Spare me the Kurzweil acolytes.

Google’s chief futurist, Ray Kurzweil, is known for his wildly-accurate predictions — back in the 1980s, when all of our current technological advancements seemed like sci-fi fantasies, he predicted self-driving cars, prosthetic legs for paraplegics, and wirelessly accessing information via the internet, among many other spot-on forecasts.

Now, his latest prediction is that humans are going to live forever, and he thinks it’s going to happen as soon as 2029.

He’s like the Amazing Criswell, isn’t he?

I lived through the 1980s, too, and those predictions were so mundane I could have made them. That’s the thing: he says a lot of trivial stuff that is already accepted knowledge (“Computers will get faster! Medicine will treat diseases in new ways! I will get older!”) that allows him to build a baseline of success that encourages people to think his other, wilder predictions will also come true. They won’t. Like Criswell, he says a lot of vague bunk, and his failures are just ignored…like those of any common ‘psychic’.

His prediction that we’ll live forever if we can just make it to 2029 are simply laughable. Modern medicine shows no such trend at work. The basis for his claim is aburd:

“By the 2020s we’ll start using nanobots to complete the job of the immune system,” he said. “Our immune system is great, but it evolved thousands of years ago when conditions were different.”

thousands of years ago? What did our ancestors do a hundred thousand years ago?

He believes that nanobots — microscopic, self-propelled robots — will act as T cells, which are blood cells involved in our immune responses. Using T cells to attack cancer cells is already an idea that researchers are using in some cancer immunotherapy, but Kurzweil wants to take it a step further. Instead of harnessing the body’s own T cells, he wants to send in nanobots to do the job.

“They’re the size of a blood cell and are quite intelligent,” he told Hochman. “I actually watched one of my T cells attack bacteria on a microscope slide. We could have one programmed to deal with all pathogens and could download new software from the internet if a new type of enemy such as a new biological virus emerged.”

That is painfully naive. Does he even realize that there are multiple kinds of T cells, that they are part of an integrated network of cooperating cells, that they have to carry out a delicate balancing act of working against some antigens while not triggering on others? He seems to be imagining sending in a robot with a laser to kill ‘bad’ cells.

Plus, his tiny nanobots are going to be ‘programmed’ (how?) to deal with ‘all pathogens’ (is there a list somewhere?) and can ‘download new software from the internet’. The ignorance just makes me want to cry. But this is his schtick: he just borrows terms and ideas current in the culture right now, and claims we’ll be doing exactly the same thing, only with another tech buzzword, ‘nanobots’. He’s an idiot. He’s a clever idiot, though, who has fooled a lot of gullible people, and has even bamboozled Google.

He also claims this:

Kurzweil is 67 years old, but claims his “biological age” is in the late 40s, courtesy of his “Immortality Diet.”

Nope. He looks his age, just as I do. He’s had the advantage of the privileged life of a well-off office worker, which does help stave off the worst ravages, the product of a hard life, but there’s nothing especially young about his appearance. He looks to be of an age with Richard Dawkins, for instance, who is 75.

But then, religious leaders do get that kind of praise from their followers, no matter how decrepit they get. I’ve been in a room full of young Mormon women telling me how youthful and virile and sexy Ezra Taft Benson was…when he was in his 90s, feeble and vacant, and doomed to die a few years later. Same thing.

This must be how creationists think a sieve works. The smaller particles see from a distance that they’ll fit through the holes, so they make a beeline for them, while the bigger particles that won’t fit recognize that fact and get out of their way. Adding more material to be filtered reduces the effectiveness of the sieve because the bulk hampers their ability to find their way to the face of the sieve.

You may laugh, but I have to conclude that this is the inevitable rationale that they’d have to make, given their inability to think statistically and impose teleology on every explanation of natural phenomena. So Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig raises a most peculiar argument against evolution. Populations are too large.

…in the 1950s, French biologists, such as Cuénot, Tétry, and Chauvin, who did not follow the modern synthesis, raised the following objection to this kind of reasoning (summed up according to Litynski, 1961, p. 63):

Out of 120,000 fertilized eggs of the green frog only two individuals survive. Are we to conclude that these two frogs out of 120,000 were selected by nature because they were the fittest ones; or rather — as Cuenot said — that natural selection is nothing but blind mortality which selects nothing at all?

Similar questions may be raised for the 700 billion spores of Lycoperdon, the 114 million eggs multiplied with the number of spawning seasons of the American oyster, for the 28 million eggs of salmon and so on.

He doesn’t think evolution can work, because how can it possibly find the two best individuals out of a group of hundreds of thousands or millions? And the problem becomes worse the bigger the population!

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This is the most extreme case of polydactyly I’ve seen — a child in China born with 31 fingers and toes.

They’re hoping to carry out a surgical correction, which can cause new problems…but in this case it’s necessary, because apparently the child’s thumbs have been transformed into other digits, or failed to form, so all they’ve got is 15 fingers. Opposable thumbs are generally useful.

Oh, and look at those big toes — triphalangeal digits? Developmentally fascinating, personally tragic.

I thought I’d take a different tack on understanding science denialists. Are there any subjects on which I would be called a science denialist?

I can think of a couple of examples immediately. I’ve been called anti-science because I reject the bigotry of the “human biological diversity” or hbd crowd; I’ve also got quite a few fuming ranters who hate the fact that I reject evolutionary psychology as an ignorant fraud. I’ve written about those things before, though, and they also seem to draw in a lot of angry privileged assholes, so let’s not go over that again.

Instead, here’s something that maybe we can discuss dispassionately, but where I do sneer at the status quo.

I am a Search-For-Extraterrestrial-Intelligence (SETI) denier. I really am. It seems to be a popular topic among pro-science people, but I just roll my eyes whenever it comes up, and I’ve written a few things where I state my biases against it, but I’ll just make it crystal clear: I think it’s bad science driven by unrealistic fantasies, I don’t think its proponents think rationally about it, and we ought to stop throwing money at it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not because I disbelieve in aliens — I rather suspect that life is relatively common in the universe. It’s not because I think it’s impossible for us to contact aliens — I just think the odds are prohibitively low. But every time a SETI person opens their mouth (like, for instance, Seth Shostak, who I also think is an extremely nice guy, and also very intelligent), I hear nothing but innumerate babble.

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Oh, crap. This is another big loss. Kroto won the Nobel 20 years ago, and most admirably, turned his fame and money towards advancing science education. Somehow, I’ve been fortunate to have had a number of lengthy conversations with him at meetings, and while one thing we had in common was atheism (he was also a freethinker and humanist and vocal atheist), it seemed we always spent most of our time talking about science education and his work on global educational outreach. He was opinionated and outspoken, but always broad-minded.

He also knew that science is a philosophy.

I always enjoyed talking with Harry. I’m going to miss that.

This morning, I heard a loud thump against our living room window, and thinking that some poor innocent little bird had accidentally hurt itself, I rushed to look out. I was wrong. It was a huge blue jay, its feathers a bit ruffled, clutching some unidentifiable small mammal in its claws. It saw me and flew off into the trees across the road with its victim.

That and all the loud singing and whistling and cooing outside my bedroom window every morning at 5am is getting to be a bit much. Don’t these dinosaurs know they’re supposed to be extinctified?