SkepTech Reminder!

Today, tomorrow, and Sunday…SkepTech, at the University of Minnesota campus. I’m leaving for the big city this afternoon after I finish dispensing justice teaching/advising today, so I plan to be there the whole session, and maybe hang about into the evening.

Look at all the lovely speakers at this free conference:


Oh, and if you’re wondering what I’m talking about, my title is “Hacking Evolution: Transhumanist Fantasies, Biological Realities”: it’s a strangely sympathetic and simultaneously scathing critique of transhumanism.

Which reminds me…the talk isn’t quite done. I should get to work.

Mastropaolo is just plain out of his gourd

It’s gotten rather annoying. Joseph Mastropaolo is this antique dogmatic young earth creationist who hasn’t said a single thing that’s novel or believable in 20 years, and somehow his name has been snared by the media. He’s getting promoted everywhere. I’m getting all this email and twitter notes telling me to debate him — I’ve even had a couple of students bring him up and suggest that they’d like to see me debate him. NO WAY. He’s dumber than Jerry Bergman, and meaner, too.

Look. Here’s an example of the kind of thing he’s prone to declare: that, for instance, humans hunted T. rex.

As for how human beings were able to survive in the same neighborhood as a Tyrannosaurus rex, Mastropaolo said that humans beings would have been able to trick them.

"Human beings were smarter the further back we go in time because they have been less degenerated by the pollutants that we’ve been putting into the air, water, and soil," he said. "T. rex … could be herded into a blind canyon and have rocks dropped on their heads from above. And they’d soon be done in."

Furthermore, Mastropaolo believes that they could even have been domesticated the "way we have domesticated cattle and elephants."

See what I mean? Please, please, please stop telling me to engage this loon…and media, could you wake up and recognize that he’s not credible about anything?

Solidarity with atheists of Bangladesh

bangladesh_B

There is an Atheist Association of Bangladesh, which is amazing. The government of Bangladesh is cracking down: atheists are being arrested, and most horribly, Islamist mobs are rioting and murdering atheists (warning: very bloody images at that link). Some atheist blogs are participating in a blackout in protest.

Taslima Nasrin has just published a statement of support from Bengali atheists. John Sargeant has suggested that we bloggers include a scarlet B for the Bangladesh situation, which seems like literally the least we can do. (Oops, this was originally Hemant’s idea.)

I feel helpless in the face of this oppression, unable to do anything for people in a distant country who are being abused by their own government. The American Humanists have issued an action alert, a petition to ask the US ambassador to lodge a formal protest. Sign it!

Free Amina!

The place to go for information on Amina, the Tunisian activist who dared to say that her body was her own, is Maryam Namazie’s blog. She has a fantastic roundup of the European protests. I’m also happy to see that secular humanists are finding common cause with women’s rights: The IEHU has also issued a statement of support.

(Note: all the links above include bare breasts and strong language, and worse, women standing up for themselves. Might not find favor with your corporate masters if you browse them at work.)

I am wondering how all the people recently sneering at atheists as islamophobes are going to cope with all these godless ex-Muslims coming out against Islamic justice.

Both wrong, both right

Uh-oh. Sam Harris and Glenn Greenwald are clashing. They both make good points and some very bad points.

Here’s where I agree fully with Harris. There has been a strange and nasty backlash against atheism lately, and it’s largely driven by ignorance and bias. There was a simply awful article in Salon, accusing atheists of being islamophobes — it was disgracefully dishonest, and Greenwald does himself no favors by linking favorably to it.

But it’s true. Atheists don’t like Islam. We also don’t like Catholicism, Episcopalianism, or whatever jelly-like dribble Karen Armstrong is peddling today. But I would still say that Islam as a religion is nastier and more barbaric than, say, Anglicanism. The Anglicans do not have as a point of doctrine that it is commendable to order the execution of writers or webcomic artists, nor that a reasonable punishment for adultery is to stone the woman to death. That is not islamophobia: that is recognizing the primitive and cruel realities of a particularly vile religion, in the same way that we can condemn Catholicism for its evil policies towards women and its sheltering of pedophile priests. We can place various cults on a relatively objective scale of repugnance for their attitudes towards human rights, education, equality, honesty, etc., and on civil liberties, you know, that stuff we liberals are supposed to care about, Islam as a whole is damnably bad.

It is not islamophobia to recognize reality.

Also, there’s a bad case of confirmation bias going on here. I still get email from people whining that I’d be afraid to criticize Islam because I was very rude to Catholicism once or twice. And if I criticize Islam, as Harris has done, I get complaints that I’m an islamophobic bigot. It’s all about whose ox is being gored. I also can’t claim that my degree of concern about a particular religion is always objectively derived from the amount of harm they do; I probably complain less about Islam than Harris does, not because I deplore it less, but because I’m more focused on local/national issues, and there is a striking dearth of Muslims in rural Minnesota. Harris has a more international perspective than I do, Dawkins is clearly more European, etc.

But there’s also a matter on which I agree completely with Greenwald. I think it is good and realistic to criticize Islam heavily, but there are also good and realistic and productive ways to address the problem of Islam, and I don’t share much common ground with Harris — or to an even greater degree, with the late Christopher Hitchens.

Harris’s defense of his position exposes the problem. I don’t disagree with him on the odious nature of Islam (and Catholicism, and Lutheranism, and…) but there’s something implicit and unrecognized in this statement.

Before you retweet defamatory garbage about me to 125,000 people, it would nice if you looked at the article from which that joker had mined that “very revealing quote.” The whole point of my original article, written in 2006, was to bemoan the loss of liberal moral clarity in the war on terror—and to worry about the influence of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. and fascists in Europe.

“liberal moral clarity in the war on terror”…there’s only one justifiable liberal and morally clear position on that: the “war on terror” is fundamentally wrong. Too often the “moral clarity” we’re asked to endorse is a whole-hearted support for bombing foreign countries, sending in drones to blow up any association of Muslims (like wedding parties), and replying to violence with violence amplified a thousand-fold. Greenwald also quotes Harris:

Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

No. No one is scarier than Cheney. Cheney is a moral monster who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, a callous, greedy bureaucrat who engineered murderous wars against whole peoples. Those tens of millions of Muslims are mostly interested in being left alone, in not being victimized by richer nations, in getting along with their neighbors. They’re also victims of a rotten religion that encourages tribalism and misogyny. A “war on terror” — a concept simultaneously quixotic and kafkaesque — is not and can not be the solution.

I despise Islam as much as Harris does, and as much as Hitchens did. Where we differ is that I categoricaly reject any militaristic solution — I heard Hitchens literally advocate a solution to the conflict with Iran by making the corpses bounce in the rubble of our bombing runs, and was appalled. I suspect that Greenwald is made uncomfortable with what some of the New Atheists write for the same reason, but is mistakenly assigning the problem to our rejection of the lies of faith.

I side with Gregory Paul on the source of, and the path to resolution, of these religious conflicts. The problems aren’t going to be solved by destroying economies, or by killing or oppressing people — that will only worsen the situation.

It is to be expected that in 2nd and 3rd world nations where wealth is concentrated among an elite few and the masses are impoverished that the great majority cling to the reassurance of faith.

Nor is it all that surprising that faith has imploded in most of the west. Every single 1st world nation that is irreligious shares a set of distinctive attributes. These include handgun control, anti-corporal punishment and anti-bullying policies, rehabilitative rather than punitive incarceration, intensive sex education that emphasizes condom use, reduced socio-economic disparity via tax and welfare systems combined with comprehensive health care, increased leisure time that can be dedicated to family needs and stress reduction, and so forth.

As a result the great majority enjoy long, safe, comfortable, middle class lives that they can be confident will not be lost due to factors beyond their control. It is hard to lose one’s middle class status in Europe, Canada and so forth, and modern medicine is always accessible regardless of income. Nor do these egalitarians culture emphasize the attainment of immense wealth and luxury, so most folks are reasonably satisfied with what they have got. Such circumstances dramatically reduces peoples’ need to believe in supernatural forces that protect them from life’s calamities, help them get what they don’t have, or at least make up for them with the ultimate Club Med of heaven. One of us (Zuckerman) interviewed secular Europeans and verified that the process of secularization is casual; most hardly think about the issue of God, not finding the concept relevant to their contented lives.

The result is plain to see. Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular religiosity. They all go material.

How do we destroy Islam? Not by terrorizing Muslims, but by respecting them as people and giving them access to the same economic and educational opportunities that we have.

To put it starkly, the level of popular religion is not a spiritual matter, it is actually the result of social, political and especially economic conditions (please note we are discussing large scale, long term population trends, not individual cases). Mass rejection of the gods invariably blossoms in the context of the equally distributed prosperity and education found in almost all 1st world democracies. There are no exceptions on a national basis. That is why only disbelief has proven able to grow via democratic conversion in the benign environment of education and egalitarian prosperity. Mass faith prospers solely in the context of the comparatively primitive social, economic and educational disparities and poverty still characteristic of the 2nd and 3rd worlds and the US.

That’s liberal moral clarity.

A way to strike against denial of abortion rights in Kentucky

PatrickG posted this deep in the Lounge, where only the bravest, thickest-skinned hordelings venture. So I’m amplifying his signal.

my partner is relentless. She keeps saying things like “you always talk about this site and how they’re so supportive of abortion rights, HIT THEM UP!”. And by hit you up, I mean it’s Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon time! Technically, has been for some time. :)

So! If you’re interested in funding abortion rights in Kentucky, specifically through the Kentucky Support Network, consider wandering over here and chipping in a few dollars. Our team is aiming to raise a measly $500, and we’re almost there. :)

Abortion access in Kentucky is a particular issue for me — we’ve got a part-time clinic in Lexington, a full-time clinic in Louisville… and that’s pretty much IT. Louisville has a hospital under siege by Catholics (gubernatorial action was necessary to prevent the latest merger attempt), and there’s basically nothing in northern/eastern Kentucky. They all have to travel. Added bonus (bleh): the Louisville site is heckled by protesters non-stop. In short, we might not be Mississippi or North Dakota, but we’re getting there.

All the funds raised for KSN go directly to transportation, housing, and medical expenses. Administrative funds are raised strictly through grants.

If you’d prefer to chaff my hide, consider donating to my partner’s page here**. She’d be thrilled to receive donations instead of me — my own father donated in her name instead of mine! But wherever you donate, it goes to the same place – the Kentucky Support Network.

You know what to do.

Clenched fist salute for the progressive cause of equality! No compromise!

I’ve long been a fan of Richard Dawkins’ Out Campaign, and think that kind of thing is the single greatest contribution to making public atheism atheism acceptable. It’s not the books, it’s not the leaders, it’s thousands of people standing up boldly and fearlessly asserting that they don’t believe in that nonsense and that we need to keep the magical thinking out of our lives.

The OUT Campaign allows individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows.

…

It is time to let our voices be heard regarding the intrusion of religion in our schools and politics. Atheists along with millions of others are tired of being bullied by those who would force their own religious agenda down the throats of our children and our respective governments. We need to KEEP OUT the supernatural from our moral principles and public policies.

But what if the campaign changed? What if the RDF decided that we were maybe being a little too aggressive (they aren’t, don’t worry) and suggested an alternative strategy: keep quiet, call up your local priest, and have a private heart-to-heart with him. Tell him first that you’re thinking of coming out about your disbelief with friends and family; give him a chance to address your concerns. Let him keep his privileged authority in matters spiritual.

Not so impressive anymore, is it? In fact, the deference to the very people we oppose sounds downright pathetic and wimpy.

So you can imagine my response to the open letter to the secular community, deploring the aggressive rhetoric on blogs, and basically minimizing the hatred radiating from the anti-feminists to equate it with calling said anti-feminists mean names. It’s signed by many people I like and respect, leaders of various secular organizations, but it’s a gooey marshmallow of spineless diplomacy. Not interested. I know they mean well, and they’re just trying to find a formula to make us all one big happy family together, but I’m not about to throw causes I care about under the bus of a blithe starry-eyed atheism.

I’ll join The American Secular Census, Ophelia, Secular Woman, Dana, and Rebecca in rejecting the overtures of the Neville Chamberlain ‘appeasement’ school of secularists.

I will continue to cheerfully abuse the advocates of silence and sexism. And I won’t even pick up the phone to let them know first!

You’re letting me down, atheists

I’ve never been surprised at a conference by anything like this: Ken Ham got a certificate for fighting the “principalities and powers of darkness.”

He [the creationist with the award] told the conference audience gathered at Quentin Road Bible Baptist Church that his creation group, Midwest Creation Fellowship, had passed a resolution—which they called a “spiritual bouquet.” In the resolution, it stated that because the “principalities and powers of darkness have captured the minds of many in our society, and whereas Ken Ham left his homeland of Australia to confront the forces arrayed against God and His Word,” I was being acknowledged by the MCF.

OK, gang, in order to keep up, I’m expecting an award from you guys for combat against fictitious beings. Maybe a “wrestling with mermaids” framed certificate, or a shiny medallion that praises my competence at squishing angels. We have a spiritual award gap here, people!

The last intelligent creationist

richardowen

Earlier today, Maggie Koerth-Baker posted this tweet:

I dig this graph, but I think it misses an outreach opportunity by ascribing common misconceptions to creationists only bouncingdodecahedrons.tumblr.com/post/17808416988

It links to a diagram showing evolution as a linear path rather than a branching tree, and it got me thinking about terribly popular misconceptions about evolution that were started by smart people, and a doozy came to mind. A whole collection of doozies, actually, from one single terribly clever person.

You’ve all heard the stupid creationist objection to evolution — “if evolution is true, how come there are still monkeys?” — but have you ever wondered who the first person to come up with that criticism was? You might be surprised.

The first instance I’ve been able to find was by Richard Owen, head of the British Museum and one of the premiere scientists of his day, and it was said in a rather notorious review of Darwin’s Origin, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1860. So not a stupid fellow, but one with an axe to grind, and also a creationist…but then, just about everyone was a creationist in 1860. Still, it’s a remarkable document.

Some background you need to know, though. This review was authored by Owen. When it needs to cite a scientist for its claims, it cites…Professor Richard Owen. It does so 11 times. Reading it with knowledge of its authorship really diminishes its authority to an amazing degree, and greatly inflates Owen’s appearance of pomposity.

It’s also an agonizing read. Darwin sometimes sounds a bit quaint and wordy nowadays, but at least he’s lucid and logical, and his writing flows well: I found Owen’s review to be a rough read, turgid and inelegant. I know I’ve got a bit of a bias which colors my opinion, but seriously, when you read the excerpt below, you’ll see what I mean.

On the other hand, if you read the whole thing, you’ll be struck by how it uses a whole collection of arguments that sound little different than what creationists say now, but that it is considerably more erudite. I hate to give them advice, but if creationists tossed out the trash written by Gish and Ham and any of the hacks at the Discovery Institute, and just regurgitated Owen’s words, there is a great deal that most of the warriors for evolution would have a tough time rebutting. Owen knew a lot of zoology, and he deploys it effectively to buttress some fundamentally flawed arguments.

Like this one. He doesn’t literally say “if evolution is true, how come there are still monkeys?” — he uses much more obscure examples and far more convoluted language, but it’s the same sentiment.

But has the free-swimming medusa, which bursts its way out of the ovicapsule of a campanularia, been developed out of inorganic particles? Or have certain elemental atoms suddenly flashed up into acalephal form? Has the polype-parent of the acalephe necessarily become extinct by virtue of such anomalous birth? May it not, and does it not proceed to propagate its own lower species in regard to form and organisation, notwithstanding its occasional production of another very different and higher kind. Is the fact of one animal giving birth to another not merely specifically, but generically and ordinally, distinct, a solitary one? Has not Cuvier, in a score or more of instances, placed the parent in one class, and the fruitful offspring in another class, of animals? Are the entire series of parthenogenetic phenomena to be of no account in the consideration of the supreme problem of the introduction of fresh specific forms into this planet? Are the transmutationists to monopolise the privilege of conceiving the possibility of the occurrence of unknown phenomena, to be the exclusive propounders of beliefs and surmises, to cry down every kindred barren speculation, and to allow no indulgence in any mere hypothesis save their own? Is it to be endured that every observer who points out a case to which transmutation, under whatever term disguised, is inapplicable, is to be set down by the refuted theorist as a believer in a mode of manufacturing a species which he never did believe in, and which may be inconceivable?

Doesn’t it sound so much more intelligent to ask, if evolution is true, why haven’t inorganic particles evolved into free-swimming medusae, and hey, why are there still polype-parents of the acalephe? Why aren’t we observing new forms bursting up out of the inanimate world in the same way they must have in Darwin’s version of the past?

The intelligent design creationists are also missing an opportunity. This is one of my favorite parts: Owen is snidely berating Darwin for thinking up this cunning new mechanism and then discarding the other ‘scientific’ mode of biological change…that is, divine creation. Transmutationists, as he calls evolutionists, are unable to see other ways that creation might work. “You can’t handle the truth!” is what he’s saying here.

Here it is assumed, as by Mr. Darwin, that no other mode of operation of a secondary law in the foundation of a form with distinct specific characters, can have been adopted by the Author of all creative laws that the one which the transmutationists have imagined. Any physiologist who may find the Lamarckian, or the more diffused and attenuated Darwinian, exposition of the law inapplicable to a species, such as the gorilla, considered as a step in the transmutative production of man, is forthwith clamoured against as one who swallows up every fact and every phenomenon regarding the origin and continuance of species ‘in the gigantic conception of a power intermittently exercised in the development, out of inorganic elements, of organisms the most bulky and complex, as well as the most minute and simple.’ Significantly characteristic of the partial view of organic phenomena taken by the transmutationists, and of their inadequacy to grapple with the working out and discovery of a great natural law, is their incompetency to discern the indications of any other origin of one specific form out of another preceding it, save by their way of gradual change through a series of varieties assumed to have become extinct.

Similarly, Owen siezes on Darwin’s remark that all life descended from one primordial form “into which life was first breathed” to chastise him for limiting god:

By the latter scriptural phrase, it may be inferred that Mr. Darwin formally recognises, in the so-limited beginning, a direct creative act, something like that supernatural or miraculous one which, in the preceding page, he defines, as ‘certain elemental atoms which have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues.’ He has, doubtless, framed in his imagination some idea of the common organic prototype; but he refrains from submitting it to criticism. He leaves us to imagine our globe, void, but so advanced as to be under the conditions which render life possible; and he then restricts the Divine power of breathing life into organic form to its minimum of direct operation.

I have some sympathy for this argument, and I think Darwin himself regretted making that one concession, because as we can see, creationists will sieze any excuse to invoke their personal god.

There’s also a section where he chides Darwin for not giving enough credit to Lamarck, and another where he favorably cites Buffon for his idea that species are mutable to a limited degree (Owen himself accepted some range of change over time), and calculated that all mammals could be reduced to 15 basic stocks. Creationists calculating storage space on the ark, take notice.

So yes, a lot of creationist arguments have their source not in really stupid people, but in some very intelligent and scientifically conservative people in the past. The problem is that modern creationists are clinging to rotten antique ideas that have long been dismantled. I’d also point out that creationist arguments have decayed: Owen’s writing, opaque and pretentious as it is, is far more challenging than anything I’ve seen from his degraded intellectual descendants.

I think if I were teaching a course in anti-creationism, I’d give this essay to my students and we’d spend about a week taking it apart — it would be a good exercise for them. And oh, they would hate me for it.