Pikers

Look here: Britain’s National Health Service threw away £12 million on homeopathic treatments. It’s a complete waste; millions were spent on teeny-tiny bottles of ‘special’ water that could have been had for pennies from the local water tap.

But hah! America is #1! We spent $2.5 billion on remedies that don’t work! Doesn’t that make you all feel so good right now? Now one might reasonably argue that paying all that money for clear negative results really isn’t that bad; good science doesn’t begin with your conclusion, and good studies can show that a hypothesis was wrong. Unfortunately, these were studies that a) were begun with no good reason to think they would work (the principles of sympathetic magic are not valid premises for research), and b) despite the fact that the treatments were disproven, quacks will continue to peddle them, and gullible people will continue to use them.

While I’m complaining about altie nonsense, remind me to never get in an auto accident in Maryland. I might get tucked into a helicopter and flown to this:

At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.
They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields.

Thanks, Rogue Medic, you’ve just increased my fear of hospitals.

Theistic evolutionist beats hasty retreat

Jerry Coyne’s criticism of accommodationism by evolutionists seems to still be shaking a few trees and is generating an endless debate. Ken Miller has posted a long rebuttal. It’s mainly interesting for the way Miller flees from theism.

His first and only defense seems to be a denial of most of the implications of an interventionist deity…which is, of course, fine with me. He argues that all of his arguments about how a god could have intervened are carefully phrased in terms of conditional probabilities — he’s not describing what actually happened, but how a god might have meddled in the world, and then he openly states that any such interference would be beyond the ability of science to investigate. Well, OK. We could use the same logic to argue for the hypothetical role of elves in human history. I don’t see Miller or anyone else writing books about Finding Darwin’s Elves, however.

He then runs through various references from his books, and points out that he has been scrupulous about keeping the supernatural out of his explanations. This is true; whenever Miller talks about science, he’s careful not to play the “goddidit” gambit. He even says that you’d find “passages very much like that in some of Richard Dawkins’ books”, which is rather interesting and a point worth emphasizing. When scientists talk about evolution, it doesn’t matter whether you are a Miller or a Dawkins…the ideas are all the same. Note, however, that this occurs without Dawkins conceding a single point about a deity, while, as we see in his latest essay, Miller has to disavow any detection of divine tinkering at all.

It gets a little weird. Miller is reduced to embracing Dawkins and Carl Sagan, while claiming Coyne’s supporters are Bill Buckingham, Don McLeroy, and Phillip Johnson. Miller writes a book titled Finding Darwin’s God, but somehow he can claim this has nothing to do with mingling theism with evolution. It all reads as something rather disingenuous.

One thing I’d really like to have seen is something simple: is there anything that distinguishes the science of Coyne and Dawkins from that of Miller? Miller is quick to complain that his views have been twisted, but he only seems to want to say how everyone else is wrong, without clarifying exactly what his views on theistic explanations in evolution are. If they’re effectively excluded from scientific scrutiny, as he states, why should we bother with them at all? If any godly interventions would be indetectable, why shouldn’t we simply show the door to anyone who claims to have found reason to believe in them? Even more oddly, why should we credit any sectarian version of this interventionist deity — why Christian, or specifically Catholic, over any other supernatural tradition? Are we really supposed to accept that a vague deism and Catholicism are philosophically indistinguishable from one another?

Finally, two little details in his essay that bug me in particular.

In an essay in which he indignantly protests that his words have been twisted, he really ought to be more careful about twisting the words of others. He complains that Coyne argues that “Apparently, NAS and the NCSE ought to change their ways, come out of the intellectual closet, and admit that only one position is consistent with evolution — a philosophical naturalism that requires doctrinaire atheism on all questions of faith.”

I think if you actually read what Coyne wrote, he’s careful and explicit to say the exact opposite. He’s pointing out that those organizations have not been neutral, but have effectively endorsed a specific position favoring theistic evolution. He and I both have said that they should not demand atheistic purity, but that they should either stop making one-sided arguments for fluffy, boring, ‘innocuous’, and scientifically unsupportable theistic evolution, or they should be more careful to accurately represent the range of views of scientists, which includes atheists.

The final thing I find objectionable in the essay is Miller’s parting threat. I see this all the time, and seriously…every time, my lip curls in a sneer of disgust. It’s this genuinely stupid argument:

The tragedy of Coyne’s argument is the way in which it seeks to enlist science in a frankly philosophical crusade — a campaign to purge science of religionists in the name of doctrinal purity. That campaign will surely fail, but in so doing it may divert those of us who cherish science from a far more urgent task, especially in America today. That is the task of defending scientific rationalism from those who, in the name of religion would subvert it beyond all recognition. In that critical struggle, scientists who are also people of faith are critical allies, and we would do well not to turn those “Ardent Theists” away.

Set aside the claim that Coyne is on a crusade to purge biology — it’s a false assertion. What I really object to is the goofy “if you don’t be nice to god belief, the churchy scientists will take their ball home”. I metaphorically puke on the shoes of anyone who tries to make that argument.

Turn it around. Can you imagine atheist scientists saying that, if the NAS and NCSE keep talking the god talk, we’ll stop being allies in support of evolutionary biology and good science education? That we’ll be turned away and go do what, support Buckingham and McLeroy and Johnson? Pssht.

If theistic scientists are going to “turn away” from the science because of vigorous debate by the atheist contingent, then that gives the lie to the claim that they are not prioritizing their superstitions over science, and suggests that they aren’t really our allies in promoting good science. It’s a genuinely contemptible argument.

Further evidence that I am a monster

We have two cats, and one of them, Merle, is a shaggy long-haired black beast. And I mean, really shaggy, and shedding constantly. Our first defense against burglary, I think, is the thick clouds of cat fur floating through the atmosphere in our house.

Well, last week, I had enough. I opened the freezer in our kitchen and discovered that all the ice cubes were matted with black hairy clumps. It was disgusting. I’ve told Merle over and over that if she’s going to sneak into the good Scotch behind my back, fine, but she’s going to drink it neat, like a civilized person. So now I’ve taken care of her.

[Read more…]

Cell phone warning

I just got a bunch of email from various people warning me that my cell phone number (no, you can’t have it) is going to be sold to telemarketers next month, and I need to call a certain phone number right away to get it blocked. I must have a cynical mind, because my first thought was that if I were a telemarketer who wanted to fish up a bunch of ripe cell phone numbers, I’d send out bulk email telling people who hated telemarketers to call me on their cell phone.

I was right. I checked Snopes, and there is no proposed sell-off of cell numbers, and calling the number given won’t help you in the slightest.

This has been a public service announcement. If you receive that email, do not call, just hit delete.

Reaching creationists: here’s the toolbox, do you know how to use the tools?

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading the articles in the latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach. This is a fairly new journal with the mission stated in the title, and I have to say that it is very, very good — the articles are almost always easily readable, and they address significant issues in the public understanding of evolution. This particular issue focuses on transitions, and not just on transitional fossils, but all kinds of evidence for change over evolutionary time. It’s been commented on by Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne, and they’re entirely right that these are extremely useful articles, not just in providing helpful data when addressing arguments about evolution, but they’re also loaded with figures that I’ll be stealing using for my own lectures.

I have to say something a little peculiar, though. It’s not really a criticism, because I’m not going to argue against these articles at all—I repeat, they are informative and useful and great to read! However, I am concerned that they address one audience, but it’s not the audience we have to really worry about. The kinds of people who will read and enjoy those articles are scientists who appreciate a good overview of a field, the kinds of informed citizens who would, for instance, read a science blog, and educators in general who want more substance about evolution to include in their classes. Creationists are not the journal’s clientele. That means that sometimes the articles miss the mark on who we need to persuade.

For example, T. Ryan Gregory’s overview of the principles of natural selection, Understanding Natural Selection: Essential Concepts and Common Misconceptions, makes an important point: selection is surprisingly difficult for many people to grasp. This is entirely true, but we sometimes mislead ourselves because once you get those few basic principles, and I mean really understand them, suddenly selection seems simple and even intuitive…and most of us doing the teaching and public outreach are solidly in that blissful state of easy comprehension.

And this isn’t at all unusual. Gregory provides a taxonomy of common conceptual errors, and points out that many of these errors, such as the idea of inheritance of acquired characters, have been held by some of the greatest minds of Western civilization, from Aristotle to Darwin.

Here’s the catch: we can see how to explain selection to Aristotle and Darwin now, but unfortunately, creationists are not a collection of Aristotles and Darwins. I wouldn’t go far the other way and say they’re all stupid, but they do have lots of ideas that are so egregiously wrong that they don’t fit into Gregory’s schemata.

For instance, here’s a nice diagram of correct and incorrect views of how selection works.

i-9710703ab05e162120038bb9b7f662ea-sel_models.jpeg
A highly simplified depiction of natural selection (Correct) and a generalized illustration of various common misconceptions about the mechanism (Incorrect). Properly understood, natural selection occurs as follows: (A) A population of organisms exhibits variation in a particular trait that is relevant to survival in a given environment. In this diagram, darker coloration happens to be beneficial, but in another environment, the opposite could be true. As a result of their traits, not all individuals in Generation 1 survive equally well, meaning that only a non-random subsample ultimately will succeed in reproducing and passing on their traits (B). Note that no individual organisms in Generation 1 change, rather the proportion of individuals with different traits changes in the population. The individuals who survive from Generation 1 reproduce to produce Generation 2. (C) Because the trait in question is heritable, this second generation will (mostly) resemble the parent generation. However, mutations have also occurred, which are undirected (i.e., they occur at random in terms of the consequences of changing traits), leading to both lighter and darker offspring in Generation 2 as compared to their parents in Generation 1. In this environment, lighter mutants are less successful and darker mutants are more successful than the parental average. Once again, there is non-random survival among individuals in the population, with darker traits becoming disproportionately common due to the death of lighter individuals (D). This subset of Generation 2 proceeds to reproduce. Again, the traits of the survivors are passed on, but there is also undirected mutation leading to both deleterious and beneficial differences among the offspring (E). (F) This process of undirected mutation and natural selection (non-random differences in survival and reproductive success) occurs over many generations, each time leading to a concentration of the most beneficial traits in the next generation. By Generation N, the population is composed almost entirely of very dark individuals. The population can now be said to have become adapted to the environment in which darker traits are the most successful. This contrasts with the intuitive notion of adaptation held by most students and non-biologists. In the most common version, populations are seen as uniform, with variation being at most an anomalous deviation from the norm (X). It is assumed that all members within a single generation change in response to pressures imposed by the environment (Y). When these individuals reproduce, they are thought to pass on their acquired traits. Moreover, any changes that do occur due to mutation are imagined to be exclusively in the direction of improvement (Z). Studies have revealed that it can be very difficult for non-experts to abandon this intuitive interpretation in favor of a scientifically valid understanding of the mechanism.

This is very nice. I can see using this in my freshman biology class right away — it’s very handy to be able to contrast correct and incorrect views, and it would provoke some thinking and discussion, since I know many of my students think just like the right panel illustrates (at least, before I’m done with them they do). Of course, my students tend to be motivated to understand, with some background in biology already, or they wouldn’t be biology majors.

Unfortunately, whenever I sit down and talk with full-blooded creationists, their views aren’t even incorrect. They’re so wrong, they’re completely off of Gregory’s charts.

For a public example of this phenomenon, look at Ray Comfort’s ideas about the evolution of sex. He seriously believes that every kind of animal had to independently evolve all of its primary properties in one sudden sweep. When elephants evolved, they had to simultaneously evolve female elephants; the idea that some traits do not have to evolve anew because they are shared with the parent population is incomprehensible to him.

Another fellow with a similar misconception is Jim Pinkoski, who states this idea rather baldly.

If “evolution” is true, then each major life form would have to evolve it’s own eyes (as well as every other major organ of its body)!

He illustrates this with a picture of a T. rex that has evolved a single eye, and then “wants” to evolve another eye. This is a really common belief, that new features arise as a consequence of desire by individuals.

These are the beliefs of the people doing public outreach on behalf of creationism, and the ordinary guy who passively accepts this stuff is even weirder. Every time I’ve had a one-on-one conversation with a casual creationist, there is always a moment when I am weirded out to the max by some genuinely twisted irrationality they trot out in their defense. We make a mistake when we look to the intellectual history of an idea to figure out how they rationalize creationism, because there is virtually no intellectual history there. They are not building on a foundation of ideas at all — they have a religious preconception of how species arise, and their vision of evolution is a hodge-podge of ad hoc contrivances chosen specifically to be absurd and unbelievable. They are not trying to explain, as Aristotle and Darwin were; they are trying to invent reasons to reject.

Like I said, this is not a criticism of Gregory’s paper, which does an excellent job at its purpose of making reasonably knowledgeable people even better informed. I think, though, that there’s a missing piece in the story: how do we turn grossly ignorant people into reasonably knowledgeable people? That’s a really difficult problem.

This is an even bigger problem in the other articles in the issue. For instance, probably my favorite article in the whole issue was Edgecombe’s Palaeontological and Molecular Evidence Linking Arthropods, Onychophorans, and other Ecdysozoa, which weighs the evidence in the great dispute between the cladists who favor a grouping of invertebrates into an Articulata clade, vs. an Ecdysozoan clade. It’s grand, big-picture macroevolution, discussing the relationships of whole phyla in deep time, and it also promotes the importance of multi-disciplinary thinking, basing conclusions on molecules, morphology, and fossils. It isn’t shy at all about bringing up the problematic taxa (where the heck do tardigrades belong, anyway?) either. It’s a wonderfully chewy article that helped clarify my perspectives on the discussion.

Again, not a complaint — this article is going straight into my file of very helpful reviews. But now imagine sitting down over coffee with an enthusiastic Hovind supporter right after church; this article is going to lose him right at the title. He doesn’t know what you mean by arthropod, let alone onychophoran. Throw articulata, cycloneuralia, and ecdysozoa at him from the abstract, and he’s going to tell you how much smarter the Hovinds are than you, because at least what they say is in English and makes sense to him.

This is tough stuff. How I would explain this paper to you, the readers of a blog like Pharyngula, would be close to what Edgecombe wrote, but how I would explain it to a run-of-the-mill church-going creationist would have to be very different. I think the way I would try it would be to start with figure 1 from the paper, which shows diverse representatives of the Ecdysozoa:

i-b39e7c019fec3887d6e5db0e4a449eaf-ecdysozoa.jpeg
Examples of the phyla of molting animals grouped with arthropods in Ecdysozoa. a Nematoda (Draconema sp.); b Nematomorpha (Spinochordodes tellinii); c Loricifera (Nanaloricus mysticus); d Onychophora (Peripatoides aurorbis); e Tardigrada (Tanarctus bubulubus); f Priapulida (Priapulus caudatus); g Kinorhyncha (Campyloderes macquariae).

Then I would explain that the paper describes the multiple lines of evidence that support macroevolutionary explanations for how all these extremely different kinds of invertebrates had a common ancestor, and then let him raise any questions about how it was done. And I would brace myself for some radically weird questions that I would never have imagined ahead of time. This is a business where flexibility is a requirement.

I am not saying that my hypothetical creationist conversationalist is stupid at all — but that he is grossly uninformed and misinformed, and comes from a background that did not provide him with the rational history of the ideas that would give him any reasonable context with which to even consider the paper. It’s a missing piece of the mission for evolutionary outreach: how do we wake those people up?

Don’t let that dissuade you from reading the journal, though. I think that where it helps most is that it will give non-experts with a reasonable grounding in science more information that they can use in arguments with creationists. When it comes to communicating the information to others though, you’re on your own…and in a lot of ways, that part, getting complex ideas across to people who are actively denying the evidence, is the hardest part of the story.

Texas dingleberries

Once again, Texas leads the way in absurdities. One kook has decided he doesn’t like to say hello, and has convinced the whole county to go along with him. Can you guess why?

In this friendly little ranching town, “hello” is wearing out its welcome. And Leonso Canales Jr. is happy as heck.

At his urging, the Kleberg County commissioners on Monday unanimously designated “heaven-o” as the county’s official greeting. The reason: “hello” contains the word “hell.”

For some reason, I now really want Michelle Obama to visit the Hellespont to collect seashells and read Percy Shelley, just so it can be reported in the Kleberg County newspapers.

Good news from outer space! The aliens are coming!

Would you believe the aliens are on the way?

The words ‘Nous ne sommes pas seuls’ or ‘We are not alone’ will be somberly pronounced this week by a senior Government official of the nation that brought the world ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’. France is set to concede that it is aware of an alien presence on earth by no later than Friday.

Paris has chosen follow the lead of maverick UFO nation Brazil and resist US pressure to continue delaying disclosure until America feels it is ready for the event.

It is believed that a telephone hot-line has been set up in Paris to deal with queries from panicky citizens. A special division of France’s police department is also to be established: to handle UFO reports.

The French have gone to so much effort to protect their culture from encroaching ‘Anglo-Saxon’ influences and now they are preparing to protect their culture from what might be even more powerful extraterrestrial forces.

It is believed Holland and Germany are set to soon follow France’s lead.

You heard it here. Be prepared for the astounding formal press announcements this week.

What, you don’t believe it? Look, the author said “it is believed”…isn’t that enough for you? This is the same author who made this persuasive announcement last month.

The numbers are growing daily of those on planet earth calling for full disclosure of Galactic Presence…and we are talking about beings who are benevolent to humans and have our best and highest interest for no more war, poverty, disease, and isolation from the rest of the multiverse.

To say that these are exciting times is an understatement. I have a friend who writes that all of those who have “transitioned” in physical death since 1999 are indeed on the starships and will be returning as we make our ascension leap as a planet.

Whatever your concept of other life forms not confined to Terra Nova, these topics warrant a place in our awareness as we move higher.

I am delighted to share an article written by Steve Beckow that puts this in perspective and reflects many of my own perceptions. I thank Steve for sharing his concepts with us and I join him in requesting FULL Disclosure from our President Barack Obama.

Oodles of credibility, see?

A $48,000 Macintosh computer

I want one, but I’ll have to wait for the price to drop just a little bit…and I’m confident that the price will plummet in the next few years. It’s really just a stock Mac, but it has something special on it: a copy of your very own genome sequence. The whole thing. Oooh.

Give it a few years, and the price of sequencing your genome will drop to a few thousand dollars, and then below a thousand…and then I’ll be going for it. Unfortunately, at those prices they probably won’t throw in a new computer with it.