Survivor: Pharyngula! Day Two.

Today, we have to assess whether any of our contestants have met the immunity challenge. Very few have tried; I’m afraid this is very much like Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year contest, in which the competitors are lucky to stumble onto the field at all. Here are all the attempts to answer this question:

In a comment that isn’t longer than about 200 words, that is grammatically correct and logically coherent, and that does not cite the Bible or other religious authorities (and does not rely on tales about who you went to high school with, or tortured analogies involving necrophiliac pedophilic milkmen), explain how evolutionary biologists resolve the trivial conundrum represented by the common question, “If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?” Remember, answer as a biologist or intelligent layman would, not like Pat Robertson or Ken Ham.

First, there is an entry from Barb. However, even if we didn’t see the sarcasm dripping from it, a check of the email address reveals that it actually isn’t from Barb. Disqualified!

Next up: John Kwok takes a stab at it, and gives a somewhat pompous but correct answer. His reply is notable for two things, however. It is accompanied by possibly the most empty threat I have ever heard — “PZ – If I am bounced off Pharyngula, then you may find yourself losing some friends over at Facebook.” — which immediately prompted a surge of voting to throw Kwok out. Then there is the fact that I specifically said there should be no talk of high school acquaintances, yet Kwok managed to squeeze in mentions of Abbie Smith, Ken Miller, his high school creative writing teacher, and the wife of his high school creative writing teacher. It is truly a marvel, and a beautiful example of exactly how he got on this list in the first place. The oblivious violation of the rules, however, means he must be disqualified.

Finally, Facilis. In an utterly stunning upset, he actually managed to turn out a brief, accurate, two-sentence explanation. The audience was stunned. The judge was frantically checking IP addresses and the validity of the entry, so miraculous was this short, and probably very temporary, flare-up of cogency. It stands, however. This twit has actually managed to complete the first section of the course!

If we’d had a few more entries, I would have opened the discussion up to judge who won. However, since we only have one standing entry, I must officially declare that Facilis is the winner of the immunity challenge. Shock! Horror! Drama!

Now, since I did have to close the previous thread, you can continue voting in this one. Do me a favor, though, and if you change your vote, please clearly say who you are retracting your vote from, and who you are now giving it to…this one may drive me insane trying to tally.

Survivor: Pharyngula! Day One.

I mentioned before that we’re a bit full up on commenting kooks, and it’s time to purge a few. Here’s a short list of our contestants this week, a few of the obnoxious people who are lurking about in the comments right now. We’re going to get rid of some of them, one at a time.

Barb
Alan Clarke
Facilis
John Kwok
Pete Rooke
RogerS
Simon

Everyone gets to vote them off the blog — just leave a comment with the name of the competitor you like least, and I’ll tally them up on Wednesday morning, and the winner gets evicted.

But wait! There’s more! We have to have an immunity challenge, don’t we? Our 7 intrepid dingleberries have an opportunity to save themselves by meeting an appropriate challenge by 1:00pm Central time tomorrow. After 1:00, I’ll ask the readers here to vote on who best and adequately met the challenge (and you’ll all be fair and honest about it, I hope), and that winner will be exempt from eviction this round. Sounds fun, right?

Here’s the challenge. In a comment that isn’t longer than about 200 words, that is grammatically correct and logically coherent, and that does not cite the Bible or other religious authorities (and does not rely on tales about who you went to high school with, or tortured analogies involving necrophiliac pedophilic milkmen), explain how evolutionary biologists resolve the trivial conundrum represented by the common question, “If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?” Remember, answer as a biologist or intelligent layman would, not like Pat Robertson or Ken Ham.

Go! Voting will continue until Wednesday morning, our contestants have until 1:00pm Central on Tuesday to meet the immunity challenge.

Who put the hallucinogens in Pat Boone’s ovaltine?

Pat Boone had a dream. He dreamed that he was president. It would be our nightmare; after going on and on about the usual far right anti-tax tripe and militaristic fantasies, he gets to education.

As a man who intended to be a teacher myself, I issued an ultimatum to the teachers’ unions: They would return to basic math, including arithmetic, and basic English (the mandated official language), and basic science devoid of unproven theories like evolution, sticking instead to factual evidence and not discounting “intelligent design” as the more scientific basis for life and existence. All history books would again detail the reasons America was founded, and tell the stories of our Founding Fathers and national heroes – not latter day revisions. Teachers’ pay and advancement would depend on the test scores and comprehension of their students.

Yikes. Delusional incompetence on display!

And then he ends his goofy reminiscence of a trivial dream with this:

I woke up tingling with excitement – only to find I’d been dreaming. But I can’t get it out of my mind.

It’s a dream, Pat. I know you loons have a tough time sorting out reality from fantasy, but it’s nothing to be excited about. And forget about running for the presidency: you’re a crazy ol’ coot with no skills or talent, and the time for your kind is over.

I get email

I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice. It’s rather strange — I’m used to getting one or two death threats in my mailbox a week, but lately I’ve been getting several a day…and it’s not as if I’ve done anything particularly dramatic lately. Or have I? Are my horns showing?

[Read more…]

You can stop now, Jim

Mr James M. Baker is really lashing out, cluelessly. He has sent me a few other emails (which I just trashed on sight), and now someone at the IP address 67.177.100.132 (which traces back to Shelbyville…Hi, Jim!) has attempted to subscribe me to a large body of gay and fetish porn. Who knew there were sites dedicated to just pictures of young boys’ feet?

Anyway, the people who run these porn sites are not stupid, and they know they’ll be abused by homophobes who think they are a weapon. Before they send me a pile of glossy magazines and DVDs they verify by sending an email, with the IP address of the person who tried to subscribe me. Busted! Tsk, tsk…how petty, Mr Baker.

The only question now is how Mr Baker came to have such a working familiarity with so many diverse sites, with such a focus on gay sex, feet, and watersports?

Besides, someone else has associated me with porn with a bit more humor…and a more appropriate focus.

i-4794d5ff9c025f5ec36bc5ffb6c7737e-hectocotylus.jpeg

Michele Bachmann: Minnesota’s gift to politics

Uh-oh. She opened her mouth again.

BACHMANN: If you want to look at economic history over the last 100 years. I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism. … But we all know that we could turn this around and we can turn this around fairly quickly. We’re still a free country.

And as the Democrats are about to institutionalize cartels — that’s what they’re very good at — they’re trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren’t able to, for all time, secure a power base that for all time can never be defeated.

She calls what punctuated equilibrium? I don’t think she knows what it means, and I don’t believe she knows anything about either biology or economic history. It’s interesting to see the Republican version of bipartisanship so nakedly exposed, at least.

(By the way, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” No one ever honks.)

Fleas flock to Dawkins’ lecture

Richard Dawkins lectured in Michigan yesterday, and apparently, some silly Christian group was handing out a flyer beforehand, “Five Topics to Consider During Tonight’s Lecture”. It contained a small set of yawningly familiar arguments. I haven’t heard of these brave Christians actually attended the lecture or tried to ask these in the Q&A (I would be surprised if they did — I had someone try this stunt at one of my talks, and not only did they run away without listening, but everyone who saw the questions on the handout just laughed at them), but I thought I’d take a quick stab at how I’d address them if I were handed that piece of paper. I’ve put a short version of their long-winded questions here — see the link for the complete version — and my brief reply, although I’d actually be tempted to just laugh and shoo the goofy kook away around about the second question.

  1. Is there an objective truth (and where did it come from)?

    Yes, there is an objective truth that we discern by studying the natural world, and by constantly subjecting hypotheses about its nature to testing. That nature is not separate from its existence.

  2. Does evolution obey the second law of thermodynamics?

    Yes, and you’ve already descended into ignorant idiocy with your second question. There is nothing in evolution that violates the laws of physics or chemistry.

  3. What are the statistical probabilities of life evolving from non-life, and the accidental evolution of a single strand of DNA

    1.0. Life exists. What you’re really trying to claim, in your clumsy and unschooled way, is that you think evolution argues that the extant complexity of the biosphere emerged in one abrupt accident. It did not, and if it did, it would be an exceedingly unlikely event. It would be creationism.

  4. Why does the existence of God make Dawkins so angry, and how can a scientist say with absolute confidence that there is no god?

    Dawkins is not angry at the existence of god, nor am I. We are a bit peeved at intrusive nitwits like yourself who try to impose your quaint superstitions on others.

    By the way, you apparently have not read Dawkins’ book (which is ironic in light of the next question), since he does not claim with absolute confidence that there is no god. I will go further, however, and claim with absolute confidence that you have no good evidence for any god.

  5. [Assorted Jesus babble and bible quotes] Have you ever read the Bible?

    <snort> Yes. It’s an incoherent collection of delusional muck, cobbled together by generations of priests trying to promote the status of their tribe and their role within it. It contains brief sparks of literary brilliance, but mostly, it’s garbage. And the whole Jesus story is illogical nonsense that no rational person should accept.

Of course, the whole problem with bothering to argue with these people is that they won’t accept any of the answers, and will just start repeating the questions at you, at greater length. I’ve been on that merry-go-round before.

The Bible is not an economics textbook

I am no fan of Stanley Fish — I thought he was a blinkered lackwit before, but now, with his latest appalling column in they NY Times, I see that he is a gospel-thumping charlatan on a par with Pat Robertson. He looks at our faltering economy like we all do, with great concern, and then, unlike the kinds of rational people we need making decisions, claims that the answer lies in the Christian Bible. Seriously, read that article and you’ll see nothing that wouldn’t have come out of a cheap Bible college stocked with pseudo-scholarly theologians. It’s so stupid it hurt to read it.

The Bible, they tell us, contains 2,350 verses “that have to do with money and possessions.” If we attend to the lessons of these verses and learn how properly to husband the resources God has given us, we will be doing his work, for “God desires a life for us that is free of debt , and the entrapments and common pitfalls related to financial difficulties” (Cross). “The way out of debt,” Dayton teaches, “is not a declaration of bankruptcy, but surrender to the word of God.”

You know, people are concerned with money and possessions; it’s a very human state of mind. What this means is that lots of books will reference those subjects: you could count the sentences that deal with money and possessions in Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, The Fountainhead, and Das Kapital and find thousands. The number of mentions of money and houses and carriages and ships and businesses does not make them legitimate authorities on economics, and doesn’t mean they can’t be utterly wrong (and of the last two, at least one must be wrong as a simple logical necessity).

Now I’ve read the Bible myself, and it really doesn’t seem to be big on economics. Most of its proscriptions are rather anti-wealth, for one thing, and there’s a fairly broad emphasis on the moral compromises of crass materialism — poverty, or rather, distancing yourself from greed and the accumulation of earthly wealth, are regarded as virtues. There really isn’t that much about bankruptcy anywhere in it, and this author, Kevin Cross, who pretends to be speaking for a god, seems to be making stuff up. I’m sorry, but God is not going to descend with a collection of legal writs to protect you from creditors, nor is he going to give you a low-interest loan to help you get over short-term cash flow problems. Surrendering to a god is a way of running away from real-world problems without fixing them. It is definitely not a solution for a nation.

Stanley Fish, of course, gobbles this nonsense right up and suggests that this is how we can fix our economy.

This economy, in which funds depleted are endlessly replenished, is underwritten by a power so great and beneficent that it turns failures into treasures. Some economists identify that power as the market and ask us to have faith in it. God might be a better candidate.

How a god is going to help the economy is something bleating theologians always fail to tell us. Similarly, there’s no explanation for how this imaginary supreme being is propping up our economy. Magic? Conjuring gold? Selling timeshares and commemorative coins?

Maybe this god’s assistance can be encapsulated in a sentence: God help us if morons like Stanley Fish were to have a say in maintaining the American economy.

Hey, is the blog still here?

Tap, tap. Can you hear me?

You sure? I heard that International Authorities were going to disappear me.

If you hadn’t heard that, you missed one of the most hilarious comment threads ever. After we made light of a pointless poll about the afterlife, various fans of that site were so horrified that many complaints were launched…and of course, the owner was so deeply committed to free speech that he simply deleted our contribution. One fellow was so indignant that he charged off to the Richard Dawkins forums to complain. He lists his grievances, and, boy, are you readers wicked people. You use rude language, you aren’t sufficiently respectful of loony ideas, and when people come here to tell you to shut up if you can’t say anything nice, you insult them.

I think I love you guys.

I am also very evil, because I link to sites with which I disagree, and then you loud, rude, skeptical hooligans go off and laugh at them. This was too much for Jonny-Boy, who wants us silenced.

Having failed to get this man to accept a single shred of responsibility for dragging his offensive website in the direction of other people who haven’t in any way requested its presence, and also for allowing deliberately offensive personal attacks to both appear and remain online in concern of me, I’m now wondering who I should start complaining to?

I’ve taken snapshots of all the content I’ve mentioned–including PZ’s remarks here–and I’m going to start emailing this stuff out to any relevant ISP’s, internet watchdog groups and scientific bodies in the States and Europe. Let’s see what other people make of it.

I also think it’s intellectually dishonest and harms the atheist cause–both points which I happen to care about.

I had hoped he’d be nice enough to cc this damning letter to me, since I’m sure it would put me in a very jolly mood, but I haven’t heard anything yet. The Western Civilization Internet Police haven’t dropped in on me yet, either. I’m facing a long afternoon of lab maintenance, the really dreary stuff that isn’t exciting at all, so being hauled off to the Hague for fomenting rowdiness on the internet would be an exciting and welcome relief.

How often have you heard the phrase, “harms the cause”? It’s getting a bit old; the only time it comes up seems to be when some over-cautious WATB gets worked up over someone who is trying to change the status quo, and especially when anyone actually dares to criticize bourgeois convention in the pursuit of a goal. It’s not a phrase I use, but it’s as good as donning a uniform for recognizing those timid souls who intend to stand in our way.

The “intellectually dishonest” accusation is a peculiar one. He’s applying it to me because I won’t go into your comments and edit them to remove profanity, harsh accusations, or worst of all, insults directed at Jonny-Boy. I’m not making this up — he actually suggests that I remove all the comments that offend him.

So that aside, please attend to those offensive comments aimed at me on your site (perhaps do it only as a one-off courtesy if you like) and feel free to replace those unwarranted, derogatory posts with animated pictures of little bunnies skipping around and eating grass–if it makes you feel better. That way you can still kind of rub my nose in the content when it’s gone and have another chuckle, only this time fully on me.

Poor fellow. He doesn’t understand that free speech means you let people say things which you find disagreeable, and that intellectual honesty doesn’t involve censoring everyone who disagrees with you. He also doesn’t seem to understand me at all — why would I feel good about shredding other people’s comments and replacing them with fluffy bunnies? Why do I need to censor other people’s ideas to laugh at him? Why do I owe him any courtesy at all?

I hope you see this. You might not. Jonny-Boy has big dreams of deleting the whole site.

Anyway we’ll see how this turns out. Don’t be surprised if you end-up wondering where Pharyngula went.

Because that would be intellectually honest and would help the atheist cause.

Amusing:

i-9cbb9c8f9aced85c1ef7c0d5459cf47d-jon.jpeg

Greg, the host of the Daily Grail, speaks, and confirms that he is an idiot. Why was he unhappy that I linked to a poll on his site?

My take is that you intentionally vandalised my site.

Take away his license to use the interwebs — I am gobsmacked that someone that stupid is actually contributing to it. (Oh, well, that’s hyperbole: I’ve read youtube comments and myspace pages, and I’m actually aware of how stupid you can be and get away with putting stuff on the web.)

Blood in the water

The blogs have talked about Bobby Jindal’s credentials as an exorcist for some time, and now, finally, after Jindal’s comical performance on national TV the other night, the mainstream media is taking notice. His dalliance with exorcism gets a write-up in the NY Times, where one of the more depressing questions I’ve run across is asked.

“That’s incredible. But is it politically problematic?”

It’s discouraging that we even need to ask this. A potential presidential candidate believes that a woman grappling with cancer and depression might have been literally possessed by a demon, and that chanting magical incantations cast the demon out. This is absolutely insane stuff. But of course, in this country it’s the people who question such ludicrous claims who are regarded as ‘close-minded’ and ‘weird’.

Discouraging as the fact that that question can even be asked might be, even worse is the answer. “Probably not”.

Check the poll results at that link. 40% of Americans in the 21st century believe that the devil sometimes possesses people. We hoped for flying cars, and all we got was voodoo and speaking in tongues. I feel a little bit cheated.

At least we can hope that maybe newspapers and television will begin to eye these claims a bit more skeptically. But don’t count on it.