I must be suffering from withdrawal

I’ve actually got this lovely two-month long block of time with no conferences scheduled, where I get to stay home. And what do I do? I sign up for another one, simply because it’s right here in my own backyard. I shall be attending <duh-duh-duuuuh>the Canary Party National Convention, in Minneapolis MN, July 20 – 22.

It’s a conference of anti-vaxxers and other such ilk. I could not resist. Orac has mentioned them a few times, and they sound entertaining.

They have not asked me to speak. I’m just going to sit quietly in the back of the room and report on what they’re talking about.

Unless they get wind of my presence and revoke my privilege of attending, which could happen.

Damn. That was fast. Really fast. They got my application at 2:10, at 2:20 I posted my intent to attend, and at 2:22 I got this.

Mr. Myers,

Thank you for your interest in the Canary Party Convention.

However, as you are not a member of the Canary Party, and as your public stance runs counter to the values of our party, it is quite difficult to believe that you actually want to come and work on our issues in good faith.

As such, I am returning your registration fee.

Have a nice day.

Ginger Taylor, MS
Executive Director

Expelled again. It’s as if they knew who I was. I guess I’ll have to stay home.

Good on ya, Australia

The Australian census results are in, and there’s good news. The Global Atheist Convention’s theme of the Rise of Atheism has proven true.

The census showed more Australians are identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation, with that number rising to 22.3 per cent from 18.7 per cent of the population in 2006.

There was another major shift: the number of Jedis in Australia has declined from 70,000 to 55,000. Those prequels really sucked, didn’t they?

Why I am an atheist – Nico Adams

There was exactly one time I went to a “serious” church. My parents took the family to the local Unitarian church every once in a while, but only because taught more lessons about tolerance than it did about Jesus. But my parents are also classical musicians. They have a hectic work schedule, and when I was five, they left us with the nanny on a Sunday morning.

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A quick peek at the future Louisiana science curriculum

Oh, boy — Bobby Jindal’s new program to open up state funds to support all kinds of random nonsense in schools is going to have some interesting (that is, horrifying) effects. They are going to be throwing money at A Beka Books and Bob Jones University texts, and Accelerated Christian Education. What kinds of things will Louisiana kids be learning?

Science Proves Homosexuality is a Learned Behavior

The Second Law of Thermodynamics Disproves Evolution

No Transitional Fossils Exist

Humans and Dinosaurs Co
Existed

Evolution Has Been Disproved

A Japanese Whaling Boat Found a Dinosaur

Solar Fusion is a Myth

It’s not just science! Look what else they’ll learn:

Only ten percent of Africans can read or write, because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists.

“the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross… In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”

“God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.”

It “cannot be shown scientifically that that man
made pollutants will one day drastically reduce the depth of the atmosphere’s ozone layer.”

“God has provided certain ‘checks and balances’ in creation to prevent many of the global upsets that have been predicted by environmentalists.”

the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to advance a socialist agenda.

“Unions have always been plagued by socialists and anarchists who use laborers to destroy the free
enterprise system that hardworking Americans have created.”

Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win was due to an imaginary economic crisis created by the media.

“The greatest struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon, will occur in the Middle East when Christ returns to set up his kingdom on earth.”

Watch the video. It’ll show you that I’m not just making this all up.

Fortunately, the student body at my university is largely from the upper Midwest, so I don’t think we’ll have to worry too much about an influx of miseducated kids here — but other universities may have to look at Louisiana enrollments. How much remedial teaching do you want to do?

An unsurprising case of plagiarism

I’ve noticed this before, and I’m sure many of you have, too: you can often take creationist comments, especially when they’re lengthy, run them through a google search, and discover that the were lifted wholly from some other source. If you read the creationist literature for any length of time, it really begins to sound all alike, because what they’ll often do is cobble together their treatises by lifting whole paragraphs and pages from previous creationist tracts. It’s the kind of thing where, if they did it as a student in my class, they’d get an automatic fail, especially since they rarely bother to include attributions.

Here’s another similar case: Hamza Tzortzis, the Muslim creationist, wrote a critique of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Guess what? It’s a copy-pasted pastiche of an article by William Lane Craig. The original Craig review was pretty bad, but running it through a copier a few times just makes it worse.

Why I am an atheist – Christophe Ego

I was born in Brussels (Belgium) in 1976. My family was catholic (but not overzealous) and I attended catholic primary and secondary schools where prayer was obligatory and religion omnipresent. I recall having been very religious until the age of about 13. I still remember bowing each time I was passing by the huge statue of Jesus that was present in the park surrounding the playground of my middle school. I was however also very interested in sciences but I did not see any conflict between science and religion at that time. Also, since Catholicism represented for me the ultimate truth, I did not understand why people were not more engaged in their religion.

Everything changed within a couple of hours at the age of 13.

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Neandertals were monsters!

Danny Vendramini is a man with a vision…but absolutely no knowledge or competence. He has invented out of whole cloth a bizarre hypothesis that Neandertals were super-predators who hunted modern humans for food and sex. To support this weird contention, he builds up a tissue thin set of speculations, all biased towards this idea that Neandertals were giant, hairy brutes who looked like bipedal chimpanzees, and that were intent on raping and eating people.

If it sounds like the plot for a cheesy SyFy channel horror movie, you shouldn’t be surprised: Vendramini is not a scientist, but he is a “theatre director, TV producer and award-winning film director and scriptwriter“. He has no training in comparative anatomy, ecology, or evolutionary biology, and it shows.

He has written a book titled Them+Us. Here’s the promotional video. Prepare to simultaneously laugh and stand aghast at the abuse of science.

I’m just going to take apart one claim out of this mass of nonsense. He commissioned “one of the world’s foremost digital sculptors”, Arturo Balseiro, to reconstruct a Neandertal skull to meet his requirements. Poor Balseiro! He’s not going to be well regarded in scientific circles after selling out this badly.

One of his hilarious claims is that all other reconstructions have been biased because they’ve been done to make Neandertals look human — but, don’t you know, Neandertals are primates, so they should be made to look like other primates.

Contemplate that last sentence. Humans are apparently not primates, and the analog for reconstruction should not be modern humans, their closest relative, separated by a mere 100,000 years, but a random gemisch of miscellaneous apes and monkeys, separated from Neandertal for over 6 million years.

To support this unlikely comparison, he superimposes a Neandertal skull on the profile of a chimpanzee, and declares that they fit perfectly.

There are a few problems with this reconstruction. To get the slope of the skull’s face to align with that of the chimpanzee, he has completely ignored the position of the foramen magnum, at the base of the skull. In the image to the right, the Neandertal’s spine would be erupting out the front of his trachea. Note also the little details, like this orientation requiring that the chimp’s ears be yanked down to be coming out of his neck, and how the chimp’s neck has to be mostly filled with the bowl of the occiput. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit at all.

You can also look at a chimpanzee skull and compare it to that of a Neandertal (strangely, an obvious comparison that he doesn’t bother to make on his web page). They don’t look anything alike, except in the general sense that they’re both apes.

But ignore all that! TV producer knows better.

The Neandertal skull above is actually the La Ferrassie specimen, the very same individual Vendramini uses to reconstruct his version of a Neandertal. And here it is, in all its ridiculous creature-feature glory.

After all that complaining about how those scientists impose their human biases on all the other Neandertal reconstructions, Vendramini just decides on the basis of no evidence at all that they had to have been as hairy as a gorilla, with cat’s eyes because they hunted at night.

It’s all ludicrous, pseudo-scientific bullshit.

We have standards, too

The other day, I wrote about this unfortunate case of a cancer researcher at UC Davis who was abused by his university for criticizing another department’s poor health advice. I said that that’s one of the things you have to protect with academic freedom: the right of scientists to make informed criticisms of others’ work.

Now I’m getting squeaked at by Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, who protests that I don’t give that same freedom to creationists.

So Myers doesn’t really believe in academic freedom — he only defends the freedom of scholars to agree with him. But without the liberty to dissent, the whole idea of “academic freedom” is pretty meaningless.

Scientists are supposed to use their intelligence, expertise, and knowledge to make evidence-based criticisms of claims. Since creationists lack all three characters, as well as having a dearth of evidence, it doesn’t apply. Academic freedom does not mean you are given carte blanche to make wild claims without an expectation that you’ll provide scientific reasoning behind them, and the thing is, in the UC Davis case, the cancer researcher was knowledgeable and discussed the best evidence.

There’s more to being an academic than having unfettered freedom, you know.

Why I am an atheist – Evan I.

Growing up I had a vague notion that we were created by a supreme being. I never really probed the existence question, so the “creator” answer suited my brian just fine then. However, the idea of God was something that wasn’t reinforced in my house. We never went to church, prayed or kept any religious symbols. What I did have reinforced, on the other hand, was the wonderful altruistic care of my parents. My upbringing was enough to let me know how rational, humane beings ought to treat one another.

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Another douchebag: Marty Klein

Ladies, aren’t you used to this yet? Marty Klein is a sex therapist who writes for Psychology Today; he’s also a dishonest hack who will distort the facts to make his case.

You may remember that strange incident in which Elyse of Skepchick was working at a conference, and out of the blue, was handed a card offering group sex by a pair of strangers. Klein has taken that story and turned it into a tale of a prude squawking hysterically at a kindly offer by a pair of friends. It’s one of the more egregious manglings of a story I’ve seen in a long time.

What I find particularly outrageous, though, is that Klein is exactly like Ken Ham: nowhere in his fractured fairy tale does he include a single link to the actual participant and witness to the story, where readers might have discovered how he lied, and of course his article doesn’t include comments, where readers might correct him.