Wingers are such post-modernists

I had a strange and twisted conversation with Billy Hallowell, a writer for Glenn Beck’s lunatic site, The Blaze, and and also the creator of that poll we pharyngulated the other day. He was not happy. He was also more than a little obtuse. He has now posted a rather fragmentary and unrepresentative version of the interview on his site.

I had to explain to him more than a few times that these online polls are utterly pointless — they are just exercises in back-patting among the commentariat, where they give themselves a false sense of confidence that they really are the majority with skewed numbers generated from their own ranks, and that all we do is show up and demonstrate that there are other views out there, and their numbers go all wacky. I even told him the situation would play out the same if I were stupid enough to put up a poll, and Beckian microcephalics showed up en masse…I don’t do these open polls because you learn nothing from them.

It’s a measure of their insularity that Hallowell seemed quite shocked that their poll could be shifted around so much; he says I “ignited a mini-firestorm”! My post was a “battle-cry”! No, I casually put up a quick link to a bad poll, as I often do, and suddenly the creators of that poll were distressed to see that they didn’t have the comfortable majority they expected.

He’s now claiming that we were making an “effort to prevent Blaze readers from participating in the Adam and Eve poll”. You naughty, naughty Pharyngulistas. Were you visiting wingnut homes and slapping the mice out of their hands? That wasn’t nice.

He also has a bit of a blind spot.

Whatever happened to making a solid case and fairly proving it? What was the point of these atheists’ time-sucking exploits?

My point exactly. Why is The Blaze substituting a stupid poll for making a solid, substantive case? It’s empty of facts, and is only an opportunity for people to cheer for their side in a complete absence of evidence.

One thing that didn’t really make it into his article, though, was his insistence that everyone had a right to their own opinion and their own beliefs. When we discussed the subject of his poll, I pointed out that there actually is a right answer in it, one that is selected by virtually all intelligent, educated adults who are familiar with the evidence, and it doesn’t jibe with the one his readership selected. He was persistent in his belief that that didn’t matter: there are creation scientists, he said, who disagreed (I explained that any large group of people will have a tiny fringe of crackpots, and that’s who he was talking about), and that surveys show about 40% of Americans believe in creationism (scientific truths aren’t settled by popularity contests), and by golly, his people had a right to believe whatever they wanted.

And of course they do. They have a right to be wrong. We have a right to show that they’re wrong.

People can disagree in their interpretations of the evidence, and I went out of my way to explain that theistic evolutionists, for instance, try to have beliefs that are consonant with the facts, but also add their own peculiar explanations, like the ensoulment of humans, that aren’t contradicted by the facts, but also lack actual evidence supporting them. The literalist interpretation of the book of Genesis, though, is something different: that’s an explanation that ignores the majority of the evidence, and is even contradicted by that evidence. That his readers largely opted for the counterfactual claim is evidence that they are ignorant of the science, or willfully defying the evidence because it does not prop up their ideology.

He was happy at one thing, though. I told him that I had readers who loved exposing stupidity, and his site looked like a rich vein of inanity, so he could expect a few new readers who’d be looking over his nonsense with a critical eye. He just likes the idea of more traffic, I guess. But sure, have fun; the comments to his article are just full of blinkered Christian bigotry and foolishness.

A Y chromosome is worth the same as a Ph.D.

I’m glad I’ve got one, and I’m so proud that my worth is enhanced by my testicles, as this report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce shows.

The findings are stark: Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men. On average, women who work full-time, full-year earn 25 percent less than men, even at similar education levels. At all levels of educational attainment, African Americans and Latinos earn less than Whites.

I have to thank Carl Zimmer for bringing that to my attention — when he isn’t writing about parasites and viruses, he also dabbles in other heartwarming subjects, like this.

(Also on Sb)

I guess I’m going to have to get a new tie

I’ve got a lovely crocoduck tie, but maybe I need a new pigbird tie. Look! Evolution is impossible! It’s like a flying pig!

This is some new awful short video from Answers in Genesis. It’s slick and fast and just babbles rapid-fire lies at the viewer — don’t stop, don’t think, you might catch on to the nonsense!

(Ugh, sorry, but WordPress thinks it is smarter than I am and refuses to let me imbed the video here. You’ll have to watch it at this link.)

It makes precisely two discrete claims that it claims disprove evolution. All you have to do is watch this video and yay, you’re done, you can forget that science stuff and move on to loving Jesus. Here are the arguments:


  1. There is no known observable process by which new genetic information can be added to an organism’s genetic code.

    Except mutations and gene transfer, of course. Oh, hey, they forgot those! That does sort of scuttle their whole point. I’m afraid we do know of observable processes that add measurable, quantitative genetic information to an organism (not to its code, though: that’s stupid. Whoever created this thing is one of those common ignoramuses who can’t tell the difference between a genome and a genetic code). Geneticists have seen this happen: look at copy number variants in humans, for instance, and geneticists have seen novel mutants in flies in which a segment of the genome is duplicated; parents don’t have it, progeny does. We also have evidence from gene families. We have five α globin genes and six β globin genes (some of which are dead pseudogenes), for instance, and they’re clearly derived by duplication and divergence.

    So sorry, guys, this one is simply a lie. I’d be happy to be confronted by a creationist peddling this bit of misinformation, since it is so patently bogus.


  2. Life has never been observed to come from non-life.

    Ooh, better. This claim is literally true and not a flat-out lie. It’s also irrelevant. One of the things you’ll discover as you get deeper and deeper into biology is that it’s chemistry all the way down. There are no vital agents working away inside a cell, adding intelligent guidance: it’s all stoichiometry and reaction kinetics and thermodynamics. In a sense, all life is built of non-life and denying it is like seeing the Lego Millennium Falcon and arguing that it couldn’t possibly be made of little tiny plastic bricks. Yeah, it is.

    But it’s true that we haven’t seen life re-evolving from simple chemicals now, and there’s a good reason for that: this planet is now crawling with life everywhere, and life’s building blocks that form nowadays don’t last long — they’re lunch. We also have only rudimentary ideas of what prebiotic chemicals were reacting in ancient seas, so we can’t even simulate early chemistry in an organism-free test tube, yet. Scientists are busily tinkering, though, and we do have protocols that spontaneously produced complex organic chemicals from inorganic sources, we just haven’t found the formula for a chemical replicator yet.

    But it’s an irrelevant objection, anyway. Nobody has shown me god conjuring people out of mud, either. Creationists have their own problem of demonstrating origins, and they aren’t even trying to puzzle it out — goddidit, they’re done.

The conclusion is, of course, to claim that they have now disproven evolution (they haven’t), and therefore…Jesus. Faulty premises and ludicrous leaps of logic make this one a pathetic foray into addressing evolution. It’s slick, though — maybe they should have used a picture of a greased pig as their header image.

(Also on Sb)

My position on communicating skepticism

Yesterday, I listened to the talks by Sadie Crabtree and Carol Tavris on the art of persuasion, and how we can further our cause by applying the science of psychology. Today, I sat on a panel with Sadie and Carol, and also Phil Plait and Eugenie Scott and Jamy Ian Swiss, discussing communicating skepticism. I didn’t go in with any notes — it was a panel! — but I thought I’d try to articulate in text the points I tried to make. So some of this is stuff I said on the panel, and some it is stuff I just wish I’d said.

Sure, there is irrational, unbreakable core to the opposition, but there are also great masses of people with mere leanings one way or another, who must be approached as honest actors, and where the best tactics for winning them over are open, polite communication and appeal to their values, rather than a full body tackle. I agree 100% with Sadie and Carol, and if you missed their talks, look ’em up when the JREF makes the recordings available, and pay attention. It’s good stuff.

But I am also troubled by it all.

What they were talking about is politics. I’m no good at politics, I freely admit, but I can at least look and observe and see what’s going on. And here’s what bothers me: the other side doesn’t follow Sadie and Carol’s advice, and they’re doing great. The Republicans in congress aren’t negotiating honestly; they’re sticking to an absolutist ideology. The god-botherers aren’t negotiating with us; they want to club us over the head with dogma. And while we can point to those tactics and see that they clearly don’t work on us, the kind of people who’d come to TAM, they clearly do work to win over a great many people.

And then I look at the president of the US, and I see a smart man who represents many of the strategies discussed here, somebody who is a fantastically skilled negotiator and compromiser who can achieve many partial victories…but I also see a Democrat who has been steadily worming himself closer and closer to conservative ideals. Maybe he’ll win the next election and explode into a liberal socialist superhero, but that’s a more audacious hope than I have.

Let’s not ignore that unswayable core on the other side. That is a great strength for them: there is no doubting that when Sadie and Carol come calling and make their sincere, rational and often effective appeals, the target of their persuasion can look to the right and see the giant figures of Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Perry standing like rocks in the tide, unmoving and impenetrable, and be comforted.

And then I’ve talked to a great many people who have left religion behind, which includes quite a few people here, and you know, many of them weren’t coaxed into joining us. I have met so many people who became atheists after reading Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, and in case you haven’t read it, it’s not a diplomatic book. It was like a thunderbolt from the sky. What won people over wasn’t subtlety and gentle appeals, it was clarity and strength. While strength alone is tyranny, kindness and charity without confidence and resolve behind them become nothing but weakness and surrender.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we must endorse only our rock-ribbed heroes of godless skepticism, or that they can do no wrong. I’m saying we have to do it all, embracing a wide range of tactics, including the proximate tools of psychology and holding high a coherent and strong set of principles. Unfortunately, in recent years, many of the people in this movement have wrongly decided that the most firmly principled people in our ranks are all dicks who need to be chastened — a weakness the other side does not have. I sometimes feel like we spend more time gnawing at our foundations than we do effectively peeling away opponents to our side.

So here we are, once again talking about how to communicate, and I fear that we’ll lose is the sense of what to communicate. Don’t forget: the truth is our pole star, science is the vessel we use to progress, and a passion to explore and learn is the engine of our purpose. If we lose sight of that in our concern to be gentle with those who impede us, we’ll lose our way.

(Yeah, I did actually say that last bit. Some people seemed to like it.)

Ha, Evilutionists, you can’t explain this!

Don’t you just love those gotcha moments from creationists? They think they’ve got you stumped with some hard question, and then it turns out to be something crazy/stupid.

Did you know that all planets in our universe are on the exact same plane with the exception on Pluto. If one single planet’s orbit were to across another planet’s orbit, the entire planetary system would collapse due to the collisions. How by chance did all the planets end up on the same plane and rotating in their own orbit without crossing another planet’s orbit? Pluto is the only exception. Pluto is at a 14 degree angle from the plane. Why? Because Pluto crosses 2 other orbits. If it had been on the same plane it would be on a collision course. Pluto is the signature of the Creator to prove the impossibility of chance.

That’s so goofy it’s almost adorable. Consider the origin of the planets from an accretion disc. Consider that there were particle collisions (and still are!), and that the results were consolidation of masses. The arrangement of the planets is easily explained by chance and physics, with no need for intent.

As for Pluto, how does the fact that its orbit is one of multitudes of potential orbits that make it unlikely to smack into another big ball of rock make chance and physics an unacceptable explanation?

And that’s just the first paragraph. He’s got a whole page of doozies.

Jen flaunts the look

As some of you may know, one of Skepticon‘s yearly fundraisers is the sale of cheesecake calendars — and Jen McCreight is in the new one, tastefully posed.

See? You don’t have to take off your clothes to look good. Why, when I showed up for the photo shoot, they were prepared for me, and even had extra clothes to pile up on top of what I already had on. When you take into account the beard covering up half my face, you can’t see any of me in my photo…very sexaaaay. (Another plus: I don’t know if they even used any of the photos of me in the calendar, which makes me even more exotic and mysterious.)