Bad, bad media

The media are lashing back. The post-convention media (with the exception of one article in the Australian) has been abysmally bad, relying on tried-and-true excuse-making from religious apologists. It would be nice if they actually had conversations with atheists rather than immediately running to the nearest cathedral for consolation, but I guess that’s what they have to do now. After all, the convention was an unqualified success, a real triumph for the atheist movement, and they just can’t have that.

Barney Zwartz is a concern troll. He’s a believer; he presumably thinks religion and god and all that crap have some value; so why is he trying to give us advice on how to make atheism more effective?

Here’s my advice. If atheists can reduce their contempt for believers and work harder for their positive goal — reducing the footprint of religion in society — they may begin to exert more of the influence they feel they deserve.

OK, Barney. Here’s my advice for you: put away the writing career, join a monastery, and pray, pray, pray. It will advance your cause!

Of course, why should a believer trust my advice on this issue? I want you to go away. It’s the same with Zwartz. Complain away, at least that’s being honest about your own opinions; but playing the game of offering grandfatherly advice to a movement you detest is insincere and obnoxious.

Oh, and what you consider unworthy doesn’t interest me much. Explain why.

Also unworthy were ABC science presenter Robyn Williams offering “a devastating argument against religion in two words: Senator Fielding”; former Hillsong member Tanya Levin: “I’m finally getting to hang out with the adults”; and Rationalist Society president Ian Robinson, asking whether there were any believers in the audience. “OK, I’ll speak really slowly.” (Wild applause after each.)

What was missing was any sign of self-deprecation. Atheism will be a mature movement in Australia when atheists can laugh not just at the religious, but at themselves.

For instance, you could try to defend Fielding — that would be interesting. Fielding is the fellow who believes the earth is 6000 years old, after all, because his religion tells him so. The religious should be embarrassed by him.

As for laughing at ourselves…we did. There was quite a bit of humor aimed at our own little group. It’s just that the wacky, goofy religious nuts are so much funnier. Religion will be a mature movement when it can stop providing so much juicy material for comedians, although, given that you’ve been struggling with that problem for a few millennia, I don’t offer much hope.

Speaking of jokes, here’s a punchline for you: Melanie Phillips. She’s the deranged religious nut who rants and raves about atheists being totalitarian fundamentalists, and who is now making a career out of her hatred of Richard Dawkins.

Just why is he so angry and why does he hate religion so much? After all, as many religious scientists can attest, science and religion are — contrary to his claim — not incompatible at all.

A clue lies in his insistence that a principal reason for believing that there could be no intelligence behind the origin of life is that the alternative — God — is unthinkable.

Melanie Phillips was not actually at the Global Atheist Convention. I specifically addressed her argument about compatibility from propinquity — it just doesn’t work, because it means that everything must be compatible with everything else in the most trivial way. I also have not heard Dawkins ever claim that God is unthinkable, or that there is no possibility of intelligence responsible for the origin of life — quite the contrary, these are possible alternatives which we simply reject because there is no evidence for them.

It’s always a bad sign when the only way you can make a point is by lying about what the other person said.

Phillips is always a source of amusement, though.

Through such hubristic overreach, Dawkins has opened himself up to attack from quarters that, unlike the theologians he routinely knocks around the park, he cannot so easily disdain.

Books taking his arguments apart on his own purported ground of scientific reason have been published by a growing number of eminent scientists and philosophers, including mathematicians David Berlinski and John Lennox, biochemist Alister McGrath, geneticist Francis Collins, and philosopher and recanting atheist Anthony Flew.

Uh, yes. We can easily disdain them. Berlinski, Lennox, and McGrath are not serious contributors to the debate; Berlinski is a popinjay and Lennox and McGrath are wacky theologians. Collins’ arguments for religion are fallacious and trivial, and Flew is in a sad state of senility.

Here’s the worst. ABC news spent half their brief coverage with shots of a communion ritual at a church, and got some smug idiot in a dog collar named Philip Freier to give his opinion of atheism, and got it all wrong.

Here’s the priest’s brainfart:

It will be interesting to me to see how something that is framed around a largely negative concept, atheism <self-satisfied smile>, is capable of developing a coherent position.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The central concept of modern atheism is the importance of evidence. We have seen the remarkable success of evidence-based reasoning, and have noticed that religion doesn’t seem to use it…that the only negative concept here is the fundamental premise of religion, faith. Evidence and reason are not negative concepts, except perhaps in the minds of faith-heads who have replaced them with a vacuum and gullibility.

We’ve also been waiting a long, long time for religion to develop a coherent position. Their failure so far suggests that they are incapable of doing so.

The problem with science journalism…

…is that too often newspapers think you don’t need a science journalist to write it. Any ol’ hack will do. Take this article on evolution in the Vancouver Sun, which distills modern evolutionary biology into 12 theories, which happens to include Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy as well as Intelligent Design creationism — which, at least, is pairing intellectual equals. The author, Douglas Todd, is speaking High Crackbrain and making stuff up. It’s all garbage from a buffoon who knows nothing about the field. What, you have to wonder, qualifies him to be writing on science?

Jerry Coyne has the answer.

He has twice taken first place in the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, which goes to the top religion reporter in the secular media in North America. Todd is the only Canadian to have received the Templeton.

Hey, the Templeton Foundation puts it right at the top of their web page: they are SUPPORTING SCIENCE. They are all about sponsoring the reconciliation of science and religion (although, perhaps, that should be written as “science and RELIGION“, since we all know where the emphasis lies). It’s just too bad that the results so often belie their claims.

Maddow vs. Cohen

Richard Cohen is one of those profit-making advocates of gay deconversion, whose work has been used in Uganda to justify laws that promote killing gay people; Rachel Maddow, of course, is the fabulous, intelligent interviewer who ought to be the model for responsible television journalism.

She politely rips him to pieces and most decorously picks her teeth with his splintered bones. I like it.

Deep Rifts in Seattle

This is fast becoming the theme of news stories about atheists this year: that there are differences in tactics in the atheist community, with some people being more in-your-face about it (yours truly takes a bow), and others wanting to be more conciliatory towards religion. Well, how surprising that a movement of diverse freethinkers who value critical thinking, skepticism, and open argument, and which lacks either a charismatic central leader or a hierarchy of control, might have members with diverse views…

Here’s another example of journalists jumping on the bandwagon: a story about the Freedom From Religion Foundation meeting in Seattle, in which different people have different tactics.

Ho hum. Let me know when the atheists appoint a pope and start erecting monuments listing dogma and doctrine. That will be news-worthy. The revelation that atheists are a fractious bunch? Not so much.

Nicholas Wade gets schooled, briefly

A few weeks ago, Nicholas Wade wrote a terrible review of Dawkins’ latest book (it wasn’t a negative review, but it just weirdly spun off into some half-baked philosophy of science).

Now the poor guy has been publicly spanked. The NY Times published short letters of rebuttal from Dan Dennett and Philip Kitcher, and then published online another dozen letters. That last link is more of a mixed bag, with some good replies and some strangely skewed ones…but it’s all fun anyway.

Unfortunately, all the letters are necessarily short. This kind of corrective actually needs some longer discussion.

How badly can a paper summary be botched?

Perhaps you are a scientist. And perhaps you have wondered how badly the popular press could possibly mangle your research. Wonder no more: we have discovered a new maximum.

Behold this research summary in The Daily Galaxy, and be amazed!

It’s about a paper in the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B. It’s straightforward physical chemistry using some cool tools to image the formation of double helices of DNA: it’s simply addressing the question of how complementary strands align themselves in solution. It’s physical chemistry, OK? It’s about tiny molecular interactions…until the Daily Galaxy gets ahold of it. Now it’s about how DNA uses telepathy.

DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn’t be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet.

Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.

…

In the study, scientists observed the behavior of fluorescently tagged DNA strands placed in water that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experiment. Strands with identical nucleotide sequences were about twice as likely to gather together as DNA strands with different sequences. No one knows how individual DNA strands could possibly be communicating in this way, yet somehow they do. The “telepathic” effect is a source of wonder and amazement for scientists.

Cue the theremins, everyone, and bring on the reanimated corpse of Rod Serling to narrate this sucker. Audience, say “OOOOOoooooOOOOOOOOooOOH!”

Oh, wait. Read the actual paper, first. It turns out that not only are the scientists not mystified, but they provide a reasonable explanation for the phenomenon, and go on to give some alternatives, even. None of them involve molecular telepathy. They actually are amazed at the ability of these molecules to align…at distances of one whole nanometer!

Pay especially careful to the first sentence of the following paragraph. If you are a journalist writing a summary of a paper, claiming that it says no one knows how the two molecules recognize each other, you should probably read more closely a paragraph that begins, “We hypothesize that the origin of this recognition may be as follows.” It’s a clue that an explanation will follow.

We hypothesize that the origin of this recognition may be as follows. In-register alignment of phosphate strands with grooves on opposing DNA minimizes unfavorable electrostatic interactions between the negatively charged phosphates and maximizes favorable interactions of phosphates with bound counterions. DNAs with identical sequences will have the same structure and will stay in register over any juxtaposition length. Nonhomologous DNAs will have uncorrelated sequence-dependent variations in the local pitch that will disrupt the register over large juxtaposition length. The register may be restored at the expense of torsional deformation, but the deformation cost will still make juxtaposition of nonhomologous DNAs unfavorable. The sequence recognition energy, calculated from the corresponding theory is consistent with the observed segregation within the existing uncertainties in the theoretical and experimental parameters. This energy is ˜1 kT under the conditions utilized for the present study, but it is predicted to be significantly amplified, for example, at closer separations, at lower ionic strength, and in the presence of DNA condensing counterions.

So, their preferred explanation is that there are electrostatic interactions between the molecules that favor pairs that fit together well. Not telepathy. As cautious investigators, they also suggest some alternative explanations; perhaps telepathy will appear here? Or maybe elves?

Presently, we cannot exclude other mechanisms for the observed segregation. For instance, sequence-dependent bending of double helices may also lead to homology recognition by affecting the strand-groove register of two DNA molecules in juxtaposition. The juxtaposition of bent, nonhomologous DNAs may also be less energetically favorable under osmotic stress, since it may reduce the packing density of spherulites. In addition, formation of local single-stranded bubbles and base flipping may cause transient cross-hybridization between the molecules, as proposed to explain Mg2+ induced self-assembly of DNA fragments with the same sequence and length. We consider it to be rather unlikely in this instance, since the probability of bubble formation in unstressed linear DNA of the studied length is very small in contrast to the case where topological strain is relieved by bubble formation in small circular DNA molecules. Furthermore, bubble formation would distort the cholesteric order of spherulites and we see no evidence of this in spherulites composed of a single type of DNA molecule.

I’m so disappointed. Telepathy isn’t mentioned once in the whole danged paper, and there aren’t even tiny diaphanous fairies tugging at the molecules. And no, the Intelligent Designer doesn’t appear, either.

Baldwin GS, Brooks NJ, Robson RE, Wynveen A, Goldar A, Leikin S, Seddon JM, Kornyshev AA (2008) DNA Double Helices Recognize Mutual Sequence Homology in a Protein Free Environment. J. Phys. Chem. B 112(4):1060-1064.

The worst article on Ardipithecus yet

The dishonor goes to ABC News, which put together an appalling mess of an article that gives credibility to creationist denialists. Right from the beginning, you know this article is bunk.

But despite the excitement from the paleontology community, another group of researchers, many of them with advanced degrees in science, are unimpressed by Ardi, who they believe is just another ape — an ape of indeterminate age, they add, and an ape who cannot be an ancestor of modern man for a range of reasons, including one of singular importance: God created man in one day, and evolution is a fallacy.

The whole article is like that: they cite Creation Ministries International, the Institute for Creation Research, and Answers in Genesis, puffing up the credentials of these loons and credulously reporting their dissent. None of these fellows is any kind of researcher, all are looked upon as utterly crazy, and there is no reason to consult any of them on a science story, let alone dedicating a long article solely to their batty position (they quote one of the real researchers just once, saying that the discovery was an important find — but it is more to lend weight to the parade of nutcases declaring it trivial.)

They give a lot of space to Answers in Genesis, especially to one of their pet frauds-with-a-degree, David Menton.

“What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible,” said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. “The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can’t live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages.”

Menton is not an acclaimed anatomist. His sole claim to fame is his weird belief that the earth is only 6000 years old. Although, I must say, I agree with his sentiment here: the first page is metaphorical, poetical nonsense and should be thrown out, and the rest should be tossed right after it. But what really annoys me is the patent disrespect for knowledge in these people. Ardipithecus is a genus that lived over 4 million years ago. Shouldn’t there be a little bit of awe at that? Not from the ICR.

“This is a meaningless discovery of another ape. As far as the creationist community is concerned, this is a big yawn. There is nothing about Ardi that has anything to do with the evolution of man,” said John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas.

Menton just keeps on bringing the dementia.

Menton believes scientists sat on the Ardi discovery for over a decade just to roll it out during the Darwin anniversary. He questions the ability to accurately date any fossils more than a few thousand years old, let alone millions, and he said the condition of the skeleton was so incomplete and fragile that serious research was almost impossible.

Menton said Ardi’s skull and feet are exactly the kind of skull and feet you would expect an ape to have and have none of the features of modern humans.

“Evolutionists want to call Ardi ‘ape-like.’ This creature is ape-like, because she is an ape. Just call it an ape,” he said.

The biggest problem Menton has with Ardi is her estimated age. The Earth, he says, is no more around 5,000 years old, a number creationists have estimated by counting the generations of man named in the Bible from Adam to Jesus.

“Evolution is supposedly based on science, but the science does not prove what they want it to. Creationism is not based on scientific observation but on God’s word. God created everything in six days, and that’s it.”

Errm, the scientists all agree: Ardi was an ape. They say it right out. They’ll also tell ‘acclaimed’ anatomist Menton that, based on the anatomy, we humans are also apes. We also regard the even older last common ancestor of chimps (which are apes) and humans (also apes) to have been an ape. Therefore, any transitional form between an ancient ape and a modern ape is expected to be an ape.

What did Menton expect? A frickin’ giraffe?

As for the rest…anyone in the 21st century who rants about the earth being 6000 years old and unthinkingly accepts the scientific authority of an ancient book cobbled together by tribes of sheepherders really needs to be shuffled off to a rubber room.

So what is ABC News doing getting a story on a serious scientific issue from a series of lunatic asylums? I don’t know. Who is this ‘journalist,’ Russel Goldman, who scribbled up this gullible slop? I don’t know and I don’t care, except that I’ll know to throw anything else he writes in the rubbish.

Maybe the media should interview this guy for “interesting” science

Since the mere majesty and grandeur of the natural world are insufficient to provide entertainment, perhaps science coverage in the media should become something like the Weekly World News. Arthur David Horn could be a major media star.

He now advocates the theory that modern man is not the result of a natural process of evolution, but that evolution was artificially aided by reptilian extraterrestrials. The reptilians bred mankind as servants and continue to rule the planet today, Horn said.

Reptilians have manipulated perceptions of world history and hold power over humankind through their influence over an elite and powerful group of humans, known as the Illuminati, Arthur said. Throughout human history, the reptilian beings have been recorded as dragons or gods.

I don’t think that was an example of media quote mangling, either. He was speaking at a meeting called a “Galactic Gathering,” organized by The Institute for the Study of Galactic Civilizations.

A plus on his side: there’s also a nice human interest story there.

The shift in Arthur’s focus came shortly after meeting Lynette, who was then a metaphysical healer, he said. After many conversations over the telephone, Arthur and Lynette finally met face-to-face in July of 1988 when they spent a week in Northern California’s Trinity Mountains searching for Sasquatch, commonly known as Bigfoot.

The couple never spotted the mythic creature, but fell in love, Lynette said. Only a few months later, they were married in the chapel on the CSU campus.

Awww. Woo Love.

Somebody pass his name on to Sharon Begley, who is manufacturing pseudo-controversies this week. She’s defending Lamarckism now, based on some work that suggests a plausible basis for multi-generation responses to the environment, a justification for some of the observations made by Kammerer on toads.

Genes for living on land seem to get “environmentally silenced in early embryos exposed to water,” says Vargas, who combed through Kammerer’s lab notes and whose analysis appears in the Journal of Experimental Zoology. “It has taken a painfully long time to properly acknowledge that environment can influence inheritance,” he told me. “I think academia has discouraged experiments testing environmental modification of inheritance,” because the inheritance of acquired characteristics—Lamarckism—drives the self-appointed evolution police crazy.

They might want to spend more time reading studies and less energy manning the barricades.

Aaaargh! Epigenetics is not Lamarckism! Also, Begley doesn’t seem to understand that the institution of science is extremely conservative, and rightly so: we ‘man the barricades’ because science isn’t like the Huffington Post, letting any wacky idea sail through unchallenged. There is a demand for rigor: show us the data, do the experiments, repeat until you’ve got a case that can’t be shot down by a lone skeptical first year grad student. Postulating reptoids guiding human evolution isn’t going to be credible until someone shoots one and writes a paper about the dissection, and Lamarckism is going to be sneered at until someone does the experiment that shows it.

I don’t think academia has been neglecting this field because of dogma, either. Epigenetics is hot right now (and again, it’s NOT Lamarckism!), and there’s some interesting work going on in the field of eco-devo. I also think that a replication of Kammerer’s work that demonstrated an actual effect would be easily publishable — I’d be interested in reading it, for sure.

We’re all the evolution police. It isn’t as sinister as Begley seems to imply: we just demand a little more evidence than speculation.

What is the point of this poll?

Some polls you know are just set up to try and get affirmations of what the pollster believes. Others are more inscrutable. Why would CNN even bother to ask this?

Do you believe the Apollo moon landings were faked?

Yes 14%
No 86%

It’s meta-meaninglessness. I was tempted to vote yes, not because I think the moon landings were faked (shee-ya, you’d have to be a raving moron to think that), but because the poll question was so freakishly crazy.

But then, I guess that’s what the modern media does. It doesn’t evaluate; its job is just to treat every point of view as if they were equally sensible.