αEP: Complexity is not usually the product of selection

This is another addition to my αEP series about evolutionary psychology. Here’s the first, and unfortunately there are several more to come.

By the way, people are wondering about the α in the title. Don’t you people do any immunology? α is standard shorthand for “anti”.

I mentioned in the last one this annoying tendency of too many pro-evolution people to cite “complexity” as a factor that supports the assertion of selection for a trait. Strangely, the intelligent design creationists also yell “Complexity!” at the drop of a hat, only it’s to prove that evolution can’t work.

They’re both wrong.

I ran across a prime example of this recently in a post by John Wilkins (It’s pick-on-John-Wilkins day! Hooray!)

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Torturing SF authors for charity

Ryan is considering the sexualization of the female body in geek art, and like all of us people with Y chromosomes, my first thought was, “But what about the meeeeeennnnzzz?” (if you’re reading this aloud, as I’m sure you do, be sure to put a good nasal whine into the phrase). Fortunately, my question has been answered, because Jim Hines and John Scalzi are using SF book covers as guides for posing sexily.

You might not want to click on that link if you’re the sensitive sort.

Scalzi is always willing to indulge in these kinds of stunts, and I’m thinking that a truly malicious sort of person could send him SF and comic book covers that would land him in the hospital with severe spinal injuries and broken ribs and shattered legs. Because, you see, this is what happens to us poor, weak, pitiful men when we try to keep up with those infinitely flexible creatures made out of rubber bands and balloons called “women”.

αEP: The fundamental failure of the evolutionary psychology premise

This is another addition to my αEP series about evolutionary psychology. Here’s the first, and unfortunately there are several more to come.

I have a real problem with evolutionary psychology, and it goes right to the root of the discipline: it’s built on a flawed foundation. It relies on a naïve and simplistic understanding of how evolution works (a basic misconception that reminds me of another now-dead discipline, which I’ll write about later) — it appeals to many people, though, because that misconception aligns nicely with the cartoon version of evolution in most people’s heads, and it also means that every time you criticize evolutionary psychology, you get a swarm of ignorant defenders who assume you’re attacking evolution itself.

That misconception is adaptationism.

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Ken Ham gets wackier email than I do!

And he doesn’t even appreciate how deranged it all is! He just published some fan mail titled “Overheard in a locker room” (it’s a fundagelical locker room, apparently, so don’t expect anything crude: the strongest word used is “crap”, and even that gets edited out.) But wow, does this letter ever highlight a bunch of the under-appreciated tropes of the modern creationist movement.

I wanted to offer a word of encouragement. I recently returned from visiting the Creation Museum. I was at the gym, in the locker room, telling a pastor how great the museum was. Pastor Jack asked me, “You believe in a literal 6 days?”

“Absolutely!” I replied.

Then out of nowhere, a man came around the corner who overheard our conversation said, “Ken Ham is a piece of c—.”

This man went on to tell me that he has four degrees, studies fossils, bends light, is a Christian, and is a follower of Reasons to Believe and its president Hugh Ross.

[1. Notice that this is a conflict between a young earth creationist and a slightly more liberal Christian (very slightly, if he’s giving Hugh Ross any credibility). They don’t care much about atheists except as boogiemen, like Satan, and see the real battle as one between slightly different Christian sects.]

But out of his same mouth he called a fellow Christian a piece of c—. There was no sign of the humble heart of a Christian.

I thought: You have got to be kidding me, right!?

I stood in my underwear arguing with this man (possibly a professor) about God being big enough to do what He said in Genesis.

[2. “We’re sooooo humble, but our god is so much bigger than their god.”]

I can’t believe that I have fellow brothers and sisters wanting to side with “scientists”.

[3. On the one hand, the creationists desperately desire to don the mantle of the “True Scientist”; on the other, they deeply distrust and despise scientists. We are their “other”…but weirdly, we are the “other” that they wish they were.]

This has been a real eye-opener for me.

I lead a men’s morning study and I am very excited to take the men down this road. Thank you for the resources, and thank you for being willing to stand on God’s Word while we have brothers and sisters scoffing at us. May our God strengthen you in your work.

[4. Two things: this is an evangelical young earth creationism. The reason creationism is so widespread in the US is that they have effectively coupled what was once a fringe belief in the Christian community, that the earth is only 6000 years old, to proper beliefs in god and morality. And they are damn sure going to make their neighbors follow the straight and narrow, which now includes creationism. The other thing to notice is the reinforcement of sex roles in these churches. Why should there be male and female guidance in understanding the Bible? Why do men and women need separate Bible study sessions? Because they’re reinforcing boundaries.]

I am one of the millions of young people who was struggling with the idea of millions of years. But Ken spoke at my church in Boise, Idaho, 8 years ago, and God really used this AiG ministry to strengthen my faith.

Thanks again.

In Christ’s grip,

[I’m sorry, but I have never received a letter that closes with “In Christ’s grip”, and I’m so jealous. I’m also thinking that these are the first words appropriate to a locker room conversation.]

– J.C., Boise, Idaho

Ken ham is a demented ideologue with scientific and religious beliefs that ought to be way out on the fringe, but never forget — and this is the scary part — he has equally deranged minions threaded through every community in the country. They’re here in Morris, Minnesota, and they’re there in your town. And they are dedicated: they are running church groups to spread that nonsense further, they are running for school boards to destroy public education, and they are effectively collaborating to elect their candidates to the city council, to state representative, to governor and senator.

The shit-house rats are cunning and organized. And they’re trying to take over the country.

Stereotypes are always best punctured

For instance, did you know that all gay men are slender metrosexuals with effeminate mannerisms and an obsession with show tunes, like these two men getting married in Washington state?

Jeez. Give me a few more years and that’s what I’ll look like…some of you may be rising to object and say I look like that now. Actually, I might just have a Harley-Davidson t-shirt somewhere in the pile, and I might even have a cap like that.

Maybe we should try to put away that world where manliness and femininity are stultifying, narrowing boxes we put people in.

Rabies vaccinations: now without agony.

Salon writer Irin Carmon was bitten by a strange dog in Brooklyn this weekend, and though the wound itself wasn’t too bad the call is out for people who might know the dog:

Hours later, I found a small actual wound and went to the ER, where they told me I have ten days to either find the dog to find out if it’s up to date on its shots, or get a miserable suite of shots. Or die of rabies.

So if you have any recollection of this dog in the Park Slope area, especially paired with the characteristics above, email me at icarmon@salon.com or, if you know me, contact me on whatever platform you want.

Irin has a lot of friends online, so the message is spreading quickly among the Park Slope dog set, and I wish her luck finding the dog.

But some of the messages going out to try to help her might end up reinforcing an inadvertent anti-vaccination message, to wit: the notion that rabies shots are an experience that you really, really want to avoid, because they involve two dozen painful injections in the abdomen with very long needles.

And who wouldn’t bend over backwards to avoid that kind of experience? Possibly even to the point of not seeking medical advice after a potentially dangerous bite?

But the urban-legend-style description of rabies vaccinations just isn’t true. Hasn’t been for a generation.

In 2004 my ex-wife took it upon herself to capture, tame and adopt out a gigantic crop of feral kittens in my old neighborhood in the SF Bay Area. One of them we caught almost too late to tame.

Did Not Want

I foolishly picked the kitten up with my bare hands, and after about 45 seconds of me not listening to it as it told me to put it down immediately, it escalated to a physical demonstration of its displeasure. Dissolve to me standing over the sink, losing copious amounts of blood from my right hand.

We had the choice of quarantining the kitten for a couple of weeks at animal control, destroying almost any chance that we could tame it during its last couple weeks of kittenhood, or me going in for rabies vaccinations. I picked that second option, and so over the next week and a half I got a pair of 11-milliliter rabies immunoglobulin injections in the ass, and five rabies vaccine shots in the upper arm. And a tetanus booster.

Some people do react to the vacccine, but for me the tetanus booster was more unpleasant by an order of magnitude, and that was less painful than the bite. The rabies vaccinations themselves, if given by someone good with a syringe, are nothing to fear. The worst part of the whole thing was driving to the hospital. And the kitten got adopted by someone who wanted a challenge.

The risk of dogs being carriers of rabies is a lot lower than it used to be in the United States, due to a decades-long interagency government vaccination campaign targeted at all dogs in the country. Some authorities use the phrase “eradicated,” which is probably slightly optimistic. But wild animals are still reservoirs; a sick animal doesn’t need to bite you to inoculate you with the disease, and the rabies virus can multiply quietly in your body for decades while you remain asymptomatic. And if you are infected, the math is pretty simple:

  • 100 percent of people infected with rabies who become symptomatic will die of the disease, assuming they don’t get hit by a truck first;
  • 100 percent of people exposed to rabies who are properly vaccinated before they become symptomatic will survive exposure.

It’s hard to argue against getting the vaccine, in other words.

[notice][Update and clarification: I said here that 100% of humans who develop rabies without vaccine treatment die of the disease, and 100% of those vaccinated in time do not. A reader has noted that six people who developed rabies symptoms have survived as a result of a still-experimental protocol involving induced coma and anti-viral drugs whose first successful use was in 2004.  Worldwide, about 70,000 people died of rabies in 2011, and as the new treatment has rescued an average of .75 people per year since 2004, the global mortality figure for those who develop rabies symptoms worldwide should actually be on the order of 99.999989%. I regret the sloppiness.][/notice]

 

Of course, since the health care distribution system in the United States is almost irremediably fucked, it turns out that the rabies immunoglobulin injections can be ridiculously costly if you don’t have good insurance. Not quite rattlesnake antivenin expensive, but high enough, in the four figure range, to ensure that if we did have a lot of rabid dogs in the US the poor would die of rabies and the affluent would be only mildly inconvenienced. (Another reason I’m lastingly grateful for my ex’s teachers’ union and its sane, humane health plan with the $5 and $10 co-pays.)

But that disincentive only means that it’s even more important not to add more disincentives to vaccination, especially those that border on urban legend. The shots were invasive and painful from the 1960s through the 1980s. Since then, not so much. The prospect of needing rabies shots is daunting enough without untruths about scary pain being spread around on Facebook and Twitter. Anti-vax myths can take a lot of different forms, mutating into strains spread by pro-vax people. Let’s not keep spreading this one.

And let’s hope Irin Carmon finds the people who own the dog that bit her, so they can cover her medical expenses.

So who’s going to do the recording?

Now that Ray Comfort has a column on World Net Daily, he has decided to dedicate himself to taking down notorious atheists…and his first target is that giant of the atheist movement, Billy Joel.

Wait. Billy Joel? Is he even an atheist? Yes, I guess he is.

Maybe he’ll be willing to sing these new lyrics for an old song. If he’s not, maybe some reader with musical talent will do it instead. It could be a hit! You know, like the rewritten Candle in the Wind.