Learning

Once upon a time, confident in my knowledge of biology, I was certain that creationists were stupid. But then I read some of their articles and listened to some of their talks, and learned that some of them (not all of them! Some really did prove to be incredibly stupid) were extremely intelligent and well-educated — they were just profoundly wrong, and were using their minds to build elaborate rationalizations to shelter their errors from correction.

And then I discovered that a lot of scientists didn’t understand evolution very well either, and that many atheists were even more ignorant of science than their creationist opponents. So I’ve been learning that some very stupid ideas may be held by intelligent people, and vice versa.

Also once upon a time, content in my privilege of being a person of equanimity with few mental instabilities to trouble me, I was certain that the people who held those bad ideas, if not stupid, were surely insane. How could you believe the earth was 6000 years old or that gods existed or that prayer and UFOs and Bigfoot were real, all crazy ideas without a doubt, if you weren’t crazy yourself? And then, of course, it sunk in that most of the inhabitants of this country believe fervently in a god, so it would require a peculiar definition of insanity to argue that a majority of fully functioning, prospering individuals were all mad. They’ve got some crazy ideas, sure, but that doesn’t mean that the entirety of their behavior can be dismissed as the product of a damaged brain.

And then I met a great many smart, disciplined, hard-working, successful atheists and scientists who admitted to suffering from mental illness…and they were good people! “Crazy” isn’t grounds for rejection of individuals.

Don’t get me wrong: there really are lots of stupid, crazy ideas floating around with dangerous levels of popularity. But you can’t reject them with pat dismissals of their promoters as obviously stupid and disturbed.

So yes, I’ll think twice before concluding that someone with a crazy stupid idea is necessarily mentally ill.

It needs to be said

David Hone has a good piece on what constitutes an appropriate subject for debate, and how the media fails.

The truth however, is near inevitably that there is only a very small minority making a disproportionate noise about their case. There is no debate over evolution, or the dinosaurian origin of birds, or that HIV leads to AIDS, or that climate is changing, or a great many others. That there are real, accredited scientists who do not think this is the case is not in doubt (sadly). But that this represents a real schism in the scientific community, that large numbers of researchers take these positions and that it occupies a significant amount of scientific research, or that there is good evidence for that position is certainly incorrect. One or two people arguing a point (and often doing so primarily in the media) does not make a debate.

…

This for me seems like the opposite of what good journalism should be. Surely the point is to provide a representation of the true state of affairs rather than spin (even if unintentionally) the fact that there is disagreement as something that is effectively 50:50, when it’s 99.9:00.1 or less. This can be humorous from an insider’s position when one sees the media triumph a paper as ‘reigniting the debate over x’ when in truth the researchers have looked at the paper, noted an obvious flaw or that it simply rehashes old and incorrect arguments or data, and carried on. The flipside of this is where there really is a scientific debate, in which case the debate is not reignited at all, but merely still going on, it has merely come to the attention of the press and public again which is not the same thing at all.

At least I have noticed over the years a decreasing tendency for newspapers to try to couple every discovery about evolution with a quote from some creationist somewhere, so I think the situation is slowly improving.

The Gumby Gambit

Tom Bethell is a fellow traveller with the Intelligent Design creationists of the Discovery Institute; he often publishes on their website, and he’s the author of quite a few books questioning the dogma of science. He also thinks he’s a polymath: he wrote Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary?, which claims that Einstein was wrong, and he also wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, which claims that radiation is good for you, there is no global climate change going on, Shakespeare didn’t write those plays, and evolution is bunk, among many other remarkable assertions.

He’s a gumbyesque crackpot, in other words.

His latest effort is a rant on l’affaire greenscreen in which he explains natural selection to us. Read on; you will be in awe as Mr Gumby bellows out his definitions and explanations. He gets everything absolutely backwards.

An analogous situation arises with varieties of bacteria that are immune to antibiotics. The immune varieties are suddenly “fit” and so they survive. But the word “adaptation” is misleading because the immune varieties have to appear first. They don’t “adapt,” or reshape themselves in recognition of the suddenly hostile environment. They are not like people who “adapt” to cold weather by putting on overcoats. They are like people who accidentally had overcoats on before the cold snap came.

NS is not supposed to be an explanation of how we get more of something; a dark moth, for example. It’s supposed to show how the moth itself arose. And that is what the Darwinists have never been able to demonstrate; not just with moths but with anything else. That’s why I hesitate to call NS “real.” Well, I guess it is, as long as it’s defined narrowly enough.

Read that last paragraph again. It’s a marvel. Tom Bethell doesn’t have even a basic understanding of the principle of natural selection; he doesn’t even understand it as well as Darwin, who wrote it up in 1859.

Natural selection is an explanation of how we get more (or less) of something; it describes one mode of change in the frequency of a trait in a population over multiple generations. It is not about physiological adaptation, but about changes in allele frequency. That’s all biologists have claimed for the concept, ever; it’s one of the things population geneticists have lots of math to describe.

Natural selection is not an explanation for how evolutionary novelties arise in the first place. For that, we have to look at mutations and subtler enabling changes that facilitate the emergence of new phenotypes, like recombination and genetic accommodation. The idea that variation in the environment can induce appropriate changes in heritable traits of organisms is the discarded notion of Lamarckian inheritance — we don’t see evidence of that.

He gets it all completely wrong. Even more remarkably, he gets it wrong after giving a useful analogy with his overcoat example.

Yes, natural selection works exactly like “people who accidentally had overcoats on before the cold snap came.” That’s Darwin’s key insight and Bethell’s key failure: natural selection isn’t about how individuals adapt, it’s about how populations adapt by winnowing out less fit individuals (those who don’t have an overcoat) and promoting the more fit individuals (those who happened to have an overcoat, and will pass it on to their children).

I really don’t understand how someone could write a whole book with chapters about evolution and not grasp that beautiful, simple, elegant idea. I suppose it’s the same way someone with no understanding of physics could write a whole book with no math in it disproving Einstein.

Isn’t it revealing, though, how the Discovery Institute promotes people like Bethell and Gauger who have no understanding of the field they aim to disprove? It’s as if the only people they can find who share their goals are all incompetents with delusions of understanding the science about as well as a reasonable high school student.

Which god, I wonder?

Hmm. Apparently, Donald Vroon thinks music is evidence of god, and he cites his emotional response to Easter music to back up his claim.

That’s right — a guy thinks that because his favorite music makes him burst into tears, his emotional experience is a sign that a god exists.

I can counter that, though. My son is home for the holidays, and I’ve been hearing a lot of death metal in the car and wafting down from the upstairs bedroom. I wonder if we threw Mr Vroon into the mosh pit at a Cradle of Filth concert, if he’d relate to the ecstatic experience of their fans? Would he burst into tears? What god would that demonstrate, I wonder?

moshpit
Rapture and ecstasy always indicate the presence of a deity, obviously.

Behold! The Legendary Intelligent Design Creationism Research Laboratory!

The Discovery Institute released a video of one of their stars, Ann Gauger, explaining the flaws in “population genetics” (I put it in quotes because it wasn’t a description of the field of population genetics that any competent biologist would recognize). Larry Moran points out the errors.

But then, someone noticed something else: the video was fake. It was Ann Gauger, all right, talking in a “lab”. Again, the quotes are because she was actually talking in front of a green screen, and a stock photo of a lab was spliced in behind her. Oops. It adds comic absurdity on top of the egregious errors in her babbling.

But of course that’s exactly what the DI wants. They can’t answer for the stupidity of her comments, but they can wave their hands and shout, “We do too have a lab! A real lab! And it’s sciencey and everything!” Because, after all, when you’re doing cargo cult science, the props are all important, and the substance doesn’t matter.

So, yeah, the indignant DI released a real photo of their real lab, with Gauger gazing at a petri dish. And here it is:

Annlab

Errm, are we supposed to be impressed? I could give you an equivalent photo of a few shelves in one of our student labs — it would look similar, just messier. A petri dish, a few orange-top bottles, a small hood in the background—all they needed to make it really sciencey were a few bubbling bottles of colored water. D. James Kennedy did a better job in “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy”.

kennedylab

See? Now that’s a lab!

But seriously, the furniture does not make the lab — the work being done in it does. When you think it matters that you can pose with a petri dish, you really are doing cargo cult science.

The total cultural solution

I told you that this problem of mass shootings was amenable to skeptical analysis, and that it would take a comparative analysis to work out exactly why America was so violent. But of course, someone has already done this; this is what sociology is all about. So here’s one interesting explanation that I didn’t think of.

Mass shooters in any nation tend to be loners with not much social support who strike out at their communities, schools and families, says Peter Squires of the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom, who has studied mass shootings in his own country, the United States and Europe.

Many other countries where gun ownership is high, such as Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Israel, however, tend to have more tight-knit societies where a strong social bond supports people through crises, and mass killings are fewer, Squires said.

…

“What stops crime above all is informal social controls,” he says. “Close-knit societies where people are supported, where their mood swings are appreciated, where if someone starts to go off the rails it’s noted, where you tend to intervene, where there’s more support.”

What, a better social support network would reduce violent outbreaks? You know, that’s the very same solution that also breaks the dependency on religion. Atheists should be entirely behind building stronger government support for everyone: it weakens religion, it reduces violence, and it reduces economic disparities, giving everyone an equal opportunity to develop and grow. It’s the best and greatest solution ever!

Too bad it’s the antithesis of Republican (and conservative Democrat) policies.

Aaargh, go away, silly physicists!

It pained me to see that bad biology peddled by Davies and Lineweaver, who tried to argue that cancer was a revived genetic atavism, a kind of throwback to a primeval state. But they just won’t learn. It’s as if they don’t care to learn. Now Lineweaver has a new article up flogging the same old dud of an idea, claiming that an “astrobiological view” of cancer's evolutionary origin is relevant. He does have a new metaphor.

Genomes have a complicated history, like a canvas that has been painted on over and over again with different scenes in each layer. When the top surface of this palimpsest gets old and cracks and peels off, you don’t get random mutations of colour – you get glimpses of the underlying scenes that were painted years earlier.

Those underlying scenes are the ancient genes that used to rule the roost. And those ancient scenes don’t contain the genes to regulate cell proliferation. So cells can proliferate without knowing where they are in the body, and cancer emerges.

You know, rather than an astrophysicist’s view, I’d rather have a microbiologist’s view. She wouldn’t be assuming that ancient single-celled organisms lacked genes to regulate cell proliferation — she’d probably know that bacteria have cell cycle regulators, and control their reproduction to match opportunities and constraints in the environment. It would be nice for these bozos to get some input from people who actually know how cells work, rather than that they continue on with their ignorant assumptions.

Also, he repeats this really annoying rationale.

Our model gives hope to cancer researchers because it predicts that the number of adaptive behaviours available to cancer is not open-ended.

You know what else would give researchers hope? If your model predicted that a shot of penicillin would cure cancer. It doesn’t, but it sure would be hopeful to pretend that something that simple would fix all our problems. Also, maybe it could fix global warming and end the wars in the Middle East, too…see how hopeful it could be?

But we don’t evaluate hypotheses by how much we wish they were true — we test them against reality, instead. Davies and Lineweaver really need a good solid whack on the noggin by the 2×4 of reality, that’s for sure.

A serious atheist survey

This one will take a little effort to respond to responsibly: no just clicking a button and going on! A sociologist is asking a lot of questions:

What do we know about the make-up of the atheist community both here in the United States and around the world? What are the perceptions of atheists about the state of atheism-related organizations and what these entities can or should do for them? What are the perceptions of atheists about believers? What types of atheists are there? How does being an atheist impact how one navigates in the social world? What is the demographic makeup of the atheist community both in the United States and around the world? What similarities and differences are there among atheists of different genders, ages, and geographical locations?

Take a half hour and answer the survey. There’s also a blog where the data is being discussed.