Marketing bros are the worst. Especially when they mangle science to fit their preconceptions

Taylor Pearson is this fellow who clearly knows nothing about evolutionary theory, has missed the point of the most basic concepts, but has no problem with appropriating evolution to justify his simplistic versions of business. No, really, he’s got this article titled Cambrian Leaps: One Way to Apply the Genius of Warren Buffett to Your Life which doesn’t actually have anything to do with Warren Buffett, dispenses useless, vague advice, and along the way trashes punctuated equilibrium while praising his flawed understanding of it.

He starts off by praising Darwin and evolution, because his insight helps us understand…marketing.

More than that, it provided a metaphor for many other systems in the world around us. We talk about people, marketing, and ideas evolving in the same way species do.
However, Darwin got one thing wrong in On the Origin of Species, which has an important implication on how you think about evolution as a metaphor for how to change your life.
He believed species evolved gradually and linearly.

Wrong. We could argue about “gradually” — Darwin was necessarily vague about the rate of evolution, and what seems slow and gradual from a human perspective might actually be rapid from a geological perspective — he definitely did not argue for linearity. The most famous illustration from his notebooks says otherwise!

He clearly had branching cladogenesis in mind. What does Pearson have in his ill-informed mind? Apparently Gould and Eldredge’s punctuated equilibrium. But he doesn’t understand that, either!

This phenomenon, called punctuated equilibrium, is the way that most natural systems evolve. Understanding punctuated equilibrium is essential to understanding how to change your life.

The left image is a gradual, linear view of Darwin’s theory of evolution where species emerge gradually and consistently over time. The right image is a “punctuated equilibrium” view of evolution where there are long periods of very little change and short periods of “explosions” with huge amounts of evolutionary activity.

No, that’s not a good model of punctuated equilibrium. All he’s got in his head are two versions of anagenesis, or gradual evolution within a single lineage in the absence of branching. In his left cartoon version, he’s got everything involving continuously at the same rate. His species 1, 2, and 3 are simply chronospecies that blend insensibly into one another. In the right cartoon, there are variations in the rate of evolution, nothing more, but you’ve still got a single lineage progressing into a couple of different species over time. That’s a poor and uninteresting model for punctuated equilibrium.

As well as not understanding the theory, he doesn’t get the facts right.

The Cambrian explosion is the most well-known example of the rapid growth stage of punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary history.

Over a period of only 20 million years (a short period in evolutionary time representing only 0.5 percent of Earth’s 4-billion-year evolutionary history), almost all present animal classes appeared.
Before the Cambrian explosion, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells. By the end of that time period, the world was populated by a huge variety of complex organisms.

The Cambrian explosion was an adaptive radiation. That’s different from punctuated equilibrium. Multicellular animals preceded that Cambrian by about a billion years. There was a long period of soft-bodied complex animals that were evolving before the Cambrian. “Class” has a specific taxonomic meaning; most animal phyla arose before or during the Cambrian, but not most extant classes — there was no class Aves or Mammalia anywhere near the Cambrian. This is just a horrible mish-mash of mangled concepts. I’d give it an “F” if it were an undergraduate essay I was grading (grading is on my mind right now, as finals week ends).

But his gravest, most fundamental error is that he doesn’t grasp that evolution is a property of populations, not individuals. It means that all of his analogies make no sense at all, or even suggest models that contradict what he’d like to be true.

This is revealing. He gives all this pseudoscientific background to justify his picture of how people’s progress in a career works. He’s trapped in a mode of thinking that is narrow and linear.

So, because people’s individual lives are not a constant monotonic rise to ascendancy, but have stops and starts, he thinks it’s useful to use punctuated equilibrium as a model.

Gah. This isn’t how it works. Think instead about peripatric speciation.

Here’s a better analogy. Taylor Pearson starts a company to sell polka-dotted widgets. He’s doing fine, there’s a stable demand, he’s got a 100 people staffing the phones, pushing those widgets. Some of those salespeople are doing great, hitting their quote, making their bonuses, but others are lackluster and uninspired and just flopping…so he lets them go, hires fresh people, he’s still got a hundred employees and is keeping up with demand.

But a couple of those fired employees get together and resolve to try something new — they start working for themselves, selling paisley widgets. The market is thrilled. They were tired of those boring polka dots, and soon the paisley widget sellers overwhelm everyone, Taylor Pearson is out of business, reduced to peddling polka dot widgets out of a tin can on a street corner. Maybe with his free time he can hang out in the library more, actually reading up on evolution.

That’s punctuated equilibrium. All the observer from the outside sees as they’re digging through the rubbish heaps left by this civilization is that polka dot widgets were the default widgets for years and years, and then fairly abruptly there was a shift, and almost all the widgets in higher strata were paisley. You could decide that all the individuals in the widget population underwent a simultaneous, gradual transition, or you could argue that an emergent novelty in a small subpopulation led to a sweeping expansion of that group and replacement of the prior dominant group. The latter is more likely.

I have to ask, though, about a more substantial criticism than the fact that he’s got the facts and theory all wrong. What do these marketing people gain by slapping an inappropriate label on an observation about variable rates of success? When Pearson says, How To Change Your Life with Cambrian Leaps, what does that mean? He’s attached a buzzword to a phenomenon, but naming it doesn’t suddenly give insight into how to take advantage of it, even if there were some relevancy to the phrase. It’s all empty noise.

And then I read the comments, which were all full of praise for his brilliant insight. I realized that this isn’t about providing useful knowledge — it was about self-promotion. It’s about selling Taylor Pearson as the marketing guy who knows about Science! Unfortunately, he’s only going to fool the people who know even less science than he does, and to the rest of us, he’s just the half-assed bullshit artist who is cultivating an audience of wanna-bes. I guess it’s a living.

Unpleasant character, unpleasant demise

Pope Danny Ray Johnson was a blustery, cocky, unpleasant dude: a racist, Confederate-flag-wavin’, Bible-thumpin’, struttin’ caricature of a certain kind of toxic Southern masculinity. Of course he had a church — the kind of church centered around a cult of personality, where the pastor could call himself Pope (and have a hat that spelled out “POPE” on it), where the choir would pose with their guns on display, where Rebel flags hung from the walls, a church with a bar (which isn’t a bad idea…) but no liquor license, but they’d try to get away with selling alcohol with the excuse that it was for communion. Johnson was happy to post memes to Facebook calling the Obamas “monkeys”. That’s just the kind of good ol’ boy he was. He also got elected to the state congress of Kentucky, because that’s the kind of horrible person who can get elected in the benighted counties of the regressive South.

Oh, and he was also a child molester. I’ve put the 17 year old victim’s account below the fold, because it’s a bit detailed and unpleasant, and the story just gets worse and worse.

[Read more…]

I’ve heard of drinking urine, but…

…injecting urine? No thanks.

It seems that some people have had the brilliant idea of treating allergies with home injections of urine, because there are antibodies present in urine, and therefore you’ll make antibodies to your own antibodies? What?

You see, you first eat the substance you’re allergic to, triggering an immune response. Then you pee urine that has lots of those antibodies (actually, it won’t be lots — if you’re leaking lots of protein into your urine, you have a problem), and then you inject 10ml of that urine, which will have a lower concentration of those antibodies than your own blood, into your butt, which will then make your immune system generate antibodies against your antibodies…oh, fuck it. This is just nonsense through and through.

But apparently it’s a thing. People are also collecting urine from pregnant women and shooting themselves up with it to help them lose weight, because there’s a hormone in it.

It’s human coriogonic gotrophin, said Iris McCarthy of Success Weight Loss Systems.

Never trust a Weight Loss Technician who can mangle human chorionic gonadotropin that badly.

Then there’s the gentleman who injected himself intravenously with his own urine, “to maximize his vitality and potency, as he had developed nausea and vomiting twice after drinking his urine orally”. Yeah, I can see how nausea and vomiting are unpleasant. Almost as bad, as the paper this story comes from describes, nearly dying of acute sepsis.

People: Urine is a waste product. Your body works hard to get rid of it. It’s not beneficial to take it back in, because then you’ll just have to pump it back out again. Trust me on this. Do not pump your butt full of pee. Do not inject it into your veins. Don’t drink it.

How do you fight madness?

That’s a serious question. The United States of America has become a seething nest of snakes; we talk about getting out the vote and campaigning and making reasonable, evidence-based arguments, but here’s an example of what we’re confronted with. Alex Jones, everyone, ranting about lesbians:


That’s the liberals. They want to get you in a dungeon. They want to strap you down and take a buzz saw and cut the top of your head off like a pumpkin and pull it off and get a little spoon and go, looking in the mirror, ‘I’m gonna eat your brain now!’
…
‘I’m gonna eat your cerebral cortex last! I’ve got power! I love Satan! And I’m gonna suck you dry and I’m gonna torture you to death. And you’re gonna follow my liberal orders!’

It’s not just Alex Jones, either. It’s people who think Hillary Clinton ran a child sex slave ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor. It’s Nazis. It’s people who think Republicans will work for the good of the country. It’s Donald Trump. It’s a whole system that makes it lucrative to be an extremist nutbag, and that amplifies the voices of the loons unfiltered.

No apocalyptic novel I know of ever predicted that the US would be destroyed by a dangerous and contagious insanity, but here we are. Future historians are going to look back on us and wonder about the causes of this catastrophic collapse.

I’m a 7. Definitely. Definitely a 7.

I’m seeing this rendition of the Dawkins Scale going around on social media.

What I find most amusing is all the people saying that they’re a 6, and that anyone who is a 1 or a 7 is an idiot. It’s amusing because I’m a 7.

Here’s the deal: the “god” we’re debating here is this amorphous, poorly defined thing that is floating around in people’s heads, often with a collection of inconsistent, incoherent associations tied to it. Before you ask me whether I believe in it, you had better tell me specifically what you mean and not rely on a set of variable cultural assumptions.

It’s like you’re asking me whether I believe in new Shimmer, and when I ask what it is, you tell me it’s a dessert topping. It’s a floor wax! No, it’s both a dessert topping and a floor wax, and it’s also three things that are one, and it’s the omnipotent ruler of the universe, and it’s afraid of iron chariots, and it thinks you deserve to burn in hell, but it loves you very much!

I’m just going to tell you to sober up, get your act together, and give me a clear and coherent definition of what you’re talking about, and then maybe I’ll be able to decide whether I believe in it or not. Until then, I’m a 7, and you’re just blithering bullshit with a wacky notion with loads of contradictions that you’re trying to conceal by reducing it to a 3-letter word.

Creationist castle

The Creation “Museum” is losing money, so Answers in Genesis is going to try and shore up profits with a renovation. It’s not looking good.

They’re going to upgrade the theater with 3-D projection. This is the theater where they currently show Men in White, a short movie that is so bad that when I visited the “museum” I only lasted 30 seconds before concluding that I wouldn’t be able to sit through it, or the gimmicky shaky seats and water sprays. Now they’re going to have plesiosaurs looming out at you as an excuse to drip water.

But the big deal they’re bragging about is that they’re going to redesign the entrance to include…new displays! Static displays with no evidence! More apologetics! I’m not feeling the urge to visit it a second time.

Wait, what’s that in the center of the exhibits? Those red balls? That looks familiar.

It is familiar! I’ve seen that so many times. It’s the centerpiece of many of Ham’s droning talks.

They have taken this cartoon, and plan to turn it into a 3D diorama.

You know, this doesn’t suddenly make it more true or believable. It does discredit the “museum” even more that they think it a noteworthy addition to create a sculpture of an old cartoon by a creationist hack. Why? Was Ben Garrison unavailable?

Jordan Peterson is peddling IQ myths and fallacies

Jordan Peterson is notorious for his desire to annihilate a liberal arts education, wanting to throw out the humanities and social sciences (except psychology, apparently) as tainted by post-modernism. We’re supposed to fire all those bad professors who teach bad ideas, false facts, and unacceptable interpretations of the evidence.

I guess that means we can fire Peterson, then.

This article correctly identifies him as The Professor of Piffle. In addition to his intolerance and failure to understand modern literary criticism, it turns out that he, a professor of psychology, doesn’t understand how the brain works.

To fully grasp the depth of Peterson’s belief in power hierarchies, take his commitment to IQ testing: “If you don’t buy IQ research,” he has told his students, “then you might as well throw away all of psychology.” Peterson rejects the theory of multiple intelligences (emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, and so on) and insists that all of human intelligence is biologically determined, essentially unalterable, and expressed in a single number that can be ranked. Your IQ, he says, will govern where you end up in life: with an IQ of 130, you can be an attorney or an editor; at 115, you can be a nurse or a sales manager; at 100, you can be a receptionist or a police officer; at 90, you can be a janitor.

Peterson’s defence of IQ rests on shaky foundations. While he tells students that IQ was empirically established through Charles Spearman’s factor analysis, he does not share the well-known critique of that method: factor analysis supports both of the contradictory causal explanations of intelligence (intelligence as innate versus intelligence as the product of environmental advantage). Peterson then stacks the deck in favour of biology, citing brain size and neural conduction velocity (essentially, the speed at which an electrical pulse moves through tissue) as the determinants of IQ. Again, he does not tell students that both explanations were discredited by later research.

In the tradition of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century pseudo-scientists, phrenologists, quacks, and scientific racists, Peterson’s commitment to IQ is simply the reflection of his commitment to an unalterable hierarchy of human beings. And this is why his dismissal of “unnatural” and “made up” gender pronouns, alongside his casual sexism—his belief that women would be better served by having babies than careers and that male feminists are “creepy”—turns out to be central to his intellectual project, which seeks to resurrect the conventional patriarchal pecking order. For Peterson, transgender people and powerful women upset the “male dominance hierarchy” that forms the centerpiece of his thought. His world view is predicated on the promise of restoring authority to those who feel disempowered by the globalism, feminism, and social-justice movements he derides.

I have to object to the phrase “stacks the deck in favour of biology”, because no sensible biologist would accept that load of crap as in any way valid. It is not good that “the most famous professor in Canada”, as the article calls him, is promoting bad science.