Someone is unfamiliar with the idea of pareidolia

You know what it is.

pareidolia
[ˌperēˈdōlēə]
NOUN
the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines.
“there could be a mysterious stone coffin on Mars, or, more likely, it’s just the latest example of pareidolia”

We’ve all seen shapes in clouds, or Jesus on a pita, but Mars seems to be a magnet for this phenomenon. This week, William Romoser, a well-known entomologist, presented a paper at the Entomology society meetings in St Louis titled “Does insect/arthropod biodiversity extend beyond earth?”

There is ample evidence to answer the question posed by the title in the affirmative. For several years, I have been engaged in study of the NASA-JPL photographs transmitted to Earth from the surface vehicles sent to explore Mars, Curiosity Rover in particular. These photos are available to the public via the internet. In this poster, I present and discuss numerous examples of insect/arthropod-like forms (fossil & living) found in Mars rover photos. Examples include insect-like forms displaying apparent diversity, clearly recognizable insect/arthropod anatomical features, and flight. Evidence of a fossil reptile-like (serpentine) form and reptile-like forms preying on insect-like forms is also presented. Each example is documented. These findings provide a compelling basis for further study and raise many important questions.

This is the new hobby for old cranks: poring over blurry photographs from exotic places, or odd-shaped rocks, and then leaping to the grand conclusion that it looks vaguely like X, therefore X lives in this place. Remember Mark McMenamin? He found fossil vertebrae, thought they were arranged in a pattern, and decided they were art created by an ancient kraken. Mars is a great font of pareidolia, with Schiaparelli thinking he saw canals, then Percival Lowell thinking likewise, and then there was the Face on Mars, which produced an explosion of very silly books and web pages in the 80s.

Now this guy is spotting all kinds of insects in still photos from the Mars rovers.

“Once a clear image of a given form was identified and described, it was useful in facilitating recognition of other less clear, but none-the-less valid, images of the same basic form,” Romoser said. “An exoskeleton and jointed appendages are sufficient to establish identification as an arthropod. Three body regions, a single pair of antennae, and six legs are traditionally sufficient to establish identification as ‘insect’ on Earth. These characteristics should likewise be valid to identify an organism on Mars as insect-like. On these bases, arthropodan, insect-like forms can be seen in the Mars rover photos.”

Distinct flight behavior was evident in many images, Romoser said. These creatures loosely resemble bumble bees or carpenter bees on Earth. Other images show these “bees” appearing to shelter or nest in caves. And others show a fossilized creature that resembles a snake.

I’ll let you be the judge. Do these look like Martian insects to you?

They look like fuzzily photographed rocks with circles and arrows and labels scribbled on them to me.

Besides, as everyone knows, there aren’t any beetles on Mars — they’re from Liverpool. Mars is supposed to have spiders.

I’m going to have to disagree with you there, Snopes

You’ve probably heard about this Ohio law that dictates that teachers can’t penalize students for religious references in their essays and exams. Snopes thinks it’s harmless, and doesn’t affect the separation of church and state. I’m going to say that that is only true if you entirely ignore context and history and take every word literally. Here’s the law:

Sec. 3320.03. No school district board of education, governing authority of a community school established under Chapter 3314. of the Revised Code, governing body of a STEM school established under Chapter 3326. of the Revised Code, or board of trustees of a college-preparatory boarding school established under Chapter 3328. of the Revised Code shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work.

It’s true, it does say “grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance,” but I have to ask…what is the purpose of this law? That’s how we calculate grades and scores now! Is there some mysterious network of teachers who have been using the frequency of “Praise Jesus!” comments in essays as an essential rubric? This is a law purportedly stating rules for STEM classes, where religious statements are irrelevant. Why do we need a law to set standards for religious statements?

Right now, if a student answers an exam question with the words “Praise Jesus” somewhere on the page, like a little doodle that they did in their spare time, I’d treat it exactly as I would if they sketched a picture of a dinosaur…as something to to ignore. However, if every other sentence in an essay was about Jesus (or dinosaurs — I don’t teach paleontology), I’d start marking it down for incoherence or irrelevancy. “Ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance” prohibit religious expression in most circumstances because we’re going to value clarity, brevity, and accuracy, so this law is redundant.

Except that what it’s really about is getting religion into the STEM curriculum somehow. It’s saying, “Don’t think of an elephant,” knowing that it immediately puts religious parents on guard to protest if their favorite creation myth isn’t discussed in biology class. This law was not written by someone concerned about the teaching of science, but by someone who wants to guarantee that theology will be brought up in science class.

Another way to think of it is that this is a law about a peculiar non-issue. Imagine if Ohio created a law that said you cannot prohibit or penalize a student from engaging in discussion of Jack Nicklaus, golfing legend, in homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Would this actually be a proposal to guarantee fairness in science teaching, or do you think it would be more of an effort to promote Jack Nicklaus? Or golfing. Or the lawmaker’s golf course.

We’ve also got decades of precedent where creationists like to nibble away, inserting references to their beliefs in all kinds of laws, and then standing back with an expression of incredulity that you’d find this harmless little acknowledgment of America’s Christian heritage at all offensive, but they’ll build on it and grow and grow the Jesus nonsense a phrase at a time into the law books. They’re patient and dedicated. That law is only the first step to expand religious bias into STEM classes, I promise you.

How did the so-called rationalist community become so gullible?

Here we go again. Remember that silly “Sovereign Nations” conference? An obscure organization — actually little more than a single crank with money — invites a couple of dubious atheist celebrities to a weekend in London to give a couple of talks. Sure, that’s a conference all right, by definition, and that’s how many currently respected atheist conferences had their beginning, but it’s not much of an effort to communicate and share ideas. What made it weird is that some people treated it as a distinctive mark of honor that conferred instant credibility on a particular narrow point of view. It didn’t help that Richard Dawkins praised it (at first…when he learned that organizer was a strange religious conservative, he back-pedaled.)

It’s happening again. In this case, two people I never heard of announced an atheist conference in England and immediately got an endorsement from Richard Dawkins. It’s called the Anti-Theism International Convention. They got some respectable people, like Maryam Namazie and Stephen Law and Aron Ra, and then…Lawrence Krauss. A gaggle of YouTubers better known for their opposition to transgender issues and support for Rationality Rules. Lurking in their unused video promos is Richard Carrier. I think I can already detect a bias here — this is just another reaction to #MeToo, trying to whitewash misogyny.

One of the organizers is someone named John Richards, the publications director for Atheist Alliance International. You know, the organization that recently hired David Silverman. By this time, the whole thing is reeking of sliminess.

But OK, they have the right to organize a conference, and I’m not going to oppose it. Please do go buy a ticket for £199 if this is the kind of thing that floats your boat. I’ll just mention that you’re being bamboozled. This is an impromptu money grab by a small group in a pretend organization that didn’t exist until this past July, when they created a Facebook page, a Facebook page that is practically empty of content and has no commenters. It’s an empty shell of an organization that seems to have been a spontaneous brain fart by a pair of obscure nobodies.

Again, that’s fine. That’s how big events get started, and they all have to get started somewhere. I’ll just point out that this one contains a heck of a lot of ridiculous claims.

One of their big things is a gala awards banquet, in which they’ll be handing out awards for “Atheist of the Year” and “Jesus Mythicist of the Year” and “Best Atheist Video of the Year”, etc. You can make nominations, if you’d like, but a panel of unnamed judges will make the final decision, and I suspect that all the winners will conform to the organizer’s somewhat regressive political leanings. Furthermore, the hyperbole will turn your stomach.

You’ve heard of the Oscars, Emmys and Baftas?

This is the Attys! (the Anti-Theism International Awards)

Yes, I’ve heard of the Oscars, Emmys and Baftas. The “Attys” are not exactly of the same rank. It gets worse.

The Atty Awards are probably the most prestigious Awards in the Atheist Community and winning a Atty Award will not only get you recognition within the Atheist Community, it will give you a chance to enjoy giving worldwide speaking engagements as well as Keynote presentations at many events around the world. The Awards will be presented by some of the most famous atheist on the planet and the winners will be invited to the VIP area of the after awards ceremony for photo opportunites and press talks.

These “Atty Awards” have not been given out before, are a new invention of this oddly new and nebulous organization, and they are already the most prestigious award an atheist can get? Wow. Winning one will get you worldwide speaking engagements? Really? I sure hope none of the winners proudly advertise themselves as recipients of an Atty Award, because it’s not going to impress. I think all it means is that John Richards likes you this year, and that and $3 will get you a cup of coffee from the Caribou stand in the supermarket in Morris, Minnesota.

OK, I’ll sweeten the deal. I’m giving out the Morris Award for the Most Lost Atheist of 2020 to the first godless person to hit me up at the Willies Supervalu. I’ll even pay for the cup of coffee. Keep the cup, because I’m sure it will get you prestigious invitations to worldwide speaking engagements.

Our greatest ally was unexpected

A decade ago, when vocal atheists were busy denouncing Christianity and other religions and furiously writing books against them, who would have thought that evangelical Christians themselves would deliver the death blow to their faith?

It’s amazing. All the values they claimed to have, that they claimed were sacred and intrinsic to their religion, casually discarded and converted to praise for a wealthy, corrupt boor. They just took everything we said was wrong with Christianity and validated it.

Unfortunately, at the same time, much of atheism decided to abandon the moral high ground and join the Christians in anti-feminism, anti-immigration, racist bullshit, so we can’t claim victory. It seems to be a general failure of humanity.

Deep Rifts have become gaping, uncrossable chasms

Krista Cox, chair of the Leadership Council of the Feminist Humanist Alliance, has a few words about what the hiring of David Silverman means. This is a good summary of the Silverman Situation–it’s a rift so deep we’re separating into different continents.

Enter the newly hired executive director of Atheist Alliance International (AAI), a global federation of atheist groups and individuals who endeavor to “make the world a safer place for atheists.” On October 11, 2019, AAI announced that it had created the new ED position and hired former American Atheists president David Silverman. A week and a half later, on his “Firebrand for Good” YouTube page, Silverman declared that we, as a culture, are post-sexism. He went on to state that the gender pay gap is fake, the glass ceiling has been smashed (because it’s “better visually” for companies to hire women now), and that since second-wave feminism won, modern feminists can stop being so angry about inconsequential nonsense.

Silverman’s comments confirmed what I feared about the nontheistic movement, and his hiring both surprised and concerned me.

Silverman’s recent anti-feminist and anti-social justice statements, as well as associations with antagonists of both movements, are legion, but I’ll limit my coverage to just a few. On September 20 he wrote he is “no longer a progressive feminist” and admitted to being “red-pilled,” a reference to a quarantined Reddit forum for Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) widely known to be anti-feminist and rife with misogyny. In a September 22 podcast episode titled “Feminist Tyranny,” Silverman asserted personally or agreed with the host (MRA-adjacent Sargon of Akkad) on a number of concerning ideas, including that women are using feminism and the #MeToo movement to “secure personal privilege” and that social justice is a “cancerous social movement” that “has to be undone.” Around the same time he did an interview with female MRA Karen Straughan and the men behind Mythcon, the conference that controversially gave platforms to several anti-social-justice atheists; he retweeted an October 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Social Justice Warriors Won’t Listen, but You Should” that mocked concepts like white fragility and systemic complicity in white supremacy and misogyny; and on October 17 he shared a video suggesting that more rape allegations are false than we think (part of a video series that includes “Feminazi vs. Reality”).

“Bye regressive left,” Silverman tweeted on September 23. “I have a lot of regrets for being in your whiney culty immitation [sic] of feminism.”

A few years ago, Silverman’s supportive words for feminism and social justice convinced me to become a lifetime member of American Atheists. Can I get my money back? (Not really, AA did a good thing in giving Silverman the axe…I would be really pissed if he was still in charge there.)

This is way too familiar, though.

It’s becoming a repeated refrain: man holds himself up as a feminist; man experiences consequences for misogynistic actions; on reflection, man decides social justice warriors are the real problem.

I’d say you could kick me out of the movement if ever I become as hypocritical and repugnant as David Silverman, but it’s not much of a promise since I was de facto expelled already, years ago. I’d say “By regressive right”, except that “regressive” and “right” are synonyms, making it redundant.

Hey, you think they’ll finally let Dave into CPAC?

Bad science tries to drip its way into everything

You want to read a really good take-down of a bad science paper? Here you go. It’s a plea to Elsevier to retract a paper published in Personality and Individual Differences because…well, it’s racist garbage, frequently cited by racists who don’t understand the science but love the garbage interpretation. It really is a sign that we need better reviewers to catch this crap.

The paper is by Rushton, who polluted the scientific literature for decades, and Templer, published in 2012. It’s titled “Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?”, and you can tell what it’s trying to do: it’s trying to claim there is a genetic linkage between skin color and sexual behavior and violence, justifying it with an appeal to biology. It fails, because the authors don’t understand biology or genetics.

They’re advocating something called the pleiotropy hypothesis, which is the idea that every gene has multiple effects (this is true!), and that therefore every phenotype has effects that ripple across to every other phenotype (partially, probably mostly true), so that seeing one aspect of a phenotype means you can make valid predictions about other aspects of the phenotype (mostly not at all true). This allows them to abuse a study in other mammals to claim that human outcomes are identical. Here’s the key graf:

The basis of the pleiotropy hypothesis presented by Rushton and Templer hinges on a citation from Ducrest et al. (2008), which posits ‘pleiotropic effects of the melanocortins might account for the widespread covariance between melanin-based coloration and other phenotypic traits in vertebrates.’ However, Rushton and Templer misrepresent this work by extending it to humans, even though Ducrest et al. (2008) explicitly state, ‘these predictions hold only when variation in melanin-based coloration is mediated by variation in the level of the agonists at MC1R… [conversely] there should be no consistent association between melanin-based coloration and other phenotypic traits when variation in coloration is due to mutations at effectors of melanogenesis such as MC1R [as is the case in humans].’ Ducrest et al. continue, ‘variation in melanin-based coloration between human populations is primarily due to mutations at, for example, MC1R, TYR, MATP and SLC24A5 [29,30] and that human populations are therefore not expected to consistently exhibit the associations between melanin-based coloration and the physiological and behavioural traits reported in our study’ [emphasis mine]. Rushton and Templer ignore this critical passage, saying only ‘Ducrest et al. (2008) [caution that], because of genetic mutations, melanin-based coloration may not exhibit these traits consistently across human populations.’ This is misleading. The issue is not that genetic mutations will make melanin-based pleiotropy inconsistent across human populations, but that the genes responsible for skin pigmentation in humans are completely different to the genes Ducrest et al. describe.

To translate…developmental biologists and geneticists are familiar with the concept of an epistatic pathway, that is, of genes affecting the expression of other genes. So, for instance, Gene A might switch on Gene B which switches on Gene C, in an oversimplified pattern of regulation.

Nothing is ever that simple, we know. Gene A might also switch on Gene Delta and Gene Gamma — this is called pleiotropy, where one gene has multiple effects. And Gene Gamma might also activate Gene B, and Gene B might feed back on Gene A, and B might have pleiotropic effects on Gene Beta and Gene E and Gene C.

This stuff gets delightfully tangled, and is one of the reasons I love developmental biology. Everything is one big complex network of interactions.

What does this have to do with Rushton & Templer’s faulty interpretation? They looked at a study that identified mutations in a highly pleiotropic component of the pigmentation pathway — basically, they’re discussing Gene A in my cartoon — and equating that to a terminal gene in humans, equivalent to Gene C in my diagram. Human variations in skin color are mostly due to mutations in effector genes at the end of the pathway, like MC1R. It will have limited pleiotropic effects compared to genes higher up in the epistatic hierarchy, like the ones Ducrest et al. described. Worst of all, Ducrest et al. explicitly discussed how the kind of comparison Rushton & Templer would make is invalid! They had to willfully edit the conclusions to make their argument, which is more than a little dishonest.

It reminds me of another recent disclosure of a creationist paper that also misrepresented its results. This paper, published in the International Journal of Neuroscience, openly declared that it had evidence for creationism.

In the paper, Kuznetsov reportedly identified an mRNA from one vole species that blocked protein synthesis in a related vole species. That same mRNA, however, did not block translation in the original vole species or another species that was more distantly related. The finding, Kuznetsov wrote in his report, supported “the general creationist concept on the problems of the origin of boundless multitudes of different and harmonically functioning forms of life.”

I vaguely remember reading that paper and rolling my eyes at how weak and sloppy the data was — it was never taken seriously by anyone but creationists. I don’t recall the details, though, because it was published 30 years ago, and is only now being retracted, after decades of the author fabricating data and being so obvious about it that he was fired as editor of two journals in 2013. The guy had a reputation, shall we say. Yet he managed to maintain this academic facade for years.

Phillipe Rushton had similarly managed to keep up the pretense of being a serious academic for an awfully long time, right up until his death in 2012. He used his reputation to spray all kinds of fecal nonsense into the scientific literature, and that’s why you have to maintain a skeptical perspective even when reading prestigious journals.

Garbage in, garbage all over the place

I just bumped into this 2 year old article in Forbes. Forbes is all sober, serious, conservative bullshit, right? This piece isn’t sober at all. It’s about post-apocalyptic visions of the future and how billionaires are buying up vast tracts of land far away from the coast because they know what’s going to happen. Normally, I wouldn’t put it past billionaires to pull off all kinds of perfidious schemes, but in this case, I suspect it’s more that lots of acreage is available and cheap far inland, rather than that they’re preparing for doomsday.

You just have to look at the sources.

In the early 1980’s, spiritual visionaries and futurists provided clues to our changing planet. Often dismissed as crazy prophets, their thoughts for a new world were quickly ignored and laughed at. Gordon-Michael Scallion was a futurist, teacher of consciousness studies and metaphysics and a spiritual visionary. In the 80’s he claims to have had a spiritual awakening that helped him create very detailed maps of future world, all stemming from a cataclysmic pole shift. The result, while not based on any science, nonetheless provides a vivid and compelling picture of an Earth ravaged by flooding.

My emphasis. Note also that Gordon-Michael Scallion was a co-host on Coast to Coast AM, that pioneering talk radio show that let the conservative world know you could get away with saying anything you wanted on radio.

So, in the event of a post asteroid apocalypse, where are the safest territories in the world? According to several prognosticators and much criticized theorists, here is the detailed list of predicted land changes based on geological positioning. All post polar shift predictions are based on theories from Gordon-Michael Scallion, Edgar Cayce and others, and should not be construed as fact.

I haven’t heard the name of Edgar Cayce invoked seriously in decades. I wonder if people have forgotten who he was? He was called the “sleeping prophet”, because he’d do clairvoyant readings while pretending to be asleep, and made all kinds of goofy predictions and claims of past history (he was big on Atlantis stories and reincarnation). But that’s enough to tell you about the quality of the pile of maps which are published. In Forbes. With an author admitting that they’re not science-based.

Gosh. I’m going to have to buy me some ocean-front property in Nebraska while it’s cheap. I am a bit baffled about how so much of Florida remains above the waves while a big chunk of Colorado is flooded, though. And if you’re going to include Atlantis and Lemuria, you ought to also mark the location of R’lyeh.

Phillip Johnson is dead

The last time I talked about Phillip Johnson it was to say I am honestly happy that Phillip Johnson is still alive — I wanted him to witness the ignominious decline of his baby, Intelligent Design creationism, and live to suffer with it’s irrelevancy and routine rejection and abysmal failure to challenge science at all. I said then:

I make no bones about the fact that I consider Johnson to be an intellectual criminal.

The reason is simple: Jason Rosenhouse is right. Intelligent Design is dead. I want Johnson to suffer the pain and frustration of knowing that he has wasted his life, and that he’ll be remembered as a failure.

His book was a cobbled together hodge-podge of specious reasoning, using legal logic to raise unwarranted doubts over concepts he couldn’t understand. He was no scientist; neither are his followers. He was a pettifogging lawyer coming off a divorce and a midlife crisis who tried to find redemption by lying for Jesus. It didn’t work.

I guess, then, I should now be sad that Johnson has joined his movement. Phillip Johnson is dead, but I’m not. I don’t care. He died as Intelligent Design did, barely remarked, recognized mainly by his cult sympathizers and the people who fought against his nonsense. We’ll just remember, as Larry Moran said, that Johnson was the very best of the Intelligent Design creationists.