Haeckel’s law has fallen into disrepute not only because it wasn’t strictly true, but also because Haeckel was accused, largely unjustly, of fudging some drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar that they really are. Yet we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Embryos still show a form of recapitulation: features that arose earlier in evolution often appear earlier in development. And this makes sense only if species have an evolutionary history.

Yeah, fallen into disrepute. So why try to play gotcha with Coyne on that point? Coyne is actually presenting a von Baerian perspective here: von Baer, who did not accept evolutionary theory, had observed how similar early vertebrate embryos were to one another. That fact is not in dispute. I can go into my lab right now and pull up slides of sectioned and stained chick, mouse, and frog embryos that all show these shared developmental features. Pharyngeal pouches are a real thing! You can’t make them disappear by citing someone’s flawed pet theory for them.

Bonus! There’s a footnote in the passage above, and here it is.

Creationists often cite Haeckel’s “fudged” drawings as a tool for attacking evolution in general: evolutionists, they claim, will distort the facts to support a misguided Darwinism. But the Haeckel story is not so simple. Haeckel may not have been guilty of malfeasance, but only of sloppiness: his “fraud” consisted solely of illustrating three different embryos using the same woodcut. When called to account, he admitted the error and corrected it. There’s simply no evidence that he consciously distorted the appearance of the embryos to make them look more similar than they were. R.J. Richards (2008, chapter 8) tells the full story.

Coyne is a little too generous here. I think Haeckel demonstrated an over-zealous commitment to his theory, and while it may not have been conscious, he did bias his examples to favor an incorrect idea. He is correct, though, that it is really common for creationists to dig up the dead corpse of poor old Ernst Haeckel and wallop on it for a bit while telling everyone they’re defeating Darwinism. They aren’t.

By the way, the bit in the Origin where he discusses “the strongest single class of facts in favor of change of forms”, consists of Darwin discussing, among other things, von Baer’s observations of embryos, not Haeckel’s. Hovind misses the mark again, but I don’t think he’s read the Origin, either.

Wait, when did Casey Luskin get a Ph.D.?

I met Luskin 8 years ago. How time flies when the idiot stops yapping.

I just learned that the Attack Mouse of the Discovery Institute, Casey Luskin, got a Ph.D. I’d known that he sort of vanished in 2016, leaving the Discovery Institute, but had no idea why…I missed it entirely, but Klinghoffer mentioned it last year, in 2021, that he’d been in South Africa, getting a degree in geology. It was a secret!

Dr. Luskin’s PhD in geology, from the University of Johannesburg, is something to celebrate. It was five years in the making, during which his location and activities were a closely guarded secret. In truth, while he was far away geographically, we thought of Casey often and missed him. The reality of the Darwinist cancel culture meant that if word got out, some malignant ID critic — more than one, in all likelihood — would try to hurt him and ruin his doctoral work, get him kicked out of his university, whatever they could do. There were a couple of times when we were anxious that something just like that might happen.

Wow, your persecution complex is showing. If they’d been open about it, I would have figured it was a good thing that he was finally off learning something. Truth be told, I didn’t care and failed to notice that he’d stopped lying for 5 years, and barely noticed his return. That’s saying something, because when I took a look at my blog archives, I’ve been ripping on Luskin’s stupidity and mendacity for over a decade and a half, at least.

September 2006: Luskin claims that the fusion of chromosome 2 in the human lineage is not evidence for evolution, and poses a huge problem for neo-Darwinism, because a Robertsonian fusion would be non-viable, and even if it were, you’d have to have two individuals of different sexes to acquire the same mutation in order to reproduce. He knows nothing of genetics, but he likes to pretend otherwise.

March 2007: Luskin reviews Carroll’s book, The Making of the Fittest, and to show how wrong the book is, inadvertently reveals that he doesn’t understand junk DNA or pseudogenes. This is a habit with him: anytime he is expected to discuss a subject, he quickly reveals that his understanding is a millimeter deep.

October 2007: Luskin declares that gene duplication is simultaneously trivial and incapable of generating new information. To make his point, he quote-mines a Nature article to misrepresent its conclusions.

May 2009: Luskin is invited on to Fox News (a match made in hell) to claim that all the biology textbooks are wrong, repeating the Haeckel nonsense, and further claiming that horizontal gene transfer invalidates all evolutionary trees.

January 2010: Luskin thinks that finding fossil trackways older than Tiktaalik invalidates transitional forms. Everything is supposed to be linear and sequential, don’t you know.

July 2011: Luskin claims that I conceded that embryology does not support evolution. I, of course, said no such thing. This is how he operates, though.

July 2014: Luskin quote-mined me to claim I agreed with Behe that chloroquine resistance in malaria couldn’t possibly be a result of evolution, when I said the opposite. This is something of a theme in Luskin’s ‘work’, that he can’t read for comprehension and replaces understanding with lies.

September 2015: Luskin gets cranky about the discovery of Homo naledi. Once again, because the fossil demonstrates a mosaic set of features, rather than recognizing that biology predicts a complex branching pattern in the human lineage, he thinks it disproves evolution. Really, the guy has the most child-like understanding of basic concepts.

Possibly most revealing, way way back in 2006 he also criticized the journalist Chris Mooney for not having a degree in biology, claiming that he has no formal credentials in neither science nor law, back at a time when he only had an undergraduate degree in geology. I guess being blind to hypocrisy is an important skill for a creationist, and I’m going to guess that he went back to school to get an advanced degree in something just so he could claim to have credentials of some sort. Joke’s on him, though: we don’t care.

Trust me, I have a long history of dealing with Luskin’s lies. Now that he’s back at the Discovery Institute — I guess he didn’t actually get a doctorate so he could do advanced study in geology — one might wonder what idiocies he’s promoting more recently? Professor Dave has got you covered.

Oh man, he was terrible in the past, he’s just as terrible as ever now. I guess the only thing his new degree did was promote him from Attack Mouse to Attack Rat.

Hell has many chambers

It isn’t just the one in the previous post. It also includes this nightmare hellscape:

It’s next week, the damned will need to get their tickets soon. Of course it’s in Texas.

It’s a one-day event, noon until 10pm, and look at all those people! Everyone is crammed into panels so they can shout over each other, a crucial part of being in Hell. They seem to have simply drafted a bunch of otherwise unknown nobodies from social media; I especially like the ones who don’t even go by an identifiable name, like Nuance Bro and Andrew, just Andrew, and oooh, Spectre. Spooky. They seem to have no qualifications other than a follower count and reliably regressive opinions.

You know, once upon a time I was one of those guys in great demand to appear at conferences, but then I became Mr Unpopular practically overnight because I spoke out against a rapist. I suppose I could have been there if only I’d abandoned human decency and all of my principles to be part of that mess, like a Peter Coffin (who is also going to be there.)

At least I can attend Skepticon without any regrets…and yes, it’s happening this year, July 29-31, in person in St Louis. Look for a real announcement from the organizers sometime soon, but keep that weekend open.

Oh no! There’s a creationist shortage!

Poor pitiful embattled Answers in Genesis. They’re facing a myriad of problems, to the point where they’re even publicly whining about them.

A number of AiG’s leadership and board were meeting recently, working through how to deal with struggles relating to “deplatforming,” the “woke” culture, and mapping out a way forward to protect AiG and resolve some problems (we can make some of these battles public once we’ve worked around them). We have staff working hard on all this, which is also a detraction from accomplishing the many daily tasks that need to be done. I said to the group, “It’s like being in a war, and we’re planning where to send the troops, where to place the tanks, and where we need to move around the enemies’ lines.”

I’d really like to know how “deplatforming” and the “woke” culture are affecting AiG. They’re an isolated, backwards little cult that has built their own enclave in Kentucky; are they having internal battles, or is this just a complaint that everyone else in the world finds them to be stupid? They do list some of their concerns, but none of them seem to have anything to do with “wokeness”. The first of their concerns is that no one wants to work for them, and this grand ark park that was touted as an economic boon for the region is finding it difficult to employ people.

1. Labor shortage. Yes, there is a labor shortage across the nation. Soon we begin what we believe (judging from phone calls, group bookings, etc.) will be a very busy year for our attractions (probably the busiest to date), and we need to employ up to 600 seasonal staff for the spring, summer, and fall months. Usually this includes mostly college and high school students and some retirees and others looking for seasonal work. Last year we were short 300 seasonal staff from what was needed. We had many of our salaried staff from all departments working in culinary, guest services, and other areas to try to deal with this staff shortage.

So their work force is mainly low-paid unskilled labor, many of them working as unpaid interns (they don’t say what percentage of their workers are interns — that would be something interesting to know), and are disappointed that they can’t get enough menial labor. Why, they had to ask people who are important and paid a salary to baby-sit the goats in the petting zoo! What a tragedy.

Ken Ham has a solution, though. Turn the place into a work camp and bring in fervent volunteers from all around the country. They’re going to build dorms.

AiG supporters have donated money to enable us to begin building student housing onsite at the Ark Encounter as we have plenty of land available for this. The first building will house 100 student staff. Now that we have the infrastructure (sewage, water, electric, etc.) in place, it will be less expensive to build the next building to house another 100 staff. One building will be designated for males and one for females (there are only two genders of humans, as we know). We believe housing for 200 student staff will go a long way to solving our labor shortage, but at the same time enable us to provide a Christian facility for these students so we can also help mentor them in the Christian faith. The cost of this additional building to house 100 people is $4.5 million.

There’s a solution! Bring in a captive workforce! It sounds hellish and cultlike, actually. In order to work there, you have to sign a Statement of Faith, along with other requirements, just to be an unpaid intern.

  • Must agree with and be able to sign our Statement of Faith.
  • Maintains a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
  • Regularly attends a local, Bible-believing church.
  • Must be able to work some evenings and weekends.

Makes you wonder how they’re going to enforce all that, once they’ve got you locked into institutional housing. Kids, this “job” isn’t going to look good on your CV, and it’s going to be an unpleasant experience. But Ken Ham will benefit from your servitude!

Oh, and Ham has another complaint about the world outside his compound.

3. “Woke” culture. There’s an increasing anti-Christian environment permeating the culture. Increasingly, we’re finding employers will not employ those who come from conservative institutions that take biblical stands on marriage, abortion, and gender (many employers check social media posts to check out what people believe), and we’ve heard of many people being fired from their jobs because of their public stand on God’s Word as a Christian.

“Woke” is not anti-Christian culture. It only means that you are conscious of oppression. Now I know that awareness is the last thing an oppressive institution like far-right conservative Christianity wants, but there are a great many more liberal perspectives on Christianity that are just as valid. I’m not sure what “Biblical stands” he is talking about, though.

Marriage? Polygamy is OK, and marriage in general is transactional…so you can sell your daughters to a suitor?

Abortion? The Bible doesn’t say much about abortion.

Gender? Likewise. It takes certain cultural norms for granted, but doesn’t say anything specific. Oh, except for that verse that says “Love your neighbor, unless they use a pronoun you dislike.” (Sorry, I made that up, but evangelical Christianity makes shit up all the time, so it’s OK.)

Also, I don’t see how this is a problem for AiG. If there are other employers who fire people for holding batshit ideas about the culture, then AiG is just a delightful little refuge from sanity. So what if a cake decorator gets fired for refusing to sell a cake to a gay couple, they can just come to work for a Christian institution and get paid very little and get housed in a little apartment and…well, probably not much cake decorating going on, but they can baby-sit the goats!

AiG is never going to succumb to this heinous “woke” culture, so what do they care?