Why isn’t this an example of the falsification of the power of prayer?

Texas has had several extremely high profile, prominent prayer events led by that braying ninny, Rick Perry, all in the name of ending the drought that afflicts the state. He even made it official, making a government proclamations calling on God to fix the weather.

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on those days for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

That was back in April. God has had 4 months to respond to those desperate entreaties. Here is the result.

Isn’t that amazing? It’s like Texas is getting blasted almost specifically — with a bit of collateral damage to Oklahoma, but then, God has always had lousy aim.

But shouldn’t this be a good strong datum that prayer doesn’t work?

Not like a worm?

Ann Coulter is back to whining about evolution again, and this week she focuses on fossils. It’s boring predictable stuff: there are no transitional fossils, she says.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record – for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

Darwin postulated that whales could have evolved from bears, but he was wrong…as we now know because we found a lot of transitional fossils in whale evolution. Carl Zimmer has a summary of recent discoveries, and I wrote up a bit about the molecular genetics of whale evolution. Whales have become one of the best examples of macroevolutionary transitions in the fossil record, all in roughly the last 30 years — which gives us a minimal estimate of how out of date Ann Coulter’s sources are.

But then she writes this, which is not only wrong, but self-refuting.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted – without evidence – that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, “the dog ate our fossils” excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery the New York Times called “among the most spectacular in this century,” Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures – precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn’t fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence – it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of 5 million to 10 million years.

It’s so weird to read that: yes, people have been predicting that the precursors to the Cambrian fauna would have been small and soft-bodied (what else would you expect), and that they would be difficult to fossilize…but not impossible, and further, scientists have been out finding these fossils. Somehow this is a refutation of evolution? What we’re seeing is exactly what evolution predicted!

What we have is a good record of small shelly fossils and trace fossils from the pre-Cambrian — before there were fully armored trilobites, there were arthropod-like creatures with partial armor that decayed into scattered small fragments of shell after death, and before that there were entirely soft-bodied, unarmored creatures that left only trackways and burrows. Even in this period Coulter wants to call abrupt, we find evidence of gradual transitions in animal forms.

And then to claim that there is an absence of transitional forms because all that was found were worms! Um, if you take an animal with an armored exoskeleton or bones, and you catch it before the hard skeleton had evolved, exactly what do you think it would look like? Like a worm.

As evolution predicted. As the evidence shows.

I can’t even guess what Ann Coulter was expecting a pre-Cambrian animal to look like. Not like a worm, apparently…but like what?

(Also on Sb)

Why is it so hard for Expert Communicators to communicate?

Gee, they just get here, and what do they immediately start writing about? Accommodationism. Both Greta Christina and Stephanie Zvan rip into the subject right out of the starting gate. Greta Christina makes the excellent point that there are shades of grey and that diplomacy is not the same as accommodationism, although the accommodationists would like you to think it is. Meanwhile, Zvan tears into the Tribal Scientist, who has a terrible post accusing all those confrontationalists of making a false dichotomy between two polarized extremes…I just want to tell him to go read Greta and be done with it.

But I have a different issue to bring up. Why are the professional communicators who lecture at us on how to communicate so goddamned bad at communicating? We saw it with Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney, and now here’s the Tribal Scientist amorphously hectoring everyone — I read the whole thing and still don’t have the slightest idea what he wants.

It’s the usual rancid mix: while declaring that there are rational, scientific ways to communicate, all he does is sneer at the New Atheists, calling them unscientific and working through his thesaurus to come up with a nice body of abusive remarks about them. I don’t mind — I’m quite capable of working up a good head of steam myself — but it’s bizarre and hypocritical to see someone berating others for being ranty and insulting while doing his best to be ranty and insulting himself. Obviously this expert on communications finds this a useful approach — either that, or he’s so self-unaware his entire philosophy is suspect.

And then there’s the usual high-horse tactic, where whatever it is he is doing is superior. He acknowledges that many New Atheists argue for a multitude of approaches, he dismisses that, too.

Yet there is an element of intellectual laziness in this view. Of course, no one approach in communication will reach all demographics, or solve all problems. Diverse approaches are indeed necessary. Yet this is not the same as saying all approaches are necessary. Some will conflict. Some will be resource hungry and have no hope of success for one reason or another. Identifying solutions to the problem of how best to communicate science in the face of religion will take more than guessing, hoping and shouting into echo chambers. Like anything in science, it demands research, critical thinking and evaluation. No act of communication should be above criticism or beyond the need for evidence, clarity and precision.

That makes no sense at all.

OK, so there are conflicting approaches. Now what? Does he imagine some utopian state where everyone agrees on everything and there is no dissent anywhere? Are we somehow hampered if we lack uniformity? That isn’t very scientific.

I don’t even know what the basis of his claim that some approaches are “resource hungry” means. For instance, I’m off in my little domain, doing what I do, having a grand time and apparently succeeding in my little niche. How am I a drain on the resources of the atheist movement? What would it even mean to say I have no hope of success, when he doesn’t bother to define success? If I shut up, will that suddenly endow other voices with more resources?

Contrary to the “scientist”, guessing certainly is a good approach — if he’d prefer fancier terms, it’s called making a hypothesis, implementing a test, and assessing the empirical results. Richard Dawkins thought The God Delusion was a good idea, but he couldn’t know for sure until it was published…and then he discovered that it was hugely popular, that it resonated with many minds, and that a strong, vigorous denunciation of religion was actually an extremely effective tool for communication. This is now denounced by the “scientists” who reject the empirical evidence of something in the neighborhood of 10 million copies sold as irrelevant. That’s just “shouting into echo chambers”, apparently.

And if you haven’t noticed, none of the New Atheists have ever argued that their work is above criticism — that’s the tactic of religion, which demands a special privileging of their beliefs.

I’d ask the Tribal Scientist for “evidence, clarity and precision” in support of his views, but if you read his post, or any of his others, you’ll find nothing — I have no clue what his position is, what he’s advocating, or what he’s griping about, other than that he thinks New Atheists are a bunch of big bad meanies. That’s not very compelling.

I also think he’s missed a very important point. Communication is an art. It is not amenable to being condensed to a formula, although it’s fair to say that the outcomes of communication can and should be measured. If one could find a concrete, inarguable result that showed that there was a form of communication that was a hundred times better than what I do, it would make no difference at all to me — I am who I am, I write as I do because I enjoy it, and I cannot artificially wedge myself into another style without destroying what I myself do. It just means that someone else can step up and do their thing and win fame and success and popularity and conquer the world for atheism…and I have no problem with that at all.

I just wish some of these critics had the talent to do it, rather than constantly carping that people like myself shouldn’t be ourselves.

I’m laughing, but it’s not great medicine

Aww, that’s kind of sweet. The creationists are trying to cheer me up while I’m on my sick bed. How else to interpret these wacky assertions from Austin Casey, a 19 year old student?

Science is fundamentally a search for the truth about the universe, and Perry’s acknowledgement of the holes in evolution theory manifests a much better understanding of science than Huntsman’s faith in scientists.

Cute. No, sorry, Perry doesn’t know anything about evolution, and acknowledging “holes” that don’t exist and denying the existence of processes well supported by the evidence is the antithesis of good science.

Scientific observations are classified into three categories: hypotheses, theories or laws. Hypotheses are the weakest interpretations of evidence, while theories garner more support. Laws are said to be the strongest explanations, but even they aren’t facts.

No, Casey is inventing a hierarchy that doesn’t exist. Which is more significant, Ohm’s Law or cell theory? Hawking’s theory of black holes, or the Hardy-Weinberg law? And hypotheses are a preliminary prediction about something; they aren’t in the same ballpark as theories and laws. A theory is “The grandest synthesis of a large and important body of information about some related group of natural phenomena”, according to Moore (from our intro textbook this year!) A law just refers to a body of observations that can be quanitatively summarized by a short mathematical (or in some cases, verbal) statement. I certainly do think that a law and a theory can be a statement of fact!

Moreover, the theory of evolution comes from one interpretation of available evidence. Contrary to Huntsman’s claim, the Republican Party is proving more scientific because of its legitimate recognition of the gaps in evolution.

To point out one weakness, evolution relies on the assumption that beneficial genetic information has been repeatedly added to genomes throughout the history of the universe. But not even Richard Dawkins, a leading evolutionary biologist from Oxford University, could name a single mutation that has added beneficial information.

Oh, piffle. Of course he can: read his books. Every evolutionary biologist can think of examples, and it’s trivial to find lists on the web. Biologists routinely identify traits with selective advantages.

It is not scientific when the Republican party denies reality.

I’m afraid it didn’t really cheer me up. I still feel icky and it’s no reassurance to know that clowns like Casey are lying in the newspapers.

(Also on Sb)

Targeting Eagleman

David Eagleman is an interesting, prolific, and lively neuroscientist who has unfortunately roused the ire of a few New Atheists with his sloppy criticisms of atheism and his flaky “Possibilianism” label — and now Sam Harris is hunting him with a big ol’ barbed harpoon. This could be fun!

What also makes it fun for me is that Eagleman will be visiting the University of Minnesota Morris campus on the 27th-28th of September, and he’ll also be popping into my Neurobiology course as a guest presenter. His lecture will be open to the public, but he’ll be talking about his latest book, not Possibilianism…but maybe we’ll be able to squeeze in a few questions.

Darn it, don’t tell me this

I have decided not to ever debate creationists any more. What settled it for me was the awful Jerry Bergman debate: I was deeply embarrassed to be sharing the stage with that raving fruitcake. It was clear that it was not an opportunity for rational discussion, and further, talking with members of the creationist majority afterwards, they were unanimous in their assessment that a) Bergman was an idiot whose clock got thoroughly cleaned, but b) so what? If FavoriteCreationist X had been there, he woulda showed me that evilution was false.

I felt like I was totally wasting my time and doing nothing but boosting Bergman’s reputation. And I decided on the spot that Gould and Dawkins were 100% correct, and debating was a fool’s errand.

But then, dammit, an ex-creationist explains what brought him over to the side of reason: watching debates.

So that’s why I say that we should debate creationists. I think that the majority of creationists simply were like me, uneducated about what evolution really is, blinded by fundamentalist religion that sees evolution as evil and ill-served by a public school system where biology teachers are afraid to teach evolution or don’t even accept it themselves.

Aaarrgh. I will not change my policy on the basis of this one account.

Maybe we should have a debate about whether to have debates…

(Also on Sb)

The sentiment pleases me

I haven’t seen this movie — heck, I never even heard of it before — but I was sent this clip and I rather liked it.

You see, no one’s going to help you Bubby, because there isn’t anybody out there to do it. No one. We’re all just complicated arrangements of atoms and subatomic particles – we don’t live. But our atoms do move about in such a way as to give us identity and consciousness. We don’t die; our atoms just rearrange themselves. There is no God. There can be no God; it’s ridiculous to think in terms of a superior being. An inferior being, maybe, because we, we who don’t even exist, we arrange our lives with more order and harmony than God ever arranged the earth. We measure; we plot; we create wonderful new things. We are the architects of our own existence. What a lunatic concept to bow down before a God who slaughters millions of innocent children, slowly and agonizingly starves them to death, beats them, tortures them, rejects them. What folly to even think that we should not insult such a God, damn him, think him out of existence. It is our duty to think God out of existence. It is our duty to insult him. Fuck you, God! Strike me down if you dare, you tyrant, you non-existent fraud! It is the duty of all human beings to think God out of existence. Then we have a future. Because then – and only then – do we take full responsibility for who we are. And that’s what you must do, Bubby: think God out of existence; take responsibility for who you are.

A whole new world of quacks

My wife and I have three kids, and while that pregnancy and childbirth thing is way, way back in the past, we did have some strong opinions after our experience. Midwives were wonderful, we had only the best and most positive experiences with them, and they were the indispensable supporters we were glad to have there. The doctors…meh. They didn’t seem to be involved much, and it was rather strange when they’d come by after all the work was done and sign the birth certificate, as if they were taking credit. But my wife had relatively uneventful, uncomplicated deliveries (the second was a bit rough, and she had to stay overnight for observation afterwards; that kid was gigantic), and we knew that the doctors were essential if things went wrong, and we would have been horrified and greatly worried if they hadn’t been there. All our kids were born in clinics, with professionals all around us, because we weren’t going to take any risks. Childbirth is dangerous when things go wrong, and they really can go very, very wrong.

But now I’ve discovered The Skeptical OB, and it’s all about this crazy kooky weird world of homebirthers — people who, just like anti-vaxxers and HIV denialists, refuse to recognize that modern medicine is actually incredibly powerful and useful, and have these bizarre myths about what is “natural”. So they insist on having their babies at home, away from those horrible doctors, and they end up with dead mothers and dead babies.

That last case is particularly eye-opening. A woman writes into a forum dispensing this quackery, and complains about ditching her OBGYN and going with an unlicensed midwife, and proceeded to go into labor for eight days and delivered a dead baby.

Or this case, where a homebirther is irate because doctors recommend against her desired natural childbirthing experience, because she’s “high risk”. She thinks she isn’t, because her first delivery was easy. But then she mentions that her second delivery had a minor problem: the kid got “stuck” and required resuscitation (!) after delivery, and her third child was born unresponsive and died two days later. And then she wonders why doctors are so worried!

It’s all very disturbing and new to me, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. There are all these strange people around who, for some unfathomable reason, worship pre-18th century medicine and make a fetish of “natural”. Heart attacks are also entirely “natural”, but you won’t catch me suggesting that we skip the doctor if I have one.

(Also on Sb)

What Steve Jobs did really well

Jobs is stepping down from his leadership role at Apple, as has been all over the news for the last several days, and I had to say that he’s someone I’ve really admired. Not just as a fully committed member of the Cult of Mac, but because I’ve really liked his style.

Here’s a video of Jobs addressing a rather insulting question…and answering it amazingly well.

He doesn’t get defensive, he doesn’t defend the details, he just steps back and explains what it means to have the whole picture in his head.

And then his management style was legendarily combative and critical. Jonah Lehrer has an excellent piece on the strengths and weaknesses of in-your-face confrontation. This resonates with me: I find a little strife extremely invigorating, and I know some personalities like to seek it out and wrestle with it.

At first glance, this cultivation of anger and criticism seems like a terrible idea. We assume that group collaboration requires niceties and affirmation, that we should always accentuate the positive. Just look at brainstorming, perhaps the most widely implemented creativity technique in the world. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborn, a founding partner of the advertising firm BBDO, outlined the virtues of brainstorming in a series of best-selling books. (He insisted that brainstorming could double the creative output of a group.) The most important principle, he said, was the total absence of criticism. According to Osborn, if people were worried about negative feedback, if they were concerned that their new ideas might get ridiculed by the group or the boss, then the brainstorming process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” Osborn wrote in Your Creative Power.

But maybe this is a big mistake. Maybe Steve Jobs was on to something when he refused to hide away his disappointment or displeasure. That, at least, is the takeaway of a new paper by Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Their first experiment was straightforward, demonstrating that anger was better at promoting “unstructured thinking” on a creativity task, at least when compared to sadness or a neutral mood. The second experiment elicited anger directly in the subjects, before asking them to brainstorm on ways to improve the condition of the natural environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.

You don’t change the world by placidly finding your bliss — you do it by focusing your discontent in productive ways.

(Also on Sb)

Sleaze and controversy from the American Freedom Association and Discovery Institute

Two years ago, a California science foundation gave permission to to the American Freedom Alliance (“freedom” is like “family” in these organizations; when you see it, you should be instantly suspicious) to show a movie in their IMAX theater. The film was titled “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record”, and it was an Intelligent Design propaganda piece. This happens fairly often; these sleazy organizations love to present the illusion of being scientific, so they like to rent out halls in museums and universities in order to put on their shows. The physics auditorium on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus is apparently a very popular venue for just that reason. But it does not imply any endorsement of the content of the movie by the venue owner — it’s being rented as a public exhibition space, nothing more.

Unfortunately, in this case the AFA and their co-enablers, the Discovery Institute (Hiss! Spit! Booooo!) did their very best to misrepresent this showing as an endorsement by the California Science Center Foundation. The DI was involved; you know they wanted to stir up controversy, because that’s what they do. And they got it: the foundation cancelled the showing over the false representations of endorsement. So the AFA sued them, again, exactly as the DI wanted.

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