John Oliver does a number on Trump’s wall. Yes, obviously, it’s a stupid plan…so how come people are taking Trump seriously?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
John Oliver does a number on Trump’s wall. Yes, obviously, it’s a stupid plan…so how come people are taking Trump seriously?
Aaaaaaaargh.
I have to go back to work, and oh boy, is there a pile of new stuff I have to deal with. My students are coming back to thousands and thousands of flies that need to be scored, so they’re probably going to be grumpy, too.
Now it’s time for me to straggle in and buckle down and dig out from under labors deferred.
I was reading the comments on Moran’s post, and there’s a creationist there challenging people to come to his youtube channel, where he has apparently refuted all of evolution. So I did. It was…pathetic. You can suffer through it if you want, but let me spare you some time with a summary of the entirety of the content.
This ignorant fellow, Tommy Hall, declares that he’s going to present a list of the failed predictions
of evolution. Right away, there’s a conceptual problem: science makes failed predictions all the time. It’s how it works. We’re supposed to make predictions, and test them, and if none of them were to fail, what would be the point of testing them? So sure, I could put together a long and accurate list of failed predictions, and how we progressed from testing them.
Science is big. Really big. Most of us who are trained in science are actually trained in a relatively narrow discipline — and as we progress through our training, our scope gets narrower and narrower. What that means is that there are a lot of questions about science that any one scientist doesn’t know the answer to, so the phrase “I don’t know” really ought to be a common part of our lexicon.
Lawrence Krauss, a physicist, got into a debate with Stephen Meyer, a creationist, as Larry Moran describes. Meyer cunningly got the debate unto the track of molecular biology and the human genome — a subject in which Krauss is far from familiar, and which Meyer doesn’t understand either (either that, or he maliciously misprepresents it). Krauss got stuff wrong and conceded some major points to Meyer.
I’ve been in these situations. I’ve mentioned before that when I get into arguments with creationists, when they discover that I’m a biologist, suddenly they switch gears and start confronting me with all this stuff about physics, or geology, or astronomy — the last thing they want to do is talk to me about stuff I know inside and out. And here’s what I do.
“I don’t know,” I’ll say. I might have some general knowledge and know a source, so if they’re asking me about, say, cosmology, I’ll add, “but I’ve read this book by Lawrence Krauss or Sean Carroll or Vic Stenger, maybe you should go read it, too.”
And then I’ll suggest that, since I know a fair bit about evolutionary biology or development or neurobiology, maybe we should focus on those areas…unless, of course, they’re conceding that they have no disagreement with the consensus in those fields.
I have my debate requirements, and I’ll refer you to point number 3:
The question to be debated must be specific: none of this “Does god exist?” crap. Come up with an addressable topic that can be adequately covered in an hour of back-and-forth.
And point number 4:
The question ought to be one I’m competent to answer: I’m a biologist, not a physicist, so don’t bother asking me to debate the implications of dark matter or the age of the earth (actually, that last one would be stupid no matter who you ask: it’s a settled issue.) Get someone else in the appropriate field.
Krauss apparently walked into a debate titled “What’s Behind It All: God, Science, and the Universe”*, which was stupid to begin with — and then he let Meyer steer it into subjects that Krauss knew little about, but which Meyer was an expert in pretending that he did.
Don’t do that.
Krauss is a good, enthusiastic speaker and I’ve found him informative and entertaining when he’s talking about his area of expertise — cosmology. He should stick to that. I have approximately zero interest in hearing him lecture about biology, or philosophy, or Russian literature, and I think any of those would be a painful experience. Unless he’s got some secret passion for Dostoevsky, maybe.
*Actually, I’d also like to know how Meyer got away with focusing on the human genome, which really isn’t exactly “the Universe”, and why he would be talking about an object, “God”, which the Discovery Institute claims to have no opinion on.
Peter Watts has this short short story about a brain interface technology that allows people to merge their consciousness with other organisms — and in this one, “Colony Creature”, someone experiences what it is like to be an octopus, and is horrified by it.
“Those arms.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Those fucking crawly arms. You know, that thing they call the brain— it’s nothing, really. Ring of neurons around the esophagus, basically just a router. Most of the nervous system’s in the arms, and those arms… every one of them is awake…”
It’s a good story, and I’m not knocking it. I think it’s also important to recognize that the experience of being a non-human organism is probably fundamentally different than being a human.
Imagine all the poor transhumanists who were born in the 19th century. They would have been fantasizing about all the rapid transformations in their society, and blithely extrapolating forward. Why, in a few years, we’ll all have steam boilers surgically implanted in our bellies, and our diet will include a daily lump of coal! Canals will be dug everywhere, and you’ll be able to commute to work in your very own personal battleship! There will be ubiquitous telegraphy, and we’ll have tin hats that you can plug into cords hanging from the ceiling in your local coffeeshop, and get Morse code tapped directly onto your skull!
Alas, they didn’t have a Ray Kurzweil or Aubrey deGray to con them with absurd exaggerations.
There deserves to be a special place in hell for smug, smarmy “pro-lifers”.
Dear @pzmyers I’ve read some of your reactions to pro-life claims on embryology. You seem to confuse biological claims with philosophical ones sir.
Oh, please, don’t “dear” and “sir” me. Have you ever noticed how some people like to paper over their stupidity with the most superficial expressions of politeness, as if it makes their argument respectable? Give me blunt honesty any day.
I also don’t need random goons on the internet telling me I have to make some distinction between science (usually, in this context, preceded by an unvoiced “mere”) and philosophy. Biology is a subset of philosophy. I get enough of that crap from real scientists.
Also, you don’t get to dignify your religious prejudices with the label “philosophy”.
Sometimes, the hard part of being a humanist is all the goddamn humans.
At the cell and tissue level, they’re pretty nifty, but once they start perambulating around they’re mostly all about stomping on you.
I’d probably be happier if all my interactions with the world were with computers and embryos. OK, and libraries. Libraries are cool. Especially computer-accessible libraries with books about embryos.
I can cope when you’re reduced to electrons and photons.
“Hello, stream of bits,” I’d say with my own spray of bits.
“You’re looking lovely, ray of light!” I’d radiate.
I’d happily arrange pixels to say, “You can’t screw me over now, abstract pattern of simplified information!”
But people…people mostly suck.
Sorry, people.
If it helps, just remember that you’re looking at a stream of electrons rendered into an array of photons. It’s how I’m trying to see you, after all.
Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke.
There are few things more rant worthy than a promise of a blog post on gender-sudoku that gets lost in off-line life.*
No, wait.
There are few things more rant worthy than a really bad text book. That’s what I wanted to say. I would be, of course, more upset at a text book that was terrible in ways I couldn’t identify as those would actually lead me to significant error, not having any reason not to rely on their representations. However, if one can’t identify the errors, one has no idea that one should feel deceived, angry, or ranty. But one should never be deprived of a good rant, should one?
