I’m back

But still a little shell-shocked. I had a terrible flight back from Denver, thanks to the incompetence of the staff at the Delta desk and the weather, and landing at the airport after 10pm and having a 3 hour drive back didn’t help, either. I just staggered up now and took a shower and desperately need a cup of tea.

But I wanted to quickly mention two things. One was something weird in my talk. I was (once again) making the argument that there had to be more to the atheism movement than just the dictionary definition, and I first made the case that we’ve comfortably accommodated much bigger, loftier goals than not believing in gods, by pointing out that we readily accept science as part of the atheist parcel. And then I moved on to asking whether there were other things we’d be willing to say that atheists, as a movement, ought to fight for. What are the secular causes?

“Science Education?” I asked. And the audience said “yes”.

“Environmentalism?” I asked. And the audience said “yes”.

“Civil rights for minorities?” I asked. And the audience said “yes,” loudly.

“Gay marriage?” I asked. And the audience yelled back “yes”.

“Feminism?” I asked. And the audience shouted “yes”.

It was weird. I kind of expected that at some point the audience would start tapering off or even saying “no,” and they didn’t. They got louder (which was also due to getting warmed up, I’m sure.) Here I was, all prepared to talk about the importance of each of those, and they just rolled over and made it easy for me. In the Q&A, I was later asked, in response to my suggestion that atheist organizations ought to have more prominent special interest groups to pursue specific sub-goals of the movement, if that wouldn’t dilute the focus of the whole organization, which was a reasonable concern, but that was the only reservation I heard. See, weird…from all the pushback we see on the web, you’d think there’d be more objections. I’m pretty sure it’s not my awesome personal charisma that overwhelmed any dissent.

Later in the talk, a similar thing happened. I showed a slide with just this on it:

The audience erupted into applause before I even said anything! I really missed an opportunity — I should have just done an Atheism+ talk and gotten wild accolades. I actually didn’t say a lot about it: I was making the case that the strong response to this idea should be telling every atheist organization something…that there is a huge swell of interest in their potential membership in making social justice issues a much bigger part of the movement.

Oh, and the second thing: I was having lunch with Matt Dillahunty and AronRa, and the possibility of doing a freethoughtblogs conference came up. We bounced around some really cool ideas about making it different from all those other conferences (for instance, what if we did it in Cincinnati, and made challenging Answers in Genesis part of it? What about bringing teenagers in to plan the social part of it all?), but it’s all very tentative and remote at this time — don’t get your hopes up. I thought I’d ask, though…would there be interest in having a free or very inexpensive con ala Skepticon centered around the FtB roster and our pet issues? Should we think a little more seriously about it?

That was quick. Video of the talk is now available.

Republicans speak to the invisible man

Marco Rubio spoke to the RNC last night, and reminded everyone that we atheists aren’t Americans after all.

We are special [We are?] because we’ve been united not by a common race or ethnicity [This is true of many countries. What about Canada?]. We’re bound together by common values [Again, trivially true of most countries]. That family is the most important institution in society [Is there a country that doesn’t have and value families?]. That almighty God is the source of all we have [Nope. Wrong. We built that].

Special, because we’ve never made the mistake of believing that we are so smart that we can rely solely on our leaders or our government [Nice sentiment in a speech where he’s trying to convince us to rely on Mitt Romney].

Our national motto is "In God we Trust," reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all [Fuck you too, Marco Rubio].

And special because we’ve always understood the scriptural admonition that "for everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required." [Say what? So the rich should pay more taxes?]

We are a blessed people [Nope. We’re lucky. Some of us are rich. But millions are poor and hungry and ignorant. Don’t forget them]. And we have honored those blessings with the enduring example of an exceptional America [What seems to be making us particularly exceptional among wealthy nations is the idiocy of our leaders and the piety of our population, neither of which is anything to be proud of].

I think it was a theme. They brought on Clint Eastwood to make a stumbling address to an invisible man in an empty chair, and Rubio to do the same thing with a bit more polish.

The Republicans can kiss the atheist vote goodbye, but it makes me wonder…are there any atheists left in the Republican party, besides Karl Rove?

Why I am an atheist – Mitch Austin

I was raised lightly religious, Lutheran, went to AWANA with friends.  At 14 I joined De Molay.  They say prayers at regular intervals.  The prayers are all non-sectarian, but everyone knows they’re said to Baby Jesus.  It’s also a great way to meet the ladies.  I’m sure most everyone lost their “purity” through club hookups.  Around age 17 that just kinda petered-out (no pun intended) and I didn’t give it another thought.

[Read more…]

A transcript!

The busy beavers have been hard at work and have provided a complete transcript of that discussion between Jen McCreight, Rebecca Watson, Louis, Brownian, and me on Atheism+. Thanks!

Although…never, ever bother to read the comments on youtube. I went to get a link to the video, and found this amazing gem.

Uh, yeah. Elevator Guy ring a bell? It started out as a non-issue, then PZ Myers trumped up a storm and all of a sudden, Elevator Guy is a rapist, sexist misogynist son of a bitch bastard with white cisgender male privilege. Then she found all the traction in the world to make a mountain out of a molehill, and I’m sure she’s gotten more than a pretty penny from the whole debacle, and of course with support from PZ Myers himself.

We don’t even know what he looks like because she’s never said.

The distortions continue. I did not “trump up a storm”, and certainly did not say any such things about this elevator guy…and Rebecca Watson herself hasn’t said anything like that, either. It’s really bizarre to see how disconnected from reality the whispers have become.

Fish are not inside-out insects

It’s a shame I have to say that right from the beginning.

I’m beginning to develop a distaste for computer models of biological processes, which is a shame. From Andrulis to Fleury to Pivar, the field is tainted with people who don’t know a lick of biology but are good at inventing algorithms that go spinning off into never-never land, spawning odd and suggestive shapes that, in their happy ignorance, they assign to real organisms.

The latest is a guy named Eric Werner who, in a surprising change of pace, has a model that does not involve whorls, spirals, vortices, or toroids, the usual objects of crackpot obsessions, and is instead about inversions. He has a model for the production of skeletons, which is his, and which explains both exoskeletons and endoskeletons. “Exo”, “endo”, get it? All you have to do to turn one into the other is to turn the animal inside out.

That’s the other thing about these kinds of modelers — it’s got to be a really simple transformation that does the job all in one step.

An intriguing unanswered question about the evolution of bilateral animals with internal skeletons is how an internal skeleton evolved in the first place. Computational modeling of the development of bilateral symmetric organisms suggests an answer to this question. Our hypothesis is that an internal skeleton may have evolved from a bilaterally symmetric ancestor with an external skeleton. By growing the organism inside-out an external skeleton becomes an internal skeleton. Our hypothesis is supported by a computational theory of bilateral symmetry that allows us to model and simulate this process. Inside-out development is achieved by an orientation switch. Given the development of two bilateral founder cells that generate a bilateral organism, a mutation that reverses the internal mirror orientation of those bilateral founder cells leads to inside-out development. The new orientation is epigenetically inherited by all progeny. A key insight is that each cell contained in the newly evolved organism with the internal skeleton develops according to the very same downstream developmental control network that directs the development of its exoskeletal ancestor. The networks and their genomes are are identical, but the interpretation is different because of the cell’s inverted orientation. The result is inside-out bilateral symmetric development generating an inside-out organism with an internal skeleton.

My first thought was…an interesting suggestion. We know from the homology of the patterning molecules involved that vertebrates and invertebrates are upside-down relative to each other, so at some point an ancestor flipped (or more likely, the ancestor was morphologically ambiguous in the dorsal-ventral axis), so let’s think about whether that’s feasible. And then my second thought was…wait, no way. That makes no sense at all.

So I read the paper. I was right, it makes no sense at all.

First thing I noticed was that the acknowledgements thank Francis Hitching, a notorious crank, Martin Brasier (no problem there, he’s a paleontologist specializing in Cambrian evolution…but also not a developmental biologist), and Cellnomica, a company that makes the modeling software. I looked. Eric Werner is the president and CEO of Cellnomica, which sort of means he was happily thanking himself for allowing him to use his software, which is nice, I suppose.

But except for Brasier, I’m already unimpressed. That doesn’t matter, though; he will sway me by the data and the evidence, right?

Next problem: there isn’t any. This is one of those totally evidence-free papers; the author didn’t bother to look up anything about the induction of skeletal elements in arthropods and vertebrates, cites nothing but three (!) papers all written by Eric Werner (!!), all published unreviewed in arXiv (!!!), and builds everything from a simplistic premise about how axis information is inherited epigenetically in dividing cells. There actually is a substantial literature on the inheritance of the orientation of cytoskeletal elements in dividing cells in flies and nematodes, for instance — but it’s not as trivial as what Werner proposes, and he doesn’t cite any of it, anyway.

The whole thing consists of the graphical output of simulation runs on his software, like this:


Orientation transform results in inside-out growth. The bilateral multicellular organism on the left Fig.a, where the red cells are on the outside, develops from the founder cells next to its right in Fig.b that have a Back-to-Back orientation. The reversal from a Back-to-Back orientation to a Face-to-Face orientation in the founder cells Fig.b is epigenetically inherited in the progeny. The result of this orientation switch is inside-out development seen in the organism on the right Fig.c where the red cells are on the inside. The transformation is reversible going in either direction depending only on the initial orientation of the bilateral founder cells.

He hasn’t even questioned his premises. Is there evidence of cells producing mirror-image progeny (actually, I recall that there is…but it’s not quite as uniform as he proposes)? Is there reason to think from, say evidence in the fossil record, that ancient chordates are inside-out arthropods? Nope, and Brasier should have been able to tell him so. Is there developmental evidence that this is how skeletons form? For instance, are the progenitors of internal skeletons homologous to the cells of the arthropod cuticle that produce there exoskeleton?

And that’s where I stopped and told myself, “obviously not”. The arthropod cuticle is produced by ectodermal cells that produce chitin. If you turned one literally inside out, the ectoderm would become the endoderm, the lining of the gut…a phylogenetically ancient tissue with homology between arthropods and chordates. It does not produce the chordate skeleton. That job is done by mesodermal derivatives…a tissue that forms in roughly similar ways by ingression/involution of cells during gastrulation in both groups. Mesoderm forms muscle and connective tissue in both arthropods and chordates, and produces bone and cartilage in addition in chordates.

The story is complete abiological and ahistorical bollocks. It’s really nothing but a pointless exercise in making a computer program run its paces, and is about as relevant to evolution as Spore, another game that attempted to model a science and failed abysmally.

It also makes me curious about something else: it was published in arXiv, which is mainly a repository of physics papers, with some abstract biological/mathematical stuff trickling in. Is the physics collection as plagued with drivel as the few samples of biology papers I’ve seen shoveled in there?

Werner E (2012) How to Grow an Organism Inside-Out: Evolution of an internal skeleton from an external skeleton in bilateral organisms. arXiv:1207.3624v1

(via Tommy Leung)

Hitchens’ last eloquent gasp

I just ordered Hitchens’ Mortality; it’ll be out next week. I’m very much looking forward to it in a grim sort of way. You can read the last chapter right now, and incoherent and scattered as those terminal jottings are, it’s still marvelously well-written. My favorite quote so far?

If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

You know the whole book is going to be full of those.