The scientific animation company, XVIVO, has had their work ‘appropriated’ by creationists before, and I hate to say it, but there is a reason for it. Although their animations of cellular and molecular processes are spectacular and beautiful, they are also annoyingly purposeful: they show tubulin making a beeline across microns of distance to assemble a microtubule, for instance, while kinesins stride determinedly down the cytoskeleton. There isn’t the slightest hint of the stochastic nature of the biochemistry, and they are seriously misleading in that sense — which, no doubt, is why creationists love them so much.

Now XVIVO is really pushing the edge. They are a commercial company, and they have to do this work to make money, but they have accepted a commission from Deepak Chopra to create an animation showing how “healing visualization” can “enhance the immune system’s response to cancer”. It shows no such thing, of course. It seems to show macrophages devouring cancer cells, then blue lymphocytes all zooming in towards an antigen presenting cell and getting energized (they glow on the inside!), and then swooping off in a squadron to touch red cancer cells, which promptly wither and die.

Once again, we have the trademark purposeful, directed cells of all XVIVO productions, but this time I guess we’re supposed to imagine magical meditation auras controlling the biochemistry.

Bleh. Sell-outs.

Among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology, one has a name: Satoshi Kanazawa. He has a blog on Psychology Today called The Scientific Fundamentalist, and earlier he published this charming article: Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?. Don’t bother trying to follow the link, the article has mysteriously disappeared from the site…although you can still find a copy here, if you really must.

I’m a little surprised that it’s gone. After all, Psychology Today had no problem with his loving look at American politics in which he wanted Ann Coulter for president, because she would have nuked the Middle East on 12 September 2001. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

In order to make his determination that black women are ugly, he draws on The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) which I now learn to my surprise has a subjective component in which the people doing the survey make judgments about the subjects’ appearance.

Add Health measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.

Good grief…shades of Francis Galton! For those of you who don’t know, creepy old man Galton ogled women and judged them for looks.

I may here speak of some attempts by myself, to obtain materials for a “Beauty Map” of the British Isles. Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, “good, medium, bad,” I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper, torn rudely into a cross with a long leg. I use its upper end for “good”, the cross arm for “medium,” the lower end for “bad.” The prick-holes keep distinct, and are easily read off at leisure. The object, place, and date are written on the paper. I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. Of course this was a purely individual estimate, but it was consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the same population. I found London to rank highest for beauty: Aberdeen lowest.

Because, as we all know, beauty is easily measured in a linear scale with no possibility of subjective bias (I say sarcastically). I’m quite pleased that no one in my family is a participant in Add Health, because I’d have to kick them out of my house when they came around. Same with Galton. Fortunately, his leering pseudo-statistical brain is now dust and slime.

Kanazawa is the kind of guy who looks at such shaky subjective evaluations, and without even considering the biases of these self-appointed judges, declares that

It is very interesting to note that, even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others.

Wait a moment there…where in this study is the objective evaluation of attractiveness? Because Kanazawa can stack up a bunch of scores and make graphs does not mean that they have suddenly acquired the property of objectivity.

Can Kanazawa make his interpretations even worse? Yes, he can. He has a real talent for this. He generously concedes that, although black women are fat and blacks are less intelligent, their shortcomings in those areas, which are associated with the perception of beauty, are inadequate to explain why black women are so ugly, especially since black men are judged attractive, and lord knows, they have inferior IQs. But then, no loss: he also thinks Africans are too dumb to live.

It seems to have been purged from Psychology Today, but I suspect this article will soon find a happy home on the pages of Stormfront and other such aryan racist tripe.

And then there’s this idiocy:

There are many biological and genetic differences between the races. However, such race differences usually exist in equal measure for both men and women. For example, because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

That makes no sense. My ancestors, your ancestors, and Kanazawa’s ancestors were all African — we share mutations with all Africans from before the time our European and Asian ancestors left Africa, and those ancestors then accumulated new mutations at the same rate as the populations left behind in the ancestral homeland. We European/Asian folk inherited a subset of the totality of human genetic variation, but there’s nothing that implies Africans are or have been mutating faster than anyone else.

I know that not all evolutionary psychologists are this bad; more of them need to stand up and repudiate this bigoted clown and his ridiculous interpretations of sloppy data.

Mike Adams, the cranky quack naturopath, has been exploring “the field of quantum physics” and “consciousness”. He says this in his silly pseudo-documentary, “The God Within”, after praising physicists and their selfless search for the truth, all while ghostly equations float by in the video. He does this a lot, panning over equations or showing stock photos of people standing in front of transparent sheets of glass with illegible scribbles all over them; but it’s obvious that he doesn’t actually understand math, knows nothing about physics, and is just holding this stuff up in front of his face like a witch-doctor’s elaborate mask. Ultimately, it turns out, he hates physics and wants to run away as fast as he can from its damnable consequences, all the while pretending to be a scientist.

The video isn’t really about quantum physics. What it’s about is that he read Hawking and Mlodinow’s book, The Grand Design (sorta — as he babbles about it, it becomes clear that he didn’t actually read much of it at all), and he’s very, very unhappy that Hawking is satisfied with the sufficiency of science and sees free will as an illusion. So his video is more like the bad book report by the sixth grader who skimmed a few chapters the night before it was due, only in this case the sixth grader also has video editing software and has stolen a lot of sciencey-looking clips to gussy up his pathetic efforts.

He claims that “conventional” physics is just like “conventional” medicine—its practitioners are all in a conspiracy of silence to refuse to admit the existence of anything beyond, like god or the mind. What he ends up doing is rejecting all of physics while parading about in his ignorance.

For instance, he defines the Copenhagen Interpretation as “Shut up and calculate, but don’t ask anything too spooky”, which I’m sure will be a surprise to the physicists. The theory of everything is trotted out as an example of hubris — apparently, Mike Adams think it is such an exhaustive goal that it will allow physicists to calculate the contents of hot dogs, rather than integrating all of physics.

The real distortions, the active lies that go beyond mere ignorance, take place later in the video, where Adams expresses his revulsion at the idea that there is no free will. Hawking does not believe in free will (neither do I, for that matter), but Adams goes further and claims that Hawking argues that there is no mind and no consciousness, either. I’ve read The Grand Design. I’ve got it on my iPad, and even did a search for those contentious terms. Mike Adams is making crap up.

Further, Adams claims that physics is all about enforcing an idea of absolute determinism, which will lead to a dystopian society in which all crimes are justifiable with the excuse that “we are just robots”, and all actions are absolvable…all said over a shot of a young thug pointing a handgun at the viewer.

He also claims that technology could allow us to try people for “pre-crime” — we’d just plug their brain into a machine and it would predict everything they would ever do, and you could get sent to jail for something you haven’t done. At the same time, life would be so cheap and valueless, that we could commit genocide without remorse — we’re mere biological animals, after all. And we’d do this while “calling it all scientific, and clutching Hawking’s books as if they were Bibles”.

As you might guess, Adolf Hitler makes an appearance, with The Grand Design crudely photoshopped into his hand.

None of this nonsense is in the book. There is no denial of consciousness or the mind, and there is no advocacy of the kind of cartoon determinism Adams invents. Here’s a relevant quote direct from the book that rebuts Adams’ bizarre claims.

It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

While conceding that human behavior is indeed determined by the laws of nature, it also seems reasonable to conclude that the outcome is determined in such a complicated way and with so many variables as to make it impossible in practice to predict. For that one would need knowledge of the initial state of each of the thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body and to solve something like that number of equations. That would take a few billion years, which would be a bit late to duck when the peron opposite aimed a blow.

Because it is so impractical to use the underlying physical laws to predict human behavior, we adopt what is called an effective theory. In physics, an effective theory is a framework created to model certain observed phenomena without describing in detail all of the underlying processes.

That’s near the beginning of the book, at the 14% mark, which also gives us an upper limit on how far Adams read.

Adams also claims that “Stephen Hawking is a strong proponent of denying people their humanity”, which again is nowhere in the book, is not even a reasonable interpretation of anything in the book, and sounds like blatant slander to me — and coming on top of outrageous assertions that Hawking’s ideas would be used to justify another Jewish Holocaust, is particularly vile.

But then, that’s Mike Adams all the way: a vile, lying moron.