The Minnesota Anti-Texan Act of 2011

I would like to propose a new law for consideration by our legislature, which I am calling The Minnesota Anti-Texan Act of 2011. I need to work on the formal language for it, but I can give the gist of it here.

If any person within the boundaries of the fine state of Minnesota exhibits any of the signifiers of a Texas origin — wearing a cowboy hat, for instance, or Big Hair, or having a drawl, or chewing tobacco — you can shoot them. You catch someone listening to Clint Black on the radio, bang, blow them away, you’ve got a justifiable defense. Someone says “sheeeeeee-it” instead of “uff-da,” you’ve got cause: kill them on the spot. It’s perfectly fair to hang out at the airport waiting for incoming flights from Houston, and following visitors outside the terminal to group hunts, too; it might even be a new source of revenue for local guides.

To be fair, after the bill is passed I support a waiting period of one year before it’s implemented, so that there’s time to spread the news and give Texans warning. They will be allowed to enter the state, as long as they respect our traditions: no leather clothing, just layers. The only hats allowed are stocking caps or tuques. They should study the movie Fargo to learn the lingo, and listening to lots of Prairie Home Companion will help them understand the local mores. We’re not so much against Texans as we are against blatant Texans, and as long as they show appropriate shame for their nature, and try hard to cover up, we’ll do our best to tolerate them.

Wait, you may be thinking, this isn’t justice: a death sentence for wearing the wrong kind of headware? No one deserves to suffer for trivial fashion choices, or because a bunch of yankees have prejudices about who someone is. But I think it’s only right that if someone takes pride in being a dumb cracker, and inflames our senses by flaunting their inherent Texish character, then they deserve what’s coming to them.

And we’re just following Texas’ lead.

A meeting Thursday night that was billed as a way to discuss concerns some have about the investigation into a series of alleged sexual assaults on an 11-year-old girl turned into a forum that many used to blame the girl police contend is the victim of heinous attacks.

Many who attended the meeting said they supported the group of men and boys who have been charged in the case. Supporters didn’t claim that the men and boys did not have sex with the young girl; instead they blamed the girl for the way she dressed or claimed she must have lied about her age — accusations that have drawn strong responses from those who note an 11-year-old cannot consent to sex and that it doesn’t matter how she was dressed.

See? My proposed Minnesota law is hallowed by good ol’ boy tradition. Texans are clearly just asking for it.

Oh, wait…there’s that remark about how lying about her age would have excused the gang rape, and this:

“She’s 11 years old. It shouldn’t have happened. That’s a child,” Oscar Carter, 56, who is related to an uncle of one 16-year-old charged in the case, said in an interview earlier in the week. “Somebody should have said what we are doing is wrong.”

So it would have been OK if the girl was 17, the age of consent in Texas? I guess I’ll have to put a clause in my law that says it’s only OK to murder Texans or people who look like Texans or people who imply they are Texan with subtle behaviors if they are over 17.

I am a just and fair person, after all.

And remember, if nobody tells you that what you are doing is wrong, it’s not your fault if you rape or murder someone. You can’t possibly detect the evil that you’re doing unless someone else reminds you. If you’re a Texan.

Twelve million dollars!

Martin Nowak has written a peculiar paper, recently published in Nature, in which he basically dismisses the entire concept of inclusive fitness and instead promotes a kind of group selectionist model. It’s an “analysis” paper, and so it’s rather weak on the evidence, but it also seems mostly committed to trashing the idea that inclusive fitness models are the whole of selection theory, which is a bit weird since no one argues that. Jerry Coyne and others will be publishing a critique next week, which should be fun.

I would like to draw your attention to a different kind of critique, though. Nowak is also a fellow of the Templeton Foundation, and he’s been using his work on the biology of cooperation to promote Jesus, because as we all know, Christianity over the past two millennia has been a paragon of altruism and gentle loving persuasion — just ask the Arians and the Albigensians! Oh, you can’t. They’re all dead. OK, so just ask the Jews!

Anyway, it turns out that being cozy with the Templeton Foundation reaps great rewards. Nowak has both served on Templeton advisory boards and been the recipient of large awards. How large?

  • A grant from Templeton to Nowak on “The Evolution and Theology of Cooperation: The Emergence of Altruistic Behavior, Forgiveness and Unselfish Love in the Context of Biological, Ethical and Theological Implications.” Amount: $2 million (work conducted at Harvard University).

  • A grant from Templeton on “Foundational questions in Evolutionary Biology”, which runs from 2009-2013. Nowak is the leader of this project at Harvard, and the amount is $10,500,000 (!)

The second one is to a group, and superficially doesn’t sound anywhere near as silly as the first, but still, $10 million dollars…wow. That’s a nice bucket of money. Of course, if you look at Templeton’s promo for that grant, you can see what appeals to them: part of the research is into “teleology and ultimate purpose in the context of evolutionary biology” (really?), and is touted as “directly relevant to a wide range of philosophical and theological discussions and debates.” Nowak himself uses “the language of god” rhetoric in a video at the Templeton, and talks about an “unchanging reality” beneath the changing patterns of evolution.

But that first grant only looks small in comparison to the second. Two million dollars to study the “theology of cooperation”, whatever that is, is an astonishing sum of money for what looks like a humanities project. Maybe I should mention to my colleagues on the other side of campus that they, as individuals, could get a grant that would put the entire science division at my small university to shame, if only they suck up to Jesus enough.

Don’t try to tell me that Templeton influence doesn’t have the potential to greatly distort and poison academic research. When they’re throwing millions at fluff, it’s going to twist attention to more fluff.

It is true, biology programs discriminate against idiots all the time

Texas, you are a wonder. You don’t have any protections against workplace discrimination on the basis of sex or gender — that might hurt bidness, you know — but you’re considering a bill to protect creationists from discrimination.

HB 2454

Sec.A51.979.A A PROHIBITION OF DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RESEARCH RELATED TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN. An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member’s or student’s conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.

I understand how discrimination rules work in employment: for instance, when we’re looking at job applications, we have to justify every rejection as well as our acceptance of the person we want to hire; when we develop a list of candidates we want to interview, it’s sent off to the administration for review. If we said we wanted to do phone interviews of six candidates, and all of them were men, they’d look at the applicant pool and tell us if we were somehow biased against women.

I’m wondering, though, how this one will work. Will a Texas biology program have to send their list to an administration that will scrutinize them and tell them they need to include more creationists in their interviews?

I would also like to see what kind of creationist “research” these faculty and students are thought to be doing. Sitting around reading a Bible isn’t science.

Much fuss about nothing at all

Jesse Bering disappointed me recently. He started off another evolutionary psychology story with this warning.

Consider this a warning: the theory I’m about to describe is likely to boil untold liters of blood and prompt mountains of angry fists to clench in revolt. It’s the best–the kindest–of you out there likely to get the most upset, too. I’d like to think of myself as being in that category, at least, and these are the types of visceral, illogical reactions I admittedly experienced in my initial reading of this theory. But that’s just the non-scientist in me flaring up, which, on occasion, it embarrassingly does. Otherwise, I must say upfront, the theory makes a considerable deal of sense to me.

Oh, boy. I love the throb of adrenaline coursing through my bloodstream. So I read further, expecting fierce data and challenging ideas.

They weren’t there. The hypothesis is rather bold — it’s the idea that homophobia is actually adaptive — but there’s no substance there. It turns out the data is all dueling surveys of people’s views about gay people. “Meh,” I said, and unclenched my fists and dabbed at the blood that was going to squirt out my eyes and damped down the fires that had just begun to flare up from the sparks crackling from my fingertips. That isn’t even interesting. They know nothing about heritability, they’ve shown nothing about differential survival or fecundity, they haven’t even tried to sort out cultural biases from biology. Is this to be the fate of evolutionary psychology, that it shrivels away into irrelevancy as its proponents overhype feeble, pathetic data sets?

I couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm to spit contemptuously, but fortunately, Jeremy Yoder has taken on the subject and nicely dismantled the exaggerations and fallacies. Go read that.

Why I am an amoral, family-hating monster…and Newt Gingrich isn’t

Today is my wedding anniversary. I’ve been married to the same woman for 31 years, without ever straying. Newt Gingrich has been married 3 times, divorced one wife while she was recovering from surgery, and has had extra-marital affairs.

Guess who is considered the defender of traditional sexual morality?

It’s a strange situation where the political party with more ex-wives than candidates, that houses and defends a disturbingly amoral network of fundamentalist operators is regarded as the protector of the sanctity of the family. They’re anything but.

I think I understand, though — it doesn’t matter what you do, all that matters is what you say. The Republicans support a version of marriage that rests on tradition, authority, and masculine dominance, and everything they do props up one leg of the tripod or the other. Public piety reinforces religious tradition; the insistence that there is one true form of marriage, between a man and a woman, which represents a legal and social commitment is part of the authoritarian impulse; and of course, if a man steps out of the matrimonial bounds, it’s an expression of machismo and patriotism and entitlement.

There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and that things happened in my life that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing it. I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness.

Gingrich was cheating on his wife, but it’s OK — because he also tells us that it was wrong and inexcusable, and then he wraps it all up in God and country to make excuses for it. Hypocrisy is acceptable as long as the right words are said to reinforce the public face of propriety.

Now look at those dirty rotten hippies, like me. We say the ties between a couple should be made with respect and affection, not the strictures of law and precedent; letting gays marry, for instance, strengthens the public approval of our kinds of bond, while weakening the authoritarian bonds. Our ideal is a community of equals, while theirs is a hierarchy of power, a relic of Old Testament values in which marrying a woman was like buying a camel, a certification of ownership, and nothing must compromise the Big Man’s possession of properties.

If we strip marriage of the asymmetry of power, as we must if we allow men to marry men and women to marry women, then we also strip away the man and wife, dominant and submissive, owner and owned, master and servant relationship that characterizes the conservative view of marriage. This is what they want to preserve, and this is what they are talking about when people like Gingrich echo those tired phrases about “Judeo-Christian values” and complain that their “civilization is under attack”. And it is, when we challenge their right to treat one partner, so-called, as chattel.

And once you look at it that way, you see no abuse of their values when Gingrich goes tomcatting around—he’s simply asserting his traditional privilege as the Man.

Paradoxically, though, it turns marriage into a brittle business where women are stressed by subservience and oppression (believe it or not, women are human beings who might resent being treated as servants), and men feel it is their right possess any woman willing to surrender to them. It’s not surprising that their relationships break up in courtroom battles.

I don’t condemn Gingrich for getting divorced, since it just means that so far he has managed to make a couple of women very happy twice. It’s also paradoxical that I see absolutely no problem in dissolving those bonds — if two people aren’t happy together, they should separate — and that that attitude can also make a marriage stronger.

I know. I’ve been married for 31 years, and my relationship with my wife is solid. Not because I’ve got her shackled with a prenup, a pile of legal documents, and a willingness to abuse her to keep her in her place, but because we’re comfortable together, she with me and me with her, and there’s no stresses that might tear us apart. With both of us in academic careers, there have been years where we’ve had to live apart, and those separations have been made with complete trust in one another — while we’ve both had times when we’ve “worked far too hard,” and we’ve been “driven” by passions for our work, strangely enough it never seems to have the side effect of sending us shopping for a different mate.

So, just a suggestion: if you want a relationship that lasts, don’t rely on god, lawyers, and social pressure to force it to work. Love and reciprocal trust are the only chains that last, and the only ones that make you feel happy while wearing them.

I think those are the “secular, atheist” values that Newt and his ilk find heretical and threatening. Those values allow me to sit smug and content in a happy home while watching authoritarians discard wives.

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I get email

I do get strange complaints sometimes.

Dear Mr Myers,

My fathers name was Helmut Max Karl Ritter.

However, in Australia, due to people’s inability to pronounce his name correctly, he suggested that they call him Tom, Dick or Harry. Henceforth, they decided to call him ‘Tom Ritter’.

I take sincere umbrage at your rants against a Thomas Ritter, and the fact that you call him Tom Ritter and therefore everyone else that responds to your comments, calls him Tom Ritter.

If I do a search for the name Tom Ritter I do not expect or appreciate finding such vitriol as yours (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/tom_ritter_has_figured_out_the.php)

Please remove such offensive materials as I find it completely inappropriate and deeply disturbing, and in essence, it is a disservice to my father’s name and his history. If you do not wish to remove it, at least rename it appropriately as it is ‘supposedly’ about Thomas Ritter, which would have nothing to do with my father

Kind regards,
[Name removed] (daughter of Helmut (known as Tom) Ritter).

So her father, Helmut “Tom” Ritter, is an Australian. The crazy Tom Ritter I wrote about is a creationist school teacher in Pennsylvania. There is no connection other than the similar name.

I suggest that she instead write to the wacky school teacher and point out that his antics are bringing dishonor to the distinguished name of Ritter, and leave me out of it. I’m busy. I’ve got to write letters to the Herbalife con artist Paul Myers, the Canadian songwriter Paul Myers, the British graphic designer Paul Myers, and the Texas Attorney Paul Myers and convince them all to change their names.

I’m going to suggest that they change it to “Tom Ritter”.

You’ve got to be kidding me

Scarcely do I put up a post arguing with Jerry Coyne, when I notice he has put up another with an example of evidence for a god from John Farrell. And lo, I did look, and verily, I did become depressed at how stupid and pathetic it was.

An archeologist working in Israel, discovers an ossuary from the NT era: the inscription on the stone in Aramaic reads: “Twice dead under Pilatus; Twice born of Yeshua in sure hope of resurrection.” And the name corresponds to what in Greek would be Lazarus.

There are bones, so presumably with luck there may be some DNA that could be sequenced, but my main idea is that you have a clear physical candidate for an actual person written about in the Gospel of John. (There are some scholars who have argued that the author of the Gospel of John was Lazarus.)

Now, this isn’t evidence for “God” in his omnipotent sense, which I know is more what Jerry Coyne and PZ were debating. But, given most scholars believe the four gospels were composed no sooner than 70AD, and for that reason less likely to be reliable accounts, you now have evidence from decades before of a key character in one of the Gospels. And more: an inscription that, whatever we might think, clearly indicates whoever buried him knew of the miraculous story of his raising from the dead and believed it.

Seriously? This is the best that Farrell can do? Confirmation that people really believe in myths and fairy tales is not evidence of a deity. Nor is the existence of people named Jesus or Lazarus in the first century AD a point of contention or dazzling supporting evidence for a magic man in the sky.

With that level of empirical support, we could point to even older inscriptions that reference Jupiter Optimus Maximus and conclude that Jupiter actually was the bestest and greatest god ever, and therefore we all ought to worship him.

Farrell seems to realize his invention is rather feeble, so he adds another level of nonsense to it.

What if the family members from the same ossuary showed a related genome (as expected for his brothers, sister, parents) except that cancer-causing mutations in all of them were…found to be missing from his genome. Or even more startling, found to be ‘corrected.’

How do we know they’re all family members? Aside from the shared ossuary, all we’d have is genetic evidence…and here he’s saying there is genetic evidence that they are not related. I think if we went poking around in various families nowadays we might discover a few surprising insertions into the family gene pool, and I doubt that anyone’s first assumption would be that a Holy Ghost had been dicking around with Great Aunt Mary, or that an angel must have tweaked Cousin George’s genome when his mother wasn’t looking.

And what the heck is the difference between a particular allele being “missing” and being “corrected”? Does this guy even have a clue about what he’s talking about?

Anyway, here’s the general conflict: material evidence will have material explanations. Any natural explanation will be preferable to a supernatural explanation that drags in an all-powerful invisible boogey man in order to explain the arrangement of nucleotides in one set of old bones.

Calvinball no more!

Uh-oh. Jerry Coyne is calling me out and reopening our old argument about whether there could be evidence supporting a god. I said no, for a number of reasons, but I haven’t convinced Coyne.

The statements by P.Z. and Zara seem to me more akin to prejudices than to fully reasoned positions. They are also, of course, bad for atheists, since they make us look close-minded, but I would never argue that we should hide what we really think because it makes it harder to persuade our opponents. On the positive side, a discussion like this one is really good for sharpening the mind.

He’s also gone to the Big Guy in the UK, Anthony Grayling, to get some allies; Unfortunately for him, Grayling is siding more closely with me than him. And now Ophelia Benson also sides with those who say gods are incoherent. This is not going well for him.

So I’ve got to pile on.

Religion has had a couple of millennia to make a case for its fundamental concepts: the existence of the supernatural, the existence of deities, the effectiveness of priestly intermediaries, etc. It has failed. It does not provide support in the form of evidence or logical consistency; it also fails to show any pragmatic utility. Religion never does what it claims to do. At what point do we learn from experience and simply reject the whole worthless mess out of hand? The abstract possibility that the god-wallopers will finally come up with a tiny scrap of evidence for their outrageous beliefs in the coming eon is not enough to win it credibility as a reasonable contender, either; you might just as well speculate that archaeologists could unearth artifacts from Middle Earth, or astronomers observing a galaxy far, far away will discover The Force. There is no cause to expect fictions and fantasies to manifest themselves as actual realities.

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Religion plays Calvinball. There are no rules except what they make up as they go. You might think that maybe you ought to concede that they could get a score of 13 and beat your 12…but they are already convinced that their Q trumps your puny pair of digits. And if they get a score of Oatmeal-Sofa, they’ll announce victory. Heck, if they somehow end up in the realm of numbers with you and get a 7, they’ll declare that they win because they’ve got a Mersenne prime and we don’t. Or because it’s like a golf score. The mistake is to play the game in the expectation that the other side has the same respect for evidence that we do, or that evidence even matters.

Here’s an example. This is part of a debate between Peter Atkins and William Lane Craig. Craig is an exceptionally glib debater, and he’s also an evangelical Christian who supposedly defends a very specific doctrine, that his god turned into a human who lived on Earth 2000 years ago, and that belief in his magical powers is your ticket to a Disneyland for dead people in the sky. I’d like to see some evidence for that, but no…his tactic here is to demand proof of bizarre assertions from science, answering questions that his religion can’t.

What’s amazing here is that Christians are actually impressed with Craig’s millimeter-deep, reason-free handwaving. Ha ha, you scientific smartie-pants, you can’t use science to prove you’re not a simulation on a computer of a brain in a vat that was created five minutes ago with false memories of your life, so therefore, Jesus. Never mind that science doesn’t deal in proofs. Never mind that Craig’s religion can’t prove it either, except by blind obdurate asseveration. Never mind that those are all non-questions, non-issues, irrelevant sophomoric wanking. Never mind, it’s Calvinball! The score is now Paisley over Feldspar, we win!

In science, we’re used to incremental progress and revision of our ideas. Evidence is our currency, it’s how we progress and it’s what gets results. It is a category error, however, to think that the way to address free-floating word salad and flaming nonsense is to take the scalpel of reason and empiricism and slice into it, looking for definable edges. No, what you do is look over the snot-ball of self-referential piffle, note that it has no tenable connection to reality, and drop-kick it into the rec room, where the kids can play with it, but no one should ever take it seriously.

Just make sure the kids wash their hands afterwards. That thing is slimy.

On second thought, just dump it in the trash. The kids would rather play video games, instead.

This will do you no good if you can’t read the site

But we do have a little more information from Seed management.

Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating from Turkey and Qatar, and until it stops, Rackspace must block IP ranges in order for the site to be accessible to anyone. They are also unwilling to manually unblock hundreds upon hundreds of individual IPs. They have advised that we invest in a firewall and additional services from them, but we are still working out what these will cost and how effective they will be. I am not sure if I was correct in thinking that these attacks are not malicious, but I said so because we were told the attackers were trying to use our servers as an open proxy, with the request “GET http://www.kosmodiskmedikal.com/ HTTP/1.1.” Upon reflection, I have no idea what that means.

I don’t know what it means, either, but I bet someone will tell me in the comments.