Where? North Texas?

I’ve got to say it: I never heard of Frisco, Texas before, and had no idea where it is. But it’s apparently a big city of 100,000 people out in the northeast part of the state, north of Dallas/Fort Worth, and they are putting on an atheist convention! These things are getting to be everywhere, and I think this is an excellent development. We just had an excellent event out here in a much more obscure part of the world (but where it is needed), and now Texas is popping up pockets of rationality everywhere.

Let’s see Amarillo and Midland and Corpus Christi join in the trend — a great wave of people of reason standing up and making themselves known all across the state.

Until the Great Texas Atheist Revolution, though, you’ll have to go to the North Texas Secular Student Convention. It’s got a great lineup; everyone in the region should hop into your Volvos with the gay pride bumper sticker and head to Frisco on the 14th of April.

As well as a debate featuring:

Why I am an atheist – Nick Harding

Richard Dawkins likes to compare openness about one’s atheism with coming out of the closet, but in my case they were even more closely related.

Like so many kids I repressed my homosexuality out of religious (in my case, Christian) compunction and social phobia. But once I finally begrudged myself some sex in college, I knew intuitively that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I reacted against the idea of the victimless crime, described as sin by the Bible. But while I had shed my denominational identity, I remained stuck in a kind of anachronistic deism. Indeed, having jettisoned the doctrine of original sin, I probably overcompensated with an overly optimistic view of nature and its presumbaly benevolent creator.

So I was in for a shock when some of my friends started coming down with, and dying from, AIDS (this was the early nineties). Of course I knew about it from reading the newspaper and watching television, but I had put off revising my worldview until now. How to explain AIDS? Of course I already knew that it wasn’t divine punishment because there was nothing wrong with sex and, anyway, it had spared many “fornicators” including myself. But it didn’t exactly accord with my new-model deism either. I was experiencing a crisis that was as much intellectual as emotional.

Resolution beckoned in the form of evolution, which I had learned in high school but never related to my daily life in that hiatus between polio and AIDS. With its frequent mutations in response to medication, HIV was (and still is) the poster child for evolution. I began to take a more jaundiced view of nature, which seemed increasingly like a struggle for existence. But I found reassurance in the thought that all this took place without reference to morality or values, instead deriving from the virus’s need to replicate and adapt to its environment.

I suppose plenty of people going back to Asa Gray have been able to reconcile evolution with their religious beliefs. But as I was seeing it in its cruelest guise, I could not. To me, evolution was an irrational and wasteful process that was fundamentally incompatible with any definition of creation. And if you take away creation, what is left for a god to do?

So it was my experience as a gay man, specifically of religious homophobia and the AIDS epidemic, that brought me to atheism. At first glance, those seem to have little in common besides their coincidental effect on the gay community. But in accepting my sexuality and recognizing the true nature of AIDS, I embraced what is rather than what cannot be. To me, atheism is the “reality-based community” of journalists’ dreams.

Nick Harding

It never ends — Bemidji is afflicted with the toxin of creationism

So this past weekend, we had the Midwest Science of Origins conference here in Morris, Minnesota. At precisely the same time, about 190 miles north-north-east of us, in Bemidji, Minnesota, a team of lying clowns from the Institute for Creation Research were repeating the same bullshit that provoked our students to organize our conference. I hope the Bemidji State biology faculty were paying attention, and that their students are right now planning some remedial education for the community; I’d be happy to help if they want to contact me.

It was a seminar titled “Rebuilding the Foundation: Demolishing the Pillars of Evolution”, and it was held in Bemidji High School. How embarrassing for Bemidji. How typical of creationists, though.

The seminar, consisting of six hour-long presentations, was presented by the Institute of Creation Research out of Texas and led by John Morris and Nathaniel Jeanson.

This is just weird, but they’re always doing it, and I don’t get it. It was the same thing last year here in Morris; Terry Mortenson of AiG showed up and did these back-to-back lectures, while refusing to answer questions (he claimed to have a sore throat…which didn’t interfere with 7 hour long lectures).

I see we missed an opportunity. We should have just told Neil Shubin to come here and spend all day talking. Unfortunately, when you’re talking science, it’s actually hard work and you have to back up everything with evidence and demonstrate some rigor and care; when you’re a creationist, it’s easier because all you have to do is make stuff up non-stop.

You might be wondering who these two guys are.

Morris has a doctorate of geological engineering and has led 13 expeditions to Mt. Ararat in search of Noah’s ark. Jeanson has a Ph.D. in cell and development biology from Harvard Medical School.

First, when your most notable contribution to “science” is haring off to chase down myths, you ought to be laughed off the stage. Morris is a deluded charlatan.

And Jeanson…he’s an embarrassment to Harvard. I’ve described Jeanson’s competence before — he’s a guy with an undergraduate degree in bioinformatics, who lectures creationists on genomics, who knew nothing about how the chimpanzee genome sequence was acquired or how it compared to the human sequence.

Students generally are taught evolution theory in early high school, Cairns [Steve Cairns is the superintendent of schools!] said.

“But it is expressed as a fact,” Penni Cairns said. She said students raised on Creationism concepts can be confused and frustrated with evolution theory teachings because their beliefs are shot down by teachers following educational guidelines.

Yes, I’m sure that is frustrating to have your superstitions constantly shot down by reality.

“There are so many unexplained aspects of evolution, such as the missing links,” he said.

In Morris’ morning session, “The Fossil Record: A Problem for Evolution,” he showed images of fossils that mirrored the images of the animals that exist today: A 200-million-year-old crocodile is still a crocodile, a 300-million-year-old dragonfly is still a dragonfly, a 65-million-year-old bat is still a bat.

Cairns keeps trumpeting his ignorance in this article. Why is he superintendent of schools again?

Harun Yahya also makes this argument — it’s about the only thing he says over and over again. Let’s show a picture of a fossil and a contemporary organism to someone who wouldn’t know a femur from a cercal bristle, and they’ll happily say that they look exactly the same. Meanwhile, someone who actually knows some systematics and anatomy will look at the 200-million-year-old crocodile and immediately spot the differences that make it a unique species.

And yes, it certainly is true that there were dragonflies 300 million years ago, and there are dragonflies today; it’s a successful form. It doesn’t follow that organisms separated by a third of a billion years of time are indistinguishable from one another, or that we ought to be surprised about it. What matters is that we have change over time: there were no T. rexes in the Triassic, and there are no T. rexes today, but there were T. rexes in the Cretaceous. The existence of successful taxa that span that range of years does not negate the reality of change.

He also showed pictures of actual fossils that show, in his interpretation, how animals died catastrophic, sudden deaths. Fish died in sediment-filled waters; land-dwelling animals drowned. He showed pictures of dinosaurs fossilized with their heads arched backward and up, saying they were struggling to find air, but were drowning.

“Every dinosaur fossil is like that,” he said.

No, they’re not…but it’s true that a lot are. It is silly to claim that opisthotonus (the arched neck in those fossils) is always a consequence of drowning; there are multiple possible mechanisms behind it. But it’s even sillier to claim that all of the dinosaurs not only died of the same cause, but died in the same cataclysmic event over the course of one year. It’s like noting that some human skeletons show evidence of fatal cuts, bludgeoning, or gunshots, therefore they all died in the American Civil War, which was global and explains all violent deaths in all of history.

But of course, Henry Morris is an idiot.

He also argued against evolution by saying that there is no hard evidence that shows one creature evolving into another. If a fish did turn into an amphibian, there would be a “missing link” or transitional fossils proving such steps. Yet none exist.

At the very same time that Morris was making that stupid claim, Neil Shubin was pulling out a cast of Tiktaalik, a transitional form in the process of fish evolving into amphibians, and showing it to a room of 200 people in Morris.

“Yet none exist.” Lying dumbass.

But OK, world. Any students out there shopping for colleges right now? Are you looking at Bemidji State University vs. University of Minnesota Morris? I think the smart choice is crystal clear.

But then, I expect someone at the university will soon come roaring back with a strong response. I’m looking forward to it.

P.S. One other odd thing about that article. It keeps touting “Intelligent Design”, and Cairns is promoting the inclusion of Intelligent Design creationism in public schools. Yet the talks are by the ICR, a specifically young-earth-creationist organization that believes the earth is less than ten thousand years old and that all of geology can be explained by a global flood, patently religious claims that the Discovery Institute tries mightily to sweep under the carpet in their pretense of being a secular, scientific organization. Somebody has apparently looked at the claims of both and can’t tell the difference. Which is not surprising.

(Also on Sb)

It turns out there is a letter from a Bemidji State University professor in that newspaper. It’s not what I expected.

Although I don’t work in the lab, I am the local professor who teaches epidemiology to undergraduate and graduate students throughout the state. In this capacity, I know of no one doubting the mutative action of skin-invading bacteria. But that’s a far cry from going from nothing to everything. Macro-evolution appears unable to explain the Irreducible Complexity of life as we observe it.

This conference, Saturday at the BHS auditorium, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., presents a wonderful opportunity to engage in civil and respectful discourse on a very foundational subject.

An epidemiologist who doesn’t understand evolution and thinks young earth creationism is reasonable — how strange and unfortunate. It’s not surprising at all that Karl Salscheider emphasizes civility and respect in his letter, though; when you’ve got nothin’ of any substance, pound that drum demanding respect for your superstition equal to that given to hard-won science.

Why I am an atheist – Ben Ehrmann

I suspect that there are a variety of origins and influences that flowered our reasoning processes or otherwise led us to connect with our sense of rational thinking, and by extension, to our atheism.

For me, the seeds were started in early youth; a fascination with how things work, a desire for understanding, a love for experimentation, tinkering and measurement,… a burgeoning appreciation of science as a tool for discovery and truth, an envy and respect for all the groundbreaking scientists with their efforts and trials throughout history, as well as a strong respect I had for my older brother whom I looked up to for his extensive reading and desire to know what is ‘real’ in the world, especially its mysteries.

Much of what I’ve seen over the past three decades has been disconcerting, as youth seemingly lack a desire to be instilled and inspired with the wonder of science and the freedom of rational thought.

There are some freethinkers (and theists of various persuasions) feel a desire to ‘coexist’ (as the artistically clever bumper sticker expresses) with others of different beliefs, or simply feel that the dogmas inherent in the belief systems of others are just not ‘on the radar’ and don’t pose much in the way of cultural or intellectual threat. Personally, I started to get a worried sense about the shift in cultural and social attitudes as we entered the 1980’s and began, as a country, a gradual ‘creep’ to the political right, with its associated disregard for–even hostility toward– certain areas of education (especially science), art ( with a penchant for censorship), media ( the ‘ liberal “elite” ‘). Some, like Newt Gingrich and others, lament the ‘decline’ of Western culture and values, as they ironically fail to pay even lip service to some of the foundational blocks of Western culture–free thought, logic and reason– while espousing and defending the virtues of the religiously devout (which they themselves often conveniently ignore). Yes, religion is an essential tool in the toolbox of the political right; manipulating and harnessing the dogmas of the devout for political gain (and presumably personal gain), reciprocally, as the vociferous devout among us flex the political muscle of right wing politicians to further their narrow, religiously ideological agendas.

These issues are central to my disdain for religious belief and many of its practitioners, stemming strongly from this insidious marriage of religious belief and political power and the danger it poses. Increasing religious influence in our political systems presents a potential for long range threat to the material and social structures of our national and international cultures, with its most corrosive influence on the most essential tool for cultural advancement and continuing understanding of the universe we’re immersed in: the minds of future generations and how they evaluate, discover and accept what is real,… and what is reliable about how we explore our world.

I believe this corrosion needs to be widely understood, exposed and actively countered in the United States in particular. It’s hopeful to see there are many notables with influence and reputation in the scientific, philosophical and educational communities who are standing up and working hard to build a strong front. I certainly hope to continue to learn, understand and support, in my own way and time, what may turn out to be a new Enlightenment,..or perhaps a Re-Enlightenment.

Ben Ehrmann

I get email

Seriously, people, I am so sick of the April Fool’s jokes. I just got this in my email.

Dear Dr. Myers:

I’m writing to you in your capacity as a biology faculty member at University of Minnesota Morris. I’m originally from Minnesota— I’m from just south of Mankato, and I’m a St. Olaf alum. Currently, I’m the Dean of Research at the National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, Oregon. My PhD is in Immunology, from the University of Colorado, and I did a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. I noticed that you earned your PhD at U of OR. My partner’s daughter graduated from U of OR 2 years ago.

This past year at NCNM, we’ve launched a Master of Science of Integrative Medicine Research (MSiMR) program. It’s a 2 year accredited program that is a combination of an MPH and a Master of Clinical Research program. As integrative medicine is on the rise, it’s important to determine what works and what doesn’t. Our MSiMR students are building the evidence base for integrative medicine. We do applied, basic, and clinical research. It’s an exciting program that examines nutrition, exercise, behavior change, massage, herbal medicine, and other natural modalities.

In addition, the MSiMR program has the potential for international medical research. I personally have collaborations in Tanzania, Brazil, and Nicaragua, and will be taking two students with me to Tanzania this summer. Thus, students who are interested in global health may be interested in this program. I’m attaching 2 brochures so that you can get a flavor of the program.

I know Morris is a little out of the way, but I’m going to be in Minnesota visiting my family April 18th-22nd, and I’m happy to make the drive if you know of students who are interested in natural medicine (naturopathic or Chinese medicine degrees) or integrative medicine research. I interviewed at Morris when I was looking at colleges for undergrad. In the past, I’ve met with the pre-med clubs at St. Olaf, Gustavus, and Minnesota State Universities. I’d like to make sure that Morris students have the same opportunities. If you’d like me to give a seminar or an informal talk for pre-med or graduate school bound students, I’m happy to do so. I’m also available to drop by a classroom and chat for 10 minutes if you think your students would be interested.

Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best,
Heather

I am being teased. I would so love to have Heather visit my classroom, just to see the look on her face when the horde of students raise their heads, eyes all a-glitter, and smile and bare their needle-sharp fangs in those last few minutes before she is shredded. I suspect, though, that if I eagerly offered her access to the students, she’d look a little closer at the content of my site and flee like a tuna before the shark.

Why I am an atheist – Steve

I went to a Catholic parochial school in St. Paul for six years, was an altar boy, could pretty competently read Latin, and casually accepted my Catholic faith. But I never believed in it, any of it. It all, even to a child, seemed to not…work. But I didn’t finally lose all semblance of any belief in a god until I worked for the prison system here in MN. I’m an RN, and have always chosen to work in the underbelly; treatment and detox centers, group homes for profoundly developmentally disabled adults who also had mental illness diagnoses, psychiatric units, hospice, and where I totally lost my faith, in a maximum security prison hospital unit.

Every day I addressed the health care needs of many offenders in the system, some not so bad, some inconceivably horrid, and dangerous, most stupid, lazy, and incompetent. But one offender, a sexual predator and murderer of children, totally destroyed any possible belief in a god. This man kidnapped a five year old girl from a church, and over the course of a day, forced upon her almost every filthy, violent, savage assault you can even imagine, and many you most probably can’t. But it wasn’t the rapes, or cigarette burns, or hair yanked out, or the beatings that killed her. It was his feces forced down her throat. Then he tossed her in a dumpster like some dead cat.

I usually never read the court transcripts from any of the men I took care of. I didn’t want to know, afraid I might be influenced to provide less than good health care. I wish I hadn’t looked up this piece of shit’s court record as well. But here’s what killed god for me. This little girl “loved Jesus” according to her mother. And god is supposedly all good, powerful, knowing etc. All I could think of was where is god? When this child went through every possible humiliation, forms of pain, terror, you add your own adjective here, where was god? Theodicy is always the fly in the ointment, Epicurus nailed it a long time ago, but the kindest thought you could take from this is that god is, as Twain put it, a malignant thug. No manner of convoluted magical thinking can excuse what happened to this little girl. If there is a god, even remotely like what most of us have been taught, he’s an enemy, beneath contempt, worthy of our hatred. If he exists, fuck him. But he doesn’t.

One last thing, to all those idiot whining pharmacists and other “health care professionals” who are troubled by Plan B birth control pills. I provided competent, professional care to the monster in prison. I changed his diaper, he was an old man by the time I knew him, after a quarter century in prison, gave him his medications, checked his blood glucose levels, in short, acted professionally. Professionals don’t get to pick and choose who they care for.

Steve
United States

Who needs an IQ test when you’ve got coalescence?

I am just blown away by the consistency of this observation. You know, the creationists are not all stupid; there’s a wide range of intelligence in their camp, even if they are all wrong. But this one recent paper on the gorilla genome has become such an excellent tool for discriminating the competent from the incompetent.

This was the paper that unsurprisingly explained that gorilla genes reveal a mosaic; that some gorilla genes are closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other. If you understand the logic of coalescent theory at all, you know this is an expected result. The only way you could fail to see the distribution we observe is if the population went through a bottleneck of exactly two individuals.

But once again, one of the so-called scientists of intelligent design creationism blows it. Doug Axe has announced that the ape family tree is hopelessly broken, and that the gorilla data should call evolutionary theory into question.

Until recently, the answer was that a real family tree should generate a fully consistent pattern of similarities. [Not true at all. Coalescent theory is an extension of Fisher/Wright models of large populations, and the formal mathematics were worked out in the 1980s] For example, we are told that chimps and humans came from the same ancestral stock (call it CH stock) and that gorillas, chimps and humans all came from an earlier ancestral stock (GCH stock) [Correct so far]. If so, then the human and chimp genomes should consistently be more similar to each other than either is to the gorilla genome [WRONG. They should not be consistently more similar. Does he know nothing of probability?], since the human and chimp histories were one and the same thing more recently than the human and gorilla (or chimp and gorilla) histories were.

Well, the recent publication of the gorilla genome sequence shows that the expected pattern just isn’t there [Jebus. Read the paper. The pattern observed is the expected pattern.]. Instead of a nested hierarchy of similarities, we see something more like a mosaic [AS WE’D EXPECT.]. According to a recent report, “In 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other…”

That’s sufficiently difficult to square with Darwin’s tree that it ought to bring the whole theory into question. And in an ideal world where Darwinism is examined the way scientific theories ought to be examined, I think it would. But in the real world things aren’t always so simple [And yet the creationists keep throwing up their simplistic models and being surprised that they’re wrong].

Axe is the one guy the creationists keep touting as a real scientist, a guy with genuine chops in molecular biology, the man who is doing serious scientific work. You know, if you’re going to publicly criticize an observation and claim it calls into question the entirety of evolutionary theory, you ought to first look into it and see whether that observation actually fits a prediction of evolution — actual evolutionary theory, not that cartoonishly naive caricature of evolution the creationists all have in their heads.

Here’s a nice, short history of coalescent theory by Kingman. It’s been around for decades, long before the gorilla genome was sequenced, and it predicted what kinds of distributions we ought to see in our comparisons of different species…predictions that were borne out by the paper Axe thinks contradicts evolutionary theory.

“Athiests” actually is a misunderstood word

Oh, great. Now we’re being hectored by sorcerers. In An open letter to the New Athiests, some guy Who peddles a One Year Intensive Course in real magic wags his finger and lectures us on what’s wrong with “athiests” — we’re all a bunch of dicks.

In short, you have a lot of important things to say but as long as you continue to prenent yourselves like obnoxious zealots far keener to argue than discuss and talk at rather than with, you will actually only set yourselves further back and make the word “Athiest” into an even more misunderstood word than it already is. It wont be because you are wrong necessarily. It will just be because no one likes you.

Right. I’m going to take advice from a self-proclaimed sorcerer who makes a long tirade against atheists and misspells the term every single time.

Here’s the problem: I’ve noticed that people who deeply wrong, like sorcerers, Christians, and creationists, love to tell us that being right isn’t as important as being liked. I suspect they’re driven by self-interest rather than honesty.

All I can say is…you don’t understand me at all if you think I’m trying to persuade you to like me, dumbass.

Why I am an atheist – Beth (the very happy lesbian)

In short, I was able to see the beauty of science with my own two eyes from a very early age.

My father loves science. Accordingly, when I was a 4 year old afraid of an earthquake he taught me about plate tectonics. I spent hours asking him questions about the universe when my mother was at work on the weekends, and I was gifted my first telescope at the age of 7.

So when the bible teacher (in a public primary school I might add!) told us that earthquakes were created by god when I was 8 years old, I immediately realised religion was a fraud. It’s lucky I did, because I later discovered that I was a lesbian. Who knows how much pain and repression I would have suffered if I had allowed that bible teacher to brainwash me!

Beth (the very happy lesbian)
New Zealand

An innovative legal strategy

David Coppedge, the creationist who was fired from JPL and is currently trying to sue them, has submitted his legal brief as plaintiff in the case. It is…bizarre. It includes a screenplay in which Coppedge imagines a dialog between a couple of JPL staff — a dialog in which he was not present, which basically makes it a work of fiction.

Are court cases often resolved on the basis of creative writing?

This kind of crankery really seems to be part of a trend: there was Kent Hovind’s “subornation of false muster” defense, Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell lying on the witness stand in the Dover trial, the prolonged whining by Freshwater, accused of burning a cross into a student’s arm. Creationism seems to draw in the wackiest court cretins; I guess it’s not surprising, given that you have to be a bit off to fall for creationism in the first place.