A few well-deserved words for Peter Leschak

Peter Leschak writes in the Star Tribune about his conversion from creationist to rational human being. He used to be a smug, condescending, young earth creationist idiot, but he got better. Good for him! He still has a few things to learn, though.

Why is it that despite convincing scientific evidence so many Americans are creationists? For me, at least, the answer was clear: I had never seriously studied evolution and the facts supporting it. I’d graduated high school and college with honors and continued to read widely, and yet was not adequately exposed to a key concept of science. The chief fault lies with the scientific establishment.

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When Venn diagrams go bad

Or, why skeptics sometimes drive me nuts.

Sometimes, skeptics are the most smug and obnoxious people, blind to their own flaws, and lording it over atheists and humanists with their assumption that they are the natural lords of the entire domain of reason (and admittedly, sometimes atheists take the same tack; there are no innocent parties here). It’s extraordinarily annoying, especially when they start looking down their noses at mere atheists.

Case in point: Kyle Hill at JREF. You see, he attended both NECSS, a skeptical meeting, and the Freethought Festival, an atheist meeting, and was shocked at how stupid the atheists were (although he uses nicer words). Some of them didn’t know who Randi was, or what the JREF was, and one person even professed to believing in psychic energy. We’ve splintered too far, he says, when you can be skeptical about god but aren’t skeptical about psychic powers.

Oh, no! There’s a disjunct! Some atheists are idiots! That’s a point I actually agree with — of course there are. They’re human. That means they’re a diverse group, and yes, there will be a wide range of different ideas floating about. Whenever you select a group for a position on one issue, such as disbelief in god, you’ll be able to find some in that group who have fringe beliefs on UFOs or ESP or an afterlife. It’s to be expected.

But this is also true of the organized skepticism he represents. Whenever you select a group for a position on one issue, such as alternative medicine or Bigfoot, you’ll be able to find some in that group who have fringe beliefs about other subjects. Hill himself notices that there are a lot of global warming deniers in the skeptical community, but this was not sufficient to tut-tut over TAM attendees deplorable lack of understanding of modern skepticism.

But here’s the smugness that annoys: this idea that “modern skepticism”, a very narrow and artificially bounded set of ideas, ought to be the parent of atheism…that skepticism is the superset, while atheism is only a subset.

When I talk about skepticism, I believe that I am talking about something that encompasses many other similar philosophies like atheism, humanism, and freethought. By this I mean that atheism, for example, is a logical extension of skepticism. Anecdotally, most skeptics that I know are in fact atheists. However, the disconnect came when I expected the reverse of this observation to also be true, i.e., that most atheists are skeptics.

Most atheists are skeptics. Hill just pretends from an anecdotal sample that most are not, by blithely overlooking the overlap. I could mention, for example, that a certain obnoxiously loud atheist — me — was a speaker at both NECSS and the Freethought Festival. That I hung out with people at the Freethought Festival who were quite familiar with the JREF, attended TAM, and were skeptical activists, and that at NECSS I ran into a number of people who were horrified at the idea of atheism. But unfortunately, skeptical organizations have a history of of marginalizing atheists as politically undesirable and uncomfortable — it is no surprise that there is a disconnect, because skeptical leaders have promoted that separation. And they also constantly make this bizarre assumption that they are in charge.

Take, for instance, this silly Venn diagram Hill uses to illustrate his point.

In the first part, he bemoans the fact that there are atheists who are not fully encompassed within the domain of skepticism — how unfortunate. In the second part, he illustrates his ideal: all atheists should be within skepticism, as a small part. What a shame that there are atheists who aren’t skeptical about psychic powers!

Do you see the glaring problem with his diagrammatic resolution? It jumps out at me, anyway.

Here, I’ll help you out and add a little color, this nice light blue.

WHAT THE FUCK ABOUT ALL THOSE SO-CALLED “SKEPTICS” WHO AREN’T SKEPTICAL ABOUT GOD? Oh, they’re perfectly OK. “Modern Skepticism” is equipped with loopholes to let them off the hook, perfectly illustrated in Hill’s diagram. But you have to wonder — why is Hill writing columns complaining about psychic believers in the atheist community, and global climate change deniers in the skeptical community, and not noticing 1) both communities have idiots in their midst and don’t get to claim the universal evidential high ground over the other, and 2) skepticism has a real problem with institutionalized acceptance of non-skepticism towards a global problem of far greater magnitude than psychic nonsense, the whole issue of religion?

He’s still attached to this flaw of “modern skepticism” that wants to isolate and diminish those socially contentious atheists. If he weren’t so blind to the issue, he might be able to better see my ideal, illustrated here.

I agree that every atheist ought to be a skeptic. But also, every skeptic ought to be an atheist. How can you seriously get all smug and high-minded about rejecting mind-reading because there is no evidence for it, a proliferation of frauds endorsing it, and no reasonable scientific mechanism explaining it, while at the same time sneering at atheists who reject this god notion because there is even less evidence for it, a world-wide history of even greater charlatanry (really, mind-readers are pikers next to priests), and a total rejection of the validity of scientific demands for substantiation from its proponents?

I’ll take organized skepticism far more seriously when they spend less effort at boundary setting and recognize their responsibility to address absurd beliefs of all kinds, not just the easy ones that aren’t embraced by a majority of benighted humanity.

The latest on Sanal Edamaruku

Sanal Edamaruku has fled India and the hounds of the Catholic church. He’s somewhere in Europe.

The church has said they will drop the complaint if Edamaruku apologizes — apologizes for exposing a weeping magic statue as the product of a mundane leaky pipe.

Edamaruku says, “NO.”

Edamaruku says, “NO.”

I marvel at that — the courage of just saying no, of refusing to bow before religious authorities. My admiration is unbounded.

Edamaruku says, “NO.”

What a beautiful word.

But will they come when you do call for them?

Oh, you just have to love a new quack and cult leader — they come up with the wackiest stuff, and people fall for it.

Serge Benhayon, a former tennis coach from Maroubra, has up to 1000, mainly female, devotees to his movement, Universal Medicine, based in the hills outside Lismore on the north coast of NSW.

Mr Benhayon told The Sun-Herald he had no medical qualifications but stood by the effectiveness of his treatments, including “esoteric breast massage” – administered only by women – and “chakra-puncture”. His daughter, Natalie, 22, claims to be able to talk to women’s ovaries – for $70 an hour.

I can talk to women’s ovaries, too! Also their kidneys and uvulas and hippocampi and elbows. I can also chat up a pair of breasts, if you’d like (they understand the language of motorboats). You should only get the big bucks if they answer, though.

Esoteric breast massage sounds fun, but chakra-puncture…no thanks, that sounds agonizing.

He’s drafted a whole lot of professional women with no understanding of medicine or science to buy into this nonsense, and make recommendations that funnel public health care money directly into Benhayon’s pocket. And of course there’s the New Age jargon everywhere, substituting for evidence.

Ms Greenaway offers “esoteric connective tissue therapy”, a technique created by Mr Benhayon. It promises to improve energy flow by “allowing the pulse of the lymphatic system to symbiotically correspond with the body’s own ensheathing web”.

You know, the lymphatic system doesn’t have a pulse, and symbiotic doesn’t mean what she seems to think it means. They also claim to do “craniosacral massage” and to measure a “craniosacral pulse”, which just tells me they’re obsessed with heads up asses.

It’s disgraceful nonsense, but Benhayon has an answer to charges that he’s a charismatic con-artist.

“A handful of people say what we have here is a cult. What if I can bring 2000 people to say it’s not?”

<pictures 2000 people in robes standing glassy-eyed and chanting “we are not a cult”>

Why I am an atheist – Ed Cara

Much like any child with a loving mother, I was often lulled to sleep by her gentle and comforting voice as she read me a story. Unlike most mothers though, she rarely read from the newest selections of the public library, instead delighting me with tales of Samson, King David and of course Jesus Christ himself. I was a young Hispanic Catholic boy and she was smart enough to sprinkle the adventure-laden stories and parables in with the more philosophical readings to tug at my boyish tendencies. Not that she needed to trick me into belief in a God, Hispanic culture being one of the last enduring bastions of Catholicism. And being a 1st generation immigrant from Ecuador, for her belief was simply the default option.

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Creationist FUD refuted

If you’re looking for a meaty weekend read, look no further than Paul McBride’s thorough dismantling of Science and Human Origins, the new bad book from the Discovery Institute, by Gauger, Axe, and Luskin. It’s in 6 parts, taking on each chapter one by one: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, a prediction about what will be in chapter 4 before reading it, Part 4 (prediction confirmed!), and Part 5.

The creationists are howling. McBride’s evisceration, with Carl Zimmer’s detailed description of the evidence for chromosome fusion, all discrediting what they thought would be a hot new text on the scientific evidence for creation, has made them so furious that they’re even lashing out at me in email — I just linked to the evidence, so I imagine Zimmer and McBride must be seeing some entertaining spectacles in their inboxes. I do so love to see the creationists dancing in the flames of their own immolation.

I will say this, though: I did get one very polite email from a creationist, who told me that he was not a scientist, but that he’d read a couple of articles that sounded impressively sciencey to him, and asked if they didn’t represent a legitimate criticism of the chromosome fusion idea? And he very nicely sent along the two papers for me to read. Here they are:

Bergman J, Tomkins J (2011) The chromosome 2 fusion model of human evolution—part 1: re-evaluating the evidence. Journal of Creation 25(2):106-110.

Tomkins J, Bergman J (2011) The chromosome 2 fusion model of human evolution—part 1: re-evaluating the evidence. Journal of Creation 25(2):111-117.

Two things jumped out at me: it’s by batty Jerry Bergman, no credible source at all, and it’s published in the inbred in-house journal of the Institute for Creation Research. These are not legitimate science papers, although they do throw around enough science terms and techniques, and follow the form of a real science paper, to generate confusion in the mind of the naive reader. They’re beautiful examples of cargo cult science by creationists. Would you like to read them, or use them as bad examples? Here you go, download it for entertainment purposes only.

I read them anyway. I’m not going to bother with a detailed refutation, but I’ll give you the gist. The fundamental confusion in both papers is the nature of the evidence for an ancestral chromosome fusion, and a focus on irrelevant details that are not central to the argument.

The story is this. At some time after the separation of the human and chimpanzee lineages, two ancestral chromosomes, #12 and #13 in the chimpanzee, fused end-to-end to form a single chromosome, #2, in humans. Chimpanzee chromosome 13 forms the short arm (2p) and part of the long arm (2q) of human chromosome 2, while chimpanzee chromosome 12 forms most of the long arm (2q) of chromosome 2.

The primary evidence for this fusion is the comparative genetic content of these chromosomes. That is, most of the genes in chimpanzee chromosome 13 are found in human 2p, and most of the genes in chimpanzee chromosome 12 are in human 2q. The chromatin binding patterns line up, the sequence analysis confirms, and there have been some lovely FISH studies that show the correspondence.

What has since been done is that a prediction was made that there ought to be fragments of telomeres (the end caps of chromosomes) in the middle of chromosome 2, at the fusion site. Which has been examined. And the prediction has been confirmed.

Bergman and Tomkins ignore every single bit of that. Instead, what they do is focus on just the region of the fusion, and complain that it is a tangled mess and hard to interpret — that it is a degenerate telomeric region, rather than a complete and intact telomere, which is what they demand be present. This is an unrealistic expectation, given that every paper on the structure of the fusion region makes the point that it is degenerate.

An analogy: imagine a red Ford Mustang and a blue BMW X6 are in a head-on collision, and both have totally wrecked front ends, with bumpers and radiators and headlights interlocked and everything about their grilles in tangled confusion, and with bits and pieces torn loose and flung about. You’d be able to look at the crash and still tell by everything in and behind the engine compartment that Car #1 was a Mustang and Car #2 was an X6.

Bergman and Tomkins are the bewildered and incompetent investigators who ignore every other factor in the crash, look at a few particularly mangled bits of the wreckage, and declare that they can’t identify it, therefore…the two vehicles were assembled at the factory in this particular configuration, and no crash occurred. But they use lots of sciencey language to explain this at tendentious length, which is sufficient to convince non-scientists that the interpretation of an obvious historical event has been refuted. And that’s all they need to do to accomplish their goals: fling about unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to win over the ignorant.

Why I am an atheist – Don from Delaware

Why am I an atheist?  A year or two ago I had to find a concise answer to this question when my wife mentioned my atheism in passing at a family gathering.  I haven’t hidden my non-belief, but I haven’t invited trouble by going out of my way to bring it up, either.  My mother was in the room, though, and apparently she had never even suspected.  (Apparently my refusal to send the kids to church with her and the “Blessed are the Lesbians” speech she’s heard me launch into in the presence of a homophobe were not sufficient clues.)
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Forever disappointed

I always have unwarrantedly high expectations of creationists. I know that there are some flamingly ignorant nutjobs out there, all your Hams and Hovindses and Luskins, but lurking in my mind is always this suspicion that somewhere there has to be one or two biologically competent ideologues on their side of the fence. And I am always disappointed.

For example, there’s this one fellow, Douglas Axe, who has a legitimate and well-earned doctoral degree in chemical engineering, and several published papers in real science journals (not the fake journals creationists create). The Discovery Institute tapped him to head their Biologic Institute, their attempt to create an organization that would do genuine biological research (it hasn’t, so far). And I thought, hey, maybe this guy at last is a worthy opponent.

But let’s be honest here. I have no illusions that I’m a super-mega-genius, or that I have high standing as a researcher in my field. I’m a grunt in the army of biology, not an officer. So I can imagine someone smarter than me in opposition; I certainly know many on my side who are far more accomplished and intelligent than I am. So you can imagine my disappointment at looking over Axe’s ideas and seeing that he, too, is an incompetent twit.

I was really shocked when he revealed that he didn’t understand coalescence theory at all. It may be a bit esoteric for the lay public, but if you’re a critic of genomics and population genetics, you must at least comprehend the basics. And he doesn’t.

And now he lets me down again. The Biologic Institute is putting out some fresh horror of pseudoscience, a book called Science and Human Origins, in which they presumably bring all their scientific guns to bear in order to question human evolution. And what do they do? They question the evidence of a fusion of chromosome two, something I’ve hammered on Luskin before. And they bumble it up completely.

This stuff isn’t that hard. I’ve explained the basics of synteny, or conserved linkage blocks; fragments of chromosomes are constantly getting shuffled about, inverted, duplicated, and deleted, and we can compare chromosome structure between two species and see exactly how they’ve been juggled. These movements leave traces, and are mechanically well understood; we can see the evidence right therein the sequences.

So Carl Zimmer engaged the Biologic Institute ideologues on their facebook page. They denied that a fusion had occured, and claimed that the evidence was actually against such an event. So Zimmer hit them right where they’re weakest: he asked them to cite that evidence. And what did they do? You know it, it’s familiar. They went dumb and stopped answering. They couldn’t answer the basic question. And this is why I’m vaguely disappointed. Even their self-proclaimed science stars can’t explain something a small-town teaching professor in the Midwest can see laid out plainly in the data.

One benefit, though, is that Carl Zimmer summarized the whole affair in a must-read post. He explains step by step with simple cartoons every event that occurred in the chromosomal fusion, and what the molecular evidence for the phenomenon is. And he shows up the creationists for frauds who won’t address a simple question of sources.

For added hilarity, David Klinghoffer of Evolution News & Views, the DI’s dishonest propaganda organ, has challenged Carl to debate the issue. I don’t know what there is to debate; Gauger, Axe, and Luskin claim there is evidence against a chromosome fusion in human history, Carl asked what it was, and they refused to give it.

So he flatly turned them down, as was sensible to do. Debating creationists is a waste of time. Now that refusal is getting trolled by creationists, accusing him of being ‘afraid’ to debate…and I still don’t know what he’s supposed to argue about. Did the Discovery Institute refuse to cite any evidence supporting their claim? Yes. We’re done.

And my quest for an honest, scientifically competent creationist continues, fruitlessly.