The future will not be the past

I want to be really clear about something. I am an atheist. I care deeply about the atheist movement. I’m also an angry anti-theist, and I want to see religion kicked off its pedestal. I’m also a scientist, and think reason and evidence and scientific thought aren’t just good ideas, but the best ideas humanity has ever had, and also the essential ideas that we need for survival and progress. I want a strong atheist movement, because that’s how these ideas will get advanced into the mainstream. We’re not going to conquer the world by scattering into a rabble of divided loners.

But there’s another aspect to expanding and broadening the atheist movement. It’s got to change. I’m a developmental and evolutionary biologist — we’re all about the continuous change. If you think growth means just taking an existing nucleus and making it bigger, keeping everything the same and just engulfing everything else into a homogeneous blob, you’re making a huge mistake. We’re in adapt-or-die mode right now and all the time. Stasis is death. Change is life. Get used to it.

So I was reading this essay about WorldCon, the science fiction convention, and it struck me that this is the same situation atheism faces. It’s the same damn thing every time and everywhere. It’s all fine to cheer the future, but you also have to embrace the changes.

Let me put it another way. The demographic shifts faced by WorldCon’s largest customer segment are the same ones faced by the Republican Party. Let that sink in for a minute. Really let it marinate. These are the same people who cheered me when I talked about Canada’s healthcare plan, and applauded Mark Van Name when he blamed rape culture for America’s ills. They want to be progressive, but they’re being blindsided by the very same demographic shifts afflicting the most conservative elements of contemporary society, for exactly the same reason: they haven’t taken the issue seriously. This is why there isn’t a Hugo for Young Adult novels. Because God forbid we reward the writers who transform young genre readers into lifelong customers at a time when even Bruce Sterling says the future will be about old people staring at the sky in puzzlement and horror.

The future? Right now. There are a lot of people within atheism staring at the new kids in puzzlement and horror. They don’t have penises, their skin isn’t pasty white, their hair isn’t graying — what weird aliens are these? What do you mean, they don’t consider the constitutional separation of church and state the only cause worth fighting for? How dare they threaten to change my movement, the movement I have contributed so much to, the movement that is supposed to cater to my needs?

I sympathize. Some of them don’t even idolize science, and they actually dare to criticize the actions taken in the name of science. Don’t they realize the movement must be entirely about science?

Oh, wait. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there are other non-scientific goals that are also worth pursuing, and that doesn’t mean we have to abandon science — I can still be an advocate for it myself — but it does mean I don’t get to remake everyone into a clone of me.

I will not sniff indignantly at that. If I want to promote my personal goals within atheism, that’s fine — but I will be most effective at that if I fit them within a complex and diverse framework, rather than trying to reshape every other individual within this movement into my likeness.

And that’s how I win. Not by demanding homogeneity, but by plugging into a growing environment with broader scope, by letting my ideas piggy-back on a dynamic and evolving and successful system — a movement that appeals to more and more people. I am a gene, I proliferate best by fitting well within a genome.

The atheist movement is that genome. We make it grow by making it flexible and powerful and diverse. That essay on WorldCon illustrates the alternatives.

The last time I was at Anime North, a bunch of kids in cosplay brought out an amp, plugged it in, and started to jam in the parking lot. In another lot, more kids put together their own kaiju battle, doing slo-mo fights to J-rock and -rap. It was great. I was with a bunch of very happy people who didn’t give a fuck about jetpacks. Worldcon may be about the future, but it doesn’t have the future. Remember, Worldcon organizers all over the world: memento mori. And what will be left will be either a dwindling crowd of increasingly conservative elements, or a thriving community of people who are actively engaged in using network culture to bring about a better, more enjoyable world.

I don’t want to be a part of a “dwindling crowd of increasingly conservative elements”! That sounds awful. I’m not a fan of J-rock, either, but I don’t have to be — all I have to do is make room for it (or whatever the atheist equivalent is) and respect the people who enjoy it. No problem. And they have to make room for me, old white guy, or you, young black woman, or you, middle-aged Asian dude, or you, enthusiastic little kid with the toy rocket, or you, teenaged goth girl, or you, whoever you may be. And the more inclusive we are, the more we grow.

And if you can’t grasp that, if you think you need a sub-group to serve you and want to kick novelty to the curb, then you are the old deadwood holding back the movement, and you need to be sloughed away.

The New Age can be as deadly as Catholic ignorance

Read this story about abortions: it’s not anti-choice. It’s anti-science and anti-medicine. It’s appalling. She contrasts brutal “Western Science” with its machines (and also its caring people: ignore her colorful descriptions of the technology, and her experience with people in the abortion clinic was one where she was asked if she was sure she wanted it, and a woman who tried to help her afterwards) with “natural healing” in which she takes a few gentle herbs and just visualizes shedding the walls of her uterus, and magically her pregnancy disappears.

Then she babbles about how it is just fine if the “fundamentalist dickheads” burn down all the women’s clinics, because they’ll just be able to use organic natural herbal chemical-free machine-free medicine-free abortions using the magic power in women’s heads.

Jesus.

This is one of the nice things about FtB. Now you can go read Miri as a warm-up, finding parts of the essay that are worthwhile, while others suck.

Then go read Avi’s total destruction of the dangerous anti-medical quackery in the story.

It’s all good.

Time to make a promise

Oh no, not another of those stories.

OK, here’s my deal: a promise. I’m not an important speaker, and I’m not the kind of make-or-break participant that any conference might want, and I’ve got a lot of haters out there who want nothing to do with me anyway, but this is how I will approach speaking invitations from now on.

I will decide whether to accept only by considering my availability and the purpose and execution of the event. I do have some restrictions: I’ve got a heavy teaching load and limited available time. I also expect some reassurance that significant effort will be made to promote diversity; if I’m one more white guy in a roster already overloaded with white guys, I’ll step aside and suggest that you invite someone who doesn’t look like me instead. If your conference doesn’t have a harassment policy or treats attendees poorly, I won’t be interested.

But otherwise, I will not discriminate on the basis of who else you’ve invited to speak. So sure, you can also invite Ray Comfort to your conference, and I won’t use that as an excuse to back out. I won’t necessarily get chummy at the event, and I might even aggressively speak out against that other person, but I’ll do my part to make your conference interesting and a good experience for the paying attendees.

One more thing: conference organizers, I expect you to have the spine to refuse to cave in to suppressive demands from other speakers. I’m promising not to make those demands, I’m expecting you to refuse to honor them from others.

You know it’s agony for me to listen to Christian talk radio, right?

You are a cruel readership. One of you — I won’t name names to protect the guilty — told me to go listen to this radio program out of Colorado Springs called “Generations With Vision”, by some guy named Kevin Swanson, and in particular to an episode called The Secular Hold is Slipping. He’s a very cheerful, confident fellow, and I listened to several minutes of him lying blithely and loudly. It was…painful. It was a happy idiot gloatingly making stuff up to make himself feel good.

Here’s their summary of the episode.

It’s getting harder and harder to “shut up” the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes proceedings. And evolutionists and the secularists aren’t happy about it. Ray Comfort’s Evolution vs. God video is going viral. Kevin Swanson also questions the McMillan new dictionary definition for marriage on this episode of Generations.

It starts off with this assertion that the holy trinity of the humanists consists of evolution, feminism, and homosexuality, and that we’re on the run in all three areas. To claim that, though, they have to mangle all three ideas. Here’s their short summary of feminist social theory, for instance: get rid of all men, get rid of marriage, kill all the kids, and have lots of sex. Abortion is the sacred sacrament of the feminists.

I wish I were joking. That’s literally what they said, in a tone of absolute certainty. How can you even begin to argue with people who are that wrong?

But then they spent most of their time laughing at evolution from a position of unassailable ignorance. They are inspired by Ray Comfort (you know their credibility is shot right there), who is making everyone so mad. They claim he’s interviewed “the big shots”: Richard Dawkins [no, he hasn’t] and PG Myers [who?]. They actually believe he has exposed an absence of evidence for evolution, when all Comfort has shown is his zeal in chopping out evidence that contradicts him.

And then comes the babble of creationist buzzwords and assertions. There is no evidence or data for evolution; there is no evidence for how a non-heart non-lung animal turned into a heart-lung animal. That, at least, is a novel constructed claim, but…have they looked? If anyone mentioned Tinman/Nkx-2.5/csx to them, would they have the slightest clue what we’re talking about? There’s been a lot of work on the molecular evolution of heart-related genes, for instance. That they are ignorant of it all is not evidence that the data is not there.

Their biggest lie: they claim “We would love to know how it happened.” No, they wouldn’t. They believe they already know, that an invisible superbeing simply zapped hearts and lungs into existence, and they deny the truly wonderful explanation backed by the evidence and aren’t even interested enough to try and learn. They are smug little jerks sitting in a puddle of their own urine, unwilling to wash themselves of foolishness.

They make a host of weird claims. “Punctuated equilibrium is where a prince kisses a frog.” What? “Richard Dawkins isn’t a scientist.” They keep talking about all the “honest scientists” who are leaving evolution, but they don’t bother to name them.

Then they try to dazzle their audience with the intimidating authority of math. They trot out Fred Hoyle’s example of 20 amino acids assembling into a protein having impossible odds — wrong. It’s actually quite trivial, and they’re making an error of invalid assumptions. By their reasoning, every bridge hand is a triumph of the impossible coming into existence.

Yeah, they actually say it’s impossible. They trot out the familiar creationist claim that odds of one chance in 1050 can never happen, this magic number of 10 to the 50th power representing an absolute boundary. It’s wrong, and it’s ridiculously wrong.

To crown their demonstration of the power of lying about mathematics, they then announce that “People are not very good at math”. They did manage to prove that claim by example.

And of course they’re making claims that “Honest scientists are abandoning the theory left and right, because there is no evidence. They have no data.” and that “Evolutionists are going away — they’re very desperate.”

I would ask how they know that. They certainly don’t have any evidence for it. The subject of evolution is placed solidly in the core of every competent college biology curriculum; every week new papers come out testing and demonstrating the power of the theory; all of the biologists I know — and I think I’ve got more inside knowledge than a couple of obscure evangelical radio guys in the heart of fundie-land — are advocates for evolution who use it routinely in their work. They might try looking at the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), or the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), just for a start. Ask them about the people abandoning evolution: they’ll give you an odd look, wonder what the hell is wrong with you, and walk away.

But then, that requires actually peeping out of their little bunker of isolated, ignorant Christianity and actually talking to a real biologist, rather than listening to a lying fraud like Ray Comfort. That’ll never happen.

I get email: looking for a geophysicist

I got a strange phone call today, from a fellow who was very polite, so I was polite in return, but it was weird — he kept asking me strange questions about the energy involved in breaking up supercontinents, and how much water could be stored under a supercontinent (which had me suspicious right there), and he was also complaining about how none of the geologists anywhere ever seemed to study this stuff. I told him repeatedly that what he needed to do was talk to a geophysicist, which I wasn’t, and that I really couldn’t help him. He had a few very basic question about plate tectonics that I could answer, but otherwise…this is not my field.

He seemed like a somewhat confused layman trying to get rationalizations for some preconceptions. And then he wrote to me.

He claims to be a Ph.D. student, and he’s getting these questions from Walt Brown. The creationist Walt Brown. Hydroplate theory. Flood creationist. Etc.

Dear Dr. PZ Meyers [sigh],

I’ve been reading your book and enjoying it. I know you aren’t a geophysics professor, but mentioned Walt Brown stating a coalescing of hydrogens and oxygens above perhaps a single, vast continent brought on 40 days and 40 nights of rain, but having taken a look at his website he seems more emphasizing that our colleges and labs take no interest at all in delving into the most size and strength of a Supercontinent planet Earth could (possibly) have broken up above where it lifted up its mid-ocean range by way of the most water it which could have had under pressure below it. Volcano interiors sometimes generate inner lightnings. Earthquaked continent sometimes do. Perhaps our planet made its record inner lightning intensities dividing a Supercontinent into its seven continents. I find it hard to believe, from what a few of my Earth science professors pointed out to me, that anyone is in possession of the absolute truth about how the Earth went from not having to having its mid-ocean range.

Thank you for being friendly to me on the phone. Please tell me if you were aware of this information on how the Earth’s heavy radioactive elements are distributed?

“The Earth’s continental crust occupies 41.2% of the surface area but represents only 0.35% of the total mass of our planet.”

(Hugh Richard Rollinson, Ph.D.[geochemistry], Early Earth Systems [Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2007], p. 134)

“90% of uranium and thorium are concentrated in the continents.”*

*Dan F. C. Pribnow, Ph.D.(geophysics), “Radiogenic Heat Production in the Upper Third of Continental Crust from KTB,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 24, 1 February 1997, p. 349.

“Earth’s radioactivity was confined to the crust, a few tens of kilometers thick.”

(John D. Stacey, Physics of the Earth, 3rd edition (1992), p. 45)

“Uranium, thorium and potassium are the main elements contributing to natural terrestrial radioactivity.. All three of the radioactive elements are strongly partitioned into the continental crust.”

(J. A. Plant and A. D. Saunders, Oxford Journals, Vol. 68, p. 25)

“The molten rock oozing from midocean ridges lacks much of the uranium, thorium, and other trace elements that spew from some aboveground volcanoes.”

(Sid Perkins, “New Mantle Model Gets the Water Out,” Science News, Vol. 164, 13 September 2003, p. 174.

Continental crust is roughly a hundredfold more concentrated with radioactivity than ocean-floor crust is.

“Surface rocks show traces of radioactive materials, and while the quantities thus found are very minute, the aggregate amount is sufficient, if scattered with this density throughout the earth, to suppy, many times over, the present yearly loss of heat. In fact, so much heat could be developed in this way that it has been practically necessary to make the assumption that the radioactive materials are limited in occurence to a surface shell only a few kilometers in thickness”

(Leonard R. Ingersoll, et al., Heat Conduction : With Engineering, Geological and Other Applications, revised edition [University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI, 1954], p. 102)

“Heat production rate is well correlated to lithology; no significant variation with depth, neither strictly linear nor exponential, is observed over the entire depths of the [two German holes].”

(Christoph Clauser, et al., “The Thermal Regime of the Crystalline Continental Crust: Implications from the KTB, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 102, No. B8, 10 August 1007, p. 18,418)

Germany’s Deep Drilling Project discovered variations in heat-exuding radioactivity related to the rock types, not to depths.

Thank you, Rick Keane

P.S.

I’m working toward getting a Ph.D. in geophysics with respect to how lightnings can synthesize and disintegrate (e.g. via building up free neutron density and interactions) heavy atomic weight radioactive elements. It is known to science: the magnetic forces between electrons associated with a billion volt; million amp lightning channel are extremely significant relative to their electrostatic forces so their magnetic pinch effects are consequential when they are shooting between, through and around certain light and medium weight nuclei as far as pulling and pushing them together into proximities wherein their strong nuclear forces interact and overcome their Coulombic barriers. The channel radius decreases with larger lightning currents, e.g., 1 billion volts or more.

“A lightning bolt is an example of a Z-pinch discharge. . . A Z-pinch operating at 600 kV and I = 100 kA in hydrogen at 500 Pa pinched from an initial radius of 5mm down to a pinch radius of a = 1.5 mm, and remained stable for 100 nanoseconds.*”

*P. Choi, et al., IAEA Conference, 1978.

(Thomas J. Dolan, Ph.D.[nuclear engineering], Fusion Research [Pergamon: Oxford, UK, 1982], p. 312)

“It is possible for the magnetic pinch effect to occur if the lightning current is high enough while the channel radius is small. For example, for a channel radius of 1 cm, a current of 8 x 104 amp must flow before the magnetic pressure at the surface of the channel exceeds 10 atm. For a channel radius of 0.1 cm, the current must exceed 8 × 103 amp.”

(Martin A. Uman, Ph.D.[electrical engineering], Lightning [McGraw-Hill: New York, NY, 1969], p. 241)

The electrons’ negative charges repel each other. When close < 3 fm, their repulsion gets strong. Hence their electrostatic forces try to blow outer electrons away from the clusters. But there's a velocity-dependent magnetic force always acting in a direction perpendicular to their magnetic fields. Magnetic forces between electrons will produce magnetic pinch effects counteracting Coulomb repulsions between electrons acting in the opposite direction.

So, with respect to the magnetic fields encircling electrons in a counterclockwise direction, they’re velocity-dependent magnetic forces. They depend not only on the positions of the particles through the value of the magnetic field, but also on the velocities of the particles. The magnetic (Lorentz) force on a charged particle involves the velocity vector of the particle and the speed of light. It’s perpendicular to the velocity and the magnetic field.

An electron emits a velocity-dependent magnetic field akin to the magnetic field encircling a current carrying wire (a magnetic force vector perpendicular to the direction of the field). Its magnetic force exerts on any other electrons traveling near to it in the same direction (directed radially inward to the first electron by which a a bunching up of the outer electrons occurs).

“In 1895 he [Hendrik Lorentz] demonstrated that a moving charged particle would experience a force in a background magnetic field, because moving charges produce magnetic fields, and are therefore magnets and so also experience forces due to other magnets.”

(Lawrence M. Krauss, Ph.D.[physics], Hiding in the Mirror [Penguin: New York, NY, 2005], p. 30)

“. .a magnetic field generates a force at right angles to the field’s direction. Also, unlike electric forces, magnetic forces depend on the charges’ velocities.”

(Paul Halpern, Ph.D.[physics], Collider [John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, 2009], p. 57)

“More current means a stronger magnetic field.”

(Don Lincoln, Ph.D.[physics], The Quantum Frontier [John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD, 2009], p. 76)

The Lorentz forces/ampere/magnetic-pinch effects/self-focusing of the electrons in extraordinarily intense lightnings keeps their electrostatic repulsive forces from blowing up their beams. The electrons’ Lorentz forces attract each other with Ampere effects strong enough to overcome their Coulombic repulsive forces and thermal expansions.

One might wonder the most atomic weights of nuclides that can be magnetically pinched into 2 femtometer proximities by the most densities; velocities of beams of electrons that a 1 billion amp; 1 million volt lightning might be able to shoot between, through and around nuclides which are shooting through it in the opposite direction coming from the side of it that has a condensation of positively charged ions. (Two nickel nuclei; for instance, have a 99 MeV Coulombic repulsion.)

Physical Review paper by the pioneer in magnetic pinch effect research, Dr. Will Bennett: http://astrophysics.fic.uni.lodz.pl/100yrs/pdf/10/002.pdf

LIGHTNINGS (even average voltages and amperages–not even close to 1 billion volts and 1 million amperes–have been observed and measured making nuclear reactions, e.g. inverse beta decays, build ups of free neutron densities; interactions with magnetic pinch effects):

“It will be shown that the observations of near-ground AGR [atmospheric gamma radiation] following lightning are consistent with the production and subsequent decay of a combination of atmospheric radioisotopes with 10-100 minute half-lives produced via nuclear reactions on the more abundant elements in the atmosphere.”

(Mark B. Greenfield et al., “Near-Ground Detection of Atmospheric Rays Associated with Lightning,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 93, 1 February 2003, p. 1840)

“Immediately after lightning crackled through the atmosphere, the detectors would register a burst of gamma rays, followed by about 15 minutes later by an extended shower of gamma rays that peaked after 70 minutes and then tapered off with a distinctive 50-minute half-life.”

(Kim Krieger, “Lightning Strikes and Gammas Follow?” Science, Vol. 304, 2 April 2004, p. 43)

“Observations of > 10 MeV gamma rays observed in NaI detectors within 10s of meters from and coincident with rocket-triggered lightning at the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing suggest that charged particles accelerated in intense electric fields associated with lightning give rise to photons with sufficient energy to initiate nuclear reactions.”*

*Joseph W. Dwyer, Ph.D.(physics), et al. “Energetic Radiation Produced During Rocket-Triggered Lightning,” Science 31 January 2003, Vol. 299, no. 5607, pp. 694-697.

(Greenfield, M.B.; Sakuma, K.; Ikeda, Y; Kubo, K., “Delayed gamma radiation from lightning induced nuclear reactions,” American Physical Society, March Meeting 2004, March 22-26, 2004, Palais des Congres de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, MEETING ID: MAR04, abstract #D39.003)

“The generation of neutrons in thunderstorm electric fields is related to photonuclear reactions in gigantic upward atmospheric discharges caused by relativistic runaway electron bremsstrahlung.”

(Leonid P. Babich, Sc.D.[physics], “Neutron generation mechanism correlated with lightning discharges,” Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, Springer, 1 January 2007. Dr. Babich is the head of the Plasma Physics Laboratory at the Russian Federal Nuclear Center All Russian Institute of Experimental Physics, Sarov, Russia)

“Nuclear transmutations and fast neutrons have been observed to emerge from large electrical current pulses through wire filaments which are induced to explode. The nuclear reactions may be explained as inverse beta transitions of energetic electrons absorbed either directly by single protons in Hydrogen or by protons embedded in other more massive nuclei.”

(A.Widom, Y.N. Srivastava, L. Larsen, “Energetic Electrons and Nuclear Transmutations in Exploding Wires,” Physics Faculty Publications, Vol. 174, January 01, 2007)

“In 1992 Gurevich et al. [1992] described how a relativistic avalanche mechanism that they termed relativistic runaway breakdown would work in the electric field of a thunderstorm and it became clear that the lightning discharge could take on an entirely different character than previously envisioned [Dwyer, 2005]. Subsequent theoretical and observational work has supported the notion that relativistic runaway breakdown plays a significant role in the lightnings process. As will be shown in this paper the measurements of enhanced neutron fluxes in association with lightning can only serve to further confirm this notion.”

(Leonid P. Babich, Sc.D.[physics], Robert A. Roussel-Dupre, “Origin of neutron flux increases observed in correlation with lightning,” Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, 6 July 2007)

http://crdlx5.yerphi.am/files/thunder/2007Babich0.pdf

“Quite analogouse correlation of the neutron enhancements with electric discharges is seen in other events. Taking into account that the atmospheric discharge lasts for a few hundred milliseconds while the neutron detectors have a 1-min time resolution we see that the additional neutron flux generated in every discharge should be really giant!”

(A.V. Gurevich, et al., “Strong Flux of Low-Energy Neutrons Produced by Thunderstorms,” Physical Review Letters , Vol. 108, 19 March 2012)

“Photonuclear reactions are capable of accounting for the possible amplifications of neutron flux in thunderstorm atmosphere since in correlation with thunderstorms gamma ray flashes were repeatedly observed with spectra extending high above the threshold of photonuclear reactions in air. By numerical simulations, it was demonstrated that gamma ray pulses detected in thunderstorm atmosphere are capable of generating photonuclear neutrons in numbers sufficient to be detected even at sea level. . . It would seem that, for neutron generation, in thunderstorm atmosphere, strong nuclear interaction is responsible.”

(L.P. Babich, E.I. Bochkov, I.M. Kutsyk, and A.N. Zalyalov, “On Amplifications of Photonuclear Flux in Thunderstorm Atmosphere and Possibility of Detecting Them,” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, Vol. 97, May 2013, p. 291)

Thank you,

Rick Keane

Just another tip here, Mr Keane: real scholars and students don’t simply concatenate a whole bunch of quote fragments and say, “explain this”. You’ve cited a bunch of geology texts; have you read them to get clarification on those scattered quotes? That’s where you start. Not by phoning up biologists and asking them to explain geophysics to you.

But maybe there are some readers here who know that field better than I do (which is not a high hurdle to cross) and they can address a few of the points. Given that they’re from Brown and the Center for Scientific Creation, though, I don’t think you’re going to find any answers here to fit your presuppositions.

Anti-choicers arguing against me in absentia

Some Christian named Scott Klusendorf responded to my interview on Issues, etc., largely by distorting my position, misunderstanding what I said, and pretending to be a better authority on developmental biology than I am. I’ve copied a quick and sloppy transcript of parts of it from another Christian.

I guess I have to get used to the idea that if you give an interview to Christians, whether it’s the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church or Ray Comfort, they’re going to use it as an opportunity to make an incomprehending hash of whatever you say. (Apparently, they’re milking me hard: they had another 2 hour interview in which a theologian argues against me, but I haven’t bothered to listen.)

Myers: I could imagine a culture where a child doesn’t have the right to life until they are 5-years old

Mod: Myers is an atheist. He believes that standards of conduct are variable depending on what is dominant in a culture. Since cultures vary by time and place, and none is objectively right or wrong, then a 5-year limit for personhood is as valid as any other standard that might evolve. There is no way to judge between cultures against some objective standard

That’s correct. There is no magic objective standard to say when an organism is a person. We rely entirely on cultural perspectives to define when we grant that organism the rights and privileges of a full member of the culture. This does not imply that I personally approve of societies that treat a newborn as expendable, only that it’s clear that there is no objective or scientific boundary. We always rely on an arbitrary definition.

Mod (to Klus): Myers says that the unborn is a “piece of meat”. It’s not a person until well after birth. Do only atheists believe this?

Klus: No others hold them. But what is more interesting is that he just asserts his views, he never argues for them. He says that pro-lifers lie when debating this issue

Yes, anti-choicers lie. I didn’t go into detail on that because it was a short interview, but here’s one plain example: they claim life begins at conception. That’s nonsense no matter how you look at it. There is continuity of life for about 4 billion years; every human life comes from living gametes. The fertilized zygote cannot be legitimately called a “person” — it has none of the attributes of a conscious being, like awareness. As I have said repeatedly, personhood, consciousness, humanity, whatever you want to call it, emerges gradually over the course of development; it is not a magic zap that occurs instantaneously and allows you to say one moment, it’s not alive/human, the next moment it is.

Mod: (to Myers) What is the unborn?

Myers: It’s a piece of tissue that will develop into a human being over time

Mod: (to Myers) What is it 5 minutes before it’s born?

Myers: It’s fetus, it’s not a baby

Klus: The development stages of a human are all stages of development of the same entity, as even Peter Singer and David Boonin admit

Mod: He made a distinction between before birth and after birth

Klus: Yes, and that contradicts what he says later when he says there are no sharp boundaries

No it does not contradict my statements. Development is a continuous process of change. Continuous. A conceptus is different than a 3 month old embry is different from an 8 month fetus is different from a teenager, even if they are the same developing organism. The boundaries we confer on this process are arbitrary.

Klus: Myers is confusing parts with wholes. The skin cells on my hand are part of a larger human being. The embryo is not part of a larger human being, they are a whole human being, directing its own development

Klus: Myers also makes the claim that embryos are constructed piece by piece from the outside. But the science of embryology is clear – the embryo develops itself.

Say what? I have never claimed any such thing. There are autonomous processes in development; in mammals like us, however, there is also an extended dependency on the parent. You can’t say either of those things: embryos are not externally constructed, and they also do not develop entirely on their own.

It’s like these people have a pathological need to slice everything into absolutely rigid boundaries and are incapable of comprehending a gradual process.

Mod (to Myers): Is the unborn a person?

Myers: Personhood develops gradually. A newborn baby is not a person. A baby’s brain is still forming so it’s not a person. There is no specific moment when a baby becomes a person. It is culturally determined. Our society says it’s birth. Some people say viability. Either of those are acceptable to me

Mod: (to Myers): So drawing the line between unborn and born is arbitrary?

Myers: Yes it is

These guys have a really rough time grasping this simple idea. Yes, it’s arbitrary. Different cultures draw the line in different ways. Would it help them to read their Bibles, in which inducing an abortion is not regarded in the same way as committing murder? Even their own religious tradition draws a different line than they do!

Let’s watch their argument get really offensive:

Klus: He is separating human beings into classes: persons and non-persons. This has resulted in injustices, historically speaking. E.g. – with American Indians

Klus: He says that a human being becomes a person when their brain is fully developed, but even teens don’t have fully developed brains

Klus: Look at this scientific evidence from PBS about NIH research which shows that brains still developing in teens and it causes them to make poor decisions

Klus: If development gives us value, then those with more of it have more of a right to life than those with less

Klus: This point was made by Lincoln in his debates about slavery, when he warned his opponent that someone with lighter skin could enslave him

Wait. So if we decide that a blastula is not a fully developed human being, then that can be used to legitimize enslaving black people? Why? Are they making the implication that they are less fully developed than white people? Who is walking around with “more development” than other people?

Look, if you’ve made the cultural decision that newborn babies have a right to live, you’re done: you cannot now say that American Indians or black people or teenagers are lesser than a newborn white baby. There is no difference in the developmental status of different human races. How do these people even make such an argument without realizing the fundamental racism of their assumptions?

Mod (to Myers): How do you decide these life issues?

Myers: We use the notion of “greater good”

Mod (to Myers): that’s a culturally determined notion?

Myers: Yes. The greater good here is that we maximize the security and happiness of most people in the society. Women are persons, so we favor their rights.

Klus: His response begs the question. He is assuming that the unborn are not human persons. He talks about the need for women’s rights. Are unborn women included in those who have rights?

You know, they did this constantly through the show, using this bizarre phrase, “Unborn X”. There are no unborn women. It’s as nonsensical as looking at a tree and saying it is an unbuilt house, or calling a cow an uncooked hamburger. A house is not a tree and a cow is not a meat patty; we give them different names to reflect their very different state.

We should give “unborn women” all the deference and protections we provide for nonexistent women, or imaginary women, or fantasy women, that is, none. Perhaps if these fellows were more respectful of the rights of real women, they wouldn’t be saying these stupid things.

I also have to add another thing to my statements. It’s not just the notion of greater good, but also of empathy. I can see that women and teenagers black people and babies and kids with Down syndrome and other adult men have an inner world, goals and ideas, and I can empathize with them — I no more want harm to come to them than I do to myself. I want to live in a society that defends them, because I want to live in a society that defends me.

An embryo has none of those elements of self-awareness that make it a relatable conscious being. I do not want to live in a society that fetishizes a gastrula over my wife or daughter.

Klus: If cultures decide who is and who is not a person, then he cannot oppose cultures that say that Jews are not persons, or that women are not persons

Klus: He admits that he cannot oppose cultures that think that children of age 5 are not persons, and can be killed

Really? I did? I don’t think so. Hey, look, there’s an example of a “pro-lifer” lying!

I said I could imagine cultures that defer granting personhood until a baby reaches a certain age. That’s actually fairly common; Victorian Europe, for instance, exhibited a marked reticence about the status of newborns, with individuals often waiting a year or more to give them a name, because infant mortality was so high. I can easily imagine a culture that thinks Jews are not persons — I just have to crack a history book.

And I certainly can oppose infant mortality and Nazis. I can recognize that those are symptoms of an unhealthy society that I would not want to live in, and that they do great harm to conscious, living persons.

Mod (to Myers): You call that kind of society “brutal”, why do you say that?

Myers: It’s my personal preference because I like my own kids

Mod (to Klus): Respond to that

Klus: He has no argument, just his own opinion. He cannot oppose any society that things that it is OK to traffic, kill, etc. 5-year-olds

Klus: He says that he has a personal preference. That is an interesting fact about his psychology, but he has no argument

I was not making an argument there. I did not think I had to — I assumed the interviewer and the audience would all share my personal views that kids are good people.

If I’d been asked a little more, like about why I like my kids, I could have gone deeper. My kids were not possessions. They were not things I liked like my iPad or my fluffy pillow — they were people I respected because they had personalities and interests of their own, and one of the things you quickly appreciate (if you’re not a psychopathic quiverful Christian who sees children as tools to deploy) is that they really are thinking, reacting, learning, growing human beings. Again with the empathy! They deserve protection because they do have attributes like autonomy and curiosity and affection and many others that are of human value.

Klus: In an atheistic worldview, human beings at any stage are cosmic accidents

Klus: How do we get any kind of intrinsic value and human rights out of an atheist worldview? I don’t see how you can

At last, something they get right, sort of. You can’t derive intrinsic human rights from an atheist view. There aren’t any. Values and rights are emergent properties of communities of people. Note: that does not say that values and rights don’t exist, it says that they are generated by the interactions of individuals in a group, and not imposed from above.

Klus: Even a woman’s absolute right to an abortion is not grounded by atheism

That’s actually an interesting and complex point. It’s true; atheism in and of itself says nothing about how human beings should treat other human beings. The absence of a caretaker god does not say you couldn’t build a patriarchal atheistic society that held women and other races as chattel. Or a Libertarian atheist society built on Ayn Rand’s hideous values. Or an inward-looking nationalistic and secular society that had no problem with maintaining its security by raining bombs down on every other nation on earth.

Atheism is only the start; it frees you from destructive traditions and throws off the shackles of dogma. The next part is the hard part: you have to think consciously about how you want civilization to operate, and you have to make commitments to other values, like humanism.

Atheism does not tell me women have rights. That I can look at women with eyes unfogged by superstitious nonsense and see that they are my equals tells me that women have rights.

Mod (to Myers): What do you think of the pro-life movement?

Myers: I’m a developmental biologist. The pro-life movement is lying to people. An embryo is not a person. “Personhood implies much more than being a piece of meat with the right number of chromosomes in it”. The primary issue in abortion is women’s autonomy. It is entirely the woman’s decision

Klusendorf: You have to present arguments to prove that pro-lifers are lying. There are pro-abortion scholars who have arguments, he isn’t one. He only has assertions, opinions and preferences.

Klusendorf: What if a woman gets pregnant solely in order to take a drug during pregnancy in order to have a deformed child. Myers has no argument against that

“Pro-lifers” consciously make claims that are false, and yes, I have made arguments against the anti-choice position, many times. That Klusendorf thinks a brief wide-ranging interview contains the entirety of my position is his problem.

As I said at that link,

We don’t have to revere every block of rough marble because another Michaelangelo could come along and sculpt it into something as wonderful as his David; we don’t have to treasure every scrap of canvas because the next Picasso is going to use it for a masterpiece. The value isn’t in the raw materials, but in the pattern, the skill, the art put into it. Similarly, those cells are simply the raw clay that the process and time will sculpt into something that is worth love and care.

Which is more important, the pigments or the painting? Even worse, do you think the pigments are the painting?

And speaking of non-existent arguments, the transcriber cut off a lot of the absurd details Klusendorf made up at the end. He went on at painful length: what if a woman got pregnant just so she could take a drug that made the fetus limbless? What if she refused to give birth by taking drugs that kept the fetus small and held it inside for 70 years?

Yeah, you’re damn right I have no argument against that. Because they’re the bizarre hypotheticals of a bigoted ideologue who’s incapable of recognizing women as conscious moral agents on their own, and is reduced to fighting against nonexistent, imaginary women who do random freakish things during their pregnancy for no reason at all.

But then, I guess that’s what you’d expect of a guy who believes in “unborn women” — no attachment to reality at all.

Jerry Coyne gets everything wrong, again

I wish I knew what it was about the appeal of evolutionary psychology that makes otherwise intelligent people promote outright silliness in its defense, but here comes Jerry Coyne again in a poorly thought-out piece. He disagrees with the anti-EP piece I linked to yesterday, which is fine, but I expect better arguments than this. He completely mangles the story.

An example: he cites a section of Annalee Newitz’s story like this, as the one substantive argument she presents against EP:

Humans evolve too fast to bear behavioral traces of ancient evolution.

I agree. That statement is total nonsense, simply not true, an absurdity on the face of it. Unfortunately for Coyne, Newitz said nothing of the kind! And most strangely of all, Coyne goes on to quote the relevant section of Newitz’s piece, and it’s obvious that she said nothing like that.

This is all part of [Miller’s] and many other evopsych researchers’ project to prove that humans haven’t changed much since we were roaming east Africa 100,000 years ago. Evolutionary biology researchers like Marlene Zuk have explored some the scientific problems with this idea. Most notably, humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it’s unlikely that humans’ early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating, or the willpower to complete a dissertation. Even Steven Pinker, one of evopsych’s biggest proponents, has said that humans continue to evolve and that our behavior is changing over time.

There’s no denial of ancient attributes in there. There isn’t even anything about the rate of evolution. It’s more specific than that: the kinds of questions we see most evolutionary psychologists exploring (dating or writing dissertations) represent novel challenges that aren’t easily explained by simply citing ancient tribal organization or food gathering practices, especially since all those ancient properties are unknown to us, and are often simply invented by evolutionary psychologists to put an imaginary evolutionary gloss on modern behaviors.

And then, to back up his assertion that we retain relics of our evolutionary history (which no one seems to be arguing against), Coyne lists a collection of morphological traits — wisdom teeth, bad backs, goosebumps, etc. — which, again, no one is saying don’t exist. I’ve read Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, too, and agree completely that what we are now is a product of a long evolutionary history.

But please, none of these are subjects of evolutionary psychology. It’s simply irrelevant, except possibly to shoot down a passing zeppelin carrying a cargo of straw.

Coyne does do something promising: he lists some psychological attributes that he considers worthy of an evolutionary psychology approach.

Higher variance in male than in female reproductive success due to differential behavior of the sexes
Weaning conflict between mothers and their infants
Preference for relatives over nonrelatives (kin selection), and xenophobia (useful for when we lived in small groups)
Fear of spiders and snakes

I agree! Those do look like phenomena that would have a deep evolutionary history and would affect modern humans in interesting ways. If that were the kind of thing evolutionary psychologists study — and I’ve said this multiple times now — the deep generalities of human behavior, rather than the parade of nonsense about foraging for berries and its effect on women’s shopping preferences, I’d have no complaint at all about EP. But those are hard questions. You generally can’t answer them with a quickie survey of your intro psych college students (let’s not even pretend that that isn’t what evolutionary psychologists do, ‘k?).

I’ve read some on his second subject, conflict between mothers and infants. I really recommend Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature as a great study of the issue — but it’s also a very anthropological topic. If you want to say something about common elements of human nature, you really do need to survey something broader than American college students.

I thought the last topic is a good one, too, and when I was trying to find worthwhile EP papers, that was one I focused on. It seems reasonable and complicated, and definitely psychological. I’ve also got a personal interest, because I have no obvious fear of spiders or snakes (other than an intellectual wariness…but otherwise, I find myself feeling attraction rather than aversion), but I do have a fear of guns — point one at me, and my heart rate goes up and I feel a lot of anxiety. So how do we sort out cultural vs. genetic predispositions? I’m assuming I don’t carry a “fear of guns” gene.

One review I found by Öhman and Mineka, “Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness: Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning” seemed to be an exercise in ambiguity and vague explanations. They actually compared fear of spiders and snakes vs. fear of guns and electrical outlets. The answers were confusing: some studies find a greater resistance to extinction in spider phobias, others can’t replicate it. It seems to be a subtle phenomenon. It left me wondering more about how EP can say anything about more detailed behaviors when they can’t even nail down this rather fundamental one. I was also deeply put off by one of their interpretations.

Finally, even if true selective associations could be demon- strated with pointed guns, we would not consider this very damaging to our account, because ontogenetic and phylogenetic accounts of fear relevance are not inherently incompatible or mutually exclusive.

I can agree completely that fear responses can have multiple causes, and finding that one response is conditioned by experience does not rule out the possibility that another has a significant genetic component. But isn’t that the question? If you’re trying to claim that there is a heritable psychological pattern, shouldn’t you be designing your experiments specifically to distinguish conditioning from instinct?

So yeah, Jerry, you’re right, there are a lot of good questions that evolutionary psychologists could be studying. Which only highlights the strangeness of all the crap we do see published.

Wait…another blimp full of straw floats by. How do they stay up in the air?

It’s simply nonsense to dismiss the field on the grounds that there’s no way that human behavior could show traces of its deep evolutionary past.

Which no one has claimed. Done.

So now we get down to the really offensive part. The one where the proponents of EP deny that there are any structural problems in their field, and instead all of their opponents are ideologically motivated. Let’s go imagine some intent!

The real reason why people like Newitz and others (that includes P. Z., I think) dismiss evolutionary psychology in toto is because they find it ideologically unpalatable: they don’t like its supposed implications. They presume that evo-psych somehow validates misogyny or the marginalization of women and minorities. They will deny this to their dying breath, of course, and pretend that it’s purely a scientific issue, citing a few anecdotal studies that are indeed laughable. But I think we know where these people are coming from. Evolutionary biology itself has been used to justify racism or the sterilization of supposedly “defective” humans, but we don’t dismiss evolutionary biology because of that. Likewise, we shouldn’t dismiss evolutionary psychology just because some cranks draw “oughts” from “is”s.

When you read a statement like this:

“Developmental plasticity is all. The fundamental premises of evo psych are false”,

then you know you are dealing with ideology rather than science. The fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology is simply that some modern human behaviors reflect an ancient evolutionary history. It would be odd if that were completely false. And developmental plasticity is not all. If that were the case, then why do we still have wisdom teeth and bad backs?

It doesn’t seem to matter how often we point out bad science or lousy protocols or unjustifiable interpretations — the criticisms will be dismissed with this “Oh, they’re just leftist ideologues!” baloney. Yet somehow the converse never seems to be brought up by the EP defenders: that somehow, these EP papers almost universally seem to find rationalizations for the status quo, that they take existing behaviors in our culture and slap on a just-so story to claim women’s roles or the place of minorities is biological or natural or genetic or determined by 100,000 years of selection. If I were to turn this argument around, and say that supporters of EP are all ideologically driven fellow travelers of Kanazawa and Murray and Herrnstein (which I am NOT doing here, by the way), we’d immediately recognize this as a beautiful example of poisoning the well.

But somehow, it’s acceptable for Coyne to claim on no evidence at all that our objections are tainted by ideology? To dismiss criticisms of the premises and procedures of evolutionary psychology as unfounded because we’re not right-wing nutcases?

I will concede that my quoted sentence was poorly worded and prone to misinterpretation, and that that is entirely my fault. (It was a quick comment on an article made while I was at a con, so don’t get too worked up about it.) The context is that I’m talking about human behavior, not wisdom teeth or bad backs (although, actually, developmental plasticity does play a huge role in both of those). Every aspect of human psychology carries a huge load of cultural and psychological conditioning; even the genetically determined elements of our behavior (note: I do not deny that those exist) are going to be heavily layered with non-genetic baggage, and every biological predisposition is going to be swimming in an ocean of plastic responses and environmental reactivity. I expect that evolutionary psychologists should be especially sensitive to and appreciative of the problems that confers on analysis, and that they seem to be more often dismissive of the most important element of their field is grounds to reject the discipline.

And now I expect that the fact that I actually do oppose misogyny or the marginalization of women and minorities will somehow be used as an excuse to claim I’m ideologically driven. Of course, I suspect that Jerry Coyne also opposes misogyny or the marginalization of women and minorities; maybe he ought to say so more often so we can use that as a reason to reject his opinions.

Oh, joy. The defenders of Evo Psych are crawling out of the woodwork to nibble on me.

Heeeere’s Preston:

@pzmyers So our brains are evolved in form, but not in function. Riiiighhhht.

With Robert Bentley following right along.

@pzmyers Do you believe that, unlike all other animals, our behavior isn’t influenced at all by our evolutionary past?

And then W. Benson makes this lovely comment:

PZ is also hates recapitulation (along with my favorite German evolutionist (flawed in other ways) Ernst Haeckel), and maintains that both are discredited and dead. Haeckel’s recapitulation (not the Freddy variety portrayed by SJ Gould, PZ and fundies) and modern EvoPsy have indeed become tinged with voodoo-ish ‘species memory’ cultism, and when subject to strawman distortions can be made out as evil fabrications that oppose the Pharyngula-certified ‘feel-good’ street view that man arose, POOF, shiny, good, and untainted by monkey business. I think that this denialism, infused with a heady yet unmapped dose of Naturalistic Fallacy, may be the drug driving PZ’s ideological warp.

Recapitulation, even (or especially) Haeckel’s old sans-genetics view, is dead. Sorry to break the news to you, W.

But what is it with all these illiterates who read this post and think I’m denying that human behavior evolved from a primate substrate?

Oh, wait. One more. My favorite, from someone named JT:

PZ Myers is my bête noire; I can’t help myself.

Who the hell are you, Johnny Snow?

Magic Irish electro-water for sale

Tell me, do you think this announcement is at all credible?

A GROUNDBREAKING new Irish technology which could be the greatest breakthrough in agriculture since the plough is set to change the face of modern farming forever.

That’s a rather…extravagant…claim. And published in the Irish Independent — I looked quite closely for a disclaimer that it was a paid ad, because I didn’t believe it from the first sentence, even before learning what it is.

Then they said what it is.

The technology – radio wave energised water – massively increases the output of vegetables and fruits by up to 30 per cent.

BULLSHIT. I saw “radio wave energised water” and knew immediately that this was nonsense.

Extensively tested in Ireland and several other countries, the inexpensive water treatment technology is now being rolled out across the world. The technology makes GM obsolete and also addresses the whole global warming fear that there is too much carbon dioxide in the air, by simply converting excess CO2 into edible plant mass.

If it’s been “extensively tested”, where are the papers? Show me something that’s been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The most common GM treatments are for pesticide/herbicide resistance. How can water, no matter how energised, make that obsolete? And no, enhanced crop technology does not address global warming. If this scheme actually worked, it would be carbon-neutral, which is the best you could say about it.

Then I looked at the actual method.

The compact biscuit-tin-sized technology, which is called Vi-Aqua – meaning ‘life water’ – converts 24 volts of electricity into a radio signal, which charges up the water via an antennae. Once the device is attached to a hose, thousands of gallons of water can be charged up in less than 10 minutes at a cost of pennies.

Read the Vi-Aqua web page. Yep, it’s a little magic box with some LEDs that you attach to your hose or your water mains. Plug it in or use batteries and it…what? There’s lots of gobbledygook and big claims, but again no data and no papers.

There are testimonials, though. And the most discouraging thing there is that the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, an entirely respectable institution, has endorsed this crap. Prince Charles, have you been dicking around again? It’s also endorsed by a J.J. Leahy, a real lecturer in Chemical & Environmental Science at the University of Limerick, although it says nothing about magic water on his professional page. He studies biofuels.

People have written to Kew; I found one report that Kew replied and confirmed that they endorse it.

One chemist maintains a catalog of these ridiculous water treatment schemes. It seems to be a very common kind of scam.

Vi-Aqua is obvious nonsense. The saddest thing about it is that the Independent is so willing to throw their reputation away with a totally uncritical puff piece about a too-good-to-believe claim, and that Kew is also backing it. The US is supposed to be the central station for wacky pseudoscience, why are the UK and Ireland horning in on our turf? You’ll rue the day, Ireland!