Wow — is this stupid or what?

At the last couple of talks I’ve given out here on the west coast, I’ve begun by introducing the appalling ignorance and illogic of creationist arguments. I think I have a new favorite example.

To summarize: God ordered the soldiers of the Hebrews to march around Jericho 6 times on 6 days, which means they would have traversed 6 * 360°, or 2160 degrees. The moon has a diameter of 2,160 miles. Therefore, God exists.

Bonus points! If you argue that the Hebrews would not have used “miles” as units (although I would have first pointed out that degrees and any linear measurement aren’t directly comparable), that’s just proof that God knew about English units 3,000 years before they were invented. Therefore, God exists and knows everything.

Poe’s Law! I saw that video and thought for sure it had to be a spoof, until I saw it was from VenomFangX, one of the more infamous youtube creationists, and that it has a lot of comments praising his “logic”.

Judge Myers presiding

Man, I’m away on vacation and you rowdies get all raucus and rude in the comments. The powers-that-be at Seed have received a complaint about your heinous behavior, and have asked me (politely, and with assurances that I have full control over how to handle this situation) to address it. Here is the complaint:

Dear Sir/Madam

I wish to complain about offensive sexual language directed towards me on one of your blogs. I have included the full quote below and a link to the offensive comment. I would appreciate your attention on this matter as I consider this deeply offensive.

Thank you
Brenda von Ahsen

Here is the offensive comment. It contains quotes from other comments by Brenda herself on that thread.

Re: #79

You all can’t be so willfully stupid that you take him literally can you? Oh, I see that you can be that stupid. This is why I repeatedly wonder if it is possible for there to be any discussion at all. It seems futile, especially given the juvenile behavior here.

Re: #224

You’re spoiled, arrogant asshats who cannot treat anyone who disagrees with you with even a modicum of respect.

Brenda, you ignorant slut.

You are a pompous liar, front to back. You have been soundly spanked.

Posted by: CortxVortx | June 3, 2008 10:04 PM

Oh, dear. What am I to do?

Hmmm. Brenda accuses everyone else of being “willfully stupid,” “juvenile,” and of being “spoiled, arrogant asshats,” yet she is the one who is offended because someone dared to recite a well-known humorous line from an old Saturday Night Live skit.

I have done an extensive review of all 58 of Mr CortxVortx’s comments to Pharyngula, and have found a general absence of misogynist malice, but he does seem to have a sense of humor.

Likewise, I have reviewed all 24 of Ms von Ahsen’s comments, and have found a consistent prickliness and the complete absence of a sense of humor.

My judgment: Mr CortxVortx is guilty of a deficiency of vowels in his pseudonym and of doing an almost unrecognizable Dan Ackroyd imitation. As punishment, he is henceforth required to shun all use of lines popularized by the inestimable Mr Ackroyd unless he is also wearing a hat and sunglasses in the style of Jake and/or Elwood Blues.

Ms von Ahsen is guilty of insufferable pretentious self-centeredness. No penalty will be imposed by this blog, as it is punishment enough.

The court is recessed. The next case on the docket may be some clown named Kenny.

The world’s most boring creationist

Wow. This guy is like Ben Stein on quaaludes — and just as wrong, wrong, wrong. The opening premise for his slo-mo diatribe is ridiculous:

True science only reports observable facts, rather than interpretations and assumptions.

Then he goes on with a tedious litany of examples: you are allowed to say that Archaeopteryx is a fossil of a winged animal, but you can’t say it’s transitional or intermediate characters, you can say Tiktaalik is a fossil of a skull and some limb bones, but you can’t say it represents an intermediate between fish and amphibians, yadda yadda yadda.

Unbelievable. First, where does this gomer come off trying to dictate what “True science” is? He’s contradicting practically every scientist in the world!

To claim that science is not about interpretations — that it doesn’t include theories as explanatory frameworks — is patently false. What does he want to do, reduce science to stamp collecting because that’s the most exciting thing his lethargic little mind can handle?

Of course science is all about interpretation — it’s how induction works. We collect data, we interpret it, we make hypotheses and predictions about what we expect to see next, and we test those ideas. No interpretation, nothing to test, science would stagnate.

This is one of the more stupid statements I’ve heard from a creationist yet, but I’m afraid he’s not at all competitive with the likes of Ray Comfort yet. On style, though, the mummified, expressionless head of Daniel Keeran is ahead on points.

My crimes are being documented

So all these people are coming to my talks, and they’re reporting on me! Scott Hatfield caught my talk at the Berkeley IEDG meeting, and even has video of my conclusion. Geoff Arnold has a discussion of my talk at the Pacific Science Center last night.

One odd (or not so odd) thing. Both of those talks have focused entirely on the process of communicating science; I’m making a case for rhetorical strategies to combat the rising tide of creationist foolishness. They have not been about atheism, and I try to phrase everything as universally applicable to even the most devout scientist — I’m telling scientists to express their passions, get out there and be advocates for good science, and to tell beautiful stories.

And what are most of the questions about? Godlessness. Some people seem confused and even angry about the fact that I do not promote compromise with religion, even when I’m trying to promote tactics that are orthogonal to religious belief, and that if I’m asked about religion, I’m completely honest about the fact that it is indefensible bullshit.

Oh, well. I’m speaking on Friday to the Seattle Skeptics, and everyone will be pleased to know, I’m sure, that that talk begins with an introduction in which I trash the bible before moving on to discuss an example of a beautiful science story. Obviously, I need to embrace my inner atheist.

My mother is also coming to that talk. I hope she doesn’t grab me by the ear afterwards and give me a spanking…that would be so embarrassing.

Uh-oh. I’ve been caught on camera wearing bling and flashing gang signs.

Another blithering apologist

I read these lame exercises in making excuses by theologians, and I don’t understand how anyone can be foolish enough to fall for them. The latest example is by Edward Tingley, who babbles on painfully about how believers are the true skeptics, the true scientists, while claiming that the believers have a deeper, stronger knowledge than mere atheists. Yet nowhere in his ramble does Tingley ever give any evidence or rational reason to believe in his god or any god — in fact, he triumphantly declares that there is no evidence — god exists, but (I can scarcely believe he makes this argument seriously) he’s hiding…hiding in such a way that only someone “muscled up with virtues” can see him. It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes argument all over again.

Even worse, how can we sense this evidence? We need to use a special instrument.

That instrument is the heart. “It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason”. “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”. Pascal’s reasons of the heart are meant to take over from an intellect that operates on hard evidence but has run out of it. “The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one”.

It’s all fluff and nonsense. Tingley doesn’t have a skeptical or scientific neuron in his head, and it shows that he’s trying to think with a muscle.

Jeffrey Shallit takes this pretentious airhead down a few more notches. Somebody somewhere is going to have to someday point me to some intelligent arguments for gods, because I’ve sure never found them. And I know, someone is going to complain that I always pick on the weak arguments…while not bothering to tell me what the strong ones are.

Yoko loses

I had mixed feelings about Yoko Ono’s lawsuit against Expelled — fair use is a desirable goal, but I don’t think Premise Media was exercising fair use, since their movie wasn’t about Lennon’s music or ideas — so I can’t say that I’m at all surprised or upset that the lawsuit is likely to go down in flames. I’m also not appreciative of the fact that Lessig thinks this is a “great success”; it is at best a mixed result, because while it may support Lessig’s principled defense of fair use, it is also a case where he’s supporting people who are promoting lies and ignorance.

It really doesn’t matter much now, though. The propaganda movie is a dead issue, a complete flop, and it is not going to come back from the dead after a court decision that had no effect on its declining popularity is reversed.

Aetogate

Sometimes, the politics of science can get ugly, and they don’t get much uglier than this ghastly mess going on among paleontologists. I’ve read a couple of accounts of this story so far, and it sounds to this outsider like a few senior scientists riding roughshod over their junior colleagues and students and appropriating as their own the interpretations and details of others’ explanations. There seem to be shenanigans all over the place, and it seems to be in the interests of all parties involved to resolve the issues.

The sensible thing to do would be to have an impartial review of both sides of the story by neutral but knowledgeable observers — as a non-paleontologist, someone like me would certainly defer to the judgment of such a panel. Well, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science put together a review, supposedly, and did so in such a bumbling, biased, and stupid way that although they decided there was no wrongdoing, I’m persuaded otherwise. Why else make such an effort to assemble a kangaroo court?

Spencer Lucas and his colleagues at the NMMNHS were accused of using the work of William Parker, Jerzy Dzik, and Jeff Martz without proper attribution. To judge this accusation, the NMMNHS put together a committee of external experts that consisted of people who had published with Lucas, one of whom declared his summary judgment before the hearings were held.

Unbelievable.

They’re accused of a serious impropriety, so they blatantly fix the review, packing the jury and even declaring innocence before the trial? That’s compounding a major ethical lapse on top of an accusation of an ethical lapse, and only makes the problem worse. What were they thinking?

How do you make a cephalopod drool?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

We’re all familiar with Pavlov’s conditioning experiments with dogs. Dogs were treated to an unconditioned stimulus — something to which they would normally respond with a specific behavior, in this case, meat juice which would cause them to drool. Then they were simultaneously exposed to the unconditioned stimulus and a new stimulus, the conditioned stimulus, that they would learn to associate with the tasty, drool-worthy stimulus — a bell. Afterwards, ringing a bell alone would cause the dogs to make the drooling response. The ability to make such an association is a measure of the learning ability of the animal.

Now…how do we carry out such an experiment on a cephalopod? And can it be done on a cephalopod with a reputation (perhaps undeserved, as we shall see) as a more primitive, less intelligent member of the clade?

The nautilus, Nautilus pompilius despite being a beautiful animal in its own right, is generally regarded as the simplest of the cephalopods, with a small brain lacking the more specialized areas associated with learning and memory. It’s a relatively slow moving beast, drifting up and down through the water column to forage for food. It has primitive eyes, which to visual animals like ourselves seems to be a mark of less sophisticated sensory processing, but it has an elaborate array of tentacles and rhinophores which it uses to probe for food by touch and smell/taste. Compared to big-eyed, swift squid, a nautilus just seems a little sluggish and slow.

So let’s look and see how good a nautilus’s memory might be. First, we need a response to stimuli that we can recognize and measure, equivalent to the drooling of Pavlov’s dogs. While they don’t measurably salivate, the nautilus does have a reaction to the hint of something tasty in the water — it will extend its tentacles and rhinophores, as seen below, in a quantifiable metric called the tentacle extension response, or TER.

i-7be37621e667c883026d43ae4fe35d87-naut_behav.jpg
The scoring system for tentacle extension response (TER) in chambered nautilus. TER was graded every 5 s from a minimum score of 0 to a
maximum score of 3. Each level corresponds to a range of percentage extension relative to the length of the animalʼs hood. Zero is recorded when all
tentacles are retracted into their sheaths. A score of 1 corresponds to an extension of <33% of the hood length. A score of 2 corresponds to extension
between 34% and 66%, and 3 is given when tentacles are extended beyond 67% of hood length.

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