Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Here we go again, another session of Christians complaining about atheists…specifically, these danged “New Atheists” who don’t show the proper respect that the old atheists did. And of course they start with an annoying definition.
I have a couple of friends who are New Atheists and have had conversations with several more. If you haven’t run across them, New Atheism is a sort of grassroots movement among atheists that has gone beyond holding the position that no god exists to the position that theism is actively bad for the world and that atheism should “evangelize” actively to move people away from theism and religion. The movement is spearheaded by the writings and stylings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.
I agree with Ed Brayton: these so-called news sites truly suck.
Occupy Democrats
Bipartisan Report
Winning Democrats
PoliticusUSA
Blue Nation Review
IfYouOnlyNews
USUncut
The Freethought Project
Addicting Info
LiberalAmerica
Newslo
Politicalo (almost anything that ends on lo; these sites specialize in taking accurate statements from politicians and then adding false quotes to them that are much worse than what they actually said)
DailyNewsBin
theintellectualist
Being Liberal
American Newsx
The Other 98%
There are others. I notice that he forgot to include the Fox network (anything owned by Rupert Murdoch, actually), Breitbart, and World Net Daily.
Every once in a while, they do say something interesting or newsworthy, but they’re so bad otherwise that you still need to check with other, more reliable news sites to verify…so maybe you should be linking to those, anyway.
We thought political commentators could actually have some snap and bite, and wouldn’t let folly pass by without mocking it. Boy, were we ever wrong, as Jimmy Fallon enthusiastically demonstrated for us.
On Thursday, Jimmy Fallon had Donald Trump on the Tonight Show and ended the segment by saying, “Donald I want to ask you, because the next time I see you you could be the President of the United States. I just want to know if there is something we could do that’s just not really presidential, really – can I mess your hair up?” Trump let him and the NBC audience roared with laughter. But, for many of us, this is very far from being a joke.
Giving comic cover to Trump just isn’t funny when he’s unleashed forces of anti-blackness and anti-immigrant sentiment. He’s labelled Mexicans rapists, raised the prospect of a ban on Muslims, patronized and insulted African Americans while pretending to be a potential new hope. As a result, Fallon managed to come over as one powerful white man protecting another.
Not only was it not funny. It didn’t do anything to take Trump down a notch (if it was even meant to). Instead, it humanized him, boosting him on that stupid metric so many Americans use when choosing a president: “Hey, he’s a guy I’d want to have a beer with! Look at him, letting Fallon have fun with him!”
I’d threaten to boycott Fallon’s show, but I never watched it anyway. Oh, yeah, I never watched Jay Leno, either.
We see you, Jimmy Fallon. You are as “apolitical” as the wretched Jay Leno was, a champion of the status quo. You think the idea of Trump in the White House is as harmless as your face on a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.
Maybe it is to you, as a powerful white man on TV who doesn’t have to worry about life as a woman, Muslim, Black or Latin person, immigrant, or queer American living under Trumpism (an era which has already begun and will continue, regardless of whether Trump is elected). Your skit was nothing like Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, which brilliantly skewered a rising leader of the right. In fact, you did the opposite, making Trump seem more palatable. When history looks back on this moment, we may well say: Jimmy Fallon, you helped build a monster.
If you want further dissection of how media personalities are often grossly incompetent at actual critical thinking, read Jen Gunter’s analysis of the Oz-Trump interview. I’d boycott Oz, too, except that’s another show I already never watch.
You know that stupid story about inheriting your intelligence from your mother, that I debunked? Emily Willingham said pretty much the same thing, so now you can trust that I was right.
This is not surprising, and it didn’t require a conspiracy or telepathy or a Vulcan mind meld — it was a totally bogus claim that anyone with any significant biology training at all would have found mind-bogglingly inane.
In the same way, scientists around the world are groaning upon hearing Attenborough’s aquatic ape fannishness, and for the same reason — it’s patently false.
I’m sorry to report that Sir David Attenborough done screwed up. He is using his mellifluous voice and awesome reputation to promote the Wet Ape Theory. The show features all the usual suspects: recordings of Elaine Morgan insisting that her story is reasonable, Marc Verhaegen’s pseudoscientific hairsplitting, cartoon versions of evolution by Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris, and that incessant nonsense of ignoring the whole organism and the existing evidence to argue that, well, this one little piece of our physiology could have evolved in the ocean, therefore we should claim that the whole beast was aquatic, because that is the only way they can now imagine it evolved.
The classic example is Alister Hardy’s initial hypothesis to explain why humans are hairless and have a layer of subcutaneous fat. What other animals have such a combination? Why, whales! They live in the ocean, and have lost most of their hair for better streamlining, and built up fat for insulation, therefore…humans lost their hair to better cut through the water, and evolved subcutaneous fat for heat retention. This is a bad hypothesis, because it ignores so much.
We don’t have any other streamlining adaptations, and are actually rather clumsy in the water.
Only aquatic mammals that live full time in the water show these adaptations; mammals that live part time in the water tend to have lots of hair.
Our “blubber” does a poor job of protecting us from that big heat sink, the ocean. We also lack the circulatory adaptations that make it useful in that function: countercurrent exchangers, arteriovenous anastomoses, that sort of thing.
Marine mammals have very little visceral fat; we’ve got loads of it. OK, I’ve got lots. Most of our fat is not distributed in a way to improve insulation.
And most annoyingly, the wet ape proponents simply pretend alternative explanations don’t exist. Hairlessness or reduced body hair, for instance, has evolved independently in several groups: cetaceans, naked mole rats, domesticated pigs, elephants, hippos, etc. So there are different strategies or environmental conditions that can lead to these features, and you can’t simply say all hairless mammals had to have gone through a dolphin-like evolutionary stage, because there are no other situations that can favor hairlessness.
But of course wet ape fanatics do — I’ve seen them seriously suggest that elephants had to have also gone through an aquatic phase.
Attenborough, I’m sorry to say, also takes this blinkered attitude. He closes episode 1 (there are two, I couldn’t bear to listen to the second) of his “waterside ape” series with what he proposes to be a “test” of the aquatic ape theory, which is no such thing. He claims to have new evidence: that there is a known feature of human infants which he predicts would be found in newborn cetaceans, and if confirmed, would both demonstrate the predictive power of the wet ape theory and provide an additional point of confirmation.
That feature is vernix, which is only known in humans. Vernix is the slimy, greasy coat that covers newborn humans, which he wants to claim is an aquatic adaptation, and therefore should be also found in other aquatic mammals. He is able to triumphantly announce that something similar has recently been reported in cetaceans.
But, again, the connection to an aquatic life has not been demonstrated. I don’t even see how vernix helps a mammal thrive in the water; it’s a fetal feature that is lost with the first bath, or is shed within a few days of birth. Vernix has many hypothesized functions for humans:
Vernix caseosa is a white, creamy, naturally occurring biofilm covering the skin of the fetus during the last trimester of pregnancy. Vernix coating on the neonatal skin protects the newborn skin and facilitates extra-uterine adaptation of skin in the first postnatal week if not washed away after birth. It consists of water-containing corneocytes embedded in a lipid matrix. The strategic location of the vernix on the fetal skin surface suggests participation in multiple overlapping functions required at birth, such as barrier to water loss, temperature regulation [the paper later shows a lack of support for this function –pzm], and innate immunity. Vernix seems to perform various integral roles during transition of the fetus from intra-uterine to extra-uterine life. It has also found various interesting diagnostic and prognostic implications in this arena. Thus, it continues to be an intriguing topic of interest among the medical fraternity to understand its detailed biology and function in the fetus and also to put its naturally endowed characteristics to use in the adult population.
Most of those multiple overlapping functions have nothing to do with adaptations for swimming — they are important for a mammal with no insulating layer of hair that is basically born prematurely with relatively few defenses. It is a logical error to imply that sharing a feature with many functions, like vernix, means that two species had to have had a similar ecological history. It makes no sense at all. I am very disappointed that David Attenborough has fallen for such crank nonsense.
I am not being peculiarly fussy, either. Very few people in the evolutionary/anthropological community think the Aquatic Ape is a credible hypothesis. Jim Moore has a very thorough compendium of rebuttals to the hodge-podge of contradictory details that make up the Aquatic Ape Theory; it’s a constant struggle to combat proponents who vomit up all kinds of odd scientific factlets that they claim are supportive of their cherished, much-loved, stupid theory. John Hawks explains why the AAT is pseudoscience. The Guardian has already posted a rejection of Attenborough’s “wishful thinking”. Alice Roberts quickly wrote an excellent response to Attenborough.
The original idea, and certainly Elaine Morgan’s elaboration of it, became an umbrella hypothesis or a “Theory of Everything”; both far too extravagant and too simple an explanation. It attempts to provide a single rationale for a huge range of adaptations – which we know arose at different times in the course of human evolution. Traits such as habitual bipedalism, big brains and language didn’t all appear at once – instead, their emergence is spread over millions of years. It’s nonsense to lump them all together as if they require a single explanation.
Despite the evidence stacked up against the theory, it is strangely tenacious. It has become very elastic, and its proponents will seize hold of any mentions of water, fish or shellfish in human evolution, and any archaeological sites found near coasts, rivers and lakes as supporting evidence. But we must always build our hypotheses on, and test them against, the hard evidence: the fossils, comparative anatomy and physiology, and genetics. In that test, the aquatic ape has failed – again and again.
It is a great shame the BBC recently indulged this implausible theory as it distracts from the emerging story of human evolution that is both more complex and more interesting. Because at the end of the day science is about evidence, not wishful thinking.
Unfortunately, I’m sure this bad idea will emerge again and again. There’s something appealing to the human psyche about one simple explanation of everything, even if that explanation is completely wrong.
This is handy — all those reflexive cliched phrases used by the alt-right, especially that odd phrase, “virtue signaling”, are entertainingly explained.
Except one. The new insult, “spengler”, is mentioned but left undefined. Now I have to make it my life’s quest to clarify spengling.
There is a mysterious shadow work force that is undermining good Americans in their quest for jobs.
The only solutions I can think of are to build walls and deport them.
Sam Kriss really doesn’t like me, or any atheists, for that matter. He name-checks me in a recent essay, Village Atheists, Village Idiots, in which he simultaneously makes the claim that the premises of atheism are obviously true, but that atheism induces dementia, which is slaughtering all prominent atheists in grisly ways.
Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.
Well, actually…
Richard Dawkins seems to be doing quite well after his minor stroke, and is going to tour the US this Fall. “Wheeling lunatic” has never been a very good description of his behavior; he’s always calm, even as he says things I disagree with.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is also doing fine. As we’ll see, he still criticizes basic errors, which turns out to be Kriss’s real objection to him.
I rather agree with his description of Harris. He is a kind of paranoid racist Vulcan.
I don’t think I’m psychotic, but then, if I were, I probably wouldn’t think I was, would I? Again, “screeching death” is also terribly inapt, and why has he put me in a hot air balloon?
Christopher Hitchens is still dead. It wasn’t a fug that killed him, or even his own rhetoric, but cancer.
Speaking of rhetoric, though, isn’t it bad form to begin an essay that’s going to accuse people you don’t like of being hysterical and excessive with such excessive histrionics of your own? Not to mention howling about how they’re all diseased and dying.
It isn’t just the beginning, either. He’s just getting warmed up. The whole dang essay is Sam Kriss doing a war dance and screaming about those awful atheists.
Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.
But wait, Sam: you’ve just shrieked that all those atheists are insane and mad and deranged, but you haven’t actually made the case that we are. Applying extravagant adjectives and adverbs to people doesn’t make them more true. Fortunately, he’s going to give us his “complete theory” of what drives atheists mad, and it’s going to explain a lot. A lot about Sam Kriss, that is, but not really anything about those atheists.
His theory, which is his, is that atheists are saying things which are true and obvious too often. No, really, that’s the entirety of his complaint.
Whatever it is, it has something to do with a litany of grievances against the believoisie so rote that it might well (or ironically) be styled a catechism. These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality—there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings—and then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-compulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma.
Weird, huh? And to make his case, he goes on and on about Neil deGrasse Tyson and his mockery of the rapper BoB, who claimed that the Earth was flat, and then Tyson pedantically explained multiple times that we can show that it is actually round, which Kriss found so annoying because isn’t it so obvious the Earth is round? And shut up Neil deGrasse Tyson, you think you’re so smart and that question is so easy and I know how to use a thesaurus so how come you’re so famous, and I’m not? And Bill Nye sucks, too.
There, you’ve got the gist of the whole thing, and unless you’re really into seeing people name-drop Kierkegaard 11 times, you can skip the rest.
It’s an odd performance. You know, I think creationism is obviously false, but that doesn’t mean everyone can or should shut up about it — it’s still an active political and theological force, even if all (and I mean all — even the latest bluster from the Discovery Institute is rehashing ancient arguments) of its arguments were demolished almost 200 years ago. We have to keep plugging away against ignorance, even if it is obviously wrong. To the person promoting it, it isn’t.
I’m currently teaching cell biology, as I have been since 1993. I wouldn’t be a very good teacher if I started yelling at a class of 19 year olds that “Jesus, the chemiosmotic hypothesis is so obvious! You never heard of proton gradients before? I’m not going to waste time teaching you about them, but they will be on the exam, because you should already know it!”
This seems to be how Kriss would run my class (he clearly knows everything there is to know about proton gradients and all the details of electron transport, because it’s all obvious, so I’m sure he could step right in to the job), because apparently calm repetitive didacticism that addresses the ignorance of different individuals is a sure sign that you’re dying of some fatal form of obsessive dementia.
It’s also strange that he would hate on Neil deGrasse Tyson for publicly refuting a flat-earther, when Kriss himself has written, I’ve always been mildly obsessed with the flat-earth truth movement
. Is this just professional jealousy, that the criticisms of an astronomer against flat-earthers get more attention than the criticisms of…whatever the hell Sam Kriss is?
It’s curious, too, that Kriss would say that it’s obvious that “there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings”, but not notice that there’s a substantial majority of people in the United States, and elsewhere, who would vigorously dispute those claims. And if repetitively addressing ignorant claims is a hallmark of insanity, what are we to make of Sam Kriss? This isn’t the first time he’s raged at Neil deGrasse Tyson for explaining something obvious, which makes him guilty of exactly the same thing, only with more hyperbole.
It’s also not the case that he reserves his squawking for atheists; you should see what he has to say about Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton, a blinding-white astral demon made of chicken gristle and wax-paper, doesn’t even pretend that she’s running for any reason beside her own personal hunger for power. She wants to rule the world; it’d be hers by birth, only she wasn’t born, she emerged like a lizard out its egg from the cold undeath of money, fully formed.
Even his word salad is grossly unappetizing.
