Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he’s a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he’s written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole ‘nother column of the times table drops out of his brain, objects to this threat. He starts off by agreeing with Pitman’s argument, but does so by tying it to some of his lunatic obsessions—he’s a pro-smoking anti-vaccination guy.
I’ve made much the same argument relative to policymakers who unscientifically exaggerate the dangers of secondhand smoke and bureaucrats who ignore scientific evidence about the dangers of universal vaccination.
This approval will not last. The rest of his column is a weird paean to excusing ignorance of science. You see, if people learn more math and physics, they’ll get the idea that we live in a “clockwork universe”, and then they won’t like music or poetry anymore. Seriously.
Admit it—you were curious to know what those ninnies who write B.C. and Mallard Fillmore would do in their Christmas comic strips, weren’t you? They were whining about the War on Christmas, of course. Do they even notice when a brutally godless blog like mine guiltlessly says “Merry Christmas!”, though? No, of course not.
(via Atrios)
Why, you might wonder, after taking Mike S. Adams apart in a burst of posts a while back, have I neglected my fellow academic? There’s a good reason for that, which you can discover by reading S.Z.’s recitation of his latest column. This is one where he responds to a students poor excuses for failing his course by making lesbian jokes and bragging about killing pigs—a humanitarian’s and conservationists’s solemn duty, don’t you know, especially the part about gut-shooting them and leaving them in the brush to rot.
The simple reason is that he’s too contemptible for me to bear, except perhaps in small doses spread far apart.
There’s also just something wrong with that poor man’s brains.
Maybe we should sic Edward Tufte on ’em—Feministing found some amazing posters that purport to explain everything with the power of overwrought metaphor and cluttered, confusing cartoons. It just draws your eye in with the awesomeness of its arbitrariness.
So contraception is the source of single-parent families and infanticide? The stalk of divorce leads to the flower of abortion? The leaves of adultery and pre-marital sex use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make the sugar of sexual chaos that is stored in the root of coitus interruptus? Watch out, kids, if you blow on the puffball of euthansia, you’ll spread the seeds of a thousand new sex weeds! Now go in the house and wash the lust and hedonism off your hands.
It just doesn’t make sense.
I realized, though, that anybody can slap random labels on a random diagram to send meaningless messages out. Even me. So here you go, a fun and informative diagram that will help you understand all kinds of curious relationships in the world around you.
Please, use this information wisely and be sure to let it guide your life…to a brighter, healthier future, rich with the well-earned fruits of ying tong iddle I po.
That crazy pseudoscientific hack, Michael Crichton, has screwed up big time. In a teeny-tiny tantrum against a critic, he made up a character in his latest book with a similar name and background who also happens to be a depraved rapist of infants. Now the obliquely defamed critic makes a measured reply.
I confess to having mixed feelings about my sliver of literary immortality. It’s impossible not to be grossed out on some level–particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child. It’s uplifting, however, to learn that Next’s sales have proved disappointing by Crichton’s standards, continuing what an industry newsletter dubs Crichton’s “recent pattern of erosion.” And I’m looking forward to the choice Crichton will have to make, when asked about the basis for Mick Crowley, between a comically dishonest denial and a confession of his shocking depravity.
Poor Crichton. The honest skewering is always more potent than the lying slander. I gave up on reading his books after Jurassic Park, and I can see I won’t be picking up any in the future, either.
My readers are a cruel people. They send me links to the strangest things, including this wacky fundagelical rant, exposing me to the bubbling looniness simmering beneath the thin shell of rationality in this country, and making my brain hurt.
So much for the logic of religious atheism. Their problem is really that they don’t accept the doctrine of original sin or free will; they want to blame God for our sorrows. It really comes down to that. If there is a God, they think God should force us all to behave correctly, and if God won’t, then God must be evil, therefore they won’t believe in God under the rubric of plausible deniability.
Religious atheism? What’s that? This person seems to be incapable of understanding that atheists simply don’t believe in any gods, so it’s awfully silly to then claim that they’re upset because they want to place blame on a god. It isn’t just one infelicitous phrasing in a single paragraph, either—she goes on and on about how atheists are “denying human responsibility” and want to “blame God”.
Worse still, that’s the least crazy point in the article. It starts off with a tirade against the “morally insane” Jimmy Carter, that he’s not a good Christian and would fit in well with the Islamic extremists…and the Third Reich. I’m thinking the Zombie Hitler needs to join forces with some Zombie A-rab terrorists and a phantasmal “religious atheist” to cope with this level of lunacy.
Now, please, I’ve got grading to do…so much grading. So many papers. You people deal with the crazy talk, I shouldn’t be distracted.
Deepak Chopra is still blathering on. I’m afraid that while he can’t shut up, I can ignore him, and this will be my last response to his drivel; it’s also the last time I’ll be linking to the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington’s exercise in indiscriminate narcissism is not the direction I want to see liberals taking, and while my voice isn’t a significant one, I can at least deny the kook wing of the Left my tiny bit of support.
This time the obsessive small-minded mystic is still whining against science and reason, still railing against his own idiotic imaginings.
But how can anyone seriously defend science as a panacea when it gave us the atomic bomb?
First of all, no one defends science as a panacea. It’s not leading us to utopia, it’s taking us towards a better understanding of the real world…which, contrary to the quacks who claim reality is what you imagine it to be, is often going to expose uncomfortable truths. There is no paradise. There is no perfection. There’s just a world where we have to struggle and compromise, and in the end we all die.
Secondly, the people who whimper about science bringing us bombs (and we’ve also got a few trolls wandering around scienceblogs damning scientists for that) have got it all wrong. Nuclear reactions are a property of the natural world—they go on in stars, they take place beneath our feet. Science did not invent fission and fusion, it only exposed the nature of the event, explained how it worked, and made this knowledge available to human beings. People chose what to do with it. We don’t have any choice in what science reveals. What would you have had 20th century scientists do, intentionally suppress all knowledge of a fundamental property of matter, and all of the unpredictable consequences of that knowledge? And just how would you propose to do that, short of destroying the scientific enterprise all together?
Reason isn’t the savior of the future. That role belongs to wisdom. With all the threats to human survival that we now face, I resort to a phrase coined by Jonas Salk: the survival of the wisest. Although a great researcher in medicine, Salk had the vision to look beyond materialism. He saw that evolution, as it applies to modern human beings, isn’t Darwinian. We no longer live in a state of nature.
Good grief, the inanity, it burns.
No, reason isn’t the savior of the future. It’s just the absolute bare minimum of what we ought to expect from the people to whom we entrust our futures—it’s the foundation of everything we ought to do. I don’t care what other wonderful virtues Chopra wants to tout, if they are built on irrationality and unreason, they are destructive.
I also don’t know what Chopra means by this fuzzy word “wisdom” he’s throwing out in his little essay, but he writes as if he thinks it is something completely orthogonal to reason, but of course it isn’t—unreasoning people can’t be wise, although they may pretend to it, and other irrational people may believe them. He’s using the word in an utterly meaningless way, the same way his kind of people use the words “spirituality” or “vibrations” or “quantum”, as subliminal tokens for indefinable emotions they might have; it’s shorthand for empty pseudo-profundity. It’s the hook the con artist uses to persuade his mark to fork over his respect, but it’s all a lie.
The rest I have no patience for. Chopra doesn’t know what “evolution” or “Darwinian” means, so trying to dissect the meaning he is reading into them as pointless: he’s just reciting buzz words, stringing them together like pretty beads on a string. It’s all noise from a fool.
Enough.
What a terrific title: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals! It’s from Wingnut Daily, of course, and it’s simply one of their kooks taking a germ of fact and amplifying it into a flaming reactionary whimper of fear. He’s complaining about soy.
Soybeans do contain compounds called isoflavones that resemble and weakly mimic estrogens. I’ve read a few papers that discuss their possible effects on human physiology, and they usually fall into the category of “Hmmm…suggestive, no evidence either way yet, needs more study.” Our wingnut author seems to have a different source than the scientific literature, though, because he makes some rather definitive claims.
Doctors used to hope soy would reduce hot flashes, prevent cancer and heart disease, and save millions in the Third World from starvation. That was before they knew much about long-term soy use. Now we know it’s a classic example of a cure that’s worse than the disease. For example, if your baby gets colic from cow’s milk, do you switch him to soy milk? Don’t even think about it. His phytoestrogen level will jump to 20 times normal. If he is a she, brace yourself for watching her reach menarche as young as seven, robbing her of years of childhood. If he is a boy, it’s far worse: He may not reach puberty till much later than normal.
So, I searched PubMed, and there’s nothing on soy and menarche or menstruation; I found a few articles on soy and puberty, and they say things like “The literature offers no evidence of endocrine effects in humans from infant consumption of modern soy-based formulas” and “To date, no adverse effects of short- or long-term use of soy proteins have been observed in humans and exposure to soy-based infant formulas does not appear to lead to different reproductive outcomes than exposure to cow milk formulas” and “Available evidence from adult human and infant populations indicates that dietary isoflavones in soy infant formulas do not adversely affect human growth, development, or reproduction.” There are many more papers on its putative effects on breast cancer and the symptoms of menopause, and even there it’s a study in ambiguity: some reports of slight positive effects, many more stating that there isn’t a detectable effect.
There doesn’t seem to be any strong evidence that eating tofu will turn your sons into girlie-boys, I’m afraid; there are better grounds to be concerned about known endocrine disruptors like atrazine and PCBs.
Of course, I have failed to take into the synergistic effects of water fluoridation, that commie plot, or the corrupting influence of Big Agriculture on science, that capitalist plot. I am amused at the fact, though, that here in rural Minnesota, where the kids rail against those homosexuals, that one of the most important crops these kids’ parents raise is soybeans. I wonder what the effect of this WND wingnuttery would be on conservative farmers out here? I expect that would trigger a more strongly measurable response than what the soybeans are doing to their gonads.
Ah, but what do I know. The author has impeccable credentials.
James Rutz is chairman of Megashift Ministries and founder-chairman of Open Church Ministries. He is the author of “MEGASHIFT: Igniting Spiritual Power,” and, most recently, “The Meaning of Life.”
See? He’s a gladhanding Jesus-promoter who makes his money founding “ministries” and selling self-help books. You can trust him.
Klein KO (1998) Isoflavones, soy-based infant formulas, and relevance to endocrine function. Nutr Rev 56(7):193-204
Merritt RJ,
Jenks BH (2004) Safety of soy-based infant formulas containing isoflavones: the clinical evidence. J Nutr 134(5):1220S-1224.
Miniello VL,
Moro GE,
Tarantino M,
Natile M,
Granieri L,
Armenio L (2003) Soy-based formulas and phyto-oestrogens: a safety profile. Acta Paediatr Suppl 91(441):93-100.
Can you stand one more Gene-Ray-level internet crackpot? A reader sent me a link to this guy, Neal Adams, who has this insane “Growing Earth” idea. Forget all the physics and geology you think you knew—this animator and comic book publisher has invented his own solution, and it involves reworking particle physics (there are no electrons!) and making bizarre calculations, all ‘demonstrated’ with computer animation.
That last link give you another reason to despise this kook: he’s responsible for that awful annoying commercial with the big-eyed bee hawking allergy medicine. I hated that stupid bee—it was the work of someone who’d never even looked at an insect, and why did it have that dumb French accent?
