I am offended!

Another day, another outraged Christian. Parents in a Utah school district were horrified to discover a link on the district web page to an evil essay:

The new battle centers on a link on the district’s Web page that was quietly removed on Feb. 16. Titled “America: Republic or Democracy?” the link led directly to an essay by William P. Meyers, a California-based writer who heralds his belief that Jesus Christ is one in a long string of “historic vampires.”

I, too, am deeply offended. Meyers doesn’t know how to spell his own name, and everyone knows Jesus wasn’t a vampire — he was a zombie.

But here’s another weird thing: you can read the offensive essay, and what you’ll discover is that it says nothing about Jesus or vampires. It’s about the nature of the US government, which he explains is not a simple democracy, but a republic that evolved towards more democratic representation gradually, which is not a contentious issue at all, or shouldn’t be. It also points out something that is probably even more offensive to the purists who worship the founding fathers like a council of demigods: among the motives of the American revolution was a demand to protect the institution of slavery, and the desire of acquisitive land speculators to seize more native American land.

Uh-oh. Questioning the nobility of our forefathers? Trouble.

And then the essay concludes with another obvious, simple piece of reporting:

There are no longer any voter-qualification impediments to democracy in the United States. But many have noted that the will of the people has tended not to prevail, and that a majority of people eligible to vote are so discouraged that they do not vote. The main reason for this is the buying and selling of elections and politicians by the wealthier class of citizens and their special interest groups. A year or more before elections take place, the winner is decided by those who vote with dollars. But this is a defect in democracy, not a reason to abandon it. The answer is to cure the defect, not to attempt to destroy our representative democracy.

Hmm, I think I like this guy even if he does consistently misspell his name. Unfortunately, to constitutive conservatives like the yahoos in Utah, the message in the essay is…creeping socialism! And they get even more hysterical:

[Meyers] believes in anarchy, pagan worship and that Jesus was just a leader of a small cult and is a real vampire! He advocates radical socialism, limiting families to two children, abortion to term, homosexuality, worshipping the sun instead of a ‘dead Jesus,’ saying that Mary was just an unwed pregnant teenager, and many other socialist political views, just two clicks from the district’s home page. … All this was linked directly from Alpine School District’s Web site.

No, it wasn’t. It actually took a fair amount of digging to find out what the heck they’re talking about. Here is his position on abortion and birth control — it’s not at all inflammatory, and includes some simple common sense, like “It is not an appropriate role of government to try to boss people’s sex lives around.” He does not advocate sun worship, in fact proposes quite the opposite. The vampire story is an introduction to a book, and isn’t even on the same site.

If it weren’t for a howling mob of witchhunters trying to find cause to censor a short, simple essay on American history that they found offensive, I wouldn’t have found any of that. It is interesting that they don’t actually address any of the content of that one essay, but instead have to resort to mad, flailing character assassination to silence a simple explanation of historical facts that did not fit their deranged view of the world.

Scattered shots against Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini

So I just put up this lengthy gripe about Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, and there were a bunch of other things I wanted to say that I couldn’t squeeze in, so here are a few left-over comments.

  • The best take-down so far is Block and Kitcher’s review — go read that. Basically, they approach the book from the perspective of both biology and philosophy, and Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini got ’em both wrong.

  • Larry Moran takes on the one-sidedness of the Ruse review. Ruse panned Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, but he also threw out the baby with the bathwater: don’t neglect the role of chance in order to promote selection as paramount.

  • Salon has a truly awful interview with Fodor. I don’t know why they do this, but Salon always gets these suck-up interviewers:

    But unlike most of these attacks, “What Darwin Got Wrong,” a new book by Jerry Fodor, a professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona, comes not from the religious right, but from two atheist academics with — surprise — a nuanced argument about the shortcomings of Darwin’s theories. Their book details (in very technical language) how recent discoveries in genetics have thrown into question many of our perceived truths about natural selection, and why these have the potential to undermine much of what we know about evolution and biology.

    Wrong all the way through. It’s not technical: it’s a couple of non-biologists writing way outside their discipline. I’ve heard nothing about “recent discoveries in genetics” revealed in their book, and I’ve seen nothing that calls selection and evolution into question. The interviewer simply gives away the game and accepts Fodor’s premises right there in the introduction.

  • In that same Salon interview, Fodor gripes about blogs.

    Most of the backlash to the book so far has been on blogs, which have been pretty obscene and debased. What’s upsetting is that they tell you that they think you’re an idiot, but they don’t tell you why — people who aren’t part of the field or who may not, in many cases, know much about Darwin. I’m not sure that all people who have been blogging about it are very sophisticated. It’s frustrating because you don’t know who you’re talking to.

    How odd. There hasn’t been that much of a response to Fodor on the blogs, and I’ve been looking. Is he complaining about Brian Leiter? The Nature Network? Brian Switek? Jerry Coyne, perhaps? I don’t think any of those people match his description of his critics as “obscene,” “debased,” or unsophisticated. I’d only apply those terms to the reviewers at the Discovery Institute, but they all seem to love his book.

    Is anybody else marveling at the irony of the philosopher Fodor complaining that his critics aren’t part of the field that he is criticizing?

  • I left out one of the most inane paragraphs in the New Scientist summary.

    …the internal evidence to back this imperialistic selectionism strikes us as very thin. Its credibility depends largely on the reflected glamour of natural selection which biology proper is said to legitimise. Accordingly, if natural selection disappears from biology, its offshoots in other fields seem likely to disappear as well. This is an outcome much to be desired since, more often than not, these offshoots have proved to be not just post hoc but ad hoc, crude, reductionist, scientistic rather than scientific, shamelessly self-congratulatory, and so wanting in detail that they are bound to accommodate the data, however that data may turn out. So it really does matter whether natural selection is true.

    That is simply unbelievable. Is Fodor really trying to argue that natural selection, in all of its demonstrations and instances, is FALSE? Simply because he doesn’t like selectionist implications and because some authors have been overzealous in making up just-so stories? That’s insane. Selection is a fact. It’s a well-established part of evolution. That some examples have not been soundly supported doesn’t mean that the good evidence is going to disappear from biology.

Amazing gibberish

Renew America, the bizarrely, deeply, weirdly conservative web site founded by Alan Keyes, really had to struggle to find someone crazier than Pastor Grant Swank and Fred Hutchison and Bryan Fischer and Wes Vernon (let alone Alan Keyes himself), but they have succeeded. They have Linda Kimball writing for them. She has written the strangest history of evolutionary biology ever — I think she was stoned out of her mind and hallucinating when she made this one up. It’s called “Evolutionism: the dying West’s science of magic and madness“. The title alone is enough to hint at the weirdness within, but just wait until you read where evolution comes from.

Though taught under the guise of empirical science, naturalistic evolution is really a spiritual concept whose taproot stretches back to the dawn of history. It was then, reports ancient Jewish historian Josephus, that Nimrod (Amraphel in the Old Testament) used terror and force to turn the people away from God and toward the worship of irrational nature. Moving forward in time to the Greco-Roman world, evolution serves as the mechanism of soul-transference in metempsychosis and transmigration of souls. In the ancient East, the mystical Upanishads refine evolution and it becomes the mechanism of soul-movement in involutions, emergences, incarnations, and reincarnation. In that both rationalist/materialist/secularism and its’ counterpart Eastern/occult pantheism are modernized nature pseudo-religions, it comes as no surprise that evolution serves as their ‘creation mythos’.

It’s a little surprising that Josephus isn’t regarded as a member of the Greco-Roman world, but I had no idea that I was teaching about metempsychosis and reincarnation. The students are going to be really shocked when I put that on the exam next year.

Kimball’s grip on the history of the last century is no better than her understanding of prior millennia, either.

Today, in addition to original Darwinism — which many scientists have already rejected as useless — there are three other versions of Naturalist evolutionism: neo-Darwinism, punctuated equilibrium, and panspermia, the notion that life was seeded on Earth by highly evolved beings either from another planet, or from another dimension. The latter two versions are favored by powerful Transnational Progressive New Age occult insiders such as Marilyn Ferguson, Robert Muller and Barbara Marx Hubbard as well as by channeling cults who are excitedly ‘receiving revelations’ from discarnate entities calling themselves the Space Brothers, the Council of Nine, Transcended Masters, and more recently, the ancient Ennead of Egypt.

Uh, neo-Darwinism is Darwinism with genetics and population genetics; it’s an evolution of the original theory proposed by Darwin. Punctuated equilibrium is a much narrower subset of evolutionary theory that describes the distribution of observable change in a fossil lineage. It’s nowhere near the same footing or the same scope as neo-Darwinism.

Panspermia isn’t even on the radar.

How come the Space Brothers, the Council of Nine, Transcended Masters, and the ancient Ennead of Egypt never show up at any of the biology conferences I attend (is anyone else confused by the conjunction of “recently” with the ancient Ennead)? And they never publish!

Then there are the conspiracy theories. You knew there had to be conspiracy theories.

Whereas occult pantheism quietly flowed beneath ‘red-colored’ atheist-materialist-communism and Nazism during the twentieth century, that order is quickly reversing. Today, ‘green-colored’ occult pantheist-socialism is brazenly striding onto the world-stage in full public view while materialist-secularism slowly fades to black. Already, zealous High Priests and Priestesses of the occult arts are calling the U.N the world church and the world mind, while other madmen such as David Spangler, demand that everyone submit to a satanic-initiation to qualify for entry to the coming green New World Order.

Back away slowly, everyone. This one needs the tranq gun and the rubber room.

She seems to have confused us godless atheistic materialist evilutionists for a bunch of New Age wackaloons. And her bottom-line message is that we have to prop up good old Christianity, because otherwise the tree-worshipping Satanists are going to take over.

Why quacks ought to lie low

Now Andreas Moritz is featured by Orac. If he was concerned because a little criticism from a student got a fair amount of attention from Google, now he has Pharyngula and Respectful Insolence highlighting his quackery.

I hate to give hints to kooks, but really, you should study the Streisand effect. Attempts at legal intimidation, threats to silence web sites, and those kinds of nasty shenanigans to squelch bad publicity always backfire on the internet.

Oh, and WordPress? You still suck.

Do not harass the quacks!

Christopher Maloney, N.D.*, is rightfully complaining about the fact that he has received rude email, and also implies that he may have received harassing phone calls. He’s a sensitive soul, apparently — hundreds of email messages is nothing, I get that much every few hours — but if you are sending nothing but vituperation and anger his way, knock it off.

I repeat, STOP IT.

No phone calls. Email should be arguments, not stab-someone-in-the-eyes loudness. You don’t have to compromise on content, just don’t be stupid. If you are intruding on someone’s personal life, you are in the wrong, plain and simple.

Making the internet a place where the foolishness of kooks is easily spotted, though, is perfectly legitimate. Carry on.

*N.D. is short for “Noisy Duck,” by the way.

Do not respect authority

I’m sorry to inflict this on you, and it’s OK if you decide not to torture your brain watching it. This is Kary Mullis, Nobel prize winner for the discovery of PCR, giving a talk. It’s long and rambling, and at various points he endorses global warming denialism and HIV denialism, but somehow thinks maybe there is something to astrology. It’s a terrible, awful, embarrassingly bad talk from a prestigious kook. Mullis has one point of pride with me: when anyone asks me to name a book by a legitimate, successful scientist that demonstrates that even smart people can be awesomely stupid, Mullis’s Dancing in the Mind Field beats out even Collins’ Language of God.

There are funny moments in the video, but they’re mostly funny because they expose the inanity and hypocrisy of Mullis. For instance, he says that he will not take statins to control cholesterol because they might damage his brain…but anyone who knows Mullis’s history knows he’s been extraordinarily indulgent in mind-altering recreational pharmaceuticals.

Kary Mullis @ Science Lecture Series (01.22.2010) from Saddleback Chemistry on Vimeo.

Really, though, the only reason to listen to this mess is at the end, somewhere past the one hour mark, where he’s dealing with the Q&A, and two people, a student and a faculty member, actually have the guts to question him critically. Mullis can’t answer them; he basically makes an argument from authority, claiming that he’s been studying diseases since before the student was born, and even stooping to calling him a “little boy”. It got ugly there. Mullis not only is incapable of assembling a coherent thought, but turns surly when anyone does not fawn over him.

The student and the professor who are willing to argue with the credentialed buffoon are the only shining lights in this depressing spectacle. I’d ask for someone to tell me their names, except I’m a little concerned that calling out an idiotic Nobelist in public may have some repercussions. It ought to enhance their reputations, but you never know…especially among a faculty that thought it was a good idea to invite Mullis (he does have a reputation, and it’s not a good one) in the first place.

Word salad lunacy Bible babble blah blah blah

I’ve often noticed a tendency for some people to host a whole gnarly syndrome of denialist symptoms: some people are creationists+HIV denialists+global warming denialists+ant-vaxers+whatever. They stand out in the crowd as hyper-intense paragons of idiocy; I often wonder how they get around at all, since the power of their disbelief is so strong that they probably deny their shoelaces as soon as they get up in the morning, yet at the same time they believe a magic man in the sky will soon make them float up into the air to a rapturous eternal congress of their fellow reality deniers.

I’ve found an amazing example of this syndrome. You’ll be able to recognize the problem from just the title of his blog post: Christendom Preachers Pastors Christian Lay People Asleep Wheel Ignore Darwinian Attacks Veracity Genesis Scriptural Inerrancy Not Defended Historical Account Torah Doubted Treated Lightly Quaint Fairie Tales Believers Story Adam Jesus Revelation When Will Evangelists Pulpits America Wake Up Academic Intellectual Onslaught Christian Holy Writ? The post is ostensibly a defense of Young Earth Creationism, but somehow includes rants about Obama’s “shadow government,” gays, Egyptian history, teabaggers, birth certificates, yadda yadda yadda. Have you ever had a conversation with a schizophrenic? Read that long, long post and you’ll get a slight feel for that.

Unfortunately, he claims to be done with blogging.

So I think I’ll be cutting back on my blogging, tired of so very few inquiries and expressions of interest, none from pastors, can you believe it?

No, really?

West Bend, Wisconsin: aspiring to be the next Texas?

There is a nest of creationist fruit loops scattered across Wisconsin, and they do try to get on school boards. The latest is David Weigand, a candidate for the board of education in the West Bend school district. Seriously, do not vote for this kook. Here’s his statement on evolution.

WITH REGARD TO TEACHING EVOLUTION OR CREATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

In a nutshell, this is what I believe:

1. Origin studies, (whether Creation or evolution) and the idea of “millions of years” does not belong in the science classroom because these are not testable, repeatable or observable; they are philosophical and accepted by faith.

2. If evolution is taught in school, students should be taught the truth about it and the scientific data surrounding it. Ideas that were once championed by evolutionists are no longer valid, much like the false science behind man-made global warming. Students deserve the truth.

You can spot an acolyte of Answers in Genesis from a mile away — that mantra of “millions of years” is a theme they recite over and over in their “museum” and website. They regard the phrase as a dead giveaway that one is not a true Christian out to destroy America.

The relativism is also AiG baloney. They love to whine that all ideas are equal, that it’s all just opinion, so their clown circus values are just as valid as science. It’s not true. The age of the earth has been repeatedly tested and observed using multiple methods, and it always comes up old, old, old…no faith required, and the science actually crosses the boundaries of individual faiths. Their young earth dogma, though, is built on nothing but faith, and has been actively refuted by experiment and observation.

That last paragraph is just kook-sign, a symptom of religious derangement syndrome. I’ve found that people who reject the science of evolution also have a tendency to be avid denialists of all kinds of other science, from climate change to the HIV cause of AIDS.

David Wiegand. Your wingnut ignoramus candidate. Vote for him if you hate science and education, too.

Wheels within wheels

Ben Stein wins another honor. He has been declared the Rosa Parks of Darwin skeptics on the Rosa Parks of Rosa Parks Blogs, which points out amusing and offensive instances of rhetorical hyperbole. The amusing bit here, though, is that he got named this on the basis of an old post by creationist Kevin Wirth which does literally say Ben Stein is the Rosa Parks of Darwin Skeptics, right in the title. I’d seen this before, way back in the old days of the Expelled hoo-ha, but this time I noticed an interesting connection. At the bottom of the article, it has this brief biographical note:

Seattle area writer and Darwin skeptic Kevin Wirth is the publisher and editor of the new book “Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters” by Dr. Jerry Bergman. He has investigated and researched issues related to the persecution of Darwin Doubters since 1982.

Wait, what? Jerry Bergman? That Jerry Bergman, the carbon-is-irreducibly-complex and chemistry-is-a-religion-so-you’ll-get-fired-for-posting-the-periodic-table Jerry Bergman? The crazy Jerry Bergman I debated back in November?

Wow. Kevin Wirth really knows how to pick ’em.

It also reminds me…that debate was recorded by the local creationists, and they said a DVD would be made available; it would have been nice if they’d sent me a copy. They haven’t. The existence of any recording seems to have faded away from their site. I wonder why?

It can’t be embarrassment, because they actually host a pdf by Bergman arguing his bizarre version of irreducible complexity.

…the only way to refute the concept of irreducible complexity is to demonstrate that all objects can be reduced to a fundamental particle and still function properly. If a radio, a functional eye or ear, can be achieved, for example, by a single quark (the particle scientists now believe is irreducible)–or all, of the functions of an intelligent human, including the ability to reproduce with other humans, can be produced by a single quark, they are not irreducibly complex.

Yeah, he’s that nuts. He doesn’t demand that evolutionists produce a mere crocoduck to prove evolution, he wants us to produce a porn film starring talking quarks.