What a strange world we live in that I could make an offhand quote on my blog and someone turns around and makes it into a demotivational poster.
Now, though, instead of emailing it to me, people ought to toss that kind of thing into a new community construction project, the Pharynguwiki. It has my blessing, go forth and fill it with strangeness and attitude.
An old-as-stupid benighted leader of a medieval institution that thinks the last word in social engineering is the mistranslated words of ancient goatherders scrawled on vellum has come out and said that using your computer for social networking is OK, as long as you don’t do it too much and adopt a suitably Christian manner in your writing — which may explain all those gleeful letters I’ve been getting that inform me I’m going to burn in hell for all eternity.
The Pope doesn’t even use a computer, and apparently writes all his missives in longhand, with a quill, unless he’s still using a stylus and wax tablet. Letting this antique make recommendations about your computer use makes as much sense as asking a mob of celibates to dispense sex advice, and no one would be that crazy, would they? I don’t think the Pope has done much research. Someone needs to show him our social networking outlet, the Endless Thread here on Pharyngula, and let’s see how quickly he reverses his opinion.
Oh, well. We’ve got an internet poll to resolve all questions and determine the truth, a far more sensible approach.
Does the Pope’s blessing on social networks change your view of them?
Yes! I feel less guilty for all the time I spend on Facebook now. 3%
Yes. It will make me use the tools with some of his ideas in mind. 14%
No. The Pope doesn’t even know what Facebook is. 3%
No. I don’t care what the Vatican thinks. 59%
I’m not sure. 21%
Bonus! The Pope thinks that if Jesus were on Earth today, he’d be using Twitter. We’re in big trouble now: I think he just implied that Ashton Kucher is Jesus.
Richard Dawkins takes a slightly harder line than I do on the case of Gaskell, the astronomer who didn’t get a job because his potential employers objected to his faith-based mangling of evolutionary biology. Dawkins regards that as entirely justifiable, and makes a good case.
A commentator on a website discussing the Gaskell affair went so far as to write, “If Gaskell has produced sound, peer-reviewed literature of high quality then I see no reason for denying him the position, even if he believes Mars is the egg of a giant purple Mongoose”. That commentator probably felt rather pleased with his imagery, but I don’t believe he could seriously defend the point he makes with it and I hope most of my readers would not follow him. There are at least some imaginable circumstances in which most sensible people would practise negative discrimination.
If you disagree, I offer the following argument. Even if a doctor’s belief in the stork theory of reproduction is technically irrelevant to his competence as an eye surgeon, it tells you something about him. It is revealing. It is relevant in a general way to whether we would wish him to treat us or teach us. A patient could reasonably shrink from entrusting her eyes to a doctor whose beliefs (admittedly in the apparently unrelated field of obstetrics) are so cataclysmically disconnected from reality. And a student could reasonably object to being taught geography by a professor who is prepared to take a salary to teach, however brilliantly, what he believes is a lie. I think those are good grounds to impugn his moral character if not his sanity, and a student would be wise to avoid his classes.
That’s all true. We’ve got a new wave of creationists like Wells and Ross who are going through the motions of graduate programs to earn degrees in subjects they intend only to repudiate, who basically lie their way through a program of advanced study, and I wouldn’t want to hire them or even trust them. Marcus Ross, for instance, wrote a whole thesis on Cretaceous paleontology while publicly professing at creationist meetings that the earth is less than 10,000 years old — who in their right mind would hire such a confused and deceptive fellow for a job which involves regularly dealing with geologic ages?
These aren’t minor, scientific disagreements, like hiring a paleontologist who emphasizes punctuated equilibrium or neutral theory in his analysis; those are legitimate scientific issues that will be resolved with evidence. These are people who throw out the evidence in favor of their religious dogma, and they are about as anti-scientific as you can get.
We’re about to re-open a search for a tenure-track position at my university. If Jonathan Wells applied, how far do you think he’d get in the review? We’d examine his application with the same impartial eye we do all the others, but the fact that he has demonstrated his incompetence in biology in his books and public speaking events, and has a known malicious intent to ‘destroy Darwinism’ means it would be round-filed very early in the process—and if you were privy to committee comments during the review, they’d probably involve lots of incredulous expletives. Would that be discrimination? I don’t think so. He’s patently unsuitable for the job.
On the other hand, many of the applicants to our position would likely be Christian with varying degrees of devotion — but if their work, the basis for hiring that person, showed no attempt to shoehorn personal and private ideas that I, for instance, find ridiculous, into their science, then it wouldn’t be an issue. Christians believe in something as absurd as the purple mongoose egg theory, this whole bizarre notion of incarnated gods dying to magically redeem us from a distant ancestor’s dietary error, but good scientists are capable of switching that nonsense off entirely in the lab, and are also aware of the impact on their credibility of espousing folly…if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be good scientists (or they’re Nobel prize winners who know they can get away with it now).
We have to be careful about letting personal disagreements on matters of taste intrude on our decisions; if the person has been circumspect about keeping them from poisoning a body of good work, I’m willing to accommodate them. The alternative is that we start rejecting applicants because we discover that they listen to 70s hair metal bands while they work, are fans of the New York Yankees, or put milk in their teacup before they add the hot water, all irrational and unforgiveable heresies. It’s all fine unless they join a Poison tribute band and start slopping dairy products about with manic abandon.
It’s shocking. How dare they. The Australian writes about our puritanical television viewers and how British television has to be stripped of religious criticism before it’s aired here, or our citizens get all Muslim-cartoon-rioter over it.
It’s not as if those real Americans are pretending to be thin-skinned. This is not faux outrage. They are genuinely shocked that outsiders do not take Christianity as seriously as they do.
Oh, yeah? We’re thin-skinned zealots from the land where “God can’t take a joke”? We’ll teach you what’s funny. The cruise missiles and predator drones are standing by on our aircraft carriers.
(Hmm. That would be funnier if it weren’t a little bit true.)
Nah, not really — that work has been independently confirmed many times over. Recently, though, Deepak Chopra has been praising Luc Montagnier, the Nobel prize winning co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, for tumbling down the walls of science — which ought to be enough to condemn the poor guy right there. But I had to take a look at exactly what Montagnier is claiming, and I’m afraid the only thing tumbling is his credibility.
Montagnier claims in several papers that the DNA of pathogenic bacteria emits an electromagnetic signal, and further, that if you dilute that DNA homeopathically so that no DNA is actually present, the water continues to emit that same signal. Further, if you put two vials of homeopathically diluted EMS emitting water next to each other, the signal can move from one to another. And further, only bacteria and viruses pathogenic to humans produce this signal; ordinary E. coli does not. It’s madness piled upon madness.
There is no sensible explanation given for this phenomenon, only some wild-eyed speculation that “water molecules can form long polymers of dipoles associated by hydrogen bonds” that may be “self-maintained by the electromagnetic radiations they are emitting”. More madness!
I’m not going to criticize the paper because it postulates a mysterious mechanism with no coherent physical cause, though. I read the paper and call it crap by virtue of the sloppiness of the work. I disbelieve it, not because I’m predisposed to find it unlikely (although I do), but because it’s an appallingly bad paper.
First, let’s look at the gadget he uses to record these signals.
Awesome, isn’t it? He uses a laptop PC with a Soundblaster audio card for analog to digital signal conversion, plugged into a hifi amplifer, which is in turn hooked up to a coil of copper wire. A vial contain the solution to be tested is dropped into the coil. Un-freaking-believable.
It’s not at all impossible to measure electrical signals with an apparatus like this. I’ve done it myself; when I was a graduate student, I built a fun little gadget which consisted of an electronic circuit board that I etched to create a fine meshwork of thin interdigitating copper lines, on which I would place a larval zebrafish, and with it I could record the action potentials from the Mauthner neuron, a large cell that mediates an escape reflex in the fish. It actually worked reasonably well, but was a bit finicky — the fish had to be oriented just right, there couldn’t be too much water on the plate or it would float away from the contact, and the signals were highly variable in strength. But yes, when an extraordinarily large cell fired off a massive signal (many tens of millivolts!) within a millimeter of the plate, we could pick it up with our apparatus. Of course, it was also wildly sensitive to all kinds of external signals — we’d do our experiments with the apparatus in a Faraday cage, and you could have great fun wiggling your fingers near the plate and picking up all kinds of spurious signals.
So now I look at Montagnier’s apparatus, which looks even more rinky-tink than my old gadget, and what I see is a sensitive noise detector. It’s little more than a fancy small-scale version of a Scientology e-meter, a gadget that picks up on noise in the environment and makes a needle on a dial wiggle.
Now look at the ‘data’ that comes out of it.
Apparently, all a Nobel prize winner can do is raw screen dumps from his PC, and he can get away with publishing that. But look at the raw data on the top — background noise from a cell-free vial on the left, and a massive homeopathic dilution of a Mycoplasma suspension on the right. Woo hoo! How many of you would like to be able to get crap data like that and publish it?
By the way, it’s not just my tiny reduction of the figure that makes the scale invisible. They don’t say anywhere what the magnitude of the EMS is. I suspect they don’t know; they just crank up the amp to the max to get a lot of jangly jitter, and don’t bother to calibrate anything.
There are a couple of other indicators that this is pathological science. They’re looking at a minuscule, variable result that is prone to be picking up all kinds of irrelevant signals, yet nowhere in the entire paper can I find the word “blind”. This is the kind of experiment that demands extreme rigor and care, yet the authors don’t even bother to describe the protocols used. That’s a warning sign.
Another sign is that the paper flits from topic to topic, doing quick superficial experiments with dilutions and crosstalk and chemical treatments. The paper itself is a welter of noise, and is one of the more unprofessional write-ups I’ve ever run across — and remember, I teach undergraduates. They are claiming the existence of a truly remarkable phenomenon. A good scientist would focus on one fundamental observation, the claim that they can record species-specific bacterial signals with their crude apparatus, and nail that one down good and hard and believably. But no. They show off some very poor raw data and then rush off to dilute the experiment a trillion fold and claim to see the same signal. I found the first observation dubious, why are you showing me something even more unlikely?
And finally, another suspicious sign are the dates. This paper was submitted on 3 January 2009, revised on 5 January 2009, and accepted on 6 January 2009. That’s an unbelievable turnaround, especially for a paper with such incredible results, and the revisions must have been trivial to be able to be whipped around in a day. Yet it’s an awful paper that I would have shredded in a sea of red ink if it had come to me. Who reviewed this, the author’s mother? Maybe someone even closer. Guess who the chairman of the editorial board is: Luc Montagnier.
The work does have some historical precedent, though. This is the same nonsense and the same apparatus that Benveniste was peddling. Is there something in the wine in France? I could almost believe this terrible waste of time was done under the influence of a hogshead or two of the cheap stuff.
Montagnier L, Aissa J, Ferris S, Montagnier J-L, Lavallee C (2009) Electromagnetic Signals Are Produced by Aqueous Nanostructures Derived from Bacterial DNA Sequences. Interdiscip Sci Comput Life Sci 1: 81-90.
Eventually, anyway. Jack LaLanne has died after a lifetime as a paragon of fitness and exercise.
OK, so he was healthy and vigorous and active right up until the end. OK, so he was 96. I tell you, eventually all that exertion will catch up with you!
All you godless folk: some busybody wants to know about your sex life. Go ahead and tell them in this survey:
This is a short survey about how your sexuality has developed over time and how it has changed in relation to your lack of belief in a god. The research is being conducted by Dr. Darrel Ray, author of The God Virus and Amanda Brown at the University of Kansas.
This survey is for ATHEISTS, AGNOSTICS, SPIRITUALISTS, HUMANISTS, and SECULARISTS. We need to have people who do not believe in a deity, or organized religion, of any sort.
I went ahead and filled it out, but I’m afraid mine was rather boring. I left religion well before I had a sex life, so I couldn’t testify to any wonderfully liberating effect — puberty was a much more powerful force than religion.
Cothran, an analyst for one of those right-wing religious think tanks, the Family Patriarchy Foundation, has written an op-ed rebuking the University of Kentucky for discrimination against Christians. It is breathtakingly ridiculous. He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious oppression, overt discrimination against him for the fact of being a Christian. A university in America would have virtually no faculty or staff if they had an unspoken policy of discrimination against the Christian majority in this country; there were believers on that committee, I’m sure, just as there are believers on every committee I’ve ever worked with at my universities, and the atheists are usually the minority. So to claim that this committee thought that the idea of a candidate going to church was grounds for exclusion is absurd.
Gaskell’s employment was questioned, not because he is a Christian, but because he is an evangelical Christian who used his authority as an astronomer to mislead the public about biology. That was a question of responsibility and competence, well within the domain of inquiry by a hiring committee. It was not about his private, personal religious practices, but how he would engage the public.
Cothran, though, has to carry his argument into the realm of offensive stupidity.
One of its arguments used to defend UK’s actions was that Gaskell would have public outreach responsibilities and that his religious views would embarrass the university.
Let’s apply this to a similar discrimination case against, say, an African-American, a group protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Let’s say the University of Kentucky was looking for an agriculture extension officer for a part of the state with a racist history. The job obviously involved public outreach.
And let’s say an African-American applied for the job and was clearly the most qualified applicant.
But there were faculty and staff who indicated in e-mails they didn’t think highly of blacks and who engaged in a concerted effort to torpedo his candidacy for the job, and one of the reasons was that they felt his race would impair his ability to do outreach in this part of the state.
I think we all know what would happen, and it would have little to do with a potential hire embarrassing the University of Kentucky. It would have a whole lot to do with the university embarrassing itself.
This isn’t diversity. It isn’t equal treatment. It isn’t tolerance. UK got off the hook by paying a relatively small settlement in the case.
Right. Christians. Just like the oppressed African-American minority, with their long history of suffering and repression, and their current underprivileged state in which they are excluded from positions of leadership by bigotry. That whole argument reveals much about Martin Cothran and his coddled Christian privilege, and not much about the University of Kentucky.
In his hypothetical example, imagine that this well-qualified applicant was great at helping farmers with the job of raising crops (he’s well qualified!), but would also go off and lecture them about how Kentucky was first settled by Egyptians who developed the system of agriculture, Kentucky bluegrass, and thoroughbred racehorses, which are all descended from purely African stock. I think the agriculture department would be justified in questioning his suitability for employment, not because of his race, but because he is promoting false ideas justified by a very narrow and ignorant myth about African contributions to history.
That’s Gaskell. He wasn’t turned away because he was a Christian, but because he actively uses Christianity as an excuse to peddle falsehoods and doubts. And the objection wasn’t to the “Christian” part, but to the “false doubts” part.
Don’t send the kiddies to Sunday School, just have them watch this video and they’ll master the whole of the Bible (Old and New Testaments!) in 2½ minutes.
(via SMBC, of course)
