Why renege now?

Remember what Ken Ham said?

Now, we’re not saying no to a debate with the Houston Atheists Association. In fact we want one of our PhD scientists on staff to debate a PhD scientist chosen by the Houston Atheists Association. This would encourage a more fruitful exchange on the merits of creation vs. evolution, the age of the universe, etc.

You know, it’s not as if we’re calling him out of the blue — we weren’t making the assumption that Ken Ham even wanted to debate. He said he did! He laid out the terms right there! And we met them. As Aron Ra says, it’s a suspicious silence — he’s just chicken.

I think what really happened is that he and his ilk were terrified of meeting Aron and getting mopped up by a guy without a Ph.D. who looks like a scary biker dude. Oh, the ignominy. You’d think they’d be used to being made to look stupid by now, though.

I’m very happy to piss you off

It’s been “scientifically” shown that Christians are happier than atheists.

With the help of a text analysis program, the researchers found that Christians tweet with higher frequency words reflecting positive emotions, social relationships and an intuitive style of thinking – the sort that’s gut-driven.

This isn’t to say that atheists don’t use these words, too, but they out-tweet Christians when it comes to analytic words and words associated with negative emotions.

Christians, they found, are more likely to use words like “love,” “happy” and “great”; “family,” “friend” and “team.”

Atheists win when it comes to using words like “bad,” “wrong,” and “awful” or “think,” “reason” and “question,” said Ryan Ritter, one of the students behind the study.

While not perfect – for example, this sort of word examination can’t account for sarcasm – word choices, Ritter and his colleagues argue, reflect something about a person’s mindset.

I would agree that it does reflect differences in mindset, but I would say that the biggest obstacle to interpretation isn’t sarcasm, but the researchers biases, which got heavily loaded into their conclusion.

The conclusion: When they are limited to 140 characters or less, these researchers say, believers are happier than their counterparts.

Well, yes, if you’re going to infer unhappiness from use of the words “think,” “reason” and “question,” atheists must be the most miserable, unhappy people in the universe. Or perhaps you might recognize in that “mindset” premise that perhaps atheists are people who find great joy in thinking, reasoning, and questioning. That we use judgmental words like “bad” and “wrong” might also be a consequence not of our unhappiness but of being a minority in a world dominated by happy clappy assholes — and that we’d be more unhappy to be one of them. You simply don’t get to make judgments about happiness from these kinds of analyses.

I speak with some authority now. I reconciled myself to the publisher’s title for my book, The Happy Atheist, despite the fact that it is largely about mocking the absurdities of religious belief and asking that we have a more profound appreciation of the wonder of reality precisely because I am so damned happy to be who I am. There is absolutely no contradiction between struggling rationally to create a better world and being happy.

We can interpret those results in different ways. Here’s my twist on those words:

Christians are superficial and unthinking seekers after acceptance and status from their communities. They lack confidence in themselves, and constantly seek reassurances from others that they fit in, are part of a team, are good people. This leads to a lack of substantial content in their communications; they are basically social groomers, their minds unengaged.

Atheists are confident and proud, and are willing to risk social capital by probing and challenging commonly held assumptions. Group cohesion is of lesser importance relative to making sure the group is progressing in a productive direction; they readily call out destructive or demeaning behaviors both within and outside the community. Their primary decision making strategy is by logical evaluation of consequences, rather than relying on tradition and the safety of aligning with the herd.

There. Much better.

Historical and observational science

Dealing with various creationists, you quickly begin to recognize the different popular flavors out there.

The Intelligent Design creationists believe in argument from pseudoscientific assertion; “No natural process can produce complex specified information, other than Design,” they will thunder at you, and point to books by people with Ph.D.s and try to tell you they are scientific. They aren’t. Their central premise is false, and trivially so.

Followers of Eric Hovind I find are the most repellently ignorant of the bunch. They love that presuppositional apologetics wankery: presuppose god exists, therefore god exists. It’s like debating a particularly smug solipsist — don’t bother.

The most popular approach I’ve found, though, is the one that Ken Ham pushes. It’s got that delightful combination of arrogant pretense in which the Bible-walloper gets to pretend he understands science better than scientists, and simultaneously allows them to deny every scientific observation, ever. This is the argument where they declare what kinds of science there are, and evolutionary biologists are using the weak kind, historical science, while creationists are only using the strong kind, observational science. They use the distinction wrongly and without any understanding of how science works, and they inappropriately claim that they’re doing any kind of science at all.

A recent example of this behavior comes from Whirled Nut Daily, where I’m getting double-teamed by Ray Comfort and Ken Ham (don’t worry, I’m undaunted by the prospect of being ganged up on by clowns.)

According to Ken Ham’s blog at Answers in Genesis, Minnesota professor PZ Myers, who was interviewed by Comfort, said: “Lie harder, little man … Ray Comfort is pushing his new creationist movie with a lie. … What actually happened is that I briefly discussed the evidence for evolution – genetics and molecular biology of fish, transitional fossils, known phylogenies relating extant groups, and experimental work on bacterial evolution in the lab, and Ray comfort simply denied it all – the bacteria were still bacteria, the fish were still fish.”

But Ham explained that Comfort “asks a question something like this: ‘Is there scientific evidence – observable evidence – to support evolution?’ Well, none of them could provide anything remotely scientific. Oh, they give the usual examples about changes in bacteria, different species of fish (like stickleback fish) and, as to be expected, Darwin’s finches. But as Ray points out over and over again in ‘Evolution vs. God,’ the bacteria are still bacteria, the fish are still fish, and the finches are still finches!”

Isn’t that what I said? I gave him evidence, which he denied by falling back on a typological fallacy: the bacteria are still bacteria. What he refuses to recognize is that they were quantitatively different bacteria, physiologically and genetically. To say that something is still X, where X is an incredibly large and diverse group like fish and bacteria, is to deny variation and diversity, observable properties of the natural world which are the fundamental bedrock of evolutionary theory.

But the giveaway is that brief phrase “scientific evidence — observational evidence”. That’s where the real sleight of hand occurs: both Comfort and Ham try to claim that that all the evidence for evolution doesn’t count, because it’s not “observational”. “Were you there?” they ask, meaning that the only evidence they’ll accept is one where an eyewitness sees a complete transformation of one species to another. That is, they want the least reliable kind of evidence, for phenomena that are not visual. They’re freakin’ lying fools.

All scientific evidence is observational, but not in the naive sense that all that counts is what you see with your eyes. There is a sense in which some science is regarded as historical, but it’s not used in the way creationists do; it does not refer to science that describes events in the past.

Maybe some examples will make that clearer.

We can reconstruct the evolutionary history of fruit flies. We do this by observation. That does not mean we watch different species of fruit flies speciate before our eyes (although it has been found to occur in reasonable spans of time in the lab and the wild), it means we extract and analyze information from extant species — we take invisible genetic properties of the flies’ genomes and turn them into tables of data and strings of publishable code. We observe patterns in their genetics that allow us to determine patterns of historical change. Observation and history are intertwined. To deny the history is to deny the observations.

Paleontology is often labeled a historical science, but it doesn’t have the pejorative sense in which creationists use it, and it is definitely founded in observation. For instance, plesiosaurs: do you think scientists just invented them? No. We found their bones — we observed their remains imbedded in rock — and further, we found evidence of a long history of variation and diversity. The sense in which the study of plesiosaurs is historical is that they’re all extinct, so there are no extant forms to examine, but it is still soundly based on observation. Paleontology may be largely historical, but it is still a legitimate science built on observation, measurement, and even prediction, and it also relies heavily on analysis of extant processes in geology, physics, and biology.

The reliance on falsehoods like this bizarre distinction between observational and historical science that the Hamites and Comfortians constantly make is one of the reasons you all ought to appreciate my saintly forebearance, because every time I hear them make it, I feel a most uncivilized urge to strangle someone. I suppress it every time, though: I just tell myself it’s not their fault their brains were poisoned by Jesus.

Mmmm, pesticide cut with baking powder, yum!

Matt Cahill is pretty much unqualified to do anything.

Cahill said he had been pursuing a program in exercise physiology, but when questioned by attorneys he couldn’t remember taking any courses in chemistry or pharmacology. He never received any degree. Before the accident, his job experience after high school involved working as a condominium lifeguard and at an ice rink.

But, he said,

“I had a scientific background in school, I just don’t have a degree.”

That’s all it takes to be a hack who markets supplements…supplements that cause liver damage, blindness, or kill. As it turns out, all those companies selling magic pills have a loophole: call it a dietary supplement, and the federal inspectors are mostly incapable of doing anything about it, short of the pill actually killing people with cyanide or something obvious.

But Matt Cahill can cut insecticide with baking powder and sell it as a “weight loss supplement”. It actualy works — low grade poisoning will tend to make you shed pounds. His pills killed a young woman, a crime for which he served a two year sentence, and as soon as he got out he was packaging marginal chemicals as “herbal supplements” for body builders and raking in $30,000/month.

a href=’http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/25/bodybuilding-supplement-designer-matt-cahill-usa-today-investigation/2568815/’>Read the whole disgraceful story (warning: autoplay video at link!).

How did they get that past the IRB?

There was this thing called Drunk Science on Boing Boing, where they got a scientist very very drunk and then asked them questions.

It was a very bad idea, as the drunk scientist, Charles Choi explains.

I ended up having five Irish car bombs, five doubles of Jameson’s, two beers and a good swig from my hip flask. Since Irish car bombs are essentially two drinks in one, made up as they are of a beer and a shot of liquor, and since a double is by definition two shots, I ultimately drank 23 drinks that night. In the span of an hour.

Um, yeah. Their subject just poured alcohol down his throat in a short period of time so that he’d talk funny in an interview. He blacked out, the others thought he might die, he was basically doing the stupid binge drinking that college students do every weekend, all in the service of a really pointless story.

I guess the world outside of science is a strange one. If I were to attempt that ‘experiment’, I’d have to justify it (“it will be funny” isn’t good enough), I’d have to lay out carefully what I was going to measure and what I expected to learn, and any protocol involving another human being is going to get inspected up the wazoo by an institutional review board. I guarantee you my proposal to get my subjects to talk funny for my amusement after drinking uncontrolled quantities of alcohol would not only get turned down flat, the ethics panel would probably recommend immediate remedial instruction in the ethical execution of science, and any pending protocols would be suspended pending re-review.

They’re not going to continue the series, by the way. Smart move.

Obvious poll is obvious

A poll in Kentucky is asking…

Should state science education standards require the teaching of evolution?

Yes 60%

No 36%

I don’t know 3%

The answer is that if you want to be prepared to attend a good university, or it you want to be an informed citizen of the world, yes, you should be taught evolution in high school. If your dream job is selling popcorn for minimum wage at Ken Ham’s Ark Park* for the rest of your life, you’re probably OK without it.

*Note: Ark Park jobs currently don’t exist, and probably never will.

Reminder: I’ll be in Houston next week

Houston speakers

On 4 August, I’ll be joining Aron Ra and Zack Kopplin and Lilandra and Mike Aus in an afternoon of talks titled Answers in Science, in which we rebut the nonsense peddled by Answers in Genesis (Ken Ham was invited to speak, since he’ll be right there in Houston for a homeschool conference, but ever since we met his demand of having a “Ph.D. scientist” on the podium, he has gone pointedly silent). I think I’ll be giving my “Evolution of Creationism” talk, since it explains just how freaking weird and unbiblical and even more unscientific creationism has become in the last 60 years.

If you just can’t bear the thought of listening to me speak, this event is being held in the Houston Museum of Natural Science — I won’t blame you if you skip out of all of the talks to tour the museum instead. I’m tempted!

Ray Comfort confesses

Ray Comfort admits to selectively editing me.

But in “Evolution vs. God” PZ gets to talk as much as or even more than anyone in the entire movie. Of course it was “selectively edited.” That’s what editors do. They remove the mundane and irrelevant and select that which is interesting–and a lot of what he said certainly was interesting. When I do interviews I fully expect to be cut back to that which the producers believe is relevant to their theme. After all, it’s their program.

Yes, exactly! I’ve done a number of interviews for the media, and it’s not surprising when an hour-long conversation is reduced to a few sentences. I expect that, and it’s no surprise.

What they don’t do, unless they are ideological hacks and liars, is chop up the interview to completely misrepresent the point I just explained to them at length. Comfort came to me asking for the evidence for evolution. The way it went is that he would a) ask for evidence, b) I would give him an example (like the research on sticklebacks or bacteria), c) Comfort would raise an irrelevant objection (they’re still fish! They’re still bacteria!), and d) I would explain why his objection was invalid, and how his expectations of the nature of the evidence were wrong. Somehow, though, in the movie (d) always ended up on the cutting room floor, so that he could announce in all of his promotional materials and in the movie itself that I was unable to provide any evidence for evolution.

That last bit is a lie. That’s not what respectable video producers do. An honest presentation of our interview would say that PZ Myers presented evidence for evolution, but in Ray Comfort’s opinion, it was not adequate…not, “all these scientists were unable to present evidence for evolution!”

h2zoom

Oh, well. I have one good result: I got my last affiliate reward from Amazon last week (they’re shutting down the program in Minnesota), and I invested it in an H2 Zoom audio recorder, which I will now pack and carry with me to every event I travel to. Creationists are welcome to ask me questions in the future, and to record them…but I’ll be recording everything they say, too, and it’ll be easier to expose their dishonesty.

I suspect my requests for interviews from creationists will now dry up.

Mississippi madrasas…with a poll

The reminiscences of right-wing kooks are so very different from mine.

As a young child I remember very vividly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and also morning prayer. When you talk about the “good old days” those are visions that come to my mind.  Of course those are things that have been taken away but Mississippi has decided otherwise.

I remember vividly how as a young child my school forced me to sit through the droll anecdotes of that old chucklehead, Paul Harvey. The first year I was just stupefied; gradually I came to despise that voice and its smug moralisms. For some reason, the public schools all thought the affected mannerisms of a conservative snake oil salesman were perfectly appropriate to blast at students every goddamned day.

Don’t get me started on the pledge of allegiance. I started out reciting that thing when I was very young, but got progressively annoyed at the very first line, once my vocabulary was good enough to know what the words meant: I’m pledging allegiance to a flag? WTF? I wasn’t even an atheist yet when I decided that was nonsense, and every morning I’d rise, put my hand on my heart (so I’d fit in), and say nothing. Then I stopped with the hand on the heart. Now I only rise because in the usual venues where this is done now, sitting would mean staring at the butt of the person in front of you.

Prayer would have been intolerable. Even before I was aware that I was an atheist, this business of pretending to talk to god made me very uncomfortable.

When I hear people babble about the “good old days” of school it always seems to be these memories of rote and ritual and reinforcement, stuff that is the antithesis of learning. Me? My magic school moments were learning about logarithms (seriously, mind blown), doing geometry with a compass and straightedge, algebra, and trigonometry.

So when some gomer tells me his vision of education was reciting the same words over and over, I’ve got him pegged already: he didn’t learn him nothin’.

Reliably, such people will continue to babble on, confirming my initial impression.

First and foremost though, why was the Pledge of Allegiance axed?  Because of the words “under God.” It’s based on our country and the fact that we are Americans who proudly belong to the United States of America.

When, exactly, was the pledge of allegiance “axed”? The last time I went to a school assembly they had us recite it (I didn’t). I’ve seen it done at sports events. As I said above, when I wasn’t even an atheist I found it objectionable for its tediousness and for the bizarre demand that we swear loyalty to a piece of cloth. Besides, the “under god” bit was tacked on during the Cold War and wasn’t even in the original version.

Having an open mind, I have always thought no matter what side of the fence you are on with the bible, “In God We Trust” is in everyone’s pocket; atheist or not.  Show me an atheist who doesn’t have at least a penny in his or her pocket.

From a penny to a $100 bill, “In God We Trust” is clearly marked on every unit of U.S.Currency.  If it’s good enough for our money, by golly it’s good enough for our schools.

I…what?

Do we atheists have an alternative? If some form of currency valid in the US did not say “In god we trust”, would theists refuse to use it? Would carrying it in any way imply that you were an atheist?

This argument, stupid as it is, is actually rather interesting. Our constitution plainly states that the government may not establish any religion — yet here’s a Mississippi loudmouth declaring that “In god we trust” on money imposes a religious belief on its bearers. Thanks, guy, for declaring it unconstitutional!

So again, if it was deemed so bad for schools, why was it not removed from our currency? My point being, it should have never been removed in the first place, but some atheists want it removed from all currency.  We live in the United States of America and we base many of our principles on the Holy Bible.  If I moved to Japan I wouldn’t be complaining that my God was not being allowed in my child’s school and I sure wouldn’t complain about theirs.

Clearly, it should be removed from our currency, especially when it’s seen as an explicit endorsement of religion by the government. It’s also apparently damaging our educational system, since Mr Redneck here obviously had a substandard education, since he got through it all without comprehending the rudiments of logic and without learning any history. Sorry, bozo, but those religious phrases haven’t been removed, but were actually added in the 1950s; the founding principles of our country were not based on the Bible at all, but on the Enlightenment.

These guys always make me feel like a conservative. They harken back to the days of Joe McCarthy — they can’t see beyond the barrier of the Red Scare — while I fondly think it would be nice if we returned to the principles of Jefferson and Madison (sans the evil excuses for slavery, that is).

Anyway, what’s got the idiots in Mississippi fired up now? Their governor just signed a law requiring public schools to allow students to pray publicly over the morning intercom, and at various school events. You know, I evolved into an atheist gradually, only becoming aware of it in my teen years, but if they’d started my morning with some sanctimonious ass yammering godly nonsense at me every day, BAM, flaming militant atheist in kindergarten.

Of course they have a poll to go with their ignorant noise, and of course, since it’s Mississippi, you can predict exactly how it’s leaning.

Would you have an issue with allowing prayer back in your child’s school?

No 80.37%
Yes 18.87%
I don’t care either way 1%