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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’ll be on this show in about a half hour. Tune in!
I know that I need a haircut, and I was losing my voice here, and that this Matt Powell character is an awful little pipsqueak who doesn’t deserve any attention, but I wanted to throw together a little video because I was bemused by the fact that he was using those claims about aliens by Wickramasinghe to condemn all of evolutionary since. When he started incredulously yelling that “THIS IS WHAT EVOLUTION TEACHES,” that squid piggy-backed on asteroids to populate the planet, I just had to point out that this is most definitely not what evolution teaches, and that it was plain bad science.
I think I’m far more pissed off at those phonies affiliated with panspermia, and their long-running infiltration of the science establishment, than I am with a not-very-bright loudmouthed kid babbling about Jesus.
And if I’m mad at those wackos, you can’t imagine how furious I get with those frauds promoting evolutionary psychology.
I decided to address a few of Kent Hovind’s stupid points in a video.
SpaceX had a planned manned space flight the other day, postponed now until tomorrow, so is it too soon to complain about the whole project? Here’s an article, The Case Against Mars, which asks a really simple question: WHY?
Why are billionaires like Musk and Bezos and Branson eager to take on the complex and expensive task of launching rockets into orbit and eventually to Mars? Why is Mars even a reasonable destination for human colonization? So the author of this article, Byron Williston, does the obvious thing: he looks at SpaceX’s own justifications, which turn out to be astonishingly vapid. Anyone should be able to see right through this crap.
To get a sense of the first attempted justification, by far the most ubiquitous of the three, return to that SpaceX promo-video. Narrated by Musk himself, the “case” for Mars it lays out has been invoked by space expansionists since humans began fantasizing about occupying other celestial bodies—asteroids, moons, and planets—and building rockets powerful enough to take us to them. The simple idea is that expansion is the next step in evolution and that we ought to push it forward. Life has evolved from single-celled organisms, has migrated from the oceans onto land, has exploded into myriad forms of multi-celled organisms, and has somehow produced consciousness. The next step, Musk says, is surely to make life “multiplanetary.”
With characteristic inarticulacy he summarizes the argument this way: “if something is important enough to fit on the scale of evolution, then it’s important.” It’s not obvious whether that’s a tautology or a non sequitur, but in either case it is breathtakingly facile. You get the impression that the appeal to evolution is semi-intellectual cover for Musk’s sense of wonder at his own chutzpah. This feeling that they are doing something so big that it defies all attempts at rational comprehension shows up frequently among technology’s high priests.
That’s not how evolution works! Elon Musk doesn’t get to dictate the necessary direction of future human evolution. This is just weird biased progressivism imposed on the pattern of diversity. There isn’t some kind of internal biological need to adapt to live in uninhabitable environments. Can we just openly admit that Mars is not a place where human beings can live, no matter how many potatoes you think you can grow in poop? Manned missions to Mars are suicide missions, something that isn’t going to be favored by evolution.
That’s one justification that is totally bogus. Surely they’ve got better ones?
That brings us, finally, to the other two attempted justifications for space expansion: that the program will safeguard the long-term future of our species and that it will enhance human freedom. The first idea arises from the observation that given the inevitable heat death of the sun a billion or so years from now, our career on this planet is ultimately doomed, so we’d better figure out a way of transporting ourselves out of the solar system as soon as possible. The idea seems to be that discovering the planet’s finitude has somehow massively accelerated the imperative to leave it. In a remark quoted by many space expansionists pushing this line of thought, Tsiolkovsky once said that “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle for ever.”
This is a stunningly silly argument. It’s a bit like learning you will have to leave the family nest several years down the road, then deciding you had better start packing right away. As Deudney notes, we have a few hundred million years to prepare for the Sun’s death, making that event completely irrelevant to our policy choices in the coming decades and centuries. Perhaps instead of worrying about being swallowed up by an expiring star in an impossibly distant future we might devote an equivalent amount of intellectual and political energy to avoiding climate catastrophe on this planet within the next decade or two. Just a suggestion.
If you are seriously concerned about the viability of the human species, why are you rushing to ship a handful of people off to their death on an inhospitable rock rather than developing technologies that maintain the health of planet Earth? If you care about “human freedom”, how does moving a subset of humanity into a confined, fragile habitat that requires tight restrictions on the inhabitants’ behavior help that? None of this makes any sense.
It makes sense to send probes to explore other planets — we learn things. It makes sense to put satellites into orbit — we learn things about our planet, and it enables all kinds of useful communications technologies. It does not make sense to launch people off to Mars. It’s rather shocking that SpaceX has no legitimate defense of Musk’s grand goal. But then, what else could we expect from goofball who also can’t defend his idea of boring lots of tunnels under cities?
It’s also not “Meyers”. As promised, Kent Hovind has uploaded his “Whack An Atheist – PZ Meyers” video to YouTube, and I’m so disappointed, since he didn’t whack me at all. He spends the whole time ranting and raving about Ernst Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law, insisting that any mention of pharyngeal structures in embryos is a lie, and that embryology does not support evolution. There are more than a few problems with his argument.
Throughout, Hovind repeatedly challenges me and others to a debate. There’s a reason I’m not going to do that: Hovind relies entirely on strawmanning me, and I’d have to spend most of the “debate” trying to explain how he doesn’t understand evolution, embryology, or me.
Also, charmer that he is, references the fact that evolutionary biology is taught at Kent State, says “we all know what happened there”, and explains it away as thanks to the students being taught that “they were animals”. That would be the moment in any debate where I’d have to dither, trying to decide between walking off the stage or kicking Hovind in the balls first, then walking off the stage. It’s the eternal dilemma when engaging someone as vile as Hovind.
If he wants to debate anyone, apparently he really wants to engage Ernst Haeckel. Go to Jena, Germany, where he died in 1919. Bring a shovel.
Kent Hovind has informed me that I’m being featured on his YouTube channel tonight.
Heads up PZ, every Wednesday night i do a “Whack an atheist” show on my YouTube channel kenthovindofficial and tonight, 5-27-20, you were honored as the self proclaimed atheist to get whacked. 😊
I would gladly pay my own way to come to Morris and debate you and your followers on the best three evidences for the religion of evolutionism or you can come to Dinosaur adventure land in Lenox Alabama and I’ll give you a tour of our science center and then debate you on my channel. Call 855-big-dino ext 3 to talk to me or ext 2 to schedule a debate or ext 1 to order my creation seminar series to learn real science and learn how to have your sins forgiven and become a child of God.
Ho hum. Should I care?
No, I’m not interested in his “evidences”.
This philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has a remarkably pessimistic view of the future of academia. He has written a requiem for the students — as if they’re all dead now — because we’re using online teaching.
As we foresaw they would, university lessons next year will be held online [in English]. What was evident to careful observers — namely, that the so-called pandemic would be used as a pretext for the increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies — is being duly realized.
We are not so much interested here in the consequent transformation of teaching, in which the element of physical presence (always so important in the relationship between students and teachers) disappears definitively, as we are in the disappearance of group discussion in seminars, which was the liveliest part of instruction. Part of the technological barbarism that we are currently living through is the cancellation from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen.
Actually, I don’t yet know how university classes will be held next year. We’re tentatively hoping that we’ll have some measure of normality restored, and are planning as if we’ll have students on campus in the fall, but we also have contingency plans in the works in case we’re only partially open, or have to close the campus after starting, or who knows what. This is also not a “so-called pandemic”, it’s an actual pandemic. We have to respond appropriately to a serious disease, because what’s most important is the health and safety of our students. Most of us aren’t particularly interested in having these young men and women sit at our feet and worship our words of wisdom, especially when it puts their lives at risk.
I’d rather go back to the old, comfortable, in-person methods of teaching, and it’s true that we’ve lost something when we have to do everything online. But he’s wrong about some things: I didn’t find that group discussion suffered particularly. The hard part for me was the asynchronous lecturing — losing the immediate feedback from having an audience, and not being able to punctuate an explanation with an opportunity to put students to work applying the methods. It took me a few weeks to get into the swing of it all, but near the end I was getting some very good group discussions going on Zoom. You just have to learn to use the medium. You, the teacher, have to adapt and change. I read Giorgio’s whine, and he sounds like a guy who doesn’t want to learn anything new, and is very good at inventing pompous excuses.
Some things are highly unsatisfactory when translated to the screen — lab work in particular is pretty much impossible to do well. I want to see that restored as soon as possible, but other bits don’t suffer much at all. Philosophy, for instance, ought to be eminently teachable through a “spectral screen”. Bodies are just another kind of meat robot holding the brains we want to reach, after all.
At first, Giorgio just sounds like a cranky old person who doesn’t want to do anything new. But reading further, I had to conclude he’s just a loon. His conclusion is stunningly out of touch.
1. Professors who agree — as they are doing en masse — to submit to the new dictatorship of telematics and to hold their courses only online are the perfect equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to the Fascist regime. As happened then, it is likely that only fifteen out of a thousand will refuse, but their names will surely be remembered alongside those of the fifteen who did not take the oath.
Whoa. Reluctantly accepting constraints on our familiar methodology for the sake of our students’ health is the equivalent of fascism? We’ve got students who want to learn, and compromising in our approach is not surrendering to the dictatorship of the ‘spectral screen’. It’s persevering in the face of adversity to do everything we can to educate people.
But then, this is a guy who thinks the pandemic is “so-called” and is a bit out of touch with reality. Does he need a few students to die before he wakes up to the cost of his intransigence?
2. Students who truly love to study will have to refuse to enroll in universities transformed in this way, and, as in the beginning, constitute themselves in new universitates, only within which, in the face of technological barbarism, the word of the past might remain alive and something like a new culture be born — if it will be born.
It’s not “technological barbarism”, it’s a tool for communication. That’s what teaching is about.
I don’t think that encouraging students to gather in large groups to give old farts the ability to engage with them in the traditional way is safe or sensible. We’re all looking forward to the day medical treatments restore our universities to their familiar modes of operation, but until then, respect the health of our communities and fire up the damned Zoom thingie. Make do. Try new approaches. Show a little flexibility.
A reader informed me that I was mentioned in a British magazine, and sent me a scan of the relevant bit. It’s not so much my brief mention that interested me, as that it’s another example of the Panspermia Mafia in action. It’s an article about a recently elected Conservative MP, Jamie Wallis, who has a science degree…or does he?
Dominic Cummings has bemoaned the fact that many MPs “did degrees such as English, history, and PPE. They operate with…little maths or science.” Thankfully, Dr Jamie Wallis, the new Conservative MP for Bridgend, is that rarest of things: an MP with not just a science degree, but a PhD in “astrobiology” to boot.
Where it gets interesting is that he obtained a PhD from, I presume, Cardiff University, which was NC Wickramasinghe’s former affiliation, although he has since ensconced himself at the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology. There is reason to doubt that Wallis actually did the caliber of work we expect in a PhD thesis.
Completing a PhD while co-directing several companies is quite an achievement. Wallis’s thesis, “Evidence of Panspermia: From Astronomy to Meteorites”, is devoted to the niche and widely rejected theories of his supervisor, one NC Wickramasinghe. Notoriously, Wickramasinghe maintains not only that life on earth arrived on comets, but that organisms continue to regularly arrive by this method. (Just last week, he wrote to the Lancet helpfully suggesting the novel coronavirus COVID-19 arrived in China from space.)
Why does the Lancet, or any respectable journal, continue to publish crank letters from Wickramasinghe? But OK, I think it’s established that Wallis’s degree was somehow earned under the supervision of a well-known fringe kook, and that it’s questionable how much work he actually invested in the project, which sounds like some kind of review involving no independent research.
But why do I call this the Panspermia Mafia? They use their connections to promote a small family of fellow travelers.
Appropriately, given that the theory of cosmic panspermia is about origins, involvement with Wickramasinghe seems to be a Wallis family affair. A typical thesis might produce several publications. Wallis Jnr’s thesis lists an astonishing 21 with him as an author — mostly not in peer-reviewed journals — 16 of which include his dad in the author list. And of the eight publications that supposedly have been peer-reviewed, six are in the highly dubious Journal of Cosmology. Wickramasinghe is the “executive editor” for astrobiology for the journal, described by US scientist PZ Myers as the “ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics”.
Yeah, that’s about it — it’s so inbred that it relies on the one guy who has a name and connections but very little credibility, Wickramasinghe, to promote the members of his cabal in a roster of fake journals. This article didn’t examine them in detail, but I suspect that all 21 of the articles are rehashed, recycled, barely rewritten examples of frantic self-plagiarism. To say you got a degree with Wickramasinghe is the British equivalent of saying you’re a colleague of Kent Hovind.
Isn’t it nice that he provides a pipeline for Conservatives to claim they have the authority of science? Just in case you’re wondering, no, they don’t.
I want to shop here now.
Karen gets upset that a store won't let her shop without a protective facemask. She then tried to pretend like she's the victim, despite the store giving her options. This is pure arrogance. https://t.co/qgFLhKjgxd #COVIDIDIOTS #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/OXV4EQLOgD
— Khary Penebaker (@kharyp) May 17, 2020
A problematic customer walks up to a store with a clearly marked policy that you must wear a mask, and everyone cheerfully informs her of everything they can do to help her: they can get her whatever she wants (she refuses, she claims she needs “personal things”, which is silly since she has to inform the store about what she’s buying when she checks out), that they can take her credit card and pay for it for her (she objects that they’d get her financial info, which they do every time she swipes the card herself anyway), yet she just generally makes an ass of herself…and the staff are as obliging as they can be. Stores should use this as a training video for how to deal with a bad customer.
The woman’s name is Shelley Lewis, and she suffers from a severe case of entitled dumbassery.
Heavy.com catalogued the Twitter background checks that began popping up Sunday about Lewis, who seems from her Facebook presence to be a real prize.
Among the topics of conversation are some conspiracy crazy greatest hits, including 5G towers, 9/11, fake moon landings, and the Earth is flat. And, as Twitter quickly found, Lewis is loud and proud in her belief system, having appeared on this Jubilee Media discussion on YouTube, arguing with scientists about whether Earth is flat.
“I live in Dana Point,” she says at one point in this video. “We see too far… I can see San Clemente Island, which is 60 miles away.” She also contends that as ships disappear she can still see them with a zoom lens.
Lewis was a speaker at the Flat Earth International Conference last year, and in her bio it states, “She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she entertained hopes of becoming an AstroNOT.” It further says she was discharged from the military after being diagnosed with lupus, and she now treats the condition with a vegan lifestyle and alternative medicine.
The problem with America is that we’ve allowed this kind of inanity to flourish unchecked, to the point where Entitle Dumbassery can run for president and win.
Oh. Ray Comfort is still making his dishonest videos? Here’s the trailer for the latest, title “Amazing Athiest [sp]: A journey of two atheists”.
Do you know those two guys? Are they supposed to be representative atheists? You know Comfort’s schtick: he confronts random people in the street who probably haven’t thought much about the subject he’s asking about, and then puts up a gloating video claiming that “hurr, hurr, hurr — look at these people who aren’t professional debaters.” Or, as the blurb says, “See their inconsistencies and struggles as they attempt to justify their blind faith.” This looks to be more of the same.
I’ll skip it.
