When our institutions fail us

The American Astronomical Society is apparently led by craven suck-ups who don’t believe in standing up for science. They removed a post that was critical of the incoming Trump administration, making bogus arguments about how they are a non-political organization. I’m sorry, but you’re a science organization, and when an anti-science goon comes into office, you decide to hide under your desks rather than opposing him? What use is such an organization? If you refuse to take a stand when your members are under threat, when you actively silence criticism, you become a collaborator. And if you think bowing to the overlords of ignorance will shelter you from their ire, you haven’t thought things through.

We’ve got a Trump coming in who wants to wreck the economy and build a wall and is already complaining about those protesting college kids. You think if you scuttle to do his bidding that that will protect you from the inevitable cuts to science programs, the starving of our universities, discrimination against our students? Have you noticed that his administration is going to be managed by a raving racist and anti-semite? Does the fact that the vice president is going to be a theocrat who thinks the universe is only a few thousand years old trouble you at all?

The AAS has censored one of their own, but it’s not going to help them, because here is Sarah Tuttle’s piece. She’s saying what our scientific institutions ought to all be saying, although they probably won’t.

To those of you preaching appeasement and patience: No. We know what that looks like. We are better students of history. I am not afraid to stand up to protect the existence of those who society has pushed to the margins. I am not afraid to stand up to protect myself.

Everyone needs to rise up, and if our institutions, from the AAS to the Democratic party, are unable to share our outrage and help, then it’s time to throw down their leadership and replace them with people who are conscious of the real threat now facing this country…and facing science.

Catching up

I’ve been grading furiously, still plowing through newly accumulated piles. Who knew that all this work wouldn’t get done if I took the weekend off?

Wait a minute…how did I end up in a job that has me working nights and weekends all the time for a lower middle class salary? There are times I wonder about that. Maybe it has something to do with being so unaware that I willingly allow work to pile up, and just accept it as normal.

Cowards and bullies

Such charming people, those Trumpkins. Here’s a coffee shop owner who raged about Clinton:

“Before last week’s election, Heafner shared an image of Trump in the White House, with a caption that read, ‘If Trump wins the election, it’ll be the first time in history that a billionaire moves into public housing vacated by a black family.’

In an earlier post about Hillary Clinton, he wrote, ‘She needs f*cked with a bat! Right up her liberal f*cking ass!’”

The day before the election, when Heafner apparently thought Trump was going to lose, he posted this message: ‘The Coffee Tavern will never recognize a murdering whore for president!! Don’t like it, keep the fuck out!! We don’t tolerate scum!!!’”

Racist and misogynist…but now that people complained and threatened to boycott his shop, he’s singing a different tune.

“The people that know me know I’m not like that,” Heafner said in an interview after the incident. “I just hope that this community can overlook the stupid comments I made.”

Nope, sorry, that is what you are like, and now we do know you. Don’t worry about your business: this is America. The decent people might avoid your place, but you can always draw in the white power crowd. Enjoy your new company!

Here’s another example of a cowardly bully. This deplorable Trumpkin started an argument with a Clinton supporter in a bar and was separated from them, which you’d think would solve the problem. Then, after the “gentleman” paid up and was leaving

“The guy came back almost running, and he started pushing some customer and the high-chair next to him with the baby because he couldn’t reach the girl,” the manager told the Brooklyn Paper. “Then he punched the girl.”

…

Drost said staffers and locals chased after the man and eventually caught up to him. Leon told the Paper that the man yelled “You don’t know who I am!” before jumping into his car and driving off. The NYPD spokesman said the assailant escaped in a white car, and that no arrests were made. Love said it took at least 10 minutes for cops to arrive.

These are going to be the chickenshit years, aren’t they?

I almost forgot! I had a workshop at Skepticon

Oh, yeah, I did a workshop last Friday titled “Bad Evolution”. It was fun! Not quite as I anticipated, though.

It was a workshop. As I understand it, a workshop should involve audience participation, not just lecturing at them, and that’s what I prepared for. I had an exercise prepared, and I came with 50 handouts, just in case a lot of people showed up.

About 120 people showed up. Whoops. I might suggest that, in the future, Skepticon have some kind of workshop registration that allows us to set limits on the audience size, because that was too many, and it was kind of chaotic. Chaotic fun, rather than chaotic evil, so I guess it was OK, but it was still a little overwhelming.

Also, it was in a room with rows of chairs lined up, all facing straight ahead, which is also not conducive to workshopping. At least that was easily disrupted, and I had everyone destroying the tidy arrangement of the room.

Anyway, what we did is fairly simple. I talked for a bit, giving an overview of good strategies for handling discussions with creationists. I gave them this list of suggestions:

  1. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” Honesty is always a good idea.
  2. Go meta if you’re asked a difficult question. Do they know the answer? Why are they asking you? Is it a sincere question?
  3. If you have an answer, don’t let them dodge it. Follow up. Pursue a line of argument.
  4. Focus. It’s better to skip an opportunity for a good jab in order to build a strong story.
  5. Ask questions of them. You are not a passive oracle at their bidding.
  6. Question their assumptions. Be prepared to have your assumptions questioned.
  7. Demand sources. Science is built on the shoulders of giants, they must be acknowledged.
  8. Patience pays off. You’re not engaged to go in for a kill, you’re having a conversation.
  9. You will not convince the creationist, or “win”. Resign yourself to that.
  10. Keep your perspective and a sense of humor. These people are ridiculous.

I walked them through a couple of simple examples (“If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”), and then handed out a long list of much more difficult, more subtle creationist claims, and had one person in the group pretend to be a creationist, present one claim, and then let the others try to rebut them. The main point was to both cultivate a little empathy for the creationist argument, stupid as it might be, and to show that even someone on the side of science might be stymied fairly easily.

For example, here’s one question from my list (which was taken from a collection of bad arguments from the mindless pen of David Buckna):

Microsoft programmers utilized complex codes to create the Windows 95 software. The genetic code, which is more sophisticated, controls the physical processes of life and is accompanied by elaborate transmission and duplication systems. How does evolution, using natural processes and chance, solve the problem of complex information sequencing without intelligence?

The average person would have difficulty responding to that. I think it’s important for us to not take for granted that the answers are always obvious…even when I might find anyone question easy to answer.

Go ahead, try to answer it in the comments, but note that “You’re stupid” and “Citations to the peer-reviewed literature or GTFO” are not on my list of recommended strategies.

Creationists are outliers in another way

Popehat is looking for someone to defend yet another science blogger from a lawsuit.

Pepijn van Erp blogs about science and pseudoscience from the Netherlands. He praises good science and skewers and critiques the bad. Wait a minute. Is that the Jaws theme playing? Yes. Yes it is — because blogging about junk science is a great way to get threatened or sued. In my experience, purveyors of “non-mainstream” science are unusually litigious and sensitive to criticism. You’ve seen it here at Popehat with “atavistic” cancer theorists and vaccine truthers and naturopaths and fans of questionable cancer remedies and AIDS deniers. I blame the crystals.

He’s being sued by Ruggero Santilli, a physics crank. However, I realized something as I was reading about it. I’ve become something of an unwilling expert in this area — I’ve been threatened with lawsuits so many times that I’ve completely lost count. I now regard cease-and-desist letters as ho-hum, and getting told I’m going to be sued for over 2 million dollars just triggers an eye-roll. But you know what’s weird?

I’ve never been threatened with a lawsuit by a creationist.

Notice that they aren’t present in Popehat’s list, either. The people who get most indignant about criticism seem to be people who are trying hardest to gain undeserved credibility from mainstream science, and that includes certain skeptics and atheists. Creationists love to steal scientific cred whenever they can, but it’s for the purpose of suckering Christians and Muslims, not for winning the respect of the scientific community.

I’ve also pissed off Catholics, but even they didn’t threaten to sue me. They threatened to kill me and my family and destroy my life, and repeatedly told me I was going to burn in hell, but not a whisper of dragging me into court over maltreatment of a cracker.

I’m going to have to file this datum away in my head as a reference to use in determining which are the “safe” targets of criticism. Religious nuts may talk a loud game about bashing your skull in, but they don’t hire lawyers to harass you.

Not “gill slits” again!

stage14_human_embryo

Troy Britain got blocked from the Institute for Creation Research facebook page because he criticized this comment:

Shouldn’t students be skeptical when they’re told that evolutionists can simply look at folds in embryos and see gill slits? The truth is that these are only folds of tissue in the pharynx region of vertebrates during the pharyngula stage of development. For mammals, birds, and reptiles, they never develop into a structure that is in any way like fish gills.

Britain has a good rebuttal in his article about “gill slits”, but I just have to point out something.

I’m an “evolutionist”. I don’t think any creationist would argue with that.

I teach students. Again, that’s indisputable — that’s my day job.

Furthermore, I teach relevant subjects: developmental biology and evolution.

But despite the fact that I ought to be example #1 for this terrible crime the creationist is condemning, I have never taught that all vertebrates have “gill slits”. I don’t know anyone who has. I took comparative anatomy and physiology in the 1970s, ages ago, and my instructors were all very explicit about the function, development, and evolution of pharyngeal structures. I would have been dinged badly if I’d made the mistake of suggesting that the pharynx was primitively a respiratory structure, rather than a feeding specialization.

It is quite correct that in most tetrapods, pharynx structures don’t form gills — gills are specialized derivatives of pharyngeal pouches, just as are hyoid arches and jaws. No one knowledgeable claims that humans develop fish-like gills. “Gill slits” is a colloquialism, not a technical term.

I am amused by the dismissal that they are “only folds of tissue”. Yeah, right. Your brain was only a fold of tissue in the pharyngula, too. Your major organs were mere diverticula. Your eyes were just outpocketings of the neural tube. Mere, just, only. Let’s all dismiss fundamental developmental structures as silly piles of cells, since, as we all know, mere cells do nothing, unless we’re trying to argue that they’re so darned complex that only a god could have created them.

We are so screwed

I think what’s emerging from the aftermath of last week’s election is that we underestimated the breadth of American racism, and that we failed to realize how damaging the aloofness of the Democratic party establishment was. We should have realized from the strength of the Sanders campaign that something was rotten up top. I hope that establishment listens to Bernie Sanders and his recipe for reform.

In the coming days, I will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party. I believe strongly that the party must break loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor. We must open the doors of the party to welcome in the idealism and energy of young people and all Americans who are fighting for economic, social, racial and environmental justice. We must have the courage to take on the greed and power of Wall Street, the drug companies, the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry.

I have this fear that the Democrats will bunker up, keep doing the same old thing, and continue to treat Republicans gently and with civility (or, more likely, servility) and slide further into irrelevance, while the Republicans are now digging in deeper into lunacy.

Of course, if the electorate was rejecting the corporatization of the Democrats to go for an outsider, boy did they get conned.

An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. Who could possibly have predicted such a thing?

The answer is, anyone who was paying attention. Look at the people Trump is considering for his Cabinet, and you won’t find any outside-the-box thinkers burning to work for the little guy. It’s a collection of Republican politicians and corporate plutocrats — not much different from who you’d find in any Republican administration.

It’s going to be worse than we ever imagined. Stop deluding yourself. Stop pretending that Trump can’t possibly be serious about the stupidities he has promised — he is packing his administration with the worst possible people, because he is compounding his own incompetence with the fact that he is a terrible judge of character who is surrounding himself with terrible people.

Like this.

gormlessgoons

That just says it all, doesn’t it?