I get email

I wondered what the creationists were doing after last night’s debate, when all the godless rationalists were partying down. They were composing a condescending letter to rationalize away their defeat!

Here’s what Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association sent me and Mark Borrello and Jerry Bergman this morning.

Thank you all

Thanks to you all for keeping the debate on a courteous intellectual level.

Obviously not all the questions were addressed but the event illustrated that it can be extremely valuable to do so.

Dr. Myers, you have a unique position, with your immensely popular blog, to change the whole complexion of the discussion. Remember how you treated Dr. Bergman on your blog?

On Monday, 16 November, I’m going to be doing a debate. I hate debates, but I’ve been dragged into this one. It’s being promoted by the local creationist loons and CASH, and I’d like to see a good turnout from the sensible, scientific, godless community. I’ll be arguing with a loud clown, Jerry Bergman, on “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in the Schools?” I think you can guess which side I’m going to be on.

You can, by the power of example and occasional criticism of overzealous followers, turn the blog into an actual forum of ideas. It would be a great contribution to the intellectual world.

To be addressed is your claim that evolution adds information. That needs to be supported. Your closing remarks about evolutionary research into the beak changes of Darwin’s Finches need to be answered with the point that they are still finches and the changes cycle with changing environmental conditions. The only point at which the crowd got rowdy was with the mention of evolution’s influence on Hitler. Actually, that issue is not solved by shouting because there is a strong case that the desire to improve the race leads to eugenic and ethnic cleansing policies. Indeed, your claim that morality comes from our culture needs to answer the question, “What if my culture is the Mafia?” Other evolutionary apologists have candidly pointed out that the only morality that can come out of evolution is that I leave my genes, as many of them as possible, to the next generation. Also, a truly interactive academic blog would allow posting of the studies on the academic success of students exposed to both evolution and intelligent design. You have consistently claimed that those students who do not get pure evolution will fail, but without offering any experimental or observational data. And to claim that evidence against evolution does not represent evidence for intelligent design needs closer analysis. There is a logical dichotomy involved. Life either has a natural origin or not. If not, then the origin must come from outside natural mechanisms. You can claim that we just don’t know, but while waiting, need to entertain the possibility that there is a cause outside of nature. To say there can be no such thing is not a scientific statement or even a logical one but an a priori elimination of one whole field of inquiry. Your redefinition of vestigial organs as reduced function may get some traction but is not the way they were presented 100 years ago, but there is no doubt that “Junk DNA’ was clearly touted as evolutionary leftovers and delayed the search for function, which was predicted by Intelligent design.

Also, you have not only personally attacked Dr. Bergman, you have allowed your followers to misrepresent his qualifications by focusing on the institution granting one of his PhDs. Here is a CV:

M.P.H., Northwest Ohio Consortium for Public Health (Medical College of Ohio, Toledo, Ohio; University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio), 2001.
M.S. in biomedical science, Medical College of Ohio, Toledo, Ohio, 1999.
Ph.D. in human biology, Columbia Pacific University, San Rafael, California, 1992.
M.A. in social psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1986.
Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation, minor in psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1976.
M.Ed. in counseling and psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1971.
B.S., Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1970. Major area of study was sociology, biology, and psychology.
A.A. in Biology and Behavioral Science, Oakland Community College, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1967.

If your case is strong, students will be enriched by being allowed to see it interact with the opposition. And your call for punishment of those who reject the ruling paradigm conflicts with the view of science as growing and self correcting. How can purveyors of new ideas work hard to establish them if they are not allowed to do so? Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions pointed out that it is very difficult for those entrenched in the establishment to change and paradigm shifts come with generational revolutions by those whose life work and reputations are not tied to the current model.

Dr. Borrello, because you have participated in a debate with me, I know you are in favor of interactions and Dr. Bergman, I know you not only are in favor of dialogue but would be delighted to bring this to the next level. Because you have been willing to change in the past, you have demonstrated that data makes a difference to you and I dare say that you might even refine some of the arguments you made at the debate given the chance.

So, Dr. Myers, are you willing to take your debate persona and transplant it to the Blogosphere?

Ross Olson

Does he really think I treated Bergman’s ideas with less contempt in the debate than I do on the blog? Trust me, the reputation I have on the internet that I seem to rip off my enemies’ heads with my claws and slake my thirst at the spurting stump of their neck does not accord well with reality — I do the same thing here on the blog that I did last night, it’s just a little more obvious in person that there is a human being behind these words. Mr Olson really needs to face up to the fact that all that happened was that the paladin-for-hire he brought into my backyard to knock me off my high horse showed up in rusty armor, wielding a bladder-onna-stick, and got his ass kicked.

His long paragraph of creationist fallacies up there doesn’t save face for him, it merely makes him look ridiculous. I think I’ll take it apart later, but right now I’m trying to get caught up on other matters, and giving three talks over the course of this long weekend has left me a little fatigued. Have no fear, I’ll treat it appropriately, and my thirst will be slaked.

As for Bergman’s CV, it’s terrible. It’s a potted history of a dilettante striving for legitimacy with a random array of diplomas on his wall. I’m really unimpressed; I’m much more impressed with the single degree of a freshly-minted graduate student who has demonstrated some depth and fervor for an idea than that fuzzy flibbertigibbet’s list of hash.

And please don’t invoke Kuhn. Creationists are not the heralds of a coming paradigm shift; they are the rotting detritus of the old regime of unreason that has haunted the human race for far too long. There’s a difference between maintaining an open environment that encourages fresh new ideas to emerge and tolerating the sloppy housecleaning that allows moldy scum to flourish.

Prophet, Patriarch…PZ

Michael Dowd, the peculiar author of Thank God for Evolution, has a strange podcast up that promotes the New Atheists because they are the new prophets — we’re telling it like it is, and religious folks need more of that. He also urges people to read Pharyngula, or, if they want something a little gentler, to read Richard Dawkins’ site…ah, flattery.

Anyway, the gist of his argument is that “The religion that the New Atheists are attacking is otherworldly, superstitious religion when it’s interpreted as objectively real. And that’s not where the power of our religious language lies…”, which is, in part, the point I was making when I criticized those faith-heads who make up pseudo-scientific explanations for the miraculous. Of course, I disagree that there is any power in religious language, except as potent mind-games to tap into kinks and biases in human psychology.

In a previous life, I was…

The Bronze Dog got to be a “pirate chick with panache and a heart of gold”, but my past life analysis isn’t quite as interesting.

Your past life diagnosis:

I don’t know how you feel about it, but you were male in your last earthly incarnation.You were born somewhere in the territory of modern South China around the year 1000. Your profession was that of a builder of roads, bridges and docks.

Your brief psychological profile in your past life:
Revolutionary type. You inspired changes in any sphere – politics, business, religion, housekeeping. You could have been a leader.

The lesson that your last past life brought to your present incarnation:
You are bound to solve problems of pollution of environment, recycling, misuse of raw materials, elimination of radioactivity by all means including psychological methods.

Do you remember now?

Wait…so I was a Chinese laborer with dreams of revolution, and therefore I now have the power to eliminate radioactivity with psychology?

I get email

My crank mail can be categorized into several categories. There are the short, barely literate splutterings of abuse; the weird rants and threats; the reiteration of long-dead creationist talking points (yeah, I get email where the writer thinks he’s trumped me by saying “If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”); and then there are the long, rambling lectures from deeply clueless individuals. I’m afraid this is one of the latter. I’ll understand if you fall asleep partway through.

By the way, the author actually sent this to me pre-formatted in Comic Sans. I’m also rather peeved that he’s sending me a letter addressed to Eugenie Scott.

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Why people believe in bad ideas

There is a must-read article at Edge by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg—it’s an attempt to explain why people resist scientific knowledge that takes a psychological view of the phenomenon. The premise is that our brains have in-built simplifications and assumptions about how the world works that often conflict with how it really works—there is, for instance, an intuitive physics and a real physics that are not entirely in agreement, and that we bring our understanding into alignment with reality through education and experience. The naive assumptions of the young brain contribute to ideas like dualism and creationism. For example:

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Africa is filled with people too dumb to live, according to the LSE

My university doesn’t subscribe to the journal, but I’d really be interested in reading this paper by Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics. Even better would be if someone else would critique it so I wouldn’t have to waste my time on it.

Mind the gap…in intelligence: Re-examining the relationship between inequality and health.

Kanazawa S.
Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

Wilkinson contends that economic inequality reduces the health and life expectancy of the whole population but his argument does not make sense within its own evolutionary framework. Recent evolutionary psychological theory suggests that the human brain, adapted to the ancestral environment, has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment and that general intelligence evolved as a domain-specific adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems. Since most dangers to health in the contemporary society are evolutionarily novel, it follows that more intelligent individuals are better able to recognize and deal with such dangers and live longer. Consistent with the theory, the macro-level analyses show that income inequality and economic development have no effect on life expectancy at birth, infant mortality and age-specific mortality net of average intelligence quotient (IQ) in 126 countries. They also show that an average IQ has a very large and significant effect on population health but not in the evolutionarily familiar sub-Saharan Africa. At the micro level, the General Social Survey data show that, while both income and intelligence have independent positive effects on self-reported health, intelligence has a stronger effect than income. The data collectively suggest that individuals in wealthier and more egalitarian societies live longer and stay healthier, not because they are wealthier or more egalitarian but because they are more intelligent.

What brings it up is that a reader sent me a link to a Guardian article on the subject of this paper, and I find it hard to believe that it actually makes such strong causal claims…even though the abstract does plainly state that the author is arguing for a causal relationship between intelligence and poverty, and it’s not in the direction I would think reasonable.

The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claims that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings.

You know, I could believe that the populations of nations ravaged by disease, poverty, and war would test poorly. I am not surprised that people could develop tests in the Western world, rush into a completely different culture (not to mention one distracted by serious internal problems), and find that the inhabitants do not respond to their tests with quite the due seriousness they do at home. I do wonder, though, how anyone in their right mind could make this claim:

In the paper he cites Ethiopia’s national IQ of 63, the world’s lowest, and the fact that men and women are only expected to live until their mid-40s as an example of his finding that intelligence is the main determinant of someone’s health.

An IQ of 63 means the average person in Ethiopia is clinically mildly mentally retarded; that’s a result that’s over two standard deviations away from the mean. If you look it up in the DSM-IV, you’ll find that this means they are at best capable of sixth-grade work, and that they are marginally capable of living independently with some community support. When a test reports that a population of 75 million people is dominated by a cohort that is incapable of reading beyond the grade school level and is unable to understand geometry, I tend to be suspicious of the validity of the test, or of the conclusions about ability being drawn from it.

I also have to wonder about the chain of reasoning behind this. I guess when I see a nation wracked by civil war with its infrastructure blown to pieces, a life expectancy of 49 years, and an infant mortality rate of almost 10%, combined with poor performance on some abstract IQ test, my conclusion would be that that situation isn’t exactly conducive to educating children. I don’t see how you would come to the conclusion that they’re just too dumb to live; perhaps the full paper would explain this in some plausible detail.

I don’t have much hope, though. I look at the evolutionary rationale in that abstract and am astonished. So this guy thinks African populations, unlike, say, European populations, have not faced the challenges of “evolutionarily novel problems”? That on an evolutionarily significant timescale, selection has been working on Europeans to generate nearly 40 point differences in IQ from their ancestors, and more improbable still, these same forces haven’t applied to Africans? This is cartoon biology, free of any constraint by fact or theory.

I also don’t have a lot of confidence in work coming out of the London School of Economics. What is it with the wacky stuff coming out of the LSE lately?

Utter nonsense

What the hell? How can the BBC News publish this tripe?

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

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