The funniest thing about this new interview of Bill Dembski is not that it’s conducted by Sean McDowell, who has a “Ph.D. in Apologetics and Worldview Studies from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary” and is the son of the well-known evangelist Josh McDowell.

It’s not that McDowell doesn’t ask him a single probing question.

It’s not that Dembski reveals he has a new book on intelligent design coming out, co-authored with the illustrious Robert J. Marks II; the table of contents can be found here.

It’s not that Dembski still doesn’t understand that the source of information in biology is well-understood biological processes such as mutations, recombination, gene duplication, and gene transfer.

No, the single funniest thing is that Dembski points to his nearly-dead, on-its-last-legs vanity journal Bio-Complexity as one of the ID movement’s greatest scientific successes.

As I’ve pointed out before, Bio-Complexity is a great example of the utter intellectual vacuity of intelligent design. Despite having an editorial board of 31 people, in 2014 the journal managed to publish exactly 1 research article and a total of 4 papers. In 2015 they published a total of 2 papers. In 2016 so far they’ve published exactly 1 paper. (At that rate, in 2017 they’ll publish half a paper.)

Wow! That is a research record to be very proud of! It really shows that intelligent design is fruitful, and inspiring top-quality research from scientists all over the world! The only downside is all the hard editorial work that needs to be done by those 31 members of the editorial board. Why, if they didn’t have to spend all their time reviewing papers, they might be publishing some intelligent design research of their own. Truly, it’s a scientific success.

One characteristic of creationists is their unwillingness to follow the usual academic norms. To name just a few things:

1. While a tiny fraction of them publish papers in legitimate peer-reviewed academic journals, they typically do not publish their creationist views or evidence for creationism and intelligent design in such journals. Instead, they invent their own bogus journals, which then struggle to stay afloat for lack of acceptable submissions. Do any of you remember Origins and Design? I think it died around 2000. Do you remember Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design? It died around 2005. Now the intelligent design crowd has Bio-Complexity, but it has published only one paper so far in all of 2016. It, too, is headed for death.
2. They typically do not present their creationist views at legitimate peer-reviewed conferences. The few exceptions seem to be closed, invitation-only conferences devoted only to creationism or intelligent design. You do not see, for example, William Dembski (the supposed “Isaac Newton of information theory”) presenting his work at the top information theory conferences, such as the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory.
3. They inflate their credentials.
4. They hold meetings at universities by renting space and then suggest or imply that the university somehow sponsored their meeting. The 2011 “biological information” meeting at Cornell is an obvious example.
5. They are prone to making public claims that they are not willing to justify.

The illustrious Robert J. Marks II, professor at Baylor University, is an example of this last characteristic. Back in 2014, he made the following claim: “we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji”. I wanted to see the details of the calculation justifying this claim, so I asked Professor Marks to supply it. He did not reply.

Nor did he reply when I asked three months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked six months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked a year later.

It’s now been two years. Academics are busy people, but this is pretty silly. Who thinks the illustrious Professor Marks will ever show me a calculation justifying his claim?

A lot of my friends and acquaintances have been Facebook-sharing the following excerpt from a book by Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence:

 

Forsyth gives a good general rule for English, but like most grammatical rules, it’s easy to find exceptions. For example, the American poet Benjamin Ivry wrote, in his poem “Ici Mourut Racine”, of a “square little cottage”.

So a challenge to readers: come up with the best natural-sounding exception to Forsyth’s rule of English. You get bonus points if you violate Forsyth’s order in multiple ways, and even more bonus points if you can find it in the published work of a native English-speaking author. No prizes for citing non-native speakers clearly lacking English skills.

Last month, an anonymous theist coward with e-mail address “DrIntellectual@hotmail.com” sent e-mail to at least 35 members of my department, informing them that I am an atheist (gasp!), and trying to get me fired.

This isn’t the first time this happened. About twenty years ago, some local evangelicals were actually picketing outside the gates of my university with the same goal. They failed, but everybody had a good time laughing.

I am happy to say that DrIntellectual’s plan also backfired. Nearly everybody ignored DrIntellectual’s message, except the Dean, who wrote me to offer his support.  I guess DrIntellectual has never heard of “academic freedom” and what it entails.

The two things that drove DrIntellectual to inchoate rage seem to be my review of Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell, and my review of Patrick Glynn’s book, God: The Evidence. But DrIntellectual offers nothing against the views I presented there, except some variations on “Wow! Oxygen! Hence, God!”. This is literally an 18th century view: it was Dartmouth’s founder, Eleazar Wheelock, who reportedly once offered the prayer, “O Lord! We thank Thee for the Oxygen gas; we thank Thee for the Hydrogen gas; and for all the gases.” But it’s the 21st century now. We don’t burn witches any more, either.

Why is DrIntellectual driven to act like this? I don’t know, but it’s typical behavior for a certain species of theist. This kind of person is so steeped in Jeebus that it’s literally inconceivable that anyone could believe differently. Furthermore, anyone who disbelieves must be evil, and therefore no tactic against them is too slimy. (It’s the same method used by Scientologists on what they call “suppressive people”.) Luckily, these dirty tricksters are usually too impotent to do much harm.

What DrIntellectual is really saying by his actions is that my book reviews are powerful. They represent such a threat to his insecure world view that he has to resort to this kind of poison-pen attack. He can’t simply leave a comment on my blog or write his own rebuttal. No, the rest of the world has to coddle DrIntellectual’s weak faith by removing all obstacles to it. He even resorts to implicit threats, writing “in the end, there will be a test, a very important test. Don’t fail it.” Threats like these are the theist’s weapon of choice.

The Internet is the most powerful weapon against this kind of theism ever devised. When people of good will see the kinds of tactics some theists have to resort to, they know very well who is winning the argument. We are.

Moose in Mineral Creek, near Silverton, Colorado. We saw a bunch of people stopped along the highway, and we stopped, too. Glad we did!

Creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doubles down in his latest at the misnamed evolutionnews.org site. He’s still claiming that animals don’t have language.

He really has nothing new to say. He provides no evidence for his claims, just a series of assertions:

“Language in animals has never been demonstrated”: actually, it has. I gave several citations, but Egnor didn’t address any of them. There is a whole subfield of ethology that deals with this. Egnor didn’t even seem to know the name of the field.

“because animals are incapable of language.”: pure assertion.

“Claims of animal language have been made by some ethologists, but those claims are mistaken”: Egnor suddenly starts using the word “ethologist”, which he didn’t before. I am glad to have informed him of the name for the practitioners of the field he is criticizing. Again, pure assertion. He doesn’t actually address any of the cited studies.

“We should begin with an examination of what we mean by language.”: Egnor is not a linguist, either.

“The confusion between signals and designators is at the root of ethologists’ misunderstanding about animal “language.”: Yeah, all those ethologists who actually study animal language are wrong, but Egnor (who didn’t seem to even know the word “ethologist” until two days ago) is right, despite not working in the field. Remember the word “egnorance” and why it was coined?

“Natural animal signals have no grammar”: Probably not true. For example, see here and here and here. Now one could certainly take issue with any or all of these, but the point is that there is a large literature that needs to be assessed carefully, and which cannot be addressed by categorical denials of the kind Egnor makes. Egnor does not do this. He just knows he is correct, because … Aristotle.

“Animals do not signal abstract concepts”: pure assertion.

(Quoting de Waal): “We honestly have no evidence for symbolic communication, equally rich and multifunctional as ours, outside our species”: A red herring. Nobody said animal language was as “rich and multifunctional” as human language, just that it exists, contrary to Egnor’s claims. This is the traditional creationist technique known as “moving the goalposts”.

Finally, Egnor insinuates that I haven’t read de Waal’s books, when I was the one who introduced them to him. He urges me to read de Waal’s books. I have. My records show that I read Good Natured in 1996, as well as Chimpanzee Politics and Peacemaking Among Primates.

We haven’t heard from creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor lately. (If I had to guess, I’d wager he’s writing a book, in order to cash in on the unlimited religionist thirst to have someone with credentials confirm their world view.) That’s too bad, because Egnor was a neverending source of amusement. He is, after all, the man for which the word “egnorance” was coined: “the egotistical combination of ignorance and arrogance”.

That’s why it’s such a delight to see Egnor make a fool of himself yet again, with this Discovery Institute column about animal intelligence and language.

Egnor claims that “cats can’t do logic, mathematical or otherwise, and they never will”. Here is one of his arguments in support of this claim: “they don’t do logic. Because they’re cats.” Well, that was certainly convincing.

Showing that Egnor knows even less about logic than he does about evolution, Egnor goes on to claim that “A logical statement is true inherently, independently of the particulars that occupy the place-holders”. Really? This will certainly be news to actual logicians, who labor under the delusion that a statement like “for all x, there exists a y such that x = 2*y” is a false statement in the logical theory known as “Presburger arithmetic”.

Like most religionists, Egnor seems to have a real need to believe that people are somehow fundamentally different from the rest of the animal world. He claims that “What distinguishes men from animals is this: men, but not animals, can contemplate universals, independently of particulars. Animals cannot contemplate universals. Animal thought is always tied to particular things.” He goes on to claim, “Animal thought lacks abstraction” and “In fact, an animal cannot think about universals, for the simple reason that animals have no language.”

How does Egnor know these things? He offers no empirical evidence in support of his claims. Empirical evidence is absolutely necessary, since there is nothing logically impossible about animals thinking abstractly. After all, Egnor’s own holy book, the bible, depicts talking snakes and talking donkeys. While I am amused to see Egnor undermine the claims of his own religion, animal language and thought are questions that have to be resolved scientifically.

And there is an area of science that is actively interested in testing these kinds of claims, although you’d never know it from reading Egnor. It is a branch of ethology, which is the science of animal behavior. (I am not an ethologist by any means, but I can recommend the eye-opening books of primatologist Frans de Waal.)  Contrary to Egnor’s claims, the evidence for animal language is quite strong, although of course there are doubters. Animal language exists in many different animals, including bees, elephants, dolphins, baboons, and whales.

So how does Egnor back up his claims? By citing Aristotle. That’s it. He writes, “This rudimentary fact about animal and human minds was noted by Aristotle, and was common knowledge for a couple thousand years. Moderns have forgotten it, and it has led to a morass of confusion about animal minds and the differences between human and animal thought.”

I suppose if one’s worldview depends on a 2000-year-old book written by people lacking scientific knowledge of the universe, then it’s not a stretch to get your understanding of animal language and thought from a philosopher who lived 2300 years ago, and who simply asserted his claims without doing any experiments at all.

There is also evidence for abstract thought in animals other than people. Evidence exists for dogs, baboons, and crows, to name just three examples. Of course, all these examples are debatable (although I find these and others pretty convincing), and will likely continue to be debated until we know more about how abstract concepts are represented and processed in brains. Nevertheless it is pretty obvious that this is a question that, at least in principle, is capable of being resolved empirically.

I’ll conclude with the words of David Hume: “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as man. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant.” Or maybe that should be “egnorant”.

I’ve been watching a bit of the British TV show QI lately, and they mentioned the fact that the word “typewriter” can be written using the top row of keys on a QWERTY keyboard.

This got me wondering about what commonly-used words are the longest for each row. In addition to “typewriter”, other 10-letter words you can type exclusively on the top row include “perpetuity” and “repertoire”. Claims for “teeter-totter” seem to be cheating, as it is almost always written with a hyphen. The OED lists a few more such words, but none that are common (“pepperwort”?).

For the middle row, the longest seems to be “alfalfa”.

The poor sad bottom row seems to have no examples at all, unless you include “zzz”, which is sometimes used to indicate the sound of sleep.

On a French AZERTY keyboard, one can type the English words “appropriate”, “perpetrator”, “preparatory”, “proprietary”, as well as the winner, “reappropriate”. The longest French words on their national keyboard seem to be “approprieriez” and “pirouetterait”.

Somehow I missed this: May 16 was the 65th birthday of singer Jonathan Richman.

Jonathan Richman is really hard to describe, but he’s sort of a weird blend of children’s singer Raffi and the Ramones. When I lived on Ellsworth Street in Berkeley from 1979 to 1983, he lived quite nearby, and we often saw him performing in Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus (where the photo above was taken, in 1981), or the club Berkeley Square on University Avenue. Once I saw him walking down the street, ran up to my apartment, and got one of his albums out for him to autograph, which he gladly did. I even have a picture of Jonathan and me together, but I only show it to close friends.

Here are a few of my favorite Jonathan Richman songs:

• Roadrunner, one of his famous early songs, about Boston
• Egyptian Reggae
• Ice Cream Man
• Back in Your Life
• Abominable Snowman in the Market
• New England

Happy 65th birthday, Jonathan!

Lately I’ve been listening to right-wing talk radio, to try to understand its attractions. In particular, I’ve been listening to Michael Savage and Mark Levin. These men are both conservative radio hosts with millions of weekly listeners. I have to admit, after more than a month of listening, I find it really hard to understand their appeal.

In some ways, Savage and Levin are very similar. They both use extensive call screening, so that practically no dissenting voices are ever allowed on the air. During the past month, I think I haven’t heard a single liberal caller on either program. If they do manage to get on somehow, they typically get shouted down and cut off.

They both shill for their own books, with Levin pushing Plunder and Deceit and Savage pushing Government Zero. They both advertise their books about dogs, with Savage pushing Teddy and Me, and Levin pushing a book written by his father, My Dog Spot. They both shill for companies that sell precious metals as investments, with Levin pushing Goldline and Savage pushing Swiss America. Levin also shills for AMAC (which bills itself as the conservative alternative to AARP) and Dollar Shave Club.

For radio professionals, they both seem to have trouble pronouncing certain words. Levin once referred to Mallorca as “Mall-er-ka”, and Savage pronounced “fiefdom” as “fife-dum”.

They both always refer to the “Democrat party”, a typical epithet of the far right.

They both love to name-call. Levin constantly uses terms like “puke”, “hack”, “jerk”, and “punk” to describe anybody he disagrees with. Sometimes he calls people “subhuman”. If there exists a single person in the world who is both personally honorable and disagrees with Levin on some substantive issue, you would not know about it by listening to him. For example, he called Elizabeth Warren “one of the biggest idiots”, “a complete freak” and a “dimwitted buffoon”. (He has a particular dislike for university professors.) Levin routinely refers to the New York Times as the “New York Slimes”, the Washington Post as the “Washington Compost”, MSNBC as “MSLSD”, Associated Press as “Associated Depressed”, Hillary Clinton as “Hillary Rotten Clinton”. I guess he thinks he’s being clever. Savage, on the other hand, routinely refers to people he disagrees with as “garbage” or “vermin”. He particularly dislikes Muslims, which he enjoys calling “Moose-lims”. He calls Rachel Maddow “Rachel Madcow”.

Both Savage and Levin like to portray themselves as brave, honest commentators who say what others dare not.  When Levin says, “There!  I said it!” you know for sure that something particularly ignorant has just preceded it.

Probably the most important commonality between Levin and Savage is they both lie. Unrelentingly. Repeatedly. In listening for a month or so, there were so many lies that I often had trouble recording them all. They’re not lying about things whose truth is hard to determine, either. Here are just a few:

• Mark Levin claimed “nobody watches CBS News”. In fact, in 2015, viewership was 6.8 million, up 4% from previously, or about the same as Levin’s own audience size.
• Michael Savage lied about what Mark Tushnet said here, claiming Tushnet advocated treating conservatives like Nazis.
• Mark Levin claimed Marx and Engels invented the term “middle class”. Not true, of course: it was James Bradshaw in 1745.
• Michael Savage claimed Japan never apologized for the Bataan death march. But they did, 6 years ago.
• Mark Levin twice claimed that “gun shows are the safest place on earth”, despite being informed that this is simply not the case: accidental shootings at gun shows are routine.

Many more examples can be found on my twitter feed. Despite these lies, in my listening for more than a month I never heard either host issue a correction or retraction about anything. (In contrast, Rachel Maddow issues corrections all the time.)

Both hosts have their obsessions. Levin is completely obsessed with Barack Obama; nearly every show is on the same theme, about how Obama is destroying America. Obama, Levin claims, is “sick” and “hates America”. Similarly, Savage is obsessed with Obama, calling him a “psychopath”, but his obsessions also include George Soros, Google, Hollywood, and Facebook, frequently insulting Mark Zuckerberg (often with exaggerated Jewish accent) and Jeff Bezos. Indeed, although Savage is Jewish (his real name is Michael Weiner), many of his comments seem either overtly or covertly anti-Semitic.

Both hosts have extremely high opinions of themselves. Savage has a doctorate from Berkeley in ethnomedicine, which he frequently likes to mention (callers often call him “Dr. Savage”), and likes to boast for minutes at a time about how smart he is compared to everyone else. He says, “I’m far more creative, inventive, entertaining, informative, educated than everyone else in the history of radio.” However, he’s not as smart as he thinks: for example, Savage frequently uses the term “coelenterate” and says it means the same as “worm”. (Coelenterates are not worms or even closely related to them. They are creatures like jellyfish and sea anemones.) Here Savage quotes Hillel’s famous questions, but attributes them wrongly to Maimonides.  On the other hand, Levin’s website describes him as “The Great One” or “Denali”, terms which Levin embraces with enthusiasm. He frequently turns testy, telling callers that he is going to “educate” them.

Despite their great similarities, both hosts apparently dislike the other one. Indeed, it seems that both are quite reluctant to mention the other by name. Levin has called Savage “a real cancer” and a “phony, fake conservative”.

Nevertheless, there are some differences between them. Savage, by far, has the stranger life story, whereas Levin had a more conventional career at the fringes of American right. Savage supports Donald Trump and Levin was a strong supporter of Ted Cruz. (Whether Levin will eventually back Trump is hard to tell, although I suspect he will eventually cave.) Savage seems to have no coherent political philosophy at all, other than his dislike of various minorities. For example, he seems to hate gay people, once telling a caller that he “should get AIDS and die … eat a sausage and choke on it”. Like his hero Trump, Savage seems to be a fascist in training; he admires Vladimir Putin and thinks bringing back the House Un-American Activities Committee would be a good idea. Levin is somewhat more consistent philosophically, claiming to be a “constitutional conservative”. However, his idea of the constitution is extremely narrow; it never seems to occur to him that there might be two or more different ways of interpreting constitutional provisions. Levin used to work under Ed Meese, whom he calls a “great man”. But remember that Meese did not believe in the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”; he once said, “If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.” Levin also buys into the typical craziness of the right, denying man-made global warming and claiming that environmentalists are responsible for the deaths of millions of people from malaria.

Savage seems genuinely unbalanced to me. For example, he thinks seltzer water is dangerous and claims that seltzer water has damaged Bernie Sanders’ sanity. He says things like, “I am a prophet. I have been a prophet. I was appointed to be a prophet since birth.” Levin is better, but his sanity is also not so clear to me. He once claimed violating transgender guidelines will get you put in “Leavenworth Prison” and once agreed with a caller that if Obama had been president during US Civil War “he would have continued slavery”. But perhaps these are just wild hyperbole as opposed to being actually crazy.

After a month of listening, I still don’t quite understand their appeal. Savage is an ignorant narcissist who is filled with hate. Levin is a boring partisan and ideologue with a single theme that he repeats with hardly any variation. Neither host is much concerned with the truth. Both like to hear themselves rant, and, despite praising their audience, rarely genuinely engage with any caller.

If these are the minds that the American right listens to on a daily basis, it’s no wonder that the right is so badly misinformed.