Rumors of our demise are highly premature

Ed West is a columnist for the Telegraph who seems to have two claims to fame: he’s a Catholic anti-atheist, and he’s one of those people who seriously argues that being against racism makes you a racist and oh, aren’t those immigrants a pain in the butt? Not one of my favorite people.

He now has a column in which he claims that the New Atheism is dead…a remarkable assertion, given that what I see of atheism, new or otherwise, is lively and thriving. The corpse is still dancing; perhaps we’re going to have to rename it the Zombie Atheism?

But wait: on what grounds does West claim that the New Atheism is dead or dying? Maybe he has a good argument.

Or maybe not. Here’s how he backs up his argument:

  • Richard Dawkins is annoying.

  • Another guy who is an atheist thinks Richard Dawkins is annoying.

  • Nobody likes Sam Harris.

  • Dan Dennett agreed with Dawkins, which makes him annoying.

  • Hitchens didn’t appreciate religion enough, which made him annoying.

  • Religion isn’t going away.

  • Religion isn’t as bad as Dawkins claims.

…and that’s about it. You know, if you’re going to claim a movement is fading, I would think citing some numbers would be indispensible to bolstering the claim; crankily reciting your animus against a few people within it doesn’t quite do the job. I could tell you that the Pope is far, far more annoying than Richard Dawkins and supports odious policies that have done far more cataclysmically awful things to other human beings than Dawkins has ever done — and in fact that there seems to be a remarkable dearth of facts showing that Dawkins has done any harm at all — but I wouldn’t be so stupid as to claim that the unsavory nature of ol’ Ratzi means the church is in decline.

West is guilty of very bad reasoning, which I guess isn’t surprising given that he somehow finds Catholicism reasonable. Even if every argument he made were true (and most aren’t, or are matters of taste and opinion), they wouldn’t support his thesis.

But the core of his claim is simply that there are many forms of religion out there, and even many kinds of atheism, and that that somehow means religion doesn’t do harm.

Even to non-believers, the argument that religion is a damaging parasite seems implausible. In their everyday lives people see that atheism does not explain the fundamental questions and a godless world doesn’t make us happier or even more questioning. The popularity of the Sunday Assembly, an “atheist church” in Islington, or Alain de Botton’s “10 commandments for atheists”, reflect the growing belief in secular Britain that religion is not just a beneficial thing but perhaps an essential one. Perhaps that is why New Atheism is as dead as Nietzsche.

The Sunday Assembly is a comedy act: a ‘church’ run by comedians to mock religion with a bit of positive spirituality thrown in. It had about 200 attendees on its opening day, and while not something I’d care enough to attend or oppose, isn’t exactly a testimonial to the failure of atheism. Next he’s going to try and tell us that Brother Sam Singleton signals a return to our Protestant roots.

De Botton…well, I’ve said a few things about de Botton before. The most generous thing I could say now about him is that he is a very silly man. That some people want to wear glasses made out of stained glass says nothing about the health of the New Atheism, which is populated by people who have no interest in any form of religion. You might as well claim that the existence of Wiccans means Catholics have ceased to exist.

But my main objection would be that atheism does address fundamental questions about the universe and our place in it, and answers them honestly, unlike religion. The answers may not be consoling, but they have the power of being true, and truth is a better foundation on which to build a good life than lies. Do they make us happier? It depends on who you are, I suppose: they certainly make me happier. Does religion make us happier? Clearly not, I can imagine few greater sources of world misery than the awfulness of the philosophies behind its religions — and as he is a Catholic, I would wave the miseries and death promoted by Mother Teresa, revered as nearly a saint by his faith, as an example of just how truly unhappy believers in his religion are.

At least I can return a favor. Catholicism isn’t as dead as Jesus; it’s an animated delusion, as lively as a cadaver on puppet strings, and still poisoning the world with its decaying reek. Would that it someday join Jesus’ physical form as scattered dust. Be one with your lord.

An Australian Football poll

And it’s not about those weird rules! Someone got very upset at those gays flaunting their sexuality at games.

fooball

Lest you think that maybe she’s homophobic, she added this in an interview later:

“I am not homophobic. I know lots of gay people.”

Ah, classic!

Obviously, this issue needs a poll. I would have thought the obvious one would be something about the apparent total lack of women cheerleaders in skimpy outfits at Australian football games, or possibly something expressing incredulity that Australian football players don’t grab each other’s asses when they score a goal, but no…it’s about supporting gay players. And it’s tied.

Should there be a gay pride round in the AFL?

Yes 50%
No 50%

Ooh, I hate to see a tied game. Go break it.

The Gish Gallop finally comes to a halt

A notorious old fraud has kicked the bucket: Duane T. Gish is dead. He was a true pioneer in the art of lying: he was infamous for his “Gish gallop” style in which he’d simply rattle off distortion after lie after BS at a rapid-fire rate, trusting that any intellectually honest opponent would never catch up with him. He mastered the Chewbacca Defense before it was even named.

The NCSE has a beautiful quote from Karl Fezer that summarizes the Gish style:

Gish will say, with rhetorical flourish and dramatic emphasis, whatever he thinks will serve to maintain, in the minds of his uncritical followers, his image as a knowledgeable ‘creation scientist.’ An essential component is to lard his remarks with technical detail; whether that detail is accurate or relevant or based on unambiguous evidence is of no concern. When confronted with evidence of his own error, he resorts to diversionary tactics and outright denial.

Yeah, that’s Gish through and through.

I think I’ve just been persuaded that MOOCs suck

I’m convinced. Physioproffe is right: MOOCs are a great big boondoggle. It wasn’t PP’s words (true as they are) that persuaded me, though — it’s that Thomas Friedman has endorsed them, in a godawful column complete with helpful discussion with his driver from the airport.

Just consider this claim:

We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach. No more. The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.

Holy crap. Right now I’m in ‘competition’ with skilled colleagues who were selected for their position on the basis of their teaching skill — I’m evaluated in comparison with my peers. I’ve seen these MOOC-style lectures, and please please please, I would love to be assessed against some person whose interactions with students are entirely through a glass screen, in a format that favors linear lecturing, and considers email a marvelous way to communicate outside of class.

This is what Friedman considers an increase in competition for college teachers? I see a slackening and a reduction of standards…and what the administrators and mouth-breathing ignoramuses like Friedman see is a way to outsource and reduce the costs of the expensive part of an education…the part that is also the only real education component of the process.

DON’T TELL MY WIFE!

An organization called the Susan B. Anthony List — it’s an adamantly anti-choice group that has neatly named itself after an icon of women’s liberation — has a wonderful president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, who not only opposes abortion, but is dead set against contraception. She argues here that increasing availability of contraception leads to increasing rates of abortion (what?), apparently because all those frisky couples losing their fear of pregnancy will fornicate more, leading to more unwanted pregnancies.

But…but…abortion rates have been going down as pregnancy rates decline. We can’t therefore account for reduced pregnancy rates by claiming they’ve been terminated by abortion, and it seems kind of unlikely that people are having sex less often, so isn’t the correlation the reverse of what Dannenfelser claims?

teen-pregnancy-abortion-rates

Also, I am greatly concerned by the implications of the statement that “to lose the connection between sex and having children leads to problems”. There were precisely 3 periods in my life in which I intentionally had procreative sex, and they were both relatively brief because I married a fertile minx who got knocked up as soon as we both put our minds to it. So, maybe three months where I’ve had sex with reproductive intent, while the other 393 months of my married life I was entirely in frivolous sex-for-fun mode. Furthermore, we have not been the slightest bit interested in having more children for 23 years. Is Dannenfelser trying to suggest that having a monogamous and healthy sex life during those decades should be causing problems because we’ve lost the connection between sex and having children?

I remember that poster!

Back in the dim dark distant days of yore, Matt Groening actually did some promotional artwork for Apple — all at about the same time he started up with some little show called the Simpsons, and when he’d apparently doodle up a poster for them for the price of a Laserwriter.

Bongos-Dream-Dorm-aopg

Speaking of Groening and the Simpsons, Richard Dawkins will be making a cameo voice appearance this Sunday. Tune in!

What’s Jimmie Walker’s favorite arthropod?

“TRI-LO-BIIITE!”

Oh, no, that was a terrible opening. You’ll only know what the heck I’m talking about if you remember JJ from the television show Good Times, and it’s such a pathetic joke it’s only going to appeal to grade schoolers. So if you’re a time-traveling 8 year old from the 1970s, you’ll appreciate the reference. How many of those are reading this right now?

Maybe this will work better. Here’s a small chip of shale I keep at my desk.

trilobite

My son Alaric and I collected that on a trip to Delta, Utah over 20 years ago. We had permission from the owner of a commercial dig site to rummage around in their tailings*, and we ambled about picking up chunks of rock and splitting them with a hammer. Everywhere we looked were trilobites. We brought home a good haul, chiefly Elrathia, like that one, and lots of Peronopsis. I keep it at my desk as a token of a good memory, and also because it’s about half a billion years old.

I can reach over and touch a half billion year old fossil at will, which I find to be an awesome thrill. That it’s also from a subphylum that was so successful, swarming in our oceans for about 300 million years, yet that ended so finally in the Permian extinction, is humbling. Puny ephemeral humans — we can only dream of achieving the glories of the Trilobite empire.

trilobiterichness
Summary of the evolutionary history of the major trilobite clades plotted against stratigraphic time. The y-axis scale approximates a log scale to permit the more detailed illustration of the Cambrian and Ordovician diversifications. Numbers refer to age in millions of years (Ma). Although the spread along the x axis approximates the morphological diversity within a clade at any given stratigraphic level, horizontal distances between groups should not be interpreted to suggest degrees of phenetic difference. The diagram is not meant to imply that maximal phenetic variance was present in the early part of the Cambrian, even though groups such as Agnostida and Corynexochida form the extremes along the x axis. This is an artifact of the mode of representation. Trilobite color represents the condition of dorsal exoskeletal trunk tagmosis: orange is the homonomous condition, pink is the heteronomous condition in which the batch boundary occurs within the holaspid thorax, blue is where this boundary occurs within the holaspid pygidium, and green where it occurs at the thoracic/holaspid pygidial boundary. The representation is schematic and not meant to imply that all members of these clades younger than the image shown had that condition.

If you want to learn more about trilobites, I can’t recommend Richard Fortey’s book, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, highly enough. It’s an excellent, enthusiastic, readable overview of the group. There’s also a gorgeous online guide to the orders of trilobites that’s full of fossil photos and detailed information. But I also recently stumbled across a review paper by Nigel Hughes that looked at them from the perspective of development — O Rhapsody! It’s beautiful!

Despite being extinct for 250 million years, and despite being nothing but fossils, we still have a pretty good idea of the development of trilobites, because they were so numerous and we can find great drifts of entire populations of the animals embedded in lagerstätten. That allows us to see the range of variation and the distribution of different developmental stages, and further, because they’re arthropods, we can see well preserved cuticles of both intact animals and molted shells. And with almost 300 million years of recorded species, we’ve also got a good picture of their evolution. This is a classic evo-devo story.

So, quick, here’s a general introduction to trilobite anatomy. First thing to know is that the ‘three lobes’ of the word ‘trilobite’ refer to the longitudinal divisions of the animal: a central axis with a lateral or pleural lobe on either side of it. There are also, usually, three transverse divisions: cephalic (head) segments, thoracic segments in the middle, and a pygidium or tail.

trilobiteanat
Basic anatomy of the dorsal surface of two trilobites. (Left panel ) The figure is based on a generalized olenelloid trilobite, which had a boundary between two distinct or heteronomous batches of segments located within the thorax, dividing the protrunk from the opisthotrunk. (Right panel ) Aulacopleura konincki displayed the homonomous trunk condition in which all trunk segments shared a similar morphology. A, anterior; Opi, opisthotrunk; P, posterior; Pyg, pygidium.

Not usually shown are the limbs. If you flip over a trilobite, you discover that each segment, except the anterior- and posterior-most, has a pair of biramous appendages — they’re branched legs, with one branch functioning as the walking limb, and the outer branch being lamellate (thin and flat) and probably functioning as a gill. They’re surprisingly uniform and consistent in general structure, from head to thorax to pygidium. One of the curious features of trilobites is that most species are marked by this homonomous condition (that is, maintaining identity or close similarity between adjacent segments), while most of the extant arthropods are strongly heteronomous, making strong distinctions in the structure of adjacent segments.

trilobiteseg
Major divisions of the anterior-posterior (a-p) body axis in trilobites. The letter M indicates an individualized segment morphotype. Colors indicate major morphological divisions along the axis, with shading approximating the degree of morphological difference between adjacent segments. Segments in red are cephalic, those in light blue are thoracic, those in dark blue are pygidial, and the terminal piece is in purple. Thoracic segments articulate with one another, whereas those in the cephalon and pygidium are conjoined.

Now here’s the cool bit: a generalized staging series for trilobites. There are some broad terms for different stages — protaspid, then meraspid, then holaspid — but this diagram makes it clear that growth was by sequential addition of new segments to the posterior end of the animal. This is not an unusual pattern: vertebrates also build segments sequentially from front to back, as do many insects (the short germ band insects), but others, long germ band insects like flies, build the whole collection nearly simultaneously.

trilobitegrowth

Generalized trilobite ontogeny showing the boundaries of ontogenetic stages based on three aspects of the development of trunk segments: generation (Gn), articulation (Art), and morphology (Form). The generation state contains a poorly known initial stage that may have had a constant set of cephalic segments, the anamorphic phase during which new segments appeared in the trunk, and the epimorphic phase after which the exoskeletal segment number was constant despite continued molting. The articulation state is based on dorsal sclerite articulation pattern, with the onset of the protaspid stage marked by the development of the dorsal facial suture, onset of the meraspid stage marked by the onset of trunk articulation, and the onset of the holaspid stage marked by the completion of trunk articulation. The morphology state refers to the form of trunk segments, which in some trilobites are divided into discrete, heteronomous batches of anterior (protrunk) and posterior (opisthotrunk) segments. The site of the appearance of new trunk segments is shown for the first trunk segment only. Segment color scheme as in previous figure. Individualized segments, such as those that bore unusually large axial or pleural spines (i.e., a macrospinous condition), retained the same position relative to the cephalic margin following their first appearance, indicating that the site of appearance of new segments was subterminal, and the boundary between articulating and conjoined segments migrated posteriorly during the meraspid phase.

Development is the foundation of evolutionary change, and I can’t help but wonder how this pattern, and the unknown genetic constraints behind it, affected trilobite evolution. The early history of arthropods seems to be one of exuberant exploration of the potentials of that modular segmental organization, with trilobites tending to be more conservative than other arthropods. What that means is tricky to interpret: the more inventive arthropods still have descendants around, while trilobites are extinct without issue. But 300 million years is still a fantastically good run, and clearly they had the flexibility to survive major changes in geological history.

The real mystery is why the clade as a whole began to decline after the Ordovician, and how the end of the Permian could so thoroughly quench this gigantic group.

Hughes NC (2007) The Evolution of Trilobite Body Patterning. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 35:401–34.

*By the way, I recommend digging in fossil beds as a great way to connect with the history of the planet with your kids. You can’t make it to Delta? There are quarries that will sell you crates of unprocessed rock, 30 pounds for $75, and you can take them apart in your back yard.

For shame, TEDx

I thought they were going to clean up their act and stop highlighting crackpots and kooks. But oh look: there’s Rupert Sheldrake, listing all the things he finds wrong about science. How could we possibly accept the dogma that matter is unconscious? Or that genetics is measurable and material?

What I found particularly galling in the video besides the smug arrogance of Sheldrake postulating idiocy is that the audience joins in and laughs smugly at his smug assertions.

“Genes are grossly overrated.” “Species have a collective memory, even crystals do.” “Everything depends on evolving habits, not fixed laws.” Gaaah.

Oh my god: his evidence that the constants of the universe are not constant is that the reported speed of light in 1920 was 20 meters/sec greater than it is now.