I couldn’t take Gilder seriously after he decided to rename molecular biology adguacyth

Way, way back in 2004-2007, one of my prime targets for my ire was George Gilder, the pretentious twit who was one of the founders of the Discovery Institute. He was such an easy target, so full of hot air and ignorance, that it was fun to take potshots at him as he bobbed about like a zeppelin that had lost its steering. Then he faded away into backrooms where he could babble nonsensically with no one around to criticize him, and I lost track (and interest) in what he’s been doing.

But he’s back now. He came out with a shiny new book a few years ago — sorry I’m late, I didn’t care enough to notice — and he has a new hobby horse. It’s blockchain of all things. Here’s an entertaining review by David Gerard.

Gilder predicts that the Google and Silicon Valley approach — big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, not charging users per transaction — is failing to scale, and will collapse under its own contradictions.

The Silicon Valley giants will be replaced by a world built around cryptocurrency, blockchains, sound money … and the obsolescence of philosophical materialism — the theory that thought and consciousness needs only physical reality. That last one turns out to be Gilder’s main point.

Right, that’s why he was promoting Intelligent Design creationism so assiduously. No surprise here.

But Gilder never quite makes his case that blockchains are the solutions to the problems he presents — he just presents the existence of blockchains, then talks as if they’ll obviously solve everything.

Blockchains promise Gilder comfort in certainty: “The new era will move beyond Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states to blockchain hashes of history and futurity, trust and truth,” apparently.

Pure Gilder. He loves to talk. Unfortunately, much of what he talks about is his personal fantasy about how the world should work.

There are so many beliefs Gilder has that ought to make him a figure of contempt, but what I can’t figure out is why people pay any attention to him.

Gilder despises feminism, and has described himself as “America’s number-one antifeminist.” He has written two books — Sexual Suicide, updated as Men and Marriage, and Naked Nomads — on this topic alone.

Also, per Gilder, Native American culture collapsed because it’s “a corrupt and unsuccessful culture,” as is Black culture — and not because of, e.g., massive systemic racism.

Gilder believes the biological theory of evolution is wrong. He co-founded the Discovery Institute in 1990, as an offshoot of the Hudson Institute. The Discovery Institute started out with papers on economic issues, but rapidly pivoted to promoting “intelligent design” — the claim that all living creatures were designed by “a rational agent,” and not evolved through natural processes. It’s a fancy term for creationism.

Gilder insisted for years that the Discovery Institute’s promotion of intelligent design totally wasn’t religious — even as judges ruled that intelligent design in schools was promotion of religion. Unfortunately for Gilder, we have the smoking gun documents showing that the Discovery Institute was explicitly trying to push religion into schools — the leaked Wedge Strategy document literally says: “Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”

Read the rest. It’s very thorough, and discusses Gilder’s ongoing machinations with people like Peter Thiel. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him drop off my radar, but my interest in him waned when his influence via the ID movement was discredited in the Dover trial. He’s been a cunning and influential little ratfucker since then, though!

Ken’s Kult Kompound is growing!

Ken Ham is bragging again. Whatever happened to Xian humility?

What’s most interesting is that “seasonal housing”. When Ham was lobbying for big tax breaks from Kentucky, one of his arguments was that they’d be bringing so many jobs to the area…only it turns out relatively few people want to work for low wages at a job that requires a loyalty oath and total fealty to conservative Christian ideals. So now he’s building cheap dorms and recruiting zealous young Christians to come work for his ministry. I wonder how much he pays them, if anything?

It’s a bizarre ministry that is going to bring converts to Jesus by way of zip lines and an imported Italian carousel, I guess.

The corruption is next door. Wake up!

Conservatives are desperately trying to change the subject. They want to avoid talking about their potential success in banning abortion and instead whine about those naughty leakers who exposed an imminent Supreme Court decision, or point fingers at protesters who stand peacefully outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, shaming them. They’d rather not discuss their actions to criminalize women’s health, something they’d been working towards for decades.

The ADF (Alliance Defending Freedom, an evangelical Christian organization, and today’s grand misnomer) was crowing about getting here four years ago. They figured that the election of Donald Trump had opened the gates and they were going to get everything they wanted. They were right.

“We have a plan to make Roe irrelevant or completely reverse it,” said Kevin Theriot, vice president of ADF’s Center for Life. Denise Burke, senior counsel at ADF, said that she is “really excited” about the strides that are being made to “eradicate Roe.”

“We have a strategic plan, that is a comprehensive, start-to-finish, from when we’re considering legislation all the way up to the Supreme Court, to challenge Roe,” said Burke. Among the reasons for ADF’s optimism is the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and so many Trump nominees to the federal appeals courts, which ADF believes will lead to courts granting approval to state laws further restricting access to and ultimately banning abortion.

This isn’t a one-off surprise at all. It’s everything they aspire to. Listen to Jerry Falwell brag that he’d been working on revoking women’s rights for 35 years.

They (I’ll get to who “they” are in a moment) aren’t done yet. Miscarriage shall be a crime.

On a humid morning in early October, Brittney Poolaw sat in an Oklahoma courtroom waiting on a verdict. Instead of the jail uniform she’d donned over the past 18 months, she wore a yellow and white blouse. After less than three hours of deliberation, the jury returned with their decision: Poolaw was guilty of first-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced to four years behind bars.

But Poolaw, a 20-year-old and a member of the Wichita Tribe, had not driven recklessly or shot a gun. She’d had a miscarriage.

At least one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage — it may be as high as one in two. You probably know women who have had miscarriages while trying to have a baby (I know of several, personally). Now imagine them thrown in jail for it. Imagine them being accused of manslaughter. This is what they want, and it’s just the start.

They want to ban contraception.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility that his state would ban certain forms of contraception, sidestepping questions about what would happen next if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

They’ve already started. A Louisiana law bans IUDs and IVF, and calls these acts of, not manslaughter, but homicide.

You really have to look at that law’s provisions to lock this act into existence, without any possibility of ever being overturned. It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so evil.

Any federal statute, regulation, treaty, executive order, or court ruling that purports to supdersede, stay, or overrule this Section shall be in violation of the United States Constitution and the Constitution of Louisiana and is therefore void.

Pursuant to the powers granted to the Legislature by Article X, Part III, of the Constitution of Louisiana, any judge of this state who purports to enjoin, stay, overrule, or void any provision of this section shall be subject to impeachment or removal.

They are like children, and they have even grander plans.

The governor of Texas want to stop educating kids.

Gov. Greg Abbott wants Texas to challenge a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires states to offer free public education to all children, including those lacking legal immigration status.

That ruling, known as Plyler v. Doe, struck down a Texas law that had denied state funding to educate children who had not been “legally admitted” to the United States.

We’ve been averting our eyes and lying to ourselves for decades. They couldn’t possibly be this bad, could they? It’s just a few people posturing for their constituents or their congregation, they couldn’t possibly succeed, and you’re probably looking at the ominous possibilities that those danged liberals bring up, saying “Nah, they can’t ban contraception, they can’t destroy the public school system, they can’t take over the government, they can’t establish a theocratic state, it’ll never happen,” and like always, it’s always easier to reassure ourselves that it can’t happen here than to act to prevent it from happening.

The problem is that they have an uncompromising philosophy that requires them to do everything possible to control your life.

…as Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, says: “Not only did Roe vs. Wade establish that there’s a constitutional right to abortion, it also rejected the idea that fetuses are people under the Constitution.” The draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is steeped in language that paints fetuses—no matter what stage of development—as people. And when we lend credence to the idea of fetal personhood, it creates “a situation in which, when there is perceived harm to a fetus, it can be a victim of a crime. You can’t add fetuses to the community of individuals who are entitled to constitutional rights without diminishing the rights of the person carrying that fetus,” Sussman says.

That evil idea is nonsense, unsupported by science. A person does not magically appear at the instant of conception; it’s not black or white, no baby, then <blink> baby. Fetal development is a progressive process that takes a single cell with all the autonomy of a shed speck of dander to a squirming infant over the course of months, and at the expense of the mother’s body and work…and that only begins years of responsibility to make it an independent person. They’ve absorbed this lie that full human beings are created at conception and that a fetus therefore has all the rights that its mother has.

Where does this foolishness come from? Here’s a clue.

The issue has also prompted Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, the House’s lone antiabortion Democrat, to clarify his position.

“My faith will not allow me to support a ruling that would criminalize teenage victims of rape and incest,” Cuellar said in a recent statement. “That same faith will not allow me to support a ruling that would make a mother choose between her life and her child’s.”

It’s their faith, their religion. Ironically, the Christian Bible doesn’t even take the absolutist position they do — these beliefs don’t come from a god, but from generation after generation of male prophets and preachers interpreting their holy book to say what they desire it to say, and endorse their possession and control of women.

And that tells you who they are. They are not The Other, they are not outsiders, they are not freakish cultists. They live among us. They are your aunts and uncles, parents and cousins. They’re your neighbors. Look around your community — it’s guaranteed to be pockmarked with a diverse assortment of churches, protected to an excessive degree by the law, given freedom from taxation or any kind of regulation, thriving like unchecked cancers in every town. Some of them are filled with decent people who care about civil rights for everyone, but in others…right now, at this instant, they are celebrating a new era of oppression, and are planning to elect more town council members, more school board members, more representatives and senators, more people who will tell everyone else that they must obey, they must follow, they must do as they’re told. Women will serve, gay people will be punished, miscegenation must be eradicated, children will be indoctrinated, everyone must accept that their beliefs, no matter how ridiculous, are Truth.

They are us. These oppressive laws are not built on a secular or rational foundation, they are entirely the product of peculiar religious beliefs of a minority that we’ve encouraged to flex and grow.

This insanity is going to continue on. We can fight back and elect better representatives, kick out some incompetent judges, pass laws that, for instance, end those screaming masses outside women’s health care clinics, but ultimately the solution has to be … tax the churches. End the special privileges given to religion. Stop the politicization of the pulpit. You want to endorse politicians, lobby for more restrictive laws, campaign against the heathen? You aren’t a church, you’re a Political Action Group, and should be regulated in the same way.

Bring back separation of church and state. Acknowledge that freedom of religion is one thing, a good thing, but that abuses of that freedom are the root cause of our current damnation. Educate our children about reality as we can see it, not blind mythology.

Don’t take offense at the Salem Hypothesis!

Every time I mention the Salem Hypothesis, as I did in recent video, I get a bunch of complaints from engineers that they aren’t creationists. I know. Most engineers are not creationists, or even necessarily prone to creationism. That’s not what the Salem Hypothesis says.

Here’s what RationalWiki says:

The Salem Hypothesis is the observation of an apparent correlation between the engineering trade and creationist beliefs (possibly due to crank magnetism, this can also include climate-change denial and other crackpot beliefs).

The hypothesis suggests that people who claim science expertise, whilst advocating creationism, tend to be formally trained as engineers (with the possible exception of chemical engineers).

This hypothesis does not address whether engineers tend to be creationists (the converse); however, it has been speculated that engineering predisposes people to a creation-science view.[citation needed]

There is some evidence that this characterization of respected members of the esteemed engineering profession can actually be extrapolated out to fundamentalism and quackery of all kinds.

Here’s Larry Moran and Bruce Salem explaining further.

The Salem Conjecture was popularized by Bruce Salem on the newsgroup talk.origins. It dates to before my time on that newsgroup (1990) and I haven’t been able to find archives to research the exact origin. The conjecture was explained by Bruce on numerous occasions, here’s a statement from Sept, 5, 1996.

My position is not that most creationists are engineers or even that engineering predisposes one to Creationism. In fact, most engineers are not Creationists and more well-educated people are less predisposed to Creationism, the points the statistics in the study bear out. My position was that of those Creationists who presented themselves with professional credentials, or with training that they wished to represent as giving them competence to be critics of Evolution while offering Creationism as the alternative, a significant number turned out to be engineers.

I know it’s subtle, but it’s not attacking engineers, it’s saying that creationists who claim scientific authority often turn out to be engineers, and not at all qualified.

I’d add a corollary: if they’re not engineers, they often turn out to be MDs or dentists.

Anyway, I also got email from an engineer who understood the distinction.

My name is [redacted] and I am a Mechanical Engineer and graduate from Michigan State University. I am not a creationist, but I did find out I was working with at least 2 young earth creationists. In a building of ~15,000 people at the former FCA/Chrysler headquarters that isn’t surprising. It was my first exposure to such ideas in person. My circle of friends/coworkers couldn’t believe someone had those ideas.

After watching some of your discussions I see they all seem to use the same tactics. I’d use their numbers for the Grand Canyon v Mount St. Helens river carving time and their numbers would work out to make the Earth older than 6,000 years, so they’d jump to a different topic without admitting the error. They’d deny evolution say it was never observed. I’d tell them about MSU’s long running evolution project in the physics building so off to another topic, then another ad nauseam.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you at least a data point to help offset the Salem hypothesis. I wonder what makes us lean toward creationism, odd. Honestly, it’s kind of sad, as I got into engineering because I wanted to know how the real world actually works. I cant imagine chaulking it up to a sky daddy and not thinking about it.

Just for laughs, though, here’s a creationist who thinks the Salem Hypothesis is just great.

Perhaps the reason that engineers are more likely to be critical of evolution, is because evolution actually is more of a question of engineering than biology, as it deals with the development of the most intricate, purposeful systems available. Thus, the field of study most likely to be able to correctly analyze this question would, in fact, be engineers.

See? Not knowing anything about biology is an advantage for certain kinds of engineers who want to pontificate on evolution.

Road trip, end of July

Here’s a little good news: Skepticon 14 is happening on 29-31 July.

I’m experiencing a little trepidation about attending an in-person meeting, but these are smart skeptics, they’ll all be practicing good hygiene and will wear masks, right? I know I will be.

What also tempts me is that I plan on driving there, slowly, with frequent stops, and maybe a couple of overnight stays en route. I intend to couple the trip to a spidering expedition in Iowa and Missouri. The farther south I go, the greater the likelihood of finding black widows somewhere, which would be cool.

Is it weird that I’m more comfortable with finding large venomous spiders than I am with meeting people?

Impressively straight-faced…until now.

He even looks like a prankster.

The people behind the silly “birds aren’t real” have always been very serious about their cause, and I’ve been impressed at how straight-faced they’ve been, but the facade cracked open on 60 Minutes, and they confessed that it’s all a pretense, but a pretense with a serious meaning.

With that, he finally broke character, and we met the real Peter McIndoe.

Sharyn Alfonsi: You’re the person that I’ve been hearing about but haven’t seen.

Peter McIndoe: Okay, great. Well, wonderful to meet you.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Yeah, nice to meet you too.

Mcindoe, the 24 -year-old college dropout behind Birds Aren’t Real, is fortunately, nothing like the megaphone carrying character under the cowboy hat.

He told us it’s all a parody, and it’s spread to billboards, bumper stickers and popped up at halftime during the NCAA men’s basketball national championship game last month.

Sharyn Alfonsi: What’s the purpose of all of this?

Peter McIndoe: So it’s taking this concept of misinformation and almost building a little safe space to come together within it and laugh at it, rather than be scared by it. And accept the lunacy of it all and be a bird truther for a moment in time when everything’s so crazy.

Peter McIndoe: The vision was creating something that reflected the absurdity through the eyes of the most confused archetype…

McIndoe at rally: People, when they make fun of me, don’t realize people also made fun of the founding fathers, you know, before they stormed the British gates and took over…

The humor is meant to be apolitical. McIndoe’s co-conspirators: Claire Chronis, Cameron Kasky and Connor Gaydos, say it’s become an outlet for a generation that’s been surrounded by conspiracy theories.

Connor Gaydos: It’s an opportunity for I think our generation to laugh, to make fun, to kind of be like, look, here’s like a laundry list of things that haven’t come true.

Cameron Kasky: You’ve been lying to us so we’re gonna lie to you back, and we’re gonna do it in a way that really is funny.

Wait, you’re telling me they’ve just been mocking and laughing at my generation all this time?

Good. Keep that in mind next time you see a Trump rally on TV. The kids are laughing at those clowns.

Who wants to break the news to them?

I consider this a clear case of pathological skepticism. Or perhaps more charitably, naive skepticism. A professional 747 pilot has set up a kickstarter to charter a passenger jet to fly from Rio de Janeiro to Perth, passing over Antarctica, to prove to flat-earthers that the Earth is spherically, or at least, that Antarctica isn’t an ice wall surrounding the rim of a disc-shaped earth. Why would you think that this, on top of all the far easier to obtain evidence, is the final clincher to convince a tiny group of delusional ranters that they are wrong?

It’s going to cost $1.5 million dollars to book this 16 hour flight, and it’s all supposedly for the benefit of educating flat earthers. Buy them a good introductory physics book instead. It’s less flashy, but probably more likely to work, given that this isn’t going to work at all.

Skeptics ought to be familiar with studies of the end-of-the-world cults, in which a prophet predicts armageddon or the rapture or some such nonsense to occur on a specific date, and the cultists gather and pray and wait and…nothing happens. It turns out that they don’t instantly drop their beliefs, which were socially expensive to acquire — getting ostracized by the out-group hurts — and which gave them the benefit of being valued by the in-group. Instead, they rationalized (that is, made excuses) and believed even more firmly. The flat-earthers are also a gang of conspiracy theorists who will invent various subterfuges that were made to undermine the truth by the pilot, who is obviously part of the plot.

It’s apparent that the flat-earthers don’t believe in their delusion because they’ve used science, so why would you imagine science would get them to think otherwise? Also, even a glance at most flat-earth literature will reveal that it’s all paranoid religious gobbledy-gook, and they aren’t going to be dissuaded by an airplane ride.

There is a documentary, Behind the Curve, about these fanatics. They are repeatedly shown evidence that demonstrate they are wrong, and they even design their own experiments to prove the earth is flat which consistently fail. They don’t change their minds. This is more of the same, only with a $1.5 million price tag, and it’s going to be another exercise in futility.

Kent Hovind whacked off to me again

Explain this, bozo.

Also to Jerry Coyne. Now there’s a fantasy trio that ought to send shivers of revulsion down your spine! Anyway, I was once again featured on Hovind’s “Whack-An-Atheist” series, and he once again avoided my challenge.

Way back in January, after repeated demands that I debate him, I offered a different alternative: that Kent Hovind should read a book. I even suggested one, Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True, because it’s a good general overview of the evidence for evolution, and would give him something actually said by an evolutionary biologist to sink his teeth into.

He responded by…not reading a book, but just regurgitating the same tired, false points he’s been making for decades. Come on, Kent, at the very least I expected this would compel him to get some new material! But nope, it was same ol’ same ol’.

Then he did it again yesterday. Still not reading a book, but instead digging up a YouTube video of Coyne presenting a summary of some of the concepts in the book, and whining about that with the very same slides he’s been using for years.

My god, but Kent Hovind is the laziest creationist on the circuits. It’s not a thick book, it’s written for a popular audience, it’s a relatively easy read. Reading it might have spared him from making a few ludicrous errors.

What Hovind did was focus on a tiny part of the story, which is generally a good idea, but he clearly picked the part where he thought he had a good gotcha. He drilled down into Haeckel. Coyne talked about how some embryonic features reveal their evolutionary history, like the presence of hind limb buds in dolphin embryos — retention of conserved features in development is evidence of evolution. Hovind, though, went on a familiar tirade about Ernst Haeckel, and his discredited theory of evolutionary recapitulation from the 19th century.

It’s totally irrelevant. That a scientist advanced a wrong theory about evolution 150 years ago does not change the fact that embryonic similarities are observed, that they make no sense in terms of modern function, but do make sense in the light of evolution as relics of their ancestry. It would be a bit like me attacking Hovind’s interpretation of the Bible by citing the Book of Mormon at him; I don’t think Hovind considers Joseph Smith to be a significant contributor to his ideas. Going on and on about the invalid Biogenetic Law to refute Coyne’s discussion of embryonic atavisms is basically the Wookie Defense.

Now if he’d actually read Coyne’s book, he’d have known that trying to attack him via Haeckel was inappropriate. Coyne also rejects the Biogenetic Law, as he explains in chapter 3:

This “adding new stuff onto old” principle also explains why the sequence of developmental change mirrors the evolutionay sequence of organisms. As one group evolves from another, it often adds its developmental program on top of the old one.
Noting this principle, Ernst Haeckel, a German evolutionist and Darwin’s contemporary, formulated a “biogenetic law” in 1866, famously summarized as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This means that the development of an organism simply replays its evolutionary history. But this notion is true in only a limited sense. Embryonic stages don’t look like the adult forms of their ancestors, as Haeckel claimed, but like the embryonic forms of ancestors. Human fetuses, for example, never resemble adult fish or reptiles, but in certain ways they do resemble embryonic fish and reptiles. Also, the recapitulation is neither strict nor inevitable: not every feature of ancestor’s embryo appears in its descendant, nor do all stages of development unfold in a strict evolutionary order. Further, some species, like plants, have dispensed nearly all traces of their ancestry during development. Haeckel’s law has fallen into disrepute not only because it wasn’t strictly true, but also because Haeckel was accused, largely unjustly, of fudging some drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar that they really are. Yet we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Embryos still show a form of recapitulation: features that arose earlier in evolution often appear earlier in development. And this makes sense only if species have an evolutionary history.

Yeah, fallen into disrepute. So why try to play gotcha with Coyne on that point? Coyne is actually presenting a von Baerian perspective here: von Baer, who did not accept evolutionary theory, had observed how similar early vertebrate embryos were to one another. That fact is not in dispute. I can go into my lab right now and pull up slides of sectioned and stained chick, mouse, and frog embryos that all show these shared developmental features. Pharyngeal pouches are a real thing! You can’t make them disappear by citing someone’s flawed pet theory for them.

Bonus! There’s a footnote in the passage above, and here it is.

Creationists often cite Haeckel’s “fudged” drawings as a tool for attacking evolution in general: evolutionists, they claim, will distort the facts to support a misguided Darwinism. But the Haeckel story is not so simple. Haeckel may not have been guilty of malfeasance, but only of sloppiness: his “fraud” consisted solely of illustrating three different embryos using the same woodcut. When called to account, he admitted the error and corrected it. There’s simply no evidence that he consciously distorted the appearance of the embryos to make them look more similar than they were. R.J. Richards (2008, chapter 8) tells the full story.

Coyne is a little too generous here. I think Haeckel demonstrated an over-zealous commitment to his theory, and while it may not have been conscious, he did bias his examples to favor an incorrect idea. He is correct, though, that it is really common for creationists to dig up the dead corpse of poor old Ernst Haeckel and wallop on it for a bit while telling everyone they’re defeating Darwinism. They aren’t.

By the way, the bit in the Origin where he discusses “the strongest single class of facts in favor of change of forms”, consists of Darwin discussing, among other things, von Baer’s observations of embryos, not Haeckel’s. Hovind misses the mark again, but I don’t think he’s read the Origin, either.