I don’t even understand the connections

Jessica Ahlquist got a nasty, threatening letter. Here’s what really bugs me about it: threats are common, and Jessica clearly pissed off a lot of Christians by insisting that a public school not promote religion … but this letter is full of sexual slander and rape threats. WHY? This is not a sexual issue. She’s a minor; the last thing you should be talking about is having sex with her.

So I’m just curious, misogynist scumbags of the world. When a woman cuts you off in traffic, or annoys you by taking too long at the grocery check out line, or any of a multitude of other trivial offenses, does that somehow immediately convert the offender into a prostitute, does it justify rape, and do you think any man would similarly be transformed into a sex worker who can be violently attacked?

I’m just trying to wrap my mind around how those people think.

I get email

Man, you guys don’t even know what shrill and militant means. I get some doozies in my mailbox.

Two days ago, on the Saturday prior to Easter, I attended a Memorial Service for a fine young man who died tragically. In attendance were his family and friends, many of whom spoke of his deep love for people, his zest for life, and his profound spiritual and intellectual curiosity. Afterwards hundreds of people gathered at the family home, consoling each other with stories about their beloved friend. As I watched them drinking and smoking their grief away, I thought of those Masters of Intellectual Malice, the college professors who teach these young people that their lives are purposeless and meaningless, devoid of rhyme or reason, filling them with nihilistic despair. I realized that these Darwinists are the true terrorists threatening our society and our world. For while our “War on Terror” targets those who allegedly threaten our physical safety, the Darwinist Demons, who mock God and demean His creation, fail in their duty to serve as role models for our young people and thus attack the very soul of America and the world that they poison with their fraudulent and misanthropic ideology.

Oh, gosh, caught me. I just checked my syllabus, and he’s right: there’s a section on apoptosis — death and despair. And then there’s the unit on signal transduction cascades, in which I teach them that the only purpose in life is phosphorylation. I probably squeezed something about nihilism into our discussion of genomic integrity, because that’s just the kind of guy I am.

Now what does my correspondent suggest we do about us “terrorists”?

So on Hitler’s Hebrew birthday, let’s all say “Heil God Creator of Heaven and Earth” and “Darwinists Sind Unser Unglück” [Darwinists are our misfortune]. Let’s see our schools, colleges, and universities made “Evolution-Rein”. Let’s implement a “Final Solution” to the Darwinist scourge against God and Humanity. Let’s find spiritual concentration camps to restore our relationship with our Creator God, where we can purify ourselves with God’s Holy Fire of the nihilistic and fatuous doctrines of Darwin, who sought to make his spiritual depression and alienation a universal norm.

Wait, really? The answer is to celebrate Hitler’s birthday on 10 April by implementing a Final Solution against college professors? He’s such a good Christian.

Let’s see all the world’s people set free this Passover and Easter from the Darwinist Pharaohs of deceit, deception, and despair.

Let our Children Go, and let God inside them Grow!

IN JESUS’ NAME, AMEN!

Oh. Letting god grow inside children…must be Catholic.

Think of it as culling the herd

Uh-oh, atheism is in trouble. We keep losing our great leaders, seduced away by the entirely reasonable arguments of Christianity.

We have lost Patrick Greene.

The Christian news media is all excited about winning over this “longtime atheist activist” to Christ. Not only has he become a follower of Jesus, but he’s planning to study to become a Baptist pastor.

There’s one catch to this fabulous story of recovering a lost soul: who the hell is Patrick Greene? Atheist activist? I had no idea who this entirely forgettable person was, until I did a little digging to remind myself.

He’s a crank.

He’s a somewhat notorious kook in the atheist movement, best known for calling into The Atheist Experience show and threatening to sue Ray Comfort over a bumper sticker he found offensive. His “activism” consisted of making ill-founded accusations and getting thoroughly chewed out by the real atheist activists, like Matt Dillahunty and Russell Glasser.

The real story is that Patrick Greene is getting old and having medical problems, and a local congregation raised money to help him out. He’s been bought, in other words. Even in his “atheist activism”, he was simply a litigious fool who clearly had his own self-interest in mind, so it’s no surprise that he’d cheerfully flip sides at the first sign of personal gain.

They’re welcome to him. He’s an idiot who was repudiated by atheists for his actions.

White people need saving?

I had no idea. Suddenly, the fact that a black teenager can be gunned down and his white assailant goes unpunished and unhindered means the entire white race is under assault. O Lord, I hope no one threatens these fearful trembling innocent white Americans by shooting more black people! They can’t possibly bear more oppression.

The photograph is of the lovely John King, who has been protesting events in support of Trayvon Martin in Indiana. Apparently, Martin was a ghetto hoodlum, and therefore deserved to be shot. It’s going to lead to an interesting cycle: every black boy wearing a hoodie needs to be murdered, and when people protest the execution, white people like King will claim their views are being oppressed, so they need to lash out and kill more black boys, which means privileged white people will be blamed even more. How dare they say such mean things about us gentle people of European descent!

Too bad about the black kids. But what’s more important, a few lives of the wrong color, or the precious white sense of entitlement?

Counter-gishing

The Gish Gallop is a notorious tactic used by creationists: spew out lots and lots of bad arguments at a rapid fire pace, and mire the poor scientist in efforts to refute them one by one…which she can do, but only at a slower pace than the creationist can assert them. For a perfect example, Don Batten has 101 arguments for a young earth, every one of them stupid and dishonest. Imagine a debate in which your opponent rattles off all of those at you!

Fortunately, there’s this thing called the interwebs, where people at their leisure can organize and refute such nonsense. I recommend to you this rebuttal to 101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe. Start reading.

I get email

Seriously, people, I am so sick of the April Fool’s jokes. I just got this in my email.

Dear Dr. Myers:

I’m writing to you in your capacity as a biology faculty member at University of Minnesota Morris. I’m originally from Minnesota— I’m from just south of Mankato, and I’m a St. Olaf alum. Currently, I’m the Dean of Research at the National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, Oregon. My PhD is in Immunology, from the University of Colorado, and I did a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. I noticed that you earned your PhD at U of OR. My partner’s daughter graduated from U of OR 2 years ago.

This past year at NCNM, we’ve launched a Master of Science of Integrative Medicine Research (MSiMR) program. It’s a 2 year accredited program that is a combination of an MPH and a Master of Clinical Research program. As integrative medicine is on the rise, it’s important to determine what works and what doesn’t. Our MSiMR students are building the evidence base for integrative medicine. We do applied, basic, and clinical research. It’s an exciting program that examines nutrition, exercise, behavior change, massage, herbal medicine, and other natural modalities.

In addition, the MSiMR program has the potential for international medical research. I personally have collaborations in Tanzania, Brazil, and Nicaragua, and will be taking two students with me to Tanzania this summer. Thus, students who are interested in global health may be interested in this program. I’m attaching 2 brochures so that you can get a flavor of the program.

I know Morris is a little out of the way, but I’m going to be in Minnesota visiting my family April 18th-22nd, and I’m happy to make the drive if you know of students who are interested in natural medicine (naturopathic or Chinese medicine degrees) or integrative medicine research. I interviewed at Morris when I was looking at colleges for undergrad. In the past, I’ve met with the pre-med clubs at St. Olaf, Gustavus, and Minnesota State Universities. I’d like to make sure that Morris students have the same opportunities. If you’d like me to give a seminar or an informal talk for pre-med or graduate school bound students, I’m happy to do so. I’m also available to drop by a classroom and chat for 10 minutes if you think your students would be interested.

Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best,
Heather

I am being teased. I would so love to have Heather visit my classroom, just to see the look on her face when the horde of students raise their heads, eyes all a-glitter, and smile and bare their needle-sharp fangs in those last few minutes before she is shredded. I suspect, though, that if I eagerly offered her access to the students, she’d look a little closer at the content of my site and flee like a tuna before the shark.

Have you ever noticed that real polymaths tend not to call themselves polymaths?

I was alerted to the existence of Jonathan Bishop on twitter: he is, apparently a super-genius who will “write papers on-demand” and “work with leading academics” in just about any field. As proof of his bonafides, he plasters a photo of him wearing a mortar board everywhere. I’ve got one of those goofy hats somewhere, I should start wearing it more often. So I’d look smart.

The hat is silly, but what he says is sillier.

I’d like to know whether HERV is linked to Lucy’s more rigid brain as I believe schizophrenia makes the brain less ‘rigid’.

My question now is: can/did retrotransposons viruses transfer from fruit flies to humans via fruit to create more rigid brains?

So many assumptions: what does Mr Bishop know about endogenous retroviruses? What does he know about the molecular biology of Lucy’s brain? What does it mean to say a brain is more or less rigid? Where’s the link between this putative rigidity and endogenous retroviruses? Why are we drawing a link between australopithecines, schizophrenia, and retroviruses?

To answer these questions, I checked out Mr Bishops’ website. Something about it reminded me of Kent Hovind, for some reason.

Hi, my name is Jonathan Bishop. I am an IT polymath with professional expertise and Masters degrees in the scientific, legal and economic aspects of online communities and e-learning systems. I have direct experience in working in government, industry and academia and using this to push the boundaries of online community and trolling research. I hope that by the end of my career to have made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of knowledge, practice and policy in the fields of information technology, the arts, law and sciences.

Oh. Well. I guess that settles that. Of course, when I looked at his publications, just about all I see are conference presentations at IT meetings; I don’t see much evidence of a polymath.

You have reached The Official Website of Jonathan Bishop. I am regarded by Incisive Media to be one of ‘Britain’s foremost exporters of online community and e-learning research to the USA and Mainland Europe‘. I am regarded as the leading authority in the world on trolling and increasing participation in online communities.

Never heard of him. Oh, and the “trolling research”? He’s got a couple of blog entries about some incident at a football game. If that’s all it takes to be an expert in trolling, I must be the Einstein of trolls!

I told him that he was babbling BS. So he replied:

We’ll see Mr Myers when my empirical research paper on plasticity and social/emotional/cognitive imparment is published!

Oooooh, he’s submitted a paper. Where, I wonder?

I sent it to Nature Neuroscience, so it will probably get into the Daily Mail after! I am based at the Insitute of Life Science!

Heh. Chewtoy. He’ll probably appreciate the brief surge of traffic this post brings to him.

Who needs an IQ test when you’ve got coalescence?

I am just blown away by the consistency of this observation. You know, the creationists are not all stupid; there’s a wide range of intelligence in their camp, even if they are all wrong. But this one recent paper on the gorilla genome has become such an excellent tool for discriminating the competent from the incompetent.

This was the paper that unsurprisingly explained that gorilla genes reveal a mosaic; that some gorilla genes are closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other. If you understand the logic of coalescent theory at all, you know this is an expected result. The only way you could fail to see the distribution we observe is if the population went through a bottleneck of exactly two individuals.

But once again, one of the so-called scientists of intelligent design creationism blows it. Doug Axe has announced that the ape family tree is hopelessly broken, and that the gorilla data should call evolutionary theory into question.

Until recently, the answer was that a real family tree should generate a fully consistent pattern of similarities. [Not true at all. Coalescent theory is an extension of Fisher/Wright models of large populations, and the formal mathematics were worked out in the 1980s] For example, we are told that chimps and humans came from the same ancestral stock (call it CH stock) and that gorillas, chimps and humans all came from an earlier ancestral stock (GCH stock) [Correct so far]. If so, then the human and chimp genomes should consistently be more similar to each other than either is to the gorilla genome [WRONG. They should not be consistently more similar. Does he know nothing of probability?], since the human and chimp histories were one and the same thing more recently than the human and gorilla (or chimp and gorilla) histories were.

Well, the recent publication of the gorilla genome sequence shows that the expected pattern just isn’t there [Jebus. Read the paper. The pattern observed is the expected pattern.]. Instead of a nested hierarchy of similarities, we see something more like a mosaic [AS WE’D EXPECT.]. According to a recent report, “In 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other…”

That’s sufficiently difficult to square with Darwin’s tree that it ought to bring the whole theory into question. And in an ideal world where Darwinism is examined the way scientific theories ought to be examined, I think it would. But in the real world things aren’t always so simple [And yet the creationists keep throwing up their simplistic models and being surprised that they’re wrong].

Axe is the one guy the creationists keep touting as a real scientist, a guy with genuine chops in molecular biology, the man who is doing serious scientific work. You know, if you’re going to publicly criticize an observation and claim it calls into question the entirety of evolutionary theory, you ought to first look into it and see whether that observation actually fits a prediction of evolution — actual evolutionary theory, not that cartoonishly naive caricature of evolution the creationists all have in their heads.

Here’s a nice, short history of coalescent theory by Kingman. It’s been around for decades, long before the gorilla genome was sequenced, and it predicted what kinds of distributions we ought to see in our comparisons of different species…predictions that were borne out by the paper Axe thinks contradicts evolutionary theory.

“Athiests” actually is a misunderstood word

Oh, great. Now we’re being hectored by sorcerers. In An open letter to the New Athiests, some guy Who peddles a One Year Intensive Course in real magic wags his finger and lectures us on what’s wrong with “athiests” — we’re all a bunch of dicks.

In short, you have a lot of important things to say but as long as you continue to prenent yourselves like obnoxious zealots far keener to argue than discuss and talk at rather than with, you will actually only set yourselves further back and make the word “Athiest” into an even more misunderstood word than it already is. It wont be because you are wrong necessarily. It will just be because no one likes you.

Right. I’m going to take advice from a self-proclaimed sorcerer who makes a long tirade against atheists and misspells the term every single time.

Here’s the problem: I’ve noticed that people who deeply wrong, like sorcerers, Christians, and creationists, love to tell us that being right isn’t as important as being liked. I suspect they’re driven by self-interest rather than honesty.

All I can say is…you don’t understand me at all if you think I’m trying to persuade you to like me, dumbass.