Who the heck are you?

Blame Ed Yong. He started this business of asking readers to speak up, and now it’s all over the place, so I guess I need to join in .

In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been reading, what do you think about it, and how could it be improved?

You need some music to listen to while you’re composing your answers.

There are a couple of lines there that are so appropriate here:

I staggered back to the underground
And the breeze blew back my hair
I remember throwin’ punches around
And preachin’ from my chair

I spit out like a sewer hole
Yet still recieve your kiss
How can I measure up to anyone now
After such a love as this?

So…throw some punches. It’s what we expect.

All alone now

I just saw the TrophyWife™ to the door, where she’s leaving for work. And from there, she’s going to Minneapolis to spend the night. And then in the morning she’s flying off to The Amazing Meeting 8, and I’m not. She’s going to spend almost a week away, while I’m just a hyper-focused drudge with a keyboard for a while.

I’ll be fine, I’ll just be single-minded for a while. But how many of you are going to TAM? Keep an eye out for the TrophyWife™, and keep her out of trouble. I’ve seen what she’s going to wear to the Skepchick party, and I’m a little concerned — why couldn’t it have had a Middle East theme, with everyone invited to show up in burkas?

Huffpo. Creationist. Nazis. Mix together and flush.

I cannot stand the Huffington Post, that bastion of Newage folly. I really despise the Intelligent Design creationists. So when Huffpo gives space to creationist cretins, I’m done with them. Even worse, it’s an idiot creationist parroting the same old story, that Hitler was Darwin’s fault. I’ll mention just one paragraph of this dishonest bunk.

Hitler’s ideas, Dr. Berlinski carefully notes, “came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin.” A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology “weren’t reading the Gospels.”

Here you go, a link to Mein Kampf on Project Gutenberg. Go to town. Search for Darwin — nothing. Or evolution — that is there, but only used in the sense of “higher” and “lower” organisms, and some bizarre notion that nature abhors crossbreeding. God is all over the book, as is Christianity, even if we do grant that Hitler is pushing an idiosyncratic version of that cult.

If you really want to find the roots of Nazism, look to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of the “gospel of the Nazi movement”, who hated Darwinism. No honest account will omit Chamberlain…but then, the Discovery Institute writes no honest account.

The Bible Belt can never improve if everyone refuses to question religion

This is appalling. This video of a supposedly secular high school biology classroom will show you what we’re up against.

These students are simply expressing uninformed incredulity — they can’t imagine how anything could have evolved. And the incompetent apologist of a teacher, who is sympathetic to creationism himself, isn’t doing his job, which is to explain to them exactly how biology explains these phenomena. Instead, he makes excuses: “How could I say to a student, ‘your ideas are trash’?”

It’s not hard. One student at the end says this:

How can like an African-American person evolve from a white person? We’re different skin.

Hey, student! Your ideas are trash!

So’s your teacher if he can’t address these trivial questions. You must be able to tell your students when they are wrong if you’re going to teach at all.

Atrocity in Kerala

This is a horrific story out of India, and the weird thing is that everyone is condemning the bloody, violent end of the story, but treating the preliminaries as a matter of course. Here’s the outline, as near as I can extract from a scattering of stories, often in poor English.

In March, TJ Joseph, a professor at a private Catholic college in Kerala, gave an exam that apparently offended Muslim students. Here’s the only description of the awful exam question I could find:

The indicted questionnaire however did not include anything that could be construed as against the Muslim religion. The authorities of Newman College, told AsiaNews that in the test, Prof. Joseph tells the story of a fishmonger who, despite hard work, becomes increasingly poor. The monger’s name is Mohammad In his desperation, he spoke to God and also asked his brother why his fortunes were dwindling. His brother told Mohammed: “Why are you calling God, God, God….” Students were asked to specify the punctuation of the narrative.

He was an instructor in Malayalam, one of the many languages of India, so this was an exercise in reading and punctuation. But the Muslim community took offense, for some indecipherable reason, and some bloggers even called the question a “blunder” and “disgraceful”, to my complete bafflement.

It gets worse. He was suspended from his job. He was arrested. One account says his son was also arrested and tortured. He got out on bail, and apparently went into hiding because of the ongoing death threats…so the police put up a wanted poster for his arrest.

This is already insane. Apparently this kind of harrassment is taken for granted in Kerala, and the police are willing to assist in it.

Could it get worse? Of course it can.

In a horrific instance of Talibanism, Muslim fanatics in Kerala on Sunday chopped off the right hand of a college lecturer, accusing him of setting a question paper with a derogatory reference to the Prophet.

Lecturer T J Joseph was returning home from church with his mother and sister around 8.30 am in Muvattupuzha in Ernakulam district when he was accosted by the attackers. “We had just got into our car when a van pulled up in front. Around eight people armed with swords and knives emerged and pulled out Joseph after smashing the windscreen.

They then chopped off his right hand and stabbed him in the left thigh,” said Joseph’s sister, Mary Stella, a nun.

Jebus. Karen Armstrong was just complaining that we want to “marginalise religion”. Damned straight we do.

We proud tyrants of the real

The last time I got a glimpse of the wretched new book from Marilynne Robinson, the review was sufficient to dissuade me from bothering to ever read it. Now we have a positive review from Karen Armstrong, and I am now convinced that if ever I am confronted with this work, the only appropriate response would be to unzip my fly and piss on it, on the spot. Only my deeply ingrained social conditioning would hinder me. Dammit, why can’t I live freely and express my primal impulses without these nagging voices in my head?

Once again, her thesis is that her own twisted version of science, which is always reductionist and ignores the forest for the hadrons, baryons, and mesons that make it up, is a curse upon civilization that destroys all beauty and aspirations. How dare we turn a critical eye upon good ol’ subjective superstition? And besides, science completely ignores the mind and art and strangeness and doesn’t encourage people to ever think long, long thoughts.

How’s your bladder holding up?

This, of course, is entirely copacetic with Karen Armstrong’s views. It isn’t civilized if it isn’t wallowing in the subjective and whining piteously about all those investigators of the real with their bright lights and poking fingers harshing her mellow and demanding that she say something sensible, clear, and objectively verifiable. In order to make her complaints justifiable, though, she has to lie about science. Oh, wait — perhaps I should be more charitable. She is obstinately ignorant of science, so she isn’t exactly lying…she just makes fantastic nonsense up about it.

In the past, the voices that say “there is something more” have always been right. The positivist approach would not only marginalise religion, but also the arts, culture, history, and the classical and humanist traditions. Most prescient of all is Robinson’s contention that “it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.”

I wish she had developed this crucial insight, because it is urgently needed at this moment of crisis in human history. If we are indeed completely in thrall to the selfish gene, why not throw all constraint to the winds and just be selfish — individually and collectively, in our politics, social arrangements, financial and economic dealings?

There’s always something more? What? It seems to me that this belief in something beyond the natural and material world has always been wrong — at least, it’s been in constant retreat for the last half dozen centuries, fading into worship of ever more petty and intangible deities. It takes a truly deluded mind to translate a perennial collapse of a world view into a pattern of unending victory.

I should think she should also realize that we happy ‘positivists’ are also trying to contain the worst impulses of human nature, but those sorry worst include the fuzzy tendency to reify wishful thinking into a collection of demanding gods and indignant priests. They don’t include art and culture and history. We aren’t the philistines. We aren’t the ones mangling a deep-rooted historical endeavor with an enviable record of alleviating human suffering and liberating the human mind, science, in order to justify lotus-eating ignorance.

As for that inane argument that the path to progress is by closing our eyes to an ugly reality and focusing on the best and most beautiful, I offer one counter-example: public health. You can appreciate that cholera, for instance, is an ugly, cruel disease that has destroyed millions in unpleasant ways, ripping through whole families, killing children in their mothers’ arms by making them shit themselves to death. It’s doctors and public health scientists that stared that ugly death in the face and fought it who made progress and reduced its ravages. There is no illusion that because it is natural, because it has plagued us for ages, because we were in thrall to merciless epidemics, that we must therefore surrender to it. We would not have gotten the answers we do have if we’d turned a blind eye to the suffering because it would demean our view of the world, and if we’d chosen instead to simply celebrate the bright, healthy, happy people who had escaped the disease (so far…oh, but please, do not disturb our opium dreams with possible unpleasant futures!)

Those selfish genes are real, but they aren’t quite what Armstrong imagines they are — when her understanding is a millimeter deep, perhaps it’s understandable that she would leap to the silly midgleyesque conclusion that it means that we are ruled by genes for nastiness and spite and evil, when it only refers to a pattern of inheritance and selection for genes that promote their own perpetuation…which can include genes that enhance cooperation and altruism, as well. But even if it were such a grim story of bad genes thriving, it does not imply in any way that scientists are cheering on selfishness, or that they advocate giving up and becoming short-sighted brutes.

On the contrary, only by understanding reality can we deal with it and apply our minds to aspire to that ambitious human world filled with art and culture and science and reason and ethical behavior that Armstrong and Robinson probably want, too. The only way to accomplish that, though, is by working harder at mastering reality, a key part of the formula that they seem to miss as they so busily languish in their dreams.

I’m still not buying their books, not even for pissing upon.

Ophelia Benson has already taken aim at Robinson/Armstrong. I’m gettin’ slow in my old age.

BMA is making an awful lot of sense lately

First homeopathy is decreed bogus and unsupportable by the NHS, and now this: UK doctors are declaring gay conversion therapy damaging and harmful. There is a bit of wishful thinking, but at least this sentiment is optimistic:

Hopefully, anyone involved in the so-called treatment of homosexuality will realize that the medical profession considers them dangerous charlatans, and will reconsider their beliefs. I also sincerely hope that any vulnerable gay person who is unhappy about their sexuality takes notice of this motion and realizes that it is the world that needs to change, not them.

Changing the world…it’s an admirable and ambitious goal.