Someone explain this to me

The Vatican claims to want to talk with atheists, so they’re having a conference. How nice.

The Vatican announced a new initiative aimed at promoting dialogue between theists and atheists to be launched with a two-day event this March in Paris.

The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture will sponsor a series of seminars on the theme of “Religion, Light and Common Reason,” at various locations in the city, including Paris-Sorbonne University.

The odd thing is that I don’t know of any atheists who’ve been invited, nor has the Vatican made any mention of who will be there. So who is this for? Are they going to actually bring in some of the argumentative atheists who have deep differences with religion, or will they just stock the place with atheist-butteries and nice atheists who love the church?

And what will they do there?

The events will conclude with a party for youth in the courtyard of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, followed by prayer and meditation inside the cathedral.

Oh, right. Two days in Paris and we’re going to hang out in a medieval church and pray. If they want to have a dialogue, they should split the events between religious la-de-da, organized by the Catholics, and secular indulgences in the fleshpots of the city, organized by local atheists. Then we’ll see which worldview wins.

But this isn’t about learning anything about how us atheists think. It’s about converting us, and is fundamentally inimical to atheism. It’s definitely not about “promoting dialogue”.

The pope has made turning back the tide of Western secularism one of the major campaigns of his papacy. The Vatican last year established the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization to focus especially on promoting Christianity in Europe.

Good luck with turning back secularism by burying yourselves in an old stone relic and mumbling at Jesus, fellas!

Episode CLXIII: Group hug!

I had my own little prediction about what would happen in the recent split: I expected the HATE thread would start off with a surge and burn out early, while the LOVE thread would end up with the most comments by endurance. Boy, was I wrong. The two threads were neck-and-neck in commenting frequency through most of their lifespans, until last night when the LOVE thread petered out while the HATE thread got all fired up. Final scores: HATE, 702 comments; LOVE, 434 comments.

It just goes to show that if love and hate go to war, hate will kick love’s butt.

But still, we need to bring everyone back together, because I’m not going to maintain two everlasting threads all the time. Group hug, everyone! Lovers and haters all together now! We need ’em both, lovers to bring the lube and haters to bring the spice.

(Current totals: 11,777 entries with 1,260,605 comments.)

Evolve a car

Looking for a nice demonstration of genetic algorithms? Here’s a simulation that takes randomized connected collections of polygons and wheels and scores them for their ability to traverse a rugged 2D landscape. I tried it last night, and it gave me an assortment of very bad vehicles: for example, a lot of them were just polygonal lumps that fell flat and sat there, while some had an odd wheel here and there, but also pointy bits that acted as brakes, or wheels that pointed upward at the sky and did nothing at all. So I just left it running and went to bed.

This morning, I’ve got strange vehicles running races on my computer screen. Unsurprising, but still kind of cool.

An odd fact

I’ve tried to catch the news on broadcast and cable TV, off and on, lately, and it always ends up being far more off than on, despite certain dramatic events going on in the world. American news is dead, it seems. What I’ve done instead is tune in to Al Jazeera on the internet, which is doing a phenomenally good job of covering Egypt.

To my cable company: you’d make me very happy if you had an option to switch Al Jazeera English for the awful Fox News you offer now. And as long as you’re doing that, can we switch out CNN for the BBC?

Holy crap, Texas, how can you stand your governor?

Governor Rick Perry has been talking about education.

Well, there is a lot of fat to cut from our public schools, especially those in our biggest urban areas like Houston and Dallas. I am concerned that some the highly diverse Magnet public schools in this city are becoming hotbeds for liberalism. Do we really need free school bus service, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian-Pacific Heritage Month, ESL, special needs and enrichment programs like music, art or math Olympiad? I think we should get back to the basics of the three Rs, reading writing and arithmetic. I mean when is the last time a 6th grade science fair project yielded a cure for a disease?

There are strange, wild, guttural sounds spilling from my lips right now; I dare not transcribe them here lest innocents repeat them, summoning vindictive elder gods to rend their sanity. I’m a trained professional in coping with madness, others may not be.

In this same talk, he also babbles about making private Christian schools more affordable. Kill public education, promote religion instead. That’s his position.

When’s the insurrection? Or at least the repeal? Don’t Texans have any self-respect?

I have been snared by Poe’s law! All I can say in defense is that I was only caught because it’s a hair’s breadth from reality.

The best is lost

A reader responded to my article where I said I found no solace in lies by sending me a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay. This could be part of the godless liturgy for coping with funerals; it’s so true to the spirit of our thinking, and so antagonistic to Christian attitudes. So I’ll share it with you, too.

Dirge without music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and laurel they go: but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains – but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love –
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind:
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Beautiful words somehow bring a little comfort to us, I agree, but better still are beautiful words that also ring true.

Brace yourselves, LA

Every time I do this I get email from people who say they were startled to hear my voice on the radio, so I figure this time I’ll warn you so I don’t cause any traffic accidents. I’ll be on Michael Slate’s radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles this morning, and we’re trying to do this on a monthly schedule. So if you’re driving along (you’re in LA, so you probably spend most of your time driving, right?) and you hear me announce over your radio that gods are hokum, it really isn’t a divine communication.

Bad science education in the US

I am completely unsurprised by the recent report on the state of evolution in the American science classroom. It confirms entirely my impressions from years of freshman college students and from previous studies of the subject, and puts specific numbers and issues to the problem.

The short summary: public schools suck at teaching basic biology. You already knew this, too, though, didn’t you? The question has always been, “How bad?”

We can now say how many high school biology teachers do a good job, teaching the recommendations of the National Research Council and also, by the way, obeying the requirements of most state science standards: 28%. About a quarter of our biology teachers are actually discussing the evidence that evolution occurred and using evolution as a theme to integrate the components of a good year of biology instruction. And since most school curricula only include one year of life science, that effectively means that only about a quarter of our high school graduates are even exposed to evolutionary biology.

There’s also another problem. 13% of our biology teachers are openly and unashamedly creationists who teach creationism in the classroom. That number varies, by the way, with the political leanings of the citizens of the school district: 40% of the teachers in conservative school districts reject evolution entirely, while “only” 11% in liberal areas do. This is a disaster. This is active, ongoing miseducation and misrepresentation of science by the teachers we entrust with our children.

What about the rest? 60% of our teachers do nothing: they teach the bare minimum of evolution that they can get away with, focusing on details of genetics and molecular biology that allow them to avoid the more obvious implications (which shouldn’t happen, either; the molecular evidence for evolution is powerful stuff), or they allow it to slip off the schedule of lesson plans. They’re afraid, and rightly so, of aggressive, nasty, privileged religious parents who will make their life hellish if they do their job properly.

The paper did surprise me in one way. It made a very strong statement about those timid teachers in the 60%:

The cautious 60% may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists. The strategies of emphasizing microevolution, justifying the curriculum on the basis of state-wide tests, or “teaching the controversy” all undermine the legitimacy of findings that are well established by the combination of peer review and replication. These teachers fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments, even if unintentionally.

Are you a teacher who avoids the subject of evolution because of the crapstorm of chaos that follows from the public if you do? Consider yourselves rebuked. You really aren’t helping.

What are we going to do about this? The authors have two major suggestions, and here’s where I get to feel rebuked. One problem is that many of the timid teachers also do not feel adequately trained to address evolution well, and that’s a significant factor in their reluctance to press the topic (creationist teachers, on the other hand, are full of unwarranted certainty and lie to their students with confidence). So they recommend that there be more thorough training in evolution for pre-service teachers, with at least a requirement for one course in evolution. I think I can say that my university does a good job at that, at least: our secondary education majors get a rigorous exposure to evolutionary biology in our program. If you’re looking to hire new science teachers, look to UMM graduates!

Another suggestion, though, is that scientists and science organizations ought to be doing more outreach and assistance. That’s tough, since our time is tight, but we know that would be a good goal. When a group of us put together the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education, for instance, one of the goals was to provide speakers and yearly seminar courses to help teachers learn more about evolution, and we did a good job the first year. But that effort was made at a time when there was active pressure from creationist groups to influence the state science standards, and as that pressure eased off, so did we, and we’ve been slacking ever since. The framework is there so we could fire it up again quickly, but maybe we ought also to be maintaining good science education in these lulls between storms, too.

There’s an interesting interview with the authors on Ars Technica — check it out.

Berkman MB, Plutzer E (2011) Defeating creationism in the courtroom, but not in the classroom. Science 331:404-405.

Tempest in τ, ζ, σ, φ, λ, ε, δ, η and γ2 Sagittarii

Dara O’Briain and Brian Cox aggravated a great many astrologers when they announced on a UK television program that “astrology is rubbish” and “astrology is nonsense”. The Astrological Association of Great Britain was so incensed that they created a petition demanding that the BBC commit to “making a fair and balanced representation of astrology in the future” — which left me amusedly discombobulated that there is a formal Astrological Association of Great Britain, and that they don’t realize that tossing their whole goofy discipline in the rubbish heap is a fair and balanced representation.

Now we get a whole new level of foolishness, though: Martin Robbins has posted a criticism of the skeptics from a serious historian who doesn’t get it. She demands that we take astrology more seriously and respectfully, and explains that many astrologers are intelligent people who study astronomy (you know, the real science), and are fully aware of concepts like precession and the actual physical arrangements of the stars in the sky, and have quite sophisticated explanations to account for superficial discrepancies like the absence of Ophiuchus from the official list of zodiacal constellations, and that they are right to be annoyed when they are portrayed as unaware of obvious physical phenomena.

This is all true, but stupid.

I’ve had long conversations with Very Serious Astrologers; early in my skeptical career, I spent a fair amount of time engaging them, and I’m familiar with the diverse ways in which their brains work. They were generally engrossed with the behavior of those lights in the sky; if you wanted to know what constellation you could spot on the horizon in the western sky in August, you could ask an astronomer and get a good answer, or you could ask a dedicated astrologer and they’d tell you the same thing, and they were certainly far more reliable sources for that sort of information than I am. I’ve played with some of their software, and it is intricate and elaborate and uses genuine astronomical data that they gather from astronomical databases.

But so what? It’s still all rubbish. There’s more to science than mastering mechanics, there’s this little thing called “understanding” that is absolutely essential. A great piano tuner is not necessarily a good musician, and memorizing the periodic table of the elements does not turn you into a chemist. Imagine a conversation with your mother: “I’m sure your father can fix the electronic ignition system in your Honda, dear…why, he managed to drive from Owatonna to the Mall of America last week, and he only got lost once!” One thing does not have anything to do with the other. Knowing a bunch of solid facts about stars does not justify explanations about magical influences that are antagonistic to known processes and which are built, not on the trustworthy foundation of that data, but on unfounded beliefs in magical influences from distant objects.

This is especially true when that specialized scientific knowledge is used as part of the pseudo-scientific patter marshalled to justify their supernatural explanations. Science is window dressing to modern astrologers; they don’t get to fulminate indignantly by pointing at the astronomy element they’ve incorporated into their delusions when someone points out that their conclusions are all wrong and completely unwarranted. Those don’t matter. Their rationalizations are like ‘sophisticated theology’ — vapor and noise that they make flashier by throwing in a few modern scientific terms.

Rebekah Higgitt wants to claim that astrologers are justified “if they are presented as idiots who don’t understand precession and do nothing but write newspaper horoscopes that cover around a twelfth of the population in one go.” OK. Then we should present them as idiots who don’t have a mechanism for their claimed influences, ignore all the logical arguments and empirical evidence that shows astrology doesn’t work, and abuse astronomy to put up a phony façade of scienciness.

They’re still idiots.