It sure was easy to get outraged at those Catholic sex pests

Remember Cardinal Pell? Tim Minchin wrote a catchy song about him. Did you see Spotlight? Even the mainstream movie industry could make critically acclaimed movies about Catholic sex abuse. It was an easy target. Now Rebecca Watson singles out another rape apologist in…watch to the end for the unsurprising twist.

I’ll refer you to the Washington Post, in a 2018 article:

Organized secularism has been struggling with charges of misogyny, sexism and sexual harassment for almost a decade. The problem went public in 2011 when a then-little-known atheist blogger, Rebecca Watson, described unwanted sexual advances from a man at an atheist conference who followed her into an elevator and to her hotel room.

She was flooded with both supportive and haranguing comments. World-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins told her to “stop whining” and “grow up.” Dawkins — whose appearances at secularist gatherings can make or break attendance — has been called out multiple times for sexist statements but remains much in demand as a speaker.

Richard Carrier, a science historian and popular secularist speaker, has both apologized for and denied accusations of unwanted sexual advances at secularist and atheist events. He has been banned from at least one conference.

Michael Shermer, who has denied allegations of sexual harassment and assault from several women, remains editor of Skeptic magazine and a top speaker at secularist events.

Most recently, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, another star speaker and best-selling author, was suspended in the spring by Arizona State University for what it described as a decade of inappropriate behavior, some of it at secularist events.

Has Dawkins ever commented on the behavior of his good buddy, movie co-star, and lecture circuit partner Krauss? I am also amused by the sneaky low blow of saying that Carrier “has both apologized for and denied accusations”.

It’s mortality assessment day!

My large collection of baby spiders is much smaller now. This morning, I went through the whole collection, scrutinizing them carefully for health, and tallied up the end result of my breeding experiments. Then I gave everyone a last meal in their baby vials, because tomorrow I rip up their natal cobwebs and transfer each to new, clean, larger containers so I can raise them to full adulthood.

It was a grim morning. There’s been a steady die-off of spiders over the last two months, often occurring at molting — they sometimes seem to get stuck, and that’s the end of that. I had three separate lines of spiderlings: 1) The R (for Runestone) line collected from a female at Runestone park, well off the beaten track; 2) The H (for Horticulure) line collected at an outdoor building at the local Horticulture garden; and 3) The M (for Myers) line collected right here in my garage at home. There was considerable variation in mortality.

R line: 95% (!) ☠

H line: 75% ☠

M line: 50% ☠

Maybe I’m just terrible at spider husbandry. I don’t have a good feel for how much normal juvenile death I ought to expect. It’s possibly interesting that the line collected from an indoor spider thrived best in the lab, while the ones found in a rather ‘wilder’ environment did worst.

Today wasn’t great, but the survivors all look fat and handsome and healthy, and tomorrow they get moved to their new roomier abodes, and I’ll also take photos of them. I’ll probably flood my Instagram account with pictures of my pretty young spider children, so watch out for that.

Now I’m hungry for snails

They’re still digging things out of Pompeii? Cool. Here’s an open food stand that’s beautifully painted and would tempt me even now:

Known as a termopolium, Latin for hot drinks counter, the shop was discovered in the archaeological park’s Regio V site, which is not yet open the public, and unveiled on Saturday.

Traces of nearly 2,000-year-old food were found in some of the deep terra cotta jars containing hot food which the shop keeper lowered into a counter with circular holes.

The front of the counter was decorated with brightly coloured frescoes, some depicting animals that were part of the ingredients in the food sold, such as a chicken and two ducks hanging upside down.

Analysis revealed traces of pork, fish, snails and beef remaining in the cylindrical containers. What I really need to know is what spices were used and how they were prepared, and I’m not handing over a single as until I smell the food being cooked.

Dinosaurs in my yard

Mary is continuing to be obsessed with birds, and they keep coming back and hanging around. Today she was all excited by something called a Brown Thrasher, which would be a great name for a spider or a shark, but no, it’s a bird.

I like the blue jay because I can recognize it. Because it’s blue.

I may have to work on my avian taxonomy skills.

Oh no! We may have to throw out the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

But it’s so intuitive! The idea that the less people know, the more they have an unwarranted confidence that they know more than they do, seems to explain so much. There is now evidence that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is an artifact.

The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data. “We all then believed the [1999] paper was valid,” Dr. Nuhfer told me via email. “The reasoning and argument just made so much sense. We never set out to disprove it; we were even fans of that paper.” In Dr. Nuhfer’s own papers, which used both computer-generated data and results from actual people undergoing a science literacy test, his team disproved the claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it (“a small number are: we saw about 5-6% that fit that in our data”) and instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.

Then I have to rethink who it applies to. We’re so used to pointing at stupid people doing stupid things and explaining it as Dunning-Kruger in action, and it’s not.

The most important mistake people make about the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to Dr. Dunning, has to do with who falls victim to it. “The effect is about us, not them,” he wrote to me. “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is not about dumb people. It’s mostly about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at.

Wait wait wait. So I may have been a victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect when I thought I knew what the Dunning-Kruger Effect was about? Dang. Well, that was a good solid punch in the balls to start my morning. But then, it’s always good to rethink your assumptions and reconsider your ideas, so thank you very much may I have another?

Are there dumb people who do not realize they are dumb? Sure, but that was never what the Dunning-Kruger effect was about. Are there people who are very confident and arrogant in their ignorance? Absolutely, but here too, Dunning and Kruger did not measure confidence or arrogance back in 1999. There are other effects known to psychologists, like the overconfidence bias and the better-than-average bias (where most car drivers believe themselves to be well above average, which makes no mathematical sense), so if the Dunning-Kruger effect is convincingly shown to be nothing but a mirage, it does not mean the human brain is spotless. And if researchers continue to believe in the effect in the face of weighty criticism, this is not a paradoxical example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. In the original classic experiments, students received no feedback when making their self-assessment. It is fair to say researchers are in a different position now.

Wait, what, so maybe I’m not afflicted with Dunning-Kruger? OK, I need to get out of the house and take a walk now.

I am inclined to like this hypothesis

I’m still going to criticize it, though.

For years, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the existence of menopause, a life stage that humans do not share with our primate relatives. Why would it be beneficial for females to stop being able to have children with decades still left to live?

According to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the answer is grandmothers. “Grandmothering was the initial step toward making us who we are,” says senior author Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. In 1997 Hawkes proposed the “grandmother hypothesis,” a theory that explains menopause by citing the under-appreciated evolutionary value of grandmothering. Hawkes says that grandmothering helped us to develop “a whole array of social capacities that are then the foundation for the evolution of other distinctly human traits, including pair bonding, bigger brains, learning new skills and our tendency for cooperation.”

I guess I’m personally inclined to appreciate the importance of grandmothers, having had a pair of good ones myself, and seeing how much time my wife invests in our granddaughter, but I’m less impressed with the study, which is based entirely on a computer simulation. I don’t trust simulations of complex phenomenon that necessarily have to simplify all the parameters. What about aunts and sisters? What about uncles?

What about the grandfathers?

None of those individuals are of interest, because this version of the hypothesis is structured around explaining menopause as the product of selection. Nope, I don’t buy it.

But why would females evolve to only ovulate for 40 or so years into these longer lives? Hawkes and other advocates of the hypothesis note that, without menopause, older women would simply continue to mother children, instead of acting as grandmothers. All children would still be entirely dependent on their mothers for survival, so once older mothers died, many young offspring would likely die too. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes more sense for older females to increase the group’s overall offspring survival rate instead of spending more energy on producing their own.

I’m willing to accept the benefit of an extended family and social cooperation, but the effort to justify menopause seems misplaced. There are many grandmothers who are not menopausal, and there would have been even more in ancient populations, where pregnancy shortly after the onset of menstruation would have been common. It also doesn’t explain the contributions of sisters and aunts to childrearing, or that brothers and sisters, who are also “distractions” from the business of raising a single delicate child. Why couldn’t it benefit a woman to raise her own child born late and also contribute to the well-being of grandchildren born to previous offspring? I suspect the simulation has assumptions built into the code about how much grandparental investment can be offered if they also have a child.

But, yeah, what about the grandfathers?

We help, too. So why isn’t there a male menopause where our testicles shrivel up and make us more willing to contribute to child-rearing? A man has a certain number of progeny, then boom, the reproductive urge goes away and he has to sit down and focus on taking care of the kids he’s got. Or his grandchildren. Or his nieces and nephews. That would be the logical endpoint of this arch-selectionist model, after all, and what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Yet somehow people feel compelled to come up with adaptationist explanations for accidents of evolutionary history.

Adventures in Creationism and Ethics

As if Mark Meadows wasn’t already sleazed enough by his association with the Trump White House, last year it was revealed that he was also entangled with creationists, like Ken Ham and Joe Taylor, starred in a documentary about a creationist “expedition” to find an allosaurus, with a lot of backstabbing among the various unpleasant protagonists. Now there are new revelations.

Maybe this isn’t the worst criminal offense, but the part that offended me most was that in the original documentary, they played up the fact that Mark Meadows’ 9 year old daughter was the one who discovered the fossil dinosaur. Except, as it turned out, she hadn’t. The whole “discovery” was contrived media hype. Oh, look, a little girl found the evidence that disproved evolution!

“Raising the Allosaur” was successful enough that it spurred Phillips to create the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival in 2004. Just before the festival opened, however, Phillips had to yank the film: It turned out that the skeleton had not in fact been discovered by Haley Meadows, but had been uncovered two years earlier by Dana Forbes, the landowner who eventually sold the site to Meadows. A paleontologist named Joe Taylor had identified the skeleton as an allosaur in May 2001, a year before Meadows’ trip. When these facts were exhumed they mired Phillips’ documentary in controversy.

Oh, yuck. Meadows knowingly had his own daughter join him in an outright lie, put her into a movie lying about her role, and set her up for public exposure. That’s disgraceful. I hope she someday escapes this poisonous creationist trap.

Of course, there is some comeuppance.

This led to a bitter dispute over who owned the dinosaur. Before the conference, Phillips sent out a letter to attendees that said “a series of ethics-based issues have been brought to our attention,” leading him to suspend sales of his film “pending a season for Creation Expeditions to appropriately address the aforementioned issues.”

Creation Expeditions posted a note to its website claiming that its ministry had “endured an outrageous attack.”

[Who is Phillips? What is “Creation Expeditions”? Doesn’t matter. This is a tangled web of lies and shifting alliances. This is creationism!]

In other news, Meadows bought the plot of land the fossil was on, and sold it to Answers in Genesis and didn’t bother to report the rather substantial income from the sale. The second saddest fate is that of the Allosaur fossil, which was also sold to AiG (they have so much money!) in a deal funneled through a “charity group” and which also ripped off a fellow creationist.

The allosaur eventually found its way to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which is owned by Answers in Genesis. That group received the skeleton as a donation in May 2014 from a charity group that had bought the fossil from Taylor, the paleontologist.

“It was a bad deal that we had to accept,” Taylor told the New Yorker, who said the dispute mediation with Creation Expeditions would have left him nearly $100,000 in debt and destroyed his business. He sold the fossils for about $125,000 to a Christian foundation, which eventually donated them to the museum. At that time the estimated market value of the allosaur was about $450,000.

But remember, Christians are the moral people.

Small town ignorance

Here’s a curious letter to the editor of the local paper in Little Falls, Minnesota. I know where that is! If you draw a straight line from Morris to Duluth, it lies about halfway along that line. I haven’t been there. I don’t think many have. If I wanted to go to Duluth, I’d take I94 east, get on 35 in Minneapolis, and not go anywhere near it. It’s a small town backwater, in other words, which can be quite nice if you like the quiet life, but it’s also the kind of place where ignorance can fester.

Like in the mind of this guy, Michael Dalquist Randall.

Evolution is going the way of the dinosaur due to modern scientific evidence.

How would you know? Seriously, go to any university where science is taught, and you’ll find the biology department is full of professors who accept evolution, teach evolution, and research evolution. That hasn’t been changing. The actual modern scientific evidence is all supporting evolution — all the fossils, the genes, the geology, the biochemistry, the comparative anatomy, etc., etc., etc. Check out the biology curriculum at these universities and you’ll find it’s typically built all around evolution. It’s the unifying principle of the science!

I notice that Mr Randall claims the “modern scientific evidence” supports his assertion, but he doesn’t provide any. I can predict what he’d say if he did, though: a lot of nonsense about complexity (not an obstacle to evolution), or nit-picking about details, which he doesn’t understand, that he’ll claim invalidate some scrap of evolutionary theory.

More and more scientists in every field are becoming Creationists as the outdated “evidence” of evolution is overshadowed by modern discoveries that reveal The Theory (yes, theory, not law) of Evolution to be what it truly is: a desperate (and not very tenable) attempt to prove that there is no God and that there is no need for a God.

The idea that more and more scientists are becoming creationists is nonsense. You can find a scattering of individuals who claim to have abandoned evolution after studying science, but most of them are lying: they went into it with a predisposition. Others may be sincere, but they are not numerous, and aren’t going to advance science at all — they’ve become religious apologists, not scientists.

What Mr Randall is demonstrating is confirmation bias, in which anecdotes about miscellaneous individuals are treated as hard data only because they fit his preconceptions.

Again, what is the outdated “evidence” of evolution, and the modern discoveries that overshadow them? He doesn’t say.

Yes, we know it’s a theory. We also know that there isn’t a ranking of credibility where “law” is better than “theory”. It just doesn’t work that way. Laws are strong definitions of simple ideal relationships; theories are explanatory frameworks that can integrate information about significant bodies of knowledge. A theory can encompass many laws, does that mean theory outranks law? That’s probably not a productive way to use the concepts.

I personally think that evolution makes gods superfluous, but that’s not why evolution was proposed. Darwin agonized over the effect his discovery would have on religious belief, it’s one of the reasons he sat on it for 20 years. Rather, evolution was an explanation of observed natural phenomena. You might as well complain that “2+2=4” is an attempt to usurp the divinity of numbers, and was clearly formulated to undermine godly revelation.

Evolutionism was a valid theory in Darwin’s time, but if he had the evidence available to him that we have today, Darwin himself would probably not believe in Darwinian evolution.

Once again, we get a vague reference to unevidenced evidence that would have made even Darwin a creationist. Sorry, guy, I would suggest instead that the molecular evidence of common descent alone would have been ample confirmation of evolution. I suspect, though, that if you sprung the mathematical basis of evolutionary theory on him all at once, he might find it a little too overwhelming.

Mr Randall, go read a book other than your Bible or the propaganda from ICR or AIG (which he cites in the letter) and learn something real about evolutionary biology. It’s awesome stuff.