It’s been a bad month for the creationists

I almost pity them. First there’s the discovery of gravitational waves that confirm a set of models for the origin of the universe — I can tell they’re trying to spin that one (it confirms the universe had a beginning, just like the Bible says!), but it’s obvious which perspective, scientific or religious, has the greater explanatory power.

Then there’s Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos, in which every episode so far has taken a vigorous poke at creationist nonsense. I think they cry every Sunday after church, because they know that later that evening they will be attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture. It’s been great.

And now, look, the Cassini spacecraft has found an ocean beneath the ice of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.

For years, the motto among astrobiologists — people who look for life in distant worlds, and try to understand what life is, exactly — has been “follow the water.” You have to start the search somewhere, and scientists have started with liquid water because it’s the essential agent for all biochemistry on Earth.

Now they’ve followed the water to a small, icy moon orbiting Saturn. Scientists reported Thursday that Enceladus, a shiny world about 300 miles in diameter, has a subsurface “regional sea” with a rocky bottom.

This cryptic body of water is centered around the south pole and is upwards of five miles deep. It has a volume similar to that of Lake Superior, according to the research, which was published in the journal Science.

Enceladus

There is hope yet for Space Squid! Or maybe space progenotes. Isn’t it wonderful that we keep finding gloriously natural discoveries in the universe?

The tears will flow again in a few weeks, when Neil Shubin’s new series, Your Inner Fish, premieres on PBS. I’m really looking forward to this one.

It is a good time to be passionate about science.

All these debate invitations, suddenly

I just mentioned on twitter this curious phenomenon that lately I’ve seen a major upsurge in requests to do debates — four in just the last two weeks. It started happening right after the Nye/Ham debate, in which Ham got clobbered thoroughly, but still bragged right afterwards that it had brought in enough attention and money to fund the preliminary work on the Ark Park.

Hmmm. Debate. Lose. Profit! Wonder why they’re suddenly more interested in debates?

Anyway, as I said, I mentioned this on twitter, and then moments later I check my email, and here’s this very polite, very nice letter.

Dear P.Z Myers

My name is Imran Hussein and I work for an Islamic outreach charity called IERA. You are most likely aware of our activities as some of our members engaged with you out side the atheist world convention a few years ago.

We have been undergoing some strategic changes in the way we have been engaging with academics and thinkers such as yourself. For instance Hamza Andreas Tzortzis recently had a very friendly nuanced discussion with Professor Peter Simons on consciousness. You can see how much we have changed and improved here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77J6g04UeY0.

In this light we would like to invite you to the UK (flights, accommodation etc. paid for) to engage in a discussion on “Is Consciousness Evidence for God’s Existence?”

We are very flexible concerning dates. If you are interested I would be grateful if you can send me a range of dates that suits you.

I would like to inform you that it will be a great honour to have you as although we carry different world views you have positively influenced the way we work and we hope that a future interaction with yourself can further improve the way we connect with others.

Warmest Regards,

Imran Hussein

You know, it’s so tempting…how often do you get an offer for an all-expenses paid trip to Europe? All it would take is an hour or two of work on the stage, and selling out my integrity to help promote Islamist bullshit. It’s friendly nuanced bullshit, but still bullshit.

I think my answer will be…

[Read more…]

When will this situation improve?

Maybe never. I know a lot of you hate facebook (with good reason), so I’ll just copy this straight from facebook so you can read it here.

From former JREF Outreach Coordinator Brian Thompson:

“Let me explain why I’m supporting Karen Stollznow’s legal defense fund. Maybe some of my Facebook friends don’t know who she is or what this is all about. Karen is a linguist, writer, and investigator who looks into claims of the paranormal, the supernatural, and the outrageous with a skeptical eye. Skeptics like her do a lot of good for the world in ways large and small. They’re the ones fighting against the kind of scientific ignorance that keeps people from vaccinating their kids, for example. And if it weren’t for skeptical investigators, I might still be cowered in fear every night thinking aliens were going to abduct me or ghosts were going to throw things around my bedroom. Now I’m just cowered in fear thinking that I might never be on one of those interior design makeover shows. This is progress.

I believe so strongly in the good work these skeptics do that several years ago I started hanging out with them, working on activism projects with them, and drinking lots and lots of booze with them. I went to their conferences and meetings and pre-swingers’ parties, and for a couple of years I even worked in an official capacity with one of the world’s most well-known skeptical activism nonprofits, the James Randi Educational Foundation.

In that time I got to know a lot of great people. I’m not going to name them all, because I know I’ll leave out Christian Walters, and then our lovemaking will take a passive-aggressive turn. But a lot of people who share this common interest in making the world a better place through rationalism are kind, honest, funny, talented, and valuable friends. Then there are people like Christian who are maybe just two or three of those.

But I no longer identify with this community of benevolent know-it-alls, because not all of them are the best folks in the world. In fact, a good percentage of the top ten worst humans I’ve ever met are prominent members of the skeptics’ club. They’re dishonest, mean-spirited, narcissistic, misogynistic. Pick a personality flaw, and I can probably point you to someone who epitomizes it. And that person has probably had a speaking slot at a major skeptical conference.

I grew particularly disgusted with the boys’ club attitude I saw among skeptical leaders and luminaries. The kind of attitude that’s dismissive of women, sexually predatory, and downright gross. When I first started going to skeptical conferences as a fresh-faced know-it-all, I started hearing things about people I once admired. Then I started seeing things myself. Then I got a job with the JREF, and the pattern continued.

There’s a particular guy popular with the skeptical crowd who writes books, gives talks, and wears bicycle shorts. What’s not to love? Well, a female friend of mine told me she didn’t like it very much when he locked eyes with her from across a room and pointed to his dick. When I started working for the JREF, my boss described this same guy as an “old school misogynist”. Then a friend told me this same skeptical celebrity had groped another speaker at a conference. Grabbed her breast without invitation. Sexually assaulted her. Then my boss told me that not only did this assault happen, but that he witnessed it and intervened. The woman who was assaulted won’t name names for fear of being dragged through the mud. Another woman I know has told me that this same guy assaulted her. Others have confirmed her story to me. I believe her. But she’s remained anonymous for much the same reasons.

I’m tired of this. I’m tired of hearing about sexual predators like Mr. Bicycle Shorts, who has yet again been invited to speak at the JREF’s annual conference. I’m tired of hearing things like what I’ve heard from [redacted]. That my old boss grabbed his junk in a car and said he would be “presidentially displeased” if [redacted] didn’t give my old boss a kiss.

I’m tired of people like Richard Dawkins, whose lashing out at my friend Rebecca Watson for having the nerve to talk about what kind of male attention makes her uncomfortable has led to years of the most heinous abuse being flung at her and her colleagues. Heinous, woman-hating abuse from enthusiastic members of this broken little community of freethinkers.

Pardon my Yiddish, but oy, that shit’s fucked. And it’s also fucked that people are afraid to speak out about their stories for fear that it will become the focus of their careers or that their privacy will be destroyed or that they’ll be sued or that they’ll somehow damage organizations that do a lot of good work.

This makes me sick, and it makes me mad. So of course I’m going to help Karen speak up and fight back.

Here’s the situation in a nutshell: Karen used to work with another writer and investigator named Ben Radford at an organization called CFI. Karen says Radford continually harassed and abused her. She brought the situation to CFI, which found Radford guilty of some of Karen’s charges. Then they let him off with a slap on the wrist. Karen blogged about this. Radford sued her for defamation.

Based on the evidence I’ve seen, my own experience with Radford’s dishonest and creepy behavior, and the assurances from friends of mine who know more about this situation than I do, I’m willing to believe Karen. And more than that, I’m willing to put my money behind her efforts to fight back in court. Because she deserves the chance to make her case instead of having to fold under insurmountable financial pressure. Defending yourself in court isn’t cheap.

Also, I don’t like bullies or creeps. Especially the kinds of bullies and creeps who have been protected by their peers and allies in a community that places pseudo-celebrity and books about how lake monsters aren’t real above the well-being of women who are at least as vital to fighting the good fight. A fight, by the way, that’s about the righteousness of the truth.

So I’ve given to Karen’s fund. You can do the same here:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/give-a-voice-to-harassment-victims/x/6875853“

As long as atheism is about nothing but disbelieving in gods, and as long as skepticism is about nothing but demanding evidence, as long as there is no human heart behind the goals of these organizations, this behavior will continue. We must have secular values beyond simply rejecting claims; we must recognize the import and implications of living in a material, natural world; there must be secular values that give us purpose.

Secular Pro-Life lies

Wow. Secular Pro-Life has accused Planned Parenthood of cheating their donors. Why? Because they had an increased budget by 3 million dollars, but they did fewer breast exams. So, yeah, SPL looked at a big, complex budget for an organization offering multiple services, noticed that one number went down, and libelously implied that all the money went to some other mysterious service, hint hint hint.

This year, we cut out meat at the Myers household, and if you looked at our total budget, despite the fact that our income rose very slightly last year, we spent much less in the meat department at the grocery store. Where did the extra money go? FRIVOLOUS ABORTIONS ON DEMAND, of course. All the money we saved by not buying steaks was rerouted into KILLING BABIES.

That’s the game SPL plays. TheTruePooka actually looks at Planned Parenthood’s detailed budget, in a way that SPL should have done if they were honestly evaluating their expenditures, and found that while breast exams were going down, other, related services were going up: for instance, follow-up care with ultrasound and biopsies (you know that breast exams are just one small part of preventing breast cancer, right?), providing educational resources so women can do their own exams, and expanding outreach to Latinas and other countries. To make it short, SPL was distorting the budget and misleading their readers, but Planned Parenthood was honest and accurate.

Follow the link and go read the whole thing, or if you’d prefer, here’s the author reading it to you:

Cosmos upstaged!

Last night on Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson explained how we know the universe is immensely old, and even took a sharp poke at that nonsensical idea that the earth is only about 6,000 years old. I figured there’d be some indignant squawking on the internet this morning, but no…the creationists are all quiet about it. Why? Well, some of them might have been tuned into the Walking Dead finale, since zombies and their theology are so copacetic. But the real reason is that they’re too busy freaking out over Noah.

The Discovery Institute is really pissed off (wait, you’re saying, why should they care about a movie that plays fast and loose with the Bible? Aren’t they a secular organization? Yeah, right). Their angle is that the movie is anti-human, because that’s all environmentalism is about, hating people.

Bottom line: Noah pushes hard on the modern environmentalist meme that — as I reported in The War on Humans — we are a terrible plague on the living Gaia. That message sells among a small group of progressive elites and misanthropic neo-earth religionists. But most of us do not consider ourselves to be cancers on the planet.

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Discovery Institute, but yes you in particular are cancers on the culture and the planet. And have you considered the likelihood that the very worst destroyers do so confident that what they are doing is right and good, and that our personal narcissism is not exactly the most reliable measure of our worth?

They are also quite happy that humans exterminated entire species of megafauna. They deserved it, don’t you know, and had to go to allow people to live.

Whatever our role in the demise of megafauna, we should not look back in shame.

Early humans’ successful fight for survival gave us the chance to thrive. I am not upset with them: I am grateful.

For a bunch of anti-evolutionists, they sure are happy to cite ‘survival of the fittest’ as a justification for slaughter. You know, it wasn’t always a fight for survival.

Roman emperors curried favor with the public by upstaging their predecessors in killing more animals and producing more spectacular displays of slaughter (Morris 1990).  Emperor Titus inaugurated the Roman Coliseum by declaring 100 days of celebration, during which enormous numbers of animals were speared by gladiators.  On the opening day, 5,000 animals were slaughtered, and over the next two days, 3,000 more were killed (Morris 1990).  The caged animals were kept underground in dungeons where they were not fed, and on the day of the festival, they were hauled in their cages onto lifts that brought them into the center of the arena.  As the crowd roared with excitement, drums were beaten, trumpets blown, and the terrified animals were set loose (Attenborough 1987).  Sometimes the animals were goaded to attack one another, and at other times, men armed with spears and tridents pursued them around barriers made from shrubs in imitation of hunts in the wild (Attenborough 1987).  One arena hunt resulted in the killing of 300 Ostriches and 200 Alpine Chamois (Morris 1990). 

Lions, Tigers, bears, bulls, Leopards, Giraffes and deer died after being tormented, stabbed and gored (Morris 1990).  Big cats that had been starved were released into the ring where a human slave or prisoner of war was lashed to a post; the animals clawed at the person before they themselves were speared and stabbed by gladiators (Attenborough 1987).  In some of the larger slaughters, 500 Lions, more than 400 Leopards, or 100 bears would be killed in a single day (Morris 1990).  Hippos, even rhinoceroses and crocodiles, were brought into these arenas, and sometimes gladiators employed bizarre methods of killing such as decapitating fleeing ostriches with crescent-shaped arrows (Morris 1990).

Still grateful?

I grew up with farmers and ranchers, and I can tell you this, too: the slaughter continues. They tend to be ruthlessly intolerant of anything perceived as compromising their income. I’ve seen songbirds shot because “it was their farm, they can do what they want”.

And the big threat is habitat destruction — the prairies are almost all gone here in Minnesota, and the wetlands are being plowed over. It is not anti-human to want to preserve some natural beauty and protect biodiversity, because this is our planet and we should aspire to maintain it as something better than a giant sewage treatment plant for Homo sapiens. We are a lesser world for the absence of giant ground sloths and European lions and black rhinos — did we really have to kill them all so we could merely survive?

Deep thinkers, they aren’t

In case you missed it yesterday, we had a visit from Eric Hovind and his small troop of Junior Woodchucks. They first visited this edition of Thunderdome, babbling incoherently, and then when I opened a new Thunderdome thread, many of them seem to have gotten lost and confused, although I also think they were losing steam already. These kooks never have much stamina, and are unused to confronting people who actually ask them to think (for another example of that kind of foolishness, Ed Brayton links to a creationist trying to answer questions — they’re terrible at it.)

But if you’re still interested, one of them, calling himself Proof of God, is still lingering, like a bloated rotting corpse left after the tide recedes for the crabs to pick over. He’s not answering questions, either, just dumbly reciting “facts” that he’s clearly never thought about it very deeply. For example…

The proof that God exists is that without God you could not know anything for certain. Without God truth would be relative and meaningless.

But why must this “god” who forms the logical foundation of the universe be an anthropomorphic, intelligent agent who cares personally about one thin layer of spontaneously interacting chemicals wrapped around one among the immense numbers of rocks bouncing about in the cosmos? Why couldn’t the fixed truth of the universe be a reflection of the Planck constant, rather than Jesus?

But I don’t think there’s much point to arguing with a fool who thinks he has found a proof of god in a banality. The only informative bit of this interaction is in seeing just how inane Hovind and his merry band are.

Edwin Kagin is dead

The founder of Camp Quest, crusader against the Creation “Museum”, former blogger at FtB, invigoratingly ferocious lawyer defending atheism, Edwin Kagin, has died. He was one of those fellows with an amazing force of personality, and strong views that he’d gleefully argue over.

There was a news segment on him a few years ago. The snide tone trolls who are interviewing him are a good example of what he fought against.

I’ve been officially de-baptized by Kagin himself; I also stayed at his home the night before my visit to the Creation “Museum”. He was a wonderful guy, and will be missed.

Not by Answers in Genesis, though.

Hollywood evolution

Gwyneth Paltrow is getting divorced, and I don’t care. I can’t say that I’ve ever even given a thought to her marital status before. But what is rather fascinatingly bizarre is her pretentious gooeyness: she calls her divorce Conscious Uncoupling…and reading elsewhere through her blog you get the impression of a young woman with so much money that she can cheerfully indulge in every poorly justified and absurd fad.

But that’s not what caught my eye. After her announcement, she has a long justification for divorce (really, Gwyneth, you don’t need to make excuses — if you’ve grown apart, it’s fine to move on), and the reasons offered are based on a Hollywood version of evolution. Not real evolution, of course — these people are too airily superficial to ever bother with reality — but a fairy tale evolution in which they are elevated above the brutes and bugs.

It’s not written by Paltrow, but by two of her friends, a married couple, a dentist, Dr Sherry Sami, Founder of Happy Kids Dental Planet Homeopathic Dentistry and Orthodontics in Los Angeles and Dr Habib Sadeghi, an osteopath who is co-founder of Be Hive of Healing, an integrative health center based in Los Angeles. So a homeopathic dentist and a quack. Fills you with confidence, don’t it?

How bad is it? It is so bad that I’m going to skip right over the lazy evolutionary psychology at the beginning, in which we’re told that marriage is a Paleolithic adaptation for short-lived early humans, to go right to the really funny bits.

It’s about insects.

Intimacy & Insects

To understand what life is really like living with an external shield, we have to examine the experts: Insects. Beetles, grasshoppers, and all other insects have an exoskeleton. The structure that protects and supports their body is on the outside. Not only are they stuck in a rigid, unchanging form that provides no flexibility, they are also at the mercy of their environment. If they find themselves under the heel of a shoe, it’s all over. That’s not the only downside: Exoskeletons can calcify, leading to buildup and more rigidity.

If only insects could sue for libel…

This is all wrong. There’s nothing unchanging about having an exoskeleton — holometabolous arthropods undergo some of the most amazing transformations during their life cycle. Have these people never heard of metamorphosis? As for flexibility, insects are the most diverse and successful animal group on the planet.

And what organism isn’t at the mercy of their environment? If I found myself under the heel of a giant shoe, it’d be all over, too.

Calcification of the exoskeleton…is this a significant problem for insects? I don’t think so. They’re just making things up.

By contrast, vertebrates like dogs, horses, and humans have an endoskeleton. Our support structure is on the inside of our bodies, giving us exceptional flexibility and mobility to adapt and change under a wide range of circumstances. The price for this gift is vulnerability: Our soft outside is completely exposed to hurt and harm every day.

Hey, they were just complaining that insects were vulnerable to passing shoes, now they’re saying the price of internal skeletons is vulnerability. It seems to me that just existing, no matter what your skeleton looks like, is a risky business.

They don’t let the incoherence bother them, they’re on a roll.

Life is a spiritual exercise in evolving from an exoskeleton for support and survival to an endoskeleton. Think about it. When we get our emotional support and wellbeing from outside ourselves, everything someone says or does can set us off and ruin our day. Since we can’t control or predict what another person does, our moods are at the mercy of our environment. We can’t adapt to the situation if our intimate partner doesn’t behave the way we think they should. Everything is then perceived as a personal attack and attempt to upset us. Up goes our armor and it’s all-out war.

Life is not a spiritual exercise in ‘evolving’ from an exoskeleton to an endoskeleton. Real life wasn’t about evolving from exoskeletons to endoskeletons, either. Their metaphor makes no sense. They have this weird idea that exoskeletons are associated with inflexibility and an inability to respond to the environment, which is just wrong.

With an internal support structure, we can stand strong because our stability doesn’t depend on anything outside ourselves. We can be vulnerable and pay attention to what’s happening around us, knowing that whatever comes, we have the flexibility to adapt to the situation. There’s a reason we call cowards spineless: It takes great courage to drop your armor, expose your soft inside, and come to terms with the reality of what’s happening around you. It’s a powerful thing to then realize that you can survive it. When we examine our intimate relationships from this perspective, we realize that they aren’t for finding static, lifelong bliss like we see in the movies. They’re for helping us evolve a psycho-spiritual spine, a divine endoskeleton made from conscious self-awareness so that we can evolve into a better life without recreating the same problems for ourselves again and again. When we learn to find our emotional and spiritual support from inside ourselves, nothing that changes our environment or relationships can unsettle us.

Are all woo artists like this? What a load of psycho-spiritual hooey. It’s all flawed metaphor, and I don’t even see how to apply this inconsistent, incoherent rubbish to my personal life.

There’s a scientific theory by Russian esotericist, Peter Ouspensky, that the creation of insects was a failed attempt by nature to evolve a higher form of consciousness. There was a time millions of years ago when insects were enormous—a dragonfly’s wings were three feet across. So why didn’t they end up being the dominant species on earth? Because they lacked flexibility, which is what evolution is all about, and couldn’t adapt to changing conditions like humans can. The lives of people who imprison themselves in an exoskeleton of anger usually don’t evolve the way they’d like them to, either. Being trapped inside negative energy like anger and resentment keeps people from moving forward in life because they can only focus on the past. Even worse, over time, these powerful emotions often turn into disease in the body.

Ouspensky was not a scientist and did not come up with any scientific theories. The idea that insects are a failed attempt at anything is absurd, and judging a species by whether it is conscious or by how big individuals are is inappropriate.

And insects are the dominant form of animal life on earth. There are 200 million insects for every human being; insects have been here for 400 million years, while humans have been around for about 6 million; when humans go extinct, cockroaches will still walk the earth. I can’t even comprehend the head-up-assedness of declaring that insects lack flexibility and can’t adapt — if they are so incapable of adapting, how did we end up with 10-30 million extant species?

But I can comprehend how they can claim emotions turn into disease. They’re quacks. That’s the sort of thing they lie about to make money.

Babies stacked like cordwood and burned to heat abortion clinics!

The latest ‘scandal’ to appall the anti-choicers is the discovery that aborted babies were incinerated to heat UK hospitals. It’s actually just more sensationalism from the Telegraph.

Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat.

Last night the Department of Health issued an instant ban on the practice which health minister Dr Dan Poulter branded ‘totally unacceptable.’

At least 15,500 foetal remains were incinerated by 27 NHS trusts over the last two years alone, Channel 4’s Dispatches discovered.

The programme, which will air tonight, found that parents who lose children in early pregnancy were often treated without compassion and were not consulted about what they wanted to happen to the remains.

One of the country’s leading hospitals, Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, incinerated 797 babies below 13 weeks gestation at their own ‘waste to energy’ plant. The mothers were told the remains had been ‘cremated.’

Another ‘waste to energy’ facility at Ipswich Hospital, operated by a private contractor, incinerated 1,101 foetal remains between 2011 and 2013.

Do the math. I calculate that, on average, that means each of those hospitals incinerated about 24 wads of bloody debris from a specific surgical procedure per month. I think we’ve just solved the energy crisis forever if setting a few grams of dead baby (how much do they think a first trimester fetus weighs, anyway?*) on fire every day or two is enough to make a significant dent in the hospital’s heating bill. Ask yourself, though — do you think crematoria are net energy producers, or net energy sinks?

Also, that wet, gooey scrap of tissue is not going to be a profitable energy source. Burning the mass of disposable pads and absorbent gauze and assorted paper waste associated with the procedure is a plus, but dead fetuses? Nope. This is a standard, significant cost for medical facilities and also universities — biological waste must be disposed of, but it’s nasty stuff that has to be disposed of properly. No one wants piles of blood-soaked laundry rotting in their landfill. It is standard procedure to use incinerators — specific incinerators rated to efficiently destroy hazardous and infectious materials.

Apparently, some of the incinerators in the UK are efficiently designed to use a high heat adequate for destroying biological waste, and some of that heat is used to also heat the place. That sounds sensible to me.

I’m not in the least disturbed by the fact that patients were not consulted on how their dead fetus was disposed. When you go in for an operation, are you concerned about what is done with the bloody towels afterwards, or how your appendix or tonsils or excised cyst are treated? Did you think there was some special room deep in the bowels of the institution where they were reverently interred, attended by a weeping chaplain who said a few kind words over your precious bodily fluids? Nope. They’re sealed up in a bag, dealt with according to appropriate protocols for medical waste, and incinerated.

Get over it.

*About 15 grams, or half an ounce…of the most energy-dense substance in the world, apparently.