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.

You should have a right to not have babies

Amanda Marcotte does not ever want to have any children, and she has said so quite strongly. She doesn’t even like children. And that’s perfectly reasonable. Around 20% of American women are child-free for life. Are you going to force them to have babies?

Well, maybe. Cassy Fiano was outraged that Marcotte rejects the idea of having children. While ranting about how horrible it was that she has no affection for infants, let alone fetuses, she effectively discloses what it’s all really about.

What’s interesting is how she acts as if floating the idea of adoption for those facing unplanned pregnancies is somehow forcing them into it. No, Amanda. It’s called having sex. You choose to have sex, you choose to open the door to having a baby, no matter what kind of birth control you’re on. Every time a person has sex, there is a possibility that they will get pregnant, barring a full hysterectomy. She compares it to forcing men to donate sperm, surely what she feels is a no-fail argument against “the patriarchy.” The problem with that is that no one made it to where women are the ones who carry babies. It wasn’t something that men engineered. It’s called science, Amanda. It’s just the way it is, fair or unfair. Acknowledge reality and move on.

There’s the simple-minded solution to the whole abortion problem! You’re only allowed to have sex if you’re willing to get pregnant. Thirty million American women should just be abstinent forever, and she invokes science and reality as her justification.

Here’s some different science and reality for you: sex is a normal, healthy behavior for human beings, and almost all the sex acts performed are not procreative: no intent or desire for pregnancy, and often with no ability for impregnation. We do it for fun, because it makes us happy, because it brings us closer to another human being. Yet Fiano blithely declares that reproduction must be a component of human sexuality.

Why? I was happy to have my children, but I have no interest in having any more (and it would be irresponsible to do so). I am not quite ready to give up sex. I have even less interest in trying to dictate to others under what conditions they are allowed to have sex.

It seems Cassy Fiano is more about controlling others’ sexuality with a soupçon of slut-shaming.

Of course, if you want even more fun, read the comments.

Suppose Amanda would have said “I hate Asians. Their slanty eyes and smooched in faces make me want to puke”…or “I hate Blacks. All of them are shiftless, lazy dopers, and we all would be better off if they blew each other away”, we’d recognize the ugliness of her hatred and prejudice. But since it’s against babies and children, that’s another matter. That’s cool, at least for pro-aborts.

This person is a little too happy to indulge in racist stereotyping while equating fetuses with Asians and blacks, I think.

If a creationist take a dump in a science journal, and the science journal later flushes it away, does it still stink?

poop

Yes, it surely does. It reeks.

I completely missed this article — no surprise, it seems everyone did — titled “Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory,” by Md. Abdul Ahad and Charles D. Michener, in the Journal of Biology and Life Science, and now you can’t read it because the journal retracted it and deleted it.

The first sign that something might be off in this paper is the title. “Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory”? Seriously? No one even stopped to notice how ungrammatical it was?

And then there’s the abstract.

Darwin‟s Theory is a central theme of biology and all theories of evolution. Paleontology, the study of fossils provide convincing and the direct evidences for evolution. Save for, if the organisms of same class arise from the same ancestor as Darwin opine; fossil record should provides a series of fossil from the progressive to older deposits, that show stage of intermediate between specialized modern (existing) living organism, but no so found at all. Nevertheless, silicafied wood is a familiar example of plant fossils. Invertebrates have no hard parts, so, they are rarely form fossils but few insects found in amber as fossils. The entire vertebrate fossils are fragmentary bones. For example fossil of dinosaurs are thigh bone, arm bone, teeth, footprints, track, bite etc., and fossils of ancestors of human are skull fragments, teeth, jaws etc. Even these fossils are negligible amount and are not found in the original form but are moulds, casts, compression, impression, etc. The only unchanged fossil is the Woolly mammoth. Furthermore, transitional fossil is absent; claimed transitional fossils of Archaeopteryx and Seymouria are not transitional, they are true bird and true reptile, respectively. Obtain fossil are of fossil of present day organisms or are fossil of extinct organisms, which may form during a universal flood. Fossil evidences prove that humans have not evolve/descent from monkey lower animal. Even Darwin himself agreed in the “Descent of man‟ that origin of human cannot explain by science. Co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace never believes that human is evolved from lower animal. Moreover, estimation of age of fossil, age of earth by radiometric method and preparation of geological time table (scale) is imaginary as it overlooks 3.5 billion year. Extinction of living organism never produce any new species, if produce, no need of biodiversity conservation convention to prevent extinction. Living fossils prove that there is no evolutionary relationship between fossils and existing organisms. The fathers of modern paleontology and geology opposed evolution. Consequently, paleontology does not provide convincing, strongest, verified, and direct evidences for evolution as well as fossils evidences are opposite to Darwin‟s Theory. Moreover, the scientists of the most countries except a few have no facility to work with fossils; due to lack of technologies even they have no chance to see the fossils too. That is why the evolutionists as well as paleontologists cunningly have shown the fossils as the direct evidences of organic evolution. Darwin stated that if the geological record be perfect then the main objection of his theory natural selection will be greatly dismissed or disappears and he, who rejects these views on the nature of geological record, would rightly reject his whole theory.

Why, that’s nothing but stock creationist assertions, all presented in fractured English in a hodge-podge fashion. It makes absolutely no sense…but it got published.

I kind of suspect that the Journal of Biology and Life Science has an amazingly slackworthy process of review in place. In fact, I dare say the review process probably involves paying the $100 submission fee, and nothing more.

But wait! There’s more! The authors on that paper are Ahad and Michener. Michener is actually a respected entomologist at the University of Kansas — and he was totally surprised to learn that his name was on a retracted paper, since he’d never seen it, contributed nothing to it, and didn’t even know it existed.

So that’s how you publish a creationist paper: find a journal that will take your money and not even bother to proofread, and then just to add that extra veneer of contemptible dishonesty, use a real scientists name as a co-author.

Guess who’s speaking at the NSTA National Conference

amyfarrahfowler

The featured speaker at this year’s National Science Teacher Association conference in Boston is…Mayim Bialik.

The lucky ones among you are saying right now, “who?”. Others may know her from her television work, but maybe don’t know the full story behind her ‘science’ activism.

She’s an actor who plays Sheldon’s girlfriend on Big Bang Theory. Right there, as far as I’m concerned, we have a major strike against her: I detest that show. It’s the equivalent of a minstrel show for scientists, where scientists are portrayed as gross caricatures of the real thing — socially inept, egotistical jerks who think rattling off an equation is a sign of intelligence. I think it’s literally an anti-science communication show. Who in their right mind would want to be anything like Sheldon, the narcissistic nerd? Who would want to work with people like that? The message it’s sending instead is that if you are a superficial asshole, you should become a scientist, where you will be loved for personality traits that would get you shunned in civilized company. (We also see the same phenomenon in atheism, where so many people think it’s a great excuse to be the insensitive Vulcan.)

But OK, that’s a matter of taste, I will admit, and maybe not enough of a reason to be appalled to think she is going to be speaking to science teachers (although it’s enough for me). And she does have a Ph.D. in neuroscience, you have to respect that.

But…

Mayim Bialik does not vaccinate her kids. She’s the spokesperson for the Holistic Moms Network. I know what you’re thinking: “holistic” doesn’t sound so bad. But take it away, Orac!

Just one look at its advisory board should tell you all you need to know. For instance, there’s Dr. Lauren Feder, who bills herself as specializing in “primary care medicine, pediatrics and homeopathy” and has been a frequent contributor to that bastion of quackery and antivaccine looniness, Mothering Magazine, where she recommended homeopathic remedies to treat whooping cough. It doesn’t get much quackier than that. But Feder is just the beginning. Also on the Holistic Moms advisory board is the grand dame of the antivaccine movement herself, the woman who arguably more than anyone else is responsible for starting the most recent iteration of the antivaccine movement in the U.S. Yes, I’m talking about Barbara Loe Fisher, the founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a bastion of antivaccine propaganda since the 1980s. She’s not the only antivaccine activist on the advisory board, though. There’s also Peggy O’Mara, publisher of Mothering Magazine and Sherri Tenpenny, who is described right on the Holistic Moms website as, “one of America’s most knowledgeable and outspoken physicians, warning against the negative impact of vaccines on health.” Then there’s Dr. Lawrence Rosen, “integrative” pediatrician who appeared at the NVIC “vaccine safety conference” back in 2009 with Barbara Loe Fisher and Andrew Wakefield. In fact, Barbara Loe Fisher, Sherri Tenpenny, and Lauren Feder are featured very prominently on the Holistic Moms Network page on vaccination.

But that’s not all. If there’s one more thing that should tell you all you need to know about the Holistic Moms Network approach to science-based medicine, then take a look at its sponsors: Boiron (manufacturer of the homeopathic remedy for flu known as Oscillococcinum), the Center for Homeopathic Education (and I bet it is homeopathic too), the National Center for Homeopathy, and a whole bunch of other purveyors of woo and quackery.

And he has a lot more to say, as usual.

So why is this woo-peddling, vaccination-denying sitcom star being featured as a speaker at NSTA? I don’t know. Because she has a Ph.D. and pretends to be socially inept on TV? That doesn’t seem to be a good reason. Will Jenny McCarthy be invited to deliver a keynote next year? How about Ken Ham — he’s very into ‘science’ education, you know. Gosh, if we’re going to open the door to quacks, the pool of potential speakers just expanded immensely! Joseph Mercola? Andrew Weil? Deepak Chopra!

Tsk, NSTA. Do you vet your speakers at all?