TESTS WARP YOUR BRAIN

That will be the new mantra of students — giving tests has a secret agenda to brainwash you. Charles Van Zant, Republican wackadoodle from Florida, thinks standardized tests will turn children gay. This is all in response to the commission of a company to administer tests statewide.

These people that will now receive $220 million from the state of Florida, unless this is stopped, will promote double mindedness in state education, and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can. I’m sorry to report that to you. … I really hate to bring you that news, but you need to know.

He doesn’t know the half of it. I’m not gay, so my tests only inculcate atheism in all of my poor victims students. If I try harder, maybe I can get all of the students who take biology here to emerge as gay socialist godless abortionists, just by asking them questions about mitochondria or recombination or Sonic Hedgehog.

But the esteemed legislator does ask everyone to look at the website for the testing company, AIR, so I did. I’m not much of a fan of standardized testing — I think we lose sight of the individual when we develop a single instrument to measure — but a lot of what they say does makes sense, and I couldn’t find anything about their magic gayness-inducing tests. I did see stuff about standards of care for “many LGBT people [who] face harassment, violence, stigma, rejection, and discrimination in their families, schools, employment, and social settings”, or improving the well-being of LGBT youth or ending LGBT youth homelessness. I don’t see what there is to oppose in that, unless you think that LGBT kids should be treated violently, not be healthy, or not have a home.

We also have AIR’s official statement on the issue.

AIR’s Health and Social Development program develops knowledge and understanding about LGBT youth that takes account of their experiences and needs. AIR also enhances opportunities for the healthy development, well-being, and safety of LGBT children, youth, and their families by providing workforce training and technical assistance to service providers across systems addressing behavioral health, child welfare, education, juvenile justice, and homelessness.

Those all sound like desirable things. I guess it’s only if you’re a Republican that caring about children without reservations about their sexual orientation is considered wicked.

The anthropologists really are buzzing

I’ve been getting lots of email and twitter remarks from the HBD mafia — they don’t seem to realize that I don’t have any respect for a gang of pseudonymous incompetents, and that they’re in a clique of self-deluded racist twits. You want to see real tribalism in action, there’s a group that demonstrates it beautifully, driven by one primitive tribal distinction, race, to constantly affirm to each other that they are right to reinforce their prejudices.

I’d rather read what real anthropologists — you know, professionals who have wrestled with and studied this specific problem deeply — have to say. Like Holly Dunsworth. She’s not very impressed with the HBD ideologues either.

That’s problem number one with HBD: It’s obviously first and foremost about tribalism and politics and pushing their beliefs, not about an honest scientific seeking of the truth.

And that’s problem number two with HBD: It can’t be about scientific truth as it claims to be because… There is no truth when it comes to whether biological race is real. It’s real. It’s not real. Choose one or both or neither. And your choice is going to depend on your own mind and as well as your social, historical, cultural, and societal context. And, that’s the reality of race. 

So that’s just one of the reasons why race is considered by many to be primarily a "social construct," rather than nature’s biological construct.

Many of us are thinking about these issues all the time because we’re anthropologists and human biologists and educators. But many of us are thinking about these issues even more intensely right now because of the slight disturbance in the Force brought on by Nicholas Wade’s new book and the HBD fandom that has ensued.

Although I do have reservations about the following statement.

In fact, I can think of no positive outcome of deciding that biological race is real… except for the opportunity for folks who are seeking such an opportunity to talk openly about their personal biases and the differential value they place on one group of humans over another, or to perpetuate stereotypes, or to act on their racism without backlash.

Beyond the chance to have freedom of derogatory expression, can you think of an actual positive outcome if a consensus of scientists decided that biological races are real? 

I’m not talking about anyone making a decision about whether mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, reproductive isolation, natural selection, epigenetics, microbes, viruses, environmental influences,… have influenced human evolution and variation over time and space.** We already know that. Human biology (the way we look, the diseases we get and don’t get, etc…) varies geographically and in some patterned ways, depending on the trait. That’s fact.

I’m talking about deciding that biological race is real, in other words, that race is real beyond being "just" a human construct. Could anything beneficial come of such a declaration?

I think the problem with determining whether biological race is real isn’t whether it’s beneficial or not — it should be whether it is true or not. And I’m satisfied that that has already been answered well. It’s not. A “race” is a mish-mash of categories that does not correspond at all well to any kind of clade. The concept emphasizes superficial differences as markers for significant cultural and personal differences, and fails.

But I can think of reasons knowledge about those patterned differences between people could be beneficial, because sociological race is real. These racial distinctions that people make have caused great injustices over time — in fact, some of the greatest atrocities ever. The American Indian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, centuries of black slavery…you will not make them disappear by pointing out the biological unity of the human species, and I think you would do great harm by trying to pretend that those weren’t acts targeting racial groups, and denying people recognition of their history. You need to know the truth to even begin to compensate for injustice, and to be aware so that those injustices are not repeated. If we should not ignore the sociology of race because the truth helps us do better, I couldn’t argue against the idea of a hypothetical biological pattern of variation called “race” because revealing a truth would make us worse.

I’d argue against it because it isn’t true. That’s enough for me.

I would not want to be Nicholas Wade right now

Two more meaty reviews of his li’l book of racism: One by Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist who debated Wade, and the other by Jennifer Raff, yet another anthropologist with expertise in genetics.

I’ve focused a lot of this review on numerous technical details because I think that it’s very important that non-geneticists understand the degree to which Wade is distorting the results of recent research on genome-wide human variation. I won’t speculate whether this distortion is deliberate or a result of simple ignorance about genetics, but it is serious. There is a great deal more in this book that also needs to be critiqued, such as Wade’s assertion that the genetic differences between human groups determine behavioral differences, resurrecting the specter of “national character” and “racial temperaments”. But as I’ve shown here, Wade’s book is all pseudoscientific rubbish because he can’t justify his first and primary point: his claim that the human racial groups we recognize today culturally are scientifically meaningful, discrete biological divisions of humans. This claim provides a direct basis for the whole second half of the book where he makes those “speculative” arguments about national character. In other words, the entire book is a house of cards.

Although the scientists are all laughing at him, at least he’ll have the praise of David Duke and John Derbyshire as consolation.

He’s not a racist!

It’s another review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance.

Nicholas Wade is not a racist. In his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, the former science writer for the New York Times states this explicitly. “It is not automatically racist to consider racial categories as a possible explanatory factor.” He then explains why white people are better because of their genes. In fairness, Wade does not say Caucasians are better per se, merely better adapted (because of their genes) to the modern economic institutions that Western society has created, and which now dominate the world’s economy and culture. In contrast, Africans are better adapted to hot-headed tribalism while East Asians are better adapted to authoritarian political structures. “Looking at the three principal races, one can see that each has followed a different evolutionary path as it adapted to its local circumstances.” It’s not prejudice; it’s science.

In addition to going over some of the sloppy science and devious distortions, the review links to other negative reviews of the book, too, but I appreciate its even handedness — it also cites at some length the positive reviews.

“Wade says in this book many of the things I’ve been saying for the last 40 years of my life,” said David Duke, the white nationalist politician and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, on his radio program on May 12, 2014. “The ideas for which I’ve been relentlessly villified are now becoming part of the mainstream because of the irrepressible movement of science and genetics.” Duke devoted his “blockbuster” show to a discussion of A Troublesome Inheritance and celebrated how Wade bravely took on the “Jewish Supremacists” and their “blatant hypocrisy over race and DNA.” There have also been multiple lively discussions about the book at Stormfront.org, the online forum Duke created and one of the most visited white supremacist websites on the net with about 40,000 unique users each day.

Over at The American Renaissance, which the Anti-Defamation League identifies as a white supremacist online journal, dozens of articles have been published about the book over the past two months. “People who understand race are clearly rooting for this book,” wrote Jared Taylor, founder and editor of the publication. Other white power advocates see the book’s arrival as a call to battle. John Derbyshire, a self-described white supremacist and former columnist for the National Review, wrote triumphantly, “Wade’s calm, brave assault on the enemy’s lines will likely be repulsed, but not without enemy losses, making the next assault more likely to break through.”

See? Glowing reviews! Doesn’t that just compel you to rush out and buy the book?

The sexbots are everywhere!

After that short post yesterday pointing out the abuse of photoshop to distort women’s bodies, I was briefly harangued by a loon who announced that I obviously did not understand the concept of sexual selection.

women’s bodies today are changing due to sexual selection whether you like it or not. Humans use tools to sculpt their bodies into appealing forms, so it’s not just left to inherent biological changes. And, women are abiding our wishes whether you like it or not. As biologists say, evolution is merciless. So why all the whining?

Actually, I do understand sexual selection quite well. I fail to see how making images of bodies plastic with photoshop is an example, or how you leap from manipulating pixels to how we can “sculpt…bodies into appealing forms”. Perhaps he thinks it is a kind of sympathetic magic, that if you paint a picture of a woman with balloon breasts and a wasp waist, women will simply comply with your wishes?

I am also impressed with the obliviousness. Sexual selection works both ways — has he ever wondered why some men are obsessed with women’s body parts, wanting them to be a certain size and shape? Exactly who’s brain is being sculpted by nature here?

I should also introduce him to the concept of the supernormal stimulus, the idea that a species can evolve to respond to a triggering stimulus that can be inappropriately strengthened by an exaggerated stimulus. This isn’t necessarily a good thing; for instance, Lorenz found that birds would enthusiastically nurture large fake eggs at the expense of their normal-sized real eggs, which at least isn’t a serious concern in nature, usually (although cuckoos can take advantage of it). There’s also the serious concern about human diet: give a person the choice of a twinkie or a carrot, and guess which one will be most attractive?

Or we could talk about RealDolls, these “life-like” (more like corpse-like) full-sized rubbery plastic dolls with conveniently compliant orifices. Is that an example of “sexual selection”? I suppose you could make a case for it, although it’s not affecting women, but rather selecting out males who waste their time in futile coupling with an infertile assortment of artificial stimuli — futile in both the sense that reproduction will not occur, nor will any bonding with another human being.

Besides, apparently those RealDolls are over-engineered. Simpler models will do the job just fine.

According to a Murfreesboro Police Department report, an officer was dispatched to the bar, where a witness said that Hutton walked to the ATM and “pulled down his pants and underwear exposing his genitals.” Officer M. Rickard added, “Mr. Hutton then attempted to have sexual intercourse with the ATM.”

After his encounter with the ATM, Hutton “then began to walk ‘nude’ around the bar thrusting his hips in the air,” Rickard reported.

Behold the latest generation of sexbot!

atm

Is that an example of selection? Or just a case of drunken disinhibition exposing the simpler driving machinery of the male sexual urge?

About time, Oregon

rainboworegon

Where will this all lead? I know that many suggest we are going down a slippery slope that will have no moral boundaries. To those who truly harbor such fears, I can only say this: Let us look less to the sky to see what might fall; rather, let us look to each other…and rise.

That’s the concluding paragraph to the federal judge’s decision that the same sex marriage ban in Oregon must be struck down. I’m glad to see this happening all across the country — the rights of the minority should not be subject to majority vote.

Women in…

When you hear those two words, prepare to cringe. We’ve got Women in Secularism going on today, and while I’ve missed this one, I am embarrassed every time I see one of those asshole men intruding on the conference #hashtag with snide remarks. And now, on the Women In Astronomy site, I’m embarrassed by my manly colleagues in astronomy. Caitlin Casey had to work with this kind of idiocy.

Another male colleague felt comfortable enough to joke about how sexy I was in front of dozens of colleagues at departmental social events.  His overt stares at my breasts (and at ALL women’s bodies in the department) combined with lewd comments were a common topic of coffee break chatter for years. “Oh, he’s always been that way,” folks would tell me, “so-and-so lodged a complaint about him with HR ten years ago and nothing was ever done.”  So I accepted it, until he ratcheted it up a notch to unwelcome hugs and cat calling in the hallway.  He’s the reason I stopped wearing dresses and heals to work, because the experience of wearing them transformed my 10am workplace into a dark, threatening alley I knew better than to walk down.

That was just one guy. There was another professor who pressured her into going on a date with him…it did not go well.

How’d I get myself in this bind? Suffice to say, I was afraid of telling him to back-off since, even though I didn’t work with him or for him, he had direct power over the success of my research program at the time through his administrative role.  Direct. Power.  He ended up testing the waters one last time, asking me on a real date after cornering me during a department social function, and I finally worked up the guts to get the message across: NO.

Then came the avalanche of hate.  His opinion of me took a 180, he started bad-mouthing me and questioning my competence and ability around the department, and before long I began to feel real impact on my research program.  Things were going downhill fast, all the while I had to keep playing a game of ‘Whac-a-Mole’ with the other creeps.  My workplace became a toxic cesspool, but in a way that was invisible to most.

The site has featured a full week of harassment stories: there’s the harasser’s playbook, recommended procedures to handle harassment, legal rights & obligations, and a challenge to those with power to change their behavior. Read them all.

There is a lesson for women in this

I’ve been reading about the shocking dismissal of Jill Abramson, executive editor at the New York Times. It says so much about what is going wrong here: if there is any paper that personifies journalism in the US, it’s the NY Times, and at the same time we’ve been witnessing the decay in journalism as an institution, we can see the rot blooming all over the flagship. I’m not a media insider by any means, but when you see the deck sagging and one of the masts falling off, even us outsiders can see something is seriously amiss.

One of the problems is simple corporate sexism.

There are two intertwining narratives of Abramson’s downfall, and both probably have some truth to them. The story that’s gotten the most attention, of course, is about sexism. “Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs,” Ken Auletta reported in The New Yorker. “’She confronted the top brass,’ one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was ‘pushy,’ a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.”

She got paid less than Bill Keller? Ethically challenged, insensitive, entitled Bill Keller? Say it ain’t so. And then she dared to actually point out this problem to the corporate executives? How dare she.

I don’t think that if a man did exactly the same thing, that his pay was not equivalent to that of his predecessor, that he’d get called “pushy”. That would be a case of pointing out an unfairness, whereas women are supposed to simply accept an unfairness. She was clearly a bad woman.

She broke the clubhouse rules. She never became that mythical female boss who is assertive but not aggressive, nurturing but not mothering, not so strong that it bothers the men, but never weak like a woman.

The top quote mentions that there were two factors contributing to her firing. One was sexism. The other was independence and ethics. She was for ’em, clearly something that put her at odds with NYT management, the newspaper that allowed Judith Miller to work until she retired.

But if Abramson’s demise is about gender, it’s also about newsroom values—and here, the implications are almost as troubling. At NYMag.com, Gabriel Sherman describes how she clashed with Thompson over native advertising or ads designed to look like editorial content. He writes about how she resisted Thompson’s push for a greater emphasis on online video, and about how she enraged him by sending a journalist to investigate his role in the unfolding Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal at the BBC, which he led before going to the Times. In all of these conflicts, she was right, and in two of them, she was defending fundamental journalist principles.

Mark Thompson is the NYT’s CEO, formerly of the BBC, where he was in charge when a documentary on Jimmy Savile, long in preparation, was squelched as just too embarrassing for management (hey, who knew the BBC and the Catholic Church would have something in common?). He’s keeping his job. The woman who thought it was newsworthy to investigate a cover up is fired.

So clearly, the lesson from this story is that if you are a woman in journalism, you must be submissive and you must abandon any sense of what is right. I guess working while female at the NYT is a bit like having a role in Fifty Shades of Gray.

We must be a force for change

There is a very limiting and very human tendency to focus on one issue at a time, and think, once that issue is dealt with, that all the problems have been fixed. We elect Obama, we have a black president, racism must be over. The Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade, therefore reproductive autonomy for all women has been achieved. We had a cold winter, therefore global warming is a myth. Many Muslim women are oppressed to a greater degree than American women, so America has achieved perfect sexual equality. We are short-sighted and self-centered and eager to see any signs of progress as an ultimate triumph.

One of the sobering things about Zinnia Jones’ latest video is that she reminds us that we have a thousand problems, not just one, and that you haven’t fixed transphobia by legalizing gay marriage. We have very far to go and we shouldn’t confuse taking a first step with reaching the destination.

Another myth: by freeing yourself of one superstition, god, you’ve freed yourself of them all. Zinnia has a special message for atheists, because she has long identified with that group and has seen it all, with proudly self-proclaimed atheists joining in the denigration of transgender people. And worst of all, they use “science” to justify their bigotry.

When you look at what these atheists are actually saying, their claims have nothing to do with religion. If you’re wondering how they can be transphobic despite being atheists, you’re asking precisely the wrong question. They aren’t transphobic in spite of their atheism. They’re transphobic because of their atheism.

And I don’t mean that their atheism has made them merely indifferent. No – it’s actively made their transphobia worse. As unlikely as that might sound, it’s pretty obvious from the way they structure their arguments. It’s not an appeal to faith – far from it. They appeal to the values of science, observation, and reality, because they feel that these values support their transphobia. In many cases, they actually compare being trans to believing in God. They’re not speaking the language of religion, they’re speaking the language of secularism.

This is not my atheism. There are many atheisms out there — one of the side-effects of believing in freethought — and some of them are narrow, elitist rationalizations for maintaining the status quo and preserving the privileges of those lucky enough to be economically secure, blessed with an education and a healthy body, marked with the right color of skin and the correct kind of genitalia and the proper sexual orientation. It is a kind of self-satisfied country club atheism. These are atheisms that look at all the human beings in the world and says to most of them, “You can not be one of us,” instead of, “You could be one of us,” or better yet, “We can be free together.”

Good atheism, like good science, is disruptive — it says tradition and dogma are not sufficient, that we have to look critically at reality to determine the best answer, and often we’ll get answers that contradict what you want to be true. By their very nature, they must necessarily identify and criticize the dysfunctional elements of society and provoke change to improve them. And if you’re one of those atheists who thinks your job is to hector people different from yourself into conforming, then you’re one of those dysfunctional elements.

Zinnia is going to be speaking at Women in Secularism 3 today — I wish I could have gone this year. I think it’s one of the best examples of atheism being true to its nature and demanding better of all human beings.