Ugh, Al Seckel’s name floats to the top again

I’ve mentioned Al Seckel before — he was a self-serving fraud who slithered his way into the skeptic community, taking advantage of their gullibility in the face of of any phony who knew the right sciencey buzzwords.

What I didn’t notice before was how entangled Seckel was in another problem: he was associated with both Jeffrey Epstein and John Brockman. He actually organized a “science” meeting on Epstein’s orgy island! He gave TED talks! He was married to Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister! Viewed with hindsight, knowing how unsavory Epstein was, Seckel’s history looks even more horrible now.

Also of note, one of Seckel’s tools to suppress anyone who might question his credentials (he had none; he failed out of everything, but that didn’t stop him from claiming to be a physicist) was the frequent use of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. He seems to have been suing someone or multiple someones at all times, and people were afraid to talk about his dubious claims because he’d drop a lawsuit on you if you didn’t reward him with honors for his nonexistent skills. It reminds me of some other people who use the courts as a blunt instrument.

A remarkably delicious exposé

I’ve probably seen the name “John Glynn” around — he was prolific, and was getting published all over the Rightosphere and elsewhere. He even got published in the Huffington Post, so some left-leaning pubs had stuff with his byline. But I would have sailed right over it, because his work was all bumblingly ideological and built on evolutionary psychology BS, which immediately flagged him as a charlatan, despite his claimed status as holder of a doctorate and professorships at several universities. Really, people, saying you’re a professor doesn’t make you infallible!

But some people, especially those gullible enough to favor EvoPsych and conservative positions, were taken in, including Michael Shermer.

To his slight credit, Shermer exposed the guy as a fraud. He became suspicious, not when Glynn submitted glib garbage to his magazine, but when Glynn asked for a loan. You can lie about science all you want, but when you start eyeballing a right-winger’s wallet, their ultra-sensitive sensors start pinging. Anyway, it turns out with a few questions it was determined that Glynn did not have an advanced degree, and did not work for any university. Everything was a lie. He’d persevered in publishing crap all over the place, successfully, and fooled Skeptic magazine for three years. The key was offering to write stuff that catered to the biases of publishers, leaping right past any critical evaluation.

Look where else Glynn published! Areo, where the “grievance study” nonsense was published, where Helen Pluckrose is an editor. Quillette. The American Thinker. The Federalist.

The credibility of Skeptic magazine and Shermer has been nonexistent for years, and they’re cruising along on the support of people who still buy into the garbage Glynn was peddling, so they’ll be fine — in fact, they’ll probably be praising Shermer as a true skeptic for identifying the fraud, ignoring the fact that he’d been publishing him for years. John Glynn will be fine, since he’s an insubstantial, lying wraith. He’ll just invent another pseudonym and another set of fake credentials, and continue making contributions to the trash heap of bad media. So I’m chagrined to say that, while this revelation is amusing, it’s not going to make a speck of difference.

An addendum to the previous two posts

This, exactly.

The far-right conservatives and the deeply stupid (but I repeat myself) have mastered one art of discourse: regurgitating nonsense so rapidly that more sensible people can’t keep up.

I don’t understand it, therefore nobody does

We’re going to see a wave of ignorance prompted by David Gelernter’s profession of foolishness, aren’t we? Every fool in the world who hears that guy’s nonsense is now inspired to spew out some nonsense of their own.

One example is Barbara Kay, who I’ve never heard of before, pontificating in the National Post that “there’s one mystery we still can’t explain”. Only one? I can think of lots. But the fact that there are still questions in the world does not mean that all the answers we have are wrong.

Her point is especially bad, because she singles out one thing that she thinks is false, and she is wrong about it.

The human brain and the power of speech put humans way beyond the boundaries of Darwin’s own three critical criteria for natural selection, which; i) may expand an animal’s power only to a point where it has survival advantage — and no further; ii) cannot produce changes that are “injurious” to the animal; and iii) cannot produce a “specially developed organ” that is useless to an animal at the time it develops. If a Neanderthal brain three times the size of any primate’s and a unique capacity for speech do not constitute “specially developed organs,” what does?

OK. Start with Darwin: he’s not our infallible prophet. He got a lot wrong, and remember, he was writing 150 years ago. You can demonstrate Darwin’s errors all you want, and modern scientists will just shrug and say, “So?”

Kay’s second error, though, is that she overlooked the meaning of her subject, natural selection. Evolution is not synonymous with natural selection, and showing that something could not have evolved by natural selection does not refute the idea that it evolved by some other mechanism. Even if we take those three points as given, it does not negate the idea of evolution.

Third error: she has not demonstrated that point (i) means natural selection could not have occurred. Where does the survival advantage of speech stop? It seems to me that the initiation of speech with grunts and crude vocalizations could only be improved, and improved continuously, by natural selection. Speech that enabled better hunting could lead to speech that is used for love poetry, or describing geography, or telling scary stories around the campfire, or expressing philosophical thoughts. She has not demonstrated any barrier which would impede the action of natural selection.

Fourth error: The brain isn’t that special (ii). All animals have one (well, we could call sponges and jellyfish exceptions). Our ancestors had one that could visualize the environment and the future, allow for sophisticated socialization, and permitted all kinds of communication shy of speech. Speech capability builds on structures that are already present in a multitude of animals.

Fifth error: brains that could process information in a complex way before speech evolved were not useless to our ancestors (iii), even if they couldn’t speak.

Sixth and biggest, most common error in creationists: the failure of their imaginations and ignorance of the evidence does not support their claim that the science is wrong. I can’t imagine how Barbara Kay manages to type words on a machine, but I think it’s clear that she did. Probably. I can’t rule out the possibility that an editor filtered the output of a monkey pounding on a keyboard, but it’s more likely that her essay was produced by a human being who simply knows nothing about biology.

Don’t play theological games with the scientific evidence

Aron Ra got into an online debate with an Islamic apologist, Nadir Ahmed, on the science of the Qur’an. No offense, Aron, but you got suckered. It’s a total waste of time. They got into a whole bunch of goofy details, which Ahmed just oozed around slimily.

Islamic apologist, Nadir Ahmad insisted there were no scientific errors in the Qur’an. So we decided to do a series of videos listing them for him. In this episode, we talked about:
1. Sūrah 105 Birds bombing elephants with stones? Seriously?
2. Sūrah 54 The Moon (being broken in half) Didn’t happen.
3. Sperm becomes blood
4. Sex is determined later
5. Sperm = Human. We are made only of sperm, not sperm + egg.
6. Sperm comes from backbone and ribs
7. Flesh forms after bones

I haven’t watched the whole thing, but Aron let me know I was mentioned 1 hour 44 minutes in (Gah! It’s interminable!), when they’re discussing that last question, does flesh form after bones in embryonic development?

Ahmed practices expert theology. First he questions my knowledge of human embryology, trying to undercut anything I might have said. Then he begins splitting hairs: does “clothed with flesh” mean that Allah created muscles at that moment? Could he have created it first, and then draped it over the bones? Everything was word games, trying to rationalize the words of the Qur’an to fit a chronology worked out now with a body of scientific evidence that he apparently just heard for the first time right there, and I’m sorry, but Aron and his other guest got played right into that meaningless ad hoc argument, and they’re all sitting there playing the interpretation dance on screen.

Cut through the shit, guys. The verse in question is one paragraph long in English translation, just two short sentences. It’s vague and general, and it’s merely summarizing Aristotle’s view of development, part of the common currency of scholarly knowledge of the Prophet Mohammed’s time. It’s derivative and not specific enough to be a test of secret, divine knowledge bestowed upon the Prophet or the infallibility of the sacred text — and it’s a disgrace that Muslim zealots insist that it is, and that anti-Islamic atheists argue that its errors are proof that it isn’t God’s word. The former are embarrassingly ignorant, and the latter should know better. God, or rather his interpreters, lie all the time.

I’ve made this point before:

…the Quran contains negligible embryological content, and what there is is so sketchy and hazy that it allows his defenders to make spectacular leaps of interpretation. Mohammed avoided the trap of being caught in an overt error here by blathering generalized bullshit, and saying next to nothing. This is neither an accomplishment nor a miracle.

We can say the same thing about the book of Genesis. It’s like half a page! It’s clearly a poetic parable that uses guesses about how life came about, written by people who had no clue, to make some currently incomprehensible point about Hebrew destiny, and all the fine-toothed combing of the story is only obscuring the meaning. People who stack it up against all the scientific observations of the complex history of geology and biology are ludicrous, and that’s the point we should be making, not dissecting what happened on what day and how it fits the science.

Unfortunately, I commented on that video, which meant Ahmed was prepared to pounce with more irrelevancies.

He wants to debate me? No. Not ever going to happen. Hamza Tzortzis wanted to fly me to London to debate him — the prospect of a free trip to England was tempting, but no, I didn’t debate him, either, and Adnan Oktar once invited me to Istanbul for a conference on Islamic creationism, even more tempting, and I turned him down. Ahmed didn’t tantalize me with anything, and his performance with Aron told me he was just a know-nothing word parser who practices motivated reasoning blatantly. To engage with him is to elevate his importance far too much, as it would have been with Tzortzis and Oktar (Oktar has since vanished into a Turkish prison, so I can safely say that association with him would not have looked great on my CV).

Then he’s desperately reduced to questioning my credentials. What can I say? As an undergraduate, I did research on development with Jenny Lund and Johnny Palka at the University of Washington; I moved on to do graduate work at the University of Oregon on zebrafish development; I did a post-doc with Mike Bastiani at the University of Utah studying early development in the grasshopper; I was hired to teach developmental biology at Temple University; I took a position as a developmental biologist and geneticist here at the University of Minnesota Morris. I’ve taught human embryology, developmental biology of both invertebrates and vertebrates, developmental neurobiology, and ecological development. Anybody could look at what I’ve been doing for over 40 years now and see that yeah, I’m about as qualified in developmental biology as you can get.

But all Mr Ahmed, the wibbly-weebly twister of words, can do is squint and try to pretend I’m less informed about embryology than he is. That’s a taste of what any debate with him would be like, and no thanks.

It’s time to recognize gun worship as a cult which has the second amendment as its holy text

Tony Perkins says that teaching kids about evolution leads to mass shootings.

Perkins said that teaching children about evolution is one cause of mass shootings.

“We’ve taught our kids they come about through chance through primordial slime and then we’re surprised they treat their fellow Americans like dirt!” he exclaimed. “It’s time we talk about the result of the left’s systematic march through our institutions, driving religious expression from the public square.”

Perkins complained that children are not being taught that they are “created in the image of God.”

“We’ve driving religion from our public life and we’re shocked that we no longer have morality and we no longer value human life,” he remarked.

As a totally godless human being who has been teaching about evolution for a few decades, I’ve noticed that I and my fellow biologists and atheists are less casual about taking life than our gun-totin’ Christian brethren in general. Evolution teaches that we’re kin to everything; it doesn’t bring us down, it elevates every living thing on the planet in our eyes. To claim that we have no morality is a lie. We have many of the same values that our fellow citizens do, we live quiet lives finding happiness in our families, our children, in service to others, in simple pleasures. Most Christians are the same way, except when their priorities have been distorted by misplaced fanaticism, which, unfortunately, the kinds of Christians who listen to Tony Perkins are fed constantly.

Take Representative Matt Schaefer of Texas, who has a similarly perverse and horrid idea of the “root of the problem”.

Godless, depraved hearts. That IS the root of the problem. Every person needs a heart transformed by faith in God through Jesus. May God be near to those suffering in Odessa and Midland, and everywhere that evil has struck a blow.

He is quite confident that the solution to everything is conversion to Christianity. Everyone must believe in Jesus to stop the mass shootings! As if no Christian had ever killed anyone senselessly.

The real root of the problem is this: that a fervently Christian legislator has decided that he must oppose all actions to restrict the “god-given” ownership of AR-15s. Apparently, the Christianity he wants us to convert to is the version that has all the followers of Jesus armed to the teeth. He’s going to do nothing but pray, and hand out more guns.

“Do something!” is the statement we keep hearing. As an elected official with a vote in Austin, let me tell you what I am NOT going to do. I am NOT going to use the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my fellow Texans. Period. None of these so-called gun-control solutions will work to stop a person with evil intent. I say NO to “red flag” pre-crime laws. NO to universal background checks. NO to bans on AR-15s, or high capacity magazines. NO to mandatory gun buybacks. What can we do? YES to praying for victims. YES to praying for protection. YES to praying that God would transform the hearts of people with evil intent. YES to fathers not leaving their wives and children. YES to discipline in the homes. YES to supporting our public schools. YES to giving every law-abiding single mom the right to carry a handgun to protect her and her kids without permission from the state, and the same for all other law-abiding Texans of age. YES to your God-given, constitutionally protected rights. YES to God, and NO to more government intrusions.

You know, the guy who went on a murder spree in Odessa and Midland doesn’t seem to have been either a vocal Christian or a vocal atheist — just another angry white man who loves guns. Maybe instead of trying to answer everything with stories about which religion they did or did not follow, we should be addressing the gun-worshipping cult that crosses boundaries between believer and non-believer.

One thing for sure, Matt Schaefer won’t be doing anything about that, because he’s a card-carrying member of that cult.

At least it only took me a few decades to learn to detest debate

It’s like looking at a history of my past misdeeds — I was that dude. My friends were all those dudes. You know, that culture that thinks we can resolve massive social conflicts with just the right debate.

Anyone who regularly expresses ideas on the Internet — especially women who express ideas critical of men — has encountered that bane of online discourse, the man who appears seemingly out of nowhere to insist on a debate. He disagrees with the sentiment expressed and is certain he can overpower the author with his superior logic and knowledge. So he takes out his metaphorical white glove and offers a slap, showing up in Twitter mentions and issuing an invitation to his YouTube channel or podcast. If you refuse, the “‘debate me’ dude,” as the journalist Miles Klee memorably dubbed him, spends the next week tweeting about how terrified you are of his massive intellect.

It’s not just women and feminists. The entire creation vs. evolution struggle has often been sidetracked by the notion that we can resolve it all with debate. So we get Bill Nye going up against Ken Ham in a massively advertised, televised debate, and afterwards we argue among ourselves about who “won”. We should have stopped ourselves before the debate, and asked ourselves who wants this debate? Because I’ll tell you who loves getting scientists to debate: it’s the creationists. Getting a godless science advocate into an uncomfortable space like a church or the Creation “Museum”, where the audience is unqualified to judge but has a prior bias against them, and then to engage them in a contest of speechifyin’ oratory? Perfect.

Cultivating a whole generation of science advocates who believe that the rhetorical skills of debate are an expression of the scientific method? Heavenly. Now it can be turned against every expert in every field that defies the podunk wisdom of what ought to be, from climate science to politics to feminism, and suddenly “evidence-based” isn’t our platform anymore. And we willingly embraced this move. I was doing it for decades.

We were Br’er Fox to the creationists Br’er Rabbit, and debate is the briar patch. Every nitwit unschooled nobody now knows they can get on YouTube, utter some tempting idiocy, and whisper “debate me”…and the people who know better will stamped over to engage them and give them a brief credibility boost, while spreading their name far and wide.

It works both ways. There are hordes of people on YouTube who have no better education than the creationists they battle, who know little about the science except the bits they skim out of pop sci magazines and books, who build reputations solely on their debating skills and praising Logic & Reason & Enlightnment Values*. “Yeah, sure, I’m the hero who argued with Kent Hovind!” As if Hovind is some fierce creature out of myth, like Humbaba the Terrible, when he’s actually just Humbug the convicted Bumblefuck, a know-nothing nobody with a cranium full of stupid ideas, and a following of gullible hicks who’ll accomplish nothing but the corruption of the country, if you give them a chance.

I’ve been there. I’ve done the debate nonsense.

We need to stop.

This stuff has derailed the atheism and skepticism movements. We’ve been distracted by the valuation of who makes the most rational argument or who can most entertainingly dismantle random callers on a phone-in show, rather than who is the best activist, who gets things done, who focuses best on engaging effectively with real issues, rather than who is ready to hare off to tangle with Dinesh D’Souza or Ben Shapiro or whoever the latest stooge elevated by the Religious Right might be. Don’t think to impress me by telling me who you’ve “destroyed” in a debate, that just leaves me cold. Those people don’t deserve a debate stage, they ought to be dealt with by pies in the face.

I know, because I’m guilty as charged.

After all, a debate isn’t a conversation — an exercise in which people generously try to understand each other’s point of view. A real conversation doesn’t have a “winner.” Debates are about scoring points and subjugating your opponent. Which means that, no matter what their opponents say, debaters have every reason to spin a confrontation as a victory. If I got angry or flustered in a debate, then I would lose by virtue of being emotional and irrational. If I used jokes or sarcasm, I’d lose by virtue of seeming unserious and smug. If I did take the debate seriously and even briefly entertained the points made by my opponent, I would seem conciliatory and weak. And no matter what, my opponent will have gotten my attention and sucked up my time. The only winning move is not to play.

Also…some people aren’t worth having a conversation with.

*Reminder: the Enlightenment Era was a complex mess of discordant ideas that may have included David Hume, but also the slave trade, colonialism, racist rationalizations for oppressing non-Europeans, and even within Europe sheltered a villainous hive of misogyny and classism. It’s not the universal praise you think it is.

“Facts, not emotion”

What would you, as a manager, do with Clifford Currie, a civilian contractor working in an Army hospital? There is a huge pile of documentation that shows he is unstable, unreliable, and hostile. There were months of reports piling up.

Army investigators reviewed more than 1,000 pages of documents, including witness statements, law enforcement case files, and email correspondence. Though some names and specific details were redacted, statements from 25 witnesses supported Blanchard’s claim that she’d warned her supervisors — and anyone else who would listen — that she felt Currie was a threat.

The hospital’s chain of command knew that Currie “exhibited erratic behavior and risk indicators,” and that he “had multiple angry outbursts, acted ominously, and actively intimidated” Blanchard, the report said.

Two weeks before the assault Blanchard said that she met with her supervisors, and pleaded: “Please, don’t leave me there as a sitting duck,” but was told to “come back with facts, not emotion,” she told Task & Purpose. “I went back to my office and I just cried, because I just felt so hopeless.”

The report noted that Currie was the subject of 53 complaints from patients between 2013 and 2016 — 31 of which occurred in 2016 while Blanchard was his supervisor. According to the report, three of the patient complaints described Currie as “being hostile.”

The military did nothing. Then Currie walked in on Katie Blanchard, poured gasoline on her, and set her on fire. It was a sudden, violent act, but there’d been obvious signs and multiple warnings that this guy was going to snap. She survived, with serious scarring and pain, and she sued the Army for needlessly putting her life in danger. Guess what happened next? They have a rule that says the military can’t be sued!

On April 18, 2019, the Army denied Blanchard’s claim for damages, citing the Feres Doctrine — a 1950 Supreme Court precedent which bars service members and their families from suing the military for injury or death brought on by their service. The claim, which Blanchard’s attorneys provided to Task & Purpose, included the names of 14 people within her chain of command who were allegedly warned by her that Currie posed a threat.

“Come back with facts, not emotion”. That sounds so familiar, the kind of thing skeptics and atheists would say all the time. Sometimes the emotions are the facts, and you have to have policies to deal with them…or you end up with women burning in their office chairs.

The J-F Gariépy/Epstein connection

One among the long list of “scientists” sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein was, to my initial surprise, Jean-François Gariépy, but then after I thought about it, I realized they were perfect for each other. If you’re unfamiliar with JF, as he’s called, his RationalWiki page is informative. He’s one of those alt-right YouTubers with an extraordinarily creepy history — he’s a Jew-baiting advocate for a white ethnostate, and he has a thing for sexual relationships with young women with severe intellectual disabilities. He’s just a terrible, horrible person all around.

But he also has some science credentials — he was a post-doc in a neuroscience lab.

Jean-François Gariépy (1984–) (usually called JF or JFG), is a French-Canadian alt right YouTube talker who promotes race realism, ethnostates, and other reactionary views. From 2012 to 2015, he was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University, but was allegedly fired due to sexual misbehavior, although he claims that he left on his own accord.

Gariépy rose to prominence as a paid co-host of Andy Warski’s YouTube show. After getting into a spat with Andy over antisemitic comments made by a guest, Gariépy left the Warski show, and started running his own show called “The Public Space”, where he frequently invites guests associated with white supremacy, such as David Duke and Richard Spencer.

He parlayed that connection into a gift from Jeffrey Epstein.

Gariépy was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University in 2014 when his nonprofit, NEURO.tv, received $25,000 from Epstein to make a series of YouTube interviews with experts in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The project is still the lead item on the dormant website of the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation.

Since posting the NEURO.tv videos, Gariépy has gained a following as a far-right YouTuber whose recent guests have included the white nationalist Richard Spencer. In 2018, the Daily Beast described Gariépy’s child custody battle, in which his ex-wife alleged a history of abusive behavior toward women. Gariépy denied the allegations.

“I am a white heterosexual male libertarian who believes in freedom, sovereignty and self-determination for all people including mine,” Gariépy told BuzzFeed News by email. He also railed against “false allegations by females.”

Dang. No one ever gave me $25K to play on the internet, but then, I have a strict policy of not taking money from rapists or pedophiles. That seems to greatly limit funding sources, I guess.

What I specifically found interesting though, is that Gariépy requested additional money from Epstein to write a book. He did not get that funding, but he did write the book! It’s called The Revolutionary Phenotype, and the description sounds kind of nuts.

The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation.

It’s an interesting combination. He’s clearly endorsing some kind of Intelligent Design, so maybe the Discovery Institute would like to take him on as a Fellow. He sounds exactly like their kind of guy.

The other part, though, is the anti-genetic engineering stuff, which is odd to hear from a “scientist”, but then, as a white racist, maybe he’s also concerned about the purity of his germ plasm.

I’m not motivated enough to find out, though. If anyone (non-racist, non-rapist, non-pedophile, that is) wants to donate $25,000 to me, however, I’ll grab a copy and read it and post a review here. I should warn you, though, that just looking at his book online has sent me a barrage of targeted ads for other books about the “Jewish Question” and white genocide and other such trash, so I’m already thinking it may not be worth it.