Rabbi Avi Shafran

There is no more reverent way to wake to a fine Sunday morning than to discover another religious zealot punching himself in the face. Repeatedly. The Rabbi Avi Shafran is waxing indignant in a syndicated article that is popping up all over the place, in which he tries to denounce Zizek’s most excellent article on the virtues of atheism. The best he can do, though, is whimper at length that atheists are just plain bad people—it’s an argument to appeal to bigots who already have a prejudiced view of those who don’t share their religion, but it’s not very persuasive to people who can think.

It is fun to shred, though.

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Kent Hovind at St Cloud State University

After sitting through Hovind’s talk, I have seen the light. I’ve always been awfully hard on Christianity and Christians here, despising their beliefs and making mock of their nonsensical ideas and backwards social agenda. But this evangelist really reached out and grabbed me.

I now feel a great pity for them.

Hovind is one of the leading lights of fundamentalist Christianity in this country; the large auditorium was packed full, and they had to put up folding seats on the stage behind him to handle the crowd. They were enthusiastic and laughing and cheering and shouting “Amen!” throughout his talk. All I could think through it all was sorrow and sympathy for all the Christians who have willingly afflicted themselves with this clown, who have gullibly swallowed his lies. I am so sorry, Christians. I’m very embarrassed for you.

On a purely objective level, evaluating the presentation and the skill of the speaker, I was surprised: it was an exceptionally bad talk. You will often hear these creationist speakers praised for their rhetorical ability, if not their grasp of science, but I’m afraid Hovind was awful. We have weekly student seminars at my university, and sometimes students do a less than stellar job at this public speaking business…but I have never heard a speaker as incompetent as Hovind.

Yes, he spits out words fast with little fumbling, and he lards his talk with well-practiced folksy jokes, but it’s all so poorly organized and clumsily presented that it has no persuasive power at all. He is doing nothing but affirming the prejudices of his audience—he’s effective at that—but he’s not communicating any information at all effectively. I imagined him giving this talk to an informed audience, rather than the bussed-in church groups that were here, and his schtick would fall flat, and fall hard. Scientists have this expectation that they will learn something from a talk, you see, and that they’ll be able to evaluate the process by which the conclusions were arrived at; there was nothing like that here.

Even if you are sympathetic to Hovind’s claims, here is an indicator of what a poor speaker he is. This was scheduled to be a one hour talk. He showed up with a power point presentation containing over 700 slides. My personal rule of thumb for a good hour presentation is that if you’re a bit lazy and fill it chock-a-block with bullet points and text slides, 30 or 40 is about right; better talks pare it down to 20 or fewer data-rich slides and spend some time discussing each one. 700+ is practically criminal; it’s a declaration of rapid-fire superficiality, that you intend to steamroller the audience with no consideration for thought. Hovind is the anti-Tufte.

He also went over his allotted time—he talked for almost 2 hours. He knew it, too; at the hour mark, he mentioned that he was going to say just a few more things quickly, and then instead he went on and on, going all the way to the end of his list of power point slides. It was agonizingly bad. Again, though, his audience was predisposed to favor him, so nobody showed up with a hook.

What about his style? It was nothing but corn-pone jokes. He warmed up the audience beforehand with a continuous display of ‘witticisms’ projected on the big screen. Things like “Why is the third hand on a watch called a second hand?” and “Where does the light go when it goes out?” It was calculated, I’m sure, to rot the brains of the audience before the ringmaster came on. The audience actually laughed at these things. I was ready to leave, and he hadn’t even started talking.

That was the tone in the talk, too. He’d rant a bit about the awful lies scientists pack into textbooks, and then he’d trot out some tired old joke. It was like watching Hee Haw—I half-expected Junior Samples to show up.

(Hovind seems completely incapable of changing his tone. In the beginning, he was introducing his family in this same jokey way, when he pointed to a picture of his son-in-law in one picture and mentioned that he’d died of cancer just a few weeks ago. One serious and sad mention, then zip, right back to the jokes. It was very jarring, and brought one word to my mind: psychopath.)

In addition to dropping a joke everytime his brain lost its train of thought, he was incessantly plugging his videos—they were on sale in the lobby. Money was a constant theme, which is also not something I’ve seen at science talks. Maybe we need to start. I didn’t buy any of his videos, of course—this one lecture convinced me I don’t need to hear any more Hovind, especially not a Hovind babbling on for several hours in each of a dozen tapes. I really don’t know how Matt survived his experience with them.

As for the content of his talk: that wasn’t the point. This was an mutual backslapping session for creationists, not an evening of substance. The talk itself was irony-rich garbage. His message was that science textbooks, yea, even the ones in use at SCSU, were full of lies, and he, lover of science that he was, only wanted to see those lies removed. In order to do this, he gave a talk that was full of lies. About 700 of them, actually.

In those 700 slides, he raced through an incredible number of creationist canards: polystrate trees disprove gradualism, non-existence of the geologic column, fossils date the rocks and rocks date the fossils, the Grand Canyon is young, microevolution, not macroevolution, humans don’t have gill slits, mutations only destroy information, yadda yadda yadda. Seriously. They were all dead arguments presented at such a rapid clip that there was no time to think about them, let alone rebut them. And the lies were just so painfully blatant: as an example, he claimed that trilobites weren’t old and they weren’t extinct, and to ‘prove’ his claim, he showed a picture of an arctic isopod and announced that there it was, alive and crawling, proof that the biology professors have all been lying to you.

It was almost too much to take: Hovind was inciting the audience to tear pages out of biology books, to protest to the university about the lyin’ professors there, and he was doing it by lying non-stop.

I didn’t ask any questions. Once he shut up, I left; I don’t think there would have been any point to trying to rebut him, any more than there is any point to trying to rebut Hee Haw.

Oh, and one more thing: St Cloud State should feel a little shamefaced. We had a creationist visit UMM, and he was politely but forcefully out-argued by our students, and even though at least one church group was brought in, they were totally outclassed by the students. This event was more heavily stacked with family and church attendees, but the SCSU students seemed to be heavily pro-creationist. That’s not a good sign for a healthy university, unless they’re cynically aiming to recruit from the poorly educated pool. It might make economic sense, in the short run, but it’s very unfortunate to see my son’s degree cheapened that way just as he’s ready to graduate.

The expected Powerline slapdown

Powerline. Round about these parts, that name is pretty much a synonym for stupid, and I see they’re doing a good job of maintaining their reputation. You’d think they’d learn that whenever they step into the domain of science, their level of ignorance is even more palpably apparent than usual.

Their latest embarrassment was prompted by an egregiously idiotic article from Michael Fumento, which catalogs an error-filled collection of so-called biases in science. The assrocket’s conclusion?

The moral of the story is that the leading scientific journals have been taken over by liberals who value politics over truth. So any time you see a news report on a “scientific” journal article that ostensibly has political implications, you should greet it with skepticism.

Wow. So any science article that discusses, say, evolution, climate, energy, reproduction, conservation, petroleum geology, glaciers, pesticides, extinction, wetlands, materials science, transportation, agriculture, neurobiology, HIV/AIDS (shall I go on?), demographics, deforestation, habitat loss, human genetics (I could keep this up all day), influenza, psychiatry, ethanol production, sexually transmitted disease, medicine in general, stem cells, weather, sex (OK, enough), all issues that have political implications, and which are therefore automatically suspect and tainted by <hiss>liberals? Jeez, John and Michael, why not just say, “Science is EVIL” and be done with it?When all the scientists are disagreeing with you, though, maybe instead you should wonder if you, people with no scientific competence at all, might just be wrong.

I’m pleased to say that we here at scienceblogs.com seem to be presenting a united front on this one, unsurprisingly. Chris Mooney also points out the absurdity of rejecting in its entirety the so-called “liberal” academy, and Tim Lambert rips into the bogus interpretations of the Fumento article. I’ll have to gnaw on a few scraps that are left over.

Here, for example, is an instance of Fumento illogic.

Consider a report
by three environmentalist authors back in 1988 in Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA), analyzing male-female birth ratios between
1970 and 1990. The authors found male births declining, and predictably
blamed man-made chemicals. Yet public data going
back to 1940 showed gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious
reason. Years that disproved their thesis were simply sliced out.

Look at that bit where he cites public data, with a link to a report by the CDC. He claims that the interpretation of the report is that “gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious reason”—I can only assume that he figures absolutely no one who reads his column will actually, like, look at his links. The report says nothing of the kind. Right at the top of the report is a graph that shows year-by-year variation, with trend lines on it to show that there is an overall decline in the number of males born. The report specifically discusses the reasons for it, explaining that it only looks at a few relationships and listing others. Here’s the CDC’s conclusion, plainly stated in the final paragraph.

Changes in the sex ratio at birth in the United States have been
attributed to many different factors. The factors examined in this report
include age of mother, birth order, and race and Hispanic origin of
mother. Other factors not examined here but cited by others in determining the sex of a child and, thus, the sex ratio at birth are weight
of mother, stress, age of father, family size, geographic and climatic
conditions, environmental toxins, and a preference for male offspring.
As such, the effect of these factors should be considered in under
standing the annual variation and overall decline in the sex ratio at birth.

How does he get away with this? He cites a report and claims that its conclusions are the exact opposite of what it actually says!

Assrocket just gullibly swallows it all whole. There is a whole parade of similarly mangled science results in Fumento’s article, and another is the recent Hwang Woo Suk scandal.

Fumento’s second example is embryonic stem cell research, where the most important “science” underlying public enthusiasm for cloning turned out to be fraudulent:

Even Science’s awful stem-cell embarrassment wasn’t purely a matter of fraud. I have written repeatedly on how both Science and Nature have turned themselves into cheerleaders for any supposed advance in ES cell science, while opening their pages to laughable attacks on what many see as both medically and ethically superior — namely adult stem cells.

Neither Powerline nor Fumento understand this result. It was an important and expected step in stem cell research, but it was only one result, and certainly wasn’t the foundation of public or scientific enthusiasm for this line of research. Nor does it in anyway invalidate the promise or past results of stem cell researchers, and the claim that everyone is sitting around wondering “How could I have been fooled?” is ridiculous.

  • Hwang Woo Suk flat out lied. I don’t know how journalists, editors, and scientists are supposed to know that until it gets worked over by other researchers, as it was. Of course we can be suckered by someone who is malicious and dishonest, for a while at least; the point of science as a community enterprise is that there is frequent cross-checking and examination of result, which means the truth will eventually out.
  • The Korean teams have had a string of successes in stem cell technology that are valid and have been double-checked. This wasn’t some nobody coming out of nowhere, but a research team with a good track record.
  • This technique of transforming somatic nuclei has worked in other animals than humans. There is no reason to think it isn’t doable—and I expect the work will be done someday. The fraud picked a good target, one that is just within our reach, nothing too outrageous, and all he did was nudge himself over the finish line first, not invent something outrageous.
  • the ridiculous cheering over adult stem cells from a scientific ignoramus is absurd. Probably one of the most prominent researchers in adult stem cells is Dr Catherine Verfaillie, right here at the University of Minnesota, and she has flatly said that she thinks the embryonic stem cell research is an invaluable complement to her work. Get that? She’s a person with a strong vested interested in AS work, and SHE is saying we need more ES work. Do Hindrocket and Fumento think they know better than a genuine researcher in the field? (yeah, probably. Incompetents don’t know the limits of their competence.)

This happens every time Powerline mentions anything about science. I think we ought to encourage a new reflex: every time Powerline mentions the word “science”, come check out scienceblogs.com, and you’ll find several of us howling with laughter.

Mangling science and history to the benefit of religion

Chris Clarke brought this strangely twisted article to my attention. It starts out just fine, pointing out that the Intelligent Design assault on science is based on nothing but incredulity, and has the sweeping goal of destroying naturalism—not just one theory in biology, but the whole scientific shebang. The author is against all that, which is good…thanks, Cynthia, we appreciate your support. Now if only she’d just ended it there at the two-thirds mark.

The last third is peculiar. She seems to be less interested in strong science than in strengthening religion, and the reason she’s arguing against ID is purely on the Augustinian principle that backing foolish statements about the natural world makes the religious look foolish.

A more effective way to bolster religious belief than attacking Darwin is to remember that religion addresses questions that are completely beyond the range of science. The meaning of life, the nature of good conduct, the nature of the human soul: Science is not set up to deal with any of these.

Is religion?

Science isn’t set up to deal with the Great Ju-Ju, the lares and penates, or Atlantean spirit-guides, either—because they don’t exist. The religious are free to invent non-existent phenomena all they want, but saying that science doesn’t deal in imaginary nonsense isn’t exactly a flaw.

As for the nature of good conduct, we don’t need religion to support that idea, and I see no reason why non-supernatural processes require metaphysical rationalizations.

This is why religion remains so potent — and, I think, so positive — a force in modern America. It alone provides answers to the hardest questions we all face. In a health crisis, we want help from a doctor who practices medicine in a completely rational and scientific manner. But our prayers that this medicine helps go to a supernatural being, not to the doctor.

Urk. That casual equation of medicine with prayer is simply creepy. In a health crisis, we need help from a doctor; prayer is superfluous and useless. Religion remains potent because so many refuse to acknowledge its impotence.

The essay is about to hit bottom. The author decides to compare Darwin to that other fellow who shares a birthday with him, and starts praising Lincoln’s spirituality.

Lincoln could never have accomplished the great tasks before him, nor inspired others to stay the course through so many defeats, disappointment and death, without recourse to ideas imbued with the deepest spirituality. Whether he declared that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” or called on his fellow Northerners to press on to victory “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” he clearly saw the unique wisdom and power embodied in the great truths of religion — wisdom certainly different from scientific wisdom, but equally certainly, just as valuable.

This, most of us would agree, is religion at its best: providing spiritual comfort, psychological strength, moral direction and righteous inspiration.

In this realm, evolution — wonderful job that it does in explaining the natural world — cannot compete with religion. In its own “ballpark,” religion, as Lincoln knew, wins every time. It’s only when it strays into the other guy’s stadium that it sets itself up for inevitable loss and disappointment.

Uh-oh. Somebody needs to look up the actual beliefs of Lincoln, rather than just making them up as she goes along.

Lincoln was a deist and freethinker. He paid token deference to religion because he was well aware that he could not win office as a man who rejected Christianity. That puts that last paragraph in a different light: he knew that religion’s “ballpark” was bigotry and intolerance, and that he had to avoid challenging it.

It’s the 21st century. I think it’s about time we started challenging.

Hate mail

I was asked to show some of my hate mail, but I’m afraid I’m not going to dig through all the ancient, musty piles of old email to find it—I have a hard enough time wading through the new stuff! Here’s the most recent, though, which arrived just this evening, although I think it is in response to a post I wrote about a year and a half ago, Is Mike S. Adams a fool?. This stuff just keeps dribbling in.

Mike Adams is god. This statement of truth, however, leads me to another question. Simply put, are you a) a eunuch, b) a hairy-armed white female feminazi type with no discernible talent or c) one of those kool-aid democrats our children are taught to avoid? I would be interested in some typological clarification on this point as you seem like a very perverse bundle of mistaken beliefs and psychological neuroses.

It’s a little more coherent than the usual babble I get, but it says more about him than me, anyway. Note that the original post was about Adams’ anti-evolutionist views, yet somehow it’s been distorted into something about my views on sexuality. I guess that’s not terribly surprising, given Adams’ own insecurities on the subject.

Ha-Hah. Brits are just as stupid as we are!

A survey of British beliefs about the origin and development of life had the following results:

  • 22% chose creationism
  • 17% opted for intelligent design
  • 48% selected evolution theory
  • the rest did not know.

Or how about this result? Here’s what the people in the land of David Attenborough would like to see taught in school:

  • 44% said creationism should be included
  • 41% intelligent design
  • 69% wanted evolution as part of the science curriculum.

Depressing, isn’t it? I’ve got some Guinness in the refrigerator, maybe I should just knock off work early and go home and start drinking.

Chris has reservations about their methodology—but I don’t know. The fact that almost a quarter of the people admit to being creationists is damning in and of itself. Meanwhile, John thinks 30-40% “isn’t a large group opposing teaching evolution”. That makes me wonder if he’s been raiding my refrigerator and all my beer will be gone when I get home.

Then I read that 73% of American teenagers “engaged in at least one type of psychic or witchcraft-related activity”, and I just want to throw up my hands and give up. I’m going to need something stronger than beer.

Isn’t it about time to admit that the strategies of the past, such as being deferential to the nonsense of religion or letting the kooks who dominate discourse off the hook because pointing out their fallacies would be rude, aren’t working? I predict that there will be much finger-pointing at Dawkins and tut-tutting about all those militant members of the high church of evolutionism being to blame, and that there will be further insistence on molly-coddling lunacy to make those willing believers in creationism more comfortable.