When the data is weak, there’s always the internet poll to prop it up

A much-abused study showed that in poor neighborhoods with low academic opportunities, better scholastic performance was correlated with church attendance. This slim thread has been seized upon by religious apologists to justify claims that church attendance improves kids’ grades, and is usually accompanied by anecdotes about good church-going children being studious and diligent. The evidence is poor and getting worse, how low can it sink?

You know where it can go, to the worthless world of the internet poll.

Do you think attending church can improve kids’ grades?

Yes 52%
No 36%
Don’t know 12%

I think it is completely unsurprising that academic scores can be improved with discipline, and that part of that family discipline will be expressed in church attendance, in religious families. It’s a long reach to claiming a causal relationship between church and grades, though.

Nessie disproves evolution…in the UK, at least

Here is a piece of text from a textbook used by fundamentalist Christians in a biology class.

Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie,’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

Could a fish have developed into a dinosaur? As astonishing as it may seem, many evolutionists theorize that fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles. This gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis. No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all.

Oy, that’s familiar tripe — creationists repeat this kind of nonsense over and over again. The cryptozoology angle is also drearily common: many creationists think dinosaurs and humans coexisted recently, and that dinosaurs even still exist in exotic locations like the Congo and Canada. The existence of modern dinosaurs is considered evidence against evolution.

So that book is unsurprisingly stupid. There is something surprising about it, though: a UK government agency has just decided that such garbage is legitimate education, and has declared the fundamentalist young-earth creationist curriculum to be equivalent to their international A-levels. This agency, the National Recognition Information Centre (Naric), is blithely advising employers and universities that students who have gone through the creationist indoctrination and propaganda program have received a respectable education in science.

Well, you now know how much to trust a Naric recommendation. Not at all.

The future is roaring your way…

Edge hosted an amazing session that described the looming future of biology — this is for the real futurists. It featured George Church and Craig Venter talking about synthetic genomics — how we’re building new organisms right now and with presentiments for radical prospects in the future.

Brace yourself. There are six hours of video there; I’ve only started wading into it, but what I’ve seen so far also looks like a lot of material that will be very useful for inspiring students about the future of their field. There is also a downloadable book (which is a dead link right now, but I’m sure will be fixed soon) if you don’t want to watch the talks…but the talks are pretty darned good. Somehow, I’m going to have to make time to soak these up. Here’s the overview of the six sessions:

  • Dreams & Nightmares
    Overview, safety/security/policy, nanotechnology, molecular manufacturing

  • Smaller than life
    What is life, origins, in vitro synthetic life, mirror life, computing and DNA, computing with DNA

  • Engineering microbes
    Bio-petrochemicals & pharmaceuticals, accelerated lab evolution

  • Engineering humans
    Electronic-biological interfaces, bioengineered personal stem cells, humanized mice, bringing back extinct species

  • The sorceror
    The diversity of life, constructing life, from Darwin to new fuels

  • The near future, big questions
    Terraforming earth, creating extraterrestrials, the singularity, human nature

There goes your weekend.

Cobb County does something right

Cobb County, Georgia is infamous for its efforts a few years ago to slap a warning sticker on biology textbooks, which might have given the impression that it’s full of southern yahoos. However, intelligent people and godless people are everywhere, including Cobb County, and they now have another claim to fame: a local atheist, Edward Buckner, used the opening invocation of a county board meeting to deliver a godless homily. It’s not bad; you can hear it online. He spoke for all the people who do not attend church, and who do not want their government interfering in religion, and decried the ‘hypocritical piety’ of using a board meeting to promote a faith. He also closed by telling people that if they resented his point of view being expressed at the meeting, they should urge county officials to stop using the meeting to discuss religion and philosophy.

Of course some people were annoyed.

County board of commissioners chairman Sam Olens, reached by phone Wednesday night, said he was offended by Buckner’s actions.

“Did I find his comments repugnant and insulting? Yes,” Olens said. “He abused the process by giving an opinion … rather than providing inspiration.”

I do not find prayers at all inspiring, but I thought Buckner’s comments were thoughtful and interesting, and a better way to start a meeting than conjuring up an invisible spirit. I predict, however, that Olens is completely incapable of seeing his prayers the way we do, as also repugnant and insulting. That we’ve tolerated such nonsense for so long does not mean we have to continue to sit silently while parasites mumble incantations, and it’s a good opportunity for people like Olens to have the situation turned about so that they need to learn some tolerance themselves.

Biological pareidolia

Jesus in a pita, Madonna in bird poop, gods speaking through the arrangement of viscera…we’re used to ridiculous religious pattern seeking. A reader, Mike Barnes, wrote in to tell me about a scientist who has been playing the same game: Francis Collins sees DNA in stained glass windows.

i-c75755a92837fc70486265e96726c544-dna_rose.jpeg

Collins showed two images–a stained-glass rose window often seen in Christian churches, and an eerily similar graphic that he described as “looking down the barrel” of DNA’s double helix.

“I’m not trying to say that there’s something inherently religious” in the DNA image, Collins emphasized. “But, I think it is emblematic of the potential here of the topic to both interest people and to make them unsettled. Can you, in fact, admire both of these [images]? Can you do it at the same time? Is there an inherent problem in having both a scientific world view and a spiritual world view?”

You know you’ve taken a long stroll on a short limb when you start using phrases like “emblematic of the potential” and start seeing significance in the fact that people can see what they want to see in a random image. Collins is also making a peculiar leap to associate the Rose Window with ‘spirituality’. As Barnes explains:

In his 2008 lecture Francis Collins used a slide of York Minster’s beautiful Rose Window as his first religious analogy. Not only is this spurious in principle, but also in fact:

I went to York University; a good friend (and atheist) was doing his PhD on the stained glass of York Minster. First, and more trivially, the Rose Window only looks the way it does on Collins’ slide because the medium of film completely distorts the exposure to create a spurious silhouette effect. It was never intended to be seen, or its meaning ‘read’, this way.

Also, Collins uses the Rose Window/genome slide and asks “do you have to make a choice between these two?”. (science versus religion, he supposes) In fact the Rose Window was designed in the 16th century as propaganda for the bloodthirsty Tudor dynasty, celebrating the union of Henry 7th and Elizabeth of York. The rose was the dynastic symbol: red for Lancashire, white for York. So the roses round the edge are as much symbols of victorious, naked state power as swastikas were in Nazi Germany – albeit more picturesque.

So, nothing to do with god or Jebus – or is the mere fact it’s situated in a Cathedral enough for Collins?

I’ve seen this comparison of Rose Window/DNA genome on Christian propaganda before and as someone who saw the original it annoys me a lot. Collins assumes a photographically-distorted soft-focus image can ‘say’ something about the genome. Unless he simply means, ‘here’s something old and pretty to see, and hey, the genome kinda looks like it’ the facts about the Rose Window blow his analogy to pieces. Or maybe he really loves old, bloodthirsty tyrants?

I can look at the Rose Window and see a piece of history; some interesting architecture; a pretty pattern; the product of skilled human labor; a monument to oppression; a relic of institutionalized superstition. There are also a few things I do not see. I do not see DNA, except that both DNA and the window share the extremely general property of exhibiting radial symmetry. I also do not see the hand of any god, because it is entirely the product of human hands and minds. There is an inherent problem in “having a spiritual worldview”, in that it compels Collins to see things that are not there.

Whatever you do, don’t let anyone show Collins the structure of laminin or potassium channels! I know it’s too late to shield him from the sight of waterfalls.

They’re back

When all the site problems were at their worst, one of the things I did to try and lighten the server’s load was to remove the random quotes feature here. It didn’t seem to help, and boy, did I get lots of email complaining about their absence — I didn’t think you guys would even notice!

Anyway, I’ve restored them now. Look over to the left, just below the big red A and the Americans United logo.

Licentious pants

A Sudanese woman, Lubna Hussein, is facing the barbaric punishment of 40 lashes for a crime against public morality: wearing pants. Not not wearing pants, but wearing pants. She was busted in the act of wearing pants while having dinner at a nice restaurant in Khartoum. They were green. I’m sure those little details have got your imagination churning away now.

This is an interesting case, illustrating the way some people feel that social mores are a club to be used to smash individual freedom, and how women especially are targets for opression. Hussein’s ‘offense’ was so trivial, and her punishment so disproportionate, that it highlights the absurdity and criminality of the strict traditionalist position. The story also has a poll that brings up another interesting point:

Should the UN step in and protect this journalist, considering she works for them?

Yes, they need to protect her and stand up for woman’s rights. 81%

No, she broke the law of the country. It is not for the UN to solve. 16%
I’m not sure. 3%

There is an issue of cultural autonomy here — we have this kind of ‘prime directive’ mindset that we shouldn’t be imperialists disrupting different societies. It seems to me, though, that when we’re talking about large groups of human beings who are being consistently oppressed by a bizarre historical and partly biological quirk like patriarchy, perhaps we have an obligation to meddle.

They’re going to need a ban against magic

Uh-oh. This cartoon about what might happen at the Creation “Museum” might put the monitoring security detail in Kentucky into a tizzy — in addition to the No Rude T-Shirts rule, they’ll have to add a No Transformation into Cephalopods rule. Better renew the magical wards and holy anointings and blessings on the buildings, boys, the godless are coming to ignore your metaphysics.

One other inaccuracy in the cartoon, though: there will be no Canned Ham during our visit. The head of AiG will not be present, due to a prior engagement on the west coast. Just as well, I don’t think he likes me very much.

The Huffington snake oil

Many of us have long noticed the truly awful quackery hosted at the Huffington Post, with acupuncturists, anti-vax fanatics, and general all-around kooks like Deepak Chopra given free rein.

Now Salon has pointed out the obvious, with some depth. Have you wondered why the HuffPo is so bad on science and medicine? The blame can be pinned directly on Arianna Huffington, who hand-picked with little discrimination or sense who the ‘medical’ contributors to the site would be. That’s the scatter-brained, credulous brain of Arianna on display in that mess on HuffPo.