I thought Google was trying not to be evil

Google Scholar is a really useful tool — it’s like vanilla Google in that it returns links to resources on the web, but it has additional filters to return genuine scholarly articles, enriched for the kind of stuff that gets peer-reviewed and formally published. Unfortunately, somebody or some algorithm is getting a bit sloppy, and it also returns articles for Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and Creation Ministries International. It’s somewhat understandable — all of those institutions know deep down in their sweet stupid little hearts that rank theology has no credibility, so they do their very best to ape real science in style, if not in content.

So, anyway, a few people are trying to ask Google nicely and politely to clean up their act. There is a petition to ask them to remove bad sources from Google Scholar — and I know, internet petitions don’t carry a lot of weight, but sign it anyway, just to add some recognition of widespread awareness of the problem to a decision they ought to make because it’s the right thing to do.

Christians depict Christians as delusional

A few Christians are indignant over this video mocking Pollyannaish theology.

Unfortunately for them, and to our increased mirth, their excuses are just as ridiculous as Suzie.

Dr. Normal L. Geisler, author of If God, Why Evil?, said the video contains a lot of misconceptions.

“You look at all of that [and] you sympathize with Susie because you think they (disasters, illnesses, etc.) are evil,” he said. “But if it’s evil, then there must be a standard for good. If there is a crooked line in this world then there must be a straight line. If there is a straight line then there must be God.”

Actually, I don’t sympathize with Suzie at all. The whole point of this video is that she’s silly and clueless.

I do have a standard for good: does it cause me or others harm? If not, it’s good. If it does, it’s bad. I don’t need a god to define this for me; humans are the yardstick. The existence of straight and crooked lines do not imply the existence of intent, but only that there are lines.

The video also gives a very limited picture of God’s presence in Suzie’s life, said Geisler, who is a Christian apologist and philosopher. When it comes to Suzie’s recovery from sickness, for example, the video fails to acknowledge that God is the one who designed her body with properties to heal naturally, said Geisler.

BECAUSE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT A GOD DESIGNED HER BODY. Jebus, he’s a philosopher…you’d think he’d be competent to recognize a circular argument when he saw one. There are alternative explanations with evidence in their support for the presence of self-repair mechanisms in evolved organisms, you know, so just point to the fact that someone can heal is not automatic evidence for the existence of a magic man in the sky.

The title of this article at the Christian Post is “Atheist Depicts Christians as Delusional”. Yeah? Depiction confirmed.

Why isn’t anyone talking about the weakness and stupidity of the New Theism?

Do you remember those ridiculous childhood arguments, “My big brother can beat up your big brother”? They were pathetic then, and no grown-up with any self-respect would think that that kind of fantasy boxing by proxy is any kind of way to settle a disagreement…but we atheists have to remember that we aren’t dealing with self-respecting grownups. Scott Stephens, some guy at ABC news, has taken that tactic and made it even more feeble and irrelevant: his argument against the New Atheists is basically “Your big brother can beat you up, ha ha, I win.” This is such a dreary and dishonest approach; it involves puffing up dead or less popular atheists into demigods who strode the earth with cosmic seriousness, while anyone new and slightly less moribund is sneered at as inferior, the weak and enfeebled scions of a diminished age, and therefore deserving nothing but dismissal.

There seems to have been an innate sense among atheists that the Promethean quest to topple the gods demands a certain seriousness and humility of any who would undertake it. Hence those atheists worthy of the name often adopted austere, chastened, almost ascetic forms of life – one thinks especially of Nietzsche or Beckett, or even the iconic Lord Asriel of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – precisely because our disavowed idolatrous attachment manifest in practices and habits and cloying indulgences, and not simply in beliefs (this was Karl Marx’s great observation about the “theological” dimension of Capital).

By comparison, the “New Atheists” look like sensationalist media-pimps: smugly self-assured, profligate, unphilosophical and brazenly ahistorical, whose immense popularity says rather more about the illiteracy and moral impoverishment of Western audiences than it does about the relative merits of their arguments.

Ah, yes, that makes it easy. Those New Atheists aren’t wizened mummies who whisper a few gnomic words of wisdom and then lie back to contemplate eternities — why, they strut confidently (how dare they!), they write a lot (how undignified!), and they engage vigorously with the popular culture (then they must be boorish louts). Nietzsche would kick their butts and Marx would shame them into silence.

I disagree — these New Atheists are simply basing their ideas more strongly on science, something the theistic critics don’t seem to comprehend — and I don’t consider them less than the Old Atheists, just different, and even there, we’re all making the same argument that gods don’t exist.

Which brings up the relevant point: Old Atheists and New Atheists don’t disagree on the existence of gods, so isn’t invoking both generations of atheists simply doubling your opposition? And if the New Atheists are such scrawny, flabby specimens, why aren’t you simply clobbering us with those powerful arguments you developed to crush our predecessors? Oh, is it because you never had any crushing arguments of that sort?

Scott Stephens has made no counter-argument to atheism at all, except to name-drop an assortment of atheists he thinks were more “serious” in his opinion than any contemporary atheists who would bother to disagree with him. That says nothing about atheism, but much about his own inadequacies.

This is the same nonsense that Terry Eagleton and David Hart, among many others, have tried to pull off, and it simply doesn’t work. Go ahead, you can wave my big brother over and try to belittle me with his awesomeness, but it just means the two of us will work together to punch you out and take your lunch money, wimp.

Are you writing a vampire novel, too?

Last night before bed, I downloaded and started to read a light piece of fluffy fiction, one of these urban fantasy novels that are so popular right now. I won’t name it because I really just want to complain about a phenomenon I’m seeing a lot of in this whole genre, as much as I’ve read, anyway.

The driving conflict of this story is supposed to be the horror of the undead: the protagonist is both tainted with the curse of partial undeadness and trying to protect friends from being similarly afflicted. This is a reasonable premise for a fantasy novel, and could make for a good story.

However, there is one little problem. The taint (vampirism, in this case) makes the victim inhumanly strong, with lightning reflexes and acute senses, and also immortal and immune to mundane threats like bullets, poison, knives, and suffocation — decapitation and being burned to ash are the only serious threats (and granted, her enemies know this and are trying to chop her head off). Meanwhile, the traditional weaknesses of vampires — sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes, holy water, etc. — are all dismissed as superstitious misconceptions of the Middle Ages. They don’t affect her.

Also, it turns out, vampirism gives its victims a hypnotic glamor that makes them irresistible, and also an awesome sexual stamina. There is a cost, in that they have to drink blood, but it turns out that nipping a pint from a willing and enthusiastic partner once a week, preferably during the throes of orgasmic ecstasy, is enough to fuel all those superpowers.

So I’m having a little difficulty getting into the story. Every time the protagonist moans about her curse and these evil, rotten vampires who must have their heads ripped off before they eat her baby sister or whoever, I’m thinking the story should be about getting this poor crazy woman into a mental hospital to address her self-esteem issues, and about how she should be joyfully trying to share her gift with her family and friends. It’s very confusing.

Just a suggestion if you’re writing one of these stories: could you either make the curse a real curse that generally puts one into an undesirable situation, or could you write a story about happy, enlightened, lucky people who are overjoyed at their amazing new abilities? ‘Cause the whiny gripey moaney stuff over objectively glorious circumstances is gettin’ old.

Gaskell confirms my opinion that he is a crank

Martin Gaskell, the astronomer who wasn’t hired at the University of Kentucky (my words were chosen carefully; that really is the only ‘crime’ against him), has won an out-of-court settlement in his discrimination suit, and has gone on to give an interview which confirms my opinion of him: Kentucky is better off not having this credulous guy on the staff. He now insists that he is a supporter of evolution, a fact not in evidence in his writings about the field, and also not evident in his answers to his dodgy replies to specific questions in the interview.

But the real problem is his complete lack of any kind of scientific filter in his evaluation of the literature. This is a man more likely to cite a religious source to answer a question about biology than to refer to any of the scientific evidence; he gets his biology from Hugh Ross, Josh MacDowell, and Philip Johnson. He expresses his gullibility well in this interview; this comment made my jaw drop, at least.

What are your thoughts on the paradox between public universities needing to teach scientific fact and the fact that they receive government funding and thus are likely not allowed to discriminate on the basis of religious beliefs, which may contradict scientific fact (e.g. believers in the young earth premise)? (And I mean this in the sense that this debate could come up for a biology faculty position, in which your beliefs might actually affect what you are teaching.)

Dr. Gaskell:
This HAS come up multiple times with biology positions. There is a good book covering this in great detail. It is called “Slaughter of the Dissidents” by Jerry Bergman. I’d highly recommend getting a copy to understand what goes on. The recurrent problem you’ll find if you look at the cases documented in the book is that Christian biologists get fired or demoted not because of what they actually teach or do in their research, but because of who they are.

See what I mean? He’s citing Jerry “Nine Degrees” Bergman, a liar and known nutcase. I’ve met Jerry Bergman; I’ve debated Jerry Bergman; I’ve read Slaughter of the Dissidents, which doesn’t document anything other than the paranoia and lunacy of its author.

You cannot take Bergman seriously. Bergman is the fellow who announced that there was a conspiracy among evolutionists to get the periodic table of the elements ripped down from classroom walls because it was a document that supported creationism; he claims to know a Christian chemistry teacher who was fired for daring to post Mendeleev’s work. This is the Jerry Bergman who also claimed that carbon is irreducibly complex, thereby proving that Intelligent Design creationism was true. So Gaskell actually recommends Bergman’s work? I wouldn’t hire him for that alone. That’s a kind of fundamental incompetence.

And Gaskell just digs his grave a little deeper.

This is a major problem in the life sciences. One recent major survey showed that 51% of scientists in the life sciences believe in some sort of “higher power” (which most of them identify as “God”). Half of all scientists also claim a religious affiliation. There is an enormous problem if one disqualifies one half of biologists because of religious
affiliation or beliefs!

But that makes no sense! If over half of all biologists are believers, doesn’t that fact right there say that biologists don’t get disqualified for their beliefs? I’ve been in this business for almost 30 years, and I’ve never once seen a committee meeting disrupted by bickering over differing religious beliefs — they are generally regarded as about as irrelevant on the job as what sports teams the faculty are rooting for. The only place where it could come up is if a faculty person started babbling irrational fairy stories that contradicted solid scientific thinking…and then they would be getting in trouble for bad science, not for what church they go to.

That’s what made Gaskell a poor candidate for the position at UK: that he was publicly promoting bad science.

I have annoyed Jesse Bering

That’s what I do, after all. I strongly criticized his uncritical analysis of a set of rape-related evolutionary psychology studies, and now he responds with a rebuttal. It’s not a very good rebuttal, but I highly recommend his second paragraph in which he lists a good collection of links to several people who also ripped into his article. That part is excellent!

But then let’s get into the part where he argues with me.

P.Z. Myers is not, of course, the undisputed public ambassador of his discipline (although I’ve no doubt he sees himself as such), and by no means does the following apply to all biologists, or even all those who are critical of evolutionary psychology. But Myers’ affect-laden views regarding evolutionary psychology do represent those of at least a significant and vocal minority.

Not an auspicious start to accuse me of regarding myself as “the undisputed public ambassador of” biology, which certainly isn’t the case. This is a blog written by a professor in a small town in rural Minnesota. I’m kind of aware of exactly what it is, and lack the airs Bering wants to assign to me. But then, this isn’t surprising, since most of his following arguments rely on telling me what I intended, and he also gets that wrong. Except this little bit, where he does get the overall objections right.

Critics are particularly irritated by the fact that evolutionary psychologists do not test for genetic inheritance of the very traits they argue are adaptive but instead rely on behavioral or self-report measures to evaluate their theories. They also believe that evolutionary psychologists take too many story-telling liberties in reconstructing the ancestral past, since we can never know for certain what life was like hundreds of thousands of years ago, when such traits would have, theoretically, been favored by natural selection. (This is a point also stressed by Rennie in his critique of my Slate essay.) According to Myers, the whole messy endeavor, therefore, “is a teetering pyramid of stacked ‘couldas’ and guesses that it woulda had an influence on evolution.”

This is actually a reasonable summary of my general disagreements with evolutionary psychology. They are quite fond of inventing evolutionary stories about phenomena that don’t even have an iota of evidence for being genetic, and can come up with truly awesome causal accounts for even the most trivial observations.

He picks out one of my objections to argue why the evolutionary psychology crowd can’t do one of the experiments I didn’t suggest doing, which is a little odd, but OK.

In his post, Myers uses my discussion of the evolution of the human penis as a prime example of the sloppy work being done in the study of evolution and human behavior. He pillories psychologist Gordon Gallup’s famous “dildo study,” which suggests that the distinctive mushroom-capped shape of the penis might serve to scoop a competitor’s semen out of the vagina. (I described this work at long, intimate length in two prior articles in Scientific American.) Myers calls this penis study “tripe” because Gallup and his colleagues failed to show how variations in penis shape within a population–and variations in how the penis is used for coital thrusting–directly affect fertilization rates. Instead, the researchers relied on dildos of different designs, surveys of college students’ detailing their sexual behaviors, and a batch of artificial semen.

Now, I can only assume that Myers has not had to face a university human-research ethics committee in the past several decades. If he had, he would realize that his suggested empirical approach would be unilaterally rejected by these conservative bureaucratic gatekeepers. Does Myers really believe that these seasoned investigators wouldn’t rather have done the full experiment he describes–if only they lived in a less prudish and libellous university world? The fact of the matter is that research psychologists studying human sexuality are hamstrung by necessary ethical constraints when designing their studies. Perhaps Myers would be happy enough to allow investigators into his bedroom to examine the precise depth and vigor to which he plunges into his wife’s vaginal canal after they’ve been separated for a week, but most couples would be a tad more reticent. Gallup’s dildo study, and his related work on penis evolution, offered an ingenious–ingenious–way to get around some very real practical and ethical limitations. Is it perfect? No. Again, the perfect study, conceptually speaking, is often the least ethical one, at least as deemed by research ethics committees. But was it driven by clear, testable, evolutionary hypotheses? Yes. And it offered useful information that was otherwise unknown.

Telling me that they can’t do an experiment that I didn’t suggest doing doesn’t really undermine anything I said. I’m perfectly aware of the ethical limitations of human research, which is one reason why I work on animal models. The problem is that what I actually offered as shortcomings of the work wasn’t their failure to wire up my genitals, but this:

They don’t have any evidence that this behavior actually affects the fertilization rate of one partner’s sperm over another, they don’t have any indication of morphological differences in human populations that make some individuals better semen-scoopers, they don’t have any evidence that this behavior has had a differential effect in human history.

Those are the criteria I would expect to see met in order to discuss this issue as an evolutionary problem; what Bering’s sources were studying were mechanical and physiological aspects of some plumbing (which can be interesting!), and then tacking on unwarranted conclusions about evolutionary history. In fact, I don’t see how Bering’s strange and unexecutable experiment of logging the details of my personal sexual behavior would even touch my evolutionary objections.

He also skips over another relevant point I emphasized. I read the research papers he cited. These were studies that had him “riveted, and convinced”, but when I looked at, for instance, the study that found an increase in women’s handgrip strength during ovulation, the paper itself mentioned that there were many other studies that showed no variation in strength over the menstrual cycle. Which is it? Do you just pick the result that favors your interpretation?

Jerry Coyne has a summary of reactions, too, and mentions several instances where the papers aren’t as clear in their support of the evo-psych hypotheses as is claimed. These are very noisy data that sometimes support and sometimes contradict their claims, and it seems that whatever result they pluck out of the mess, it’s always in support of some purported evolutionarily significant effect on behavior or physiology.

As I said in my previous article, I think the general claim of evolutionary psychology, that our current behavior has been shaped by our biological history, is true. I think much of the research in the field is damaging to their thesis, though, not because it demonstrates the opposite, but because it flits over tiny details, like monthly variations in how a woman moves her hips or how she feels about men, and pretends that they’re all examples of the power of natural selection in sculpting a genome that encodes every pelvic wobble and every nerve impulse. It’s become a kind of modern ornithomancy, where each dip and swirl and change in direction of a flight of birds is interpreted as directly connected to the fate of nations. I remain unconvinced.