Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I guess I’m going to have to think about my price now. I think the clash for me (and everyone) is over what I think I’m worth, and what the market will pay.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are deeply suspicious of twin studies, and those who welcome their confirmation that that their identity is fixed and heritable. I’m in the first group. I always have been. Maybe it’s something in my genes.
I first encountered the popular accounts of the Minnesota twin studies when I was a teenager, seeing the scientist and some of the twins doing the rounds of the afternoon talk shows — I think I saw them on the Mike Douglas Show (I’ve dated myself now). I remember them going on and on about the amazing similarities between the twins who had been raised apart. They both married women with the same name! They drank the same brand of beer! They were both volunteer firemen! They gave their dogs the same name! But while there were some recognizable similarities in the pairs, at the same time the obsession with superficial trivia wrecked the credibility of the stories. What? You’re trying to argue that my pet’s names are somehow encoded in my genome? It seemed to me that what we were seeing is echoes of similar culture in their upbringing (later confirmed: most of the twins weren’t really ‘separated’, but were raised by different relatives).
I also saw psychological tropes that ought to have been recognized. These were people who were rewarded for finding coincidences, and they avidly complied, and the scientists were readily accepting of coincidences as evidence of fundamental causal similarity. I was exposed to this pop genetics at the same time I was reading Fate magazine with a critical eye, and the stories were similar. I’d see stories that claimed to confirm the fact of reincarnation, for instance, by compiling lists of similarities between the contemporary claimant and their past life incarnation. They have the same birthday! Note the resemblances in this old-timey photograph! He lived in the Civil War era, now he is a Civil War re-enactor! He died in a fire, and now he’s afraid of fire!
It was exactly the same. That bugged me. And to this day I still see people touting the old twin studies as conclusively demonstrating the genetic basis of personality and intelligence, declaring that it has been positively confirmed that the heritability (a word they often don’t understand — genetically, it has a very narrow and precise meaning that isn’t exactly what they think it is) of intelligence is exactly 50%, meaning that half your IQ is determined by your genes (again, that’s not what it means), and therefore we should be more concerned with breeding intelligent people than teaching people. I also see this fandom coupled with other ugly associations — racists love it, as do Libertarians and simple-minded techno-fetishists. There are definitely genetic contributions to brain development and behavior, but human twin studies are deeply flawed and prone to exaggeration.
Stephen Hsu is a member of the gullible second group. He has posted a reply to my criticisms of his claim that we can readily ramp up human intelligence to reach an IQ of 1000 because hey, intelligence is obviously heritable. The twin studies say so.
The man is totally outclassed.
The most telling exchange is when Klingenschmitt tries to justify oppressing transgender people because all of them are sexual predators.
That is perversion. it’s people who label themselves as transgender for the purpose of getting that access to violate the rights of others.“Is it fair to say that because you’re a priest that you’re a pedophile?”
Well, of course not.“Why, ‘Of course not’? Why?”
Because some people are criminals and some people are not criminals.“Could you take that logic and apply that to the transgender community?”
They’re apples and oranges.“By apples and oranges do you mean apples and apples?”
I got asked some questions by Carrie Poppy about decay, because as everyone knows, my name is a synonym for “to rot”. Sorta. By association only.
Oh, I wish I had a cool name.
Uh-oh. I’ve disappointed David Klinghoffer. I should probably put that on my CV.
You see, the other day he praised a fellow named Tom Gilson for a post in which he provided a succinct summary of Intelligent Design creationism, and I took that summary apart, point by point. You might think, perhaps Klinghoffer finds fault with my analysis? He doesn’t provide any rebuttals. Did I get something wrong in using Gilson’s definition of ID? Nope, he doesn’t say…that would be hard to do anyway, since Klinghoffer praised it as exactly accurate!
, exclamation point and all. Even in his title he declares that Tom Gilson Nails It
.
So what’s his complaint? That I corrected the wrong person.
There’s going to be a new Star Wars movie in December. Really new, not like that recycled plot line we saw in the last movie.
It’s a Star Wars story that has escaped much of the baggage of the characters and plots of the George Lucas movies? Yes please. Also, the smaller scope (“steal some plans!” rather than “save the galaxy!”) is welcome, as is a character with more personality than “hero”.
I also look forward to the angry tears of the fanboys who discover that it’s another movie that puts a woman protagonist front and center. Don’t you all know that a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, gender roles were identical to the traditional expectations of 1950 America?
Solemn greetings, all. Today, as the more reverent among you know, is Paul Nelson Day. Today is the 12th annual feast day of St Nelson, patron saint of obtusity and procrastination, and we honor his contributions to science
by…well, by not doing much of anything at all. You could make grandiose claims today and promise to make good on them tomorrow, a tomorrow that stretches out into a decade or more, I suppose, but that’s too much work. Instead, maybe we should all just shrug and say we’ll think about celebrating later.
Oh, jeez, shrugging? I don’t have time for that. How about if we don’t and just say we did.
I also thought about suggesting waffles as the perfect food for this day, but nah, I’d have to cook them, or go to a restaurant. I’m just going to say “waffles!” and put it off to some other day.
Anyway, if you don’t know the story, Paul Nelson is a creationist who attended the Society for Developmental Biology meetings in 2004, with a poster in which he claimed to have developed this new evo-devoish parameter, Ontogenetic Depth, that supposedly measured the difficulty of developmental complexity to evolve. I quizzed him on it, and specifically asked him to explain how I could measure it in my zebrafish, for example, and he couldn’t tell me, even though he seemed to be saying that he and a student had been doing these ‘measurements’. But he promised to send me a paper he was working on that explained it all. Tomorrow! A tomorrow that never came.
So now we remind him of his failure every year. It’s a good thing to point out to Intelligent Design creationists that they don’t seem to be very good at fulfilling their grand promises.
He seems to sometimes notice that he’s being mocked, at least. Last year, he tried to trot out Ontogenetic Depth 2.0, which was just as impractical and ill-conceived as the first non-existent version. Maybe he’ll have a new beta for us this year, too?
Unlikely. Too much work. Not in the spirit of the day.
Another atheist has been murdered in Bangladesh, for atheism.
Nazimuddin Samad, a 26-year-old atheist who had taken part in protests against Islamist leaders, was attacked late on Wednesday near his university in Dhaka by unknown assailants carrying machetes.
“They hacked his head with a machete. As he fell down, one of them shot him in the head with a pistol from close range. He died on the spot,” deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police Syed Nurul Islam told AFP.
They shouted “Allahu akbar” as they butchered a human being — a human being they presumably believe was created by Allah, whose body is an astonishing work of God, whose mind is the most wonderful thing in the universe. It’s a strange form of praise and worship, I think. Do they also stroll into museums and enjoy the artwork by destroying it?
Oh, yeah…I guess some of them do.
Maybe it’s not so much that they are obsessed with their gods, as they are besotted with the thrill of wanton destruction and sanctimonious self-validation.
Isn’t it weird? There are all these clueless people telling people like me what we’re thinking, and getting it so wrong. Just this morning, Ken Ham announced…
Secularists are fearful of @ArkEncounter cause they don't want people hearing the Christian worldview they're vehemntly intolerant of
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) April 7, 2016
Secularists are fearful of @ArkEncounter cause they don’t want people hearing the Christian worldview they’re vehemntly intolerant of
