Marco Rubio backs off

Rubio has changed his mind: he now concedes that the earth is 4½ billion years old.

“There is no scientific debate on the age of the earth. I mean, it’s established pretty definitively, it’s at least 4.5 billion years old,” Rubio told Mike Allen of Politico. ”I was referring to a theological debate, which is a pretty healthy debate.”

“The theological debate is, how do you reconcile with what science has definitively established with what you may think your faith teaches,” Rubio continued. “Now for me, actually, when it comes to the age of the earth, there is no conflict.”

I’d actually agree with that statement, although I’d go on to mention that reality and faith are irreconcilable, so that theological debate is pretty damned pointless.

But of course now the Teabaggers will be gasping in horror. He is also now officially a flip-flopper.

Man, it’s got to be fun to be jockeying for a position in the 2016 presidential run…trying to simultaneously seem rational and intelligent while looking just stupid enough to appeal to the far right base.

Ignorance isn’t my ally

It’s so nice of Hank Campbell to share his lack of concern about creationism with us “simpletons”.

One of the silliest tropes in the hyped-up ‘controversy’ over evolution is that all religious people should be conflated with ‘Young Earth Creationists’.

Uh, what? Who does that? You certainly won’t catch the NCSE claiming that; you won’t even find me, rabid militant shrill atheist that I am, saying that. I’m not a fan of theistic evolutionists, but you won’t find me denying their existence.

So what does he base his belief in? Well, the recent news that Pat Robertson is an old earth creationist, a point I mocked myself — but that’s just an old story, and as I point out, this radically literalist bible-believing Christian stuff is relatively recent. But Campbell goes way too far in denial, and builds a case on his personal ignorance.

Granted, anecdotes are not data but I have never actually met a Young Earth Creationist. I know they exist but I know lots of religious people inside and outside of science and I have just never come across one of the true crazies. However, living in California I have come across all kinds of anti-science atheists who are just as creepy and nuts as any religious zealot. Because I am not a science blogger who wants to be a political one, I am not worried about evolution – Young Earth Creationists can’t even convince other Christians they aren’t batty so they are not convincing the country to make a federal standard for education and include religion in the science curriculum. If we just ignored them, they would be patronized and disregarded as harmless cranks, like they are in every civilized country where people have more interesting things to talk about.

He’s never met a YEC? Wow. What kind of bubble does he live in?

The data is available: a little less than half the American population believes that humans were created less than 10,000 years ago. The biggest creationist organization is Answers in Genesis, and I think the second biggest is the Institute for Creation Research; both explicitly insist that the earth is very young. Stroll into your local conservative mega-church and ask the pastor about the age of the universe — you’re most likely going to get a young answer. Check your local school board, and unless you’re in a very liberal region, it’s probably packed with teabaggers and the religious right.

But oh, yes, that sounds like a winning strategy: ignore them and they’ll go away. Right.

The rest of his agenda reveals his true agenda, though: he wants to argue that Democratic anti-science attitudes are worse than Republicans’, and tries to make the case that nobody ever criticizes the Democrats’ follies. Yeah, because I love Tom Harkin and hate those icky vaccinations and think every Democrat is automatically a saint of science.

But oh, no, he’s not a political blogger.

αEP: Shut up and sing!

This is one of a series of posts I’m working on over the next few days to criticize evolutionary psychology. More will be coming under the label αEP!

Recently, Bob Costas, a sports announcer, spoke out about gun control. In reply, the right wing has been in a frenzy of denunciations — he should just shut up, he’s not qualified to speak, he can’t possibly have reasonable opinions about anything other than football (of course, these same angry commentators don’t express similar opinions about Ted Nugent). It’s called Shut Up and Sing Syndrome.

Named after a Laura Ingraham book and a 2006 documentary about the harsh reaction to the Dixie Chicks’ anti-Bush comments, this syndrome condemns many Americans to believe that actors, musicians and athletes — really, anyone not deemed political “experts” — have no right to use their platform to address issues considered “political” in nature. In this case, conservatives are insisting that Costas is not merely wrong on the substance of his gun-related comments, but also that, according to the New York Times, “it was inappropriate to use the platform of an NFL telecast to make arguments concerning a hot-button issue like gun control.”

The insinuation is that as a sportscaster, he has no standing to weigh in on a political issue. In other words, like critics of outspoken athletes who tell them to “shut up and play,” critics want Costas to simply “shut up and talk only about sports.”

Sound familiar? It should. It’s a problem in more than just entertainment and politics — it’s also a problem in skepticism. What it really is is an authoritarian defense of orthodoxy that dismisses criticism unless it comes from the right kind of person — preferably one comfortably embedded deeply in the orthodox position. It’s a version of the Courtier’s Reply, only in this case it’s used to defend science, or a political position, rather than theology. Shut Up and Sing Syndrome imposes unjustifiable barriers to criticism: you don’t get to criticize the subject at hand unless, for instance, you have a Ph.D. in the relevant subject, or some other lofty credential, even if the criticism is based on obvious and trivial flaws that a layperson can see.

[Read more…]

Feathers on dinosaurs are UNBIBLICAL!

So Ken Ham visited Sea World in Australia — he didn’t like it, it was too expensive and full of evilution, so he thinks you should save money and go to his el cheapo animatronic Sunday School in a box, instead — but I did learn something new from his complaint. I knew that “millions of years” was a phrase to make a young earth creationist’s bowels palpitate, but it turns out there are three wicked phrases to assault Christians with.

As Christians, we need to have a mental security system where an alarm goes off when aspects of this anti-God religion are presented. Here’s what should happen when you hear or read the following:

  • “Millions of years” should set off a mental buzzer that says, “warning—this is an attack on biblical authority—this is a buzz word to say there was no global Flood.”
  • “Evolution” should set off a mental buzzer that says, “warning—this is an attack on biblical authority—this is a buzz word to say creation by God was wrong.”
  • “Feathered dinosaurs” should set off another mental buzzer that says, “warning—an attack on biblical authority—this is a buzz word to say creation by God was wrong.”

According to the true history book of the universe—the Bible—birds were made on Day 5, and dinosaurs (which are land animals) were made on Day 6. So birds existed before dinosaurs. But evolutionists claim dinosaurs existed before birds!

Umm, yes — birds are derived descendants of dinosaurs. Here Hammy boy, just to make you apoplectic: Microraptor. We’ve got some very good fossils of dinosaurs with feathers — and reality once again makes a creationist’s head buzz.

Hey, if I go up to a bible-believing Christian and say, “Feathered dinosaurs evolved over millions of years”, will the klaxons going off in their head make their brains explode, or just give them a mild headache? Either seems worth doing.

Did he just compare atheists to the Washington Generals?

I am offended! But I’m too busy waging war on the ubiquity of Christmas to care very much.

I have a plan. As Stewart notes, Christmas has been expanding, reaching gigantic size as it gobbles up Thanksgiving and threatens Halloween. It’s massive size means it has some vulnerabilities, however; there is a small thermal exhaust port located on 25 December itself which leads directly to the core of the religious system, and which we believe can be reached by a small elite strike team…either the atheists, or if they aren’t available, the Washington Generals. Your mission is to fly in close and drop a torpedo directly down their holiday by treating it as an entirely secular event: give material presents to family and friends, eat non-imaginary food, discuss real events, and just generally treat it as a period of time in the rotation of our planet at a particular point in its rotation about our home star.

This is going to work.

Oh gob, evo psych again?

You may have already heard that Ed Clint, a guy who has been dedicated to bashing Skepchick and Freethoughtblogs for over a year, has cloaked his biases in a pretense of objectivity and written a long critique of one of Rebecca Watson’s talks, accusing her of being a science denialist and anti-science because she so thoroughly ridiculed pop evo psych. The excesses and devious misrepresentations in that post were painful to read, as was the revelation that Clint is throwing away his career by jumping on the evo psych bandwagon in graduate school (I frequently advise students on good disciplines to pursue in grad school; bioinformatics and genomics have a great future ahead of them, as does molecular genetics and development, but evolutionary psychology is one I would steer them well clear of, as a field that has not and will not ever contribute much of substance. The good papers in evo psych are the ones that use the tools of population genetics well and avoid the paleolithic mumbo-jumbo altogether).

Fortunately, Stephanie Zvan has already torn into his ‘analysis’, showing that it’s mostly misplaced and misleading. I’m relieved, because I’m going to be tied up for a while, and I found Clint’s response to be extremely irritating.

One think that particularly rankled is that Clint puts up a pretense of being objective and that his criticisms are nothing personal; bizarrely, he even puts up a photo of himself taken with Rebecca Watson as if that were evidence that he’s not biased against her. What he doesn’t mention is that he’s been sharpening an axe since the “elevatorgate” episode; together with a disgruntled ex-FtB blogger who left in a bizarre huff over not getting enough respect, he founded a competing network (which is fine, of course) which they proceeded to stock almost entirely with writers with an an anti-FtB and strongly anti-Skepchick slant — I’ve had to laugh at the lineup which looks largely drawn from the ranks of the Slymepit, a notorious anti-feminist/anti-Rebecca Watson hate site, and my list of banned commenters. And looking at the people who comment there, again, they seem to be largely driven by hatred of Watson and feminism in general.

Again, that’s fine — we have biases here at FtB, too, in that we tend to be pro-feminist and when we founded it, I specifically told Ed Brayton that we needed to be sure to include more than just old white guys like us — but what isn’t fine is to lie about your motives. Any day, I’ll prefer open antagonism from an avowed enemy than fair and dissembling words from an Iago.

For example, after telling people to avoid insults in the comments, this is what Clint has to say:

Although PZ’s behavior is unfortunate, I would urge a modicum of compassion. I believe he lashes out because he feels so small and vulnerable, and because he is. I can think of few other reasons for such unprovoked barking. He is making a mistake in coming after me. He will be wounded by it. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, and that we could just have a calm chat about it.

Condescending and smarmy, isn’t he? Ick. He won’t call me names, he’ll just call me “small and vulnerable.” Man, I despise that kind of sliminess.

I’ll follow up on Stephanie’s post later this week, when my schedule calms down, and what I intend to do is dig into the substantive flaws in both Clint’s hatchet job and in that awful discipline of evolutionary psychology. Seriously, in the reviews Clint recommended to give the background on what evo psych is, I was appalled — do these people have any understanding of modern evolutionary theory at all? I think the answer is clearly “no.”

Hammy gets it wrong, again

Ken Ham is mad at Bill Nye again, because in the wake of the Rubio nonsense, Nye went on the air to explain why the earth is actually 4½ billion years old. Here’s the clip:

Now here’s where Ken Ham wigs out.

Well, children’s TV host Bill Nye’s understanding of science is worse than I thought. A few days ago, Bill Nye was interviewed on CNN about the age of the earth (this topic was a hot one in America because of headline news after Sen. Marco Rubio was asked a question about what he believed concerning the age of the earth).

Bill Nye in this CNN interview actually equated the age of the earth to the invention of smoke detectors. Hard to believe—but he did!

No, Ham really didn’t understand anything Bill Nye said, and it’s richly ironic to see Ham claiming someone else has a worse understanding of science.

Ionizing smoke detectors use a tiny amount of radiactive material to generate charged ions by their decay; these ions are released into the space in a capacitor, and their movement generates a constant trickle of current. If smoke particles enter the detector, they bind to the ions and block the current; that easily measured decline in current is what triggers the alarm in the detector.

This is a very simple system that depends entirely on our quantitative understanding of radioactivity. If radioactivity didn’t work like we thought it did, your smoke detector would not be very reliable, and for that matter, no one would have thought of using this function to work as a smoke detector.

Bill Nye did not equate the age of the earth to smoke detectors. He used smoke detectors as an example of how scientists have a very thorough understanding of radioactive decay. What he did use as an indicator of the age of the earth was a very brief summary of how rubidium decays into strontium with a half-life of about 48 billion years, allowing us to estimate the age of a sample by measuring the relative amounts of the two elements.

Ham then goes on his usual ignorant tangent of observational vs. historical science (ignore it, it’s rank inanity and I’ve dealt with it before) and challenges Nye to explain the very fact he explained in the video: I’ve highlighted a particularly relevant bit.

I once again challenge Bill Nye to give us one example of how evolution has anything to do with the development of technology and to explain how smoke detectors have anything to do with the age of the earth—when a detector is actually the result of intelligent observational science and the accumulated information about the properties of matter that enabled inventors to build such technology.

Yes, exactly. We have accumulated information about the properties of matter that allow us to build smoke detectors, and that same information rules out the possibility that the earth is 6000 years old. The information contradicts Ham’s claims. But what Ken Ham wants to be able to do is throw out the scientific information that makes his biblical exegesis into nonsense, and keep the bits that allow smoke detectors to work.

You don’t get to do that.

But the smoke detector discussion wasn’t about evolution, anyway. It was about a measurable physical property of the universe, its age, which Ham denies. I wish these guys could get it straight: evolution is about biology, and describes processes in living creatures that occurred on this one planet; physics is describing more general physical properties that are not specific to biology.

Ham is screeching about a debate between Nye and one of his clueless staff people. I do not recommend that Bill Nye take him up on it — as we can see, the Answers in Genesis folk don’t understand anything, don’t pay attention to what other people say, and don’t learn anything, so a debate would just be an opportunity for a creationist to preach from a podium with a credible and credentialed real science educator right next to them. Not a good idea.

HOLY CRAP! Pat Robertson repudiates Young Earth Creationism!

I really shouldn’t be surprised; Pat Robertson is kind of a dinosaur himself, and this literalist creationism pushed by Answers in Genesis is actually a relatively new development, but Robertson did come out and plainly reject the notion that the earth is only 6000 years old, or that dinosaurs and humans lived together. That’s sort of good news, but it’s really just old school creationism of the type that was common at the time of the Scopes trial and up through the 1950s.

But still…it’s always helpful to see the religious right splitting this way. You just know that Ken Ham is spitting blood in fury at this horrible liberal Christian who is denigrating the holy word of god! For the Hamites, the young earth is a bloody battle flag emblematic of their whole struggle for a Christianist nation, and to see Robertson under the banner of “Millions of Years” must be irritating.

(via The Friendly Atheist.)

Wasn’t Ron Lindsay just pinin’ for the days of the Accommodation Wars?

Yes, he was. We could happily bring them back, though, because Nicholas Wade is still writing for the NY Times, as Jerry Coyne mentions today.

Wade’s column is practically an exercise in nostalgia, harking all the way back to 2005. He’s very concerned that people are bashing poor Marco Rubio for not understanding that there is no confusion about the age of the earth — it’s 4½ billion, not 6000, years old. Wade is almost Mooneyesque in his tribute to the old tropes. Look here:

The inevitable clash with science, particularly in the teaching of evolution, has continued to this day. Militant atheists like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins beat the believers about the head, accomplishing nothing; fundamentalist Christians naturally defend their religion and values to the hilt, whatever science may say.

There’s Richard Dawkins! He’s militant! He’s beating up the Christians, who are all just meekly defending themselves!

I swear, I thought we fought our way past those old stereotypes years ago — only the terminally clueless still refer unironically to “militant atheists”. But have no fear, Wade has a solution to the conflict between scientists and creationists: all we need to do is admit that evolution is a theory.

By allowing that evolution is a theory, scientists would hand fundamentalists the fig leaf they need to insist, at least among themselves, that the majestic words of the first chapter of Genesis are literal, not metaphorical, truths. They in return should make no objection to the teaching of evolution in science classes as a theory, which indeed it is.

It’s like one of the oldest creationist misconceptions in the book! Of course it’s a theory, but it’s a scientific theory, which means that it is a broad explanation that encompasses all the available evidence and has excellent predictive power to guide research. It’s not going to console creationists, unless we plan to also encourage them to continue believing that it means “just a guess”. And seriously, Wade believes that that’s enough to make all the creationists in the world simply fold up shop and go back to church, blissful and happy in a world full of singing angels and magic spun sugar fairy-tale castles? That is quite possibly the dumbest resolution of a chronic problem in the conflict between science and religion that I’ve ever read.

Hey, I’ve got an idea: we can solve all the problems in the Middle East by just getting the Jews and Christians and Moslems to admit that they’re all worshipping the same god. Presto! The fighting ends! (Sorry, I just felt my own words were a challenge and had to come up with an even dumber idea.)

And please, if you’ve ever read the Book of Genesis, practically the last word you’d ever apply to it is “majestic”. Petty, tribal, vicious, demented, small-minded, violent, bizarre…those are better words. And the first chapter isn’t really great poetry, I’m sorry to say — if you think otherwise, you’ve been brainwashed by the repetition. I’m really not prepared to abandon a commitment to scientific evidence just so some dim bumpkin can cling to his cherished belief that a poem saying a magic man poofed everything into existence is a deep insight.

I save the worst for last.

A scientific statesman, if there were such a person, would try to defuse the situation by professing respect for all religions and making a grand yet also trivial concession about the status of evolution.

I’m no statesman, but…you will never catch me lying and saying that I respect all religions. I do not, sir. Religions are systematic collections of threats and cajoling lies intended to bully a population into living in fear and supporting a parasitic priestly caste. They do not deserve respect. What they need is dismantling.

You will also not catch me making concessions about science simply to appease pious politicians. I will state the strengths and limitations without regard for the sensibilities of ignorant charlatans.

Damn, I really am not a statesman. But if that’s what a statesman does, you shouldn’t be able to find a scientist so willing to compromise on their principles to be one.

What I really want to see is the DNA sequence of an alien Grey

Dr Melba S. Ketchum has made press release of an astonishing discovery: she has sequenced Bigfoot DNA, she claims.

“Our study has sequenced 20 whole mitochondrial genomes and utilized next generation sequencing to obtain 3 whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatch samples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species. Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.

Hominins are members of the taxonomic grouping Hominini, which includes all members of the genus Homo. Genetic testing has already ruled out Homo neanderthalis and the Denisova hominin as contributors to Sasquatch mtDNA or nuDNA. “The male progenitor that contributed the unknown sequence to this hybrid is unique as its DNA is more distantly removed from humans than other recently discovered hominins like the Denisovan individual,” explains Ketchum.

“Sasquatch nuclear DNA is incredibly novel and not at all what we had expected. While it has human nuclear DNA within its genome, there are also distinctly non-human, non-archaic hominin, and non-ape sequences. We describe it as a mosaic of human and novel non-human sequence. Further study is needed and is ongoing to better characterize and understand Sasquatch nuclear DNA.”

Wait. Fully human mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from your mother, so she assumes that all Sasquatches had human women as relatively recent ancestors, but at the same time, the nuclear DNA is some bizarre mish-mash that includes non-ape sequences? That makes no sense at all.

Well, there’s one way it makes sense: it’s the result of sloppy lab work and high levels of contamination, and a complete lack of discrimination on the part of the investigators. No details have been released yet, but I imagine that what they’re sequencing are from hair samples turned in by Bigfoot investigators: dirty, grimy hair samples collected by a mix of charlatans and naive, deluded hunters. I wonder if there are raccoon and possum genes in their sequences…

The paper has not been published, and I don’t see how making a press release about a paper in peer review would help. I expect that no reputable journal will touch it, and it will sink unpublished…except that the myth that Bigfoot DNA has been examined and found to be unique will live on.

But here’s what really bugs me: it’s from a DNA lab called DNA Diagnostics, Inc. They do forensics, paternity testing, and consulting/expert witnessing in the court system in Texas. Would you trust results from that lab? How many other labs doing forensic DNA testing are run by people who think they can identify Bigfoot in a sample? If Ketchum has dealt with any criminal cases, I foresee grounds for future court challenges in her future.