Real Scientists™ don’t let the evidence get in the way of the theory

David Sloan Wilson amuses me outrageously. He accuses me of not thinking scientifically in an astonishing glurge of pettifogging pedantry. You see, he’s peeved that I have said that the deleterious effects of patriarchal religion on women are obvious and that arguing that religion is beneficial to women is ridiculous, so he’s going to set me straight on how to think like a real scientist…that is, apparently, like someone who is divorced from pragmatism and reality.

Myers the ideologue thinks that he can demonstrate the harmful effects of religion on human welfare with a single word — WOMEN. Here’s how a scientist would set about studying women in relation to men. The first step would be to ask what evolutionary theory predicts about male-female relationships and how the predictions are borne out in nonhuman species. [I…what? The first thing a scientist should do is look up the theory that will tell him about the relations of men and women? I would have thought that the first thing we should do is measure the relative status of men and women.] That inquiry would show that sexual conflict is common in the animal world and that the kind of sexual equality that has become a virtue in contemporary western society evolves by genetic evolution only under special circumstances.[OK, I understand that comparative ethology can be useful…but it doesn’t answer the question of the actual status of men and women. That sexual conflict occurs does not mean we should not oppose it] Among the great apes, gibbons are monogamous, bonobos form female coalitions that resist domination by males, and males boss females around in all of the other species (and most other primate species). [I notice we still aren’t talking about humans] None of this variation can be explained by religion. [Yes. Because humans have religion and those other apes don’t. “Religion” is the variable in question, and we’re pondering how it affects human society; you can use data from other primates to show that religion isn’t the only factor that affects sexual relationships, but that’s not the question.]

The second step would be to see if variation in male-female relations within the human species can be explained by the same evolutionary dynamics that explain cross-species variation. [Nice of him to consider our species finally] For example, it is likely that in both cases, the ability of males to control resources needed by females will result in sexual inequality. This is one reason why agricultural societies are more patriarchal than hunter-gatherer societies — regardless of their religions. [That there are many factors that affect the relationship of the sexes in a species is not a point under contention. The question is whether religion does harm, or is a moderating factor to limit the damage caused by biological predispositions]

To measure the effect of a given religion on sexual inequality, that religion should be compared to the other cultural forms (religious and otherwise) that existed at the same time and place, such as early Christianity vs. Roman pagan society, early Islam vs. the many Arabic cultures of the region, or Christianity vs. scientific views about sexual equality in Britain during the Victorian era. I won’t try to second-guess the result of such an inquiry, but I do know this — it isn’t self-evident. [Or, rather than trying to calculate from theory the effects of a welter of complex phenomena, we could cut to the chase: are women oppressed by their society? Does religion act to oppose that oppression, or justify it?]

Myers and other new atheists seem to think that their action-oriented agenda doesn’t leave room for such scholarly footwork, but the reverse is true. Scholars who remain in the Ivory Tower can make mistakes without hurting anyone. [This was my very favorite part!] Those who leave the Ivory Tower to make a difference in the real world need to be extra careful, lest they hurt people on the basis of faulty theory and information. Humility is called for, which is the very opposite of ideological braggadocio.

I love that last bit. It’s an admission that David Sloan Wilson sneers at that dirty complicated real world; we’re supposed to sit in our ivory tower and calculate whether religion has a deleterious effect on women.

Rather than condescendingly telling us about evolutionary dynamics, I’d like Wilson to get specific.

How does depriving girls of an education benefit women?

How does raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children benefit women?

How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

How do honor killings benefit women?

How does stoning rape victims benefit women?

How does female genital mutilation benefit women?

How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

I’m just asking about women here, but I could also say that the attitudes fostered by religion-based misogyny also do harm to the well-being of men — these are deep, wide-spread, endemic problems that poison whole cultures, including our own.

I would also not argue that these problems are solely caused by religion: atheists can be misogynists, too, and history and culture shape individuals in many ways. But these are cases where religion validates and reinforces the oppression of women; secularization and liberalization (more liberal religions are less damaging than conservative, dogmatic ones) reduces the harm done. The question is not whether religion is the only force that does harm, or even the force that does the most harm, but whether religion does more harm than good. I suggest that Wilson open his eyes to the tangible, measurable harm done to women in the name of god, rather than closing them to the real-world data that makes his theories superfluous.

You know, while he sits in his ivory tower trying to ponderously calculate whether women are being hurt, women are actually being hurt.

There is no blacklist

The latest uproar from the misogynist mob is over a rumor that there is a secret list of people who won’t get invited to conferences. There is no list. There are petty people who think calling someone ugly is reasonable behavior, people who have not yet grown out of junior high school. There are personal preferences, as well.

For instance, I will not participate in any conference in which Abbie Smith is a speaker. If I’m invited, and later discover that she is also invited, I will politely turn down the offer.

I could find myself spending a lot more time at home, which wouldn’t be bad at all, except that she doesn’t get invited out that often, and her coterie of slimy acolytes are virtual non-entities, too. It is a positive aspect of the growing atheist movement that it tends to be progressive, egalitarian, and not particularly supportive of shrieking over-privileged children.

Now I have to stroll out to a bäckerei for coffee and pastries.

Let them have coathangers

He had to be named Bubba. He just had to fill every possible stereotype of the Southern good ol’ boy, the shallow, narrow-minded redneck who treats his women like he treats his dogs. Only he’s a state representative, elected to serve in the Mississippi congress — and Bubba Carpenter is proud to have stripped medical services from the women of his state.

We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital…

It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to– Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.’ That’s what we’ve heard over and over and over.

But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.

“You have to have moral values.” I agree. I truly wish Bubba Carpenter had some.

It’s not just coathangers. Poor women will also use clorox, turpentine, quinine, misoprostol, and back-alley butchers. They’ll bleed out, they’ll have perforated bowels, they’ll suffer unbearable agony, they’ll die. These are “moral values” at work. And note that he even acknowledges the other inequity: if they’re wealthy enough to go out of state (read: Republican), they won’t have to worry about the coathanger. This is open warfare on both women and the poor.

Bubba let slip the naked truth about the Republican agenda. The video of his statement is on youtube, but I suspect it won’t be for long: they’re scrambling to hide it away right now. I suppose it’s good that they exhibit a little shame, but it seems to be embarrassment that they were caught openly expressing what they think, not shame at their callousness.

You want evidence that religion is bad for the species? OPEN YOUR EYES.

David Sloan Wilson does not like the New Atheists. He’s pushing something he labels Evolutionary Religious Studies, which, by his view, attracts all the serious scholars of religion. His definition of “serious”, though, seems to be simply scholars who agree with him, who do not regard religion as harmful as the New Atheists do, and who are willing to plug his group selectionist theory of religion as a prosocial phenomenon.

In a new piece at the HuffPo (I’d rather not link to that place, so read it through Jerry Coyne, who ably deconstructs Wilson), he lays out three points comparing ERS to the New Atheism, and his third point is this: that the New Atheism ignores the scientific evidence.

Whenever New Atheists make claims about religion as a human phenomenon, their claims should respect the authority of empirical evidence. Insofar as the new discipline of ERS has added to empirical knowledge of religion, the New Atheists should be paying close attention to ERS. This is especially true for Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, whose names are so closely associated with evolution. Step 3 should go without saying and I doubt that anyone would disagree with it in principle. Yet, by my assessment, there is a serious disconnect between the New Atheism and ERS at the level of Step 3.

To back this up, he uses an example from Dawkins who clearly explains the byproduct theory of religion, and shorts him because he doesn’t fluff David Sloan Wilson’s pet idea, that “religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities”. I note that Dawkins also did not seriously discuss the Catholic church’s theory that the one true religion is the product of divine fiat, either.

What if he had said that religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities? That all people require a cultural meaning system to organize their experience, receiving environmental information as input and resulting in effective action as output? That all cultural meaning systems confront a complex tradeoff between the factual content of a given belief and its effect upon action? That secular meaning systems often depart from factual reality in their own ways? The effect upon the audience would have been very different than when they were told that religion is like a moth immolating itself or like a child mindlessly being fed useless information.

This is why Dawkins has a reputation as an excellent communicator, and David Sloan Wilson does not. That humans process data using a mental model shaped by cultural influences is simply a given, a kind of common property of the substrate that does not say anything about the special status of religion in poisoning (or more charitably, shaping) our cultures. It does not increase understanding. And most importantly, it does not address the problem of religion, or beliefs that lead entire cultures into benighted dead-ends of onanistic inanity.

The feline fanatic has a succinct summary of the New Atheist agenda. I concur with this:

  1. Testing whether the tenets of religion are true. The New Atheist answer is “no.”

  2. Assessing the effects of ungrounded religious belief on the world. The New Atheist conclusion is that, seen as a whole, religions have inflicted far more harm than good on the world.

  3. Getting rid of the unwarranted authority and privilege that religion, established churches, and religious officials have garnered for themselves over the centuries.

Even David Sloan Wilson would agree with the first point: religions teach false dogma about the origin and nature of the world. He is reduced to making pragmatic arguments that false beliefs can have beneficial effects on society.

But I have one word for David Sloan Wilson’s benign view of religion, for his argument that it is a prosocial phenomenon. It represents a huge pile of evidence for our second agenda item that he seems to ignore. That word is…

WOMEN.

Whenever I hear that tripe about the beneficial effects of religion on human cultural evolution, it’s useful to note that the world’s dominant faiths all hardcode directly into their core beliefs the idea that women are unclean, inferior, weak, and responsible for the failings of mankind…that even their omnipotent, all-loving god regards women as lesser creatures not fit to be intermediaries with him, and that their cosmic fate is to be subservient slaves to men, just as men are to be subservient slaves to capital-H Him.

David Sloan Wilson can argue all he wants that religion helped promote group survival in our evolutionary history, or that his group selectionist models somehow explain its origins, but it doesn’t matter. Here and now, everywhere, those with eyes to see can see for themselves that religion has for thousands of years perpetuated the oppression of half our species. Half of the great minds our peoples have produced have lived and died unknown and forgotten, their educations neglected, their lives spent doing laundry and other menial tasks for men — their merits unrecognized and buried under lies promulgated by religion, in cultures soaked in the destructive myths of faith which codify misogyny and give it a godly blessing.

Isn’t that reason enough to tear down the cathedrals — that with this one far-reaching, difficult change to our cultures, we double human potential?

A pretty fantasy

I like the sentiment, but…

Jesus probably didn’t exist, and if he can be said to be modeled after some first century Jewish rabbi, he would almost certainly have been virulently concerned with controlling people’s sexual lives…and would have regarded homosexuality as an abomination. Also, there’s no afterlife, so he isn’t lounging about in heaven moaning about our bad behavior on earth. Also, Freddie Mercury is, regrettably, dead and no longer exists: no afterlife, remember.

This has been a clarification from your friendly godless party-pooper.

But otherwise, yeah, nice.

Guess what the election is going to be all about?

Oh, boy. Mitt Romney gave a speech at Liberty University, and made it clear what side he’s taking.

The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family. The power of these values is evidenced by a Brookings Institution study that Senator Rick Santorum brought to my attention. For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2%. But, if those things are absent, 76% will be poor. Culture matters.

Wait, what? Has this man never heard of cause and effect? So if you’re a high school graduate and get a good job, you aren’t poor. If you’re poor, you’re less likely to graduate from high school and get a good job. Sure, culture matters: so why are the Republicans trying to perpetuate poverty?

I don’t see where getting married before having children has a causal relationship to the problem, either, or where it’s relevant to gay marriage.

As fundamental as these principles are, they may become topics of democratic debate. So it is today with the enduring institution of marriage. Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman. The protection of religious freedom has also become a matter of debate. It strikes me as odd that the free exercise of religious faith is sometimes treated as a problem, something America is stuck with instead of blessed with. Perhaps religious conscience upsets the designs of those who feel that the highest wisdom and authority comes from government.

What’s the probability that a gay married couple are poor? I think if he’s going to try and justify a particular pattern of relationships by correlating them with socioeconomic status, I suspect the lesson might be that the god of the prosperity gospel actually favors gay couples.

I expect that this is going to be a major talking point on the Republican side in the coming months. I hope Obama is ready to sharpen his rhetoric and come out a lot more strongly on the issue than he did in his tepid announcement.

Dudes, get some self-awareness!

Cracked.com, the humor site that has mastered the art of making lists of stuff (and sometimes making them funny), recently posted a list of the The 5 most ridiculously sexist superhero costumes — which is funny, but is kind of an easy target, one that is addressed elsewhere, too.

What made it especially funny, though, are the comments: comic book fans came out in a furious horde to complain that someone dared to criticize the cheesiness and sexism of their beloved medium. So the author turned around and wrote The 8 Stupidest Defenses Against Accusations of Sexism. It’s amusing its own right, and has a nice explanation for why people who like comic books ought to care.

Loving comics is why I’m annoyed at major publishers deciding “We’ll only target half the population, then much less than that” by turning it into expensive fake softcore: ridiculously stupid characters and more camera angle than character development. It’s also why I’m excited by new characters who exist in their own universes, and so are allowed to actually do things that won’t be erased in the next story arc. Atomic Robo features women who kick ass and wear clothes at the same time, as if not being naked were some kind of combat advantage. Empowered proves that joyously, blatant fan service doesn’t preclude a personality or character development. It turns out you don’t need a Y chromosome to have a lead role or protection against chilly breezes.

But, you know, it was inevitable — the comments again steal the show. It’s an interesting mix of people who get it and agree, and other totally clueless pig-people who respond to being called out on their sexism with…more sexism. Here are a couple of quick ones that made me laugh, ruefully.

Damn dude, get a life. Why do you waste your time bitching about this stuff?

Dude, you’re a comic book fan griping about an article about comic books.

Exactly what is so terrible about sexism anyway?

Well, gosh, he’s got me there. I guess if you never want to talk to half the human race, sexism is just peachy.

The latest Sinfest fits in right about here.

At least Bill Donohue has been poked savagely

The divorced Bill Donohue is in full-blown apoplexy over Obama’s tepid support for gay marriage.

I want the law to discriminate against straight people who live together — I used to call it shacking up, now it’s called cohabitation — I want the law to discriminate against all alternative lifestyles, against gays and unions.

Donohue’s argument against gay marriage is that it would open the door to all kinds of abominations…like brother and sister marriages, for which he cites a case in the courts. He asks the other guest on the show if he approves of that.

You know, if I were asked that question, I’d say…yeah, it ought not to be against the law. My personal squeamishness about how two people relate to one another ought not to be legally enforced; I’m sure there are people who consider what my partner and I do in the bedroom to be utterly disgusting, and I don’t think anyone should have to defend their private, consensual preferences to a team of strangers. I think prospective sibling marriages ought to be confronted with extensive genetic counseling, at the very least, and I might be willing to consider limiting the reproductive rights of such a relationship (because it would bring a third person into it, who does not deserve the potential genetic afflictions that can result from inbreeding) as reasonable, but otherwise…it’s not my place to police what other people do.

That answer would probably turn Donohue purple.

I have a song for you, Bill. Perhaps it will soothe your furrowed brow and bring your blood pressure down a few points.

“At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

Jebus Teetotalin’ Christ. That’s the best we’ve got from Obama? Seriously? It’s taken him this long to “evolve” to the point where he can take a personal (not even a political) stand on civil rights?

I am not impressed.

Those few words were the bare minimum I’d have expected from a Democratic candidate running for office last century — they are so self-evident, so clear and obvious to any decent human being that I’m appalled that anyone thinks this is a remarkable achievement. Our standards are apparently so low for our politicians that we clap and applaud when they make even a token declaration against bigotry.

Hey, maybe if he’d taken a stand a few years ago, we wouldn’t have had debacles like the recent anti-gay ballot in North Carolina.

He might as well have. In response to that tepid and qualified and ineffectual statement, American hate groups like the American Patriarchy Association, the Patriarchy Research Council, and the Catholic League are already denouncing him furiously. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say — I dare Obama to now stand up and fight for this right. None of this pussy-footing around — he’s going to get screwed by the haters already — so he might as well take a strong stand and earn the goddamned liberal/progressive vote.

He might earn a little respect, too.