They’re always hucksters at heart

When I heard about Eben Alexander’s I-died-and-went-to-heaven story, my first reaction was dismissive: I’ve heard these stories so many times, and they always turn out to be confabulation. When the brain is rebooted after trauma, especially if the process is prolonged as in Alexander’s case, it tries to reconstruct the continuity of experience by building memories (heck, even in normal healthy brains, memories are constructed). What I would have condemned Alexander for is extreme gullibility, unforgivable in a highly trained neurosurgeon.

I did not assume he was making stuff up for a payday. But not so fast; an Esquire reporter did some digging into Eben Alexander’s background, and also checked the details of his claims in his book, and it looks like we ought to be more suspicious.

When Alexander got sick in late 2008, he hadn’t practiced surgery in a year and faced a $3 million malpractice lawsuit. He now has a best-selling book and a movie deal.

Not just a malpractice suit, which are fairly common, but a whole string of malpractice suits that made him the subject of the highest number of such suits in his state. He’d similarly faded out of practice in Massachusetts, first, and then moved to Virginia to restart, where he then lost his surgical privileges at his hospital after a succession of screwups in spinal surgery…and after altering surgical records to cover his tracks.

Whoops.

Oh, well. When you’re a venal fuckup, you can always find a loving home in the Christian community by lying about Jesus a lot.

They really are just putting up obnoxious roadblocks

The right has been obsessed with putting up pointless obstacles to getting an abortion: waiting periods, ultrasounds, vaginal ultrasounds, etc. Their entire purpose is to punish and increase the suffering and anxiety of women trying to get a legal and necessary procedure done, because they sure as heck have nothing to do with actually dissuading women from getting abortions.

Researchers analyzed over 15,575 visits to a large, urban abortion provider in 2011. All of the patients received an ultrasound before continuing with the abortion procedure, and all of them were given the opportunity to look at the image. Most patients chose not to look at it. Women did opt to view the ultrasound about 42 percent of the time — and among those women, about 98 percent of them went on to have an abortion anyway. Looking an the ultrasound only had an impact among the seven percent of women who reported they didn’t feel very certain about ending the pregnancy. “Such viewing does not alter decisions of the large majority of women who are certain that abortion is the right decision,” the researchers concluded.

That aligns with previous, smaller studies into this area. In 2012, after reviewing the data from two separate studies on the impact of ultrasounds, University of California researchers concluded that women’s emotional responses to seeing an ultrasound can vary, but those emotions ultimately don’t lead them to cancel their abortion appointment. Other studies have reported that 87 percent of women are “highly confident” about their decision to have an abortion, and state requirements that are intended to give them time to change their minds — like forced waiting periods, mandatory counseling sessions, and ultrasounds — don’t change their mind. Furthermore, a full 90 percent of women say their primary reaction to ending a pregnancy is “relief” and report they don’t regret their decision, suggesting that further invention wouldn’t have changed that reality.

The whole idea that ultrasounds might have a persuasive effect is built on the infantilization of women: if I show you a picture of your big-eyed placid fetus, you’ll break down in tears, fall in love with that grainy image (because you’re a woman, and that’s what you do, coo over baby pictures), and abort the abortion.

What the data actually show, though, is that women think seriously about the consequences of their decisions and make choices confidently — and that maybe significant life-changing decisions will not be lightly swayed by a jebus-lovin’ state senator telling doctors to make pregnant women stare at flickering gray images.

The ark is sinking! All Christians to the lifeboats!

It’s looking dire for the Ark Park. They are facing financial collapse.

Bloomberg reported on Friday that creationist ministry Answers in Genesis must sell $29 million in unrated junk bonds by Feb. 6, or else their entire bond structure will collapse for the construction of Ark Encounter — the proposed evangelical tourist attraction in Grant County that will feature a giant boat telling the story of how a 600-year old man rounded up dinosaurs and fire-breathing dragons onto Noah’s Ark a few thousand years ago.

To put that in perspective, they need to raise $29 million in less than a month…and they have only managed to raise a total of $27 million in a few years of heavy PR.

And you know whose fault all this is? Well, Satan, but also…Ken Ham blames us!

As you have read in some of my prior emails, many challenges and road blocks came up as we worked through the stages of the bond offering and the first closing. From atheists attempting to register for the bond offering and disrupting it, to secular bloggers and reporters writing very misleading and inaccurate articles about the bonds, to brokerage firms saying “yes” but after reading these incorrect reports saying “no” in allowing the Ark bonds into their client accounts—the obstacles were numerous and disruptive. Frankly, it has been an extremely stressful and frustrating time for all of us.

Well done, everyone.

I guess as a sign of desperation, AiG has now opened up free attendance to the Creation “Museum” for kids under 12. He’s quite proud of this, and has a cartoon to illustrate it.

freecreationism

To which I must reply, if he’s so interested in helping souls into heaven, why is there an asterisk there that says “with paying adult”? Don’t us grownups get to be saved?

There are lots of creationists commenting on it that make a similar point; I like this one. Why not make it free to atheists? Or those other non-Christians, like the Catholics.

KEN HAM: You should open up the museum, free to atheists for a certain time period. However some ppl may lie to get in for free. Idk how you would discern the atheists from the theists. Or possibly all non Christians free (Catholics, Muslims etc)

Sikivu tells it like it is

She tears into a phenomenon that bothers me, too: white evangelical ministers jumping ship for atheism, being embraced by atheists, and tainting atheism with the Christian culture. In particular, there’s this awful parasite, Ryan Bell, who’s only just trying out atheism for a year, which is simply ridiculous — it’s not a set of superficial practices, it’s a mindset. What’s he going to do at the end of the year, erase his brain?

A thriving brand of secular tourism can now be definitively filed under the category “stuff white people like”:  Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta has sponsored a crowd-funding campaign for a white male former pastor named Ryan Bell who—in a bit of brilliant PR stagecraft—“decided to…give atheism a try” for a year.  As a result of his “experiment” Bell was fired from two Christian schools.  Currently the campaign has far exceeded its $5,000 goal, generating over $16,000 from 700 plus donors in one day.  Bell joins a jam-packed, largely white, mostly Christian cottage industry of religious leaders who are capitalizing off of untapped reserves of atheist dollars, adulation and publicity by jumping onto the “maverick ex-pastor” bandwagon. 

But there’s more to it than that. American culture as a whole tends to be racist, and atheists are following the majority.

In studies conducted by Princeton University researchers, white job seekers with criminal records were slightly more likely to be called back for and/or offered entry-level jobs than African American job seekers with no criminal record. According to lead researcher Devah Pager, “Even whites with criminal records received more favorable treatment (17%) than blacks without criminal records (14%). The rank ordering of (these) groups…is painfully revealing of employer preferences: race continues to play a dominant role in shaping employment opportunities, equal to or greater than the impact of a criminal record.”

That’s the problem: that racism cuts people off at the level of denying them opportunities, so they don’t get a chance to demonstrate competence, providing a self-perpetuating basis for the myth that they’re less qualified. It’ll never end unless everyone consciously opens the doors and encourages more participation; unless we recognize the handicap that assumed white dominance places on all others who have slightly more melanin.

She also points out one egregious example of failure by atheist organizations:

For example, although many atheists profess a commitment to ‘science and reason’ there are still no atheist STEM initiatives that acknowledge the egregious lack of STEM K-12 and college access for students of color. In their zeal to brand predominantly religious communities as backward, unenlightened and unsophisticated in the exceptionalist ways of Western rationality, atheist organizations are MIA when it comes to discussions about STEM college pipelining, STEM literacy and culturally responsive recruitment and retention of STEM scholars and professionals of color in academia.” While white atheists give jobs, “atheist” pulpits and big bucks to American secular tourists numerous black churches support STEM tutoring, mentoring, college access and scholarship programs to confront the gaping educational divide between white and black America.

There are, unfortunately, a substantial number of atheists who declare that anything beyond simply stating there is no god is ‘mission creep’. They can cheer when a prominent scientist like Richard Dawkins endorses atheism, but recognizing that a commitment to science means a heck of a lot more than clapping really hard at a talk is too much for them. They like science, and isn’t atheism supposed to be just about affirming what they already like? Oh, and of course, affirming how stupid people are who don’t like the things we do.

But taking that next step and realizing that a commitment to science means investing and working towards expanding knowledge of science is hard. Exercising political will is hard. Demanding social change is hard. But that’s what atheists need to do if they are to be something more than an empty label.

I’ve been seeing first-hand what it takes to expand an idea, and atheism isn’t doing it. Science is. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to people at HHMI and NIH, and their focus is crystal clear. They prioritize getting science done, and they don’t give a damn whether it is a white hand or a brown one doing it.

The demographic trends are perfectly obvious: America is going to become a majority-minority country in the next few decades (states like California and Texas are already there), which means white people aren’t going to be the dominant default anymore. At the same time, when these grant agencies look at who is doing science, they’re mostly white and minority populations are largely excluded. They can do the math, they’re scientists. It means we can’t afford to discriminate against the largest subpopulation as a pool of potential scientists.

So there are programs in place at all the big science funding agencies to encourage an expansion of that pool, before the trends kill us. Even my little HHMI grant is designed with the goal of giving underserved populations a chance to do science at the undergraduate level.* These represent commitments of money and time to give those who are denied by default assumptions an opportunity to prove themselves. That’s what we need more of, not just lip service.

I know all the major atheist organizations either have a narrower goal, or are making major efforts to grow the atheist community. If your goal is to just grow your membership, it’s always tempting to just focus on the people you’ve already got, and just try to get more. But grabbing a greater share of a shrinking subpopulation is short-term thinking. Long term, you have to invest in recruiting from the faster-growing subset — and the atheist organizations that are still going to be here in the future need to make that commitment now.

*By the way, women are not considered an underserved population in undergraduate education any more. We have no problem getting women involved in entry-level science — the problems come later for women, when it’s time for promotion and moving on to professional status. That’s a ceiling minorities hit as well; these are problems that have to be addressed at multiple levels.

He’s not really filling me with confidence

Bill Nye comments on his upcoming debate with Ken Ham:

Oh, dear.

Let’s see, what’s in Nye’s favor here:

  • He’s got the science on his side. He really is arguing from the only rational position.

  • Ken Ham is a palooka with no reputation as a debater himself.

Then there is the stuff that makes me worry:

  • Nye has no clue what he’s in for. Absolutely no clue. I hope he prepares by watching lots of creationist debates, or he’s in for a surprise.

  • Maybe it was an off night, but he didn’t respond well when confronted with Greg Laden’s objections. He needs to be ready with fast, succinct replies to a hell of a lot of different tactics…or he needs to be much quicker on his feet.

  • If his only approach is to talk about the economic advantages of good science, Ham is going to be prepared. I don’t think the people he’s trying to persuade are going to care much about those wicked jobs, anyway — they know you can get filthy rich making duck calls.

If I were making odds on this matchup, I’d say Nye’s chances just slipped a bit with that performance. My own personal bet would be that this is going to be an event in which both sides spend most of their time talking past each other, and that they’ll both flop hard except with their most fervent proponents.

I hope Eugenie Scott and Nye are having conversations right now. Serious conversations.

Aron Ra understands the nature of the show; maybe Nye should have conversations with him, too.

In the proud tradition of Expelled

Gosh, where do the kooks get their money? Watch this slick trailer for a fancy new “science” documentary called The Principle. There’s Michio Kaku…oh, wait, he’s always getting cheerfully dragged into woo…and Lawrence Krauss? Krauss is one of those hard-headed rational types who wouldn’t be a knowing part of any nonsense. But just watch, and the subject of this movie will gradually emerge.

It’s a pseudo-documentary about geocentrism. Zeno tells me he heard about on that weird Catholic zealot Michael Voris’s show. It’s being made by weird uber-kook Rick Delano, who’s sole claim to fame seems to be advocating geocentrism, and showing up in the comments of every blog that ever laughs at the subject (so don’t be surprised if he appears here).

What isn’t at all surprising is that Lawrence Krauss has already repudiated the movie.

One crank dies, another rises to take his place

The regulars here may recall John A. Davison, who died in 2012. He was notoriously persistent and repetitive, and rather clueless: he was the guy who started a blog with one article, never wrote another one, and just made new comments. He later announced that it was full, and so…he started a brand new blog, one article, and posted more comments to himself on it. It was rather sad.

Less well known is that he was actually a biologist, had a Ph.D. in zoology, and taught at the University of Vermont. He had a “scientific” theory, which was his, which he thought explained all that evolutionary change while refuting those silly scientists who believed that mutations occurred. No! Evolution was all due to chromosome rearrangements, which somehow are not mutations, and he also somehow ignored the existence of allelic differences between species:

In 1940 Richard B. Goldschmidt [1940] presented the evidence that it is the chromosome, not the gene that is the unit of evolutionary change. While this was not then accepted by the evolutionary establishment, recent karyological studies fully support his perspective. The primary demonstrable differences that distinguish us from our closest primate relatives are revealed in the structure of our chromosomes. They consist of several reorganizations of homologous chromosome segments in the form of translocations, pericentric and paracentric inversions and a single fusion which result in the human complement of 46 chromosomes while the Chimpanzee, Gorilla and Orang each have 48 (Yunis and Prakash [1982]). The important point is that there is no evidence that such transformations involved in any way the introduction of species specific information into the genome. This is further reinforced by the demonstration that we are nearly identical at the DNA level with our close relatives. The simplest explanation is that the information was present in a latent state and simply revealed or derepressed when the chromosome segments were placed in a new configuration (Davison [1993]).

Yet when you read what he had to say about it, what was striking was the complete failure to read and understand the scientific literature — he had come up with his scientific theory, by God, and he didn’t have to address it critically, ever. All he had to do was go on blogs and internet forums and write the same pretentious catchphrases over and over again. And that was the saddest thing of all, that a mind could become so calcified and bitter and obsessed.

So he died, but you knew another had to emerge, and he has come. I was asked to look at a string of comments left on a science article by a fellow going by the pseudonym JVK, and all the Davison traits were there. Pretentious phrasing. Repetition: if the audience didn’t get it the first time, just say the same thing again, twice. A kind of sneering anger that people don’t understand how smart he is. An obsession with one narrow idea, which is his, which explains all of evolution and proves that everyone else is wrong.

Behold James Vaughn Kohl.

Ecological adaptation occurs via the epigenetic effects of nutrients on alternative splicings of pre-mRNA which result in amino acid substitutions that differentiate all cell types of all individuals of all species. The control of the differences in cell types occurs via the metabolism of the nutrients to chemical signals that control the physiology of reproduction.

These facts do not refute evolution; they simply refute the ridiculous theory of mutation-initiated natural selection that most people here were taught to believe is the theory of evolution.

That theory is far too ridiculous to be anything but a joke in the context of biological-based increasing organismal complexity. But here, we have lots of jokers, don’t we? The proof of ecological variation that appears to refute the theory of evolution, which actually refutes itself, is that ecological adaptations occur too fast for mutations to compete with them as a source of anything but diseases and disorders.

Basically what he’s saying in the first couple of sentences is that the environment induces variations in gene expression that are responsible for the differentiation of the various cell types. This is partly true; environmental influences certainly do contribute to cells developing in different directions. However, there are many examples of patterns that resist environmental influences, or in which maternal factors shelter the embryo from the environment. Fertilized human eggs, for instance, acquire polarity information when they implant in the uterus, but are largely insulated from temperature and nutrient stress.

Then there are other things that are just too narrow. Is alternative splicing the only mechanism to create variants in cells? No, of course not. External signals cause changes in the phosphorylation state of proteins in the cytoplasm, for example, that can affect metabolic activity; no alternative splicing involved. Signals can also switch on and switch off specific genes, again, no alternative splicing needed.

Then there are bits that are just plain weird. He gives the impression that what we eat dictates what signals we can generate. Do you get Sonic Hedgehog in your diet? No. It’s a protein synthesized by your cells.

The primary patterning elements in multicellular organisms are produced by networks of interacting genes; major body plan features might be initiated by environmental or maternal signals (which then begin a series of gene-regulated processes that produce the details), but the environment is primarily going to be an important modulator. Need I point out as well that what Kohl has described is a limited subset of the processes in development and that no one in their right mind thinks that development somehow refutes the contribution of other sources of variation to evolution? It was Van Valen who said in 1973 that “Evolution is the control of development by ecology…” That’s pretty much the mainstream view, so there’s nothing novel in what Kohl wrote.

Further, what he writes is a particularly pretentious, obfuscatory way of saying what he means — he’s trying to obscure rather than explain.

But then, that’s what he does. He crashes into a thread full of lay people and then lords it over them with his abuse of jargon. And he does it over and over again, and you can see the responses: most of the other commenters are more or less stunned, they don’t know how to deal with all the specific buzzwords he throws at them, and they have these doubts…maybe he’s saying something I should know about. No, he’s not. He’s babbling in scientese.

And he just keeps hammering away with his pseudo-scientific pronouncements.

Nutrient stress and social stress force organisms to adapt via seemingly futile cycles of protein biosynthesis and degradation that either result in amino acid substitutions that stabilize organism-level thermoregulation or the organism dies. It does not mutate into another species, which is why that cannot be explained to a high school freshman.

The point of this article was to show people that high school freshman have already been taught to believe in a ridiculous theory of mutation-initiated natural selection. Thus, they think everything that happens to DNA must be a mutation and there is plenty of extant literature that supports that idea. All of it is wrong in the context of ecological adaptations.

Based on Darwin’s ‘conditions of life’ ecological adaptations are nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled. The adaptations can be viewed as amino acid substitutions.

96 of them differentiate our cell types from those of most recent extinct ancestor.

He’s also obsessed with human pheromones. He has written a book, The Scent of Eros, about the physiological responses to pheromones — speaking of murky, difficult, ephemeral phenomena, I think the human dependence on pheromones is probably real, but only one tiny part of our behavioral repertoire, and almost certainly not a major influence on development. Kohl also sells a line of beauty products: for example, Scent of Eros With Musk Fragrance – Pheromones For Men To Attract Women.

Maybe he thinks belligerent pomposity is the way to attract the attention of investors from Axe.