And a complementary view from Ars Technica

When I agreed that many so-called ‘controversies’ don’t warrant a debate, I wasn’t saying that we shouldn’t cover them…just that they should be addressed appropriately, as fringe issues. The last thing we would want is media silence on, for instance, creationism! Ars Technica has a good piece on why we mustn’t be quiet about weird political positions.

Through the years I have received countless e-mails and have read hundreds of article comments imploring Ars to keep "political" stuff off the site. Such entreaties most commonly occur in relation to our scientific coverage of climate change or evolution, but also when we cover biological and anthropological matters of gender and sex. (They also come to a lesser extent when we cover the inherently political world of intellectual property, where, coincidentally, there are far fewer facts—but that’s outside the scope of this editorial.)

What those petitioners do not realize is that in asking us to be silent, they require that we take a politicized stance. Intentional silence is support for the status quo, and as such, it’s inherently political. Note that I’m speaking of intentional silence or avoidance, purposely not covering a topic so as not to bring light to it. Inasmuch as our editorial mission is, in part, to cover the issues relating to science and technology that are most challenging to our culture, it is unthinkable for us not to cover these issues. To reiterate, not covering them would be just as "political" as covering them.

This is also why I ignore or mock people who complain that “The movement has been co-opted by people with an agenda” — everyone has an agenda. Demanding silence on topics you don’t like is a symptom of having an agenda.

It needs to be said

David Hone has a good piece on what constitutes an appropriate subject for debate, and how the media fails.

The truth however, is near inevitably that there is only a very small minority making a disproportionate noise about their case. There is no debate over evolution, or the dinosaurian origin of birds, or that HIV leads to AIDS, or that climate is changing, or a great many others. That there are real, accredited scientists who do not think this is the case is not in doubt (sadly). But that this represents a real schism in the scientific community, that large numbers of researchers take these positions and that it occupies a significant amount of scientific research, or that there is good evidence for that position is certainly incorrect. One or two people arguing a point (and often doing so primarily in the media) does not make a debate.

…

This for me seems like the opposite of what good journalism should be. Surely the point is to provide a representation of the true state of affairs rather than spin (even if unintentionally) the fact that there is disagreement as something that is effectively 50:50, when it’s 99.9:00.1 or less. This can be humorous from an insider’s position when one sees the media triumph a paper as ‘reigniting the debate over x’ when in truth the researchers have looked at the paper, noted an obvious flaw or that it simply rehashes old and incorrect arguments or data, and carried on. The flipside of this is where there really is a scientific debate, in which case the debate is not reignited at all, but merely still going on, it has merely come to the attention of the press and public again which is not the same thing at all.

At least I have noticed over the years a decreasing tendency for newspapers to try to couple every discovery about evolution with a quote from some creationist somewhere, so I think the situation is slowly improving.

An experiment: why do you despise feminism?

Michael Shermer is feeling victimized, and is now seeing persecutors under the bed, I think. He posted a complaint about Ophelia writing a post that discussed subliminal biases. It’s a bizarre and paranoid whine — apparently you’re not ever supposed to criticize a skeptic, or you’re carrying out a witch hunt.

The feminist witch hunt continues! Ophelia Benson and PZ Myers have caught me again being a sexist: Trolling through my Scientific American columns Ophelia discovered that in my October column I report on Leonard Mlodinow’s book Subliminal, in which he reports on studies that report on people’s report of how they feel about politicians based on various subliminal cues, one of which is the pitch of the voice, lower judged as more truthful than higher (although looks matter even more). Guess what? My reporting of Leonard’s reporting of the studies’ reporting of subjects’ reports makes ME a sexist! Wiiiiiiitch. Seriously. I couldn’t make this up (note PZ’s comment on my own voice!)

Go ahead and read the Butterflies & Wheels post that hurt Shermer’s feelings; nowhere does she accuse him of being a sexist. She does suggest that he seems oblivious to the fact that a bias favoring the authority of deeper voices is also going to be a bias against women, but it’s more an affirmation of his point that we have these unconscious prejudices.

As for my terrible, awful, evil comment: I pointed out that Shermer isn’t exactly a baritone himself. That wasn’t an accusation or an insult; I don’t have a deep voice, either. My point was that you don’t have to have a voice like a foghorn to be a leader.

It’s a truly delusional state he’s worked himself into, and now he’s seeing witch hunts with himself as the target everywhere he looks (probably abetted by those slime pit denizens who see every cross-eyed look and every criticism as a sign that someone is about to get shivved by the all-powerful FtB mafia, and flood twitter and blog comments with such knee-jerk reactions). It’s a shame.

But that’s not what’s got me curious. Notice what else he does? He uses “feminist” as an insult, a very common phenomenon. It has me mystified.

And if you read that facebook post, the comments are similar: mobs of people having fits over “feminists”, sounding like Republicans fretting over “communists”. Here’s a subset of the shorter complaints:

Also, don’t worry about moronic misandrists.
True feminists (those wanting equality and NOT superiority for women) do not behave like this.

Just look at what happened to Thunderf00t when he dared question the pseudo-feminist dogma.

Welcome to The hysterical totalitarian feminist left….(just ask Lawrence Summers)

The death of Hitchens and this feminist clusterfuck have ruined the Atheist community.

Skepticism (capital “A”) is over for me. The movement has been co-opted by people with an agenda. Sad.

Trying to creep feminism into the skeptic movement is total nonsense. Tea Party was bought out by social conservatives, Occupy Wall Street taken over by hippies, and now the skeptic AND atheist movement is being bought out by radical liberals. It’s a shame.

It is a shame that people like PZ Myers and his ilk are so quick to abandon reason when their feminist religion tells them what nonsense to spew.

This shit is getting really annoying. Please ban all those feminist morons from skeptic conferences. Its a dogmatic belief system not based on evidence, dismissive of evidence provided to them and generally pretty aggressive towards other people for no real reason. How can they call themselves skeptics?

(That one’s a favorite: a dogmatic, dismissive, aggressive comment declaring that you can’t be a true skeptic if you’re dogmatic, dismissive, and aggressive. Own goal!)

I have to laugh at this other non sequitur that popped up:

Pz lost his mind after he went vegetarian. I don’t know what Ophelia is thinking

Well, vegetarianism isn’t associated with insanity as far as I know, and also, little awkward fact, I’m not a vegetarian, although I have reduced my meat consumption.

But anyway, I started to realize something: I don’t understand how these people think at all — they’re completely alien. Regarding feminism with contempt is a bit like regarding science with contempt: it’s incomprehensible to me, and I’m wondering if they really understand what they are throwing away.

So let’s try an experiment. Let’s hear from some of these anti-feminists. I’d like them to comment here and explain themselves, and to do so a little more deeply than just reiterating dogmatic excuses. If you think feminism is a religion, explain why, and be specific. If you think feminism is unsupported by the evidence, explain what evidence opposes the principles of feminism. If you think it’s wrong for the skeptic movement to have a social agenda, explain what you think it should be doing that has no social implications.

Most importantly, if you think feminism, that is equality for men and women and opposition to cultural institutions that perpetuate inequities, is irrational, let’s see you explain your opposition rationally.

This could go a couple of ways: there could be dead silence as the anti-feminists wilt under pressure to honestly explain themselves, or there could be an eruption of the usual shrieking misogyny, or there might actually be a few who try to explain themselves. If it’s the latter, the rest of you behave yourselves — pretend you’ve got a cockroach under the microscope and try to probe it to figure out what makes it work, and don’t just try to crush it under the heel of your shoe, OK?

I’m a bit curious myself. I’ve had these sorts of conversations with creationists, and it’s always like wandering through an alien world; let’s try to figure out what weird things are going on inside the skulls of anti-feminists.

The NRA has spoken

The executive vice president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, gave a press conference today on the recent school shooting. He had a culprit in mind — the media, which lets kids see all these horribly violent programs — and a solution, which had absolutely nothing to do with addressing his postulated causes. Instead, he proposes that the nation fund armed guards for every school. Really. That’s his serious answer.

LAPIERRE: You know, five years ago after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if — what if when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security? Will you at least admit it’s possible that 26 little kids, that 26 innocent lives might have been spared that day? Is it so important to you (inaudible) would rather continue to risk the alternative? Is the press and the political class here in Washington D.C. so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and American gun owners, that you’re willing to accept the world, where real resistance to evil monsters is alone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life, her life, to shield those children in her care.

No one. No one, regardless of personal, political prejudice has the right to impose that sacrifice.

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no national one size fits all solution to protecting our children. But do know that this president zeroed out school emergency planning grants in last year’s budget and scrapped Secure Our Schools policing grants in next year’s budget.

With all the foreign aid the United States does, with all the money in the federal budget, can’t we afford to put a police officer in every single school? Even if they did that, politicians have no business and no authority denying us the right, the ability, and the moral imperative to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm.

LAPIERRE: Now, the National Rifle Association knows there are millions of qualified and active retired police, active, Reserve, and retired military, security professionals, certified firefighters, security professionals, rescue personnel, an extraordinary corps of patriotic, trained, qualified citizens to join with local school officials and police in devising a protection plan for every single school.

We could deploy them to protect our kids now. We can immediately make America’s schools safer, relying on the brave men and women in America’s police forces. The budgets — and you all know this, everyone in the country knows this — of our local police departments are strained, and the resources are severely limited, but their dedication and courage is second to none. And, they can be deployed right now.

I call on Congress today, to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation. And, to do it now to make sure that blanket safety is in place when our kids return to school in January.

Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation, or anything else, as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work and by that I mean armed security.

Shorter LaPierre: MOOOOOORRRRE GUUUUUUUUUUNS!

Then we should surround playgrounds, libraries, movie theaters, swimming pools, football fields, grocery stores, candy shops, toy stores, and every place that kids might go with heavily armed guards. Let’s live in fear and turn this country into a police state.

People called him crazy 5 years ago. Now we call him obsessively, dangerously stupid.

Frontiers in taxonomy

There are days when having a glass desk is a serious health hazard, because I run the risk of serious facial lacerations when I read certain things.

Take this extremely well-intended article at Care2.com:

Human-accelerated climate change is a disaster waiting to happen. We’ve already seen the superstorms and drought it can create. Although we can work to slow climate change, there’s no way to stop it completely. This reality means adaptation will once again become the most important strategy for survival.

One thing’s for sure: the Earth will continue to exist as it has for eons. The question is, what will be left behind to inhabit it? Below are five species known for their resilience and ability to survive in adverse conditions. They are the most likely to survive a climate change disaster.

If you’re going to write one of those web-traffic pandering List Posts — not a criticism: I’m writing one this weekend as it pays the bills — that’s not a bad topic to tackle. True, the fact that the article starts this way might cause an anticipatory eyeroll:

Survival of the fittest. This basic tenant of evolution explains why the dodo bird no longer exists and why humans have opposable thumbs.

I’m trying to imagine what a basic tenant of evolution looks like. Maybe a Sphenodon. She’s paid her rent on time since the Pleistocene, comes from a good family, never made noise or caused trouble. You know the type.

That said, if I start making fun of people for typos there’s about a decade and a half worth of mine online people can choose from.

And it’s a great idea for a post. What species are likely to survive the disastrous climate change we’re almost certainly facing in the next decades? Human-adapted pests, probably, like rock doves a.k.a. pigeons, Rattus norvegicus, German cockroaches, but those stories have been written over and over again. How about wild species? Western sagebrush, maybe: that complex of subspecies in Artemisia tridentata that’s only just gotten settled in the Intermountain West, and is busily evolving new regional strains since the end of the Pleistocene? Or invasive exotics in the wild? That’s be a good if not precisely new topic.

Nope. Here are the five “species” listed:

  1. Trees in the Amazon
  2. “Wolves and coyotes”
  3. Ants
  4. Algae
  5. Cockroaches.

We can call “species” 2 and 5 near misses: wolves and coyotes comprise two closely related species, and while there are about 4,500 species of cockroaches and five commonly found in human dwellings as pests, the author mentions one in particular, the American cockroach. Though that’s not the one you usually think of as surviving Armageddon.

But those others. “Trees in the Amazon” as a species? really? There’s not a single place on the planet you could have picked where there are more tree species. One estimate of species diversity for trees in the Amazon basin put the likely number of species in the Brazilian section alone as above 11,000.

There are an estimated 22,000 species of ants. The author says this, almost:

There are approximately 20,000 different species of ant, with colonies of millions located all over the world. They were here long before humans, and the odds are good that they’ll be here long after.

One has to wonder what the author thinks the word means, if a species can be made up of more than 20,000 species. “Taxon,” maybe? Hard to say.

And “algae.” The author says:

Once of the few species that has been around since the beginning of evolution (remember the primordial slime?), there are over 200,000 varieties [of algae] known to man.

A chance to use the word “species”  correctly, almost, but the author opts for “varieties” instead.

This is an inconsequential article and the author meant well. It’s a good thing to get people to think about. And Care2’s editors, if they have any over there, are really the people to blame here, if I were blaming rather than observing.  Which I’m not. Really.

But to quote the celebrated environmental scientist Rush Limbaugh, “words mean things.” Maybe it’s just PTSD from having spent most of my adult life editing prose by environmental activists. I may well have had a big red button pushed. But if you’re writing about saving the natural world, you need to know at least a little bit about the natural world. And when you write about threats to biodiversity, knowing the actual definition of the word that represents the basic unit of biodiversity is a good idea.

Lest you end up calling “algae” a species.

The Gumby Gambit

Tom Bethell is a fellow traveller with the Intelligent Design creationists of the Discovery Institute; he often publishes on their website, and he’s the author of quite a few books questioning the dogma of science. He also thinks he’s a polymath: he wrote Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, which claims that Einstein was wrong, and he also wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, which claims that radiation is good for you, there is no global climate change going on, Shakespeare didn’t write those plays, and evolution is bunk, among many other remarkable assertions.

He’s a gumbyesque crackpot, in other words.

His latest effort is a rant on l’affaire greenscreen in which he explains natural selection to us. Read on; you will be in awe as Mr Gumby bellows out his definitions and explanations. He gets everything absolutely backwards.

An analogous situation arises with varieties of bacteria that are immune to antibiotics. The immune varieties are suddenly “fit” and so they survive. But the word “adaptation” is misleading because the immune varieties have to appear first. They don’t “adapt,” or reshape themselves in recognition of the suddenly hostile environment. They are not like people who “adapt” to cold weather by putting on overcoats. They are like people who accidentally had overcoats on before the cold snap came.

NS is not supposed to be an explanation of how we get more of something; a dark moth, for example. It’s supposed to show how the moth itself arose. And that is what the Darwinists have never been able to demonstrate; not just with moths but with anything else. That’s why I hesitate to call NS “real.” Well, I guess it is, as long as it’s defined narrowly enough.

Read that last paragraph again. It’s a marvel. Tom Bethell doesn’t have even a basic understanding of the principle of natural selection; he doesn’t even understand it as well as Darwin, who wrote it up in 1859.

Natural selection is an explanation of how we get more (or less) of something; it describes one mode of change in the frequency of a trait in a population over multiple generations. It is not about physiological adaptation, but about changes in allele frequency. That’s all biologists have claimed for the concept, ever; it’s one of the things population geneticists have lots of math to describe.

Natural selection is not an explanation for how evolutionary novelties arise in the first place. For that, we have to look at mutations and subtler enabling changes that facilitate the emergence of new phenotypes, like recombination and genetic accommodation. The idea that variation in the environment can induce appropriate changes in heritable traits of organisms is the discarded notion of Lamarckian inheritance — we don’t see evidence of that.

He gets it all completely wrong. Even more remarkably, he gets it wrong after giving a useful analogy with his overcoat example.

Yes, natural selection works exactly like “people who accidentally had overcoats on before the cold snap came.” That’s Darwin’s key insight and Bethell’s key failure: natural selection isn’t about how individuals adapt, it’s about how populations adapt by winnowing out less fit individuals (those who don’t have an overcoat) and promoting the more fit individuals (those who happened to have an overcoat, and will pass it on to their children).

I really don’t understand how someone could write a whole book with chapters about evolution and not grasp that beautiful, simple, elegant idea. I suppose it’s the same way someone with no understanding of physics could write a whole book with no math in it disproving Einstein.

Isn’t it revealing, though, how the Discovery Institute promotes people like Bethell and Gauger who have no understanding of the field they aim to disprove? It’s as if the only people they can find who share their goals are all incompetents with delusions of understanding the science about as well as a reasonable high school student.