My turn

Today is the last day of the Paradigm Symposium, which is good — I don’t know how much more my poor brain could take. But this afternoon, after lunch, it’s my turn to speak. And I’ve been doing my homework, looking into what kinds of things paranormalists often believe about biology and evolution, and it’s been a long exercise in face-palming. They’re all over the map, but there are some common threads: the idea that evolution is inadequate (even while they rather blandly accept it for everything other than humans) and that aliens had to somehow assist us to reach the state we’re in now. Again, there isn’t one simple, coherent formula to describe their ideas — they’re not like the creationists who neatly fall into a few categories — and their hypotheses wobble all over the place. Some believe humans are the aliens, that we immigrated here to Planet Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. Others believe that we’re hybrids, the product of mating between alien star-lords that we called gods and the common stock. Others think that no, it was planned modification of the ape genetic line by high-tech aliens, who intentionally inserted special genes into our cells to give us higher powers. And some are willing to say we evolved naturally here, but the aliens showed up to give us a technological boost, planting only ideas in human culture. So I’ve got a great big moving target to deal with, and I suspect that if I shoot down one hypothesis people will just glibly shift to one of the other excuses.

Here’s an example of the kind of nonsense I have to deal with.

Why is it that ancient native, cultures all around the world, from the Americas to Africa and Australia speak of advanced ETs ‘seeding’ humanity on earth? How is it that such apparently primitive peoples had in-depth accurate knowledge of constellations such as Sirius – which cannot be seen with the naked eye – several thousand years ago?

It is in my knowing that originally, a group of spiritually and technologically advanced ETs seeded humanity with the apparently ‘benevolent intent’ of mankind becoming ‘custodians’ of Mother Earth and working to live in balance with her. That’s why so many of the original tribal cultures such as the North American Indians, The Mayans, The African Dogon, The Tibetans and the Australian Aborigines all lived largely in harmony with the earth and at balance with nature.

I love that phrase, “It is in my knowing.” So meaningless, so pompous, so vacuous. You also get a taste of that benign assumption that any alien intervention was friendly in intent, and that “tribal cultures” are one with the Earth Mother. No, these cultures had relatively small population sizes and so did not impose any stresses on their environment that the environment could not handle, but give ’em a chance, and they could overwhelm a place just about as well as Europeans — look at Easter Island, for instance. We are all of us just people.

But that optimism also hides some profound ignorance and some nasty racism. On the ignorance side, this passage is about as annoyingly stupid as anything I’ve heard from creationists:

When Official Science delved deeper [into the question of why humans have 46 chromosomes while other apes have 48], it realised that the reason we have two less, is because the second and third chromosomes have been fused into one. It tries to explain this by saying such a mutation could happen naturally and points to other evidence in nature such as butterflies. Indeed such spontaneous mutation can happen, but what they’re not saying (and quietly brushing under the carpet), is that although this ‘mutation’ offers no natural evolutionary advantage whatsoever, it appears in EVERY SINGLE HUMAN!

How could that be? This fusing of the chromosomes is not what makes us human, and it does not offer any ‘natural’ evolutionary advantage (I’ll return to this in a moment). Yet we all have the mutation? If we supposedly evolved from Hominoids (like Neanderthal) and this mutation offers no advantage, then you’d expect to see some humans with 48 chromosomes and some with 46, but not ALL with 46!

But when you delve deeper into the chromosome story it gets even more curious. Each chromosome has three parts to it: both ends and a middle. Now in eight of the other human chromosomes, there has been an inversion of the middle part – it’s been ‘spun around’. Again, these inversions offer no natural evolutionary advantage – they don’t change the genetic material – yet ALL eight supposed ‘mutations’ appear in ALL humans.

Now you don’t need to be a mathematician to know, that the odds for all nine mutations to happen spontaneously, where no natural evolutionary advantage was gained, and for that to happen to both the original human male and female, at exactly the same time, and in exactly the same place, and for them to breed and produce the entire human offspring is so unlikely, the odds are literally zillions to one!

“Literally zillions to one!” Heh.

Just look at that raging typological thinking, though. This person apparently can’t grasp the idea of long, slow periods of gradual change in relatively neutral properties: it all had to happen all at once. Zing! All at once, all of the differences between humans and chimpanzees had to occur.

And here’s the underlying nastiness. This same post includes the video below with no qualification. It’s a smug little conversation between two racist assholes of the genus Newageius concluding that human races are soooo different that they must have been independently transplanted to earth from different alien worlds.

If you don’t want to listen to the whole awful thing (and I don’t blame you), here’s a representative comment from youtube that nicely illustrates what we’re dealing with.

My studies have actually yielded the idea that there are four basic structures that the Multi-racial structures evolve from: Africans, Asians, Europeans and Native Americans. These will coencide with the colors of the Medicine Wheel being Black, White, Yellow and Red. As with paint in art, you can derive many colors from four basic colors. Cells Are solar systems. We’re making all of this harder than it has to be. Chakra Systems. LOOK for crying out loud.

I can’t possibly address all of this bullshit in one hour; I also don’t assume that most of the audience agrees with this particular brand of lunacy. So I’m going to be giving a very simplified introduction to the human genome and properties of the human population that show that we are entirely children of Earth. Baby steps. Basics first. We’ll see how it goes.

Bigfoot!

I spent my first evening at the Paradigm Symposium last night. I’ve missed virtually all of the talks so far — I got to watch a panel about new media, podcasting and that sort of thing, and there wasn’t too much novelty to it, but it was fine…except for the bits where they mentioned how the skeptical outlook was distasteful.

There was also a final Q&A session of the evening where a few of us, me included, were put up front to introduce ourselves and take questions from the audience. I went bold and made it explicitly clear that I’m a skeptic, I don’t believe in little grey men or ghosts or the paranormal or any of that sort of thing, just so no one would be at all confused about my position. The responses of the other panelists were interesting: lots of mumbling about how we don’t know everything, and mysteries, and that sort of thing, and I got in one rejoinder about how science builds on what we know, not what we don’t know, and leaping into mysteries is a formula for failure.

It was an aggressive approach, but a good one, I think. At the bar session later a number of people collared me to argue, and several just wanted to know more. There’s a huge difference between this group and, for instance, the creationist events I’ve been to: paranormalists tend to be strongly anti-dogmatic, so so far I’ve only encountered one person who hit me with the “invite Jesus into your heart” line. They also tend to be curious, so they ask lots of questions, which is good. I think the main problem is a lack of criteria to judge the quality of evidence, so they tend to go lurching off indiscriminately into weird phenomena.

I met one nice fellow who was proudly showing off his cast of a Bigfoot print.

bigfoot

He was very friendly, and he’d carefully documented everything he could about it: who found it, when it was cast, all that sort of thing. Of course it’s totally useless as evidence for Bigfoot since prints are so easily faked, but that’ll be one of the subjects I talk about tomorrow: the quality of evidence and setting standards for your work.

Today I’m going to sit back and listen. I’ve browsed all their vendor tables, though: anyone need some healing crystals, or books about the Illuminati?

A shame

Ken Ham is very proud to have spent a half-million dollars to buy a genuine, rare allosaur skeleton, which will now be locked up in a non-research institution and used to gull the rubes. It’s all part of their grand plan to pretend to be a scientific institution, while doing everything in their power to corrupt the public understanding of science.

What a shame.

And of course they’re going to use it to lie to visitors. Here’s what Andrew Snelling, their pet pseudoscientist, says about it.

As a geologist, Dr. Snelling added that unlike the way most of the Morrison Formation bones had been found scattered and mixed, the intact skeleton of this allosaur is testimony to extremely rapid burial, which is a confirmation of the global catastrophe of a Flood a few thousand years ago.

Lovely logic. Because the bones this one example were unscattered, it somehow supports their claim that it was killed 4000 years ago in a global flood. What? There’s nothing in the distribution of the bones that can be said to support a particular age for the specimen, and even if it were killed in a flood, floods do happen — it says nothing about a global catastrophe.

And if unmixed bones equal Recent Global Flood, what does it say that they admit that “most of the Morrison Formation bones had been found scattered and mixed”?

The rest of the press release is revealing in that it mentions that money for this grand exhibit, and another half-million dollars, came from one family — one very, very rich family — with far more money than sense. Just another demonstration that being an idiot does not interfere with the process of getting rich.

The best review of The Happy Atheist yet

The Happy Atheist

It’s good to see The Happy Atheist getting great reviews. This one is from…the Discovery Institute! And even better, they put their top man on it, the inimitable Casey Luskin!

Go ahead, you can read the whole Luskinish thing, but here’s the shorter version of Casey Luskin:

PZ Myers can’t be happy, because he’s angry and kinda mean.

Thank you, Casey! I’m glad you were able to discern my true character there, unlike all these other people I meet who keep insulting me with phrases like “teddy bear.” But I should point out that “happy,” “angry,” and “mean” aren’t necessarily incompatible. Maybe he’s used to the Christian version of “happy,” which is synonymous with sheeply and oblivious bliss-ninny idiocy.

I like my joy ferocious.

Should be an interesting debate

August Berkshire of Minnesota Atheists will be battling Scott McMurray of Faith United Methodist Church in LaCrosse on Sunday.

berkshiredebate

Isn’t the premise of these debates insulting in itself? McMurray is basically arguing that the man on the other side of the stage is evil…or if he’s not, he has already conceded the debate. Or maybe he’s going to pull an Oprah move and claim August isn’t really an atheist — I’ve seen that one a lot.

Sci Culture

Did you fall for this? Science published a paper which claimed that reading literary fiction, you know that stuff that gets taught as highbrow reading material in college literature classes, is objectively better than genre or popular fiction at improving your mind and making you better able to understand other people’s mental states. It was all over the popular news sites.

Language Log shreds the paper wonderfully. It’s a great example of stirring the muck and taking whatever odor wafts out of the mess as a great truth. You might be able to see some obvious flaws just from my brief description: what the heck is “literary fiction”? Isn’t that a contentious division already? How do you recognize it (mostly, I fear, it’s because they’re old books that you’d never pick up to read for pure pleasure)? How did the authors of the study choose it?

As it turns out, the authors hand-picked a few passages from books that they subjectively placed into their categories of literary vs. popular fiction, had subjects read them, gave them a couple of standard tests of theory of mind or empathy, and got a very weak statistical effect. You know, if you shovel garbage at a wall, you can probably find some seemingly non-random distribution of the pattern of banana peels, too.

But it got published in Science, which is dismaying. Unfortunately, here’s where Language Log fails — they infer nefarious commercial intent from it.

The real question here is why Science chose to publish a study with such obvious methodological flaws. And the answer, alas, is that Science is very good at guessing which papers are going to get lots of press; and that, along with concern for their advertising revenues from purveyors of biomedical research equipment and supplies, seems empirically to be the main motivation behind their editorial decisions.

Oh, nonsense. I’m sure that Science is quite careful to keep editorial/review and advertising decisions entirely separate, and if their main concern was peddling expensive biomedical gear, why would they waste space on a simple and flawed paper using cheap psychological techniques? There are trade journals that are much better sources for overpriced gadgetry and reagents.

I’ll also point out that they’ve reversed the situation: Science isn’t good at guessing what papers will appeal to the popular press, the popular press is accustomed to turning to a few journals, like Science and Nature, for finding what the scientific soup d’jour is.

This is not to say that Science or Nature are objective paragons at finding the most important science of the day. To the contrary, both are self-consciously elitist journals, jockeying for position as the premier sources of distilled scientific wisdom. Language Log completely missed the boat: paper decisions at Science are not made to satisfy either the popular press or the scientific supply houses; they are decisions to appeal to the tastes of other scientists, and the financial benefits flow secondarily from that.

There is a Sci Culture, just like there is Pop Culture and High Brow Culture and Redneck Culture. And all of these fragments of a greater whole have their various organs of communication and modes and expectations of behavior, which are all much more complicated than being simply driven by the invisible hand of the market.

Oprah’s bigotry

Oprah Winfrey did it again. She did an interview with Diana Nyad, and along the way, Nyad revealed that she was — oh, horrors — an atheist. Oprah could not process that. She’s so thoroughly anti-atheist that she could not imagine that someone who had accomplished something, who was a human being right before her eyes, could actually not believe in a god, so she vocally denied the possibility. David Niose has written the best criticism I’ve read so far.

Obviously, Oprah needs needs an education. At a minimum, she needs to add some Carl Sagan titles to her book club’s reading list. An outspoken nonbeliever, Sagan was known not just as a great scientist, but for inspiring wonder and awe. Many would agree that his Pale Blue Dot commentary is more profound than any religious broadcast. Or perhaps Oprah should consider the deep message behind the monologue of Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God. Atheism and awe are quite compatible.

Oprah, exalted by so many but oblivious to the fact that she is dehumanizing atheists, does more to perpetuate negative attitudes toward nonbelievers than Pat Robertson or James Dobson ever could. The general public takes comments from Robertson and Dobson with a grain of salt – but Oprah, as a media tycoon and a beloved celebrity whose opinions are taken seriously by millions, has just confirmed that atheists are "the other," outsiders who just don’t belong in the in-group. (And the evidence is clear that atheists are indeed widely, and wrongly, scorned in America. With commentary such as Oprah’s, we can see why.)

Maybe she needs to devote a show to educating herself and her viewers on the awe-inspiring, wondrous aspects of atheism and secular humanism?

Yes! And of course, to illustrate that atheists are wonderful, sensitive, caring people who are delighted with the universe, she should invite ME to be on the show.

Oh, wait.

Stephen Fry meets a ‘reparative therapist’

Gentle bemusement and delicate debunking ensues.

The question I always want to ask these people is whether the reverse is possible: whether with the right psychological tinkering, they themselves could be switched from heterosexual to homosexual. They always seem to be so certain that their conventional sexuality is such an intrinsic and essentialist part of their identity, yet the premise of their therapy is that sexuality must be so much more fluid.

Good work, Minnesota talk radio

For once, I approve. Corey Cove, a talk radio host on KFAN in Minneapolis had that shameful and shameless psychic fraud, Chip Coffey on his show…and he shredded the kook. None of that Oprah/Larry King style simpering credulity, he just ridiculed his predictions and demanded that he back up his claims with evidence.

Coffey was upset and complained that the host was rude to him and called that unprofessional. You know, I’ve been on a few radio shows, and I never go into them on the assumption that the host will suck up to me; I expect that I will have to defend my ideas, and I actually prefer it if the host is open about any disagreement.

I guess psychics don’t get very far if they can’t demand deference.