Answers in Genesis gets everything wrong

Tonight, at 9pm Central, I’m going to try and wade through the bullshit Ken Ham threw everywhere in a recent video. He’s complaining about atheism, abortion, molecular biology, development, and of course, evolution, all in one crowded half hour, so I’ll start going through it all and see how far I get.

This is also an experiment for me, to see if I can simultaneously put up a YouTube video and make commentary. I don’t know, seems like a tool it would be handy to have in my toolbox.

Quacks are thriving nowadays

The Republicans have a new favorite doctor, Stella Immanuel. She loves hydroxychloroquine and detests face masks, so of course the Trumps love her. She has a few other…interesting…ideas.

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.

A couple of Trumps are retweeting her claims, as is Turning Point USA, but Twitter and Facebook are removing the false information she’s spreading.

I think the White House ought to go all in and fire Birx and Fauci and replace them with Immanuel, and also that all of Donald’s medical care henceforth be provided exclusively by Dr Immanuel.

Where da boaters at?

When Donald Trump beckons, the media fall all over themselves to answer. For instance, lately Trump has been obsessing over “boat parades” and how much boaters love him, so the Washington Post indulges in overwrought analysis and puts together some fancy data visualization to show that yes, people who can afford boats tend to be Republican. Whether the boater population is a significant slice of the demographic pie, and whether they will be a significant factor in the election, and whether it is at all appropriate or useful for a newspaper to focus a microscope on such a trivial question is an exercise left for the reader.

“A state where the dark-red slice of Republican boaters is larger than the light-red slice of Republicans overall is a state where the boating community is more densely Republican.”

I can’t afford a boat, and I have no interest in owning a boat, so I guess I won’t be cruising around Lake Minnewaska waving a big blue “Trump Sucks!” flag. Is this a meaningful datum? All it tells me is that wealth has a positive correlation with supporting an establishment party that panders to money. (Well, actually, both parties pander to money, but one is more overt than the other.)

By the way, the WaPo is at least willing to point out what a narcissistic flibbertigibbet Trump is. He had earlier announced that he was “too busy” to throw out the first pitch at a major league baseball game, then abruptly, to the surprise of his staff, announced at a press conference that he was going to throw out the first pitch for the New York Yankees…which was also a surprise to the Yankees. What prompted the about face?

He learned that Anthony Fauci was throwing out the first pitch for the Washington Nationals.

Trump was irritated that Fauci was given the honor, the Times reported, citing an official familiar with his reaction. Not to be outdone, he reportedly told his staff to get in touch with the Yankees and take Levine up on his offer, but then the president went ahead and threw a curveball at the coronavirus briefing with his claim that he would take the mound on Aug. 15.

Jesus. The country is run by petty high-schooler.

Only we call them “contract security personnel” rather than “mercs”

Marcus Ranum asks a really good question: who are all these mysterious masked strangers dressed in black armor who show up at the best of the federal government to crush protests? It’s not the lone ranger. They seem to appear out of an undocumented pool of semi-professional thugs. That suggests an answer.

I’ve been puzzled by the fact that nobody seems to be talking about where these “federal troops” have come from.

They’re not well-trained and they’re not particularly brave, but they have spiffy gear that someone bought them from an online Tactical(tm) store. They’re fond of hitting people, especially people who can’t defend themselves. They act like they’re an occupying force; Amerikkka come to the inner city to bust some heads. Sound familiar?

Where has Trump friend Erik Prince been, lately? Because the smell of Blackwater is wafting all around; it’s unmistakable.

Could our government be hiring mercenaries to put down citizens who don’t like injustice? As Marcus suggests, there is a good opportunity for journalistic investigation here.

Here’s how they operate: four thugs abruptly attack a 14 year old girl in Eugene, Oregon.

I guess she was a dangerous threat.

Just an ordinary TERF talking about biology

You wanna see reductive? She’s gonna give you reductive.

My first thought was, “Why are these aliens murdering us all, and why does she care what pile of corpses we end up in? And why are these aliens sorting us this way?” I mean, once we’re reduced to dead meat and tossed into rotting piles for some inscrutable purpose (Mulching into fertilizer? Animal fodder? Party decorations?) why are chromosomes even relevant?

There are also a few people wandering around with fragmented Y chromosomes and translocations that make this distinction difficult. I picture the aliens wandering around the heap of corpses sampling bits of tissue and being totally baffled by the occasional individual and flicking them off to — oh no — a third pile. Maybe that small third pile will be marketed as rare exotic meat.

Of course, if the aliens sorted by some other criterion, like penises, or size, or the presence of the A blood antigen, you could also throw them into two piles by setting your boundary values to whatever you want, and then find there are a few individuals who fall into boundary conditions. This is a pointless thought exercise.

Wouldn’t you know that this TERF also has strange ideas about evolution.

Using this same logic, we could say that humans evolved to be squishy, unarmored, and lacking in natural armament so leopards could eat them more easily. Everything has an evolutionary purpose, after all. As we all know, we men have testicles in a convenient external pouch to simplify extracting gametes with a biopsy needle. The predictive powers of evolutionary prophesying are truly astounding!

Tell me again how evolutionary psychology is not a con game

This is how evo psych works: state your hypothesis about past human societies with absolute confidence in the absence of any evidence, and then follow up with how The Lord of the Rings supports your model of a transition from a brutish form to a more gracile, effeminate form. Geoffrey Miller demonstrates:

So, the kill count competition between Legolas and Gimli is easily understood evidence of the evolution of warfare. Does that make Aragorn a transitional form?

Where is the informed discussion of alien life on the internet?

Oh, god, the assumptions. I like speculations about alien life, just as I appreciate the diversity of life on Earth, the different forms of life in the past, and the prospect of evolution in the future, but every time I read about this stuff in astronomy-related journals, I feel like they’re making an effort to reduce my intelligence. The problem is that they have no imagination and no biology, but they’re trying to imagine the nature of alien biology, and all they end up doing is running around in circles trying to figure out why little grey humanoids aren’t landing their flying saucers en masse to march out and shake hands with the president. It’s all Fermi Paradox this and Drake Equation that, two stupid ideas that have captured the eyeballs of everyone with these biased priors, and they always go trotting off to get the opinions of the same spectacularly ill-informed people. Take this bad article in Universe Today.

The first horror: they favorably cite Robin Hanson, the creepiest economist in America, and they quote a contradictory statement by him.

Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?

Why? Why do you think a “bright future” is equivalent to “expanding to fill the universe with lasting life”? Why do you think that’s the road we’re on, when there’s a total absence of viable colonies of humans on other worlds, and all the other planets in our solar system are uninhabitable, and planets around other stars are unreachable? What is the basis for thinking that we have that particular “bright” future in front of us, especially when you immediately admit that the chances are astronomically low?

This is my problem with the general tenor of these speculations. They all assume that we, that is human-like intelligences, are desirable, inevitable, and the only proper kind of life; they’ve read far too many science-fiction novels prophesying a colonialist destiny led by strong-jawed Anglo-Saxons with glinting eyes and a finger on the trigger of their blaster. They never seem to consider that the truly successful clades on Earth are things like algae, grass, protists, and insects. If we were to speculate on the species with bright futures, they’d all be weedy and prolific and adaptable to a wide range of environments. They wouldn’t be overgrown monkeys who can’t even imagine a non-monkey future.

The second person the article cites is weirdo philosopher Nick Bostrom. It’s funny how these kinds of stories always shy away from talking to evolutionary biologists. It’s probably because we tend to get all squinky-eyed and sarcastic about their faulty premises. Or is that just me?

The Great Filter can be thought of as a probability barrier. It consists of [one or] more highly improbable evolutionary transitions or steps whose occurrence is required in order for an Earth-like planet to produce an intelligent civilization of a type that would be visible to us with our current observation technology.

See? That’s what I’m talking about. They’re always going on and on about the likelihood of finding an intelligent civilization like ours. Why not speculate about finding a planet that has produced kangaroos? Or stomatopods? Or baobab trees? These are all unlikely outcomes of a contingent, complex process that produces immense diversity, and they’re all wondering what the “barrier” is that prevents our kind from winning the cosmic lottery every time. Get over it, we’re not a favored outcome, there’s no direction to evolution, and that’s why there aren’t smarty-pants bipeds tootling about the galaxy stopping by for tea. That and physics, probably. I also don’t understand why mobs of physicists aren’t rising up and pointing at the speed of light and the energy requirements for interstellar flivvers and saying “That’s why!”

Then this article has to take a predictable slant in a section titled…

Gotta Love the Drake!

No, you don’t. The Drake equation is a simplistic collection of variables with no suggestion of mutual dependency that are concatenated to provide a whole string of excuses for why human-like aliens aren’t sending us their version of “I Love Lucy”. It’s basically a Ouija board for apologists for science-fiction outcomes. It’s a tool for churning out meaningless crap. It’s kind of like how the article ends with this self-serving statement.

We have written many interesting articles about the Great Filter, the Fermi Paradox, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and related concepts here at Universe Today.

Again, no you haven’t. If I were an editor at Universe Today, I’d scratch out the word “interesting”, and maybe, to throw them a bone, write in “infuriating”.

One more thing that annoys me. They cite Hanson again, saying that one of the benchmarks for his preferred flavor of alien intelligence features Wide-scale colonization. I’m just thinking, given his other criteria, that any planet suitable for colonization is already going to contain a fascinating extraterrestrial biota — they wouldn’t have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, or soil, or exploitable organic materials otherwise — and from a biologist’s point of view, the “colonization” he considers desirable is going to involve the destruction of native species on a large scale. We’re lucky, given that it’s Hanson, that he didn’t speculate on the universality of rape. That’s more his thing.

Minnesota has mandated face masks in public

Meanwhile, down at the Wal-Mart…

Stupid people will find a way to obey the letter of the law, while still parading their ignorance and hatefulness.

You know, I hate to tell you this, but if you merely want to be offensive you can buy “Make America Great Again” facemasks on the internet. I’ll still despise you, but I won’t think of you as an ahistorical idiot promoting genocide, mostly.