Almost there. A little more…more…oh, that’s so good, keep doing that…

Did you know that Skepticon is next week? Next week! My talk isn’t done! I have vowed to finish it this weekend, though: they’ve got me scheduled to talk on the first night, probably because they know that I have a tendency to fuss over these things and would be tweaking it every day before I go on.

Do you know what else is almost, but not quite done? Fundraising! They’re within a few thousand dollars of reaching their goal, so it’s the final push. It’s like my talk, we’re always skirting the edge of getting it done in time. But I’ve already promised to get that talk done this weekend, so it would be nice if they could get their fundraising done then, too.

If you need additional incentive, consider this: this is the conference the haters hate the most. I’ve already got some wackaloons I’ve never met and who have never attended a conference I’ve gone to and in particular have never had any plans to attend this one ranting and raving about a boycott of the con, and a walkout of my session (but then, these are the same kooks who propose to do that every time I give a talk somewhere, and the only people who’ve walked out so far seem to be invisible). This is the convention that has Rebecca Watson, Amanda Marcotte, Greta Christina, Debbie Goddard and all kinds of uppity women stirring up trouble.

Subvert the dominant paradigm! Support the skeptical conference that isn’t run by asshats!

SkepTech 2

It’s coming: 11-13 April 2014 in Minneapolis. Of course that means that the eager students who put on this free conference are deep in fundraising mode right now.

Their latest get-rich-quick-scheme is to enslave Zach Weinersmith and force him to draw for free so they can auction off a personal portrait. That’s right, be the winning bidder and you can look like you’ve just stepped off the pages of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

I hope they invested in good strong iron shackles down in the basement. It’s not going to be pretty if your imprisoned webcartoonist breaks free — there’ll probably be rampaging.

My weird weekend in St Paul

Hey, it’s Fall Break for me, which means no classes or labs, but instead, I have to buckle down and get all caught up in my grading, so that’s what I’ll be doing the next few days. I thought I’d give a quick summary of my talk at the Paradigm Symposium, though. It was an odd experience. It had been a weekend full of woo and pseudoscience; that morning, L.A. Marzulli put on the most ghastly spectacle of ignorance and nonsense I’ve ever seen, raving about how evolution was false and aliens built piezoelectric teleporters in Peru and people with funny-shaped heads were signs that the End Times were here. I had been tempted at that point to drop my entire planned talk and simply get up there and tear every single one of his lies down…but I had a few hours to cool down, and I took into account that this was probably going to be the most hostile audience I’d ever had anyway, and went back to my original plan, a talk about biology. The talk was titled “An examination of the evidence for alien intervention in the history of life on earth”. It was a bit of bait and switch, because once I was up there I told them I couldn’t say much about that.

The first thing, I put the most antagonistic comment front and center: I told them that if I was here to talk about the scientific perspective on the evidence for aliens mucking about on planet Earth, there was one big problem: there isn’t any. They may have photos of lights in the sky, or the testimony of abductees, or the amazing mythology of ancient peoples that names the alien’s home star, and sure, that’s data of a crude sort…but there are many alternative explanations for the observations, and you simply can’t pick one alternative because it’s the one you like best. Blurry photos of ambiguous phenomena, numerology, interpretations of myth or religiously motivated pictograms in rocks, are very, very bad evidence, poorly assessed and clumsily shoe-horned into pet mythologies. They are not going to get published in peer-reviewed science journals.

I know what some of them would think about that: it’s a conspiracy theory. The grand poobahs of science are acting as dogmatic gatekeepers who will not allow the bold new ideas of an open-minded generation of serious investigators to enter the temple of science!

But that’s not it at all. I know a lot of scientists; I am one. We grew up on science fiction and weird ideas — I read Fate magazine as an adolescent — we love the idea of extraterrestrial intelligences. We have the same desire they do to see strange ideas come true, and experience exotic and mysterious phenomena.

But we also have standards. Extraordinary phenomena require extraordinary evidence. You don’t become a scientist unless you can couple imagination and curiosity to rigor and discipline.

And the current “evidence” doesn’t rise to the level it ought to — the enormous hypothesis that we have been visited by aliens is supported by the thinnest, feeblest, most bizarrely subjective nonsense.

I suggested that they imagine that I proposed that there was an elephant roaming the hall of the Union Depot, which is where the meeting was being held. That would be really cool — I love elephants. It would make me ridiculously happy to find a domesticated elephant sharing this room with us. And they might think that would be awesome, too — but looking around, there was no elephant is in sight. It was a fairly open space, and aside from a curtained area, there wasn’t anywhere where an elephant could possibly be hiding.

Just on the obvious evidence of your eyes, you would say there is no elephant there. But maybe, as an open-minded person, you might assume that I’ve got some additional information — I’d just come from behind the curtain, so maybe it was lurking back there. So you ask me to support my claim…and in reply, I say, “I found a peanut in my pocket. How else could it have gotten there other than that it was put there by a friendly elephant?”

Would the quality of my evidence and my logic reduce or strengthen my claim of an elephant? I think everyone would agree that that is extraordinarily poor reason and exceptionally weak evidence, and it would greatly reduce my credibility, and you’d be even less likely to accept the possibility of elephants lurking in train stations.

That’s how the scientific community feels about these stories of aliens. An enormous, earth-shaking reality is proposed, and the best evidence anyone can trot out is trivially dismissed blurry photos backed up by unsupportable logic. No, I’m sorry, until the alien proponents can provide better evidence, they’re not going to be taken seriously, and floundering about and flinging even more blurry photos and bizarre claims and elaborate fairy tales about ancient hieroglyphics is going to weaken your case.

Then the bulk of the talk was a discussion of why the idea that aliens hybridized with humans, or that humans are aliens who emigrated to Earth, is completely ridiculous. I tried to keep it as basic as possible. The first bits were a primer on what a gene and an allele are, a quick explanation about how we have roughly 20,000 genes, and that basically all mammals, to a first approximation, have the same suite of genes, and that differences in the forms of those genes in a mouse or a human allow us to estimate how closely related we are. I showed them a cladogram and explained how it was generated and what it meant.

I addressed some of the most common misconceptions: I explained that chromosome number isn’t that big a deal, and showed them a synteny map to illustrate that it just meant the genes were juggled about in a different arrangement…but they were still the same genes. I knew some of the more knowledgeable people might have heard that the human genome project had found some genes that were unique to humans and not shared with other mammals, so I explained what ORFans were, and how they aren’t the key to finding signs of alien tinkering. I probably spent the most time discussing an actual, known case of “alien” genes in the human genome, the analysis of human and Neandertal genomes.

That’s the kind of evidence we expect to see if their stories are true, I told them.

I had to mention one thing that had been bugging me all weekend, even if it wasn’t strictly about biology. Could aliens have offered cultural guidance, rather than tinkering with genes? And I told them flat out that the question was a bit insulting and also often a bit racist. So I showed them a photo of the pyramids (man, there had been a lot of talk about Egypt this weekend) and said that it was peculiar that alien astronaut proponents are always talking about aliens helping to build these monuments, but…and then I showed a photo of Notre Dame cathedral and asked, why don’t you think the French needed alien assistance to build that? It helped that John Ward had given a talk earlier in the conference where he described the quarries where the stones of the pyramid had come from and how they’d been built by human labor.

Finally, I touched on the peculiarity of little grey men — why are so many of the aliens described so human-like? I told them that evolution would not predict any such convergence to a remarkable degree, and that was evidence that these creatures were actually projections of human fears and desires, rather than physical visitors.

My summary slide:

  • We are children of this Earth

  • We know our kinship to other children of Earth

  • We know the history of our genes

  • We know the history of our populations

  • Humans have accomplished greatness on our own

Humanity: Alien-Free for 6 million years, and proud of it!

I suppose I could have said “Earth: Alien-Free for 4.5 billion years”, as well. I was defining humanity pretty broadly, too, to stretch it to 6 million years.

The Q&A wasn’t as bad as I feared. A couple of people were aggressive about challenging me — one wanted me to enumerate all of the alien abductees I’d talked to, and I’ve only met a few, and most of what I know comes from reading. But that’s hardly relevant: as I said at the beginning, trotting out more anecdotes from people who claim their butts were probed is only going to weaken their credibility. Most of the people wanted clarification, and there were some questions about junk DNA, nothing unmanageable.

I think I reached a few people, anyway. I have no illusions that scales fell from eyes and anyone decided that aliens are bunk on the basis of what I said, but maybe they’ll think a little harder about what constitutes good scientific evidence. I invited the conference organizer, Scotty Roberts, to join us on FtBCon in January, and maybe we could argue some more.

‘ware the cookies!

What have I gotten myself into? I just sat through a bizarre, rambling, self-congratulory lecture by Scott Wolter (some guy with a fringey History Channel show) that started with the Kensington Runestone — it’s a genuine Viking artifact, don’t you know, staking a land claim for some Catholic order of monks — then wandered over to the Bat Creek stone, a rock with some funny scratches on it unearthed from an Indian mound. The scratches are ancient Hebrew! Wait, no, they’re secret Masonic symbols! Did you know the Cherokee rituals were exact copies of the Knights Templar’s rituals? Yes, they are. Obviously.

Then we got a whole series of photos of Catholic figures and medieval and renaissance paintings and sculptures in which people are making the Masonic gang sign. This one:

image

That’s an “M”. For Mary Magdelene, Jesus’s wife. The Masonic cult spread over to the New World in the first century AD to share the word among the Indians, who happily adopted it. And now it’s everywhere.

image

Oreo cookies bear the sign.

Then to wrap it all up, he goes back to ancient Egypt, the precession of the Equinox, and the signs of the zodiac, which represent major shifts in world cultures, each paradigmatic shift associated with changing which house was represented in the equinox.

People applauded.

Dear god, wasn’t the cookie slide a loud enough cry for help?

Bigfoot!

I spent my first evening at the Paradigm Symposium last night. I’ve missed virtually all of the talks so far — I got to watch a panel about new media, podcasting and that sort of thing, and there wasn’t too much novelty to it, but it was fine…except for the bits where they mentioned how the skeptical outlook was distasteful.

There was also a final Q&A session of the evening where a few of us, me included, were put up front to introduce ourselves and take questions from the audience. I went bold and made it explicitly clear that I’m a skeptic, I don’t believe in little grey men or ghosts or the paranormal or any of that sort of thing, just so no one would be at all confused about my position. The responses of the other panelists were interesting: lots of mumbling about how we don’t know everything, and mysteries, and that sort of thing, and I got in one rejoinder about how science builds on what we know, not what we don’t know, and leaping into mysteries is a formula for failure.

It was an aggressive approach, but a good one, I think. At the bar session later a number of people collared me to argue, and several just wanted to know more. There’s a huge difference between this group and, for instance, the creationist events I’ve been to: paranormalists tend to be strongly anti-dogmatic, so so far I’ve only encountered one person who hit me with the “invite Jesus into your heart” line. They also tend to be curious, so they ask lots of questions, which is good. I think the main problem is a lack of criteria to judge the quality of evidence, so they tend to go lurching off indiscriminately into weird phenomena.

I met one nice fellow who was proudly showing off his cast of a Bigfoot print.

bigfoot

He was very friendly, and he’d carefully documented everything he could about it: who found it, when it was cast, all that sort of thing. Of course it’s totally useless as evidence for Bigfoot since prints are so easily faked, but that’ll be one of the subjects I talk about tomorrow: the quality of evidence and setting standards for your work.

Today I’m going to sit back and listen. I’ve browsed all their vendor tables, though: anyone need some healing crystals, or books about the Illuminati?

Skepticon: It’s a mystery

Perhaps you are familiar with this scene from Shakespeare in Love?

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

That’s Skepticon. Every year they struggle to meet the budget of the largest free skeptical conference in the world, and strangely, it all turns out well, and what’s more, the organizers always seems so cheerful about it right up to the instant the curtain lifts. At least, that is, they’re cheerful in public — they might be rending their garments and gnashing their teeth in private, but it doesn’t show, anyway.

They need those last few big bags of cash to pull it off, but it’s no mystery how they do it: they ask you to DONATE. Help them out, it’s going to be excellent!

Also, just like Shakespeare, my talk isn’t done yet. That’s a sign of quality, right?

Oxford in August — be there

I’m hoping to be able to make it to the World Humanist Congress next summer — I’m at the stage where I’ve convinced myself I must go, but am still moaning at the expense. Maybe if you guys all buy lots of copies of The Happy Atheist I’ll be more comfortable with swinging it; or alternatively, if a lot of you tell me you plan to be there, the pull of good company will sway me further.

Although…have you looked at the speaker roster? Grayling, Pullman, Singh, Edamaruku, Igwe — whoa. I need to go to this. I am desperately seeking something to bring aspiration and inspiration back to atheism, and this looks like the place.

Also, a vacation in England and Scotland is rather attractive.

Time to make a promise

Oh no, not another of those stories.

OK, here’s my deal: a promise. I’m not an important speaker, and I’m not the kind of make-or-break participant that any conference might want, and I’ve got a lot of haters out there who want nothing to do with me anyway, but this is how I will approach speaking invitations from now on.

I will decide whether to accept only by considering my availability and the purpose and execution of the event. I do have some restrictions: I’ve got a heavy teaching load and limited available time. I also expect some reassurance that significant effort will be made to promote diversity; if I’m one more white guy in a roster already overloaded with white guys, I’ll step aside and suggest that you invite someone who doesn’t look like me instead. If your conference doesn’t have a harassment policy or treats attendees poorly, I won’t be interested.

But otherwise, I will not discriminate on the basis of who else you’ve invited to speak. So sure, you can also invite Ray Comfort to your conference, and I won’t use that as an excuse to back out. I won’t necessarily get chummy at the event, and I might even aggressively speak out against that other person, but I’ll do my part to make your conference interesting and a good experience for the paying attendees.

One more thing: conference organizers, I expect you to have the spine to refuse to cave in to suppressive demands from other speakers. I’m promising not to make those demands, I’m expecting you to refuse to honor them from others.

GeekGirlCon looks fun

And Scicurious is raising money to bring DIY science to the con! Those look like fun activities, and maybe we should steal some of them for Convergence/Skepchickcon. (I’d love to attend GeekGirlCon myself — it’s in Seattle, my favorite city! — but dang, I’ve got to limit myself and there are only so many weekends I can tear myself away from my responsibilities here.)

Atheists should have good rules for behavior

It has come to my attention that certain people — certain thuggish, stupid people — are objecting to the Code of Conduct for the American Atheists 2014 convention. In addition to complaining that it shouldn’t bother to address the needs of trans people (WTF?), they object to this section.

American Atheists does not tolerate harassment of or by conference participants in any form. Prohibited conduct may include but is not limited to harassment related to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, sexual images in public spaces (not related to convention sessions or materials), deliberate intimidation, stalking, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention. Racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic conduct will not be tolerated.

That all sounds good and reasonable to me. But some people are complaining that at an atheist convention, it is far too PC to say you may not harass people for their religion, and then they point to David Silverman, who is known for his confrontational style and his willingness to openly disagree with religious convention.

These objectors are obtuse and wrong. This does not say you may not disagree with someone; it does not say you may not publicly express a different opinion; it does not say you have to be kind and gentle to bad ideas.

It says you may not harass someone.

Harassment is persistent, aggressive behavior with the purpose of intimidating or silencing someone. The code of conduct even goes into detail: “deliberate intimidation, stalking, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.” To say that you may not do that to a religious person is not a violation of the purpose of American Atheists; I’d say it’s actually a damn good idea if atheists don’t harass religious people and make respectful behavior towards other human beings a part of their policy…while still continuing aggressive campaigns against bad ideas.

So if Thomas Monson, president of the LDS church, shows up at AACON2014, you can argue with him, you can tell him how much you dislike his church, but if he asks you to step aside and leave him alone, you will do so. David Silverman can give a talk in which he castigates the Mormons for their hypocrisy and the absurdity of their religion, and if Thomas Monson raises his hand to ask a question afterwards, the audience will not heckle him and shout him down. And when he starts walking up the aisle to leave afterwards, you will not grab him, block him, spit on him, shout obscenities at him, or interfere with him in any way, because that would be harassment, and that would put you in violation of the code of conduct. Well, and also put you in violation of many norms of civilized behavior.

I have no objection at all to the American Atheists code of conduct, and think it is a fine document fully in accord with the aims of the movement. If you disagree, you shouldn’t go anywhere where you might find yourself in groups of people. Perhaps you’d be better off living in a small cave in the middle of nowhere? Or perhaps confining yourself to the company of trolls on youtube?

I was pointed to the commitments and code of conduct for an anarchist book fair. They’re rather progressive. It doesn’t matter who you are, when people gather, there will be rules to regulate your behavior.