An atheist watches The Witch

thewitch

Mary and I saw The Witch at the Morris Theatre this weekend. I liked it very much.

“But,” you say, “it’s a supernatural horror story. How can an atheist see something like that and not sneer at it?”

Easy. It’s a movie. I believe that movies actually exist. I also enjoy some superhero movies in spite of the fact that they postulate huge violations of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. I like movies that tell me something about the human condition, and big budget spectacle is a distraction from the story at the core.

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Social justice networks are metastasizing!

metastasis |məˈtastəsəs|
noun (pl. metastases |-ˌsēz| )
the development of secondary malignant growths at a distance from a primary site of cancer.
• a metastatic growth.

It’s true — Freethoughtblogs has divided, although I prefer to think of it as multiplying. A new network has sprung from our loins, The Orbit, which includes some popular bloggers formerly of FtB, including Aoife O’Riordan, Ashley Miller, Brianne Bilyeu, Dana Hunter, Greta Christina, Heina Dadabhoy, Miri Mogilevsky, and Zinnia Jones, and incorporating several new bloggers as well. Head on over there, say hello, and start adding them to your RSS feeds.

You can also help them fund their efforts by donating to their kickstarter.

We’re hoping the trolls will be confused. Suddenly, more sites that are opposing and mocking them are spawning? Aren’t we supposed to be collapsing and going away?

FtB is going hyperplastic!

hyperplasia |ˌhīpərˈplāZH(ē)ə|
noun
the enlargement of an organ or tissue caused by an increase in the reproduction rate of its cells, often as an initial stage in the development of cancer.

Get ready — we’re expanding. We’re launching a whole new army of bloggers at FtB this week, so it’s going to get hectic and confusing. Some are leaving, even more are being added, so expect to see strange new blogs popping up in the list on the left sidebar, and lots of “Hello, World!” articles appearing in the Recent Posts list. I’m doing the grunt work of installing the new blogs so I may not be saying much here for a while — once the dust is settled we’ll do proper introductions and try to acquaint you with all the new people.

Until then, feel free to welcome the new mob as they trickle in.

Dang, he did it again

Ouch. Why is Neil deGrasse Tyson doing this to himself?

No, that’s not right, for multiple reasons.

  1. Celibacy is a behavior that almost certainly isn’t genetic in the first place. It’s more of a choice, strongly shaped by culture.

  2. Traits that are deleterious to reproduction can get transmitted easily if they’re recessive.

  3. You can get pregnant even if you don’t enjoy sex, and even if you are firmly committed to never having sex. Has he never heard of rape?

But really, the biggest problem here is that he’s echoing a pernicious fallacy that’s used to demonize all kinds of behavior. Haven’t you ever heard a wingnut complain that homosexuality is unnatural and can’t possibly have a genetic basis, because gays can’t reproduce? It’s the same argument. And it’s wrong.

Jeremy Yoder has torn that one apart in depth.

It’s getting weird. Tyson just keeps throwing out science canards — which is something a science popularizer shouldn’t do.

See? This is why we can’t have heroes

Neil deGrasse Tyson stuck his foot in it yesterday.

Ouch. Astronomers talking about biology is probably about as painful as biologists talking astronomy. But at least it inspired the #BiologistSpaceFacts hashtag, which is amusing, and Emily Willingham put together a good summary of cases where sex hurts.

But what I find interesting is the assumption, and it is a common one, that if some phenomenon exists, it must be part of a purposeful good, and that evolution in particular produces only beneficial outcomes. We’d be extinct if it didn’t, is the way the thinking goes.

There are problems with thinking that way, though.

One: natural selection isn’t the whole of evolution. Some features simply have not become fixed in a population because they’re good for it; detrimental novelties exist and can become ubiquitous because they aren’t severe enough to be seen by selection.

Two: In cases where selection applies, advantageous does not necessarily equate to “good”, whatever that means. It is possibly advantageous to male cats to have barbed penises that rake out sperm from other males; it does not make mating more fun. Many species of salmon exert themselves so strenuously to produce and fertilize eggs that they die, and presumably fish that conserved their resources to permit multiple breeding seasons were outbred by their frantically semelparous competitors. Would we say that an explosively fecund death is “good”?

Three: Selection doesn’t demand that an organism achieve an absolute “good”. It only needs to be slightly better than other individuals. So if pain is a negative criterion for sexual success, all you have to do is hurt less than the competition to win.

Four: A twist on my second point is that we often define “good” from a subjectively human view point, and even from a narrow cultural position. We assume that sex should be fun because it is for us, mostly, but from the broader perspective of biological success, “fun” is a concept that’s orthogonal to actually getting the job done.

Tyson’s perspective as an astronomer gave him no information at all on what evolution is all about, so he lapsed into his perspective as a human being, and gave a parochial guess. It takes a major effort to think outside the box of Homo sapiens for us, and the default is always going to be far narrower than reality.

Gaming the rankings

Academics have this scheme to rank different universities — many of them revolve around publication metrics, which is one entirely reasonable way to assess one part of the research enterprise. Unfortunately, if a university is ranked by how many publications are produced by affiliated faculty, one way to jack up the numbers is to buy nominal affiliations — pay researchers with successful publishing careers to put their university’s name on their CVs. All it takes is lots and lots of money.

King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia is playing that game. They are contacting highly ranked researchers, offering them a pile of cash, and asking them to list KAU as one of their academic affiliations.

UC Davis professor Jonathan Eisen also contacted Pachter. Almost a year ago, Eisen had been solicited by KAU but ultimately declined the offer.

Most researchers, such as Eisen, were initially contacted by KAU via email and asked if they would like to join the university’s faculty as a “distinguished adjunct professor.” Eisen traded emails with several people at KAU, trying to figure out what the catch was.

“I tried to get them to explain what they were trying to do,” Eisen said. “It smelled really off.”

KAU offered him $72,000 per year and free business-class airfare and five-star hotel stays for him to visit KAU in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, according to an email sent to Eisen by KAU. In exchange, Eisen was told he would be expected to work on collaborations with KAU local researchers and also update his Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher listing to include a KAU affiliation. He would also be expected to occasionally publish some scientific journal articles with the Saudi university’s name attached.

So, basically, free money for sticking KAU’s name in a paper. I have to respect all the people with the integrity to turn that down, like Eisen did. Unfortunately, not everyone rejected them (and it’s also kind of hard to blame them — the life of a college professor rarely provides opportunities to get wealthy), and the stratagem worked.

Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.

Who knew you could just buy an academic reputation?

Praising the dead, forgetting the living

Hillary Clinton made some remarks about Nancy Reagan.

It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s, and because of both President and Mrs Reagan, in particular Mrs Reagan, we started a national conversation…

It may be hard for your viewers to remember? Apparently, it’s really hard for Hillary Clinton to remember. I remember the 1980s; I remember our national nightmare of incompetence under the Reagans; and I most vividly remember their dismissal of AIDS, their neglect of the disease, the open ridicule that inflicted on the people suffering from it. Nancy Reagan was not an advocate for empathy or support or research into HIV. Quite the opposite.

Dan Savage remembers, too.

Hillary Clinton needs to walk this back immediately or she risks losing the votes of millions of queer Americans who survived the plague. We watched our friends and lovers die by the tens of thousands while Nancy and Ronnie sat silently in the White House. More than 20,000 Americans died before Ronald Reagan said the word “AIDS” in public—because it was a “gay plague” and Nancy and Ronald Reagan didn’t give a fuck about sick and dying faggots. I’m literally shaking as I try to write this. There are no words for the pain Clinton’s remarks have dredged up. I’m supposed to be writing a column—it’s way overdue—but all I can think about right now are all of my dead friends, lovely guys who might still be with us if Nancy and Ronald Reagan had started a national conversation about HIV/AIDS. Or done something about it.

You want to say something nice about Dead Nancy Fucking Reagan on the teevee? Compliment her taste in china. Don’t go on television and lie about her and her husband’s homophobic, hateful, appalling, murderous record on HIV/AIDS. Just don’t.

He includes a video of the Washington press corps laughing at people dying of the gay plague, and making jokes about each other not being gay, and therefore not having to worry about it.

This isn’t just a lie by Clinton. It’s demeaning a lot of people who watched the inactivity and obstruction of the Reagans in fury.

It’s also the kind of pandering remark to poisonous conservative ahistoricity that could cost her the election. We don’t need Democrats in office who look back fondly on the Reagan years — they were a horror.