The dose makes the poison

Princeton physicist William Happer is still getting invited on television to say stupid things.

I keep hearing about the "pollutant CO2," or about "poisoning the atmosphere" with CO2, or about minimizing our "carbon footprint." This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving "pollutant" and "poison" of their original meaning….CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth.

Did you know oxygen, while not a poison at standard concentrations, is highly reactive and will kill you at high concentration? Or that CO2 is vital for plants and is measured to regulate your breathing, but too much and you’ll suffocate?

What makes a substance poisonous is how much of it there is. Paracelsus figured this out in the 16th century. So Princeton physicists are unaware of developments and explanations that predate even Newton? That’s kind of amazing.

Maybe CNBC and other networks ought to take a lesson from the BBC on ginned up controversies and false dichotomies, and cut this bozo Happer from their invitation list.

It’s not just creationists who mangle science, some atheists do, too

I was sent this terrible statement reputed to be from the guy who calls himself “The Amazing Atheist”. There is, however, no evidence that he actually said these specific words, so the attribution was inappropriate. However, somebody still wrote this idiotic statement:

Nature already has an age of consent. That age is approximately 12-13, otherwise known as the onset of puberty. We don’t need Christian morals to set an arbitrary age on when a sexually mature human female can mate legally. We already have clear parameters on sexually maturity as established by the law of evolution, and acting within those parameters does not under any reasonable definition constitute “rape”. Moreover, because this irrational moral imperialism is almostly solely applied against males who pursue relationships with younger females, I do believe the change of age-of-consent laws should be a critical area of focus for Men’s Rights Activists.

So much wrong.

Nature does not set an age of consent. Nature doesn’t care. Nature doesn’t stop you from raping babies, and it doesn’t tell you it’s OK to rape 21 year olds, either. The age of consent is a social construct, made by people, intended to protect our children from exploitation during those difficult years when they are transitioning from childhood to adulthood.

The law of evolution (tell me, which one?) does not set clear parameters for sexual maturity. Humans have complex, prolonged development — we’re an altricial species, helpless at birth and requiring a long period of nurturing before fully independent. Ovulation is not a magic signpost that says you’re ready to be impregnated. It says your ovaries have developed, but humans live by complex social interactions and sex can be a difficult phenomenon, with obligations and responsibilities and privileges. We expect people to be able to be able to interact with each other in non-damaging social ways before they leap to bumping genitals.

The only way evolution comes into play here is in a pragmatic, rather than a moral sense. For instance, if the author were to promote the idea that since babies are plump, tender, and helpless, Nature’s Law says that we’re free, even encouraged, to eat them, it would be easy to see that any population that thought that would be quickly on their way to self-enabled extinction. Similarly, evolution doesn’t say that you can’t rape young children…it will simply and objectively pass a kind of operational judgment on your population, as the next generation grows up with fucked up, likely unstable and untenable, social structures.

The legal age of consent is arbitrary. Some people might be able to enjoy sex in a mature fashion at an earlier age, others might be best off avoiding it for a few extra years. But we don’t have a way to measure sexual maturity, so as social and legal animals, we abide by one arbitrary dividing line. But picking the moment of first menstruation is also arbitrary — it says nothing about human behavior, or the ability to be responsible for one’s actions, or readiness to cope with the burdens of a possible pregnancy.

Somehow, even worse, the author seems to think that the ability to get pregnant nullifies the concept of rape. That doesn’t follow. If a person has poor judgment because they are too immature to consider all of the consequences, that does not mean you’re allowed to freely have sex with them, as long as they say “yes” to a bowl of candy. We do not use the legal age of consent to dismiss the idea of rape — we don’t say, “she’s over 21, we can rape her now” (well, some people do, but they’re wrong.)

I’ll also condemn with equal severity older women who take advantage of boys. I know, the attitudes in our culture do trivialize sexual assault on boys and men, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them. Maybe that would be a good goal for MRAs, to work to defend the sexual autonomy of young men and boys.

But that would be a rational and responsible approach. That last line is revealing: rather than a responsible goal, go for personal sexual gratification. Yeah, sure, encourage MRAs to embrace pedophilia. We’ll see how effectively cultural evolution can work.

Responsible atheism

It’s the same old story: ever since I introduced the idea of dictionary atheism, I’ve been accused of trying to redefine the word.

Wrong. Although I should have noticed their twitter handle and realized that they weren’t worth talking to.

What I advocate is taking atheism seriously, owning the word and recognizing the implications and the causes behind your ideas. A flippant “I just don’t believe in god” is only the middle of the story: it’s actually “because X, I just don’t believe in god, therefore Y.” Yet so many people just make that statement, and then argue that there are no antecedents and no consequences of atheism — a revolutionary idea for which people have been executed, which is in opposition to the premises used to establish many of the powerful institutions in our culture, which directly contradicts what many people consider the basis of all morality in society, is treated as casually and cavalierly as the statement, “I don’t much care for Justin Bieber’s music”. So what we get are people who jump on the bandwagon, assert their atheism, and then continue to perpetuate the same old injustices and prejudices as before. Which is not at all unexpected in any movement, but still doesn’t sit well — I think it’s important that we remind everyone that taking on a major philosophical position isn’t the same as getting the latest shoe from Nike. There’s baggage. There are implications.

I’ll also say something that will irritate much of the readership here: you may not like some of their interpretations, but Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens definitely take atheism very seriously, and see it as a transforming principle for society. They’re right about that. If we do take responsibility for what atheism actually means, it has a host of consequences: it means that naturalism is the only principle we should use in making decisions, no waiting for miracles. It means that there is no afterlife, so causing death is a problem of far greater magnitude, no cop outs that they’re going to a better world. It means justice isn’t something imposed on us from above, but arises from our relationships with one another. It means we have to work together to build a better society, and clinging to old biases will not work.

Obviously, this does not mean atheism needs dogma — the disagreements we have are actually a good sign that we recognize that making a post-theist society takes work, and there certainly is no unity within the movement. But I think an important first step is to realize that some people are responsible atheists, and others are not. And for me, the first sign that I shouldn’t even bother arguing with someone is when they pull out the dictionary and declare that atheism only means that you don’t believe in any gods. Well, good for you, you’re nominally atheist, we’re all done, come back and talk to me when you’ve grown up a little.

I get email

I’m getting a swarm of these, all sounding nearly exactly alike. And what do you know, an idiot youtube atheist just issued a fatwah. Guys, I’d be more impressed with your claim to be unique individuals if you didn’t simply parrot some youtuber’s talking points.

Hello PZ myers. I just want to email you to ask you a few questions and to plead for sanity. I am fairly sure that I am just wasting my time and you will not respond but here I go anyways. What is the deal with your “free thought blog”? You censor comment and ban people for not agreeing with you, from what I have heard.

Oh, please, get down off the fucking cross already. It’s a really boring trope: I’ve got comments all over the place that start, “I know you will delete this comment because I disagree with you…” and strangely, they don’t get deleted. Look at any article with a lot of comments, and you won’t find it’s all a bunch of people agreeing with me — even regulars here routinely criticize me. What you always find in those long threads is one or more jackasses braying repeatedly and inciting prolonged rebuttals.

“From what I have heard”…right. Sleazy little wanker, you are. Where did you hear it? I bet I can guess.

You seem to start arguments in the atheist community, which largely serve to divide the community and make it harder for us to get in a position to actually do something about the harm that religion causes humanity. You have people on other websites talking bad about other atheists and scientists in your name.

In MY name? That doesn’t even make sense. I’m a guy with a blog and a teaching position, with zero power and authority. I write what I think, and many people agree, and many disagree.

And what atheist community? You act as if there is some monolithic institution with a few rebels causing trouble. Atheism is a chaotic mess, with many communities within it. It seems to annoy some people that I don’t join with the libertarian, anti-feminist herd, but they never seem to consider that it takes two sides to make a rift.

I am trying to be polite in this email but you seem to be starting a cult in your fan base. We all need to work together to make the world a better place. We won’t always agree 100% with everyone even in our little niche groups, if we do then that is a sign of something worse at work. I am not asking you to just go out and say “sorry I was a jerk” but you NEED to stop doing things to divide the community.

Oh, no, I’m dividing the community! I dare to point out that some members of this community are assholes, and you get to call me a jerk and tell me what to do. If you really want to do something to help humanity, then I’m afraid what you need to do is separate yourself from the anti-feminist ranters and join a group that sincerely cares about social justice, rather than using the term as an insult.

I grew up in the 1960s, and I remember a real divide — there were all these young people demanding an end to the draft and opposing war, and then there were all the people with the “America, love it or leave it” bumper stickers. And even when I was 9 years old I could see the deep logical flaw in the bumper sticker people. If you really loved the country, and you saw serious problems (like Nixon, or creationism, or misogyny), wouldn’t the appropriate response be to work to fix them, rather than denying their existence?

Yet here we have atheists who insist on the equivalent of “atheism, love it or leave it,” seeing no flaws at all, and demanding that anyone who disagrees should shut up in the name of holy unity.

Fuck that noise. I do not aim to conform.

When you let assholes be the public face of atheism, it’s no wonder we have a bad reputation

I am no fan of Bill Maher. I was extremely uncomfortable with his selection as the recipient for the Richard Dawkins Foundation award in 2009, and I could only accommodate it by telling myself it was solely for his movie, Religulous, and not a general appreciation of his asshattery. And I didn’t even like Religulous! Orac was spot on in his criticisms, and while I’d hoped to talk to Maher at some time — we were even seated at the same table — he showed up late, complained about the brand of water served at the table, did his acceptance speech, and blitzed out of the room immediately afterwards. While happy to get an award, you could tell he was completely uninterested in associating with the riff-raff of atheism.

He also showed up with an extremely attractive young woman who could have been his daughter, or even granddaughter, but was actually his date. She was pleasant to talk to, quite unlike her sugar daddy, and actually bothered to engage the table briefly in light conversation. But you could tell that Maher’s ideal woman was candy to decorate his arm in public. It also illuminates his behavior — the man has a history of sexist remarks. Is it any surprise that he has done it again?

Bill Maher benefits from the hive mind mentality of so many atheists. You cannot disagree with Bill Maher without simultaneously delivering a slap to atheism — you must not foster divisiveness. You must accept all prominent celebrities who openly embrace atheism as pure paragons of human goodness — it is simply too complicated to think that a person might have a mix of views that are sometimes appealing, sometimes repugnant. So we constantly loft up “heroes” as exemplars, failing to recognize that the essence of atheism has to be a recognition of the flawed humanity of its people, and then we end up with primitive atheists getting defensive and angry at all those critics who point at the awkward reality of those heroes, whether they’re Feynman or Maher or Sanger or whoever.

The problem is compounded by the fact that these same boosters of the Brave Hero Leader of Atheism simultaneously insist that atheism has no guiding principles or morality or goals — it’s a complete moral cipher that simply says there is no god. So sure, as long as you clearly state that there is no god, you can be sexist or racist or endorse bombing the Middle East or love Ayn Rand with all your heart or believe that the poor deserve their lot since Darwin said “survival of the fittest” (he didn’t), and still be the paradigmatic Good Atheist. In the absence of any moral principle, we can promote even moral monsters, or ascientific promoters of bunkum and quackery, to be our representatives — and if you dare to disagree, you are ‘divisive’ and ‘bickering’ and doing harm to the movement.

I am tired of it. Atheist organizations, step it up, clean up your act, and put together a clear statement of what you stand for. If it’s just that you agree that you believe there is no god, fine; if you think the only cause worth fighting for is separation of church and state, that’s a good cause and it’s reasonable to limit your goals; if you want to promote science education, I’m all for it. But I think you need to go further. You need to recognize the implications of godlessness, that there is no Chosen People, that there is no godly support for patriarchy, that everyone is equal under Nature’s law, and that that means there is a whole raft of social and political causes under your purview…and that you should have a broader statement of the meaning of atheism. I want to know what you stand for. This current vacuum of any attempt at an understanding of what atheism ought to mean is exactly what allows assholes to flourish.

I apologise for the “sugar daddy” comment, which implies that the woman had no say in the relationship. That was not my intent; Bill Maher came off as a sexist pig, but she was actually quite an interesting person. She seemed more intelligent than Maher, that’s for sure.

Shermer rides again!

Jesus. He’s written a climatological ‘Dear Muslima’ for Scientific American, defending Bjorn Lomborg. It feeds directly into a common Republican trope: ‘sure, climate change occurs, and maybe humans contribute to it, but it’s just too costly do what is necessary’. He lists a bunch of problems, and then does a “cost-benefit analysis”.

The ranking is based on a cost-benefit analysis. For example, an investment of $300 million “would prevent the deaths of 300,000 children, if it were used to strengthen the Global Fund’s malaria-financing mechanism.” Another $300 million would deworm 300 million children, and $122 million would lead to total hepatitis B vaccine coverage and thereby prevent another 150,000 annual deaths. Low-cost drugs to treat acute heart disease would cost just $200 million and save 300,000 people.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more about climate change. But what? Both books posit technological solutions: Lomborg’s Copenhagen experts recommend spending $1 billion for research on planet-cooling geoengineering technologies; Oreskes and Conway have humanity saved by the creation in 2090 of a lichenized fungus that consumes atmospheric carbon dioxide. Whatever we do about climate, we should recognize that the world has many problems. If you are malnourished and diseased, what the climate will be like at the end of the century is not a high priority. Given limited resources, we should not let ourselves be swept away by the apocalyptic fear generated by any one threat.

I fucking hate “cost-benefit analysis” — it’s always accomplished by sweeping a lot of costs under the carpet to reach the desired conclusion. It’s such an easy way to create imaginary books that you can fudge without consequences. Do they factor in the cost of losing New Orleans and Miami? Wanna bet everything is lowballed?

The argument about other problems is bogus, too: if we could wrest government out of the control of goddamned Libertarians and Republicans, we could talk about rational policy making and trying to fund all of those projects. Does anyone really believe progressive politicians are arguing we can’t save those children because we’ve only got money for ONE project, and we can’t prioritize to support humanitarian goals? Does anyone seriously believe for one second that if we follow the Libertarian dream and spend less on carbon reduction (as if we spend enough now), that suddenly the wretched conservatives in congress will decide they can invest a few hundred million dollars to prevent the deaths of foreign children?

NO ONE is claiming that we need to stop everything else and deal only with climate change right now. But they are arguing that we need to carry out an appropriate, necessary, and immediate change in our carbon consumption habits — which we are not doing, thanks to obstructionists and pseudo-scientific rationalizers for the status quo, like Shermer. Pretending that climate scientists want everyone to be “swept away” to deal with “one threat” is simply dishonest. Reprehensibly dishonest. What they’re doing instead is explaining how the long term costs of climate change represent a far greater concern than phony ‘cost-benefit analyses’ allow.

And citing Oreskes and Conway…they wrote The Merchants of Doubt, which is all about how industry assholes have connived to lie to us about the scientific consensus on tobacco, ozone, acid rain, and climate change — Oreskes does not agree with Lomborg. Yet here Shermer lumps Conway and Oreskes into the same camp with Lomborg. And what is this nonsense about ‘lichenized fungus’ in 2090? Nobody can make that absurd claim now, nor give it a date of arrival, let alone a couple of historians of science. What are they going to do, switch to molecular biology and develop it themselves? Why should we trust magic bullet solutions to complex problems?

Simply citing the discredited conservative hack Lomborg is grounds for suspecting Shermer’s ability to judge the quality of the arguments. He might have been well off reading Scientific American’s 12 year old demolition of Lomborg’s credibility. I don’t know what has happened at SciAm that they continue to encourage a Libertarian crank to publish in their once respectable journal…and this after his bogus article on a liberal war on science, and his more recent lying with statistics to dismiss concerns about wealth inequity. Do they simply not care any more?

Don’t be this atheist

Ophelia has already registered her displeasure with the anti-feminist attitude of this new video by Jaclyn Glenn, which Glenn describes as A video about Atheism+ and pussies.

But I have to criticize it as being simply an awful example of bad argumentation. Here’s the pocket summary: Glenn sets it up as an attempt to, in a comedic way, compare the bickering in the atheist community to arguments about vegetarians. To do this, she acts as two vloggers: for one, she puts on a blonde wig and glasses and makes a bunch of extremist, stupid arguments and demands absolute agreement; for the other, she just plays Jaclyn Glenn, reasonable, compromising, sensitive, egalitarian defender of reason who just wants to get along. In other words, she pretends to be the rational one pleading for unity while characterizing her critics as total idiots.

Really, it’s disgraceful and stupid and dishonest. And she closes it with a pitiful …and this is my life now :'( How sad.

But imagine for a moment that I made a video in which I tried to argue that atheism was a rational position, and I did it by arguing against myself, dressed up in dorky clothes, making cartoonish facial expressions, and saying things so stupid that Christians wouldn’t recognize them as their own views, which I then described as “Atheism vs. Retards.” Would that be considered at all effective? (Well, it would probably get me a 100,000 subscriptions, because the youtube atheist community is that bad.)

Look, if you want to be effective, you have to at least quote the real arguments of real opponents. Do not invent characters who do not exist and then place silly words in their mouths. If I’m arguing against religion, I don’t have to resort to mocking imaginary Christians — there is more than enough proudly stated idiocy in the religious community to keep me busy for years. It’s telling that when Glenn wants to argue against the divisiveness of feminists, she has to gather lots of hay and stuff it into a silly costume, and then translate them to vegetarianism, in order to try and come off looking reasonable.

Sorry, Ms Glenn. You failed. You failed miserably. To do it while wearing a “LOGIC” t-shirt that you sell in your store is deeply ironic.

This is stuff that embarrasses me as an atheist.

Also, I have to rub a little salt in the wound: her first lines are that she is an atheist “because she cares about people.” Lovely. She’s already paying lip service to Atheism+.

A good illustration of the problem:

Quote-mined by Casey Luskin!

Once again, Casey Luskin demonstrates that he’s a biological ignoramus. He is much buoyed by a science report that chloroquinone resistance in the malaria parasite requires two mutations, claims that Michael Behe has been vindicated because that’s exactly what he said, and demands an apology from all of Behe’s critics.

Will Ken Miller, Jerry Coyne, Paul Gross, Nick Matzke, Sean Carroll, Richard Dawkins, and PZ Myers Now Apologize to Michael Behe?

No.

Here’s what his critics actually said. We have no problem with the idea that a particular functional phenotype requires a couple of mutations; I can think of lots of examples of that, such as the work of Joe Thornton on corticosteroid receptors. That the malaria parasite needs two mutations was never a point of contention, nor was it particularly worrisome. What was wrong with Behe’s work is that he naively claimed that the two mutations had to occur simultanously in the same individual organism, so that the probability that could happen was the product of multiplying the two individual probabilities. That’s ridiculous.

As Sean Carroll explained:

Behe’s main argument rests on the assertion that two or more simultaneous mutations are required for increases in biochemical complexity and that such changes are, except in rare circumstances, beyond the limit of evolution. .. Examples of cumulative selection changing multiple sites in evolving proteins include … pyrimethamine resistance in malarial parasites (6) — a notable omission given Behe’s extensive discussion of malarial drug resistance.

To show that the activity required two mutations, as the new paper says, is not an issue; it would have to claim that two simultaneous mutations were required, and that the cumulative accumulation of mutations in the population does not happen. And Behe goes further and declares on the basis of his bogus calculations that no evolution, beyond minor changes in a species or genus, occur at all.

So it’s weird to see Luskin announce that I’ve already conceded Behe’s point. No, I have not.

What we’ll probably get is nothing more than PZ Myers’s concession, offered in the context of the rant quoted above:

Fair enough; if you demand a very specific pair of amino acid changes in specific places in a specific protein, I agree, the odds are going to be very long on theoretical considerations alone, and the empirical evidence supports the claim of improbability for that specific combination.

Well, that’s more or less what’s required to generate chloroquine resistance. We’ll gladly take this — i.e., simply being proven right — in lieu of an apology.

Yet if you actually read the post in question, you’ll see that I’m not conceding that Behe is right — I’m explaining that a low probability is not a barrier to evolution.

Yet his argument for this dramatic conclusion is not only weak, it’s wrong. I could, for instance, correctly argue that the odds of getting a straight flush dealt to you in a 5 card poker hand is about 1 in 6×104; we could calculate this with probability theory, and we could also deal lots of poker hands and determine it empirically. No one’s going to argue with that part of the math.

But now, if I were to define a Straight Flush Complexity Cluster (SFCC) parameter and wave it around and claim that “no hand of the same complexity as a straight flush has been dealt by chance in the last ten years of poker games here in town,” that players can only possibly win one hand in 60,000, or worse, that no one has won a poker hand without cheating and stacking the deck, you’d know I was crazy. But that is basically Behe’s entire argument — he claims to have found the “edge of evolution,” and that it is much sharper and steeper and more impassable than anyone but a creationist could believe.

I’m flattered that Luskin thinks a concession from me would be so significant, but he ought to wait until I’ve actually made one before declaring victory.

Ken Miller wrote to second my comments:

With respect to the malaria mutations, your rebuttal is exactly correct. I’m attaching my review of Behe’s book in Nature. The portion of that review that directly deals with Behe’s contention about two mutations is this:

Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined
the odds of a mutation “of the same complexity”
occurring in the human line. He hasn’t. What
he has actually done is to determine the odds of
these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously
at precisely the same position in exactly
the same gene in a single individual. He then
leads his unsuspecting readers to believe that
this spurious calculation is a hard and fast statistical
barrier to the accumulation of enough
variation to drive darwinian evolution.
It would be difficult to imagine a more
breathtaking abuse of statistical genetics.

Then, later on, I wrote:

“Behe obtains his probabilities by considering
each mutation as an independent event, ruling
out any role for cumulative selection, and
requiring evolution to achieve an exact, predetermined
result. Not only are each of these
conditions unrealistic, but they do not apply
even in the case of his chosen example. First,
he overlooks the existence of chloroquine resistant
strains of malaria lacking one of the
mutations he claims to be essential (at position
220). This matters, because it shows that there
are several mutational routes to effective drug
resistance. Second, and more importantly, Behe
waves away evidence suggesting that chloroquine
resistance may be the result of sequential,
not simultaneous, mutations (Science 298,
74–75; 2002), boosted by the so-called ARMD
(accelerated resistance to multiple drugs)
phenotype, which is itself drug induced.”

I hope these quotes are useful to you and your readers. As usual, Luskin is playing the “pretend” game of taking a new scientific paper and telling folks that it presents a “problem” for evolution. Ain’t life grand?

Best Wishes,

Ken

Minnesota Republicans are not nice

We try. We really try. But no matter how progressive the state might be, we’re still afflicted with horrible, demented people who run for office. Fortunately, there’s a tell: they always join the Republican party.

Look, here’s Michele Bachmann (she’s still around?). She thinks because a few immigrants committed crimes once upon a time, the entire recent influx of foreigners — including the children! — are all an invading horde of rapists.

“Foreign nationals that have come into the United States are between 300- to 500,000,” Bachmann told an incredulous Crossfire co-host Van Jones. “My heart is broken for a female college student in Minnesota who was raped, murdered and mutilated by a foreign national who came into our country. We had a school bus full of kids in Minnesota — four children were killed on that school bus because an illegal alien driving a van went into that schoolbus.”

“There are lines that can’t be crossed here,” Jones responded. “I’m sorry, congresswoman. Are you gonna scapegoat children for the crime of this despicable person?”

Uh-oh. Did you know the guy who kidnapped the Lindbergh baby was Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German? All you Germans — out of my state. Robert Hanson was a serial killer in the 1980s. Look at that name. Scandinavian. All you Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes…out. The Lakota…you can stay. Clearly all those European immigrants were a bad influence.

But Bachmann is a fading star, soon to be out of Minnesota politics altogether and persisting only to haunt the media, where a dumbass conservative is always welcome. Are there any others we should watch out for?

Meet the Freys.

Bob Frey is running for state office. His big issue is sodomy, and he has a theory, which is his, about what causes AIDS.

“It’s more about sodomy than about pigeonholing a lifestyle,” he explained. “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there’s an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg.”

But Frey said that it was a different story when the “sperm is deposited anally” because “it’s the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail.”

“That’s why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome,” he opined.

That’s an amazingly distorted version of the acrosome reaction. Yes, the sperm head releases enzymes like hyaluronidase to digest away matrix that surrounds the egg, and also triggers changes in the oocyte membrane to facilitate fusion at the entry point and to also inhibit fusion elsewhere. This has nothing at all to do with AIDS. For one thing, the reaction is specific; it requires recognition of receptors on the egg surface that are not present in generic epithelial cells. For another, we know how the HIV particles (which are not sperm) enter immune system cells and it doesn’t involve a mechanism anything like the acrosome reaction. We also know quite obviously that sperm aren’t the cells involved in transmission.

Mr Frey is an idiot.

Also, if his sperm is transmitting anything, it seems to be idiocy. His son Mike also has the same silly idea.

Last year, Frey’s son, Mike, used the exact same theory while testifying against a same-sex marriage before the Minnesota House Civil Law Committee.

And earlier this year, Frey distributed a DVD that claimed an anti-bully bill was part of a plot to infect the general population with AIDS through sodomy.

I’m trying to puzzle out how anti-bullying legislation would spread AIDS. Because…if bullies aren’t beating kids up, they’re … having …anal sex … with them?

I’m also reminded that years ago, when Cheri Yecke was on her crusade to get creationism into Minnesota public schools, Bob Frey was a particularly loony witness at state hearings, who would show up with a giant plastic bone, claiming he had proof that there were giants in the earth in those days, and therefore every word of the Bible was true. He also threatened the education committee.

Frey: I have about 25 hours of presentation material with lots of slides of dinosaurs, lots of slides of this sort of thing, and also the consequences of teaching known fraud and everything to society.

Kelley: Thanks very much Mr. Frey .. .

They’ve always got hours and hours of noise.

Oh well, if it’s any consolation, this dynasty of Freys will end with this generation. No one is ever going to marry a Frey ever again.