Think, creationists, think

I was reading this gushing review of Mark Armitage’s work by Dr Jay Wile, who was “voted #1 by the readers of Practical Homeschooling magazine.” Armitage is the microscope technician who claims to have discovered intact cells in dinosaur bone. He’s full of it. But I have to say I appreciate the unwitting way Wile tears apart Armitage’s work while thinking he’s praising it.

Here’s an easy one. You’d think someone with a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry would understand that this is garbage:

A couple of years ago, for example, a sample of the fossil was analyzed for carbon-14 content. If it really is 65 million years old, there should be no carbon-14 in the fossil. Nevertheless, carbon-14 was found. Of course, there is always the chance that the carbon-14 is the result of contamination, but combined with the presence of soft bone cells, it seems obvious to me that the fossil is significantly younger than 65 million years!

C14 dating uses the ratio of carbon isotopes; it can’t be used on material above about 50,000 years because the quantity of carbon-14 is too low to be reliable, not because it’s nonexistent. If the bone was really young, you wouldn’t just be reporting that there was some C14 in it, you’d be reporting an age derived from a ratio.

But now for the real nonsense: the cells are just there, requiring no chemical isolation.

This soft tissue didn’t require any chemical procedure to isolate. It was simply there, inside the horn. He describes the sample as “soft, stretchy fibrillar bone,” and the light microscope image clearly shows the bone cells embedded in the tissue. Thus, this isn’t some biofilm left behind by bacteria or some other form of contamination. This is soft bone tissue from the horn itself, as evidenced by the bone cells embedded therein.

But wait, no! It does take long chemical processing to extract these cells!

While all of these images are incredible, he saves the best for last. Using a six-week process involving a weak acid, dialysis tubing, and distilled water, he was able to isolate individual bone cells. Look at the photo at the top of this post. It is of an individual Triceratops bone cell, as seen with a standard light microscope. The final two images of Armitage’s paper show two bone cells like the one above. They are free of any surrounding tissue, and one of them shows what appears to be the cell’s nucleus! If I hadn’t been told that these cells came from a Triceratops fossil, I would think they had come from a living animal’s bone tissue.

Which is it? From that description, though, I have to wonder — that is a protocol that opens the door to lots of opportunities for contamination. How meticulous is this technician’s procedure? That question is moot, because he quotes Armitage’s description of the fossil bone sample.

The remarkable preservation of delicate ultrastructures such as filopodia and cell-to-cell junctions (white arrows, Figures 6 and 7) has resisted a simple explanation despite hypothesized temporal limits on molecular preservation over millions of years. In the case of soft vessels recovered from dinosaur femur specimens, it seems reasonable that these tissues were sequestered from the elements and from biological scavenging activity because of deep encapsulation within compact bone. Within the Triceratops horn, however, which was highly vascular, no sequestration was likely because all of the vessels were openly exposed to air, soil, water, scavengers, dissolved salts and minerals, and the freeze-thaw cycle and heat of Montana seasonal weather; yet a high degree of preservation persists. While plant roots, fungal hyphae, and insect remains were all found traversing the horn, soft fibrillar sheets of bone and well-preserved osteocytes remain.

Unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable. He just compromised his own results, and Wile obliviously calls this the most important part of the article. I agree, but not for the reasons Wile thinks.

Tucker Carlson will continue O’Reilly’s war on atheism

Now that the conservative establishment has those Muslims all sorted (kick ’em out!), the Hispanics under control (build a wall…I mean, fence!), and the black population terrorized (just shoot them), and the transgender kids timed to explode (don’t ever let them go to the bathroom and wait for them to pop) it’s time start tightening the screws on the atheists again. I don’t think they’re particularly strongly targeting us, especially not in light of what’s being done to other minority groups, but that there is simply a rising tide of intolerance for non-white, non-Christian, non-asshole people. So Tucker Carlson had Amanda Knief of American Atheists on to complain about the removal of a park bench that said “Men Who Aren’t Governed by God Will Be Governed by Tyrants”.

I have to say that that slogan is discriminatory against unbelievers — and it’s false as well. I think the example of history says that believers are fairly susceptible to tyranny, and the more fanatical the belief, the more likely their tyrants will be incredibly awful. Flip it around; if a city put a park bench that said “Men Governed by God Are Governed by a Tyrant”, it would be seen as strongly anti-religious, and Tucker Carlson would be demanding that it be removed.

As for Tucker Carlson, he’s the replacement for O’Reilly. O’Reilly was stupid and would would address these kinds of issues with mindless blustering anger, but Carlson isn’t any better. His approach is to squint and babble and act like he doesn’t understand what the person he’s interviewing is saying — and he probably doesn’t. I guess Fox News hosts have to be dumbasses so their audience can identify with them.

Amanda Knief was good, and she’s a good choice to go on these kinds of shows. She’s one of the nicest people in the movement — she’s a lawyer and an atheist, so she’s shattering both stereotypes by being friendly and nice — but she also wasn’t going to let Carlson’s inanities slide by, answering everything patiently and with a smile. David Silverman is good if you want a combative personality fighting back on the screen, but Amanda is better if you want someone who’ll defuse the anger.

Belle Plaine gets a new ornament

A small town in Minnesota put up an exclusively Christian memorial to veterans in a city park — only Christians have fought in our military, apparently. The FFRF got on their case, and they initially backed off, but then under local pressure they decided to put it back up, but with a new compromise. They decided to call the park a free speech zone where anyone can put up a monument, just so they could allow this one religious symbol to stand in a civic space.

And somewhere, a Satanist’s eyes glittered with joy and anticipation.

Belle Plaine is now getting a lovely black steel cube with inverted pentagrams on it for their park. Good choice. Some of the citizens don’t seem to understand the first amendment and have defaced secular signs before, so it’s going to be tough for them to do much of anything to a heavy, squat, metal block.

I kinda want one for my lawn now.

History will judge evolutionary psychology as the phrenology of our era

I’ve criticized evolutionary psychology more than a few times, and usually my arguments rest on their appallingly bad understanding of the “evolutionary” part of their monicker — proponents all seem to be rank adaptationists with a cartoon understanding of evolution. But what about the “psychology” part? I’ve mentioned at least one dissection of EP by a psychologist in the past, but here’s another one, a paper by the same author, Brad Peters, that explains that evolutionary psychology is poor neurobiology and bad psychology.

The paper points out that EP uses evidence inappropriately, ignores the range of alternative explanations to set up false dichotomies (“if you don’t accept evolutionary psychology, you must also deny evolution!”), plays rhetorical games to dodge questions about its assumptions, and basically is pulling an ideologically distorted version of neuroscience out of its institutional ass.

Evolutionary psychology defines the human mind as comprising innate and domainspecific information-processing mechanisms that were designed to solve specific evolutionary problems of our Pleistocene past. This model of the mind is the underlying blueprint used to engage in the kind of research that characterizes the field: speculating about how these innate mechanisms worked and what kinds of evolutionary problems they solved. But while evolutionary psychologists do engage in research to confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses, the results of even the most rigorous studies have been open to alternative, scientifically valid means of interpretation. What constitutes “evidence” would seem to vary in accordance with the theoretical assumptions of those viewing it. Arguments about, or appeals to, “the evidence” may thus involve little more than theoretical bible-thumping or pleading for others to view the “facts” from their preferred theoretical perspective. When theoretical paradigms are unable to agree on what it is that they are looking at, it reminds us that the data are anything but objective, and gives good reason to question the theoretical blueprints being used. This paper argues that evolutionary psychology’s assumptive definitions regarding the mind are often inconsistent with neurobiological evidence and may neglect very real biological constraints that could place limits on the kinds of hypotheses that can be safely posited. If there are problematic assumptions within evolutionary psychology’s definition of the mind, then we also have reason to question their special treatment of culture and learning, since both are thought to be influenced by modular assumptions unique to the paradigm. It is finally suggested that the mind can be adequately understood and its activities properly explained without hypothetical appeal to countless genetically pre-specified psychological programs, and in a way that remains consistent with both our neurobiology and neo-Darwinian evolution. While some of these critiques have been previously stated by others, the present paper adds to the discussion by providing a succinct summary of the most devastating arguments while offering new insights and examples that further highlight the key problems that face this field. Importantly, the critiques presented here are argued to be capable of standing their ground, regardless of whether evolutionary psychology claims the mind to be massively or moderately modular in composition. This paper thus serves as a continuation of the debate between evolutionary psychology and its critics. It will be shown how recent attempts to characterize critiques as “misunderstandings” seem to evade or ignore the main problems, while apparent “clarifications” continue to rely on some of the same theoretical assumptions that are being attacked by critics.

Another valid criticism is how evolutionary psychologists seem to be unaware of how the brain actually develops and works. Anybody who has actually studied neurodevelopment will know that plasticity is a hallmark. While genes pattern the overall structure, it’s experience that fine-tunes all the connections.

The current consensus within the neurobiological sciences seems to support a view where much of the brain is thought to be highly plastic and in which an abundance of neural growth, pruning, and differentiation of networks is directly influenced by environmental experience. This is especially the case for secondary, tertiary, and associational areas, which make up the majority of the brain’s neocortex and are primarily involved in the kinds of complex, higher-order, psychological processes that appear to be of greatest interest to experimental psychologists. These particular areas seemingly lack characteristics indicative of innate modularity, though, with experience and use, they may build upon the functional complexity of adjacent primary cortices that perhaps have such characteristics.

I also like that he addresses a common metaphor in EP — floating free of good evidence, much of the field relies on glib metaphors — that we can just treat the brain like it is a computer. It may compute, but it’s not very analogous to what’s going on in your desktop machine or phone. We aren’t made of circuits hard-printed by machines in Seoul; there is a general substrate of capabilities built upon by the experiences of the user. Further, we’re not entirely autonomous but rely in the most fundamental ways on by growth and development, sculpted by culture.

We can see the problem from a different perspective using evolutionary psychology’s favored computer analogy. While it is true that humans have some engrained and preprogrammed biological circuits, all evidence would suggest that, unlike modern computers, our environmental experiences can cause these mental circuits to become edited, hi-jacked, intensified or lessened, inhibited, and so on. How else might we explain a person acquiring a phobia of hats, a fetish for shoes, or having an apparent indifference to what might be an evolutionarily relevant danger (e.g., cliff jumping)? If we accept this is true, we must also accept that it becomes difficult to say what might have been there at birth, or instead shaped by common environmental experiences that we all share. Modern computers cannot be re-programmed without a human; they do not function like the human mind. We are the ones who effectively tell computers what the binary ones and zeros of their programming language will represent. We give symbolic meaning to the code, which allows us to even say that computers processes information. Now let us turn to the human mind. Evolutionary psychologists want to say that meaning and information are objectively pre-programmed by our inherited biology. However, it would appear that we extract much of our information, and the meaning it contains, from a sociocultural cloud of symbolic representations that belong to a shared human subjectivity, or something Raymond Tallis refers to as the community of minds. Our subjective mental states are thus socioculturally structured and shaped through our reliance on an agreed-upon language and agreed-upon sets of subjective human meanings. The brain is only one part of the picture: it facilitates the mechanistic activities of the mind, but it does not solely cause them. Human meanings, which belong to the collective community of minds, will thus often transcend the underlying mechanisms that represent them.

Wait. If the “evolution” part is crap, and the “psychology” part is bullshit, what’s left in evolutionary psychology to respect?

Peters, BM (2013) Evolutionary psychology: Neglecting neurobiology in defining the mind. Theory & Psychology 23(3) 305–322.

Watch the skies!

Or, how not to get a bachelor’s degree:

According to UK Police, UK statistics instructor John Cain had been working late in his third floor office in the Multidisciplinary Science Building on Rose Street on Tuesday night. About midnight, he left to get something to eat. When he returned about 1:30 a.m., he tried to unlock the door, but it was blocked by something.

“He yelled out that he was calling the police and then the door swung open and two young men ran down the hallway,” recounted UK spokesman Jay Blanton.

Shortly after police arrived, one of the students returned and confessed. Henry Lynch II, a 21-year-old junior majoring in biosystems engineering, gave police an earful, including that he’d climbed through the building’s air ducts to the ceiling above Cain’s office and dropped down into the room, then unlocked the door and let in his friend, sophomore Troy Kiphuth, 21, who was not in Cain’s class.

Lynch also told them he had already tried to steal the exam earlier that evening around 6 p.m., but couldn’t find it. And, he said, it wasn’t the first time: Earlier in the semester, he’d successfully stolen another exam from Cain’s office, but he assured officers that he had not shared the answers with other students.

Lynch apparently gained access to Cain’s office all three times by climbing through the building’s ducts, and dropping down through the ceiling. How he got into the core of the building remains under investigation.

I rather doubt that Mr Lynch will be graduating from the University of Kentucky, nor will Mr Kiphuth, who deserves to be kicked out for the stupidity of trying to help cheat on an exam in a class he isn’t taking.

I think there’s probably a way to get into my office by removing some of the ceiling tiles in the hallway and working your way through the space above (which isn’t structurally strong enough to hold your weight), and then crashing through the tiles in my office. But then they too would be foiled by my filing system and never find what they’re looking for.

Friday Cephalopod: All we’re missing is the spinach

I was reading this account of an encounter between three cuttlefish — a consort male escorting a female, who is challenged by an intruder — and the story was weirdly familiar.

The intruder’s pupil dilation and arm extension began the first of three brief bouts over the course of about four minutes, each with escalating levels of aggression. The consort male met the initial insult with his own arm extension and — as only color-changing animals like cuttlefish can do — a darkening of his face. Then both males flashed brightly contrasting zebra-like bands on their skin, heightening the war of displays further.

Bout number one would go to the intruder as the consort became alarmed, darkened his whole body, squirted a cloud of ink in the intruder’s face and jetted away.

For more than a minute, the intruder male tried to guard and cozy up to the female, but the consort male returned to try to reclaim his position with a newly darkened face and zebra banding. He inked and jetted around the pair to find an angle to intervene, but the intruder fended him off with more aggressive gestures including swiping at him with that fourth arm. Bout number two again went to the intruder.

Then the intruder crossed a line.

He grabbed the female and tried to position her body to engage in head-to-head mating, but she didn’t exhibit much interest, Allen said.

The intruder’s act brought the consort male charging back into the fray with the greatest aggression yet. He grabbed the intruder and twisted him around in a barrel roll three times, the most aggressive gesture in the cuttlefish arsenal. He also bit the other male. The female, meanwhile, swam out of the fracas.

The intruder fled, chased off by the victorious consort male. Study co-author Roger Hanlon, Brown University professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., moments later observed and filmed the consort swimming with the female. Allen was affiliated with the Brown-MBL Joint Program in Biological and Environmental Sciences while Akkaynak was studying in a joint Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanagraphic Institute graduate program.

“Male 1 wins the whole thing because we saw him with the female later, and that’s really what matters,” Allen said. “It’s who ends up with her in the end.”

OMG, I thought, that is the plot of every Popeye cartoon ever. Popeye is strolling along with his goyl, Olive Oyl, when Brutus comes along and snatches her away, battering Popeye a few times in the process. Then Popeye makes a spinach-fueled comeback and beats up Brutus.

Read it again with that trope in mind. It’s uncanny.

How much have we lost to sexual assault and discrimination?

Read Holly Dunsworth’s history of being treated like a thing in anthropology; sexual assault, bland avoidance of the topic by her colleagues, and yet she persevered. This stuff is everywhere.

Once again, there is a whisper network, or in this case, the lack of one in 2003, on which we rely to get the word out about these kinds of men, because academic communities tacitly support such oppressive behavior. We’re past due for some kind of reliable, readily available network of disclosure about these predators — maybe someone should set one up.

Here’s an interesting example, only it’s for science-fiction conventions rather than science conventions: Midwestern Convention Predators, an online list, with evidence, of creeps. I’d like to see similar accounts publicized everywhere. This isn’t a problem if you’re not ashamed of your behavior, is it?

Once again, Charles Pierce expresses what I was thinking

The Republicans are having a fucking party to celebrate disemboweling health care in the country, to the profit of the rich.

Goddamn them all. Goddamn the political movement that spawned them and goddamn the political party in which that movement found a home, and goddamn the infrastructure in which their pus-bag of an ideology was allowed to fester until it splattered the plague all over the government. Goddamn anyone who believes that blind, genetic luck is a demonstration of divine design. Goddamn anyone who believes in a god who hands out disease as punishment. Goddamn anyone who stays behind the walls and dances while the plague comes back again.

And if the Democratic Party can’t reduce these idiots to smoking ash through the stunning visuals that greeted this atrocious vote, then goddamn the Democratic Party, too.

Everyone who voted for this crime must pay a heavy price. The Republican party must be destroyed.

Finally! A perspective on AI I can agree with!

This Kevin Kelly dude has written a summary that I find fully compatible with the biology. Read the whole thing — — it’s long, but it starts with a short summary that is easily digested.

Here are the orthodox, and flawed, premises of a lot of AI speculation.

  1. Artificial intelligence is already getting smarter than us, at an exponential rate.
  2. We’ll make AIs into a general purpose intelligence, like our own.
  3. We can make human intelligence in silicon.
  4. Intelligence can be expanded without limit.
  5. Once we have exploding superintelligence it can solve most of our problems.

That’s an accurate summary of the typical tech dudebro. Read a Ray Kurzweil book; check out the YouTube chatter about AI; look at where venture capital money is going; read some SF or watch a movie about AI. These really are the default assumptions that allow people to think AI is a terrible threat that is simultaneously going to lead to the Singularity and SkyNet. I think (hope) that most real AI researchers aren’t sunk into this nonsense, and are probably more aware of the genuine concerns and limitations of the field, just as most biologists roll their eyes at the magic molecular biology we see portrayed on TV.

And here are Kelly’s summary rebuttals:

  1. Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.
  2. Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.
  3. Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.
  4. Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.
  5. Intelligences are only one factor in progress.

My own comments:

  1. The whole concept of IQ is a crime against humanity. It may have once been an interesting, tentative hypothesis (although even in the beginning it was a tool to demean people who weren’t exactly like English/American psychometricians), but it has long outlived its utility and now is only a blunt instrument to hammer people into a simple linear mold. It’s also even more popular with racists nowadays.

  2. The funny thing about this point is that the same people who think IQ is the bee’s knees also think that a huge inventory of attitudes and abilities and potential is hard-coded into us. Their idea of humanity is inflexible and the opposite of general purpose.

  3. Yeah, why? Why would we want a computer that can fall in love, get angry, crave chocolate donuts, have hobbies? We’d have to intentionally shape the computer mind to have similar predilections to the minds of apes with sloppy chemistry. This might be an interesting but entirely non-trivial exercise for computer scientists, but how are you going to get it to pay for itself?

  4. One species on earth has human-like intelligence, and it took 4 billion years (or 500 million, if you’d rather start the clock at the emergence of complex multicellular life) of evolution to get here. Even in our lineage the increase hasn’t been linear, but in short, infrequent steps. Either intelligence beyond a certain point confers no particular advantage, or increasing intelligence is more difficult and has a lot of tradeoffs.

  5. Ah, the ideal of the Vulcan Spock. A lot of people — including a painfully large fraction of the atheist population — have this idea that the best role model is someone emotionless and robot-like, with a calculator-like intelligence. If only we could all weigh all the variables, we’d all come up with the same answer, because values and emotions are never part of the equation.

It’s a longish article at 5,000 words, but in comparison to that 40,000 word abomination on AI from WaitButWhy it’s a reasonable read and most importantly and in contrast, it’s actually right.