I got into a discussion last night about the harm faith and religion and church do…and ended up going on for two hours. I told them at the beginning that my answer was “yes”, which should have made it brief, but noooo.
Captain Kirk always was willing to violate the Prime Directive when it suited him. He went on Reddit to do an IAmA, and guess what he did? Shatner dissed Reddit and the whole idea of irresponsible speech!
Now watch: I’m going to immediately derail the whole comment thread by starting a real nerd war: This just confirms that Star Trek TOS was the very best of all the Star Treks.
It is a very good and measured response that highlights the flaws in bad evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionary psychology, the study of human psychological adaptations, does not have a popular or scientific reputation for being rigorous, even though there are rigorous, thoughtful scientists in the field. The field is trying to take on an incredibly challenging task: understand what of human behavior is adaptive and why. We can better circumvent the conditions that lead to violence, war, and hatred if we know as much as we can about why we are the way we are. What motivates us, excites us, angers us, and how can evolutionary theory help us understand it all?
Because of this, there are consequences to a bad evolutionary psychology interpretation of the world. The biggest problem, to my mind, is that so often the conclusions of the bad sort of evolutionary psychology match the stereotypes and cultural expectations we already hold about the world: more feminine women are more beautiful, more masculine men more handsome; appearance is important to men while wealth is important to women; women are prone to flighty changes in political and partner preference depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles. Rather than clue people in to problems with research design or interpretation, this alignment with stereotype further confirms the study. Variation gets erased: in bad evolutionary psychology, there are only straight people, and everyone wants the same things in life. Our brains are iPhones, each app designed for its own special adaptive purpose.
I’ve still got plans to post more on this subject, but an unfortunate event has blocked me. I was going to make my next post on evolutionary psychology one that focused on some of the papers, and in particular, I wanted to discuss a good paper or two, so that I could start off on the right tone. And people sent me links and papers.
Only problem: they were all awful. Every one. I couldn’t believe that even these papers that some people were telling me were the best of the bunch were so lacking in rigor and so rife with unjustified assumptions. I read through about a dozen before I gave up in disgust and decided that there were better things to do in my time.
I’d ask again, but I was burned so badly on that last go-round that I’d have a jaundiced view of any recommendation now.
Get rid of one, and they’re just going to appoint another one. It’s not as if the job description has changed: the primary criteria are the ability to profess brain-buggering bullshit and work your way through the arcane medieval hierarchy of church politics, so it’s not as if we’re going to be surprised. It’s going to be another old guy who has dedicated his entire life to superstitious nonsense.
How I’ll always remember this pope:
We got about a foot of snow here this weekend, and a blizzard is supposed to blow through after midnight…so the university has cancelled all the early morning classes, including my 8am developmental biology course! How dare they!
This weekend, I got the next two weeks worth of lectures all prepped, and now I’m so disappointed that I don’t get to talk about this really cool stuff tomorrow. But I guess that’s better than having students kill themselves on slickery nasty roads in white-out conditions. I guess.
Here’s something that really, really annoys me: clueless idiots who blame atheism for creationism.
I don’t have stats but I strongly suspect that the strenghtening of creationism with the simultaneous rise of public atheism is not a coincidence.
That isn’t just ahistorical ignorance: it requires such short-sightedness that they aren’t able to look back even a decade.
The major events in creationism that led to their expansion were the publications of the Scofield Reference Bible and The Fundamentals in the early years of the 20th century, and the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961. Neither periods were associated with a rise in atheism. The first actually coincides with the third Great Awakening; I don’t want to diminish the importance of Robert Ingersoll and the Golden Age of Freethought, but lets not pretend that these were serious challenges to the ubiquitous association of the church with morality and political power. They were promises of secularism that didn’t threaten the status quo all that much, yet. If you wanted something that was scaring many conservatives of that time, look to the Suffrage Movement. I don’t see many people arguing that women’s rights were responsible for creationism, but I expect they are out there.
The second major event in creationism came after the entrenchment of Christianity in the 1950s as part of the Cold War. Our money was splattered with “in God we trust” and “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s; where, pray tell, were the loud aggressive atheists who prompted those religious actions in that period? Is anyone seriously going to argue that the era of the gray flannel suit and Ward Cleaver and the Red Menace was a time of high atheist activity?
Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s lawsuit to end the reading of the Bible in public schools was settled by the Supreme Court in 1963. It was not a trigger for widespread public piety, but was a response to that association of patriotism and civil life and religiosity that had been brewing in this country since the end of World War II. American Atheists was founded after “in God we trust”. Finding a causal relationship that pins the blame on atheism has a few temporal difficulties.
The Institute for Creation Research was founded in 1972. Answers in Genesis was founded in 1980. The NCSE was established in 1983, in response to the rising influence of creationism in the schools (and it is explicitly NOT an atheist organization). No one was trying to insert atheism into the schools in the 1960s. No one is trying to do that even now, but we’ve been dealing with efforts to push Genesis crap and faith-based bullshit in the schools for at least 60 years.
The Moral Majority was big news in the early 1980s, and was founded in 1979. I was wide awake and politically aware in the 1980s; there were no big atheist role models making a noise in the public sphere, they were still little more than a despised minority at the time, and most people were surprised to learn that atheists even existed in America.
The recent rise of public atheism can be traced to a number of influential books. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
It’s been less than ten goddamned years.
And we’ve still got idiots claiming they see a correlation between creationism/public religiosity and outspoken atheists.
Listen, whenever you see someone making that claim, you know you’ve found an idiot talking out of their ass. Give them a look of contempt and walk away.
I know you’re all tired of him, but NoelPlum99 is a sincere troll, so I’ll actually answer him, despite the fact that his sincerity is really just a side effect of self-absorption. So he asks in a video, where all the dissenters are (why in a video, I don’t understand; isn’t this a case where his written paragraphs are simpler, shorter, and easier to get through then 2+ minutes of yelling at a camera?)
PZ I ask you – given the footfall of Pharyngula; the contentious nature of the subjects in question; the substantial number of people who disagree with your position; the way in which you are regarded as a lead figure in many of these things; given all of this, is it really credible for you claim you don’t mind reasonable dissent when you appear, for all the world, to not have a single regular dissenter who has not been banned?
You may think I am a troll but please don’t mix up trolls with idiots. If you had a good couple of dozen REGULAR dissenting posters on these issues your arguments would look more convincing. In my couple of months before being banned I never encountered a single one. Not one. Nada. Zilch.
So where are these dissenters PZ? Is this just some incredible statistical freak of nature that you are the only person on earth with a substantial number of detractors but somehow none of them EVER bother to argue regukarlyon your blog, except the ones who are trolls????
Oh, yes. Why don’t I tolerate dissent, from a dissenter who posted here for over 4 months, making 168 comments. I have to say, this is a remarkably stupid question.
Why aren’t 50% of my commenters creationists, just like the American population? Why aren’t 90% of them Christians? Why aren’t a third of them Republicans? We can apply this to every site on the internet: why aren’t the comment threads at AVoiceForMen full of people aghast at the misogyny on display? Why aren’t 10% of the comments at RaptureReady people belittling the inanity of Bible prophecy? Perhaps NoelPlum99 ought to think it through a little bit, and wonder why he assumes that the internet ought to be a great gray panmictic uniformity.
But all right, I’ll just assume that he’s not very bright and explain the obvious. There are a number of reasons why you aren’t ever going to see mobs of angry dissenters here.
This is a self-selected community. Look at the header on the blog: liberals, atheists, science-minded people will congregate here. It’s a successful center for that kind of person, and that means that people with different views — well, those that have a speck of self-awareness — will know that they are going to be a tiny minority in a swarm of opinionated, outspoken, ferocious liberals. Venturing here will be daunting. The mirror of community is that there will also be self-selected avoidance.
I have commenting rules, linked to on the main page. It’s not just the community, but me: this is my party, and I am the bouncer. I keep on eye on things and disruptive intrusions will get shown the door. I hope it’s clear that this is not a completely open noise machine with no expectations or standards of behavior. Reasonable dissent is allowed, but the key word there is reasonable.
So why aren’t there a bunch of reasonable people here disagreeing with the major premises of the blog (there is, of course, a great deal of disagreeing going on in the comments — NoelPlum99 has to have his blinders on to fail to see that — but it’s just not over fundamentals, like the value of science)? Because they can’t disagree reasonably.
Part of the reason is that the culture here means people who have a minority view often charge in here with a chip on their shoulder, promoting confrontation for confrontation’s sake. They’re not here to have a conversation, or discuss issues philosophically; they’re here to assault the fortress, to do their best to piss everyone off. They want to disrupt rather than argue. And like any good bouncer at a party who sees the angry drunk blundering about interrupting conversations, I give them the boot.
Another reason is that when they aren’t aggressively abusive, these dissenters are often completely tone-deaf and unable to see beyond their own myopic little obsessions. Case in point: NoelPlum99. He wasn’t openly abusive; he didn’t charge in like another recently banned spammer who had the username “PZ MEYERS IS A FUCKING DOUCHEBAG”; he was just consistently narcissistic.
In this case, I posted my regrets that Natalie Reed was leaving FtB, and also pointed out something that NoelPlum99 ought to find ironic: that the trolls and abusers are driving someone out of their own space. Oh, no…the real problem, in NoelPlum99’s head, is that blogs have some expected range of behavior that might preclude the participation of assholes, but that those same resentful assholes might be actively trying to shut down entire blogs and blog networks? No, not an issue. No worries. Create an environment of such unremitting hostility that people can’t bear the pressure of posting on their own sites is OK, but how dare a blog ban NoelPlum99?
So NoelPlum99 got banned for a couple of things. One was the complete inappriateness of jumping into a thread regretting Natalie’s departure with the deep sentiment that he didn’t like her. Another was the complete lack of awareness of context: it’s all about him, everywhere. And finally, there was the absurdity of a guy complaining now about how we don’t allow dissent arguing at length in that thread (completely off topic) about how skeptics ought to be able to disallow certain topics, such as gender politics.
And there was another obvious reason why some dissenters get banned: they are obtuse and don’t listen. There are regular commenters here who are similarly obstinate, but at least this is their space and they have voluntarily joined up with a group sharing similar views. If you’re a dissenter, holding a minority view, there’s an expectation that you’re actually here because you’re looking to learn about a different point of view (although, as I said above, usually you’re here about confrontation for confrontation’s sake). You’re getting dogpiled; there are 20 people telling you you’re wrong. Then what happens, typically? You pick the worst possible argument (it’s true, sometimes people I agree with in general do make bad arguments), ignore all the reasonable arguments, and never ever listen. NoelPlum99 was notorious for that. He hung around for 4 months and never changed his tune, never addressed any sensible arguments, and never acknowledged any points that might represent serious concerns by commenters here.
Imagine a party where some boor keeps walking up to conversational groups, announcing his position on some sociopolitical point that may not have anything to do with what the conversation was about, and when the others actually try to engage him, he goes glassy-eyed, ignores them, and eventually wanders off to assert his great truths to a different group. That was NoelPlum99. That was not reasonable dissent.
One last remark: sometimes there is no such thing as reasonable dissent on certain issues. Sometimes trolls are idiots. NoelPlum99 lasted as long as he did because he didn’t come right out and shout some intolerable stupidity; I will, for instance, ban racists on sight, because their arguments are not in any way scientifically or ethically defensible, and in fact are simply odious and evil. NoelPlum99 was smugly privileged and dense, but there was some faint hope that he might actually wake up and recognize his own blinkered view, a hope that faded fairly rapidly.
But otherwise, there are views that I find insufferably stupid, that only idiots would hold, and I’m happy to make this environment as hostile as possible to them. There are no rational grounds, no context for reasonable dissent, for being anti-feminist, for instance, or denying that our culture is deeply patriarchal and sexist. I can see reasonable argument about how we ought to deal with this fact of life, but denial (or worse, the kind of inane argument so many make that “why, calling someone a ‘cunt’ is not a reflection of de facto sexism!”) is going to be fired upon with all ferocity and anyone holding such a view is going to find interacting here intolerable and infuriating, leading to them lashing out and trying to turn the whole blog into a brawl over some really idiotic issues.
And then they get banhammered.
Because really, how do you express “reasonable dissent” from the view that women are people, and that our society institutionalizes discrimination of all sorts?
I missed it, but Angry by Choice, Tangled Up in Blue Guy, and Greg Laden visited the Creation Science Fair yesterday, and Greg Laden already has a write-up. It was as tawdry as expected, with every poster lauding Gawd with bible verses. It was also very small.
There is another reason we go: To keep the creationists honest(ish). A few years ago, a group of us went to the fair and noted 20-something posters, and in that year the organizers, unaware of our presence, reported a much later number, thus lying about the level of participation in this event. When I pointed out on my blog that among all the photographs they took and we took one could not count any number of even close to that suggested by them, the organizers of the creationist science fair deleted all their photos from their web site and accused me of being a child abuser.
Total poster count this year: 23, in all age groups. See? That’s why it’s hard to get up the enthusiasm to drive 3½ hours to see little kids dressing up science with Jesus.
There’s a 30+-acre solar project proposed for a spot of Joshua tree woodland less that a mile from the house we’re renting here in Joshua Tree — significantly less than a mile — and I went for a walk on the site today.
My gut feeling when I heard about the project was that this isn’t the right place for it. I’m a big fan of smaller solar, and I have no problem living near a facility of that size. In fact, I’d love to live directly under a few kilowatts’ worth of photovoltaic panels. When people started calling me a NIMBY a few years back for publicly opposing some of the huge solar projects on publicly owned tortoise habitat in the Mojave, I thought “WTF are they talking about? I want this in my backyard!” Well, not a 750-foot power tower surrounded by a hundred thousand heliostats the size of billboards, but you know. Solar. Fill the parking lots and the roofs and the bus shelters with solar panels. I want to see them everywhere I look, mostly.
But this site happens to be on a strip of land connecting our local National Park with a square mile of undeveloped land the local land trust just bought specifically due to that connection to the park, for wildlife linkage purposes. This project would cut that connectivity. It’s full of wildlife and mature vegetation. Very mature. During my walk today I saw at least five shrubs likely more than 1,000 years old, and I wasn’t being anything like a thorough surveyor. There were tons of burrows and tons of scat, rabbit and coyote and possible bobcat. The plot is obviously well-used by wildlife. There are plenty of places in the area that would be more suitable for solar, I’m thinking.
But because I do live here, and could reasonably be accused of NIMBYism — construction dust will likely blow into our yard, for instance — I wanted to scope out the site and become slightly better informed. I want to read the plans when they come out, talk to the proponents, make up my mind carefully.
So I walked around on the site for a bit.
As you can see from the photos so far, the Joshua trees on the site have been tagged. The proponent says that was done in order to inventory them, which seems reasonable. They are unlikely to be just cut down: villagers would show up with pitchforks and torches and such, as we love our Joshua trees here. They may be dug up and transplanted, an operation with a less than 50 percent survival rate. At any rate, for whatever end purpose, all the Joshua trees on the site have been tagged with pink ribbon.
Even the baby ones, like the 5-to-10-year-old tree at right. Just a wee cute little thing.
If it turns out that this patch of land won’t work for a solar array, then they picked the wrong place to try to push it through regardless. Aside from having an obscure but irritable desert blogger in the neighborhood, the site is right up against and upwind of a number of properties owned by relatively opinionated people, including two separate households of attorneys on the staff of a national environmental group known for its litigiousness. It may be that the developer decides to use this land as mitigation land for other nearby projects: preserving it to make up for the disturbance of less-valuable habitat elsewhere. Or maybe they’ll persuade us all that the project is right. We’ll see.
But what I found on the site this morning doesn’t bode well.
These two yuccas, in right foreground and center mid-ground, were tagged by the crew during Joshua Tree Tagging Day. You can see the tags if you look closely. Can anyone tell me the problem with that?
Anyone besides Chas?
They’re not Joshua trees. They’re Mojave yuccas, Yucca schidigera rather than the Joshua tree’s Yucca brevifolia. They are roughly similar to a Joshua tree, enough so that tourists will call them by the wrong name. For anyone who’s worked with desert plants for even a little bit of time confusing the two is like mistaking an aardvark for a giraffe.
I found three Mojave yuccas tagged as Joshua trees. They weren’t tagging Mojave yuccas as well, because there were hundreds on the site, from babies to matriarchs, not tagged at all.
This doesn’t bode well for the solar developer’s knowledge of actual conditions on the ground. Protip: when hiring consulting field biologists, make sure they don’t claim to have graduated from the Larry The Cable Guy School of Biologism.
