I had to skip out on all the talks of the last day of the American Atheists convention — we’re entering the last two weeks of the semester, with lots of extra work, and usually I spend my weekends catching up on grading and preparing for the next week of content, so I’m already behind.

It was a good weekend though, although yesterday was all deja vu. So many talks on social justice! It sounded like an atheist conference from 15 years ago, with all the liberal weirdos standing up and talking about feminism and gay rights and how the atheist community needs to fight for equality, except this time around we didn’t have audience members leaving their seats and cornering the speakers later to hiss at them about how “atheism only means disbelief in gods, how dare you taint the meeting with liberalism” and then the speakers get assailed with nothing but hate mail from the unbelievers for a year afterwards. So it’s getting better. I think the religious right is actually helping things, because nowadays everyone is seeing the horrible consequences of raging conservatism on the country. The few times I heard Trump mentioned, the audience was snarling/groaning/booing in response.

One difference: no one was talking about science. Not one talk the entire weekend. I think that might be another unintended consequence of so many of the atheist-scientists of yore having turned out to be such roaring asshats. Thanks so much, Dawkins & Coyne & Harris & Pinker, you’ve made science a toxic pill in everyone’s mouth.

This old atheist found it to be an encouraging day.

• Keith Ellison spoke at an atheist conference despite being a Muslim because he’s committed to religious freedom and plurality. He also never shuts up about rights and freedoms, and Nick Fish, who was interviewing him, had an easy job since you can just wind Ellison up and he keeps going and going and going, saying all the right things.
• I spoke to Debbie Goddard for a bit, and she’s optimistic about the direction American Atheists is taking. They’re listening to the members and volunteers, and those people all want social justice to be a priority, and AA is listening. Hey, I feel less like an isolated weirdo over here.
• Aron Ra’s dog Falcor is a pretty cool dude.
• Do not leave your phone charger in the parking garage across the street. I did, and I was afraid to prowl the building after dark, so I’m going to have to wait for sunrise to get my phone working again.

Shortly, I’m going to retrieve my phone charger, maybe have breakfast, and then go off to a bunch of social justice talks. This should also be a good day.

I’m about to drive to Minneapolis for the American Atheists conference. I’m not as enthused as I ought to be.

Atheism is an important topic, especially given the ascendance of destructive Christianity in this country, but so much of the atheist movement has become orthogonal to everything else I value — somehow people can be libertarian atheists or conservative atheists without feeling any conflict with the movement, and that bugs me.

I’ve paid for it, and there are some good people there I’d like to see, so I guess I’m going to go anyway. Maybe I’ll be revitalized.

A new paper is out: A Critical Reassessment of the Anthropogenic CO₂-Global Warming Hypothesis: Empirical Evidence Contradicts IPCC Models and Solar Forcing Assumptions.

Let us examine the authors.

• Grok 3 beta: the first author is AI software, Elon Musk’s pet AI, to be specific. It is competent at stringing words together, but can you trust it?

• Jonathan Cohler: He’s a professional clarinetist with no scientific training (he has written software), but he’s also a vocal climate change denialist. Ironically, he’s also the author of The Puppeteers of Perception: How AI systems are designed to mislead. I guess now he has changed his mind and decided that AI is a path to the truth.

• David Legates: He actually has climatology credentials! But he’s been using them to deny climate change. He’s a creature of the Heartland Institute, and was recently appointed by Trump to a position at NOAA.

• Franklin Soon: He’s a high school kid. He’ll have to grow up a bit before we can kick him around.

• Willie Soon: A notorious climate crank. He’s an aerospace engineer affiliated with the Heartland Institute and a whole slew of far right think tanks. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly many millions, from the fossil fuel industry, but he works damn hard to lie about his ties. He’s generally an awful person, worst of the bunch on that paper. He’s apparently also corrupted a teenaged boy to follow his path in lunacy.

I am unperturbed by the human authors on this atrocity, who have been babbling like this for decades, but am very concerned about the use of AI to churn out garbage. The paper is dense and technical, and mostly impenetrable by me (dammit, Jim, I’m a biologist!), but clearly goes against the climate consensus, denying any role of carbon in global climate change. I’m going to reject its conclusions out of hand because a) it flouts all the information delivered by real, human, scientists who are experts in the field, b) it’s a machine-generated Frankensteinian mishmash cobbled together from cherry-picked sources; c) it was fed by a team of kook climate deniers who fed it garbage in, and got garbage out, designed to mislead. But you know all the climate change deniers are going to be citing this thing without question.

What I dread, though, is when even more denialists pick up on this. You want to argue against vaccines, or a spherical earth, or evolution, or racial equality, it’s easy: crank up Elon’s Lie-Making Machine, feed it trash from any of a number of delusional web sites, and it’ll spit up a technically dense, grammatically competent, flaming heap of bullshit that you can cite in your debates. I imagine the Discovery Institute and AiG and Jay Bhattacharya’s corrupted NIH already have some dumbass intern gearing up to crank out more papers with a shiny pseudoscientific gloss. The Gish Gallop will be mechanized.

In two weeks, I’m going to be attending the American Atheists convention in Minneapolis. I went back and forth on whether to go or not. I’ve never questioned the fact that I’m an unrepentant atheist, but I have struggled with the implementation of the atheist movement.

The last time I was actively involved with an organized atheist event was in 2016. Nine years ago! And that event was a glorious trip to Beijing, China to talk to a group of scientists/the public, organized by American Atheists. I enjoyed it immensely, visited the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, all the tourist sites. I was paired with David Silverman, then president of the group, who was fun to be with, especially since I wasn’t a woman. Unfortunately, shortly after we got back to the US, all hell broke loose, Silverman was fired, his family rejected him, it was incredibly ugly — it was sexual abuse and potential misuse of organization funds, etc. Was I disillusioned with the whole atheist movement, again? You betcha.

I considered dipping my toes back in the waters, especially since it was so conveniently close. Now I’m going to dive in and see what people are doing. American Atheist’s organization seems to be rightfully on track, with good people running the show — Silverman was replaced by Nick Fish, which was a huge improvement in values, if less flamboyance. The problem with atheism is that, as we all know, there are plenty of assholes who are members of the group, and you can’t expect to avoid jerks by hanging out with atheists. In fact, when the speaker list for the Minneapolis conference was published, I saw there was one colossal asshole featured, which was discouraging, but I figure I can tolerate one — it’s inevitable — and I just won’t be attending their talk and will be avoiding them scrupulously.

There are plenty of good atheists in attendance, but I wouldn’t mind if a few more of you were to attend and dilute the bad ones a bit more.

Anyway, I’ll let you all know how it goes. If nothing else, it’ll be a weekend in the big city.

Jay Bhattacharya is the new director of the National Institutes of Health. He says,

As NIH Director, I will build on the agency’s long and illustrious history of supporting breakthroughs in biology and medicine by fostering gold-standard research and innovation to address the chronic disease crisis.

Sure. Sounds great. How does he plan to accomplish that?

There is no step 2.

NO STEP 2. Just fire everyone.

Every few weeks, I get a fresh comment on an old video I made a about a year ago about Gilbert Ling. It’s low level stuff, remarkable only for the persistent trickle of comments I get, and because there are apparently people on the internet who practically worship this guy, Ling, who most people — even professional biologists — have never heard of.

Quick summary: Ling was an old scientist who, in the 1940s, concluded that the molecular engine that drives ion gradients in cells, the sodium-potassium pump, didn’t exist. That was a reasonable doubt in the ’40s, but became quixotic and bizarre as the evidence accumulated over the subsequent decades. Ling invented an idea he called the Association Induction hypothesis, and later the Polarized-Oriented Multilayer theory of cell water, neither of which have any empirical foundation, while the sodium-potassium pump is one of the better characterized molecules in the cell.

I think that explains the longevity of the support for his crackpottery. People love weird models of water, especially the quacks, who greatly appreciate having a cheap, ubiquitous substance that they can spin mystical jargon around to inflate the appearance of value. There are lots of miracle water claims on the internet, like Gel Water, H₃O₂, and its unlikely chemical structure.

I think I’m getting criticized by quacks who revere Ling as a credentialed scientist who legitimizes their opposition to scientific authorities and provides a pseudoscientific framework for their rationalizations.

Also, all the people whining about the oppression of poor Gilbert Ling can’t read, can’t understand the content of a video even, and can’t comprehend even a lay explanation of a biological phenomenon. This guy, for instance, tries to summarize what I wrote and doesn’t even come close.

Yeah. What I said.

Here’s a provocative idea from Gregory Paul: the churches are dying.

One might think that the religion in its vast array of guises continues to be a potent force in human societies. And of course in some ways it remains so, especially in the conservative, reactionary, often proautocracy, sometimes violent flavors that are causing so much trouble around today’s world – think of the Russian Orthodox church in bed with Putin and his war, and the Evangelical driven MAGA fast working to turn the USA into a Christian Nationalist Autocracy. But at the same time theism is in grave crisis as it suffers enormous losses in popularity in much of the world. Most of the first world has been highly secularized for decades. Even the United States, long thought the last bastion of popular western religion Christianity especially, is seeing the churches losing ground like a downhill skier, with membership down forty percent since the turn of the century to under half the population, The Southern Baptists are shrinking, those who do not believe in God were a mere few percent when Ike was president, hit near a tenth in the 2000s, and are nearly a fifth if not more these days. Bible literalism is down to a fifth as creationism is slipping, while support for evolutionary science grows. As Ronald Inglehart detailed in Religion’s Sudden Decline, theism is in big demographic trouble in much of the second and third worlds as well. So much so that about half of the people of the globe and even more among Americans no longer think religion has the answers to societies problems.

An anecdotal observation in support of this idea is that I’m seeing a lot of strident, desperate apologetics in my in-box and online, and all of it is stupid. Seriously. William Lane Craig? Lee Strobel? Josh McDowell? Frank Turek? Greg Koukl? These people are the worst, and their arguments are all old and tired. Then there are there followers, who are even worse.

It would be nice to imagine that people are finally waking up, that there is new wave of rationalism that is causing people to abandon old dogmas, that atheism is finally winning. Paul makes a case that that helps, but that it can’t be the main impetus for people losing their religion. Just look around you — is MAGA a rational movement? Is the American government a shining beacon of reason?

Paul argues that there is something else driving people out of the churches.

But there is another aspect of modernity that is giving popular religion a sucker punch in its vulnerable supernaturalistic belly, an item as far as I know what not been discussed to date. And that secularization force is….

Aliens.

Especially, ancient aliens.

Not actual ancient aliens that visited our pretty little planet in ancient times and in the process set up human civilizations while being mistaken for the gods that silly people then worship. The possibility that they really existed being very, very minimal to say the most. It’s the new, thrilling and hip belief in ancient astronauts, the exciting new and modern creation myth, that is helping wreck that old timey, yawn inducing religion.

He points out lots of circumstantial evidence for that. There’s this new wave of gullibility demonstrated in popular TV programming. How can Ancient Aliens be so popular? I tried watching Graham Hancock once, and couldn’t cope with his combination of ignorance and confidence. Science fiction and fantasy have taken over the movies, which us SF fans might think is benign, except we aren’t wondering why people flocked to Star Wars.

Paul is also a science popularizer, and he’s running into a rising class of inquiry. Did ancient aliens kill the dinosaurs? That’s a question I never even thought of until now.

While flat earth geography remains fringe, AA is transforming the culture. When folks learn I research dinosaurs they often ask me the Big Four – are birds dinosaurs (yes like bats are flying mammals), were dinosaurs warm-blooded (yep), how do we know what color they were (we usually don’t, but of late preserved color pigments are giving us clues), and did the asteroid really kill them off (looks like, although massive volcanism going on down in India may have played a role). But I have of late received a new query. It starts with the asker looking at me as if I am going to tell them the real truth! So they make the ask. Was it aliens that actually killed off the dinosaurs to clear the way for humanity? I say no – can then see their disappointment that I am part of the conspiracy to hide the plain truth – and proceed to explain why the documentary biz is all about making money in part based on my personal experience and they don’t care what kind of schlock goods they put out as long as it generates revenue from the viewers whose interests are low on their priority list. I hope to at least sow some seeds of doubt. Worth a shot.

Come to think of it, I was also surprised by how many people have asked me whether octopus were of alien origin, an idea I would never have taken seriously.