The SETI boondoggle

Here’s Seth Shostak pumping up SETI again, and now he’s predicting contact with aliens within 20 or 25 years, or by 2030.

I don’t buy it for a minute, and I think his whole argument is ridiculous.

As these guys always do, they have a small set of arguments. One is the argument from very big numbers: there are 1022 stars in the known universe, and the current data shows that a significant fraction of them have planets, and they’ve even observed a few of them that have earth-like temperatures.

I say, big whoop. The other big numbers we could throw around are the distances of these stars from us and each other, which completely negate the bonus of large numbers. We’re simply not going to get an accidental signal from elsewhere; signal strength is going to drop off as the inverse of the square of the distance, so we’re not going to pick up some broadcast from an alien civilization. They’re going to have to aim a signal at us (one unexceptional star out of 1022), and they’re going to have to invest a significant fraction of the energy output of their star to get the signal to us.

I would ask, from the example of the sole technological society we know about, are we doing that? Why do we expect other civilizations are going to do that, and specifically send a signal to us?

But the most objectionable part to me, personally, is the short section titled “Biology: An Easy Thing?” Life arose very early on Earth, and there is good reason to expect that we are not unusual, and the emergence of life as an outcome of normal planetary chemistry probably is common and likely. Biology is only easy, though, if you’re willing to point to a stromatolite and leap immediately to the conclusion that life will build radios. There’s a rather wide chasm there that Shostak elides. The ubiquity of bacteria in no way implies the ubiquity of technology. The specific kind of intelligent life that builds telescopes and radios and artificial intelligences is going to be really rare: I can understand how an astronomer might get excited about incremental increases in likelihood by discoveries that maybe 70-80% of stars have planets, and maybe planets orbiting red dwarf stars would have habitable zones, but those numbers do not compensate for the fact that in the 4 billion year long history of life on earth, the technology to even dream of collecting signals radiating from other stars is only a century old. Only one 40 millionth of this planet’s existence contains that kind of capability.

Add to that the likelihood that any matching civilization might be a thousand light years or more away, and that their signal (although from our example, they probably aren’t signaling; think instead of thinly scattered civilizations all listening casually and unintently for a bit of patterned electromagnetic radiation) can only be received and echoed back over a time span far greater than the duration of any of our cultures, and that puts Shostak’s 16 or 20 or 30 year bet in perspective. That’s a convenient eyeblink on the scale of the time and space SETI proponents tout as an advantage for their calculations.

I do agree with Shostak’s comments about how science isn’t shackled to the narrow hypothetico-deductive method taught in introductory science courses, and that sometimes fishing expeditions are legitimate components of a research program. But I tend to expect fishing expeditions to have slightly better rationales and expectations of useful results than SETI can provide.

I blame David Futrelle. And maybe the Jews.

So I was reading Manboobz, which is usually about as low on the referenced depravity scale as I can go, and I ended up clicking on a link in an article which led me to…Stormfront. They were all outraged that some pick up artist was swarthy, yet he was chasing after beautiful pure European white women. That article was appalling enough, but it linked to something about the Neandertals, which is a subject I find interesting, and I clicked on that, and whoomp, down the rabbit hole I went.

I had discovered the bizarre pseudoscientific and profoundly anti-semitic world of Michael Bradley.

There are many things that you will find offensive at that link: the hideous Geocities style page layout, the incoherent rambling content of the text, the stupidity of the arguments, the goddamn racism, so be warned. It’s not my fault if he wrecks your brain or induces nausea.

Plowing through the wall-of-text interspersed with ads begging you to buy his revolutionary books ($49.95 for an e-book this badly written? No thanks), his message is fairly simple and wrong. He thinks there are two kinds of human, with some interbreeding between them: one kind are the tall browed, lean and handsome Cro Magnon people who are scattered around the lowland areas of the globe; the others are short, stocky, hairy people with receding foreheads who arose in the highlands of an area he calls the “Toxic Lozenge”.

This other contending subspecies originated in what I call the “Toxic Lozenge”, a narrow elongated area extending from the Rift Valley lakes of Tanzania, Kenya and southern Ethiopia to the northern Caucasus Mountains. This Toxic Lozenge therefore encompasses the geographic epicentres of both Homo habilis and later Neanderthal development. This Toxic Lozenge is also the original homeland of the Hamitic languages and the later seemingly related Semitic ones.

In case you didn’t get the hint, these Toxic Lozenge residents were descendants of Neandertals, and are the modern Jews and other Semitic people.

Physically, this subspecies is characterized by very great nasal development, extreme hairiness in males, long torsos and short legs, extremely high numerical and spatial intelligence, very little visual artistic ability, a low level of emotional stability, fanatical monotheism, anti-feminism and a predisposition to control, enslave or exterminate “ordinary humanity”. There is some fairly recent anthropological evidence (1990-1991, see “Homo Georgicus” on Wikipedia), coming from the Caucasus Republic of Georgia, that this subspecies may derive from Homo habilis, through the Neanderthals and on to modern living representatives.

However, not all anthropologists agree that Homo habilis should be considered fully “human” as that term is rather loosely defined, but was possibly an aberrant offshoot of either Homo or Australopithecus (see Esau’s Empire I on this website).

That is, people deriving from this Toxic Lozenge in ancient times may not be exactly human and certainly seem to be incompatible with the values and attitudes of “ordinary humanity”. However, recent historical migrants into the Toxic Lozenge represent mostly ordinary African humanity.

Much more important than physical traits, the aggression of this subspecies is responsible for its expansion from its original Toxic Lozenge both east and west to inhabit most of the “Middle East” (especially mountainous regions) and even parts of Europe, western India and northern and eastern Africa, imposing its religious and social values. In short, the people of this Toxic Lozenge have gradually driven a wedge of perhaps “not-quite-human” genes and culture between the ordinary humanity of the West and the ordinary humanity of the Far East. And this wedge has been inexorably expanded by well-known historical events from 5600 BC to the present. Despite the incessant propaganda and disinformation promulgated by this subspecies, adherence to Judaism, Judeo-Christianity and Judeo-Islam are the symptomatic indications of its biological expansion and/or cultural influence.

Oh, look. He’s in favor of some flavor of feminism, and he’s against monotheism, and he later announces that he’s a humanist. He’s one of us! (Cue projectile vomiting and blinding tears.) The othering of Jews as not quite human and on a mission to enslave “ordinary humanity” is a bit off-putting, isn’t it?

You might be wondering what his evidence for this remarkable thesis might be. Well, there are the pictures:

neandertals

That’s supposed to be a picture of rampaging Jews erupting out of their homeland in the Toxic Lozenge. It might be a little more persuasive if it weren’t a painting by Frank Frazetta that was used to illustrate some sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel.

What about the scientific evidence? He’s not a fan of Svante Paabo, who sequenced the Neandertal genome and determined that Europeans and Asians have a small infusion of Neandertal genes, on the order of about 4%. Paabo is misinterpreting the data, he thinks. Try to follow this logic:

Anyway, that’s the worldwide “Paabo spin” on Neanderthal DNA in modern humans and, looked at this way, “1 to 4 percent” doesn’t amount to much. Figures don’t lie but liars figure.

On June 5, 2010 the world’s population was estimated to be 6.8-billion-plus people (United States Census Bureau, Wikipedia). One percent of that is roughly 68-million and change. Four percent works out to about 278-million people. Odd, isn’t it, that this is about the population of the Middle East, according to my Bloomsbury Pocket Atlas? And this is the geographic homeland of the Semitic peoples, the present Judeo-Islamic Arabs and the Jews. Work it out for yourself using any good atlas.

With good maps and atlases there is a way of looking at this “1 to 4 percent” of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans that makes a great deal of historical sense. What if this Neanderthal DNA is concentrated in the Caucasus Middle East, where this 2010 study admits that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (or “Early Modern Humans”) met and interbred? Surely it is reasonable to suppose that the main concentration of the world’s surviving Neanderthal DNA must be in this area, discounting very modern migrations of some people by railway, steamship and aircraft transportation, and that Neanderthal DNA decreases rapidly as distance from the Caucasus centre of interbreeding increases?

You see, Paabo was reporting an average admixture, but if you just assume that all the Neandertals are living in the Middle East, and no Neandertal genes are anywhere else, then you get the same average! As you read further, you discover that this flawed calculation is gradually assumed to be proof of Bradley’s thesis.

And it gets crazier and crazier, and the font gets bigger.

Basically, I estimate that about seventy percent of the present crisis on this planet can be fairly attributed to the machinations of Neanderthal-Semitic elements of the human population against the Cro-Magnon majority of the human population.

And then…9/11 was a Jewish plot! Obamacare! Hillary Rodham Clinton climbing to the presidency via her Jewish constituency! Jews control Hollywood! Fascism…it isn’t so bad!

It is time for the non-Semitic peoples of the world to come together in a multi-racial alliance under one banner in order to severely limit Semitic activities before they put an end to us and everything else on the planet. I offer the following banner, emblem and symbol. However, I will warn everyone that it may well be too late.

The symbol is a flag with a swastika on it. He thinks he’s too old to run this movement, but he has a suggestion for a charismatic person who could: Mel Gibson.

Then…Roswell — we’re part of a cosmic war! ATLANTIS!!! Aaaah! Argle-bargle! Mene tekel upharsin! Ëa ëa! Blaaarfh!

I think I need to lie down. Or get drunk. It’s always something, someone who has to show how low and stupid and vile humans can get.

Karen Stollznow has a new book coming out soon

Now this looks interesting: God Bless America: Strange and Unusual Religious Beliefs and Practices in the United States.

God Bless America lifts the veil on strange and unusual religious beliefs and practices in the modern-day United States. Do Satanists really sacrifice babies? Do exorcisms involve swearing and spinning heads? Are the Amish allowed to drive cars and use computers? Offering a close look at snake handling, new age spirituality, Santeria spells, and satanic rituals, this book offers more than mere armchair research. It takes you to an exorcism, a Charismatic church and a Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist compound. You will sit among the beards and bonnets in a Mennonite church, hear the sounds of silence at a Quaker meeting, and listen to L. Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi stories told as sermons during a Scientology service. From the Amish to Voodoo, the beliefs and practices explored in this book may be unorthodox, and often dangerous, but they are always fascinating. Some of them are dying out, while others are gaining popularity with a modern audience, but all offer insight into the past, present and future of religion in the United States.

My only question would be…are there religious beliefs that aren’t strange and unusual?

A vaccination survey

The survey on vaccination that’s being held up by DJ Grothe is not out yet, but there’s a preliminary summary that was made available. I learned something from even that one page summary: most anti-vaxxers actually do recognize that vaccination is protective, and their opposition is based on widespread misconceptions about side-effects and the evilness of pharmaceutical corporations. There is even a hint about effective strategies to convince reluctant people to vaccinate.

The full results were supposed to be released a year ago. I wonder when we’ll finally get to see them?

You can study the past scientifically

One of the most common rhetorical games creationists play, especially those influenced by those frauds at Answers in Genesis, is to erect a phony distinction between historical science, which they claim is not a science, and observational science, which they claim is the one true kind of science. It’s a way for them to deny claims of events in the past having any credibility unless there is a direct, eye-witness, personal, written account (a restriction they blithely ignore when it comes to things like the first five days of the creation week, or the life of Jesus, which is all by second-hand accounts).

So it’s always useful to collect good summaries of how you certainly can evaluate claims about the past, and how science can legitimately study historical processes. John Wilkins adds some more arguments.

To deny that we can know the past in any sense is not science. It is in effect an admission of failure, but we need not be so pessimistic. For example, we know Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legions. We might not know how they were dressed or if it was raining that day, but we do know it happened. Likewise, we know the earth is 3.85 billion years old since the surface hardened. The evidence is there, supported by experimental observations.

Oh, those secular ethics

In case you’re interested, DJ Grothe will be speaking at the Midwest Philosophy Colloquium on the University of Minnesota Morris campus next week. I can’t attend; it’s scheduled at the same time as one of our HHMI student research events.

He’s speaking on secular ethics.

By the way, of no possible relevance at all, I’m sure, Grothe is threatening legal action against Women Thinking, Inc., and is holding up publication of a survey on vaccination outreach, because he doesn’t like that someone reported a bad joke that he made. Which he denies.

Secular ethics in action!

Man, am I glad I have a good excuse to not attend that talk. I’m going to enjoy celebrating students’ summer research instead.

Oh, yay! More examples of secular ethics!

Give Kentucky a hand

They need all the help they can get — having a festering boil like the Creation “Museum” in their midst is not conducive to a healthy educational system. They’re trying, though, and the Kentucky Senate education committee is poised to approve some Next Generation Science Standards.

But of course, some nitwit has to raise absurd objections to the fact that the standards include material on evolution and climate change, the two big hot button issues for ignorant conservatives. The nitwit also happens to be the chair of the Senate education committee, Mike Wilson.

Yeah, there’s a fundamental problem right there, that the Kentucky senate puts an idiot climate change and evolution denier in charge of education.

How about if you all flood this petition and get the message across that science must be supported in education…in Kentucky and in every state.

I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, please stop

I’ve strained to pardon Richard Dawkins’ many insensitivities — ‘dear muslima’, the missteps on twitter, the petty snits against other people — but his latest is just a disaster.

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, he said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

I can think of some lasting harm: he seems to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children. He was a victim of an inexcusable violation; that he can shrug it off does not mean it was OK, or ‘zero bad’, or something trivial.

Should I have raised my children with such a lack of self-respect that they should have allowed dirty old men to play with their genitals? I would have wanted them to inform me, so that such behavior could be stopped.

Just when did it stop being OK for acquaintances to put their hands inside Richard Dawkins shorts? I presume it would be an utterly intolerable act now, of course — at what age do the contents of childrens’ pants stop being public property?

Should we be giving pedophiles the idea that a “mild touching up” is reasonable behavior? It’s just a little diddling…it does no “lasting harm”. Christ, that sounds like something out of NAMBLA.

And that all Richard Dawkins experienced was a brief groping does not mean that greater harm was not being done. That man was a serial child molester; do we know that he didn’t abuse other children to a greater degree? That there aren’t former pupils living now who bear greater emotional scars?

As for that excuse about not judging behavior of an earlier era by our modern standards…I’ve heard that before. From William Lane Craig, to justify biblical murders. Richard Dawkins had this to say about it then.

But Craig is not just a figure of fun. He has a dark side, and that is putting it kindly. Most churchmen these days wisely disown the horrific genocides ordered by the God of the Old Testament. Anyone who criticises the divine bloodlust is loudly accused of unfairly ignoring the historical context, and of naive literalism towards what was never more than metaphor or myth. You would search far to find a modern preacher willing to defend God’s commandment, in Deuteronomy 20: 13-15, to kill all the men in a conquered city and to seize the women, children and livestock as plunder.

We do not excuse harm to others because some prior barbaric age was indifferent to that harm. Furthermore, the excuse doesn’t even work: are we supposed to believe that a child-fondling teacher would have been permissible in the 1950s? Seriously? Was that ever socially acceptable? And even if it was, in some weird version of British history, it does not excuse it. It means British schools were vile nests of child abuse, just like Catholic churches.

Thanks for swapping the moral high ground for a swampy mire of ambiguity, Richard. I’m not going to argue that compelling kids to memorize Bible verses and fear hell, as stupid an excuse for education as that is, was child abuse, while getting manhandled by lascivious priests was a trivial offense, to be waved away as harmless. I’m sure many Catholics are quite gleeful that Richard Dawkins has now embraced the same moral relativism that they use to rationalize crimes against children.

It’s going to be very popular, I fear

I was stunned by Rebecca Watson’s account of the promotion efforts of a new show that looks like a drunk version of Mythbusters. Then I watched a couple of their videos, which were garbage, and I heard this tag line:

You’ll know stuff your friends don’t, which will give you a temporary feeling of superiority, and might just get you laid.

And I thought, that’s brilliant. They’ve identified exactly what the modern skeptical market wants. And it’s all schlubby guys with women in bikinis as props.

The creator, Jon Hotchkiss, has a horrible blog post bragging about his show on HuffPo, and he also reveals his intellectual lineage: he’s worked on a number of shows I’ve never heard of, but also with Bill Maher, Penn & Teller, and Playboy TV. It shows.

I’ll skip it. It’ll probably thrive anyway.