The sexbots are everywhere!

After that short post yesterday pointing out the abuse of photoshop to distort women’s bodies, I was briefly harangued by a loon who announced that I obviously did not understand the concept of sexual selection.

women’s bodies today are changing due to sexual selection whether you like it or not. Humans use tools to sculpt their bodies into appealing forms, so it’s not just left to inherent biological changes. And, women are abiding our wishes whether you like it or not. As biologists say, evolution is merciless. So why all the whining?

Actually, I do understand sexual selection quite well. I fail to see how making images of bodies plastic with photoshop is an example, or how you leap from manipulating pixels to how we can “sculpt…bodies into appealing forms”. Perhaps he thinks it is a kind of sympathetic magic, that if you paint a picture of a woman with balloon breasts and a wasp waist, women will simply comply with your wishes?

I am also impressed with the obliviousness. Sexual selection works both ways — has he ever wondered why some men are obsessed with women’s body parts, wanting them to be a certain size and shape? Exactly who’s brain is being sculpted by nature here?

I should also introduce him to the concept of the supernormal stimulus, the idea that a species can evolve to respond to a triggering stimulus that can be inappropriately strengthened by an exaggerated stimulus. This isn’t necessarily a good thing; for instance, Lorenz found that birds would enthusiastically nurture large fake eggs at the expense of their normal-sized real eggs, which at least isn’t a serious concern in nature, usually (although cuckoos can take advantage of it). There’s also the serious concern about human diet: give a person the choice of a twinkie or a carrot, and guess which one will be most attractive?

Or we could talk about RealDolls, these “life-like” (more like corpse-like) full-sized rubbery plastic dolls with conveniently compliant orifices. Is that an example of “sexual selection”? I suppose you could make a case for it, although it’s not affecting women, but rather selecting out males who waste their time in futile coupling with an infertile assortment of artificial stimuli — futile in both the sense that reproduction will not occur, nor will any bonding with another human being.

Besides, apparently those RealDolls are over-engineered. Simpler models will do the job just fine.

According to a Murfreesboro Police Department report, an officer was dispatched to the bar, where a witness said that Hutton walked to the ATM and “pulled down his pants and underwear exposing his genitals.” Officer M. Rickard added, “Mr. Hutton then attempted to have sexual intercourse with the ATM.”

After his encounter with the ATM, Hutton “then began to walk ‘nude’ around the bar thrusting his hips in the air,” Rickard reported.

Behold the latest generation of sexbot!

atm

Is that an example of selection? Or just a case of drunken disinhibition exposing the simpler driving machinery of the male sexual urge?

The horror! The video they don’t want you to see!

Emily Letts recorded her abortion. You know what you expect to see: Anguish! Pain! Screaming! Bloody body parts flying around the room! Regret!

Oh, wait.

She’s comfortable with the choice, she smiles through the procedure, and it’s so quick — having watched my wife go through three childbirths, the contrast is striking. I suffered far more than Letts in having a cyst removed last week, but what I went through was trivial compared to what women experience in labor.

There is so much fuss over something that ought to be regarded as a fairly simple decision for most women.

Mike Adams, blustering scoundrel

We all know about Mike Adams, notorious quack, conspiracy theorist, quantum dork, and raving nutball around here, right? If nothing else, you must have enjoyed Orac’s regular deconstruction of his nonsense.

Jon Entine has published a profile of Mike Adams in Forbes magazine that distills all the lunacy down to a relatively concise summary. For instance, it documents his recent public obsessions.

Adam’s latest crusade: the world’s governments are covering up the fact that the doomed Malaysian Airlines jetliner was pirated safely to a desert hideaway by Iranian hijackers, and is now being refitted into a stealth nuclear bomb.

In recent months, Adams has claimed that high-dose Vitamin C injections, which he conveniently sells, have been shown to “annihilate cancer” (doctors warn high doses of vitamin C can be dangerous); that measles and mumps are making a comeback because vaccines are “designed to fail” (he’s an anti-vaccine campaigner); and that fluoridated water causes mental disorders. He is also an AIDS denialist, a 9/11 truther, a Barack Obama citizenship ‘birther’ and a believer in ‘dangerous’ chemtrails.

But his most heated attacks—and the ones that generate the most traffic and business on his websites and what has made him a oft-cited hero of anti-GMOers—are directed at conventional agriculture, crop biotechnology in particular.

In a recent screaming but typical headline, Adams claimed that research at his Natural News Forensic Food Labs—another of his bizarre websites—has turned up unequivocal evidence that corporations are intentionally engineering “life-destroying toxins” into our food supply, with genetically modified corn as one of the chief ‘weapons against humanity.’ His recommendation: buy the natural products that he sells and rid the world of GMOs.

It also digs into his past published works, and it’s quite clear that he’s an amoral con artist out to make a heck of a lot of money by bilking the gullible — and that he’s been busy playing the SEO game.

Adams is quite open about his business model: play on fear to make as much money as possible. To dispel any doubts about his real motivations, in 2008, he bragged publicly in his self-published book, The 7 Principles of Mindful Wealth, that his operating philosophy was “Getting past self-imposed limits on wealth… Karma doesn’t pay the rent. Good karma isn’t the recognized currency in modern society: Dollars are!”

To peddle the alternative nostrums that have helped build his fortune, Adams operates a string of fringe health scare sites, including prenatalnutrition.org, expectant-mothers.com, NewsTarget.com, HoodiaFactor.com, EmergingFuture.com, SpamAnatomy.com, VitaminFactor.org, CounterThink.com, HealthFactor.info, JunkScience.info, BrainHealthNews.com, LowCholesterolDiets.DietsLink.com, PublicHealthNews.org, PharmaWatch.info, HomeToxins.com, PoisonPantry.org, DepressionFactor.org, webseed.com and ConsumerWellness.org.

Promoting terrorist scares is Adams stock and trade. In 1998 he launched the Y2K Newswire promoting apocalyptic claims of impending software disaster whileoffering sales of emergency preparedness products and foods. Following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, he wrote, falsely, that the Japanese radiation, “spans oceans and continents” to panic his readers into buying useless “FDA approved” potassium iodide treatments and storable uncontaminated super foods that he shamelessly sold on his site. That got him a mention on the sin qua non of conspiracy programs, the wacky Alex Jones Show, which Adams had previously guest hosted—further stoking his notoriety among the fringe set.

All of his claims are documented with quotes and publicly available information (pdf). It’s a very thorough piece of work. It won’t affect Adams’ business at all — the kinds of people who respond well to paranoia, fear, and weird invocations of pseudoscience aren’t going to pay much attention to the evidence at all. But guess how Mike Adams has reacted?

Mike Adams is threatening to sue Entine and Forbes for libel. Of course.

It’s pretty much the routine response nowadays to getting hit with evidence that leaves one dangling guiltily — call up the lawyers, try to intimidate the accusers into silence, and even if one’s suit doesn’t stand a chance in hell of succeeding (or worse, will just drag more exposure of one’s unpleasant behavior into an open court), one can hope that a good loud cease-and-desist letter will intimidate someone. It shut Forbes up, anyway — they pulled the article from their website. You can always trust a corporate lawyer to play turtle and shell up at even the most bogus legal threat.

Now Mike Adams’ has attempted a rebuttal — he’s playing the poor pitiful me card, claiming to just be an honest scientist doing his best with his very own lab equipment to make the world a better place — while not mentioning that it’s all dubious crap that he uses to peddle quack supplements on his various websites. He also doesn’t mention where his reputation as an “AIDS denialist, a 9/11 truther, a Barack Obama citizenship ‘birther’ and a believer in ‘dangerous’ chemtrails” fits into his imaginary scientific credentials.

I predict this will go nowhere. A few lawyers will get a little richer. Adams will bluster and use the Forbes article as evidence to his conspiracy theorist followers that the Man really is out to get him, and he will get a little richer. Jon Entine would be silenced by corporate cowardice, except that the internet will make his article even more well-known.

But maybe someone, somewhere will read about Adams’ scam and steer clear, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Marco Rubio is already Gish-Galloping

Marco Rubio is still staggering over charges that he’s a science denialist on climate change. He has discovered a familiar way to deal with it: distraction. Ask him about climate change, and he babbles about abortion.

Here’s what I always get a kick out of, and it shows you the hypocrisy. All these people always wag their finger at me about science and settled science. Let me give you a bit of settled science that they’ll never admit to. The science is settled, it’s not even a consensus, it is a unanimity, that human life beings at conception. So I hope the next time someone wags their finger about science, they’ll ask one of these leaders on the left: ‘Do you agree with the consensus of scientists that say that human life begins at conception?’ I’d like to see someone ask that question.

This is only settled science if you get all your science information from the preacher on scienticianology at your local fundagelical Church of the One True American Jesus. Let’s take that phrase “human life begins at conception” apart.

What do you mean by “life begins”? Was there some step between your parents and you where there was a dead cell? Life is continuous — there hasn’t been a transition from non-life to life for about 4 billion years. So, yes, I’d agree that the zygote is a living cell, but so were the sperm and egg that fused to generate it, and so were the blast cells that were precursors to it, and so were the zygotes that developed into your parents. We can trace that life all the way back to early progenotes with limited autonomy drifting in Archean seas, to self-perpetuating chemical reactions occurring in porous rocks in the deep ocean rifts. It’s all been alive, so this is a distinction without meaning.

What about “human”? It’s a human zygote, we’d all agree; but it’s also human sperm and human ovum. You can pluck a hair from my head and determine with a few tests that it’s a human hair; you can take a blood sample from me and check a few antigens and determine that it is human blood; you can similarly swab a bit of saliva or earwax or tears from me, and analyze its biochemistry and find that it is specifically human spit or earwax or tears. That we can tag something with the adjective “human” does not in any way imply that my earwax deserves all the protections and privileges of a full human being. “Human zygote” imposes as much ethical obligation on me as “human spit”.

And don’t even try to pull that BS about a unique, novel genetic individual being created at conception. One of the key properties of meiosis is a genetic reshuffling of alleles by random assortment of the parental chromosomes and recombination by crossing over — every sperm and egg is genetically unique as well, and we spew those profligately with no remorse. Conception just adds another level of semi-random rearrangement of a random assortment of genes that were made during oogenesis and spermatogenesis.

So what are we left with? An obvious attempt at distortion or incomprehension in which the common modifier “human” is used as an absolute signifier for sociological and historical and psychological of an entity as being a complete member of a higher level community. It’s a lie cloaked in ambiguous language.

And of course, at the end of that dissection, we’re still left with the fact that Rubio is dead wrong on climate change and threw out this whole line of argument to distract us from the point that Marco Rubio is an idiot.

It didn’t work.

Complex, real world problems

I saw the new Captain America movie last night. It wasn’t bad, for a comic book movie, and there were a number of things I very much liked about it. The super-heroes weren’t that super — technologically enhanced, really, really good at battling the forces of evil, but also human and vulnerable to mundane menaces like bullets. I think I also like stories that don’t end neatly with the good guy beating up the bad guy, and presto, problems solved. Instead we have deeper issues that aren’t neatly resolved, because we live in a complex and difficult world full of messed-up human beings.

Speaking of a complex world…I arrived at the theater shortly before the 9:00 movie. I was surprised — there was no parking in any of the usual places within a block of the theater, and I had to park a whole block and a half away. That may not sound onerous to you, but it was unusual for me, since this is Morris and I can usually show up 5 minutes before the movie starts and park right outside the theater. The place was jammed. Swarms of people were there for the 7:00 movie.

Heaven Is For Real.

Captain America: sparsely attended. Ludicrously stupid movie that claims Jesus is waiting for you in a magical land of flowers and eternal youth: packed. Both are totally escapist fantasy, but one is honest and openly admits to being a made-up story based on a work of patent fiction, while the other is feel-good bullshit that puts up a pretense of being a true story. This is the reality: that a large part of the population here wants to be reassured, wants to be told that the dumb stories they were brought up on are really true, and wants to be promised that they don’t have to worry about this world because the next one is really nifty … and it’s not the same population that wants to go see a gosh-wow spectacle based on comic books.

Obviously, I don’t see a problem with wanting to be entertained by a work of fiction, but I do see a problem with mistaking fiction for reality, which is the entire premise and appeal of this Heaven bullshit.

Now if I were really sucked into thinking the fantasy worlds of Marvel were parables for how to handle a difficulty, I’d suggest a solution: I just have to find the one nefarious priest in town who has been poisoning the minds of the citizens, and engage him in an epic battle in downtown Morris. Sure, a few storefronts would be smashed, and a few craters would dapple Atlantic Avenue afterwards, but boom, the malignant influence would be gone and the happy people of Morris (who would all be lining the barricades around the city center, cheering) would be free. The End.

But that’s not how it works. There are no bad guys here, no foci of evil. The people sincerely want magical reassurances of a cosmic plan for their lives, and a destiny of bliss and goodness, and they specifically want the fantasy stories passed on by their parents to be literally and completely true. I have no super powers, and in fact, the ideas that I know to be true and verified by evidence and reason — there is no magical resurrection, superbeings like the supernatural Jesus did not and do not exist, we have this one life to live and nothing after death — would mark me as the villain in this story.

Man, real life makes for a lousy action movie.

By the way, the next movie coming to Morris is God’s Not Dead. It’s the story of a villainous atheist villain who is defeated in a final battle with a good-hearted Christian hero. It takes the trope of the movie that supports the reality of a superstition, and combines it with the very worst element of the superhero movie, the ultimate showdown that determines what is right. I imagine the theater will be packed again.

We must be a force for change

There is a very limiting and very human tendency to focus on one issue at a time, and think, once that issue is dealt with, that all the problems have been fixed. We elect Obama, we have a black president, racism must be over. The Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade, therefore reproductive autonomy for all women has been achieved. We had a cold winter, therefore global warming is a myth. Many Muslim women are oppressed to a greater degree than American women, so America has achieved perfect sexual equality. We are short-sighted and self-centered and eager to see any signs of progress as an ultimate triumph.

One of the sobering things about Zinnia Jones’ latest video is that she reminds us that we have a thousand problems, not just one, and that you haven’t fixed transphobia by legalizing gay marriage. We have very far to go and we shouldn’t confuse taking a first step with reaching the destination.

Another myth: by freeing yourself of one superstition, god, you’ve freed yourself of them all. Zinnia has a special message for atheists, because she has long identified with that group and has seen it all, with proudly self-proclaimed atheists joining in the denigration of transgender people. And worst of all, they use “science” to justify their bigotry.

When you look at what these atheists are actually saying, their claims have nothing to do with religion. If you’re wondering how they can be transphobic despite being atheists, you’re asking precisely the wrong question. They aren’t transphobic in spite of their atheism. They’re transphobic because of their atheism.

And I don’t mean that their atheism has made them merely indifferent. No – it’s actively made their transphobia worse. As unlikely as that might sound, it’s pretty obvious from the way they structure their arguments. It’s not an appeal to faith – far from it. They appeal to the values of science, observation, and reality, because they feel that these values support their transphobia. In many cases, they actually compare being trans to believing in God. They’re not speaking the language of religion, they’re speaking the language of secularism.

This is not my atheism. There are many atheisms out there — one of the side-effects of believing in freethought — and some of them are narrow, elitist rationalizations for maintaining the status quo and preserving the privileges of those lucky enough to be economically secure, blessed with an education and a healthy body, marked with the right color of skin and the correct kind of genitalia and the proper sexual orientation. It is a kind of self-satisfied country club atheism. These are atheisms that look at all the human beings in the world and says to most of them, “You can not be one of us,” instead of, “You could be one of us,” or better yet, “We can be free together.”

Good atheism, like good science, is disruptive — it says tradition and dogma are not sufficient, that we have to look critically at reality to determine the best answer, and often we’ll get answers that contradict what you want to be true. By their very nature, they must necessarily identify and criticize the dysfunctional elements of society and provoke change to improve them. And if you’re one of those atheists who thinks your job is to hector people different from yourself into conforming, then you’re one of those dysfunctional elements.

Zinnia is going to be speaking at Women in Secularism 3 today — I wish I could have gone this year. I think it’s one of the best examples of atheism being true to its nature and demanding better of all human beings.

The danger of correlational studies

My doctor had me on fish oil pills for quite a while — they were a popular supplement that was supposed to reduce the incidence of heart disease. She told me not to bother any more about a year ago, as more information was coming out that they didn’t really do anything. Now it looks like the original study that started the fish oil fad is falling apart.

The original study, by Danish physicians H.O. Bang and D.J. Dyerburg, claimed Inuit in Greenland had low rates of heart disease because of their diet, which is rich in fish oil and omega-3 fatty acids from eating fish and blubber from whales and seals.

"I reviewed this original paper and it turned out to be that they actually never measured the frequency of heart disease in [Inuit]," said Dr. George Fodor, the new study’s lead researcher.

If you’re going to do a correlational study, you have to be fairly rigorous in exactly what you’re measuring: if you’re going to claim that Substance X has an effect on Disease Y, it’s kind of important that you’re actually measuring Disease Y. In this case, the correlation wasn’t what they claimed it was: it was more like, poverty-stricken indigenous populations with limited access to public health facilities poorly document their incidence of disease.

Fodor and his team of three other researchers found that the chief medical officer’s annual records were likely deficient because the inaccessible, rural nature of Greenland made it difficult to keep accurate records, and also because many people didn’t have access to doctors.

The 2014 study has found that Inuit do have similar rates of heart disease compared to non-Inuit populations, and that death rates due to stroke are “very high.”

The study also shows that the Greenland Inuit overall mortality is twice as high as non-Inuit populations.

This is almost as bad as the claim that the paleo diet must be good for you, because public health records from the paleolithic are even scantier than those for the Inuit.

It’s heresy all the way down

Uh-oh. Pat Robertson has been sniping at the Young Earth Creationists again, and Ken Ham is pissed off.

Well the secularists love Pat Robertson today! A number of them are posting a section from CBN’s "700 Club" program today (Tuesday) on YouTube and on various websites. They love it that Pat Robertson has once again used his "700 Club" program to engage in name-calling as he attacks those of us who take Genesis as literal history (as it is meant to be taken—as Jesus takes it).

Actually, no, none of us secularists love Pat Robertson. That he rejects one absurd tenet of far right Christianity does not mean he’s on our side — he’s still a mad theocrat.

But OK, let’s go through Ham’s rebuttal of Robertson’s denial of young earth creationism.

If you watch the CBN "700 Club" program from 37:50 to 40:56 on Tuesday (see link below), you will hear Pat Robertson:

1. … claim that: “The truth is, you have to be deaf, dumb and blind to think that this earth that we live in only has six thousand years of existence."

So, Robertson has called all of you who believe God’s Word as written in Genesis as “deaf, dumb and blind.”

Let’s get one thing out of the way: deaf, dumb, or blind people are quite smart enough to see through the bogosity of creationism. What he should have said is that you have to be in active denial of the evidence to be a creationist…a creationist of any kind, young earth, old earth, or intelligent design.

2. … express his utter ignorance of science as he equates radio carbon dating with millions of years! He just has no idea! Carbon dating has nothing to do with millions of years—he’s using the wrong dating method to even discuss millions of years. Yes, it’s his ignorance that abounds.

Ha ha! Yes, he got that wrong! He cited the wrong radiometric method for dating Mesozoic rocks. Radiocarbon dating is only good for about 50,000 years…oh, wait, Ken. It’s not good for millions of years, but it does date objects that are eight times older than the purported age of the Earth given by you Bible-wallopers.

You’re so concerned about citing the right technique, so I take it you should be fine with potassium-argon or uranium-lead or rubidium-strontium dating? Those do give us dates in the millions and billions of years.

You’re even goofier than Pat Robertson if you simply reject all those other methods. He made an error of range, but you make the error of outright rejecting all of physics.

3. … give an explanation of the first three days of creation that is, well, beyond ignorant! Frankly it is ridiculous.

Robertson said a Biblical day could be millions or billions of years long. The day-age excuse for Bible chronology is pretty silly, but even more so is demanding that the creation week actually involved 6 literal 24 hour days 6000 years ago.

4. … state that: “There was a point of time after the earth was created, after these things were done, after the universe was formed, after the asteroid hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, and after all that there was a point of time that, there was a particular human being that God touched. And that was the human that started the race that we are now part of. I think prior to that who knows what was here."

So, he appears to be saying there were other human beings before Adam, but only one that “God touched" who started the human race! He doesn’t know his Scripture! For instance, in I Corinthians 15:45 we are told Adam was the “first man.” There were no other men before him.

Your Scripture is incoherent mess that is not an accurate description of world history, so who cares? You are objecting to an interpretation of the book of Genesis that is different from yours — but you’re both interpreting and twisting and making a hash of the book. There are also an awful lot of Christians who interpret it like Robertson.

5. … state that “To deny the clear record that’s there before us makes us look silly.”

Sadly, it’s Pat Robertson who makes Christianity look silly, which is why the atheists love him today. What a travesty! This man uses his position on a major Christian TV program to help the atheists mock God’s Word!

Oh, stop that. We atheists don’t love Pat Robertson. I think you all make Christianity look silly.

And again, you have no evidence that this is “God’s word” — given that everyone seems to have a different understanding of “God’s word,” I’d have to say God seems to be a piss-poor communicator.

6. … claim: “There’s no way that all you have here took place in 6,000 years. It just couldn’t have been done. It couldn’t possibly have been done.”

Really Pat Robertson? You mean there is no way God, the infinite Creator, could not have created the universe in six days just six thousand years ago? God could have created everything in six seconds if He wanted too! And it’s not a matter of what you think anyway–it’s a matter of what God has clearly told us in His infallible WORD!

Pat Robertson illustrates one of the biggest problems we have today in the church—people like Robertson compromise the Word of God with the pagan ideas of fallible men! That’s why a big part of the AiG ministry is to call the church and culture back to the authority of the Word. Pat Robertson is not upholding the Word of God with his ridiculous statements — he is undermining the authority of the Word. And any attack on the WORD is an attack on the person of Jesus Christ, who IS THE WORD!

You’ve invented this magical all-purpose explanation called God — who can do anything you want. That is not an explanation. Just shouting louder and louder that your explanation is the only correct one is not at all convincing.

Nice to know, though, that every single Christian on the planet is a heretic, except for Ken Ham.

#PLOSGenetics: The Case for Junk DNA

This is the paper to read: Palazzo & Gregory’s The Case for Junk DNA. It clearly and logically lays out the complete argument from evidence and theory for the thesis that most of the genome is junk. It’s not revolutionary or radical, though: the whole story is based on very fundamental population genetics and molecular biology, and many decades of accumulated observations. And once you know a little bit of those disciplines — you don’t need to be a genius with a great depth of understanding — the conclusion is both obvious and in some ways, rather trivial.

Here’s that conclusion:

For decades, there has been considerable interest in determining what role, if any, the majority of the DNA in eukaryotic genomes plays in organismal development and physiology. The ENCODE data are only the most recent contribution to a long-standing research program that has sought to address this issue. However, evidence casting doubt that most of the human genome possesses a functional role has existed for some time. This is not to say that none of the nonprotein-coding majority of the genome is functional—examples of functional noncoding sequences have been known for more than half a century, and even the earliest proponents of “junk DNA” and “selfish DNA” predicted that further examples would be found. Nevertheless, they also pointed out that evolutionary considerations, information regarding genome size diversity, and knowledge about the origins and features of genomic components do not support the notion that all of the DNA must have a function by virtue of its mere existence. Nothing in the recent research or commentary on the subject has challenged these observations.

The whole ENCODE debacle, in which hundreds of millions of dollars was sunk into an effort to identify the function of every bit of the genome, was a PR disaster. Larry Moran asks how Nature magazine dealt with the errors; the answer seems to be with denial. Authors of the ENCODE report are claiming they were “misunderstood & misreported” and that they aren’t “backing away from anything”.

I’m not too dismayed that science journalists didn’t understand how the claims of ENCODE conflicted with evolutionary biology, since I don’t expect journalists to have the same focus on the science (this is not a knock on science journalism; I have a lot of respect for the good practitioners of the art, but just that they have different priorities than the working scientists who have to deal with the background details). But what really shocks me is that big-name genomics researchers, people who get awarded lots of money to study the structure of the genome, don’t understand the fundamentals laid out for them in the Palazzo & Gregory paper. It’s not that I expect every scientist to know the entirety of a gigantic field — heck, I get confused and lost every time I read a bioinformatics paper — but these are scientists paid in big money and prestige to study genome function who don’t have a grasp on the evolutionary constraints on genome function, which seems to be a rather critical omission. And these scientists without a clue get elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society.

How does that happen? I had this fantasy that science was a meritocracy and that great scientists advanced by having deep knowledge and doing great work, but it seems another way to succeed is leap into a new field and bamboozle everyone with technology.

I am so disillusioned.