My cunning plan has worked!

In my talk at the Society for Developmental Biology, I encouraged more scientists to take advantage of the internet to share science with the public. Someone fell for it! Saori Haigo has started a blog, and she even explains why.

I’ve started this blog because I believe I have a social responsibility as a professional scientist to communicate science openly to the people. I will blog about what I think are important topics in the biological and biomedical sciences and explore the value, current issues, and realistic expectations of what we gain from doing research on that topic. In addition, I’ll explore how science is done, share with you why I think the research I’m working on is of interest and worth funding by taxpayers, give you a taste of what my daily activities entail, and share the latest cutting edge research published in science journals. All in layman’s terms, so you can follow too.

I hope through my posts you will come to appreciate the value of academic science and learn about a world which may seem ‘foreign’ to you. And also to learn something neat along the way. Enjoy!

So go browse already. It’s a brand new blog, but she’s already got some interesting stuff, including spinning eggs.

Coming attractions

I have a couple of promising events that don’t have firm dates yet, but you might want to keep your eyes open for them in the near future.

  • The paperwork for Rock Beyond Belief has been resubmitted, and with any luck they might be able to pull off an atheist event at Fort Bragg after all.

  • What are you doing next spring? You might want to think about visiting Washington DC for the big Reason Rally. Several of the big atheist organizations are coordinating for a massive rally on the mall. Everyone must show up! We will all demand a secular nation NOW!

Changes, one way or another

I have news. Scienceblogs is going to be folded into a new organization sometime soon — basically, we’ve been bought. I can’t discuss all of the details just yet, but let’s just say it is a prestigious national magazine with a healthy bottom line that will do us a lot of good. There are certainly some advantages: like I said, prestigious, and there’s also a commitment to up-to-date technology and migrating to better blogging software. There’s also an agreement that the range of topics I discuss here, including the strong dissent from religion and the atheism and the anti-creationism stuff, are acceptable subjects. So that’s the happy part of the story.

The worrisome bit: there are standards and practices to follow, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but I do not want my peculiar voice to be compromised. That’s why I’m in this thing in the first place, to be able to express myself as I want when I want. So we’re in the delicate negotiation phase, trying to find agreements on form that don’t infringe on content, that will allow me to say any damn thing I want but maybe will require me to take an extra moment to review my articles with more cool deliberation before clicking that ‘submit’ button.

It is entirely possible that we won’t be able to find that position that is acceptable to both sides of our discussion, in which case I’ll cheerfully move on to an independent server and keep on keeping on right there. I’ll be thinking about the pluses and cons for a while.

I said “both sides,” but there are actually three sides: me, the hosting organization, and you the readers. How would you react if, for instance, profanity filters went up on the comments? Right now, it’s a real free-for-all in the comments, but I do clean up spam, ban certain elements that have demonstrated their trollishness, and will occasionally swoop in and erase comments that reveal personal information or contain nothing but bigoted raving. Would you leave if some automated software converted certain four-letter words to euphemisms, or if comments containing such words were held up until you edited them to meet the standards? What limits to expression would you accept?

These are trade-offs, so another interesting question is, what would persuade you that some limits to language are acceptable? Are there features that you think it would be worth demanding (say, user editing, or just faster performance, or free ponies with every comment) that you’d like to demand for the price of watching your potty-mouths a little more? We’re negotiating, you know — they make requests, we make requests — so tell me what’s most important to you.

I sure haven’t signed any contract with this organization yet, so it’s still entirely possible that I’ll just fly off my own way. Your input will be a factor, so speak up here, and I’ll listen. No matter what, though, things will not be the same, and there will be changes coming this summer.

Order soon!

The latest special t-shirt from woot is this one:

i-91a6e5800d6852f9dd30e9a95b4ee958-wootshirt.jpeg

I don’t think they’ll last long so you better get your order in fast.

Woot seems to track their sales stats closely; I wonder if there is a significant preference for cephalopods on shirts over, say, flowers or trios of wolves or something.

There is no case for Hell

I cannot imagine being Ross Douthat. There’s just something so bizarre and twisted in his brain that I cannot empathize at all with his point of view — it’s a brain in which all the proteins have been crosslinked by the fixative of religion. Now he’s arguing that Hell must exist.

As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn’t have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile with God’s omnipotence with human anguish.

These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press.

Wait. There might be another factor here, you know. How many unearthly infernos have occurred, and how would we get news about them? Douthat is unhappy that all we hear about is mere “ordinary” infernos like the Holocaust and disasters in Haiti, and we’re all worked up about those, but hey, what about the Queekwan Rebellion on Fomalhaut VII, or the outcome of the theological debate on the nature of ectoplasmosis in Heaven’s sixth ward? Why aren’t the newspapers making a big deal about those catastrophes, huh?

This is just weird enough to discombobulate me already, but where he loses me is where he thinks the omission of supernatural news from beyond is a very bad thing.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

So we’re less human because we care far more about real human catastrophes than we do about lobstermen in outer space or archangel celebrity gossip? This does not follow. This does not make sense.

There’s also a peculiarly inverted perspective on the issue. Douthat argues that Hell must exist because we wish it to exist, to create a particular desirable environment to shape humanity’s moral development.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death … salvation or damnation.”

No, no, no. This is so backwards. That he wishes something to be so does not mean it must exist; it is so primitively theological to argue that “X exists because it should” rather than “X exists because there is evidence for it”. But worse, there it is again, the diminution of the real for the fantasies of his poor imagination.

The birth of my children was not an unimportant event to me. It is not humanism to look down on a wonderful, human event like two people joining together to produce a child and declare it meaningless unless we’re also dwelling on an existential horror invented by self-serving priestly parasites. I could see important choices on the horizon, real-world responsibilities and actions, that would make a huge difference in the lives of myself, my wife, and my kids, and I don’t need imaginary goads to motivate me.

So confused is Douthat about what is real and imaginary that he chooses to end his little essay with a ‘difficult’ theological question that is…well, you have to see it to believe it.

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?

No. Not only does heaven not exist, but Tony Soprano is a fictional character who did not really exist in the first place.

Also, about Gandhi? He’s dead. He has ceased to exist. He’s not anywhere anymore.

These are not difficult questions, unless your brain has been addled by religious damage.

Truth isn’t reached by a dissembling path

Where’s my rusty porcupine? If you want to understand why I despise the Templeton Foundation, just read the BS from their latest hero, Martin Rees, who advocates silence in the face of absurdity.

“Campaigning against religion can be socially counter-productive. If teachers take the uncompromising line that God and Darwinism are irreconcilable, many young people raised in a faith-based culture will stick with their religion and be lost to science. Moreover, we need all the allies we can muster against fundamentalism – a palpable, perhaps growing concern,” he wrote.

So…when someone says their god (an invisible, intangible being) infused a soul (an invisible, intangible imaginary vapor) into a human ancestor at some unspecifiable date by an indescribable mechanism, hold your tongue — don’t you dare point out that that is credulous unscientific garbage.

So…when someone claims their imaginary god works miracles by diddling subatomic particles at the quantum level, and there’s no way to detect this, but he knows this is how his magic man works, you’d better not mention that he’s illogical and promoting unscientific nonsense.

So…when our politicians and bureaucrats begin their meetings by asking everyone present to beg a nonexistent ghost to sprinkle magic illusions over the participants so that they’ll do their work better, we ought to close our eyes along with everyone else—presumably so we don’t see them making idiots of themselves.

I was just listening to Lawrence Krauss talk about his new book on Richard Feynman, and he closed the lecture with a fabulously appropriate quote.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman

At least Feynman could see the centrality of honesty in science. Too bad Martin Rees lacks that much integrity —but then, if he had it, it would have disqualified him from the Templeton Prize.

Jerry Coyne’s open letter

Go read Open letter to the NCSE and BCSE. Or read it here:

Dear comrades:

Although we may diverge in our philosophies and actions toward religion, we share a common goal: the promulgation of good science education in Britain and America–indeed, throughout the world. Many of us, like myself and Richard Dawkins, spend a lot of time teaching evolution to the general public. There’s little doubt, in fact, that Dawkins is the preeminent teacher of evolution in the world. He has not only turned many people on to modern evolutionary biology, but has converted many evolution-deniers (most of them religious) to evolution-accepters.

Nevertheless, your employees, present and former, have chosen to spend much of their time battling not creationists, but evolutionists who happen to be atheists. This apparently comes from your idea that if evolutionists also espouse atheism, it will hurt the cause of science education and turn people away from evolution. I think this is misguided for several reasons, including a complete lack of evidence that your idea is true, but also your apparent failure to recognize that creationism is a symptom of religion (and not just fundamentalist religion), and will be with us until faith disappears. That is one reason–and, given the pernicious effect of religion, a minor one–for the fact that we choose to fight on both fronts.

The official policy of your organizations–certainly of the NCSE–is apparently to cozy up to religion. You have “faith projects,” you constantly tell us to shut up about religion, and you even espouse a kind of theology which claims that faith and science are compatible. Clearly you are going to continue with these activities, for you’ve done nothing to change them in the face of criticism. And your employees, past and present, will continue to heap invective on New Atheists and tar people like Richard Dawkins with undeserved opprobrium.

We will continue to answer the misguided attacks by people like Josh Rosenau, Roger Stanyard, and Nick Matzke so long as they keep mounting those attacks. I don’t expect them to abate, but I’d like your organizations to recognize this: you have lost many allies, including some prominent ones, in your attacks on atheism. And I doubt that those attacks have converted many Christians or Muslims to the cause of evolution. This is a shame, because we all recognize that the NCSE has done some great things in the past and, I hope, will–like the new BCSE–continue do great things in the future.

There is a double irony in this situation. First, your repeated and strong accusations that, by criticizing religion, atheists are alienating our pro-evolution allies (liberal Christians), has precisely the same alienating effect on your allies: scientists who are atheists. Second, your assertion that only you have the requisite communication skills to promote evolution is belied by the observation that you have, by your own ham-handed communications, alienated many people who are on the side of good science and evolution. You have lost your natural allies. And this is not just speculation, for those allies were us, and we’re telling you so.

Sincerely,
Jerry Coyne

Richard Dawkins has also commented on it.

I really feel that the NCSE has lost its way on this issue. I want to support the NCSE, but it has become increasingly hard to do. I have heard these arguments over and over again that they have to coddle religious believers because they need them to support science. They don’t. As we’ve said repeatedly, we aren’t asking that the NCSE give atheists even as much support as they do the religious: imagine if they had “atheist projects” or an “atheist coordinator”—there’d be rejection from the Christian community. We’re not stupid, and we know that the NCSE has a delicate political game to play as well, so all we ask is that the organization we’d like to support should be genuinely secular, and stay entirely out of the religion/atheism argument. It’s what they say they’re doing, but it’s not what they’re doing. And the hypocrisy is corrupting.

Nothing will change in what atheist scientists are doing. We will continue to support science and science education, but that doesn’t mean we will feel obligated to support the NCSE.

It’s funny. The organization has such a finely tuned political sense and diplomatic strategy to promote science to the whole of the United States, and have managed to profoundly alienate that segment of our society that is most dedicated to promoting science. That’s quite an accomplishment. Maybe we should stop supporting them because they’re that incompetent at the political side of their mission.