A defense of the Blasphemy Challenge

Greta Christina has an excellent and lengthy defense of the idea behind the Blasphemy Challenge— that exercise on YouTube that received a lot of criticism from certain quarters because it wasn’t serious or respectful enough. She gets it exactly right: that was the point, to show that religion receives a lot of unwarranted deference. If you’re one of those people who got irate because the challenge mocked and ridiculed religion, thanks for making the case for us: your irritation is what was being pointed to as part of the problem.

Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Go on over to his place and leave a birthday greeting, and be sure to check out the multimedia collection of good wishes.

We wondered what we could do to express our appreciation, and had a hard time figuring out what would be appropriate … until a student asked to borrow one of my copies of The God Delusion because he couldn’t find one anywhere in town. Instead of giving Dawkins a present directly, the Myers family is donating a copy of his book to the local library, where we hope some receptive minds will discover it.

Planet Earth

This evening, I caught most of some episodes of this series the Discovery Channel is airing, Planet Earth, which was advertised here for a while. It wasn’t bad. It had some spectacular photography, did a great job of displaying a wide range of environments, and showed off some of the amazing abilities of animals very well. There were a few things that irritated me, though (I admit it, I criticize everything).

The biggest problem? It’s a show for people with short attention spans. We got brief vignettes of a few minutes—you’d just be getting into the pumas and alpacas in Patagonia, and zip, we’re off to grizzly bears in the Rockies. It was popcorn biology, crunch crunch crunch, you’ve snarfed down a whole bag a few kernels at a time.

That quick glimpse of each biome also meant the focus was entirely on the biggest, most distinctive organisms in the environment, the ol’ charismatic megafauna problem of nature documentaries. For instance, several of the scenes featured whale sharks or dolphins or sailfish chowing down on these great schools of generically named “bait fish”…but hey, wait a minute, aren’t these “bait fish” a rather critical component of the ecosystem? Why not tell us more about them? Treating them as convenient clouds of meat for bigger predators didn’t seem to do them justice.

Still, it was worth watching, and maybe younger kids would have an easier time getting into it. After a few hours exposure, I was feeling a bit whipsawed by the too frequent changes in subject.

Inconceivable!

I just had to say that I stepped outside the door a few minutes ago, and it is 60°F! And almost all the snow is gone! And the sky is blue! And there are birds chirping in the trees!

I think aliens kidnapped me while I wasn’t looking and have transported me to a strange and distant world. But the internet still works here!

No, really, I doubt that religion is adaptive

That Allen MacNeill fella is crazy brave — after trying to approach Intelligent Design seriously as a course subject, now he’s going to teach another controversial summer seminar on whether religion is adaptive. I think where the previous course ran off the rails was in the too-respectful attempt to encourage the participation of the Cornell IDEA club — he basically ended up aiding and abetting a gang of ignorant ideologues, and that’s also the way it got spun in the media, to the creationists’ advantage. I agree that it’s a good idea to engage the counter-culture warriors who are pushing the unscientific glop on the public, but we can’t begin with the premise that ID creationism has some validity; that’s doing the work of the Discovery Institute. Discussion of evolution has to begin with the scientific foundation of modern evolutionary biology, and if anyone wants to wiggle in with their alternatives, they need to do the hard work of providing evidence, first.

I also have to disagree with one of the premises of his course description. After explaining the ubiquity of religious belief, it’s variation, and the existence of people who have no use for religion, he says:

To an evolutionary biologist, such pan-specificity combined with continuous variation strongly suggests that one is dealing with an evolutionary adaptation.

No, it most definitely does not.

I have noticed a lot of students wandering around with these white rectangular objects with cables hooked up to their ears. I’ve also discovered by personal experience with a teenager that these objects are quite precious to their owners, and are practically revered. Yet there are also some students who don’t care at all for them. Do evolutionary biologists look at the iPod and say “A-ha! There is an evolutionary adaptation”? Probably not. Evolutionary psychologists might, but we already know they’re nuts.

I think instead that we ought to determine if there is a hereditary component before talking about its likelihood of having an evolutionary function. Since we see that whole cultures can rapidly, within a few generations, shed much of their religious baggage; since religion seems to be largely a product of indoctrination rather than a built-in product of the brain; and since individuals can exhibit reversals from religiosity to atheism and vice versa within their lifetime, I remain unconvinced that there exists any kind of direct biological predilection for religion. The frequency of a phenomenon is not an indicator of its adaptive value, nor do variations reinforce that notion.

For another example, people in the US largely speak English, with a subset that speak Spanish, and a few other languages represented in scattered groups. That does not mean we should talk about English as an adaptive product of evolution. Language, definitely—there’s clearly a heritable biological element to that ability. Similarly, religion may easily be a consequence of a universal trait like curiosity (we want answers to questions, religion provides them, so it spreads—even if the answers are all wrong) or empathy (we are social animals, we like community activities, religion hijacks that communal urge), but religion itself is but one replaceable instance, an epiphenomenon that too many people mistake for the actual substrate of the behavior.

Someday, Cosmopolitan will ask me to write a piece on beauty tips, too

My opinion of Wired magazine just dropped a couple of notches. They’ve got Gregg Easterbrook pontificating on a science issue, the origin of life. Easterbrook is a sports writer with absolutely no clue about science—I’ve commented on his incompetence a few times before (OK, more than a few times). This time he’s soberly stating that no one has done any research on abiogenesis since Miller/Urey, or what they’ve done is a series of failed experiments, and that there are no hints in nature about the chemical origins of life, therefore, maybe a god did it … while completely oblivious to the fact that no one has ever done any research on gods or higher beings, and that there is no evidence for their existence. The man is an idiot. I am still utterly baffled why anyone consults that twit for his opinion on science.

Well, I don’t need to dirty my hands with the fool this time. Smithers, release the Poor Man Institute!

(By the way, I’ll plug it again: if you’re looking for a good summary of the research in early chemical evolution written for a lay audience, I recommend Hazen’s Genesis. I guarantee you that Easterbrook hasn’t read it, from his comments in that article linked above.)

“We failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public”

That phrase is a perfect summary of the influence of the Bush administration. It comes from an article in which a prosecutor explains how the office of the Attorney General undermined the tobacco lawsuit.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.

“The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said,” Eubanks said. “And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public.”

The last few years make sense if you see them as a prolonged exercise in treachery at the highest level: a betrayal of the American public to benefit American corporate interests. Gonzales must go. Bush and Cheney must be impeached. Let’s not make the mistake we made with Nixon, letting a corps of criminals escape unscathed, even allowing them to continue their pernicious influence on government for another generation.

How many times has Limbaugh hit bottom, only to sink lower still?

New Rule, everyone! Whenever you see Rush Limbaugh, puke on his shoes.

If you’re fortunate enough that you think you’ll never actually be in the physical presence of the revolting tick of the far right, at least write to your local paper and demand that they never run another opinion piece from him. Call up your local AM station and ask that they remove him from the airwaves. I don’t understand how even a conservative can stomach Limbaugh’s contemptible schtick anymore.

What is their religion? I don’t doubt they’re religious people, but, we talked about this. Political people are different than you and I. And, you know, most people when told a family member’s been diagnosed with the kind of cancer Elizabeth Edwards has, they turn to God. The Edwards turned to the campaign.

Their religion is politics and the quest for the White House. And that’s — it’s not just with them, I mean, it’s part and parcel of political people — undergo all this stuff, the media anal all over their private life being made public even by the candidates themselves — it’s all part of the drill.[…] If you’re Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, how do you now attack John Edwards? Not a problem for Hillary, the Clinton [inaudible] will find a way. But Barack, it’s going to be a challenge. […] What the Edwards campaign is going to do here is see what the reaction is within the ranks of Democrat [sic] voters — as far as this announcement is concerned — and then go on from there. If there is not a big jump, if this doesn’t cause a breakout, if this doesn’t cause a big uptick, then, at some point, Senator Edwards will probably have to suspend the campaign.

Killing comic book characters for Jesus

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The pop culture hysteria is getting ridiculous. The movie 300, based on a graphic novel treatment of the sacrifice of the Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae, has become a political palimpsest with everyone trying to find support for their agenda in it—but get serious, it’s a comic book on the big screen. Similarly, a few have tried to see omens in the death of comic book hero Captain America recently. Again, it’s a comic book — superheroes die all the time, and they bounce back like Jesus or get replaced by someone else willing to look ridiculous in public wearing garish Spandex. For the most obvious example of a hyperbolic search for Meaning and Significance in the death of fictitious characters, though, we have to turn to the religious — they’ve got so much practice at it, after all. Ladies and gentlemen, behold Rabbi Marc Gellman, whose thesis is that the Spartans and Captain America died for God.

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