Ken Ham is feeling defensive

Poor Ken Ham is getting mocked everywhere for his Creation “Museum” and proposed Disneyland for Dummies, so he has put up a post defending Kentucky. It’s a remarkably weak argument (no surprise there, that’s all he can do), which mainly lists famous people who have been born there and occasional connections and horse racing. Whoop-te-doo. He also left off a few important merits to the state.

  • PZ Myers had ancestors who lived in Kentucky!

  • PZ Myers has a son who lives in Kentucky right now!

  • Ken Ham is not from Kentucky!

Ham did find one relevant piece of information: he dug up one study that developed a metric of important educational parameters like average class size, drop-out rate, teacher salaries, etc. that gives Kentucky a #1 ranking in public education. Good work, I knew there were smart people in Kentucky who had their priorities straight, and being from that state or living there is nothing to be ashamed of. We don’t have a detestation of Kentuckians.

The thing is that Ken Ham brings down the state average in intelligence, and his exhibits of stupid ideas bring the region and the country into disrepute. We don’t blame Kentucky.

It’s all Australia’s fault.

The commonality of bad movies and bad religion

Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn’t put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series.

And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck.

So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?

Here’s one interesting explanation: cult movies plug into the same cognitive keyholes as religion does. The article is a bit superficial — comparing Star Wars to Catholicism, Star Trek to protestantism, and the recent Star Trek retcon/reboot to Mormonism is stretching the analogy way too much. But there’s something to it.

The Star Wars/Star Trek phenomena are a bit odd; I watch bad movies sometimes for entertainment, but I never lose myself in apologetics for them. They’re bad movies. They’re fun for the comic opera klutziness of them, and half the pleasure is being able to stand above them and outside them, and appreciate the sincerity of the exercise in slapping together a weird piece of crap in spite of little obstacles, like a lack of money or talent. But Star Wars/Star Trek have serious fans who devotedly study the lore and get into arguments about which is better, and even think they represent some high quality story telling.

I will boldly predict that some people will be arguing for that in the comments. Of course, they’re wrong. They sucked. Just like religion.

So the question is why do people cling to them…and it seems to me that our brains are equipped with a kind of ideological inertia, which is probably a good thing, since you don’t want to too casually flip-flop on ideas before you’ve worked out their viability. But sometimes we seem to be prone to a pathological degree of attachment, where because once we favored some strange object of worship, whether it’s Jesus or Spock or America or the Green Bay Packers, we can’t let go. Changing our minds would be an admission that we were wrong and could be wrong about something we regard as important in our lives, and there’s a reasonable fear that opening the door to that kind of uncertainty might lead to chaos.

There’s also a peculiar inability to separate the parts from the whole. You can like classical sacred music without endorsing the silliness about magic crackers and Original Sin, just as you can enjoy a light sabre battle on the screen without getting goofy over The Force.

So what is religion? It’s a parasite on a couple of useful features of how the mind works, its tendency to try and model the world around us as a coherent whole and its reluctance to abandon models that fail to work. It’s a particularly successful parasite because it can be introduced early, with mother’s milk, well before they get plonked down in front of the boobtube, and so it generally outcompetes Captain Picard…and it also gets relatively little pushback from the culture once the child leaves the breast to spend more time with outsiders, who are all praising the same mysterious being, and so far Yoda worship isn’t very common.

The first persuasive argument for Christianity that I’ve seen

I was sent this link to an apologist defending Christianity against rationalist requests for evidence, and I was unimpressed — all he’s got is repeated claims that the Bible says Jesus was lord of the universe, which is not a good argument. I can also point to the Lord of the Rings, which says Gandalf was a powerful wizard, but that doesn’t even begin to support any claim that he actually existed.

But I read on, and it got weird. Read this, and somebody explain to me…is he arguing for or against Christianity?

As for the empirical and falsifiable evidence scientists and atheists demand, let’s just say it might never be found, at least not on this side of the grave. It may not even exist. And even if someone does find it, along with the missing link, it will probably be like nothing they ever expected.

But if you look up in the sky some cold winter’s night around the 25th of December, you just might catch a glimpse of it. No, it’s not the space shuttle, or a Russian spy satellite; nor is it an Iranian missile with a nuclear warhead or some other terrorist attack; it’s certainly not Louis Farrakhan’s mothership, or any other extraterrestrial spacecraft. Is it a myth? Is it science?

No — it’s Santa Claus! And if you don’t believe that well, you just ain’t trying. Or maybe what you really need is a little less science, and a little more myth.

OK, I give up. He has convinced me. Jesus is just as real as Santa Claus.

There’s plenty of time for evolution

This is a familiar creationist argument, stated in this case by a non-creationist:

Consider the replacement processes needed in order to change each of the resident genes at L loci in a more primitive genome into those of a more favorable, or advanced, gene. Suppose that at each such gene locus, the argument runs, the proportion of gene types (alleles) at that gene locus that are more favored than the primitive type is K−1. The probability that at all L loci a more favored gene type is obtained in one round of evolutionary “trials” is K−L, a vanishingly small amount. When trials are carried out sequentially over time, an exponentially large number of trials (of order KL) would be needed in order to carry out the complete transformation, and from this some have concluded that the evolution-by- mutation paradigm doesn’t work because of lack of time.

Basically, what creationists argue is that the evolution of new genes is linear and sequential — there is no history, no selection, it works entirely by random replacement of the whole shebang, hoping that in one dazzling bit of luck that the entire sequence clicks into the right sequence, and then it all works. If that were the way the process occurred, then they’d be right, and evolution would be absurdly improbable and would take an untenable length of time.

Another way to think of it is a bizarre version of the hangman guessing game, where one person thinks of a word, and the second person has to guess what it is. In the normal version of the game, the second person guesses letters one by one, and they’re placed in the appropriate spot. In the creationist version, you only get to guess a whole sequence of letters in each round, and you are only told if you are right or wrong, not which letters are in the correct position in the word. Not only does it become a really boring game, but it also becomes extremely unlikely that anyone can solve it in a reasonable amount of time.

Evolution does not work like that. It works in parallel, changing and testing each variant simultaneously in many individuals, and then selection for the most favorable subset of changes latches them in place, making the matching letters more likely to be fixed. Or, as the paper by Wilf and Ewens explains,

But a more appropriate model is the following. After guessing each of the letters, we are told which (if any) of the guessed letters are correct, and then those letters are retained. The second round of guessing is applied only for the incorrect letters that remain after this first round, and so forth. This procedure mimics the “in parallel” evolutionary process. The question concerns the statistics of the number of rounds needed to guess all of the letters of the word successfully.

That’s the question. If purely random changes would require a ridiculous length of time to match a target, proportional to KL, how long would it take if we actually use more reasonable, biologically relevant model? Wilf and Ewens state the model in mathematical terms and derive a theoretical answer, and you won’t be surprised that it’s significantly shorter; you might be impressed at how much shorter the operation would take.

Instead of a time proportional to KL, it will take a time proportional to K log L.

That’s very much shorter! To put some representative numbers on it, imagine a protein that is 300 amino acids long, made up of 20 possible amino acids, and I’m going to ask you to guess the sequence. Under the creationist model, you wouldn’t even want to play the game — it would take you on the order of 20300 trials to hit that one specific arrangement of amino acids. On the other hand, if you took a wild guess, writing down a random 300 amino acids, and I then told you which amino acids in which position were correct, you’d be able to progressively work out the exact sequence in only 20 log 300 trials, or around 50 guesses.

Notice that this is not a concrete estimate of the time it would take for something to evolve! It’s a grossly simplified version of the story: the example overstates the power of selection (amino acids won’t be locked in, but will only be less likely to change), and overstates the required accuracy of matching to a target (there would be more tolerance for variation), and the whole idea of meeting a specific target is not necessarily a good model. As a guide to short-circuiting the invalid assumptions of creationists, though, it’s handy to have a simple mathematical formula to remove that naive combinatorial model from the table.

Wilf HS, Ewens WJ (2010) There’s plenty of time for evolution. arXiv:1010.5178v1.

Look at it as a promising sign of the rapidly accelerating senility of religion

Last week, the CNN Belief blog published some transparently inane pseudoscience from Oprah.com; this week, it’s publishing some awesomely trivial tripe about where your dog goes after death (how does the author know they go to heaven? He dug up some Bible verses, of course.)

This is amazingly bad stuff. It’s as if there is some sneering, mocking atheist who has been put in charge of CNN’s religion section, and she gets up every morning on a quest to find whatever will make religion look profoundly stupid…and she succeeds three minutes after going to work, and spends the rest of the day sipping lattes and cocktails while writing scenarios for her nightly Dungeons & Dragons game.

There is a danger to thinking this way, though: pretty soon you’re wondering if Pope Ratzi isn’t actually some godless antitheist mole for the Global Atheist Conspiracy, because he’s doing such a good job of making Catholicism look evil, and every silly expression of faith begins to look like an intentional effort to discredit themselves. Either the world is dominated by a lot of atheist weirdos who get off on making everyone else look ridiculous, or religion really is this goofy. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so I’m going to have to favor the latter.

Mommy, why is there a War on Christmas?

You’ve probably been wondering. Who in their right mind would declare war on a family holiday? Who would be crazy enough to think such a thing was actually happening? You might have the impression that it’s all a delusion erupting from the fevered brain of blowhard Bill O’Reilly, but it goes deeper than that, back to the 1950s, when the Cold War fostered a whole generation of destructive nuts. Here’s a lovely summary of the history of the War on Christmas, which finds its roots in paranoia about Communists:

In 1959, the John Birch Society, a far-right organization that sees anti-American and communist conspiracies in just about everything, released a pamphlet called “There Goes Christmas!” written by Hubert Kregeloh. The pamphlet claimed, “One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to take Christ out of Christmas — to denude the event of its religious meaning.” The John Birch Society believed the UN was being used to crush religious belief:

The UN fanatics launched their assault on Christmas in 1958, but too late to get very far before the holy day was at hand. They are already busy, however, at this very moment, on efforts to poison the 1959 Christmas season with their high-pressure propaganda. What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.

These “UN symbols and emblems” were simply secular Christmas decorations that did not employ religious imagery, decorations that had been around for some time. The pamphlet claimed this was a plot to destroy Christianity and called on patriotic Americans to boycott any stores that displayed such decorations. No one took this very seriously in 1959 — this was, after all, the John Birch Society. The conspiracy theory did not catch on. But it was to come back a few decades later.

Oh, but that brings back Christmas memories…I had a crazy uncle who was in the John Birch Society, and it didn’t take much to get him ranting about how the UN was a Commie Plot. Christmas was presents and tinsel and butter cookies and ol’ Henry handing out JBS tracts and explaining how the Africans were a servile race.

Speaking of race, there’s also the odious Steve Sailer and VDARE explaining how it’s a Jewish conspiracy. But then, Jews, Commies, they’re all the same, right?

The paranoid psychoses are getting ripe over on the other side, and have been putrefying for over 50 years. We’re at the stage now where if a Jew, Commie, or Atheist doesn’t say “Merry Christmas”, it’s a sign that they’re out to destroy the holiday by outlawing it; and if they do say “Merry Christmas”, it’s a sign that they’re out to destroy the holiday by subverting it. No matter what we do, we stomp on Christmas!

Russian philosophy

I find myself wrestling with the meaning in this story of an epic struggle of worldviews.

A dispute over the existence of God between four Russians drunk on a litre of pure alcohol resulted in the death of two of the drinking buddies, news agencies reported on Monday.

The disagreement began at the weekend when the female house owner, her son, a male roommate and undisclosed male relative drank the litre of pure alcohol, “which they downed with snow,” a police investigator told RIA Novosti.

First, I’m wondering whether downing 250mL of 190 proof alcohol improves one’s philosophy, or renders it incomprehensible. That’s only an interesting question because most philosophy is incomprehensible even when sober. I’d do the experiment, except I’ve often worked with beakers full of lab alcohol, and no way are they at all tempting.

The second big question is about the outcome: the story explains that the son knifed the other two men to death, but it doesn’t mention what his position on the existence of gods was.

So did the atheist win, or the believer?

Does it even matter in a grim cold universe, where we’re all doomed to eke out a futile existence until we die, where we’re either meaningless sputterings of a few pounds of electrified meat, or the serfs of immense beings who will snuff us out painfully, slowly, eternally and with casual disregard if we fail to properly praise them incessantly? Does anything matter? The snow falls. It will cover us all.

Pass the lab alcohol, tovarisch. Budem zdorovy.

Episode CXXXXIII: Strange tides

Yarr, ye scurvy dogs sailin’ on the Flying Dutchman thread — it’s the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, On Stranger Tides.

Hang on there, though : On Stranger Tides is a fantastic novel by Tim Powers, my favoritest pirate/zombie story of all time. What abominations will Disney be performing to warp a mad, wild standalone novel that doesn’t have any of the characters of the franchise into a continuation? Powers approves, at least, although that may mean he’s just overjoyed to be about to be rolling in money.

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