But what about the baaaaabies?

Nicotine is a teratogen — it’s known to have all kinds of interesting effects on the developing fetus. It’s very strongly associated with low birth weight, increases the likelihood of premature placental detachment, and it also causes deficiencies in lung development. You shouldn’t smoke during pregnancy (or use nicotine patches or any of the other alternatives for nicotine delivery), and if you really, really care about babies, you shouldn’t encourage other people to use nicotine during pregnancy.

Isn’t Jenny McCarthy supposed to be really passionate about protecting children? I recall her getting rather shrill about those wicked vaccines with their traces of propylene glycol used as a preservative.

Forget that, though, when money is on the line. Jenny McCarthy is now shilling for e-cigarettes…which use propylene glycol as part of a delivery system for nicotine.

So…in Jenny McCarthy’s mind, vaccines, which have been proven safe and even better, prevent serious diseases, are evil; e-cigarettes which give you a jolt of a known teratogen and toxin are sexy and fun.

As a reward for her hypocrisy and child-killing opinions, she gets a cushy job on broadcast television.

Last call, Minnesotans

The fun and informative Minnesota Regional Atheists conference is over for another year, but there’s a little tiny bit more. After Atheist Talk radio this morning, Annie Laurie Gaylor and Greta Christina will be joining us for brunch at Q Cumbers — an open event. So if you weren’t able to make it to the conference, but you’d still like to meet some of the guest speakers, this is your chance.

Deja vu…accommodation vs. confrontation, again

Tonight at the Minnesota Atheists Regional Conference I’m participating in a panel discussion on “Atheism and Religion: Confrontation or Accommodation“. Sound familiar? Interestingly, they had a hard time finding panelists who are openly in favor of pure accommodationism, although I’m sure there will be nuances between us that will give us lots to talk about. I think that sort of tells you who won the Great Accommodationism Wars that raged on the blogs a few years ago.

Anyway, it’s a panel, so I didn’t have to prepare a talk, but I did put together an introductory statement that I can use to lay out my position. This will be familiar ground to many of you, but seeing as I’ve been neglecting the blog all day, I thought I’d at least throw it online. And here’s what I plan to say:

Let me first strike a note of harmony and unity: we’re all atheists. Those of us who are activists for atheism share a common passion for the cause — the reason why we are activists is that we care very deeply about this cause.

But there are differences. Not just in how we operate, but within our motivations — atheists are a diverse lot.

For instance, for some of us, the passion might be for reconciling our godless communities with the religious default in our society: how can we help people realize that we are people too, and that we can work together?

Others might be driven to correct the deep inequities favored by religion. They don’t want to make friends, they want to see injustices resolved. If that means tearing down institutions that others cherish, then so be it.

Some of us are committed to identifying truths. When we see intellectual laziness and outright lies, we’re appalled. Before we can be friends, they have to realize that what the religious are saying is completely wrong. Don’t ask me to grit my teeth and get along with creationists, for instance: I am constitutionally incapable of allowing that nonsense to pass.

These differences between accommodationists and confrontationists are real. They represent the fact that this isn’t a group of cookie-cutter atheists whose every goal is identical; we share the broader purpose but have different foci and strengths within it. The only way to resolve these differences is to allow individuals to follow their different strategies. You will not catch me telling the kinder, gentler wing of atheism to do exactly as I do; I can see the value in their approach and encourage them to go to it. But you will also not catch me responding well to someone telling me to soften my righteous anger — I do what I do because it achieves MY goals, because it is effective FOR ME, and uses my strengths.

Working together as atheists does not mean that we subordinate the favored tactics of individuals to follow a single line of attack. The accommodationists must accommodate themselves to diversity.

Scientology’s views on evolution

historyofman

I had a conversation with Tony Ortega about L. Ron Hubbard’s book, A History of Man: Antediluvian Technology. He is the author of a blog, Tony Ortega on Scientology, and he had cruelly sent me a copy Hubbard’s book specifically to inflame my already enlarged outrage gland.

The post there emphasizes everything Hubbard got wrong about evolution, but let me tell you: there isn’t much evolution or history of Man in History of Man. The bulk of this book, written in the preening style of a pretentious fourth-grader, weebles on and on about his tech and how it can cure cancer, illuminated with little anecdotes about sending gullible victims back along their history track to the time when they were clams. It was appalling drivel, like all religious stories.

The most revealing moment for me was when he confidently announced that he had seen his ideas confirmed by medical science in their best source…Reader’s Digest. That’s L. Ron Hubbard’s mind in a nutshell.

Are you going to Utah in the spring?

It’s not exactly a Mecca for atheists, but the American Atheists have announced their speakers for the 2014 National Convention in Salt Lake City. It looks good!

American Atheists revealed details on Wednesday about its 2014 national convention in Salt Lake City, announcing that speakers will include NFL Raiders punter Chris Kluwe, Survivor®: Philippines winner and sex therapist Denise Stapley, and Grammy®-nominated Spin Doctors bass player Mark White. The convention will also feature an art show, workshops, childcare, and a comedy show the weekend of April 17-20.

“We’re thrilled to bring so many great nontheists to our convention—some of whom have never addressed our movement before,” said American Atheists President David Silverman. “This is our 40th annual convention and it’s going to be stellar.”

Early bird tickets will go on sale Wednesday, August 7 on the American Atheists website at www.atheists.org. The convention will take place at the Hilton Salt Lake Center hotel & convention center in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

Salt Lake City is famous for being the seat of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. American Atheists chose Salt Lake City in order to better reach out to the sizable ex-Mormon population there.

“We want ex-Mormons to know that there is this entire community of people here for them,” said Public Relations Director Dave Muscato. “Often when people leave the Mormon church, they continue to base their identity in it because they don’t know any other community they can identify with. The 2014 American Atheists National Convention will be the place where ex-Mormons know that it’s okay to take that step and start saying, ‘I am an atheist.’”

Other speakers include the Reverend Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Maryam Namazie, Matt Dillahunty, Greta Christina, PZ Myers, Marsha Botzer of the Ingersoll Gender Center, Faisal Saeed al Mutar, Sikivu Hutchinson, Brian Keith Dalton also known as Mr. Deity, and Vickie Garrison.

Chris Kluwe, whom the New York Times called “The Most Interesting Man in the NFL,” is also a gaming enthusiast, author, LGBTQ equality activist, and musician. His book, Beautiful Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities, features personal essays about religion and the Pope, his family, guns, and many other topics.

Denise Stapley is the $1,000,000 grand prize winner of the 2012 CBS show Survivor®: Philippines. She is also a sex therapist and lives with her husband and 9-year-old daughter in Iowa.

Mark White is the bassist of the Grammy®-nominated alternative rock band Spin Doctors, known for their hits “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” He lives in Houston, Texas where he also teaches music privately.

I’m especially happy that they’re reaching out for speakers who aren’t on the usual roster of known atheists (although the ones they’ve got are good, no complaints there!). This is how we grow. I’ll be especially interested to hear Chris Kluwe talk.

ENCODE has its defenders!

You know I was really pissed off at the crap ENCODE was promoting, that the genome was at least 80% functional and that there was no such thing as junk DNA. And there have been a number of better qualified scientists (like W. Ford Doolittle and Dan Graur and many others) who have stood up and registered their vehement disagreement with that nonsense. But there are some who agree that the genome must be largely functional, like John Mattick. Larry Moran reminds me that Mattick is the author of this infamous chart, however, which is best known as the original Dog’s Ass Plot.

Worst evolution diagram ever

That is so misleadingly dishonest it takes my breath away — Mattick cherry-picked genome sizes to fit his curve. One of my cell biology labs involves teaching students how to properly construct a simple graph, and I think I’m going to include this figure as a bad example.

Well, Mattick has done it again. He has published a paper (how do these things get through peer review?) disputing the existence of large quantities of non-functional DNA, which is largely an attempted rebuttal of Graur’s paper. It’s a short paper, but painful in its contortions and extraordinarily poor arguments. Larry Moran has done an excellent job of tearing it apart — I think he needs to polish it up and get that published.

The worst part of the paper, though, is the concluding paragraph — you know, where most of us try to put the most important message of the work.

There may also be another factor motivating the Graur et al. and related articles (van Bakel et al. 2010; Scanlan 2012), which is suggested by the sources and selection of quotations used at the beginning of the article, as well as in the use of the phrase “evolution-free gospel” in its title (Graur et al. 2013): the argument of a largely non-functional genome is invoked by some evolutionary theorists in the debate against the proposition of intelligent design of life on earth, particularly with respect to the origin of humanity. In essence, the argument posits that the presence of non-protein-coding or so-called ‘junk DNA’ that comprises >90% of the human genome is evidence for the accumulation of evolutionary debris by blind Darwinian evolution, and argues against intelligent design, as an intelligent designer would presumably not fill the human genetic instruction set with meaningless information (Dawkins 1986; Collins 2006). This argument is threatened in the face of growing functional indices of noncoding regions of the genome, with the latter reciprocally used in support of the notion of intelligent design and to challenge the conception that natural selection accounts for the existence of complex organisms (Behe 2003; Wells 2011).

I’m sure the Discovery Institute staff are dancing in pirouettes of joy at getting a neutral or possibly favorable mention in a legitimate journal. It’s not clear exactly what Mattick is trying to do here (lack of clarity is also a sin in science writing, let me remind you): either he’s trying to pre-emptively slander his critics by impugning them with an ideological motive, or he’s granting credence to Intelligent Design creationism. I’m inclined to think it’s both; he’s clearly trying to argue with the motives of Graur and others, but also, he’s claiming, as the creationists do, that evidence of function for the highly variable component of our genome is a de facto argument for a purpose for that variation, and that evolutionary theory does not support the idea of a functional purpose for variation in the sequence of most satellite DNA, for instance.

But I would not argue that ubiquitious functionality is unlikely because it has consequences for our theories; it’s wrong because of all the evidence that has been marshaled that most DNA is not there to serve a specific, selectable purpose for us humans.

Sikivu, Ophelia, and Rebecca — who says atheism lacks women stars?

I just watched our very own Sikivu Hutchinson and Ophelia Benson, along with Rebecca Watson, brilliantly discuss this silly question, “Are women afraid of atheism?” I think this embed code below will work, but who knows…it was through the Huffington Post, and they have to make everything weird and difficult.

There was also a concurrent text stream, and wouldn’t you know it, all the usual dudebros were there to complain that there is no problem, women are all equally represented, atheism has no cultural relevance anyway so why are these women talking?

For shame, Discovery Channel

It’s shark week. I’m not going to watch a bit of it; I’m actually boycotting the Discovery Channel for the indefinite future. The reason: An appalling violation of media ethics and outright scientific dishonesty. They opened the week with a special “documentary” on Megalodon, the awesome 60 foot long shark that went extinct a few million years ago…or at least, that’s what the science says. The show outright lied to suggest that Megalodon might still exist somewhere in the ocean.

None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents.

Though certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized, sightings of “Submarine” continue to this day.

Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant sharks persist all over the world. There is still a debate about what they may be.

There is no evidence of this species’ persistence, nor did they present any. They just made it all up; reality isn’t awesome enough, so they had to gild the giant shark story. They’ve gone the way of our other so-called “documentary” channels dedicated to fact-based education — the History channel, Animal Planet, TLC. Garbage rules.

This also makes me sad because I already have to deal with irrational loons telling me that since coelacanths exist, scientists are wrong and humans walked with dinosaurs. I await with gritted teeth the first creationist who tries to argue that the survival of the Megalodon to modern times means it’s perfectly plausible that medieval knights hunted dragons/dinosaurs.

Thanks, Discovery Channel. And screw you.