The New Atheism gets another bashing

Last week, I posted about my deep regrets at ever being involved with New Atheism, and oh boy, have I been getting the hate mail. The most amusing thing was seeing an atheist facebook group filling up with complaints about how awful I am, and simultaneously whining that they never heard of this New Atheism thing, what four horsemen, and hey, wasn’t that just some nasty slur the theists threw at us? Memories are so short, and so easily diverted into safe and easy denial.

But I am not alone in my rejection of the Old Guard. The Guardian is asking “Whatever happened to New Atheism?” as if we didn’t know. I’ll tell you what happened: it foundered on the egos of its leaders, and their desire to steer it onto the shoals of misogyny, racism, and war. Hmm…maybe the “Four Horsemen” were appropriately named after all.

The article tears into the Four Horsemen, but especially into Harris (Hitchens was spared the worst of it by dying, I would guess).

The intellectual path followed by Harris is most balefully illustrative of the poisonous seeds that were always present in New Atheism. At one point here, the men admire themselves for their willingness to consider truths that might be politically dangerous. For instance, Hitchens says, if the notorious hypothesis of the 1994 book by Richard J Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve – that black people are genetically inferior in intelligence to white people – were true, it shouldn’t be ignored. Luckily, Hitchens hastens to add, that example is not viable. Later on, however, Harris brings up the argument again. “If there were reliable differences in intelligence between races or genders,” he begins, before Hitchens cuts him off dismissively. “But I don’t think any of us here do think that that’s the case.”

Hitchens might have been too generous. In 2018, Harris caused a storm by inviting Murray on to his podcast for a weirdly uncritical two-hour conversation. Murray, Harris claimed, had been the victim of a terrible “academic injustice” for the way in which his notions about the inherent cognitive inferiority of some “races” had been rejected by the scientific establishment. (Lest you worry about Murray, be reassured that he is still a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is funded by the ultra-conservative billionaire Koch brothers.)

This is where the preeningly fearless insistence on entertaining uncomfortable questions can so easily lead. Harris ended up in the company of the “alt-right” and the so-called “intellectual dark web”, populated by people who portray themselves as valiant enough to say what you’re not allowed to say any more, and are constantly invited on rightwing talk shows to say it. For some, New Atheism was never about God at all, but just a topical subgenre of the rightwing backlash against the supposedly suffocating atmosphere of “political correctness”. In its messianic conviction that it alone serves the cause of truth, this too is a faith as noxious as any other.

This was the gigantic strategic error of the New Atheism. The time was right to make a strong appeal to humanist values and grow a movement around basic decency and fairness, and instead, the most influential voices decided to draw on the nascent alt-right and get rich quick off regressive values — they aimed the ship of atheism straight into the Trumpkin swamp, a mob of people who are explicitly anti-anti-religious, and now all they can do to maintain some popularity is to double-down on the ignorance and racism and sexism that that group likes. Reason and rationality have been turned into empty buzzwords. It’s a real shame.

A lifetime of science!

Hey, look — the esteemed scientist who helped shape my education is getting acknowledged for his work. Not the work he struggled with in getting me to finally graduate, but his work on zebrafish. Chuck Kimmel is getting a lifetime achievement award from Oregon Academy of Science.

“Importantly, Chuck saw the virtue of zebrafish as a genetic model for studies of vertebrate development, due to the relative simplicity of its embryonic cell lineage compared to other vertebrates, its optical clarity during embryogenesis and its rapid generation time,” Bowerman wrote. “It is truly remarkable how Chuck’s insight has had such a global impact, with hundreds of laboratories throughout the world now using zebrafish as one of the two leading models for vertebrate development and behavior.”

In case you are wondering, the #1 model is the mouse. Zebrafish are #2, but at least you don’t need to disembowel Minnie Mouse to get access to embryos.

I knew Chuck would do good in his career. Way back in the day we also knew zebrafish would be a popular tool.

The Little Ice Age was anthropogenic?

Climate change denialists love to bring up the Little Ice Age (and the Medieval Warm Period before it) as examples of natural variation in climate that wasn’t human-caused, and therefore cast doubt on all the arguments about anthropogenic climate change. Except…what if the cooling recorded for the 17th-19th centuries was actually caused by human activity? A new analysis suggests that that might be our fault, too.

It’s the UCL group’s estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world’s total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.

The scientists calculated how much land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and what the impact would be if this ground was then repossessed by forest and savannah.

The area is in the order of 56 million hectares, close in size to a modern country like France.

This scale of regrowth is figured to have drawn down sufficient CO₂ that the concentration of the gas in the atmosphere eventually fell by 7-10ppm (that is 7-10 molecules of CO₂ in every one million molecules in the air).

“To put that in the modern context – we basically burn (fossil fuels) and produce about 3ppm per year. So, we’re talking a large amount of carbon that’s being sucked out of the atmosphere,” explained co-author Prof Mark Maslin.

It’s horrifying enough that the American genocide killed about 50 million people, but that it was so immense that it affected the climate is stunning. I also have to wonder how much the earlier Black Death in Europe contributed to a decline in CO2.

This does suggest an obvious solution to our current climate change concerns. Annihilate a few billion people, and the problem goes away.

It looks like the American and Russian leaders are working on a plan to do just that.

Who would win in a battle between Florida Man and Minnesota Man?

I know that Florida Man gets all the press, but Minnesota Man is an up-and-comer.

Officers arrived at the couple’s home and found the words “Death Parde God Hell” spray-painted on the front door. A naked Duane Johnson allegedly ran outside and said his wife was dead, then ran back inside to take a bath. He was later found in the bathtub hallucinating and trying to wash white and black “things” from his skin, according to deputies.

Debra Johnson’s body was found wrapped in a sheet the top of the stairs, deputies said.

The newspaper reported that Debra had been living in a nursing home, but Duane checked her out days earlier because she wanted to die at home.

Duane Johnson said they took methamphetamine and she stopped taking her medications. They spent their final hours having sex and “rocked out” to their favorite metal band, Quiet Riot.

He said when Debra couldn’t eat or drink, he used snow to moisten her mouth, according to the court documcents.

Duane said Debra began having convulsions, but wouldn’t let him call police. After she died, Johnson said he washed his wife’s body and wrapped her in linen “like the Bible told me to do.”

They casually mention that he ran naked outside. That was on Wednesday, when it was below -30°C. Florida Man couldn’t do that!

I have to respect their commitment to death with dignity, where they get to decide what dignity means.

Inference: Dracula is a creationist and climate change denialist

When this new online “science” journal, Inference, came out, no one was fooled. The first issue featured an article by the notorious crank creationist, Michael Denton, so it wasn’t as if it wasn’t obvious. Jeffrey Shallit wrote the first expose, I think, noticing that the grubby fingerprints of David Berlinski were all over it. Ho hum, yet another attempt by creationists to create a pet journal, to feed the illusion that they’re actually doing credible, peer-reviewed work. But then another mystery has arisen: where is all their money coming from?

When Inference first approached me, the offer was appealing: up to $4,000 for a 4,000- to 6,000-word essay. According to their website, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow was on the editorial staff, which—as a physicist myself and a fan of Glashow’s work—was almost enough for me to accept on the spot. But a declaration in italics on their masthead gave me pause: “We have no ideological, political, or religious agendas whatsoever.” This struck me as unusual over-emphasis, so I did a little digging and came across a 2014 blog post by the computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit, where he muses on the first issue of this new “science” publication, adding: “the weirdness is strong—very strong—with this one.”

When someone claims they have “no ideological, political, or religious agendas whatsoever”, they’re lying. What they’re really claiming is that their biases aren’t biases at all, which is a real danger, because it means they aren’t thinking and challenging their own assumptions.

But wow. That’s some nice pocket change for an article — I am so used to just writing stuff for free. That adds up over multiple issues with multiple articles, and it isn’t funded by ads, so there has to be a pipeline somewhere that’s pouring cash into the enterprise. This article did some digging and found out who: it’s Peter Thiel.

Those tax returns reveal that Inference’s entire operating budget came from $1.7 million in donations during its first three years (through August 2017, the latest reports available). These donations came from a single donor: Auzen LLC. Looking at corporate tax reports and other registration documents, it’s unclear whether Auzen LLC and another entity, Auzen Corporation, are involved in activities other than funding Inference. But those documents make it clear that Auzen LLC and Auzen Corporation are run by the same people — and they also state that the sole director of Auzen Corporation is Peter Thiel.

Ah, another billionaire poisoning the world. “No ideological, political, or religious agendas whatsoever”…bullshit. He’s a libertarian wanna-be vampire and climate change denier who loves Donald Trump and thinks letting women vote was a bad idea. His agenda is devious but transparent.

Not all of Inference‘s articles are junk science. About 90 percent of the articles in the publication appear to be accurate, written by genuine scientists and science writers—at least several of whom weren’t aware of the publication’s record on evolution or climate change, or the source of its funding.

But whatever Inference’s actual intentions, one thing is clear: The inclusion of demonstrably pseudoscientific writing alongside the work of highly regarded researchers puts the two on equal footing—a false equivalence that gives creationism and climate denial an air of legitimacy that is not only unwarranted, but misleading to readers. Add in the fact that the enterprise is apparently funded by a billionaire with close ties to President Donald J. Trump—whose administration has a clear history of attacking and undermining science—and there seems ample reason to question just what it is that Inference and its backer are hoping to accomplish.

Note to self: When the revolution comes, make sure some of the people storming the citadel of malignant capitalism are carrying wooden stakes. Also, do it during the day so Thiel can’t flap away.

Drinking, smoking, hanging out in saloons, following sports and the stock market — it’s a nightmare world!

In 1908, Harry Dart was commissioned to produce an image of what horrors would be produced by the suffrage movement. I guess he succeeded?

Apparently, the worst thing he could imagine was that women might do the very same things men did all the time. I’m supposed to recoil from this unthinkable future…but it’s just fascinatingly detailed.

Microbiologists don’t need labs, apparently

All they need to do is visit student residences.

A student died after eating leftover pasta that had been left on his kitchen benchtop for five days.

The 20-year-old from the Brussels in Belgium became sick after eating leftover spaghetti with tomato sauce which had been prepared five days earlier and stored at room temperature.

Many thoughts are wheeling through my brain right now.

What kind of environment was this in that food left out for 5 days wasn’t covered in green fur?

Was it all furry with mold, and the student ate it anyway?

I don’t eat food that’s been refrigerated for more than a few days. How desperate was this person? What circumstances led someone to such a dire meal?

I don’t recommend this as an analysis tool, but how did it taste? Shouldn’t the first mouthful have been his first warning?

He became violently ill after eating it. Second warning. You’ve just done something incredibly dangerous.

I wonder how many student kitchens are greater health hazards than anything they might encounter in a microbiology lab. On second thought…I don’t want to know.

Students do not deserve death for poverty and carelessness. How about if we all recognize that what grows on our food and what we stuff in faces might be the greatest threat to our health and survival?