Hucksters hear the blunt facts about the Serpent Mound

The Serpent Mound in Ohio is an amazing artifact of a past culture — earthworks over 400m long in the shape of a snake.

You can imagine how the European colonizers of the area regarded this immense communal work of architecture…or don’t imagine, just see what a mess they made of the story.

“Unfortunately the Serpent Mound has become the epicenter of efforts to appropriate sacred American Indian sites and replace the Indigenous story with all sorts of fantastic, absurd stories,” said during his solstice presentation.

“Let’s be absolutely clear. At the heart of these myths and fantastic stories is the racist notion that American Indians were too stupid to have built something so wonderful,” he added.

Right. There’s Graham Hancock, of course, babbling about “The Ancients” and a world-spanning civilization of New Age stargazers, or various people on the History Channel claiming that it’s evidence of a race of giants, because, after all, American Indians were too short to build large structures, so there had to be a population of 9 or 10 foot tall giants to build these mounds. It’s disrespectful and nonsensical.

In recent years, activities at the mound have taken on the quality of what Barnes describes as a minstrel show disrespecting and appropriating Native cultures.

Since the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the mound has become a mecca for followers of New Age spirituality. The idea of the Convergence was created by author and art historian Jose Arguelles who claimed August 16-17, 1987, were significant dates in the Maya calendar and represented an especially auspicious time to meditate for global peace.

Some New Age activities such as digging and burying items in the mound, forwarding information purporting that the effigy was built by aliens from space or prehistoric giants and misrepresenting Native connections to the site has been of growing concern to tribal leaders like Wallace and Barnes. Of even greater concern was the way that past managers of the Serpent Mound site often turned a blind eye to these activities, sometimes allowing such practitioners to manage and stage events at the mound. This sent a message to the public that these wild theories were part of the official history of the site according to Wallace and Barnes.

It was supposed to be a kind of cosmic bomb shelter for people at the end of the world predicted by the Mayan calendar to occur in 2012, for instance. You may have noticed we didn’t achieve world peace in 1987, and the world is still here in 2021, and that whole Mayan calendar thing was nothing more than the end of a calendar cycle. That reminds me — I’ll have to get a new calendar in January. Either that, or the world is ending at midnight on 31 December. Hey, what do the Maya have to do with the native people of Ohio, anyway?

Jason Colavito has a thorough dissection of the absurdist pseudo-history of Serpent Mound. Would you believe that some claim it is a cathedral for a global penis-worshipping cult? Of course you would. There are loonies everywhere, and they tend to get rewarded with a “documentary” series on the History Channel.

The summer solstice was just this past weekend, so I took a look at the calendar of events for Serpent Mound. There was some good stuff about the history of the area and the archaeology of the mound, but also…Bigfoot? Nephilim? New Age quacks peddling crystals and herbs? Whoever runs this event has no integrity at all and willfully misrepresents the truth to make a buck.

The good news though, is that at least this time the organizers invited some of the descendants of the people who actually built the mound to come speak. That’s a little progress.

The Shawnee tribe returned home to the Serpent Mound on the longest day of the year.

The Summer Solstice, June 20, the longest day of the year, marks the first time that the Shawnee tribe has officially returned to the Serpent Mound located in Ohio to present their history and connection to this place that they called home so many years ago.

Although it was certainly ancestors of the Shawnee people who built the magnificent serpent shaped mound, the largest earthwork effigy in the world, Ohio failed to involve the tribe in conveying its meaning to the public until now.

Glenna Wallace, chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and Ben Barnes, chief of the Shawnee Tribe, also located in Oklahoma, spent the weekend telling visitors to the Serpent Mound historical site about their peoples’ and ancestors’ connection to Ohio and the mound.

I also like the title of the article: “Shawnee reclaim the great Serpent Mound: Ancestors of Native Americans, not prehistoric giants or space aliens, built the mound in Ohio”. The white people who run the solstice event ought to be embarrassed that they had to invite Indians, who had been dispossessed from the land and treated as primitives who couldn’t have built the structure, to come back and tell them the simple truth.

Every Intelligent Design debate ever

I’ve been in a few. I hate ’em. Here’s how they work: the ID proponent declares that the thesis of the debate is “Everything is Designed” and launches into his argument:

Cars are designed by intelligent agents. Shoes are designed. Computers are designed. iPhones are designed. My right hand is designed. Therefore, everything is designed.

The scientist who got suckered into this engagement begins to unlimber their long list of counter-examples. “We have natural mechanisms that generate complex forms without the need for a designer…wait, did you say your right hand is designed?”

Sure. It’s made of cells, and cells are designed, so of course it’s the product of design.

“You can’t just declare that everything you don’t understand is designed. That’s the whole point of contention here; you have to address the evidence for your position, not just announce by fiat that everything is designed.”

I’m ready to discuss all of the evidence.

“OK, I begin again. So Tiktaalik…”

Designed. Clearly designed.

“The entire fossil series illustrating tetrapod evolution…?”

Designed.

“The citrate metabolic pathway?”

Designed.

“Cells are…”

Great example. Cells are complicated, with lots of fiddly bits, therefore implying a Fiddler. Shall I throw some big numbers at you to show you how complicated cells are?

“No, that’s OK. I know how complex cells are. You don’t get to simply decide that all complex things have to be designed. Again, that’s what we’re debating! If I show you something of unknown origin, or even something with a well-documented history of natural evolutionary history, you don’t get to just greedily snatch it up and put it in the “Designed” category!”

Yes, I do. The burden of proof is on you, and I can refute everything you propose by pointing out any one thing that could have been designed, and that is sufficient to make it designed.

“By a mysterious invisible intelligence that operated for billions of years before the origin of intelligent life on Earth.”

Now you’re getting it! By the way, welcome to my proof for the existence of my God.

I bring this up because I listened to another Intelligent Design debate, this time between James Croft and the reliably ridiculous Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. It was interesting because I’d be one of those guys who brings a catalog of biological counter-examples to the debate; as a philosopher, Croft ignores all that and drills right down to the logic of the argument the creationists are making. I think that’s a smart approach, even if Meyer is only capable of a different flavor of evasion.

I’ve queued it up below at the start of James’ argument, because all the politeness and niceness in the introduction turned my stomach.

He starts by summarizing Meyer’s position:

Note: Meyer has turned that simple statement into three long-winded, tedious books now. If you can grasp that simple summary, there’s no reason to read any of his books, since they don’t provide any further evidence for his position.

Point 1 is false. Meyer exercises a kind of studied neglect of the actual state of the evidence in biology that allows him to pretend there aren’t any adequate explanations for evolutionary phenomena. Croft focuses on the link between 1 and 2, that Meyer is making an abductive argument while failing to support his primary premises. He points out three problems with the logic of Meyer’s claims which I won’t get into — watch the video. It’s not as painful as it looks: Croft begins at the 14 minute mark, and wraps up at 25 minutes, so the interesting part is only 11 minutes long. The rest is Meyer making noises with his mouth and frequently interrupting Croft, and then there’s the interminable period of the two of them telling each other how nice they are and what a worthy and interesting this conversation was. That bit was aggravating: Meyer is his usual pompous self, pretending that Croft’s annoyingly congenial, smiling manner was an affirmation that there was something of substance to his pretentious bullshit, completely oblivious to the fact that the cheerful fellow with the British accent has effectively torpedoed him below the waterline. He is unconcerned; he’s just going to sail off and write another tendentious, wordy tome repeating his 3 points over and over again.

Suddenly, meetings

Nothing for a year, and suddenly I’ve got two meetings at once this week. The big one is the annual meeting of the American Arachnological Society, which begins on Thursday and continues until the following Wednesday. It’s a virtual meeting (I think registration is still open, and it’s cheap at $20) so it’ll be almost a week of nothing but spider talk on a fairly loose and casual schedule. I am so looking forward to it.

And then, on Sunday, I’m going to have to skip an online poster session because — hold on to your hats, this is unbelievable — I’ve been invited to speak to the Atheists of Florida. An atheist meeting? Do they still have those? And they invited me? Don’t they know who I am? Sheesh. A fellow works hard to destroy the whole atheist movement and a few years later they all forget.

Anyway, they probably think they’re safe, since I’ll be talking about science. Little do they know, my topic is the biology of intelligence, and one of the things I’ll be doing is taking apart atheist buzzwords, like “rationality” and “reason” and “logic” and “intelligence” by explaining how spiders, and other animals, are also logical and intelligent, and are probably better atheists than humans, since none of them have any need for that god hypothesis.

Expect schisms, rifts, and recriminations all across Florida after my poisonous spirit touches the state. It’s what I do.

Never, ever waste your time with an Islamic fundamentalist

Sheesh. You have one conversation with one of these slimy wankers, and they never let it go. I’ve been getting harangued constantly by this fanatic, Nadir, who is now sending me ultimatums.

retract your statement before it is too late

Hi PZ –
A major Islamic channel has asked me to
document your flip-flop, under the spotlight
of investigation, you answered in the negative
to the question of scientific errors in the Quran.
We have it ALL ON TAPE. Only upon knowing
about the Islamic promotion, you flip flopped.
This latest statement was NOT motivated by
the objective pursuit of science, but rather polemics.

Regarding your NEW scientific error claim:

The Quran does NOT state that embryos were poofed into existence
with bones and flesh fully formed. If you think that anyone is going to
go for this, you are sadly mistaken. This is nothing more than a dishonest
malicious and nefarious interpretation being imposed upon the text. And you will be exposed.

IF you think, there is any fool out there who will buy into this, you are mistaken.

Retract this statement by this afternoon on your blog.

Ooooh. A major Islamic channel is going to talk about me.

I did not “flip flop” on anything, nor was I under any illusions that I was not talking to a group of Islamists. It was rather obvious. They were not undercover, and were quite open about their perspective.

What he thinks is a new scientific error claim was merely recognition of their own post hoc rationalizations. One group of Muslims is telling me that there’s a clear sequential progression in development, with bones first, then muscles, and then when I point out that isn’t true, they try to tell me they’re formed at the same time, even though the text in the Quran states a sequence.

I really don’t care. It’s two fucking sentences in a holy book. Don’t try to tell me there’s some deep insight into embryology there; it’s a couple of broad guesses by people who didn’t have microscopes or any knowledge of even cell theory, so I’m going to reject any suggestion that it’s scientifically accurate.

Forever fringe

Now that we’ve paid off our share of our legal debt, I’m getting all these questions about why we didn’t press on for Richard Carrier to pay our legal costs, or for damages, or for punishment. Let me give you the reasons all in one place.

  • Just shutting down his SLAPP suit cost us a quarter million dollars and three years. Going after more would probably take another quarter million that we wouldn’t get back until the suit was over, and then only if we succeeded. The legal system is a gamble.

  • Even if we did win, we’d already been through discovery, and we knew what Richard Carrier was worth: diddly-squat. He’s an itinerant classics scholar who’d been living off his wife’s income (now divorced because he’d cheated on her multiple times, so that’s gone), who had latched on to the Jesus mythicism grift to sell books and get atheist speaking gigs and to pump up his Patreon account with misogynist resentment money. He’s poor. He makes a bit more than he would if he were working for minimum wage. We’d be squeezing blood from a stone.

  • What about teaching him a lesson? You know he wouldn’t. He has nothing to lose, so slapping him hard with a financial punishment wouldn’t cost him much. He doesn’t have an academic reputation, so we wouldn’t be affecting that. He does have a favorable reputation with the right-wing grievance squad, and he’s been milking that for a while now — punitive damages would make him even more of a hero to them.

  • What about just shutting him up? No, that would put us on his level. Remember, the whole point of his SLAPP suit — Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — was entirely to silence us. If he’d succeeded, a $2.1 million judgement would have shut down Freethoughtblogs, the Orbit, and Skepticon, and would have reduced the named individuals in his suit to penury (we aren’t rich, either). We’d rather deal with bad speech with more good speech, which is why an important part of the final settlement was his total capitulation and the absence of any gag order. We can talk about what an asshole Richard Carrier is all we want!

    Ironically, Carrier was supported in his suit by a lot of Free Speech Warriors.

  • We just wanted it over so we could get back to our ordinary lives. Wasting a couple more years on the courts would be a distraction and deprive us of valuable time that could be better spent…chasing spiders, for instance.

  • It’s enough that his own legal shenanigans have now cemented his reputation as a sex pest, rather than as a serious scholar. No legitimate academic institution is going to touch him — one quick google will label him as radioactive — and he’s going to be forever on the fringe.

Gone almost a week, and nothing has changed

It was a good 5 days. I’m an internet junkie, but my laptop died a few days before my flight, and while I considered bringing along an old clunker of a netbook, I eventually decided to be strong and go mostly cold turkey and hang out with the family. I had my phone as one slender lifeline to keep in touch with Mary, and that was it. So I visited my mother, my two sisters, my two brothers, my son and his wife, my grandson, and went to the beach and went fishing. I went for walks and looked at spiders. I went to a church, once. I didn’t do much of anything, actually.

I got home early evening last night, and was finally able to shuffle some money around on the internet and make the big announcement, but then I just hit the sack and slept in until 7am. I got up this morning and finally, after that respite, plunged back into the internet and…

AAAAAAAAIAIIIEEEE.

Nothing has changed. The right wing is still ginning up a culture war, and they look even more stupid when you haven’t been desensitized by the continual barrage. I mean, look at these two idiots:

The Left’s War on Hydroxychloroquine Continues? What? Hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug that shows no effectiveness against the coronavirus — it was tossed out to the media by chickenshit politicians (like Ron Johnson there) as cheap snake oil to shut gullible people up. The “Left” didn’t buy it. Now we’ve got safe, effective vaccines, we lefties are happily lining up to get those while the righties are inventing conspiracy theories to avoid them. There never was a “war on hydroxychloroquine.” Johnson and every loudmouthed liar on Fox News can go gargle bleach if they want.

It only takes a little distance to see that the way these quacks operate is to tell an outrageous lie, and the first time you hear it, you think “That is the dumbest thing I ever heard.” The second, third, and fiftieth time they say it, you roll your eyes and tune it out. The hundredth time you think, “Am I gonna have to go dig into the scientific literature and read a bunch of papers?” The thousandth time you begin to have doubts and wonder, “Maybe I missed something? Should we fund another clinical trial?”, and then they’ve got you. Trust me, your first impressions were probably correct. Bullshit isn’t turned into science by a thousand Fox News morons churning it over.

Sometimes they even admit what they’re doing. Here’s Chris Rufo outlining their strategy against Critical Race Theory: they just lie about it, misrepresent it, and if they hammer it hard enough at the public, they’ll start to associate the lies with the real thing.

You just have to turn up the volume on your bullhorn and be really, really repetitive and you too can get any nonsense you want drilled into the discourse. If you can’t get on Fox News right away, there’s always Sam Harris and Joe Rogan to act as pre-amps and get you started on your program to purée everyone’s brains via mass media.

I strongly recommend the clarifying effects of watching ocean waves roll in for a while. Unfortunately, I have to warn you of the spectacular downer you will experience when you get back from the shore.

The only way you’ll get me into a church is to support my family

Julie Lynn Bjornsson Myers — 1961-2021

It says something about my brother’s character that he marries well. His first wife, Karen, was the sweetest, kindest young woman you’d ever think to meet, and they had a long and happy marriage until she was killed by melanoma.

A few years later, lightning struck a second time, and he married Julie, a marvel and a saint, former Peace Corps volunteer, health care worker, and just general all-around joy to be with. Yesterday I met friends who’d known her for over 50 years, and were still loyal and loving her. She was active in her church, and was a critical part of the glue that held the congregation together.

She had a secret, though: bouts of severe clinical depression. It killed her earlier this year.

So I sat through a church service yesterday and listened to her friends, many if not all of them equally devout, sing her praises, entirely deserved from all I knew about her. She was someone they knew was in heaven.

All I could think was that my brother was a better person than their god, and God didn’t deserve her.

Absolutely mental

Ricky Gervais and Sam Harris have teamed up on a podcast called “Absolutely Mental”. It sounds like the title matches the content.

The most delusional thing about this is not the idea that aliens have been anally probing people for decades, but that government officials would call on Sam Harris to help them out in breaking the news to the public. Yeah, right, and the head of the CIA is going to ring me up next to arrange lessons in tact.

But if you want to read some real delusional stuff, check out the Reddit thread on this podcast by the the True Believers in UAPs (“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” — they changed the name because “UFO” carries the stigma of silliness. Were you fooled?)

That tone you hear in Sam Harris’s voice…? That’s called objective acceptance.
His words perfectly illustrate the gigantic implications this reality will have on a public that might not be properly prepared to process these forthcoming facts.

When Sam starts talking about the Tic-Tac he just flat out calls it an “alien spacecraft” without any hesitation or pause. Obviously he doesn’t know what it is, but it just illustrates the incredible shift in perception of UFOs that has come around that he (and others in media of course) can say “alien spacecraft” in serious conversation without batting an eye.

Sam Harris is measured, calculated, & matter of fact on everything he says publically. I find the probability of him putting himself in an “uncomfortable position” very low. If he is talking ET…we might want to listen.

Oh god. That’s always been Harris’s schtick, stating the outrageous with a totally flat demeanor. It means nothing, but it sure hooks the gullible.

You really shouldn’t believe this stuff until you see Trey Gowdy talking about UAPs on FoxNews. There’s the gold standard of integrity. Scientific American? Pfft. What do they know?

New Atheism is dead…does that make this abuse of a corpse?

The current crop of New Atheists take a brutal beating. Phil Torres takes the approach of looking at the atheists who get all the attention today, and asking whether they were actually good moral people who represented the ideals of atheism well.

The answer is “No.”

So if you want to read about how the atheists who rode the glory train of the atheist resurgence 10 or 15 years ago to fame and fortune now are doing, check it out and be depressed. The faces of the New Atheism are Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman, and Steven Pinker, and if just that list is harrowing enough, wait until you read the dissections. To make it even worse, they’re all converging on the Intellectual Dark Web, which ought to be renamed the New Fascism.

What’s sad is that the New Atheist movement could have made a difference — a positive difference — in the world. Instead, it gradually merged with factions of the alt-right to become what former New York Times contributing editor Bari Weiss calls the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a motley crew of pseudo-intellectuals whose luminaries include Jordan Peterson, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, in addition to those mentioned above.

Flash this image to see how fast a ‘free speech warrior’ will block you.


At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about “moral progress,” but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of “free speech,” they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

When I think back to that period when we were all giddy with the possibilities of a strong atheist movement, there are many other names that come to mind of eloquent, activist atheists who got left behind by that glory train — people who I thought were fantastic representatives of a progressive atheism. Think about Greta Christina, Mandisa Thomas, Jey McCreight, Lauren Lane, Rebecca Watson, Monette Richards, Sikivu Hutchinson, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and a few hundred others who should now be the names and faces we see on CNN whenever they go looking for a representative atheist perspective. They’re still around, but not getting the attention they deserve. Instead, Richard Dawkins is still the figurehead of atheism, with those other guys getting an occasional nod. I wonder why? Are the people on my list missing something? Or is it just their estrogen vibe?

Think back just a decade, and what happened to atheism? A massive anti-feminist backlash that hounded so many good people out of the movement and left the assholes in charge. We still feel the repercussions.

At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are “markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian” than religious people. It’s a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.

Oh, what could have been…