I give you all fair warning: my daughter Skatje has passed her driver’s test, and has a license to drive. Alone. Without her father sitting by her side, hands clenched tightly to the armrest, feet pounding the floorboards to hit imaginary brakes, and using the force of his indomitable will to prevent collisions, explosions, squirrel-squishings, etc.
You might just want to stay home for the rest of your life.
I used to love to watch barnacles. Well, I still do, but there’s a distinct shortage of tidepools here in Minnesota, which makes it a very difficult hobby. Barnacles are arthropods hunkered down in stony shells attached to a substrate, and what they do is unfurl feathery legs like ostrich plumes (called cirri) and wave them about in the water to catch small particles of food. They’re very pretty, but also very skittish: a shadow passing over, a splash, the klunk of a rock sending vibrations through the substrate, and they instantly withdraw their limbs and slam the plate-like doors to their home shut. There isn’t much variation in their response; they can’t get up and run away, they can’t leap out use kung-fu on an interloper, all they can do is hide behind their armored shells, and that’s what they do as a reaction to any stimulus.
Barnacles are completely lacking in curiosity. It makes sense; they have very tiny brains, and all they want is to be left alone to strain the water for nutrients. For a barnacle, curiosity would be a dangerous vice. Any intrusion on their routine is a risk, and they don’t need to analyze…just slam the doors shut.
While there may be few tidepools in Minnesota, I can find some in the pages of the NY Times. Stanley Fish is apparently some species of barnacle. James Leach of the National Endowment for the Humanities gave a lecture titled “Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?”, which has stirred Fish to protest. I think. In a wonderfully consistent pattern that I’m sure would meet the approval of barnacles everywhere, he doesn’t actually express an opinion directly himself. Instead, he merely reports what others have said. We must deduce his opinion from the fact that he only quotes critics of curiosity. Curiosity is the original sin, you know: we can blame all of our suffering on a god who righteously slapped down a couple of people for daring to be curious.
When God told Adam he could eat of all the fruits of the Garden of Eden, but not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he placed what has been called a “provoking object” in Adam’s eyes. The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything. Such a being would imagine himself, God-like, standing to the side of the universe and, armed only with the power of his mind, mastering its intricacies. Those who engage in this fantasy, says Thomas Aquinas, think “they are doing something great, if with surpassing curiosity and keenness they explore the whole mass of this body which we call the world; so great a pride is thus begotten, that one would think they dwelt in the very heavens about which they argue.”
Another churchman, Lorenzo Scupoli, put it this way in 1589: “They make an idol of their own understanding” (“Knowledge puffeth up,” I Corinthians 8:1). Pascal said it succinctly: “Curiosity is only vanity.” Jonathan Robinson, writing in this century, makes the same point: “What we are talking about is the desire to satisfy our curiosity on any and every conceivable subject that takes our fancy” (“Spiritual Combat Revisited”).
Isn’t that fascinating? If barnacles could imagine and could write, that’s precisely what they’d say, too. There is a hallowed tradition in certain scholarly circles of simply quoting famous dead white guys who agree with you in order to lend your words some authority that reason cannot bestow on them, and Stanley Barnacle has this same attitude. When someone quotes stodgy old promoters of the status quo who insist that human knowledge must have limits, we must go no further than we have up to this century, though, I have to note that they’ve all been irrefutably proven wrong by the time the next century rolls around. I am unpersuaded. Actually, I’m anti-persuaded. There’s something about citing a 5th century bishop telling everyone to stop exploring the world that has the effect of convincing this 21st century secularist to go turn over a few more rocks.
Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge’s boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H. to digitalize just about everything. “The computer revolution,” he announces, “holds out the prospect that the digital library could be become an international citadel for the pursuit of curiosity.”
That’s exactly what Paul Griffiths, professor of divinity at Duke University, is afraid of. Where Leach welcomes the enlargement of curiosity’s empire, Griffiths, who is writing a book on the vice of curiosity, sees it as a sign of moral and spiritual danger: “Late modern societies that are fundamentally shaped by the overwhelming presence of electronic media and the obscene inundation of every aspect of human life by pictures and sounds have turned the vice of curiosity into a prescribed way of life” (“Reason and the Reasons of Faith”). The prescriptions come in the form of familiar injunctions: follow the inquiry as far as it goes, leave no stone unturned, there is always more to know, the more information the better. “In a world where curiosity rules,” Griffiths declares, “unmasking curiosity as a destructive and offensive device . . . amounts to nothing less than a . . . radical critique of superficiality and constant distraction.”
Oh, no! Digitizing books? Heresy! We should be reading marks chiseled in stone or clay, as the gods intended!
I would have been shocked that an academic would condemn curiosity as a “vice”, as “destructive and offensive”, as “superficiality and constant distraction”, since exercising our curiosity, and fostering curiosity in our students, is supposed to be one of our jobs. However, the barnacle gave us advance warning: it’s not just an academic, it’s a professor of divinity. Oh, well then, point taken. I can understand why a professor of nothing would resent the possibility of other human beings poking into his little niche and discovering what a hollow lie it all is.
I, with my omnipresent laptop and smartphone, my kindle and my flash drives full of pdfs, my blog and my facebook and my twitter accounts, am a walking, talking, info-flooding obscenity to these guys. I like it. Now why, though, should they find the data-driven life so disgusting? You can guess why.
Griffiths builds on the religious tradition in which curiosity is condemned because it distracts men from the study and worship of God, shackling them, says Augustine, “to an inferior love.” But curiosity can also distract men from secular obligations by so occupying their minds that there is no room left for other considerations. These men (and women) fail to register the pain of animals subjected to experiments in the name of knowledge, pay no heed to the social consequences of their investigations, and take no heed of the warnings issued in Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus,” Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (not to mention the myth of Pandora and the Incredible Hulk).
God likes his people uninformed, ignorant, and close-minded. With good reason: if his followers aren’t that way, they might discover what a sham the priests have erected. I reject such self-serving excuses.
The social consciousness argument has a little more weight, but is still unconvincing. Scientists have changed the world, and that always causes stresses on society, the kinds of stresses that writers like the ones he cites have explored. That does not imply that scientists are somehow outside of the culture they are changing; we do pay attention, we have to. The point is, though, that we change social realities because we are bringing about greater understanding of material realities, and if our beliefs about how the universe works are confronted with the reality of how the universe works, we think it is the beliefs that ought to change, because the universe is not going to bend to our convenience. We are responsive to nature, not the contrived dogma of theologians.
As for his dig against animal experimentation…he’s clueless and has never been in a research lab. We care very much about the comfort of our animals.
They are obsessive and obsessed and exhibit, says John Henry Newman, something akin to a mental disorder. “In such persons reason acts almost as feebly and as impotently as in the madman: once fairly started on a subject, they have no power of self-control” (“The Idea of a University”). They have no power of self-control because they have no allegiance — to a deity, to human flourishing, to community — that might serve as a check on their insatiable curiosity. (Curiosity is inherently insatiable; its satisfactions are only momentary; there is always another horizon.)
In short, curiosity — sometimes called research, sometimes called unfettered inquiry, sometimes called progress, sometimes called academic freedom — is their God. The question, posed by thinkers from Aquinas to Augustine to Newman to Griffiths, is whether this is the God — the God, ultimately, of self — we want to worship. Given the evidence, including Chairman Leach’s address, the answer would seem to be yes.
Wow. Curiosity as a mental disorder: are these people not primates? It’s a behavior that practically defines us naked monkeys! There is no greater joy and no more satisfying experience than exploring new avenues and discovering new ideas. It’s what makes us civilized humans and not cows or jellyfish or barnacles. It’s how Stanley Fish ends up clucking over our insatiable desire to learn more and do more…on the internet, with his computer, from his position as an academic at a university. It’s a bit hypocritical, don’t you think? He should at least be living in a cave, draped in animal skins, and scrawling his treatises in charcoal on flat pieces of rock.
Or better yet, his ideal life of the mind would be better spent sessile, locked in a limestone shell, with his only interaction with the world being the gentle scraping of his environment for little slimy gleanings of food. He could worship god as he did so, as well.
The rest of us…well, we’ll try to reach a little higher and a little deeper, and enjoy our curiosity.
Frank Schaeffer was on fire in this interview with Rachel Maddow, prompted by a bizarre NJ poll that showed 35% of the conservatives in that state believe Obama is the anti-christ. Heh, “We have a village idiot in this country, it’s called fundamentalist Christianity”. Gold star for Schaeffer!
He’s right. Those are minds that are lost, and we have to move past them.
A recent survey that correlated the degree of fundamentalism, as measured by positive responses to questions about the absolute, literal truth of the Bible, and teenage birth rates, has discovered something we all suspected all along: fundie kids are getting pregnant despite their stern, restrictive upbringing. There are caveats, of course, and some implied messages here.
However, the results don’t say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: “We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”
Fancy that. The adolescent sex drive is a power greater than Jesus.
Uh, there is a Team Canada, isn’t there? Many of you may have noticed that Dennis Markuze has been going on a commenting spree lately. He’s leaving a few hundred threatening messages a day, which I clean up as I find them, and has also said he is emailing these threats to every individual member of my university (I haven’t verified that he has yet, but he has done so in the past). I’d say he is just another deranged spammer, except that he’s been escalating lately — the messages have become more personal and much more violent. Here’s a small sample of the terroristic threats he’s sending out:
i will execute you. the police wont save you
God told me to MURDER you…
pz and his entire family will burn in HELL…
police won’t save that fucker from me…
you will be executed without mercy…
you have forfeit your lives…
and the police wont save you…
see, the entire university is going to be destroyed because of
blaspheming PZ…
this will be sent to every member of the University…
police won’t save that fucker from me…
did you know that blasphemy is punishable by DEATH and I am here
to execute all of you?
He is quite simply insane, and unfortunately, he’s got violent delusions and is becoming increasingly frenetic in his outbursts. It’s time to call in the police. Unfortunately, he’s Canadian, so I need to contact them…and the Mounties don’t have a station down here in Minnesota. Here are some of his recent IP addresses.
whois 72.12.103.179
B2B2C Inc B2B2C-CABLE (NET-72-12-96-0-1)
72.12.96.0 – 72.12.111.255
CIDC Internal use B2B2C-CABLE1 (NET-72-12-96-0-2)
72.12.96.0 – 72.12.111.255whois 69.70.187.234
Le Groupe Videotron Ltee VL-13BL (NET-69-70-0-0-1)
69.70.0.0 – 69.70.255.255
Videotron Ltee VL-D-QN-4546BB00 (NET-69-70-187-0-1)
69.70.187.0 – 69.70.187.255whois 69.28.232.153
Peer 1 Network Inc. PEER1-BLK-07 (NET-69-28-192-0-1)
69.28.192.0 – 69.28.255.255
3482286 Canada Inc PEER1-3482286CANADA-02 (NET-69-28-232-0-1)
69.28.232.0 – 69.28.233.255
I suspect that he spends his insomniac nights wandering from internet cafe to internet cafe, sitting down for a while in each to tap in his rants and screeds and post them repeatedly to various blogs and forums. It makes it difficult to get his ISP to put a block on him, because he doesn’t seem to have one and is probably using public terminals. He also varies his login name and fake email address, which makes it difficult to block him on my end.
Markuze has been doing this for years and years…I remember him popping up on usenet with this nonsense. We’ve all become somewhat inured to the crazy ranting Canadian with the Nostradamus obsession, and it’s not good — at some point he’s going to snap and cause harm to himself or others, and investigators will look with considerable alarm at the rising tide of hysterical threats he has been posting and wonder why no one did anything.
So let’s do something now. I just need somebody with some knowledge of Canadian legalities to explain how. Suggestions about how to get the RCMP to take this nut seriously would be appreciated.
If nothing else, when my body is found beaten to death with a hockey stick, surrounded by scrawled quatrains from Nostradamus, you’ll all know who was responsible and will be able to point a finger. Seriously. I don’t think I’m his only declared target, and I think he’s too scrambled up in the head to make the concerted effort necessary to get all the way to Morris, Minnesota (and I have mentioned him to the local police), so I’m not barricading my doors — but he has loudly announced his desire to commit mass murder. I think the innocent residents of Ottawa or Montreal (it’s not clear where he lives) are in some danger.
Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in this thread, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown…the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful thread. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal, like Sven. The incidents, the places, the birthdays. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent.
It’s happened again. One thread dies, another is born.
The director of the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History (the one hosting a Discovery Institute event) has posted an open letter about the program. I presume there will be more coming, because while it’s a beginning, I’m not too impressed yet.
Although the museum does not support unscientific views masquerading as science, such as those espoused by the Discovery Institute, the museum does respect the religious beliefs of all people. Moreover, the museum is obligated to rent its public space to any organization that is engaged in lawful activities, free speech and open discourse. The museum does not discriminate against recognized campus organizations based on their religious beliefs, political philosophy, scientific literacy, or any other factors.
It’s nice that they clearly dismiss the DI as unscientific, but they would have been better off leaving out the nonsense about respecting the religious beliefs of all people. They don’t have to come out and say they disrespect some religious beliefs, as I would, but they shouldn’t have pretended otherwise. No one should offer blanket respect to all religious foolishness — the kind offered by the DI, or any creationist group, is antithetical to the mission of a science museum. Do not offer them false comfort!
Their plan to address the bogosity that will be presented in their halls is currently a bit vague.
We invite everyone interested in an accurate description of how life developed over the last four billion years to visit our galleries. The well-organized and scientifically accurate exhibits illustrate – through real specimens and scientific methods – the fact of evolution by natural selection as first described by Charles Darwin and continually supported by all branches of science ever since that time. The museum also recommends that people interested in evolutionary science review the more than 1,000 publications by our curators and professional staff that are based in evolutionary biology.
The museum’s many galleries will be open for free before and after the showing of the Discovery Institute’s film “Darwin’s Dilemma” on Sept. 29 so the public can see that there is no scientific controversy in evolutionary science’s explanation of the development and history of Earth’s biodiversity.
“Read our publications” and “free admission before and after the presentation” will not do the job. I hope that more will be added later — but they really need to directly address the lies that the creationists will be peddling. With this minimal plan, I know exactly what will happen: most of the creationists will arrive just for the DI’s movie, and leave afterwards. They will tell their friends that they saw a movie about science in a science museum that proves that a god created all life on earth. Some might stay a little later and browse, but the DI will have their people there to provide a creationist spin to all the exhibits.
They need to address the dishonesty directly: stir up controversy of their own to get people to want to hear the rebuttals. Don’t claim to respect every religious belief out there; point out that this religious belief is incredibly bad science and rotten theology, and have people lined up to criticize it without the lame excuses. They don’t need to bring in a bunch of atheist hired guns to do that, either: they almost certainly have biologists on campus with religious views of all kinds who will happily agree that intelligent design creationism is garbage.
You can now buy scents on the web that are inspired by HP Lovecraft. For instance, you could get Cthulhu: “A creeping, wet, slithering scent, dripping with seaweed, oceanic plants and dark, unfathomable waters.”
But what if you already smell like that all the time?
(via io9)
There are no more excuses. None.
The defining characteristic of all arguments with creationists is how damned ignorant they are. I’m sure many scientists have been stupefied into stunned silence when they first encounter these people; these advocated of creationism are typically loud and certain and have invested much time and effort into apologetics, but when you sit down and try to have a serious discussion with them, you quickly discover that their knowledge of basic biology is nonexistent. It’s worse than that. We’re used to freshmen entering our classes who don’t know much about the basics, and we can deal with that; these, though, are people with negative knowledge, whose brains are so packed with raging falsehoods that we have to struggle to overcome an unfamiliar hurdle.
For example, last year I got into a radio debate with a Discovery Institute creationist, Geoffrey Simmons. He had written a whole book for creationists arguing that there are no transitional fossils…yet he had never heard of any of the major fossil discoveries in the whale series, and seemed to have gleaned all of his understanding from a garbled misreading of a short Scientific American article.
It’s infuriating. You want to argue against evolution? Then you’d better have some elementary understanding of what evolution actually says. We’ve got the same phenomenon going on right now in one of the comment threads, where a particularly obtuse creationist, Sean Pitman, is raving about the inadequacy of natural selection. I wouldn’t mind, except that he’s a freaking idiot. This goes on day after day — creationists are mired in a pit of ignorance so deep and so black that it takes incredible patience to lead people out of it (and also, some rhetorical boot-stomping against the fools who are trying to drag others even deeper into the darkness).
I have no illusions that we’ll suddenly see a blossoming of enlightenment, but we now have tools to help us, a whole series of recent books that cover the basics. Everyone should read at least one of these, especially if you’re one of those clowns who wants to argue that there is no evidence for evolution. Read and understand, please; we’ve already got enough idiots who claim to have read them and didn’t grasp anything in them.
Read Donald Prothero’s Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Or Sean Carrol’s The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Or Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Or Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). These are all eminently readable, and are aimed at an audience that knows next to nothing about biology — they will quickly pull you up to a level at which you can at least ask intelligent questions. We even use Carroll’s book here at UMM in our freshman biology course, with the idea that it will introduce them to the concepts they should have gotten in high school, but most didn’t.
Now we have another entry in this collection: Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).
READ IT.
Maybe you already know everything Dawkins writes about in this book, if you’ve got a degree in biology and have done a fair amount of reading in the field; there really aren’t any radical surprises here, just a lovely review of familiar facts. You should read it anyway. Realize that this is the level that you have to operate on if you want to discuss the science of evolution with the public. What this (and the other books I mentioned above) is is a primer on how to communicate the ideas of science to a wider audience. It’s an overview and a synthesis, and it takes each piece of evidence and makes them part of a narrative. This is science plus storytelling — it’s what you have to do.
Or maybe you’re a high school student who is interested in science, but all you’re aware of is that the dumbed-down curriculum in your school has stripped out all of the important content from your courses. Or maybe you’ve got a teacher who is promoting creationism in subtle or not-so-subtle ways in the classroom. Get this book: it will give you the preparation for college that the conservatives on your local school board want to deny you. It’ll also make you ten times smarter than your creationist science teacher, which always feels good.
Hey, and when you graduate, give that science teacher a copy as a parting gift. Or perhaps as a gift to the next class.
Or maybe you’re just a sensible layman who’d like to know more about this subject, but really don’t want to have to get a Master’s degree to understand what the author is talking about. You want something you can read on a quiet Sunday morning, before the football game starts. You want to learn, but you’re not about to invest a lot of sweat in the effort. This is your book. It touches lightly on a lot of lines of evidence, and explains them clearly. You too can become informed painlessly, and for a low, low price!
Like I said, there are no more excuses. If you want to argue for or against evolution, cretins like Ken Ham or Ray Comfort or Carl Baugh or Eric Hovind or any of the thousands of other wandering ranters against the Enlightenment are about to face a big problem: more and more of the people in their audiences are going to have read these books, and are going to be prepared to call them on their bullshit. The enemy of ignorance is education, and the creationists know that; it’s why there is so much effort by the religious conservatives to destroy public education. These are books that provide an end-run around the current deficiencies in science education in this one area, and what they ought to do is help people question the wanna-be theocrats. If they lie about evolution, if they are so transparently wrong about this one subject, maybe more people will wake up to the anti-science agenda so many are peddling in this country.
Dawkins’ new book is very much a grenade thrown right at the heart of the creationists. The God Delusion was a kind of wake-up slap to shake people into attention, and now The Greatest Show on Earth follows on to pound them into the ground with a fusillade of evidence backed up by sound theoretical explanations. It’s all beautifully explained, too, a kind of elegant overview of the various lines of evidence supporting evolutionary theory, with much of the discussion informed by an awareness of the kinds of denial creationists typically make.
Read it, please, please, please.
We need a vocal and informed group of activists in this country who understand the science, but we can’t demand that they all go to grad school. This book and others like it will help us build the intellectual foundation and the network of well-versed literate elites who can can address the rot at the root.
You don’t need to watch a spooky movie or visit a haunted house to see dead zombies walk: you’ve got an Intelligent Design creationism conference going on in Castle Rock! Watch them stagger about, drooling, looking for some brains, frustrated because there aren’t any on stage. They’ve got Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and David Berlinski (oooh, a zombie with an affected air of superciliousness! Creepy!), and they’re going to explain to you how Darwin drowned the world in a sea of meaninglessness. And you get to learn how to turn the tide! Right.
It’s a little bit revealing, too, that this is organized by the Shepherd Project, which provides “Christian speakers, conferences and resources to help Christians maximize their impact on the world for the sake of God’s Kingdom”. I thought ID was a secular hypothesis? Was I wrong?
