I get email

Nathan Moran wrote to chastise me. I feel bad for him…I get these things all the time and the stream-of-consciousness reaction I have to them is never flattering to my correspondents. Maybe they should stop.

Kent Hovind & Your Point of View/Opinion

I would extremely promote you to debate Dr. Kent Hovind, when he is accessible [When he gets out of prison?]. I guarantee you, afterwards you won’t look very smart [Yeah, what would I be thinking, debating a lunatic ex-con with a mail-order degree?] PROFESSOR [Is there a salary raise with my promotion to ALL-CAPS PROFESSOR?] PZ Myers [He spelled my name correctly! I am stunned.]. Secondyly [What happened to firstyly? And can you at least give me a thirdyly?], if “there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction“, then who decides the rules and regulations of man [Woman. Definitely woman.]. Man alone cannot go 24 hours without doing something unexpected or unwanted [You’ve been watching The Simpsons too much.]. The fact is that man is far from flawless [Yes? Has someone been arguing otherwise?]. We are prone to fail [Says the fellow touting Kent Hovind. I know.] PROFESSOR [Emphasize it some more, non-professor.]. If you cannot agree with that [Huh? What? When? Where?], then the college or university that you graduated from should be condemned or demolished [The universities of Washington, Oregon, and Utah will be greatly relieved to learn that Nathan has no reason to demolish their facilities. Think of all the homeless PROFESSORS, wandering the streets of Seattle, Eugene, and Salt Lake City.]. By the way, if you honestly believe in the evolutionist view [Uh-oh. I actually do. What will Nathan demolish now?] intruding in our universities and destroying the faith of many young adults [I keep saying it does, thank you for your support.], then you should know that there is no reason to live [What about sex? How about brook trout almondine with wild rice and a fine glass of wine on the side? How about a stormy day on a wild and rocky shore? How about taking a nice deep breath and just feeling your heart beat and your blood sing? Nathan, Nathan, Nathan…there’s so much to live for, don’t do it!] since we came from nothing [Well, Nathan, you personally came from a spurty little dribble squirted from your father’s penis to slather over a tiny scrap that erupted bloodily from your mother’s ovary, but really, we shouldn’t hold anyone’s humble beginnings against them. Why, the fact that I worked my way from nothing to this sumptuously fleshy instantiation containing the complex residue of exploding stars is something I regard as a mark of considerable well-deserved pride.]. That is the underlying statement that evolution eventually leads to [“from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Yes. Lovely, isn’t it?], causing citizens to commit suicide [What? Where? We should be swimming in the decaying corpses of dead biology PROFESSORS, then. This doesn’t seem to happen, you know.]. So save your pitiful blogs [I’ve only got the one.] about non-intellectual information [You’re reaching, Nathan. What is intellectual information? Does it wear tweed and pontificate sagely?] that could be taught by the “average joe” [Somehow, I’m not surprised that someone touting Kent Hovind believes just anyone can teach biology.] or Charles Darwin [Oh, bad news there! Charles Darwin didn’t know any genetics or molecular biology…he’d need a lot of remedial work before he could teach biology.].

Wait…no closing line? No “Regards, Nathan” or “Love, Nathan” or “In Jesus’ Name, Nathan”? I guess he really must be angry with me.

Catching up with old news

Some people are in the news that I’ve covered before. Let’s do a quick update.

Congratulations to John Dixon

Dixon, you may recall, was the fellow who mention on twitter that he was hurrying past the Church of Scientology “in case the stupid rubs off”, and for his casual contempt was rewarded with a lawsuit from the ever-sensitive Scientologists. It didn’t work. Dixon has been cleared.

I think that in his honor everyone should get on Twitter today and write something dismissive and rude about Scientology.

Dennis Markuze exposed

Many people in the godless community know and detest Dennis Markuze AKA David Mabus, the crazy spammer who repetitively and obsessively sends email and posts on forums and comments on blogs, with lunatic accusations, deranged claims of prophecy, threats, and random Depeche Mode videos. Others know him too; this is the guy who CC’s his rants against me to every member of the faculty at my university. He’s definitely mentally ill.

He also lives in Montreal, where I was this weekend for the AAI convention, and would you believe that he actually showed up! A while after someone pulled a fire alarm in the hotel, he appeared in the hall, ranted and raged and argued incoherently with a few of the attendees, and then…ran away. Really! He ran off! I was right there in the hall, and I missed him! I’m so disappointed. Apparently, though, in his swift and flighty passage through the room, he spotted me and then fled to the lobby to brag online about seeing me.

go post this up on “pharnygula”. I’ve had an opportunity to see PZ’s ugly face in real life! I am spamming the world from the Delta Hotel where the convention is taking place….

I know. He’s crazy and pathetic.

But here’s what you really want to know. Tessa Brown got a good photo of the loon who has been so pitifully harrassing us on the internet, and here it is.

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Dennis Markuze AKA David Mabus, internet kook

It’s a shame he didn’t have the courage to actually talk to me. I would have invited him out to the hotel bar for a beer.

Atheists have conquered America by being really good at trivia

The Pew Forum surveyed Americans on their knowledge of religion, and discovered that the group most generally knowledgeable about world religions was…those unshriven hellbound godless folk. This does not sit well with many believers, who have long preferred to relegate atheists to a hell of total unawareness of the gods, smugly assuming that if only we knew what they knew, we’d be True Believers in god in general and their specific, narrow sect in particular. That we might actually know what they believe and not only choose to not believe, but also to regard their superstitions as ridiculous, is unthinkable.

You will have a difficult time finding someone more offended by reality than John Mark Reynolds, professor of Catholic rationalization at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. He’s got an excuse: atheists are trivia kings but bad thinkers. We’d do well on the home Bible version of Jeopardy, but you see, we really don’t understand the facts, and we lack the wisdom to hear the secret music of theology.

This surprises me. Apparently, the Trinity is trivia, an idea I can sort of sympathize with, but Professor Reynolds’ own Catholic faith waged bloody wars over the Arian heresy—people by the thousands were slaughtered because they didn’t believe that Jesus and the Holy Ghost had equal status and substance with the One True God. Ask the Visigoths. Oh, you can’t — they’re all dead.

And now we learn that transubstantiation is also trivial! Where was John Mark Reynolds a few years ago? I could have used his help calming the raging hordes of Catholics who were outraged that I should desecrate a cracker. He was on their side, damning me as a vandal of all that was right and good, you say? Oh. I guess it wasn’t all so trivial after all. And again, representatives of his faith have in the past used the sanctity of their magic crackers as an excuse to slaughter thousands of Jews, men, women, and children, for imagined slights against that trivia. What a shame that they died over something so unimportant.

John Mark Reynolds is not done undercutting his own points right there in the title of his article, though. No, he pens an incoherent, inconsistent, contradictory mess of assertions because atheists outscore his team in trivia contests. The Christian martyr complex is on full display here.

As a boutique belief system in the United States, atheism has a good many advantages. There are so few atheists and agnostics that they do not run all the risks of a populist movement. Not for them is the burden of dealing with the masses of a global population, their idiosyncrasies, worries and all.

Since Christians make up three-quarters or more of the American general population, we have the burden of accounting for almost everybody’s problems. Sadly, we are much less well represented in elite education, media, and government. This is not because religion is incompatible with elite education, but because “skepticism” about religion has become a sociological way for the elite to mark themselves off from the rest of us. In this sense, anti-religion (and in particularly anti-Catholicism) serves the same function that joining the “right” church used to serve in another era.

See, atheists are the ones who are trivial — we’re so few in numbers that we hardly count, and since we make no difference at all we escape responsibility. We’re negligible, just the thin scum riding on the surface of the deep ocean of Christianity. And Christianity…oh, man, poor Christians. They’re the responsible ones who have to take care of all those sick people and maintain the economy and work so hard to maintain everyone else’s moral probity. Atheism is just the fashionable façade of the “elites” (I do so wish the people who sneer at “elites” would look up the meaning of the word. It is not a synonym for “dregs”).

I did learn something new here. Despite the pitiful fact of our miniscule numbers and complete irrelevance, teachers are mostly atheists, Fox News and CNN are run by atheists, and most our senators and representatives and governors are atheists. It’s as if we belong to a secret sinister cabal that has sneakily taken over the entire culture.

I wish!

It’s a strange state of civilization that Reynolds imagines. Christianity is entirely responsible for all the important stuff, but somehow, this insignificant film of godless elitists are entirely responsible for every one of the faults of society. We have a culture of entertainment that is all the fault of a tiny minority, and no, no, no, Christians didn’t participate in or create any of it.

The secular elite has provided most of us with wretched religious education by all but banning it as a topic for serious enquiry or discussion. Meanwhile, they know just enough about religion to get some “facts” right on a pop-religion quiz, but have no grasp on why, despite all temptations, some thoughtful folk remain religious. They know some of the lyrics of religion, but cannot hear the music.

You might blame Christian education in churches for this problem, except a culture of entertainment has reduced most Americans ability to tolerate difficult discussions. Pity the pastor, with seminary training in ancient languages and a carefully constructed sermon, who must face a congregation taught by television to anticipate education with Muppets and Katy Perry.

Damn you, Veggie Tales, you spawn of the Global Atheist Conspiracy! Elmo is Satan!

Reynolds returns to his contradictory message that only Christianity does good, while atheism tells people to commit criminal acts that will get them sent to jail.

Weirdly, Christians must clean up the mess of broader culture, but we have had little power to create pop culture in the last fifty years. The poor and the disadvantaged are always the first to bear the brunt of bad cultural ideas and only the religious remain on the ground to try to help. Christians, for example, try to keep people from doing the things that get men sent to prison, but then work hard to help prisoners once people fail.

In this sense it is easier to be an agnostic or atheist. You have rejected the mainstream of American history, which means you don’t have to take responsibility for its failures, though you can appropriate its successes.

But wait, Professor Reynolds! Isn’t this whole essay patently about denying Christian responsibility for the current state of affairs, placing the entire blame on the shoulders of a minority you simultaneously deride as being so tiny they can’t take credit for anything? How do you get a professorship when your brain is so confused and inconsistent?

Oh, right. He’s at Biola. Never mind. Being a fervent defender of the faith is enough there.

But wait, we have to look at a peculiar tangent the Catholic professor takes. He’s open-minded, he’s advocating learning more about lots of religions, so he has to suggest that we learn more about all kinds of weird cults and sects and beliefs, and that means even learning about the Latter Day Saints.

For example, one of the most influential books first published by an American is the Book of Mormon. It appears in almost no American government school curriculum, though it exercises a global influence and impacts the lives of millions of Americans. This is foolish. I am, to say the least, no Mormon partisan, but there are entire states in our nation that cannot be understood without some grounding in Mormon thought.

How many American college graduates have a more charitable comprehension of the indigenous culture of Paris than of Salt Lake City? Mormon Utah can only wish it were treated as gently as “other cultures” are in a politically correct curriculum.

That’s interesting. I lived in Salt Lake City for seven years. I frequently left the walled enclave of the University of Utah to explore Mormon culture — I’ve heard the Tabernacle Choir, I read parts of the Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price (but not their entireties, there are limits to the schlock I can digest), I took the official tours, I’ve read on the history of Utah, I visited the genealogy archives, I’ve shopped at ZCMI and played with my kids at Liberty Park. I know Mormon culture about as well as a curious Gentile can, so once again, here’s an atheist with significant knowledge about a faith he denies.

And you know what I learned about Mormonism? It’s a lot of wacky bullshit, with some very nasty misogynistic undertones. I also encourage everyone to learn more about this foolishness, one of the many brands of pretentious nonsense advocated under the guise of religion, but I will not suggest that our views of this poison have to be “charitable”. Why should they be? It’s far wiser and not at all trivial to recognize that millions of people live lies and believe in fairy tales that are wrong.

I have been informed that Reynolds is not Catholic. He belongs to some weird Eastern Orthodox sect. Knowing this, however, is simply trivia, so I can’t feel too guilty about missing the details of his superstition. He might think it’s non-trivial, though, since he did almost lose his job over it.

Stuart Pivar has responded

Stuart Pivar has replied to my criticisms. He’s very quick. It’s too bad he isn’t rational.

Dear Dr. Myers,

My paper, “The Origin of the Vertebrate Skeleton,” published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, does not describe what is observed in embryology. I never made this claim. The references in the paper illustrate and support the historical context. Namely, attempts to represent in drawings the missing historical stages lost by the phenomenon called condensation (the attrition of initial stages by the addition of terminal stages over eons, see Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Stephen Jay Gould, 1977).

By analogy this phase is the reconstruction of a missing first reel of a long movie. The model is a hypothetical construction, common in cosmology, geology and atomic theory, to account for historical or unobservable events. It is the only accurately predictive model of morphogenesis ever published.

For further explanation my proposed model, see: www.syntheticlifelab.com.

Sincerely yours,

Stuart Pivar

Yes, I know those drawings could not be derived from embryology, because nothing in the embryo resembles them. But that disclaimer still leaves wide open a significant question.

Where is the evidence for his “reconstruction”?

It’s not in embryology, it’s not in molecular biology, it’s not in systematics, it’s not in paleontology. It’s just, boom, plopped on the page in a series of fantastic sketches. If you’re doing science, the central part of any paper is a description of how you derived your conclusions, and that is completely missing. With that level of rigor, Brian Froud’s books could be called scientific evidence for the existence of fairies and goblins.

He’s baaaack — Stuart Pivar hasn’t learned a thing

I lied. Lied, lied, lied. You knew I was being sarcastic — there’s no way I’m going to give Stuart Pivar a pass.

Pivar has published in a rather obscure journal, The International Journal of Astrobiology, which is obviously going to contain a fair amount of speculation…but his article doesn’t fit the subject matter of the journal in the slightest, and I suspect he relied on an unqualified pool of reviewers who knew nothing about developmental biology to get it published. It’s the same old crap Pivar has always peddled.

The title of the article is “The origin of the vertebrate skeleton“. Flacks for the journal are calling it an “innovative solution to the evolution of form” and are hyping it to a ridiculous degree.

How life originated and evolved is arguably the greatest unsolved problem facing science. Thousands of scientists and scores of organizations and scientific journals are dedicated to discovering the mechanisms underlying this mystery. In the peer-reviewed journal’s letter of acceptance the reviewer states, ” . . . the article should be published, so that as many scientists as possible can participate in the discussion on this new important subject.” Simon Mitton, prominent Cambridge scientist and IJA editor-in-chief, calls it “a groundbreaking concept.”

I have a suspicion that the flack writing that copy was…Pivar himself. It sure sounds like the pompous fluff in his books.

I have to criticize a few things in that noise. “How life originated and evolved” is a gigantic constellation of problems; it is not ever going to be answered in a single short paper. That’s just extravagant hyperbole. The reviewer’s endorsement is vague — encouraging discussion is the least we should expect from any paper — and wrong: Pivar’s article is not new, simply rehashing unsupported assertions from previous editions of his self-published books, and it is not important. It’s wrong.

Simon Mitton, by the way, is an astronomer. He is not qualified to judge whether a paper about developmental biology is “groundbreaking”. And given the appallingly bad quality of the work, I suppose he isn’t even qualified to be embarrassed by his incompetent assessment.

The paper itself is patent nonsense. There is no data. It’s a fantasy erected around fictitious games in imaginary topology — Pivar invents metaphors of tissue arrangements and cell movements that he claims generate form by purely mechanical forces, but he has no observations or measurements to suggest that they exist anywhere. It’s 2½ pages of text and 20 hand-drawn figures with little explanation.

Here, for example, is his explanation of the development and evolution of the skull. The complete story, in one paragraph.

Skull

The skull takes its form from the apical cap, a two-layer spherical surface divided into four sectors and three zones, each containing a hole at the centre resulting from the thinning of the membrane. Hydrostatic collapse causes the ventral half of the outer layer to fold over upon the dorsal half, forming the zygomatic arch and prefrontal ridges. The remaining ventral segments of the apical cap fold underneath the presumptive mandible (Fig. 19).

You may be wondering if perhaps Fig. 19 clarifies this abbreviated gemisch. Here it is.

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No, it doesn’t.

That middle column illustrates one bizarre assertion: that some part of the mandible rises up over the top of the skull to form the zygomatic arch and a kind of frontal cap. It doesn’t do that in any embryo, ever. There is nothing in the anatomical configuration of any vertebrate skull that would even suggest such an origin, and this is the only “data” he shows to back up the claim, a drawing he made. Similarly, there is no apical cap, no pattern of membranes in four sectors of three zones, no arrangement of holes, and I’m completely baffled by the row of lower teeth floating in space waiting for a mandible to drift up and give them a base.

And don’t get me started on his fable about how limbs evolve and develop.

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It’s bullshit at every step with no connection to reality, and he doesn’t even try in the text to document any evidence for these various stages. He drew them, and that’s good enough for the septic tank king of New York.

How did this get published? I have no idea. Let’s be charitable and assume that the reviewers were not drooling idiots, but were just ignorant of the actual data for the evolution and development of these structures, which completely contradicts everything Pivar is claiming. Shouldn’t they have looked at the form of the paper? It’s embarrassingly inadequate. There are no methods given, so reading the paper gives you no clue about how the conclusions were generated. There are no observations, just a large pile of sketches made with no sign that the artist had ever looked at an embryo. Shouldn’t any competent scientist have stopped somewhere in their reading of the paper and asked themself how Pivar knew what he was claiming? Shouldn’t they have stopped altogether and either consulted a biologist or recused themselves from reviewing the paper on grounds that it is outside their domain of expertise?

Something funny is going on here. I don’t see any other sign that the International Journal of Astrobiology is a crank journal, other than that this dreadful disgrace of a paper got published in it. I’m mystified that a journal would poison their own credibility by publishing a paper this ridiculous, but there it is, a cuckoo in the nest, and no one but some random blogger squawking about it.

I don’t think I can trust that journal, ever. Other authors who’ve published there might want to contact the editors and ask why they they’re so willing to flush their reputation away.

Let’s be nice to bad science now

I have been chastised by William Connolley; he thinks I was too “strident” in condemning that lousy paper about Moses parting the sea with a fortuitous wind. I disagree, obviously. It was a bad paper, and I gave the reasons why it was so awful: it was poorly justified, it was not addressing an even remotely significant question, and the logic of the work and the conclusions was lacking. Connolley also doesn’t seem to understand why it is objectionable and serves an ideological purpose for the creationists. Yes, as I pointed out, finding natural causes makes miracles irrelevant, but that logic doesn’t matter. The point of this paper was very simple: to allow creationists to make the claim that science supports the truth of the Bible.

Right there, that defeats his claim that this work was “harmless”. I’d also add that this paper was remarkably widely publicized by the media everywhere, far more so than your typical obscure bit of part-time climate modeling work. Somebody should be countering this sloppy and contrived nonsense, and if we’re going to insist that cranky scientists give it a pass, who will? A credulous media? How bad does sloppy science need to be before it’s legitimate to criticize it? Or is it the case where once purported science becomes so absurd that we’re supposed to patronizingly overlook the pathetic clown who did it?

I guess that means I should just look away and not criticize this other paper that just turned up. It’s by Stuart Pivar, proponent of imaginary embryology, world’s greatest expert in the development and evolution of balloon animals, author of a failed lawsuit for $15 million against me, and persistent crank. He has managed to get himself published in a peer-reviewed journal.

But gosh, it’s harmless. It’s just another kook getting published in a science journal. Let’s all wink and look away and pretend it isn’t happening — we wouldn’t want to seem strident, after all. Closing our eyes to it all is the best response to bad science, I understand now.

Never trust the anti-woman brigade to be honest

They are as bad as creationists. They often are creationists. Their anti-abortion ideology is so overwhelming that they will make up ‘facts’ and call them science. Here’s a recent example:

“I think it’s important to note with the term fertilized egg, that’s the same thing as using the N word for an African American,” said Mason. “Because it’s a dehumanizing term and it’s not based in science. The term would be a zygote, or an embryo, speaking of a unique individual.” Mason is hoping the passage of the amendment will lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“It’s a bad law,” said Mason, referring to Roe v. Wade. “It was not based in reason. They ignored the concept of the pre-born child being a person.”

That’s simply insane. You aren’t insulting a fertilized egg by referring to its status, and there is no one there to be insulted by your terminology. This Keith Mason wanker has no qualifications as a scientist — he seems to be little more than a self-appointed minister…which explains his propensity for lying.

We use the term “fertilized egg” all the time — so do farmers and grocers. I could show it to you in developmental biology textbooks.

While we use the term “fertilized egg” routinely, there is another term you won’t find in any of the texts or on the lips of developmental biologists: “pre-born child”. What a crock.

Texas Board of Education: Hey, that’s an awfully big beam in your eye

I don’t know how they do it. The Texas BOE has a new ‘controversy’ to fret over:

At a three-day meeting that started Wednesday, the board is scheduled to consider a resolution that would require it to reject textbooks that it determines are tainted with teaching “pro-Islamic, anti-Christian half-truths and selective disinformation,” a bias that it argues is reflected in current schoolbooks.

I really missed the public school education in Islam — we never learned much of anything about anything outside the borders of the US, I’m afraid. And I rather doubt that in the current political climate that Islam is suddenly getting a lot of positive press in school textbooks. This is just another stunt by the kooks running the educational system in Texas, who would regard a statement mentioning that Muslims exist and they also happen to be human beings as a disgusting slam against True ‘Murcans™.

They should worry more about the pro-Christian, anti-science half-truths and selective disinformation that are promoted by the fundamentalist/evangelical movement.

But of course, if you want the actual story, ignore the idiots at the BOE: the Texas Freedom Network has documented the falsehoods in their claims, and is following the hearings.