Time to nuke the fault line and split the rift deeper

Thomas Smith wraps up his experience at the Mythcon conference. It wasn’t good. It’s clear that Carl Benjamin is a waste of time, as are his followers. He ends with the suggestion that next year, if they double down and invite yet another group of shitlords, let ’em have a shitlord conference…but if you’re anyone with a drop of social awareness and even a hint of conscience, don’t participate and don’t attend. The only problem with that, unfortunately, is that white supremacy has become a fruitful path to become YouTube-famous, so they’ll still have an audience. They just won’t have prominent mainstream atheists, and they’ll also be lacking all the atheists who support social justice (the only atheists worth listening to). Dig the rift deeper, and cut them loose.

Meanwhile Skepticon is about a month away, and if you want to help out the decent side of atheism, donate to help it happen.

Matt Dillahunty delivers his position on the conference.

Letters from an imbecile

Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will; her fight against this violation went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed her rights with the remark that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Now you can see for yourself how imbecilic Carrie Buck was. Some of Buck’s letters have been published. Here’s one sample:

Dearest Mrs. Berry, Will write to you this A.M. This leaves me real well and getting along just fine. Mrs. Berry I have wrote to Dorris several times since I have been here and haven’t gotten any answer from it. I guess there are lots of girls going away now. I had a letter from mother here several days ago and said for me to send her some things. Will it be o.k. for me to do so or not. Will you please let me know. Give her my love and tell her I will write to her later as I haven’t got time to write now as I have got some work to do. Give Miss Vian (?) my love and all of the girls. Well I must close for now. With Love, Carrie B., Bland, Va.

That’s perfectly normal, an average human being with average human concerns having a conversation with another person. These are also scans of her letters, so you can also see that she had remarkably clear penmanship — not that penmanship is the mark of a worthy human, but it does show that she had normal skills and values.

What we did to this woman was a tragedy and a crime.

So tired of the “freedom” excuse

You’ve heard it before. “They hate us for our freedoms”. It’s a catch-all excuse, where we can simultaneously pat ourselves on the back for being so “free”, whatever that means, and condemn others for not being as “free”. I’ve developed a bad reaction to that: I want to know what you mean by “freedom”. Freedom to exploit people? Freedom to harass? Freedom to eat bacon? Freedom to pray to your gods? There are a lot of freedoms that are worth exercising, and many of those that I’m happy to say can be exercised in my country. There are also things people call freedoms that are truly awful, and those get exercised, too — like the freedom to take advantage of underprivileged people. There’s also a tendency for my fellow Americans to assume that America is the land of the free, and that everyone is equally and completely free, which is not true. They also tend to get angry if you point out the shortcomings of America, in particular that different people have different degrees of liberty.

So my usual reaction is to wonder how the ‘freedom’ cheerleaders define freedom, and whether they seriously think the ideal is to be free of all responsibilities and obligations. It’s usually used vacuously, as a dogma that is not to be questioned.

Which means that I had to facepalm at this complaint about new atheism. That’s fair; there are good reasons to criticize, and an important part of intellectual growth is to address good faith criticisms. I read this, for instance, and didn’t reject it out of hand.

Many new atheists, including Dennett or Dawkins, have been criticised for being too radical. The phrase “militant atheist” is often thrown about. The general worry is that they have little patience or compassion for religious people and the reasons why they choose religion.

I’ve heard that complaint frequently enough that we should pay attention to it and try to deal with it. I wasn’t particularly impressed that this critic then goes on to babble approvingly of Alain de Botton, one of the shallowest, least interesting, wanna-be replacements for Richard Dawkins ever.

But don’t worry! He’s got a suggestion for what the next generation of atheists need to do.

What should we do then? Is there a genuine, not merely superficial alternative to both religion and the “something bigger” new atheists talk about? I suggest that there is a very simple alternative: we should try to avoid forcing a straight-jacket on our ever-changing self – by religious doctrines or by one of these “projects” the new atheists talk about. We should accept and cherish our freedom to change.

For the new atheists, freedom plays a very limited role. You are free to choose what you devote your life to, but once you’ve done that, your life is on a fixed track – no more free decisions. The new atheists’ “projects”, just as religious doctrines, put unreasonably severe constraints on our inner freedom.

The opposite of religion is not the slavish following of “something bigger” as the new atheists suggest. The opposite of religion is freedom.

Baffling. What “projects”? Is this a thing among the new atheists? (I think I’d know.) What “straight jacket” [sic]? Where is this assertion that new atheists aren’t allowed to change and grow, that they’re on a fixed track? This is news to me.

And what is his alternative? Fucking “freedom”. What does that mean? It’s stunning that this platitude comes from a professor of philosophy. Define your terms. What do you mean by the “opposite of religion is freedom”? Religion is slavery? All a slave must do is accept atheism and they are free?

We need good criticisms because we do need to improve our image and our approach. This is not a useful argument. We don’t need hackneyed bromides. Explain what “freedom” means in a social movement.

The Chocolate Ritual

I was reading about this secret Nazi convention back in my hometown of Seattle. It is, as expected, a collection of unpleasant, ignorant people, who are also prosperous young professional men, so I suspect it’s the kind of crowd Mythicist Milwaukee would love to attract, so maybe they should read it for tips.

But there’s one bit that picqued my interest. Apparently there’s a famous Nazi author lurking back home.

When I’d asked Krafft back in 2015 how many white nationalists resided in Seattle, he responded “not many.” The only local voice for white separatism was the laughably uncharismatic Harold Covington of Northwest Front, who according to Krafft, asks people for money immediately upon meeting them. Surprisingly, some white nationalist circles now hold Harold Covington in high regard. That’s especially true among younger followers (including the church Shooter Dylann Roof). His “racially aware” Northwest sci-fi novels are required reading among convention attendees. Some have read all of them. To prep for the forum, I planned on reading Covington’s best-known works. I started with a young adult novel about a delinquent and his cheerleader girlfriend in the Seattle race war, but gave up after forty pages because the book is unreadable.

“Unreadable”? That sounds like a challenge. So I looked him up on Amazon to see if any were available for free, since no way in hell was I paying for them. None are free. But some had some had fairly extensive free previews, so I could get a taste. It was not a good flavor. These things are full of misogyny, racism, and violence by smug, oblivious white men with guns.

So I started on one, called The Brigade. The beginning was not auspicious. It’s about a guy who decides to murder two women because they got a friend of his arrested and thrown into jail. He was arrested because — of course he did nothing wrong — he called his girlfriend a “dyke”. That is enough of an excuse for ZOG to throw an innocent white man into prison!

The real problem is that she was a…wait for it…a feminist.

“Oh, she was always like that, ever since she came back from the university,” said King with a shrug. “I mean, what else do you expect from U of O? I just figured she rebelled against her religious upbringing when she went to college, trying to be chic and fit in, and then she just never sort of grew out of it. I actually used to think it was kind of cute, kind of her way of retaining her youth.”

“Yeah, well, baby tarantulas grow up into big fucking poisonous spiders,” Hatfield reminded him.

Yeah, I went to the U of O, too. No wonder I turned out this way. But I have to object: tarantulas are not poisonous. Neither are feminists.

But you might be wondering what terrible thing his girlfriend did to deserve having the criminal insult of “dyke” thrown at her. He caught her in flagrante with another woman!

Which leads to a hilarious revelation.

“Strike her?” laughed King bitterly. “My God, have you seen that creature? She’s built like a bulldozer! I lost my temper is all, when I walked into my living room and found them doing–dear Christ, what they were doing–I can’t even talk about it!”

“The Chocolate Ritual,” said Hatfield. “I know. It is supposed to be for bonding between female lovers. Most people have no idea of what homosexuals actually do. You were unlucky enough to get a crash course.”

The things you will learn in this book. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read much further, because the original article is correct: this book is unreadable, and stops being funny fast. Yes, Our Hero sneaks into a house, and callously murders the two lesbians with a big gun. It kind of makes all the protestations about innocent, harmless men being unjustly accused by conniving women ring false. Not funny at all.

There’s also lots of crap about organizing paramilitary brigades, and boring details about military weapons. Not recommended, except for burning or wiping your ass.

Any lesbians reading this should chime in with an explanation of what the Chocolate Ritual might be, though, since I clearly don’t know as much about what homosexuals do as Harold Covington.

Uh-oh, we have competition

I told you that the University of Minnesota Morris has an opening for a tenure track position in quantitative biology — really, we do, and we urge qualified individuals to apply.

Only now it turns out that we have some competition in the market. Liberty University is also trying to fill an assistant professor in biology position.

Disclaimer: Liberty University’s hiring practices and EEO Statement are fully in compliance with both federal and state law. Federal law creates an exception to the “religion” component of the employment discrimination laws for religious organizations (including educational institutions), and permits them to give employment preference to members of their own religion. Liberty University is in that category.

Minimum Qualifications
Ph.D. in a biological field, or an M.D. minimum qualifications or 18 graduate hours in biology related coursework. Candidates must be committed to the evangelical standards and mission of Liberty University.

Preferred Qualifications

Ph.D. in a biological field, or an M.D. minimum qualifications or 18 graduate hours in biology related coursework. Candidates must be committed to the evangelical standards and mission of Liberty University.

I might be wrong, but I think there might be some religious requirement for the job at Liberty. You might want to read it carefully, I could have missed it.

In the spirit of true academic collegiality, though, if you meet the requirements for the Liberty position, I urge you to apply there. Not to UMM. We’re secular, super gay, and satanic. We might be drawing on a different pool of applicants.

The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

Now there’s an ambitious title: Adam Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. It’s a substantial book, but I would have thought it would have had to be a bit longer to cover everyone, and really, a biography of every individual who ever lived would probably get a bit repetitious.

Fortunately, this isn’t a collection of actuarial tables and obituaries. It’s something much more useful: a description of how we know what we know about humanity, from the perspective of genetics, with a solid awareness of the limitations and capabilities of such an approach. That’s helpful — one of our big problems right now is the abuse of genetics by the ignorant to advocate for an impossibly deterministic and racist view of human history. This book counteracts that by describing the methodology accurately, and you’ll learn a lot by reading it. But don’t panic, it’s not a textbook — it does tell the stories and is a good read.

If you doubt me, a revised chapter has been made freely available, A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas, just for us provincial Americans (the full book has a far more global perspective). This one focuses on some of the historical and scientific controversies around efforts to pigeonhole American Indians into one ill-fitting racial category or another.

The idea that tribal status is encoded in DNA is both simplistic and wrong. Many tribespeople have non-native parents and still retain a sense of being bound to the tribe and the land they hold sacred. In Massachusetts, members of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe identified European and African heritage in their DNA, due to hundreds of years of interbreeding with New World settlers. Attempting to conflate tribal status with DNA denies the cultural affinity that people have with their tribes. It suggests a kind of purity that genetics cannot support, a type of essentialism that resembles scientific racism.

The specious belief that DNA can bestow tribal identity, as sold by companies such as Accu-Metrics, can only foment further animosity—and suspicion—toward scientists. If a tribal identity could be shown by DNA (which it can’t), then perhaps reparation rights afforded to tribes in recent years might be invalid in the territories to which they were moved during the 19th century. Many tribes are effective sovereign nations and therefore not necessarily bound by the laws of the state in which they live.

When coupled with cases such as that of the Havasupai, and centuries of racism, the relationship between Native Americans and geneticists is not healthy. After the legal battles over the remains of Kennewick Man were settled, and it was accepted that he was not of European descent, the tribes were invited to join in the subsequent studies. Out of five, only the Colville Tribes did. Their representative, James Boyd, told The New York Times in 2015, “We were hesitant. Science hasn’t been good to us.”

Data is supreme in genetics, and data is what we crave. But we are the data, and people are not there for the benefit of others, regardless of how noble one’s scientific aims are. To deepen our understanding of how we came to be and who we are, scientists must do better, and invite people whose genes provide answers to not only volunteer their data, but to participate, to own their individual stories, and to be part of that journey of discovery.

A book about human genetics with a humanist perspective? That debunks 19th century dogma about race and intelligence? Yeah, it’s good. I’ve been trying to think of ways I could fit it into my already packed-full genetics course, or whether I could offer a non-majors course that incorporated it as a text.

But at least I can tell you all that you need to read it.

There will be a test. Not that I’ll be giving it, but rather that our entire culture seems to be testing you on this subject right now. You should read the book so you can answer it correctly.

What are we going to do about the Nobels?

Ed Yong points out the problems with the Nobel prize: they don’t reflect how science is actually done, they tend to reinforce an archaic notion that scientists work alone and have “Eureka!” moments, they are arbitrary in picking which of the many scientists who contributed to a discovery get the award, and when they make those arbitrary choices, they tend to be biased towards male establishment scientists. It also adds an excessive luster to recipients — it’s for a single discovery, but you’re set for life if you get one, and it gives people who had a singular insight, for which their prize was justly deserved, an unwarranted authority on all too many things. That’s how we get a Watson, a Shockley, a Mullis.

He doesn’t mention another problem, though: the narrowness of the categories. You cannot win a Nobel prize for mathematics, or computer science, or evolutionary biology. Not even biology: all the great work in my field has to be warped to fit a category called “physiology and medicine”, which the Nobel committee does (after all, they’ve managed to award developmental biology a few times), but still, it forces us to look at the world of science through a specifically focused 19th century slit.

Rosbash, Young, and Hall, who won for their work on the molecular basis of circadian rhythms, did great work and should be acknowledged. But thanks to the arcane rules of the prize — no more than three people, who all must be alive — there is an army of researchers who also contributed to the work, and will be ignored. Among those contributors was the late Seymour Benzer, a real scientist’s scientist, who made amazing discoveries in the arcane fields of phage genetics and neurogenetics and of course, circadian rhythms. It’s not that Benzer was neglected — he had awards out the wazoo — but that a life of sustained effort and scientific discipline does not get the ultimate award (it’s also bothersome that there is an “ultimate award”) and won’t get the public attention he deserved.

I don’t know what to do about it, though.

The Nobel prize is the result of a wonderfully successful PR campaign that does a good job of highlighting good science…but it also contributes to the public perception of all worthy endeavors as being kind of like a horse race. It’s not what they did or how they got there or where we go to next, it’s all about who got to the finish line first and who gets to wear the shiny gold medal. You can’t exactly abolish them — they’re the outcome of a committee and an endowment, and people have every right to honor scientists — but it would sure be nice if those honors could be spread around more to everyone who deserves them, rather than being concentrated to create an artificial scientific elite.

Bottom line is that we aren’t and shouldn’t do anything about the Nobels. We should have more ways to recognize scientific accomplishment, though, and the media should be able to notice the science happening all around them instead of celebrating gold disks handed out every October.

Teams of Memes, bursting from the seams

Image courtesy of the googles.

Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back is a lengthy and winding journey. It is characterized (including by its publisher) as a general explanation of the evolution of minds and various peculiar mental functions, consciousness and language being the two most hotly discussed by philosophers, but there’s a better way to read it. As its best, the book is a tour of Dennett’s personal philosophical repertoire, illustrating how ideas from his books and papers fit together.

Dennett’s general theory of the development of genetics stems from his broad theory of memes, where a meme is any informational entity that can be transmitted and replicated. The rough idea is that minds are meme-machines in the way that organisms are gene-machines (in Dawkins’ analogy of the gene’s-eye-view). This is a fruitful analogy, in some respects, though I think it can and should draw some skepticism from readers. I’ll return to those worries later.

The basic building blocks of Dennett’s view are indicated by gestures and short explanations, which is a challenge since he’s spent so much time discussing and arguing for them elsewhere in his work. In any case, there are really two that it is important to understand.

[Read more…]

On the bright side, we have another reason to be best buddies with Saudi Arabia

OK, I’ve had enough. A resolution before the UN to condemn executions for apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, and consensual same-sex relations has passed, but Botswana, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China, India, Iraq, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates voted against it.

Oh. And one more. The United States voted against it, too, all for allowing countries to continue to execute people for being an atheist or a gay person. The United States. My country.

Can I have myself frozen and thawed out a century, or maybe a thousand years from now, when this madness is over?

(Damn it, no. That cryogenics stuff doesn’t work. We don’t have time machines, either. Technology, you have failed me again!)

Pressure rising…rising…rising

Good god, our president is in Puerto Rico and he opened his mouth, and this came out:

The bit at the beginning in which he jokes about having to spend money on their island, You have thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico and that’s fine, is bad enough. But listen to the whole thing, and what came next is even more nauseating.

…if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous…hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and if you look at what happened here with a storm that was totally overpowering, nobody has ever seen…what is your death count here? 17, 16, 16 people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands, you can be very proud of all of your people…

He’s comparing it to a real catastrophe like Katrina, and justifying his belittling attitude with a fucking body count. Hey, Puerto Rico, what are you complaining about? We spent money on you, and you’ve only got 16 dead (so far), compared to something really bad.

This president is going to kill me. Only question is whether it’s going to be explosive exanguination when my blood pressure blows the top of my head off, or nuclear apoplexy.