Brace yourself for more allegations against a prominent atheist: Lawrence Krauss

I knew this was coming; in fact, I was interviewed several times for this article about misconduct by Lawrence Krauss. I had to tell the journalist that at most I’d gotten some second-hand echoes from the whisper network, but that I knew nothing directly about any accusations against him. But then, I’m a guy — I wasn’t at risk for being groped, so no one was going to pull me aside and warn me. Also, as a guy who was hanging out with Krauss now and then, there was no way to trust me not to spread the word to the accused…and whoa, but a lot of women were terrified of being alone with him, and of the effect he could have on their career.

Go read their stories. I believe them.

It’s a shame, too, because in theory, he’s an ally. He just seems to fall short in practice.

But Krauss says his movement is getting more diverse, not less. He is politically liberal, decrying sexism, racism, and “the fear of people who are different,” and is a vocal critic of Donald Trump. And yet, he’s not always politically correct, whether saying that religion drives xenophobia, dismissing burka-clad Muslims as “women in bags,” announcing that a statue looks like “Jesus on the toilet,” or tweeting articles arguing that #MeToo has gone too far.

And in his private life, according to a number of women in his orbit, Krauss exhibits some of the sexist behavior that he denounces in public. Now that these accusations are coming out in the open, some women have doubts that the skeptics will acknowledge the body of evidence about his behavior, and confront their own preconceived beliefs.

Once again, skeptics are afflicted with a curious blindness. There’s a psychology study waiting to happen here.

“Skeptics and atheists like to think they are above human foibles like celebrity worship,” Rebecca Watson, a prominent feminist skeptic, told BuzzFeed News. “In a way, that makes them particularly susceptible to being abused by their heroes. I think we see that over and over again.”

Women at skeptics meetings would often warn each other to avoid Krauss, she added, but conference organizers seemed reluctant to act. “He was a popular speaker,” Watson said. “None of them were interested in doing anything about what was happening.”

Krauss hasn’t done himself any favors, either.

But Krauss’s reputation took a hit in April 2011, after he publicly defended Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier who was convicted of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl and spent 13 months in a Florida jail.

Epstein was one of the Origins Project’s major donors. But Krauss told the Daily Beast his support of the financier was based purely on the facts: “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”

Oh, well, the cynic in me knows exactly how all this will turn out. Krauss will face no consequences, his popularity in the skeptic/atheist movement will be undimmed, and all the women who spoke out in that article will face an increase in the torrent of abuse they already get. It took a lot of courage for them to go on record, for which I know they will be punished.

I guess I just can’t be happy with bad data

I used to be a fan of Steven Pinker’s work. He speaks fluent academese, he just sounds so reasonable, and his message of optimism is something I want to be true. I’d love to be able to go to my grave thinking the world was going to be a better place for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and all the children of the world. I wanted to believe.

O sweet irony, that an atheist could be tempted by hope and faith.

But as I read more, I became disenchanted. Hope is great, but it has to be backed by reason and evidence, and as I read more, it became obvious that Pinker is kind of the Norman Vincent Peale of atheism, and that there wasn’t any substance to him — he starts with a happy belief and works to fill in the gaps in the evidence with cherry-picked data and his own indefensible interpretations.

So now he’s written a book about the Enlightenment, reviewed by Peter Harrison. It is not a good review.

The Enlightenment may seem an ambitious topic for a cognitive psychologist to take up from scratch. Numerous historians have dedicated entire careers to it, and there remains a considerable diversity of opinion about what it was and what its impact has been. But from this and previous work we get intimations of why Pinker thinks he is the person for the job. Historians have laboured under the misapprehension that the key figures of the Enlightenment were mostly philosophers of one stripe or another. Pinker has made the anachronistic determination that, in fact, they were all really scientists – indeed, “cognitive neuroscientists” and “evolutionary psychologists.”

In short, he thinks that they are people like him and that he is thus possessed of privileged insights into their thought denied to mere historians. The latter must resort to careful reading and fraught interpretation in lieu of being able directly to channel what Enlightenment thinkers really thought.

Uh-oh. This reminds me of that ghastly essay Pinker wrote that made me recoil in horror, it was so bad, so egocentric, so ignorant of the humanities and social sciences, I bet it was the foundation of his new book. The book that gets this summary:

For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don’t be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers – just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club.

For their part, historians have found the task of tracing the legacy of the Enlightenment more difficult, not least because even characterising what the Enlightenment was has proven challenging. It is now commonplace to speak of multiple Enlightenments and hence multiple and sometime conflicting legacies. Obviously, moreover, not everything that came after the Enlightenment has been sweetness and, well, light. Edmund Burke and G.W.F. Hegel, for example, drew direct connexions between the French Enlightenment and the reign of terror. In the twentieth century the German-Jewish philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described what they called “the dialectic of the Enlightenment” – a mixed inheritance that included the technical mastery of nature along with a conspicuous absence of the moral insights that would prevent that mastery being turned to barbarous ends. In their view, this led ultimately to the horrors of Nazism.

That bit about picking things you like and stuffing them into graphs reminds me of someone else: maybe Pinker is actually the hybridized clone of Norman Vincent Peale and Ray Kurzweil.

I think, to be a good honest atheist and scientist, I have to respect the work of philosophers and historians and all those people who have deep domains of expertise that I lack, and recognize that when people who say things I wish were true, yet disrespect and don’t even acknowledge the historical breadth of humanity’s thought, they are probably full of shit. Or at least the living personification of the Alexander Pope poem:

A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

A little humility would help, and you don’t approach the Pierian spring with a sippy straw.

Some anniversary

Would you believe it’s been 20 years since Andrew Wakefield published his disgraceful paper? It was retracted for undisclosed conflicts of interest, unethical treatment of children, and dishonest data manipulation. So Wakefield ought to be commemorating the destruction of his career from a nice ditch somewhere with a bottle of Thunderbird, right?

Wrong.

Wakefield got to celebrate the death by neglect of children with celebrity appearances on a tour for an anti-vaccination movie, the spawn of his bad study, and he attended an inaugural ball for Donald Trump. Last year, he was invited back for another round of talks in Europe.

Last week, Wakefield did not speak at a working men’s club, but at the supposedly reputable Regent’s University in London. To top that, he was invited to the European parliament, not by a neofascist know-nothing, but by an MEP from a Green party, which readers who have not been paying attention may think is filled with decent people.

And now he lives in a nice house near Austin, Texas, profiting off the conspiracy theory he instigated.

There is no justice in the world.

Garbage in, garbage out: Foerster misinterprets the Paracas skulls, again

The paranormalists are all a-buzz right now because Brien Foerster has announced the results of a DNA analysis of the Paracas skulls — the extraordinarily deformed skulls of high caste Peruvians from several thousand years ago. The skulls look weird, warped into conical shapes, so they’ve long been the focus of people like Lloyd Pye, who wants to argue that they’re the remains of extraterrestrials. Or Nephilim, fallen angels. Or ancient hominids from a completely different lineage than Homo sapiens. They aren’t very consistent in their explanations.

Anyway, here’s Foerster announcing the ‘intriguing’ results of having sent off samples from Peruvian skulls to various commercial labs.

I can tell you what part has the fringe groups most excited: Foerster explains that all native american peoples…are of haplogroup A, B, C, and D, but in this set of skulls, the most common haplogroups that showed up were U2, E, and also H, H1a and 2. If you look at where the most prevalent percentage of U2 and the H1s are, it is in between the Black and Caspian seas, as in, the Caucasus Mountains. These people weren’t aliens, or supernatural beings, they were…WHITE PEOPLE. Ta-daa! As we all should know, brown people in South America, or Egypt, or the Mississippi river valley, or anywhere for that matter, could not possibly have developed sophisticated cultures, and white people, or Jews, must have traveled there in ancient times and taught them everything they know.

Man, it’s not surprising at all to discover racism rotting deep in the heart of the ancient astronaut community. He also seems oblivious to the fact that identifying human haplogroups in these skulls tells us that they were fully…human. Not angels, not aliens.

Foerster has a long history of obsession with these skulls.

Brien Foerster managed to persuade Juan Navarro Hierro, director (and owner) of the Paracas History Museum (sic: on the sign outside the museum, the name is given first in English, then, smaller, in Spanish) to part with some tissue samples. He claims that he did this because “[t]he only way to establish the actual age, and possible genetic origins of the Paracas people is through DNA analysis of the skulls themselves”. Dating human tissue by means of DNA analysis is such a new technique that I can find no other use of this remarkable development in any other archaeological investigation. Of course, there is no such dating technique: this is Brien Foerster displaying his ignorance of archaeological dating techniques!

Where did he choose to send the samples? To some prestigious university department, well known for its work on ancient DNA? No. Instead, he chose to send them to Lloyd Pye (1946-2013), a crank who believed in ancient astronauts, the extraterrestrial origins of humanity and, worst of all, touted the “Starchild Skull” as an alien/human hybrid. Why? This suggests that, far from being a dispassionate researcher, Brien Foerster has a preconceived agenda and it’s one that involves aliens. Although his original Academia.edu page lists his affiliation as “University of Victoria, Biological Sciences, Department Member”, his association with the university is as a graduate, not a member of faculty. [Update 11 April 2015: he has a new page that more honestly describes him as an undergraduate.]

That’s from a few years ago. I guess the accusation that his DNA analysis was done by a crank stung a bit, because these latest results were obtained by sending samples to professional, commercial labs. He mentions that one lab refused to send him results, which he attributes to malign motivations, but more than likely it’s because his samples were crap.

In 2016, Jennifer Raff gave a talk on the sloppy methodology of these pseudogenetics researchers, and specifically discussed the poor technique used by these cranks.

As you can see from the image, the individuals attempting to sample DNA from this mummy made some attempt to cover themselves, but it’s entirely inadequate for ancient DNA work. There is exposed skin on every individual in the room, the gentleman’s beard and hair are uncovered, and at one point they start squirting water all over the mummy, claiming that because it’s distilled, it won’t introduce contamination. Wrong. All water used in ancient DNA work has to be purchased from vendors who guarantee that it’s certified DNA free. Distilled water has lots of DNA present in it. Any one of these things could have (and probably did) introduced contamination to the sample they tested.

Yeah, so Foerster’s results are meaningless garbage, tainted with contamination from, no doubt, “Caucasian” investigators who slobbered all over the skulls. None of that will stop Foerster, or his ignorant followers. He promises to publish the results in a book with none other than LA Marzulli, another notorious crackpot. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this on the History Channel in the near future.

Engaging Jordan Peterson is enlightening and frustrating

I’ve made two videos about Jordan Peterson now: in the first, I addressed the basic errors in biology he made in a television interview, and in the second I drilled down into the bad biology in the first chapter of his book, where he would have presumably been more rigorous in his treatment (he wasn’t). The results have been interesting. Note that what I was doing was cutting through the fog of obfuscation he throws up around one simple point, and was actively avoiding any temptation to deal with extraneous issues, like social justice, or mere feminism, or his confusion about whether behaviors are culturally or biologically determined.

It sort of didn’t work.

The comments have been weird. A fair number of his fans are willing to admit that I popped Peterson’s balloon on that one point — he really is making illogical arguments, and you can’t simply announce what ideal human behavior is from the behavior of lobsters, and Peterson is just wallowing in the naturalistic fallacy — but they don’t care. They just move on to something I didn’t address here and announce that he’s still right.

Peterson can be confusing to listen to. I think he makes some excellent points…. but we gotta give PZ the nod with respect to evolutionary biology.
This video has confirmed that we need to be careful when listening to Jordan Peterson. Some of what he says…particularly with respect to religion….seems purposefully obscurantist and unnecessarily confusing.

I’m right there with him on the “pronouns” issue though. There is only XY and XX. Anything else is pretense. (notwithstanding the 1% of people born intersex)

I wonder if this person has even seen his karyotype? Probably not. Very few people have. But the thing is that I did not address Peterson’s gender misconceptions in either of these videos, so why fall back on something that I’d have to make another video to address?

And then there is this sentiment:

Even if ALL of Peterson’s scientific references are incorrect, his greater messages are more important, and that’s why his book is waking the globe.

These are young men who mostly identify as skeptics and atheists and hard-bitten realists (although I don’t know about this specific individual), and look what they’ve sunk to. That’s pure faith-based acceptance of a conclusion while seeing the evidence for it debunked. It’s sad to see. This is where organized skepticism has led us — to a tool you can use as a blunt instrument, without comprehension, to shout down science while waving science as a banner.

Some don’t even bother with argument.

And the thing is … Peterson makes a strong and persuasive case against the SWJ woo that you appear to promote.

PZ, you are a clown. The only reason anybody takes you seriously is that because those who do are brainwashed social justice warriors who will support anybody, no matter what they say, who loudly spouts their rhetoric. Take the SJWs away, and you would just be the laughing stock of everybody.

Nothing in those videos was “SWJ woo” — it was straightforward, basic biology and science. I focused on the narrow point at hand. It doesn’t matter. Any criticism of Peterson will be dealt with by huddling with the ideological tribe and cursing those damned sssjooooos.

If I were to do it again — I do not plan to do it again — I wouldn’t be so restrained. I’d point out that his book is terribly written, relying on a fog of flowery prose and long digressions into irrelevant issues to conceal his central conceits. If he embeds his message in a cloud of noise, you can still see it as a negative space, his readers can imbed it in their brains, but he never has to expose himself to the risk of a direct statement…and when you do catch him saying something specific, he can trust his fans to defend him by saying, “Hist, poltroon, look over there in the mist, a vague outline of something that refutes what Jordan said, therefore he didn’t really say what you caught him saying!” But wink, wink, nudge, nudge, they know exactly what he’s saying, his “greater messages” that are “waking the globe”.

I’ve written about his inanity on gender issues, but you can read far more from Siobhan. His fans sound even worse, but that’s only because they don’t have the political sense to conceal their views behind a cloud of evasion and verbiage.

I recommend this video by Peter Coffin. He takes the opposite approach from what I did — instead of taking a microscope to one narrow point and stabbing it with a micropipette, he steps way back to look at the big picture and expose Peterson’s general strategies. It’s good.

Obviously, the comments are predictable, claiming that he’s strawmanning and taking Peterson out of context. That’s what happens when you try to argue rationally with people who have abandoned all reliance on reason.

But every day is Doubting Darwin day!

Today is Charles Darwin’s birthday — he’d be 209 years old if he hadn’t kicked the bucket in 1882. It’s a good excuse to find something to celebrate, so go have a cupcake or something. I’m planning to spend the next few days working with people at the Science Museum of Minnesota on a science education project, which sounds appropriately productive and entertaining. But, you know, the best way to celebrate Darwin’s life and research is to ask questions, question everything, and explore new ideas, which is how Mr Darwin would have liked it. Although you shouldn’t do that just one day a year. Every day is a day to learn something new.

I just wish the creationists could do that. Eric Hovind and his merry band of ignoramuses have declared today to be Doubting Darwin Day, unaware that the sentiment is already inherent within the scientific program, and are distributing their 15 questions for evolutionists flyer again. I’ve seen many versions of this kind of thing over the years; they tend to be repetitive and tendentious, and are a combination of a) questions long answered, b) interesting questions they are unaware that people are actively studying, and c) assertions of Christian dogma that we don’t care to address. I’m not going to bother with them (note that I have to get to St Paul today to do a bunch of fun/work), so I’ll just turn it over to Jackson Wheat.

When will the creationists learn that if their questions can be answered by a well-informed undergraduate, maybe they aren’t asking particularly challenging questions?