Were you anxiously awaiting Dr Oz’s assessment of Trump’s health?

I wasn’t. Don’t really care. Knew it was going to be a couple of frauds slapping each others’ backs. Didn’t watch it, and am not going to. Fortunately, Orac suffered for us, and delivers a surprising review: it was exactly as I expected, but in addition, it was boring.

But yeah, it was nothing but a Trump commercial.

Basically, Dr. Oz is every bit as much of a carnival barker as Donald Trump is, and in this instance he helped Trump not only brag about his own health but to insinuate that Clinton is not healthy enough to be President while also allowing Ivanka Trump to air what was basically a campaign commercial for Trump’s childcare proposal. The two were clearly made for each other. It was placebo transparency, making a mockery of transparency norms.

Shouldn’t a creative genre naturally gravitate towards greater diversity?

I like this essay about science fiction’s woman problem — it really hammers home the distorted demographics of the SF community, and on the surface, it seems very odd. This is a genre of literature that emphasizes strange, new, weird perspectives, and we’re supposed to be fans of mind-bending cosmic novelty that the Mundanes and Muggles just don’t get; we tell ourselves that the whole point is to turn the lens of “what if…?” back upon ourselves, and see how people and cultures would change if one little thing were different, if the future were a tiny bit different from the present. And what do we get? Lots of repetition of White Imperialist Men in Space. That’s fine, I enjoy a good heroic space opera myself, but can we also leaven it all with some variety?

I’ve been consciously selecting my light reading lately to avoid the familiar white authors — again, nothing wrong with them — and what started out as something requiring intentional effort quickly turned into a genuinely fun and stimulating pastime. There’s a place for comfort food, but once you’ve been on a diet of mac-and-cheese for a long time, and you start trying new stuff, pretty soon you’re unsatisfied if you aren’t getting sushi or bibimbap or falafel for dinner, and they stop being “exotic” foods and become that really tasty goodness that you crave all the time.

So the latest two books I read: Everfair by Nisi Shawl and Engraved on the Eye by Saladin Ahmed. Fabulous! You like steampunk, Victorian fantasy and SF? Everfair has all that, but in addition, it’s set in the Congo of King Leopold II of Belgium (he’s the villain, obviously, but actually, the whole dang colonial system is the bad guy). Just moving the story out of the usual London setting is great, but having a nightmarishly wicked villain who was actually real, and even worse than the novel portrays him, makes the story seem just a bit more fierce. You like sword and sorcery? Who needs burly grunting Aryan barbarians when you can have aging, overweight Doctor Adoulla Makhslood to admire. I found it gratifying to finally have a hero I can actually physically identify with.

But here’s the deal: if you’re really into imaginative SF, shouldn’t you be avidly seeking out different authors and different ideas all the time? You don’t have to like it all, but jeez, shouldn’t it be a natural phenomenon that all SF readers would be exploring strange new worlds on their bookshelves?

Where junk science comes from

Did you know that intelligence is produced by genes that are located on the X chromosome? I didn’t. In fact, I know of a lot of evidence that directly contradicts that absurd idea. So where did that strange claim come from?

Start here. A local television news station in Sacramento reports on Study: Children get their intelligence from their mom. They make a remarkable claim.

Since women carry two X chromosomes — that’s where intelligence genes are located — several studies have found kids are twice as likely to inherit their intelligence from their mom.

Yes, your dad may give you some intelligence genes, but the study says they won’t have an affect on your brain. The genes will only work if they come from your mom because they will go directly to the cerebral cortex. Genes from the father’s side go to the limbic system.

But none of that is true! “Intelligence genes”, whatever they are, are not discrete entities located on just the X chromosome, and it doesn’t make much sense to claim that kids are twice as likely to inherit intelligence from their mothers. Every boy has one X chromosome that they inherited from Mom, and every girl has one X from Mom, and one X from Dad. And what are these “several studies” that did this work? They don’t say.

That second paragraph is pure gibberish. Maternal genes “go” to the cortex, while paternal genes “go” to the limbic system? This makes no sense. You have to watch the report to believe it, though: to evaluate this claim, the reporter calls up his mom to ask her if he got his brains from her, and then goes to a toddler tumbling class to ask random moms if they agree. Science!

You might be wondering, what study actually makes that original claim? They actually have a link to that, but more about that in a moment.

Let’s look in on that hive of blithering mendacity, gossip, and side-boob shots, the Huffington Post. They report on the same “study”, saying Intelligence Gene: Science Proves Moms Are Responsible For Kids’ Smarts. Don’t you just love that phrase, “science proves”, especially when it’s immediately followed by some bogus nonsense?

The genes that carry intelligence are located on the X chromosomes. And since women carry two, it’s more likely that children get their brain power from their mom as opposed to pops.

But while some dads may brush this off, it’s actually extremely unlikely that their intellect has any impact on their kiddos.

“If that same gene is inherited from the father, it is deactivated,” the study reported.

There’s that mysterious the study again. What study? I’ve never seen a study that shows that intelligence is confined to the X chromosome, and such a claim would be bizarre and unlikely anyway. They also give a link, though, and it’s the same source used in the television news story.

Here it is: Did you know that intelligence is inherited from mothers? It’s not a study. It’s a blog post. It contains quite a few references to the scientific literature, but it seems to have muddled up their contents quite a bit. None of them say what the author claims.

For instance, the blog post says “Mother’s genes go directly to the cerebral cortex, those of the father to the limbic system” (so that’s where the news got it…), and cites a couple of imprinting studies done in mice. One of them is even titled “Completion of mouse embryogenesis requires both the maternal and paternal genomes.” If you aren’t up on imprinting, it’s the observation that normal development sometimes requires complementary patterns of gene expression on maternal and paternal chromosomes — that is, on the chromosome you got from Dad, gene A might be turned on while gene B is turned off, while on the chromosome you got from Mom, gene A is off and gene B is on, and that complementation means you’ve still got one active copy of each of A and B.

What about the claim that intelligence genes are on the X chromosome? The author cites a 1972 paper that isn’t a study of any kind, but instead merely proposes the hypothesis that “major genes relating to intelligence are located on the X-chromosome”, largely based on the observation that males have a greater frequency of mental retardation and learning disorders than females. The author also cites another paper that was a review of the database of genetic disorders in OMIM that found that 10% of the genes associated with mental disabilities are linked to the X chromosome.

Both of those facts are true: boys are more likely to suffer mental disabilities, and known genes correlated with those problems are found on the X chromosome. This does not, however, imply the existence of “intelligence genes”, nor does it map intelligence to the X chromosome. What it tells you is that boys are hemizygous for the X chromosome, and that recessive alleles that can cause developmental disorders are more likely to be exposed and phenotypically expressed if a) they’re on the X, and b) they are inherited by a boy. Brains are also particularly sensitive to developmental problems, so generic deficiencies are often going to have cognitive consequences.

Another problem is that the OMIM database is not a complete account of every possible gene and its effect. Some genes are easier to isolate phenotypically…like, if you’ve got a lot of individuals running around who are reliably known to be expressing a deleterious allele in the absence of a complementary wild type allele. Like, you know, some boys. The reason the “intelligence genes” are underrepresented in autosomal chromosomes (that is, non-sex-chromosomes) isn’t because they’re not there, but because they aren’t as obviously expressed or as easily detected. What they’re actually reporting is a bias in the literature: the X chromosome, because of its unusual genetic properties, is more brightly “lit up” than the somewhat more difficult autosomes.

So, basically, the article is all wrong, but coming to a simple, sweeping, fallacious conclusion is more attractive to mass media than a complex, multifactorial, correct conclusion. Who knew?

One more thing. You know how they say you shouldn’t read the comments? I read the comments.

They’re a mess. There are lengthy digressions where people pick over the grammar and spelling of the author, who is not a native English speaker, and people who defend it because the content is so interesting (it isn’t. It’s wrong). But it’s still silly, because it’s written in competent if slightly flawed English, and is perfectly clear. It’s just perfectly wrong.

There are lots of anecdotes about smart moms and dumb moms. These are totally irrelevant to the facts, but that actually is kind of interesting, to see how people are really interested in relating science to their personal lives, even when the science is wrong.

But the worst comments, the very worst, are the ones that take issue with the science. Why? Because those commenters don’t understand the science either, and they take an article that has already mangled the information and mutilate it further. The usual suspects, MRA-types, are outraged, because it has a whiff of feminism.

Highly unlikely. IQ is a product of genetic diversity and since XY is by definition more diverse than XX, intelligence is inherited from the contributor of the Y gene. Men outnumber women by a factor of 6:1 at IQs of 140 and above for this reason. Men, on average, are smarter than women because they have a greater diversity of genetic material to draw upon (fewer redundant systems).

If the original article was merely wrong, that comment is stupidity squared. None of that is true. It is factually false and it is built on a collection of presuppositions and theories that are false.

And then there’s this, which starts off well, pointing out that intelligence is complex and not simply reducible to genes, but then it goes off weirdly into Christian gender roles.

IQ is influenced by many factors – perhaps only half of those actually even being genetic. Clearly our Creator designed males and females to inherit particular types of intelligence. Therefore, the X chromosomes provide the feminine aspects and the Y the male characteristics of mental acuity. We are biologically intended to be balanced and complimentary to each other. There is no disputing this obvious fact.

None of that is true, either!

Let us review.

  • Intelligence is not a product of single genes. A gene does not produce intelligence, an array of genes directly affect brain development, even more genes play necessary supporting roles in brain function, and all gene effects are filtered through and regulated by the environment.

  • Intelligence is not a trait localized to the X chromosome. It is a distributed property of many genes on many chromosomes, and of the environment.

  • Masculinity and femininity are cultural properties. They are not genetic. It is a category error to try to find a genetic basis for skirts vs pants, or manly acuity vs feminine submissiveness.

  • Having a Y chromosome does not increase the genetic diversity of your genome (it’s a desert with a paucity of genes!), nor does “genetic diversity” automatically increase your intelligence.

  • Some humans are idiots.

  • Don’t trust TV news or the Huffington Post or random blogs. You should also be critical of papers published in scientific journals.

I despair of humanity sometimes.

This same “study” is also cited in Good Housekeeping. The disease is spreading.

It’s also in the Wall Street Journal, but cites different sources.

Also, AOL.

And Cosmopolitan.

<curls up, dies>

That explains why I get so irritated by people who complain about trigger warnings

It’s because they’re blatantly misinterpreting them, and incorrectly telling me how I’m using them. Miri explains it all.

What’s gaslighting is when we say, “We need trigger warnings in order to be able to engage with content rather than automatically shut down,” and you respond, “You’re just trying to avoid engaging with difficult content.”

If people are telling you that they are trying to engage with trauma-related material and you insist that they’re actually saying that they want to avoid it–or literally ban it from being taught–you are gaslighting them. You are insisting that you know better than they do what’s inside their own heads. You are pretending that they said something other than what they actually said, making them doubt their own thoughts and words.

Exactly! When I’m going to talk about icky stuff, I warn people “We’re about to talk about icky stuff,” and then…we talk about icky stuff. It’s incredibly annoying when obnoxious people try to tell me that we use trigger warnings to avoid talking about the icky stuff, when it’s exactly the opposite.

I can’t say that I’m being successfully gaslit, though, because I’m confident that I know what my own intent is, and I mainly come away feeling that the complainer is full of shit. It does seem to be effectively persuading a lot of bystanders who just want to despise anyone who has respect for the experiences of the people they are teaching, though.

The anti-SJW mentality

Fred Clark discusses the insulting intent of “SJW”. It’s very good, in particular in shooting down the defense that the people using it intend it sarcastically.

To describe this use of “SJW” as sarcasm would entail mockery directed at the insufficiency of the “social justice warriors’” battle for social justice. It would require an affirmation of an agreed-upon framework that regards “social justice” as a good and noble, desirable thing, and truly being a “warrior” advocating for it as an honorable, praiseworthy trait. If it were sarcasm, the scorn would be directed at the “SJWs” for being only so-called “SJWs” — for posing as SJWs while actually failing to be the true, genuine article, the steadfast advocates for social justice that we all agree we all ought to strive to be.

But there is no such shared framework. And that is not the target toward which the scorn here is directed. What is being scorned, rather, is the very idea and standards of that framework — the idea that “social justice” is, in fact, a Good Thing. Their attempted mockery of “SJWs” is an attempt to mock the very idea of social justice itself.

Isn’t it obvious when so many of the people who sneer at “SJWs” are anti-feminists and racists that it can’t be because they’re mocking keyboard warriors who aren’t very good at supporting equality? They’re against egalitarianism.

Next up, Clark should discuss the popularity of the word “cuck” among these same people. There’s something psychologically strange going on there, too.

What is it with neurosurgeons and evolution?

Yesterday, I mentioned that creationist conference in Istanbul. There wasn’t much to say about the content of the event, but they did have photos of some of the displays, that looked exactly like the nonsense published in Harun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation. But now I’ve got an essay from one of the speakers, Oktar Babuna. I’m sorry to say he’s another data point damaging the reputation of good doctors everywhere.

A Turkish anchorman, neurosurgeon, and doctor of medical sciences, Oktar Babuna, exposes the absurdity of Darwinism by scientific evidence and explains the reason why this preposterous theory is promoted almost everywhere world-wide.

Between Michael Egnor and Oktar Babuna and Ben Carson, I’m hoping I never have a brain injury, because the profession seems to be a magnet for vapid nitwits.

He has the usual ignorant creationist arguments against Darwinism.

Darwinism is absurd because it proposes that life emerged by coincidence

No, it doesn’t.

and that human beings are a mere animal species.

We are animals (although not “mere” — biologists value every species, including our own). What definition of “animal” do the creationists have that somehow fails to include humans?

He tries to back up those assertions with the usual creationist “ooh, big numbers” approach: proteins are assembled from thousands of amino acids, humans have trillions of cells, therefore it’s all just too complex to have been constructed, except by one really smart engineer. This is a fallacious argument. You might just as well look at a beach, notice there are an awful lot of grains of sand out there, and decide that they are so numerous that they must have been placed there, one by one, by a very finicky deity. Every beach is an artisanal beach. Or you could just read Ian Musgrave’s brief introduction to abiogenesis and get the stupid smacked out of your head.

Then he makes the standard Yahya argument. They all look the same to him.

If we look at the beginning of life on Earth, the first cells emerged all at once. For example, the first cell was a cyanobacteria, a cell which exists even today and produces oxygen through photosynthesis. This cell emerged and remains the same cell. All species – from elephants to tigers, plants, fish, and reptiles – appeared all at once and never really changed. There is no evolution.

Ho hum. This is the fallacy of looking at a twig and declaring that there are no branches or trunks, the tree is a twig all the way down. All the things he mentions have known antecedents in the fossil record that are different from modern forms.

Don’t worry, though, Babuna doesn’t waste much time lying about the evidence. He’s got better things to do, like lying about our motives.

So, we can ask: why is this theory supported world-wide? Because evolution is atheism. The reason why Darwin is defended by so many scientists all around the world is in order to keep atheism alive. But this didn’t start with Charles Darwin. The idea that life appeared by chance goes back to the Sumerians, Ancient Egypt, and Ancient Greece. This is the beginning of materialism.

Charles Darwin was not an atheist. He was agnostic. He had no plans to promote atheism, and was actually reluctant to publish in part because he knew what controversy would arise, and in part because he was uncomfortable with contradicting religion’s explanations. Babuna reverses causality here. Atheism didn’t create evolution, but evolution was compatible with atheism, and modern atheism actually uses the scientific evidence to support the idea that gods are unnecessary.

You know what’s coming next, right? It’s so predictable. Hitler.

In Russia, Turkey, the US, and any other country, there is a dictatorship of Darwinism in all universities and schools. Darwinism implants the idea that humans are fighting-animals which have to struggle to survive. If you are strong, you will survive, but if you are weak, you will be eliminated. This is the selfish struggle of Darwinism. This selfishness takes law away from the world and provokes all kinds of violence, terrorism, and fascism. Karl Marx said that evolution is the basis of Marxism’s natural history. Hitler also put the foundations of fascism on Darwinism. When we look at terrorist groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, etc., these groups emerged for two reasons: religious ignorance and Darwinism. These people need to be educated.

No, evolution accommodates many strategies for survival, not just kill or be killed. Cooperation is just as viable as competition. You don’t need to physically eliminate your competition if you can outbreed them. Species and communities matter.

The relationship between Marxism and evolution is ambiguous and complex. On the one hand, Marx did appreciate the materialist approach; on the other, Marxism wants there to be an arrow of progress that can be consciously directed, something not present in evolutionary theory. Marx also saw Darwin’s version of evolution as more than a little bourgeois, appropriate for a nation of shop-keepers.

Hitler was anti-evolution. He banned Darwin’s books. The foundation of his ideology was God and the state, and he said so repeatedly in Mein Kampf, and religion was a staple of Nazi propaganda. Kinder, Kuche, Kirche!

But how can anyone take someone seriously who claims that ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram are rooted in Darwinism?

I guess that would be the kind of person who thinks religion consists only of good things, so anything bad must, by definition, be the spawn of satanic atheism.

Darwinism has taken love away from the world. It brings selfishness; it sees human beings as animals which can and should kill other animals. If we look at the three major religions –Islam, Christianity and Judaism – they all say that God created all human beings and all other living things with love. Love is the essence of religion. Love will come back to the world with religion. We hope that, with scientific struggle, Darwinism will go away with its egoism and lawlessness.

See? Boko Haram cannot be a religiously motivated terrorist movement, because religion is only about love. Darwinism is all about killing animals, which includes humans, therefore Boko Haram is a Darwinist organization.

With logic like that, how can you not trust Oktar Babuna with a scalpel and your brain?

“geyser of mendacious vomit”

Remember “journalism”? I have this vague recollection from the distant past that it was an occupation with standards and a noble calling, but I may have been confusing reality with Spencer Tracy and Kate Hepburn movies. Unfortunately, right now television newscasting (and the New York Times) is doing it’s best to flush what reputation it had down the sewer, and is doing so at the worst possible time.

At least we’ve still got Samantha Bee and a few print journalists doing their best to do what journalists are supposed to do.

I bet there’s a book somewhere that discusses the corrupting influence of television “news” and the crappy 24 hour “news” shows on good journalism.

Please keep Malcolm Roberts, Australia

The last flaming nutter to emerge out of Queensland, Ken Ham, emigrated to the US and is busily exploiting the rubes here, so you get to keep Roberts. We don’t want him. His latest bit of raging stupidity is a speech in which he said:

It is basic. The sun warms the earth’s surface. The surface, by contact, warms the moving, circulating atmosphere. That means the atmosphere cools the surface. How then can the atmosphere warm it? It cannot. That is why their computer models are wrong.

That…that…is shockingly idiotic. I have one question: was Roberts naked when he said that? After all, using his logic, clothes are not a heat source. The only sources of heat are your own body, and external sources like the sun, or a nearby radiator. Therefore, that means that clothes can only cool your body. How can they warm it?

It’s good to know. Winter is coming to Minnesota; last night the temperature dropped below 4°C, and I actually felt a little chilly. I made the mistake of putting on a light jacket, and when I went to bed, snuggling up under the blankets. As the cold season arrives, I think all the climate change deniers ought to follow Malcolm Roberts’ basic logic and strip themselves starkers when we hit -20°C and go play golf. It’s usually sunny and clear when it gets that cold, so they’ll be able to absorb all the energy of the sun unimpeded.

There’s a much more thorough debunking of all of Malcolm Roberts’ lies here.

Went home for dinner. Caught a groundhog.

Those two sentences are not at all connected, but I was famished, and this beast looked so plump and succulent, I contemplated having a tasty haunch of Marmota monax. Fricasseed whistlepig. Charbroiled chuckling.

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But then it made all kinds of clicky-chitterings at me, and called me “deplorable”, so we just relocated it to a pleasant spot down by the river, instead.

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Then we went out for Chinese.