Sorry — I’m not talking to you today

This weekend has been busy — yesterday, I gave my talk at the Amaz!ng Meeting, and I think it went OK. I tried to go against type and gave a talk that was all science and biology*, no debunking, no godless inspiration pep talk, no railing at the state of delusional thinking and ignorance in the US. I saved all that instead for the conversations with people afterwards. I was hanging out with swarms of people all day and all night, talking myself hoarse and listening to all these interesting skeptics. I was up until 3am, at which time I discovered I was drinking something bright blue called an “Adios, Motherfucker”, which seemed like an appropriate time to finally drag myself off to bed.

Today contains many more talks, and Ben Goldacre and I are hoping to sneak away sometime today to do something which isn’t quite what you might think a pair of soft-spoken tweedy academics would normally do…but you’ll just have to wait a bit to discover what that might be. Maybe we can get away during some boring, unimportant talk, like Phil Plait’s.

Anyway, if you really must hear my terrifying opinions on various matters like religion and science, I recorded a podcast for Point of Inquiry earlier this week, so you can tune into that and listen to D.J. Grothe needle me. While I was here, I also recorded about an hour of stuff for the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, which isn’t up yet, but Steve Novella has been all over the place here at TAM6 assembling lots of material — keep an eye on that podcast for all kinds of exciting conversation, not just with me, but many other people as well.

*Well, and with a good dose of Phil Plait bashing. Unfortunately, he’s giving his talk today, and I expect retaliation and escalation.

I’m here!

I’m at this amazing meeting meeting these amazing people right now. I’m going to have an amazing lunch and then I’m going to an amazing reception. Say hello if you see me — I’ve already put my autograph on one octopus.

A Father’s Day thought…

My father is gone. He died in 1993; I vividly remember how I felt when I got that phone call, the desperate search through my memory of every last moment I’d spent with him, the anguish over the missing details and lost days and years, the despair that there would be no more memories, ever. It’s gotten worse over the years, too — it becomes harder and harder to recall the faces and voices of the dead as they recede into the past, no matter how important they were to us once, and while we might regularly resurrect fond remembrances, they aren’t so pressing anymore, nor are they as vital as they once were, and the pain of loss slowly fades. I loved that man very much and respected him as a guide, a father in the best sense of the word, yet there he goes, all his personality and works and words and concerns, dissipating into the background hiss of the universe, someday to be lost to all.

His grandchildren scarcely knew him, if they met him at all. To his great-grandchildren he’ll only be a name, at best, and to his subsequent descendants, even less, perhaps a scrap of a tattered record in some archive, or a tombstone, or a few bits in an online database. There is no immortality for us, not even in the history books or in some great saga … which only serve to promote a myth or echo of the man, anyway.

And so it will be for us, too. You and I will be gone some day, and be realistic — a few generations beyond that, and we will be unknown, forgotten, unimportant to anyone.

Perhaps you think this is too bleak a view, and that this is a vision of the future that we have to turn away from or lose all hope. It’s truth, though. Think back through your past: most but not all will remember their fathers well. Many will have known their grandfathers, but only in their aging years. Some will have met their great-grandfathers, but remember only an old, old man. Beyond that, you might have a few stories, a sepia-colored photo, an entry in a genealogy record, and the otherwise relatively recent will be nothing but a name and a few dates, while go back a few centuries and not even that will be there anymore. Each of those men were for a time among the most important people in their children’s lives, and now, nothing but dust. Do you think you will be any different?

But wait. I am not some glum nihilist who counsels everyone on the futility of their existence. There is more to this story than generations of wasted effort — to think that misses the whole point.

Look at the biology. Parenthood has a personal cost — we know this objectively. Both males and females are sinking a great deal of effort into reproduction, and we know experimentally that parental investment in breeding and care for offspring reduces longevity — and it’s true for fathers as well as mothers. Those of us with caring fathers know well the time and work involved, and the heartache we caused, and the hopes and worries that afflicted our parents.

Richard Dawkins famously said we come from a long line of survivors, that we are all descended from historical champions. This is true, but it leaves off another important factor: they were all survivors who made a sacrifice in order to leave progeny. Almost all of this chain of fathers are nameless and faceless, but all have in common the fact that at some time in their life they spent health and time to create new life (and before you belittle paternal investment as often little more than a spasm and spurt, think about the genuine cost of sexual reproduction; it’s such a silly activity, with only a small and transient reward, and yet it’s so ingrained in our being that we take for granted that males will sink much of their life into the business of courtship. Among humans, of course, responsible parenting is also a huge, prolonged expense.) Our parents were people who held our hand through childhood, who gave us the car keys when we were adolescents, who got us through high school and college, who paid for our weddings and gave us assistance through the rough spots, and all of that was to send us off into the world on our own, and they took pride in our independence. What a strange idea, that a life could find meaning in selflessly helping a generation that will leave one behind.

That is what fatherhood is really about: not immortality, not long-term reward, but self-sacrifice to launch a new generation into the world with a little momentum and a little potential … potential to stand autonomously and be something new; not to serve the past but to become the future. We regretfully watch our fathers fall away behind us, knowing that we will be next, and at the same time we prepare our own children to carry on and be themselves, just as we were given this chance at life.

I miss my dad, but I also know how to honor him. By being myself, as he brought me up to be, and by raising my children to be themselves, as he did for me.

Catching up

I’m home after a 10 day absence, which means … catching up with a backlog of work and mail. I just got back from my office, where a stack of packages was awaiting me — publishing companies keep sending me books to review, and it’s getting a little daunting. There was a fine collection of gems in this stack, though, which I’ll get to later, after I’ve read them.

There was also this, though, which I don’t know if I can read, since the tears of laughter and dismay keep getting in the way: several books and pamphlets pushing geocentricity. I’m not joking. These books, including He Maketh His Sun to Rise: A Look at Biblical Geocentricity, by Thomas Strouse, and A Geocentricity Primer and The Geocentric Bible by Gerardus Bouw, are very, very serious. Their primary argument is that the ancient Hebrews can be documented as believing the earth was the center of the universe (which I can accept without hesitation), that the Hebrews got their information directly from God (which I do not accept), and since God wouldn’t lie, therefore the earth must be at the center of everything. Wacky astronomy then follows. I wonder if Phil got copies of these, too, or if they thought a biologist would be gullible enough to fall for their silly reasoning.

But enough about bad books. Here’s the truly important thing I received in the mail this week:

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You’re all so jealous right now, aren’t you? I should heighten the envy by telling you that she is very, very soft and squishy, and she’s going right into my bed.

Unfortunately, there was no name on the box, other than the company that made her! I’ve got email from someone saying they were going to send me something nice, but they weren’t specific, so I need you to confess in the comments. Whoever sent this to me, let me know…and thanks!

Local Boy Gets Obnoxious

Cool — I’ve been written up in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It’s a good story by a journalist, Tom Paulson, who I just met this week, and who seems to know what’s up in the area. I’ve already had a relative call up and say she’s glad I’m famous, so it’s all just in time for the family reunion tomorrow — everyone will be prepared to take me down a peg and make sure I’m not too cocky.

Since I did say a few things about the Discovery Institute, he called them up and got their side of the story. This part is the typical creationist sidestep.

Not so, said John West, associate director of the institute’s center for science and culture. Intelligent design allows for the possibility of some kind of ultimate intelligence behind everything, West said, but their research “doesn’t start from a religious premise.” He rejected Myers’ contention that they are “creationists.”

West noted that one of their scientists, Douglas Axe at the affiliated Biologic Institute in Redmond, just this week had an article describing his computer simulation of protein evolution published in the prestigious online science journal, the Public Library of Science.

“We’re not proposing the book of Genesis as a scientific textbook,” West said. “We just think science and religion are friends, not enemies.”

Where to start?

ID doesn’t just allow for the “possibility” of an ultimate intelligence, it is their fundamental premise. Read the very first sentence of the Wedge document: “The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.” It declares that their goal is the “overthrow of materialism” and that they want to re-open the “case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature.”

They are insulting our intelligence when they claim that they are not creationists. Of course they are. You have to be blind, stupid, or a dishonest scoundrel to say otherwise.

I never claimed that they were using the book of Genesis as a scientific textbook; however, their base, the people who are going rah-rah and trying to use ID as an angle to sneak their ideology in the public schools, would like nothing less. ID is a façade of pseudo-secularism erected to cloak the religious goals of their organization. If you followed the Dover trial exposed that plainly; there’s a reason we laugh and call these bozos “cdesign proponentsists“.

And of course West would bring up the recent PLoS paper — it’s an excellent example of their new attempts to patch up their secular cloak.

The paper is called Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints. It’s a description of a new software package written by the secret Biologic Institute, which they argue will have utility in modeling protein evolution. The paper says absolutely nothing about Intelligent Design, makes no arguments against evolution, and is utterly untroubling to evolutionary theory, and it’s clear that the way they got it published was by studiously avoiding the kinds of stupid statements that are the hallmark of the Discovery Institute. It’s useful cover for them: they will now be announcing at every opportunity that they do too do science, and they deserve a cookie … hoping that the luster of a publication that does not address their core assertions at all can be redirected to put a little shine on the tawdry crap they advance elsewhere.

It’s actually not a bad paper, with an interesting idea at its center. They have designed an evolution simulator built on an analogy, that protein shape can be compared to the shape of Chinese characters. The virtue of the plan is that they can associate a complex morphology with an unambiguous functional criterion, its similarity to a representation in the vector world of of a Han character. It’s a clever idea, but the paper really doesn’t do anything with it yet, except propose it and make arguments for some similarities with natural processes. OK. Now if only I could trust the authors not to twist it in bizarre directions in the future, knowing that few of their critics will have bothered to plumb the arcana of their software, or that they know that all they have to do is claim that they’ve got some observation that disproves some facet of evolution, which will require that some people be distracted from real biology to address it.

Wesley already has some criticisms. I haven’t read it carefully enough to offer my own (I’m on vacation, dangit!), but I do have some general doubts…and suspect that if it works well at emulating biology, it won’t be supporting the scientific claims of Intelligent Design creationists, anyway. But no matter its successes, it is already being used by the Discovery Institute as a political tool to prop up their sham operation.

My crimes are being documented

So all these people are coming to my talks, and they’re reporting on me! Scott Hatfield caught my talk at the Berkeley IEDG meeting, and even has video of my conclusion. Geoff Arnold has a discussion of my talk at the Pacific Science Center last night.

One odd (or not so odd) thing. Both of those talks have focused entirely on the process of communicating science; I’m making a case for rhetorical strategies to combat the rising tide of creationist foolishness. They have not been about atheism, and I try to phrase everything as universally applicable to even the most devout scientist — I’m telling scientists to express their passions, get out there and be advocates for good science, and to tell beautiful stories.

And what are most of the questions about? Godlessness. Some people seem confused and even angry about the fact that I do not promote compromise with religion, even when I’m trying to promote tactics that are orthogonal to religious belief, and that if I’m asked about religion, I’m completely honest about the fact that it is indefensible bullshit.

Oh, well. I’m speaking on Friday to the Seattle Skeptics, and everyone will be pleased to know, I’m sure, that that talk begins with an introduction in which I trash the bible before moving on to discuss an example of a beautiful science story. Obviously, I need to embrace my inner atheist.

My mother is also coming to that talk. I hope she doesn’t grab me by the ear afterwards and give me a spanking…that would be so embarrassing.

Uh-oh. I’ve been caught on camera wearing bling and flashing gang signs.

The perils of travel

I’ve made the journey to Seattle (actually, Auburn, where many of my family members live), and have discovered that access to the internet is spotty in the west coast suburbs — there are wireless servers everywhere, but at the same time, everyone has gotten savvy and protects them with a password. How cruel! Fortunately, I’ve talked one of my nephews into handing out their home network password to a known internet provocateur, so maybe I’ll have some access this week.

Alas, I’m too late to remind you of Atheists Talk radio — I’m sorry if you missed it, but really, it should be a habit by now. Catch it on their podcast instead!

It’s not too late to remind all that I’ll be speaking before the Northwest Science Writers Association tomorrow, Monday, 2 June, from 7-9pm at the Pacific Science Center Laser Dome. Come on out! I don’t have any other specific plans, so if anyone wanted to grab me and drag me out to a pub afterwards, I could be willingly abducted. Make suggestions for specific places in the comments — someplace near the Science Center and not too far from public transit, please — and we’ll do it.

If you can’t stand me, maybe you’ll like Carl Zimmer better. He’s talking on Tuesday at Town Hall Seattle. It’s $5 admission! My talk is free…now I feel so cheap.

I’ll also be speaking on Friday at the Seattle Skeptics, but you’ll need to buy a $30+ dinner to hear that one, and you’ll need to make reservations soon. A-ha — I’ve one-upped Carl!

If it’s Saturday, it must be Seattle

Well, almost. My flight is delayed a bit, so I’m stuck in the San Francisco airport for a few hours. I will get there, though, and I will nap the whole way. It’s been a long couple of days.

So, yesterday for lunch I was able to visit the giant gleaming temple to rampant Darwinism, the NCSE. I got to tour the crystal dome containing the Laser of Retribution, the underground bunker, the massive computer complex…oh, wait. They didn’t have any of those things. They did have stacks of paper and an overworked staff, and Kent Hovind’s Ph.D. thesis, and the worlds most interesting bathroom, but otherwise, well, send them money. They need it.

I gave a talk. I went on too long. I chastised Berkeley briefly for giving Jonathan Wells a Ph.D., but I think they forgave me for that (but maybe not for talking too much).

We did have a Pharyngulista meetup at the local pub. I had two beers, twice my usual allotment (I was thirsty! I talked too long), so let’s see if I can remember who all made the event: Ken Cope, robbrown, Ron Sullivan and spouse, Scott Hatfield, Greta Christina, Josh Rosenau, dsmccoy, BobGo, Nurse Ingrid, a young lady on crutches (leave a comment! Tell the world your name!), Richard (leave me a link to your skeptics’ organization!). Anyone else? It was good. I also had my second California pizza of the day: the first was an arugula, walnut, and balsamic vinegar pizza at my lunch with NCSE, and the second that evening was covered with shrimp. They were very good, but purists will be horrified.

We’ll have to do something in Seattle, too!