The madness of Michael Ruse

Ruse has long been in his maundering dotage, but at least he could be counted on to maintain a thought in his head for more than a few minutes…and sadly, he has now written an inconsistent and incoherent pile of drivel in which he clearly rides his favorite hobby-horses while failing to notice that he’s skewering his own windmills.

Let us begin with Micheal Ruse’s wounded pride. It’s a common marker of a Ruse article: the litany of his grievances, the stinging memory of past defeats. He will never forget an insult. It’s as if every time he mentions me, it’s solely to complain that I once called him a ‘clueless gobshite’ (a remark made in passing; if I’d known it was going to be immortalized by Ruse I would have tried to be more creative.) Yes, he brings it up again in his latest article.

And yet I, and others of my ilk, am reviled in terms far harsher than those kept for the real opponents like the Creationists. We are labelled ‘accommodationists’ for our willingness to give religion a space not occupied by science. We are put down in terms that denote powerful emotion, way beyond reason. In The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, I am likened to Neville Chamberlain, the pusillanimous appeaser of Hitler. Jerry Coyne, the author of both the book and the blog Why Evolution is True and an ardent fan of Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, wrote about one of my books in terms used by George Orwell: ‘There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.’ The Minnesota biologist PZ Myers, who writes the blog Pharyngula, has referred to me as a ‘clueless gobshite’.

Let it go, Michael. It was 3½ years ago. I’ll try to find something new for you to be bitter over.

And then he says this:

I don’t care about the personal attacks. Indeed, I have the kind of personality that welcomes being in the public eye, even if the attention is critical.

He doesn’t care? Michael Ruse obsesses over past insults more than anyone else I know…well, except maybe John Kw*k.

What else is this article about? Why, the horribleness of those New Atheists. They’re just like those religious fanatics, especially that guy Richard Dawkins. It’s yet another familiar tirade about how atheism is just another religion.

But then, this is weird…after excoriating the New Atheists for their fanaticism, he declares that he, Michael Ruse, is the fanaticalest of them all.

Dawkins has said that on a scale from 0 to 7, from belief to non-belief, he scores about 6.9. I place myself even higher than that. I am a true non-believer. I am also a fanatical Darwinian — more so even than Dawkins because I think that, when it comes to culture, genes do much that he hands over to his own special cultural notion of ‘memes’. I have written many books about the implications of Darwinian thinking for epistemology and ethics.

What’s more, I think that religion has done and continues to do much harm to society.

If certainty and aggressive advancement of ideas are the signifiers of a ‘religion’, and if Michael Ruse really dislikes those atheist proselytizers, I suggest that he go lock himself in an empty room and beat himself up for a while.

But wait! There are more paradoxes! One of the big problems with the New Atheism, says Ruse, is the way we idolize and support our leaders unquestioningly.

There are other aspects of the New Atheist movement that remind me of religion. One is the adulation by supporters and enthusiasts for the leaders of the movement. It is not just a matter of agreement or respect, but of a kind of worship. This certainly surrounds Dawkins, who is admittedly charismatic.

We worship Dawkins? And possibly Hitchens and Harris? Has he ever noticed how much we all freaking argue with each other? There are no saints and popes in the New Atheist movement.

Oh, wait, yes he has noticed. In the very next paragraph.

Freud describes a phenomenon that he calls ‘the narcissism of small differences’, in which groups feud over distinctions that, to the outside, seem totally trivial. It is highly characteristic of religions: think of the squabbles about the meaning of the Eucharist, for instance, or the ways in which Presbyterians tear each other apart over the true meaning of predestination. For those not involved in the fights, the issues seem virtually nonsensical, and certainly wasting energies that should be spent on fighting common foes. But not for those within the combat zone.

The New Atheists show this phenomenon more than any group I have ever before encountered.

So which is it? Blind, unquestioning worship of our leaders, or incessant fractiousness and dissension? It doesn’t matter. Ruse is just spinning his wheel of deplorable sins and accusing us of whatever random flaw pops up.

It’s a freakishly odd article. It turns out that a major crux of his argument is that these New Atheists are all Humanists…and Humanism is bad. It’s an awful muddle, free of all distinctions and thought. Atheism is the same as Humanism is the same as Religion. It’s the most useless philoosophical assertion ever.Which makes it entierly appropriate that the comment is coming from the most useless philosopher ever.

For the Youtube commenters

I finally had to disable comments on two of my youtube videos, one on Atheism+ and another on the Thunderf00t affair. Why? Because the commenters were just too stupid and far too repetitive. Seriously, if youtube commenters don’t bother to read each others comments, and therefore say exactly the same idiotic comments over and over again, why should I bother to read them myself? And in most of the cases, it was just people reciting their knee-jerk hatred while clearly not even paying any attention to what was actually said in the video (to blame: Thunderf00t linked to those videos, told everyone a distorted version of their content, and then his followers jumped in to regurgitate the Asshole Approved commentary.)

So I finally got bored with the pile of stupid and shut them down. I’m not going to allow comments on any future youtube videos, either — instead, I’ll redirect them to the comments section Pharyngula and let them try to babble here. I’m going to add links to this post to each of the videos; either they’ll ignore it, because it takes too much effort to puke up something on a blog, or we’re about to experience an inundation of inanity. I’m expecting the former; really, these gomers are not the brightest lot.

The same old bad argument against gay marriage

Riley Balling, patent attorney, is certain that gay marriage will affect his marriage. Why? Well, he splutters on in a long op-ed in the Star Tribune, but all he manages to say is the children, because…the children, that’s why.

For many of us who favor traditional marriage, marriage is about raising children in a healthy environment. Thus, any change to the definition of marriage affects our marriage. Our “traditional” marriages and the children they produce are our greatest source of happiness, and we desire that our children will live in a world that will promote their ability to make the same choices that brought us happiness.

Shorter Riley: “I have defined marriage, and marriage is defined this way, and therefore changing the definition of marriage changes marriage by definition. Oh, and my marriage is all about pooping out kids, therefore your marriage damn well better be too.”

[Read more…]

Jonathan Wells talks about history

Oh, boy. Jonathan Wells explains why some of us reject the outrageous interpretations made from the ENCODE work claiming 80%+ functionality of the genome. It was really an effort to get past this sentence.

Some historical context might help.

Bwahahahahaha! First sentence, he makes a joke. Wells is a creationist clown notorious for his tortured abuse of the history of science. He doesn’t have a merely whiggish view of history — it’s more of a Burke&Hareish perspective, where if History isn’t conveniently dead to permit him to commit ghoulish atrocities on it, he’s willing to take a cosh to it’s skull and batter it into extinction. When Wells announces that he’s going to provide “historical context”, brace yourself for a graceless exercise in ugly alternative histories.

After James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the molecular structure of DNA in 1953, Crick announced that they had found "the secret of life," a popular formulation of which became "DNA makes RNA makes protein makes us."

What? I don’t even…OK, second sentence is wrong. That looks like a mangled version of the Central Dogma of molecular biology, with a weird appendage tacked on to claim that it “makes us”. Crick did not discover the secret of life. What the Central Dogma is about is the irreversibility of information flow: nucleotide sequence specifies the order of amino acids in a protein, but there is no mechanism to translate a sequence of amino acids back into a sequence of nucleotides in RNA/DNA. It’s an important concept, but not the secret of life.

But biologists discovered that about 98% of our DNA does not code for protein, and in 1972 Susumu Ohno and David Comings independently used the term "junk" to refer to non-protein-coding DNA (though neither man excluded the possibility that some of it might turn out to be functional).

More garbage. NO. No one equated non-protein-coding DNA with junk. Unless it was a creationist. In 1972, we knew about lots of non-coding DNA that wasn’t just functional, it was essential — genes for tRNAs and regulatory sequences, for instance. The term “Junk DNA” was initally coined to describe pseudogenes — gene duplicates that had been rendered nonfunctional by mutation. We knew that gene duplication was common, but that successful gene duplications, that is events that resulted in a copy with novel functions that would be maintained by natural selection, were going to be rare. So Ohno expected large quantities of such relics to be found in the genome.

Why didn’t biologists simply call non-protein-coding sequences "DNA of unknown function" rather than "junk DNA?" For some, it was because "junk DNA" seemed more suited to the defense of Darwinism and survival of the fittest.

No, because the term was initially applied to a specific class of sequences that were recognized as failed duplications. They weren’t of unknown function…they were the debris left over from unsuccessful natural experiments.

Now we know of other mechanisms that produce repetitive, non-functional sequences. There are transposable elements that have no purpose but to replicate themselves over and over in the genome, there are viral insertions, for instance. We know how they get there, and it’s not because their existence confers greater fitness on the bearer, or because they make active contributions to the phenotype. They’re just splatters of DNA.

The term “Junk DNA” is perfectly reasonable to apply to such mostly-useless sequences. I think the only legitimate argument against the term is that we have so many different classes of the material that more specific labels would be more useful…but the argument that these sequences are functional is a nonstarter.

In 1976, Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene that "the true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus [i.e., non-protein-coding] DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA."

Hey, Wells gets something mostly right! Yes, that’s correct, and it’s the explanation born out by observations of things such as LINEs and SINEs, which code for enzymes (or sequences recognized by such enzymes) that insert copies of themselves back into the genome. This isn’t just a supposition, we know how this works.

He gets the motivation behind the dispute completely wrong, however. We aren’t calling some sequences “junk” because we don’t know what they do: to the contrary, it’s because we know where those sequences come from and what they do. It’s also not because, somehow, it is a Darwinian prerequisite that “junk” exist in the genome. Again, to the contrary, there was initially resistance to the idea of junk because of a Darwinian bias towards seeing adaptedness in everything. The idea of non-functional DNA sequences that don’t contribute significantly to the phenotype emerged from observations of what we actually found when we started taking apart the components of the genome.

That’s why a lot of us are irritated with the ENCODE interpretation that the whole genome is ‘functional’. It’s not because of a philosophical predisposition, or because we apply the label by default to sequences we don’t understand, but because that conclusion rides roughshod over a lot of well-established evidence.

Oh. Right. In addition to history, evidence is another of those esoteric concepts that Jonathan Wells can’t comprehend.

Why do I despise MRAs?

Because they are narcissistic clueless psychopaths, that’s why. David Futrelle had to ruin my morning by linking to an awful, horrible post by an MRA on Reddit (two words in combination that multiply the dreadful effect of each one alone). It’s written by a smug jerk who is busily congratulating himself on how he and MRAs in general are superior beings with a greater grasp on reality than those childlike women, who are deluded by all those glossy women’s mags they read, don’t you know.

So far, so typical. But there’s a victim here, his wife. She’s quit her job to dedicate herself full time to raising their child, and he finds her weeping on the bed, overcome with stress, and feeling trapped. The whole post is about how weak she is, and how strong he is, and how he does everything for this family.

Except…well, he’s so oblivious that he tells us all about his day.

I rise in the morning, I get my daughter up, fed and dressed, I walk the dog, I put in a solid ten hours at my work to make hundred grand or so a year, then I meet my wife and daughter at the door every evening, cook dinner for us all, bathe my daughter and put her to bed, walk the dog some more and do the dishes. I do the garden, fix anything that needs fixed and take my daughter swimming once a week. In short I do just about everything.

I helpfully highlighted the important part there for you.

This guy does nothing. His wife is on non-stop baby duty all day long, while he’s off interacting with adult human beings who do not poop in their pants and expect him to clean them up, and who speak fluently of phenomena more complex than “play with me” and “feed me”. I’ve been there; I put in full-time baby care briefly while my wife finished her thesis; I’ve been in the shoes of the guy whose wife puts her career on hold to dedicate herself to raising the family even more. Child care can be rewarding, but it’s also a huge amount of stressful work.

This guy blithely tosses all the child care responsibilities on his wife for 10 straight hours a day, then claims he does everything, and can’t understand why she’s depressed and exhausted — why, it must be because she’s been reading Cosmo. Couldn’t have anything to do with her husband being a self-centered asshole.

The kicker is in the comments, where someone suggests that he divorce his useless wife (throughout, she’s faceless and with no personality at all — just another female, weeping). He says he’d rather not, and like the typical egocentric twit, goes on to explain why and removes all doubt that he’s a creep.

I’d be very unlikely to get custody of the wee one, and the damage it would do to her would be awful, I’m sure you agree. We don’t fight and our home life is stable, so I think divorce would likely make things a lot worse for her.

I don’t stand to gain much from a divorce and I’d lose a great deal. Besides, I’m nearly forty and I have a two year old. A wild life of drinking and dating isn’t likely even if we do separate!

His response is to consider it, and to weigh the utility of a divorce. I hope this woman read this and realizes that part of her problem is that she’s married to a loveless shit with no sense of empathy, who really doesn’t love her, and gets out while she can.

Man, if someone asked me why I don’t get a divorce, my response would be a disbelieving stare and the simple statement that we love each other and don’t want to be apart.

Bob Beckel is an embarrassment to Democrats and humanity

Beckel has always been a hack; I’ve known him as Cal Thomas’s partner in a series of tag-team columns in which he always ends up conceding. And now he’s a Fox News Democrat, with all that implies.

But this is just beyond the pale. Watch Beckel and his Fox News colleagues call for the blood of Julian Assange. It’s disgusting and uncivilized.


"A dead man can’t leak stuff," Beckel said. "This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch."

Why isn’t he for the death penalty? He’s for simply shooting the guy outside the rule of law!

I think there’s a reason I never watch Fox News.

If you ever wanted a perfect example of why government should be secular…

…just examine the logic and evidence behind this judge’s decision to deny a transgender woman to have a name change.

“A so-called sex-change surgery can make one appear to be the opposite sex, but in fact they are nothing more than an imitation of the opposite sex,” the judge wrote in a seven-page order last year.

“Here, petitioner has not even had the surgery by which his sex purports to be changed. Thus, based on the foregoing and the DNA evidence, a sex change cannot make a man a woman or a woman a man all of which, the Court finds is sufficient in and of itself to deny petitioner’s request for a name change,” Graves wrote.

“To grant a name change in this case would be to assist that which is fraudulent,” Graves wrote. “It is notable that Genesis 1:27-28 states: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …’ The DNA code shows God meant for them to stay male and female.”

That is a scientifically and ethically bankrupt position, driven entirely by a fundamentalist interpretation of Biblical dogma. We do not determine gender by chromosome counts; what is this judge going to do to determine the Official Sex of individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome (XY chromosomes, but physically female)? And how can he make the leap from the book of Genesis to the “DNA code”? The Bible verse he cites says absolutely nothing about the genetic basis of sex, or whether it is fixed and inflexible in any individual.

The Bible is silent on this subject. The science tells us that gender is far more fluid than Judge Black&White thinks it is. Yet that ignoramus is trying to use both to justify a cruel and stupid decision.

Maybe the problem isn’t so much religious people as it is idiots in our judiciary, who think the nonsense their preacher thunders at them from the pulpit is actually information of worth in making a reasonable decision.

Rick Santorum finally says something that is true

Give him credit, everyone: he actually gets it right. At the Values Voter Summit, he declares 'We will never have the elite, smart people on our side…our colleges and universities, they won’t be on our side'.

He claims that instead of intelligence and education being allies of the conservative movement, there are only two things that count: church and family. He can keep his church, but he doesn’t get to claim sole ownership of family. Family is whatever human beings bring to it; family evolves; what I consider family, Rick Santorum and his cranky cronies disparage and reject and deny. Family is greater and broader than the narrow, bigoted, and patriarchal version that he wants to promote.

And my ideal of family is not incompatible with intelligence and knowledge and expertise. My families can grow cooperatively and with love and affection while embracing the entirety of human knowledge, seeking more, and adapting to the truth rather than dogma.

My families can go to colleges and universities and come away richer and wiser. At least, those who can afford it…and I want to make that education reachable by more people, unlike Santorum, who wants to limit it and despise it because it undermines his ideology of ignorance.

Kanazawa pushback

I mentioned that Satoshi Kanazawa has a new column on Big Think. Now I’ve got two flavors of responses for you!

  1. Flavor #1 is spicy! Adam Lee, who is also on Big Think, is indignant that standards have dropped so low.

    I can only speculate as to the lapse in editorial judgment that must have occurred for Big Think to extend this racist, sexist, genocide-advocating pseudoscientific bigot a platform. Were they unaware of his views? Were they aware, but went ahead anyway because controversy is good for traffic? (Racism can’t be good for traffic, can it?)

    I don’t want to be accused of giving any extra publicity to Kanazawa, so I won’t be writing to criticize him again. However, I want to make it clear in the most emphatic terms that I think him utterly vile and contemptible. And rest assured, I intend to follow up with Big Think’s upper echelons to find out who made this decision and why, and I’ll update when I know more.

    Apparently, he did talk to the upper echelon at Big Think, because a nameless editorial source posted a response, which is Flavor #2.

  2. Flavor #2 is oleaginous, lumpy, and full of sugar — it’s a kind of lard-flavored ice cream, with bullshit chunks (Hmm, what would Ben & Jerry’s call that? “Fecal Globsplosion”?). The editors support Kanazawa with many adjectives.

    Having tracked his thinking for years, including having him appear for an interview on Big Think, we cannot help but admire Satoshi’s convictions to freedom of thought, even if sometimes we too have cringed at his missteps . At its best, it yields wondrous new perspectives on confounding aspects of modern life, such as the challenge of dating in big cities. At its worst, it yields the intellectual equivalent of shock-jock antics which serve as a call-to-arms for the legions of self-righteous self-promoters eager to decontextualize and oversimplify matters into stark injustices they condemn into oblivion across the cable news airwaves.

    Our support for his approach to thinking, and intellectual purview, should not be confused with an endorsement of his conclusions and prescriptions, to the extent that he actually argues on behalf of any specific outcome or conclusion in any given instance. The best and fairest criticisms of his work are truly academic in nature and involve just how far his cross-cutting postulates (one might call them intellectual mash-ups) can extend on the backs of the (current) consensus theories that underpin them and the empirical data he marshals alongside them (often circumstantially).

    Whoa. Read the whole thing. It reeks of desperate justifications, but it’s entertaining to watch this person twist themselves into knots trying to simultaneously praise Kanazawa while also trying to make sure they don’t get splashed with the slime from his certain eruptions.

Recommendations for cannibals?

Oh, please dear Gauss, not more of this hyper-adaptive crap.

It appears that men’s preference for more curvy women has quite a lot to do with the fact that curvy figures historically have possessed more of the healthy omega-3 fatry acid DHA, which is essential for proper brain development in children.

An article in the August 2012 issue of Psychology Today explains that men “know” something significant about women’s bodies that women don’t. And it all has to do with nature’s mandate to produce children with great survival skills. In fact, women are usually more like men’s ideals than they realize, and losing weight to meet the standard set by the fashion and modeling industries may not make them any more attractive to men.

Well, gosh then…if I were still trying to raise my kids and feed them a healthy diet, I guess I now know which of the herd to cull out and put on the dinner plate! At least, that’s where the first paragraph was leading me.

Look: if you are a woman eating a reasonable diet, if you aren’t abusing yourself with an eating disorder on either end of the spectrum, your kids will probably be fine. If you’re getting standard dietary supplements, vitamins and cofactors, that are routine in almost all standard pregnancy care situations (but unfortunately not routine for the poorest of the poor), your fetus is getting what it needs no matter whether you are slender or curvy. There is a broad range of tolerance here.

Also, in a normal, healthy relationship, men should not and are not judging you by either a conscious or unconscious assessment of how much DHA is available in your blood supply — if they are looking at you like a cut of meat rather than as a fellow human being who would make a good partner in living, you really don’t want to associate with them.

And this — this bullshit — is rank idiocy.

American children rank 31st out of 64 nations in tests of academic ability. The highest scores are in places like Japan, where women have slender hourglass figures and have four times the amount of DHA in their blood.

So…much…wrong. Not only the racism of categorizing an entire nation of women as possessing “slender hourglass figures”, but reducing academic ability to the product of your mother’s sexual desirability and biochemistry…jebus, let’s forget about tests and ability and background education and just let the children of MILFs into Hahvahd.

Also, guess who he cites as the source of this splendid information about men’s ability to assay DHA levels with a glance? Psychology Today. What, not Cosmo?