Science doesn’t say that!

Have you ever noticed how the religious regard ‘scientism’ and ‘reductionism’ and demands for concrete evidence as barely a notch above obscenities? That is, until they need to reduce complex issues to simplistic claims and don the mantle of Science to support their beliefs. Then they become Holy Writ.

You can really see this behavior in the abortion debate, where suddenly anti-choicers decide that humanity is defined by a particular arrangement of alleles in the genome. Case closed, they say, Science has spoken! Unfortunately, they get the science wrong, and we know their commitment to the authority of sacred science will be discarded the instant a scientist says something they disagree with…like, say, there is no soul and the mind is a product of the brain, or you are an evolved variant of an ape, or maybe, just maybe, genes aren’t the magic ju-ju beans you think they are.

A classic example was published in the Independent. Look how Declan Ganley bows and scrapes to the authority of science, multiple times!

Of course, the only way to guarantee that the law protects all individual members of the human species equally, is that at a minimum, from the moment that a member can be identified as such, the law insures immunity from deliberate bodily destruction.

This moment of identity is unequivocally known today as conception (as indeed the word itself suggests), when the DNA of a new member of the human species arises. It is scientifically indisputable that the DNA discovered here by science is that of a unique individual distinct from their biological mother, and that this DNA is the unique and irreplicable identifier of a unique member of our species.

So the question is not whether we know when the human individual is first created (this is unequivocally proven by science), but rather whether an individual’s right to life can be made subject to another and one individual human can be fully owned by another to the point where their very life is subject only to the whims of another.

None of us are created in the fullness of our potential, but science has shown us that human life is a journey, not a static moment. Our potential is gifted us at our conception – our appearance, talents and very fingerprints are hardcoded, and the rest is up to us. We are all conceived with the destiny to be born, grow, mature, slowly fade and die. The deliberate and targeted interruption of this process at any point is the ending of a single, unique, never-to-be-replaced human existence, and is the most base form of discrimination. That is why we make killing another human the most serious of all the crimes.

I’ve got news for you, Ganley. Science does not have such unambiguous answers as you claim; human-ness is an emergent property of a gradual process of development, and no one is going to ever be able to say, “Here, right here, is the magic instant in which an embryo becomes fully human.” That’s because “human” as used in law and sociology and philosophy and even theology is something complex and very, very hard to define, so looking for a mathematically precise and sharp boundary in the vagueness of complexity is a contradiction in terms.

You can try to do it by putting on blinders and pretending that the genetic sequence of an individual is sole criterion, and that it is well-defined and unambiguous, but it isn’t. It just creates more problems.

Genetically, we’re nearly identical to chimpanzees. They have the same genes in roughly the same organization on their chromosomes; they have some novel variants, or alleles, but every newborn chimp also has a “unique and irreplicable” arrangement of alleles. Why aren’t you declaring their lives precious and demanding protection? Why not say the same for cows and ears of corn? They are also genetically special.

But, you will say, they are uniquely human. And I will ask what that means. If I have a mutant gene (and I do! On average, I’ll carry a few hundred novel mutations relative to my parents) that isn’t shared between me and all other humans, am I still human? If I have a cytologically detectable chromosomal rearrangement, am I still human? How many differences are allowed between two genomes before you can say one is not of the same species as the other? Is an embryo with a unique deletion in one chromosome still human? If an embryo has a unique mutation that makes it infertile as an adult when interbreeding with other members of the species, is it still human?

That magic line in development should be getting a bit smearier in your head about now. Conception isn’t necessarily associated with the generation of a unique person.

I’m glad that he noticed that science sees development as a journey, but a little disappointed that he couldn’t see that that actually contradicts his claims about conception as a singularity. Just the genetic complement is not enough. A blastocyst, a hollow ball of cells with an inner mass that will become the embryo proper, has exactly the same genes as a five year old person or an octagenerian. But it doesn’t have limbs or eyes or brain, it doesn’t think or feel, it doesn’t dance or learn. It is…a hollow ball of cells. It’s got cilia and might spin in place. That’s about it. It’s human only the most trivial, reductionist sense.

That should tell you something. There has to be something more. There has to be a complex history of epigenetic interactions that set up tissue domains and generate morphology and trigger physiologically functional activity in different cells. That isn’t there yet. That history is a significant part of what makes you what you are right now, and it’s absurd to pretend that that doesn’t matter and that everything is plainly established at the moment of conception.

And of course, he’s factually wrong. To claim that “appearance, talents and very fingerprints are hardcoded” is not true, and all you have to do is look at identical twins to see that it is false. There is a good similarity in appearance, but if you know any identical twins at all well, you know that you can tell them apart…and that their differences increase with age. I’ve known a few elderly identical twins, and you wouldn’t know that they were identical unless you’d been told so, because variation accumulates. “Talent” is also meaningless; there is evidence that some broad characteristics (musical ability, for instance) are heritable, but so much of what we call “talent” is not intrinsic, but the product of hard work and discipline.

Also, fingerprints are not hardcoded. Identical twins have general similarities in the arrangements of whorls and loops, but are readily distinguishable in the details.

Science would not belittle the significance of all the essential changes that go on after conception, so I think Mr Ganley was a bit premature in claiming its authority for his dogma. How about if we recognize instead that science actually tells us that the process, that journey he regards as so vital, is the interesting part, and that imposing arbitrary dividing lines on a continuum is a silly exercise that he’s trying to use to put boundaries where there are none?

The present is the past, the past is the present

Ken Ham is preaching about what science is again. He’s accusing the secular activist Zack Kopplin of being “brainwashed” by evolutionist propaganda, and to support this claim, he once again drags out the tired proposition that there are two kinds of science, historical and observational, and that only the observational kind is valid; well, unless the historical version is based on the Bible, which in his dogma is an unassailable compendium of absolutely true facts about the past.

What’s more, Kopplin—like almost all evolutionists—confuses historical science with operational (observational) science. Operational science is indeed observable, testable, falsifiable, and so on—but none of those words describes evolutionary ideas! While biblical creation may not be provable through tests and observation, neither is molecules-to-man evolution (or astronomical evolution). And in fact, the evidence that is available to us concerning our origins makes sense in the biblical creation-based worldview, not the evolutionary one. Of course, secularists mock creationists for separating out historical science and operational science. But they do that because the secularists want the word science to apply to both historical and operational science so that they can brainwash people (like Kopplin) into thinking that to believe in creation is to reject science.

This is utter nonsense. It’s a phony distinction he makes so that he can bray, “Were you there?” at people and pretend that he has refuted anything they might say about the past. It is a set of appalling lies from a know-nothing hidebound fundamentalist who knows nothing about science, and who happily distorts it to contrive support for his ridiculous beliefs.

It is false because of course I can observe the past. The present is the product of the past; if I open my eyes and look around me, I can see the pieces of history everywhere.

I live in the American midwest. I can go into my backyard and see on the surface the world as it is now; fenced and flattened, seeded with short grasses, surrounded by paved roads and houses. But it takes only a little effort to observe the past.

In ditches and pioneer cemeteries and dry unplowable ridges, traces of an older world, the prairie, still persist. I can find clumps of tallgrass, scattered forbs, rivers fringed with cattails, turtles like primeval tanks on the banks, frogs and salamanders lurking in tangled undergrowth, fragmented bits of the pre-European settlement. I can see relics of a changing human presence; there are places where flint arrowheads turn up regularly, and to the south are the native pipestone quarries. I can walk along the increasingly neglected railroads, and trace how they contributed to our presence here; small towns sprinkled along the railroad right-of-way, acting as central depots for tributaries of wagons on dirt roads, hauling corn to the granaries. It’s all here if you just look; it’s not a story told by fiat, poured into books that we accept as gospel. That history lies in scars in the land, observable, testable, falsifiable.

I can dig into the ground with a spade and see the rich dark loam of this country — the product of ten thousand years of prairie grasses building dense root systems, prairie dogs tunneling through it, the bison wallowing and foraging. This isn’t an illusion, it’s the observable result of millennia of prairie ecosystems thriving here, and it’s the source of the agricultural prosperity of the region. I can sieve through the muck that has accumulated in prairie lakes, and find pollen from the exuberant flora that grew here: clover and grasses, wildflowers and the flowering of the wetlands. I can track back and see the eras when the great eastern deciduous forests marched westward, and when they staggered back. It’s all in the record. It all contributed to what we have now.

We can go back and back. We can see the scattered rocky debris left as the glaciers retreated; we can see the vast depressions left by the pressure of ancient lakes; we can see the scouring of the land from their earlier advance. Seeing the landscape with the eyes of a geologist exposes its history. While the glaciers demolished the surface, we can also find places where seismic cataclysms thrust deeper layers to the surface, and there we find that millions of years ago, my home was the bottom of a huge inland sea, that diatoms silted down over long ages, burying the bones of plesiosaurs and nautiloids in chalky deposits.

Again, this is not mere historical assertion (and isn’t it demeaning to treat history as something empty of evidence, too?). Open your eyes! It’s all written in towers of stone and immense fractures in the earth, in microscopic drifts of long dead organisms and the ticking clock of radioactive molecules. We are immersed in the observable evidence of our past. Everything is the way it is because of how it got that way — you cannot blithely separate what is from the process that made it.

I can see it in me, too — biology is just as much a product of the changing past as is geology and ecology. I can look in the mirror and see my mother’s eyes and my father’s chin; I can observe myself and see my father’s sense of humor and my mother’s bookishness. I remember my grandparents and my great-grandparents, and looking back at me are a collection of familial traits, all shuffled and juggled and reconstituted in me.

Beyond those superficial impressions, I can have my genome analyzed and find my particular pattern of genes shared in distant places in the world. I know that my family came from Northern Europe, that in turn they migrated out of central Asia, that before that they were living in the Middle East, and long before that, a hundred thousand years ago, they were an adventurous (or desperate) tribe of people moving northward through East Africa. This is not a mere story, a fairy tale invented by ignorant scribes — my ancestors left a trail of alleles as they wandered over three continents, a trail we can follow even now.

“Were you there?” Yes. Yes, I am here, imbedded in this grand stream of history, aware of my place in it, seeing with open eyes the evidence that surrounds me. And I pity those unable to see the grand arena they are a small part of, who want to deny that history is observable.

The Republicans really hate women

They’re still going at it, and the latest effort in New Mexico will take your breath away with its sheer vindictive nastiness.

Should a recently introduced bill in New Mexico become law, rape victims will be required to carry their pregnancies to term during their sexual assault trials or face charges of “tampering with evidence.”

Under HB 206, if a woman ended her pregnancy after being raped, both she and her doctor would be charged with a felony punishable by up to 3 years in state prison:

Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.

They really, really want you to keep that rape-baby, don’t they? Imagine finding yourself pregnant from a rape and then being told that because you were the victim of a heinous crime, your right to autonomy is being suspended. The victim is now the criminal.

This law is so absurd and extreme that it will never ever be passed, and its author’s political career has just been self-destructed, right? Right?

Data! About secularism!

This American Secular Census thing is actually asking some good questions — insightful, even. It’s trying to get a fine-grained perspective on various factors in our involvement and sometimes comes up with some revealing data. This bit, for instance, about women’s perspective on the movement:

Regardless of gender, all respondents who are or have been involved in the secular movement are asked: Have you ever felt unwelcome, discriminated against, or harmed in the secular movement? Women outnumber men 62%/34% in responding “Yes.” It is worth noting that women do not outnumber men when asked the same question about religious organizations with which they’ve been associated. It appears they are less comfortable in secular groups than in the churches they left.

This is what a lot of us have been saying for quite some time. You have a choice of a few responses to reality: one is to deny it, one is to implicitly approve it, and one is to try and change it. Put me in the last category. Also note that I am shocked at how many skeptics/atheists are in the first, and disappointed at all the ones in the second category.

No matter your position, though, think about signing up for the American Secular Census (it does require registering and giving a valid email address). I approve of more information about the state of this movement…even if some of it does leave me shocked and disappointed.

Houston Cancer Quack gets a message

A campaign to raise donations for real cancer research on a Houston Cancer Quack’s birthday has resulted in a $13,000 donation.

This morning, a group calling itself Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients (SPCP) has delivered controversial cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski a birthday present: a $13,000 donation in his honor to St. Jude Children’s Research hospital. The SPCP says that St. Jude’s is a well-respected, compassionate institution that does real research into childhood cancers, unlike the Burzynski Clinic, which has never produced the results of a single large scale peer-reviewed clinical trial in a reputable journal in over 30 years, despite apparently having treated thousands of patients with so-called “antineoplastons”.

They’ve now asked Burzynski to match that donation.

Unfortunately, Burzynski bilks so much money from his victims, hundreds of thousands of dollars from each, that he’s going to be able to lift a butt cheek and fart out that much money. The question is whether he’ll even bother to exert himself that much.

I’m predicting he won’t, since that would involve actually acknowledging the rebuke, not because he’s unable to afford that much.

You’ve all been slacking!

People sometimes wonder where all the Kristian and Kreationist Kooks have gone — they only rarely pop their little pinheads up here anymore. Well, I can tell you: since most of the commenters have decamped from my old scienceblogs site to frolic here on freethoughtblogs, the kooks have moved in unopposed over at Sb. For example, look at the Creationism and racism article that I crossposted to both networks: there they are! There’s good huntin’ over there nowadays.

Of course, one thing I’ve learned from this is that they aren’t afraid of me, but they’re terrified of you all.

Methinks it is like a sauropsid

Eugene McCarthy, the author of that crackpot stabilization theory, has discovered my review and is now making a noise on twitter. He’s gone from thanking me profusely for mentioning him, to whining that I stole his figures, to complaining that I don’t understand his theory at all, all in the last 24 hours.

But here’s the fun part. Recall that one of his bizarre claims is that whales did not evolve from terrestrial artiodactyls, but from mosasaurs, mesozoic marine reptiles, instead. But the anatomy shows that mosasaurs are derived squamates, reptiles, with a completely different skeletal organization than a mammal. This has attracted the attention of Darren Naish and Tom Holtz, fully qualified comparative anatomists and paleontologists, who actually know a great deal about the structure of these animals, and are giving him a spectacular ass-whooping. Browse it on Twitter.

The basis of his claim is that mosasaur teeth “look like” sperm whale teeth. That’s not a good criterion, and it’s not true; as has been pointed out to him, basal mosasaurs are pleurodont (that is, the teeth are fused to the inner side of the jaw bone), not socketed as are sperm whale teeth. He’s also now claiming that mosasaurs swam by vertical motions of their tails, like whales…but he’s citing articles with poor comprehension. The cited articles show evidence that mosasaurs propelled themselves with axial motions of the tail, which is a far more general statement; they moved by sweeping their tails like oars, but it says nothing about vertical vs. horizontal undulations.

So I went back to McCarthy’s book to see how he backed up this ridiculous claim. He doesn’t. He cites Pieter Camper, an 18th century anatomist, as proposing the idea that whales are related to mosasaurs. His critics are citing contemporary and detailed papers. This, however, is really the totality of McCarthy’s argument:

The varanid theory was based on Adriaan Gilles’ assertion that certain skeletal characters found in mosasaurs are not found in modern whales. However, a glance at figures 9.4 and 9.5, will convince most readers that mosasaurs have much in common with early whales. Certainly, they have far more in common with whales than does the late Cretaceous terrestrial insectivore traditional theory posits as the common ancestor of whales and all other placental mammals (it should be emphasized that all of the various forms classified as mosasaurs, too, are of late Cretaceous age). They are also far more similar to whales than is Pakicetus. One would not expect the ancient ancestors of whales to have every characteristic of modern whales. Their dissimilarity with respect to a few minor bony traits should not be allowed to obscure the well established fact that mosasaurs were huge, whalelike, air-breathing animals with whalelike teeth and that they had the same sort of prey as modern whales.

The referenced figures are grainy, low resolution images that do not do an adequate job of displaying the structures. The “dissimilarity with respect to a few minor bony traits” is trivialized; these are actually substantial differences in the arrangement and number of bones in the skull, where the mosasaur displays a fairly standard reptilian pattern and the whales show a mammalian pattern. They only look alike if you don’t look at all closely. How can you say that the jaw joint or the auditory complex of a whale look anything like that of a reptile? Only by not looking.

His other argument is that it would take fewer evolutionary changes to transform a mosasaur into a whale, than a shrew into a whale. This is nonsense. Turning a reptile into a mammal requires a major reorganization of the bones of the skull, and further, requires that those shifts exactly mimic the pattern found in other mammals. There is no reasonable way to accomplish that. Again, the basis of his entire argument is a complete ignorance about the anatomy!

This is the well-supported pattern of whale evolution. Notice: no mosasaurs.

whale_evo

Creationism and racism

When I visited the Creation “Museum”, one thing that shocked me was this display:

hamite

At the time, I pointed out the pernicious nature of this claim:

With complete seriousness and no awareness of the historical abuses to which this idea has been put, they were promoting the Hamite theory of racial origins, that ugly idea that all races stemmed from the children of Noah, and that black people in particular were the cursed offspring of Ham. If they are going to reject science because of its abuses, such as eugenics, they should at least be conscious of the evils perpetrated in the name of their strange cultish doctrines, I should think.

Boy oh boy, let me tell you…Ken Ham was indignant and outraged. How dare we connect creationism to racism? He was claiming that all races were one, descended from a common ancestor, Noah, 4000 years ago! Of course, what he neglects to mention is that the Biblical story claims that Africans are the product of a curse of servility placed on Ham and all of his descendants.

Well, and he also neglects to mention that the story is totally bogus, disproven by modern evidence, and has no relationship at all to the patterns of migration in human history.

Ken Ham is wrong and racist. The Biblical story of the origins of the diverse peoples of the earth is wrong and racist. It really is that simple. It takes a complex history and turns it into a pat partitioning of humanity into the chosen people, and the cursed people.

And just now people are taking notice. Schools in Texas are taking advantage of creationist curricula to incorporate instruction in racism into the schools. This is an actual image from one of the creationist textbooks.

RacialOriginsNoah

And this is what Texas schoolkids are being taught.

  • Instructional material in two school districts teach that racial diversity today can be traced back to Noah’s sons, a long-discredited claim that has been a foundational component of some forms of racism.

  • Religious bias is common, with most courses taught from a Protestant — often a conservative Protestant — perspective. One course, for example, assumes Christians will at some point be “raptured.” Materials include a Venn diagram showing the pros and cons of theories that posit the rapture before the returning Jesus’ 1,000-year reign and those that place it afterward. In many courses, the perspectives of Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews are often left out.

  • Anti-Jewish bias — intentional or not — is not uncommon. Some courses even portray Judaism as a flawed and incomplete religion that has been replaced by Christianity.

  • Many courses suggest or openly claim that the Bible is literally true. “The Bible is the written word of God,” students are told in one PowerPoint presentation. Some courses go so far as to suggest that the Bible can be used to verify events in history. One district, for example, teaches students that the Bible’s historical claims are largely beyond question by listing biblical events side by side with historical developments from around the globe.

  • Course materials in numerous classes are designed to evangelize rather than provide an objective study of the Bible’s influence. A book in one district makes its purpose clear in the preface: “May this study be of value to you. May you fully come to believe that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the son of God.’ And may you have ‘life in His name.’”

  • A number of courses teach students that the Bible proves Earth is just 6,000 years old.

  • Students are taught that the United States is a Christian nation founded on the Christian biblical principles taught in their classrooms.

  • Academic rigor is so poor that many courses rely mostly on memorization of Bible verses and factoids from Bible stories rather than teaching students how to analyze what they are studying. One district relies heavily on Bible cartoons from Hanna-Barbera for its high school class. Students in another district spend two days watching what lesson plans describe a “the historic documentary Ancient Aliens,” which presents “a new interpretation of angelic beings described as extraterrestrials.”

Would you believe that they also teach that the Jews killed Jesus? Of course you would.

Creationism isn’t just a source of ignorance; it’s a major wellspring of ethnic bigotry.

(via Addicting Info)

Totally unsurprising

Chandra Wickramasinghe is on twitter, trying to defend that awful paper claiming to have found diatoms in a meteorite. When asked why he published in the Journal of Cosmology rather than a more credible journal, he replied “because the conclusion is tentative and awaits peer review. Have patience my dear son.”.

So JoC is unreviewed. Tell me, who is just blown away by that amazing revelation?

Relief for the heartsick

I am constantly dunned by email and tweets from the haters and sick scumbags, and I read stuff by my colleagues who get far worse, and at times it is just too depressing and dismal — there really are reactionary fanatics within atheism who refuse to recognize the responsibility to work towards equality. And I just want to give up.

But then…perspective. Step away from the smears and assaults and slime and look at the movement as a whole: look at the leading organizations of the godless. You know what you’ll see? None of them support these loons. They’re all progressive and committed to improving the diversity of the atheist community and broadening our engagement with the greater culture.

Really. Look at American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, the Center for Inquiry, Atheist Alliance International and Atheist Alliance America, the Secular Coalition, the Secular Student Alliance, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation. They are not supporting these petty, resentful snipers; they are working towards a future in which those goons are irrelevant.

That’s reassuring. There are loud, obsessive, creepy people who should not be ignored, but it’s always a good idea to step back and look at the bigger picture, and see that their skirmishing is born of desperation — they’re the past, they’re the failures, they’re the ones who have no productive role to play.

Rebecca Watson has a different perspective. She’s less sanguine about organizations (and particularly the RDF), and I’m not going to argue with someone who has been the target of so much hatred, some of it inspired by Richard Dawkins’ remarks. I will agree entirely that any virtue in these organizations rest on the efforts of individuals who have struggled hard to bring inherently conservative institutions towards a more just perspective, and we cannot rest — we all have to keep fighting that fight.