Someday, Cosmopolitan will ask me to write a piece on beauty tips, too

My opinion of Wired magazine just dropped a couple of notches. They’ve got Gregg Easterbrook pontificating on a science issue, the origin of life. Easterbrook is a sports writer with absolutely no clue about science—I’ve commented on his incompetence a few times before (OK, more than a few times). This time he’s soberly stating that no one has done any research on abiogenesis since Miller/Urey, or what they’ve done is a series of failed experiments, and that there are no hints in nature about the chemical origins of life, therefore, maybe a god did it … while completely oblivious to the fact that no one has ever done any research on gods or higher beings, and that there is no evidence for their existence. The man is an idiot. I am still utterly baffled why anyone consults that twit for his opinion on science.

Well, I don’t need to dirty my hands with the fool this time. Smithers, release the Poor Man Institute!

(By the way, I’ll plug it again: if you’re looking for a good summary of the research in early chemical evolution written for a lay audience, I recommend Hazen’s Genesis. I guarantee you that Easterbrook hasn’t read it, from his comments in that article linked above.)

Killing comic book characters for Jesus

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The pop culture hysteria is getting ridiculous. The movie 300, based on a graphic novel treatment of the sacrifice of the Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae, has become a political palimpsest with everyone trying to find support for their agenda in it—but get serious, it’s a comic book on the big screen. Similarly, a few have tried to see omens in the death of comic book hero Captain America recently. Again, it’s a comic book — superheroes die all the time, and they bounce back like Jesus or get replaced by someone else willing to look ridiculous in public wearing garish Spandex. For the most obvious example of a hyperbolic search for Meaning and Significance in the death of fictitious characters, though, we have to turn to the religious — they’ve got so much practice at it, after all. Ladies and gentlemen, behold Rabbi Marc Gellman, whose thesis is that the Spartans and Captain America died for God.

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The daily egnorance: the mind reels

What are we going to do with Michael Egnor? He seems to be coming up with a new bit of foolishness every day, and babbling on and on. Should we ignore him (there really isn’t any substance there), or should we criticize him every time (although he’s probably capable of generating idiocy at a phenomenal rate—he’s got a real talent for it)?

I’m not going to link to the awful “Evolution News & Views” site, and I’ll make this brief. His latest gripe is with the recent Newsweek cover story (that I had some problems with, too), but his argument is silly.

This is your assignment. You are to read the mind of someone named “Lucy.” Actually, you are to find out where Lucy’s mind came from. You can’t meet Lucy. She’s been dead for 3.2 million years. Your only data will be a fragment of Lucy’s fossilized skull and genetic analysis of some apes, men, and lice.

This isn’t a bad dream. This is an exciting new branch of evolutionary biology, and it’s on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And they’re serious.

The article doesn’t claim to be able to read dead minds. It cites a few studies in paleoneurology, where some interesting correlations between hormones and brain-associated proteins with behavior might provide some general insights. If Egnor is going to build straw men, he could at least try to make the stuffing a little less obvious.

He also goes on and on about how he can’t read brains by looking at blood flow in his work. We know. No one claims that we can. Of course, Michael Egnor does use these indirect measures to diagnose general properties of the brain — broad function, health, injury, etc. Unless he wants to argue that the physical state of the brain has nothing to do with the individuals possessing it, in which case he is out of a job, it’s awfully strange for him to claim that we can’t learn anything by examining brains and the molecules associated with him…and the only way he can do it is by inventing this false claim that biologists are saying they can “read the mind”.

He’s going to have to do better than this dishonest junk. I’m getting bored with him already.

Scott Adams reads Newsweek. Uh-oh.

If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, the insignificant, minute information Adams has on evolution must be exceedingly risky—it’s like the atom bomb of ignorance. In this case, it’s not entirely his fault, though. He read the recent Newsweek cover story on evolution, which fed his biases and readily led him smack into the epicenter of his own blind spots, and kerblooiee, he exploded.

This is a case where the flaws in a popular science article neatly synergize with an evolution-denialist’s misconceptions to produce a perfect storm of stupidity.

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Go back to Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor has done it again: he’s written another insipid article loaded with casual bigotry, this time against gays. I’m pleased to see that Dan Savage has savaged him, so I don’t need to go on at length.

However, this really isn’t the first time Keillor has done this—he has a history of unthinking stereotyping and rejection of gays and atheists. He’s an excellent example of why, when I see the Religious Right and the Religious Left, I don’t think the problem is the Right or Left…it’s the Religious.

My criticism of Keillor from 2005 is below the fold. Not only does he reject atheism and homosexuality, but he does so on the most trivial grounds—gay people want to get married to economize on their wardrobe? It’s nuts.

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What a waste of some fine reptiles

Why not slaughter snakes? The bible says it is their fate to be ground under our heel, after all. Laelaps has a story about a town in Texas that turns butchery into a fun family event — warning, there is a photo, and if you decapitate enough snakes, you can get a lot of blood spattered around.

I was most disgusted at the rationale; I heard this kind of stupid excuse a lot when I was a young fellow, in the country around Eastern Washington:

According to Yahoo!News, some justify the atrocities by claiming that it keeps livestock safe from the dangerous snakes, and although I haven’t seen any numbers, I wouldn’t imagine that rates of mortality by snakebite are very high among livestock.

Think for a moment. Can you imagine a rattlesnake hunting down and swallowing a cow? Then maybe you can swallow that story. Snakes don’t prey on cows. They might rarely bite one that stumbles across it, but that’s not going to be a major health hazard to a cow.

I’m hoping the lovely town of Sweetwater, Texas experiences the sweet justice of a plague of rats and mice.

A.N. Wilson has a genuine talent for stretching a quote

Perhaps your curiosity was aroused by Richard Dawkins’ apology:

I am distressed to find myself reported as participating in a “literary spat”, and as “pouring scorn” on an individual, comedian Peter Kay, for whom I actually feel nothing but goodwill (Heard the one about the atheist who scorned a comedian for his belief in a comforting God? March 8). The explanation is as follows. I am one of those whom reporters regularly telephone for a soundbite. Last week, I was fed a quotation from somebody, previously unknown to me, who said he believed in God because he found it comforting. Assuming I was one of a panel of usual suspects being asked to comment on this rather common sentiment, I gave my usual response.

Now it seems that I was being set up by a hired publicity machine, so that I would appear to be mounting a personal attack upon a particular individual who is my rival for a literary prize. And I also learn that the quotation they selected is an unrepresentative one from a book I haven’t read (I look forward to doing so), which is competing with my own for the same prize. I hope you will allow me publicly to apologise to Peter Kay and wish him well in the competition.

Perhaps you are also wondering what horrendous torrent of abuse he must have spewed to require that he apologize. Here it is, in full:

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it “comforting”? If evidence for a Supreme Being were found, I would change my mind instantly—with pride and great surprise. Would I find it comforting? What matters is what is true and we discover the truth by evidence and not by what we would like.

That’s it? He said he finds it difficult to take someone seriously who believes in some elaborate my because it is “comforting”? That doesn’t sound like it warrants any kind of apology at all.

What demands an apology are the extravagant, indignant histrionics that A.N. Wilson spins into a half-page article of shrill denunciations in the Daily Mail. You can get an idea of the tone from the title alone, but do read the whole thing: Why, in God’s name, do we take this silly, shallow scientist seriously?. Ouch. A.N. Wilson stands exposed as a silly, dishonest, and patently sleazy journalist.

(via Back off, man; I’m a scientist)

Ooops, the link to the Daily Mail scan didn’t hold up under the load: try this copy instead.