Do you need a good, basic introduction to Neurodiversity 101? Here you go.

Neurodiversity is, according to activist Nick Walker, “the diversity of human brains and minds – the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.”

Basically, it’s a fancy name for the fact that all our brains and minds are unique and individual. Like snowflakes, no two brains and no two minds are exactly alike.

But that’s not enough! The article also points out that within that range of variation there are some brains that work in a way that society finds acceptable — the neurotypicals. I think it’s safe to say I’m a standard neurotypical, which is not to say that some of the workings of my mind are out of sync with the larger culture, but that I can fit in reasonably well in most circumstances. While someone who is neurodivergent in some way might have extreme difficulty with situations that I find not at all stressful, but that does not mean they are somehow inferior.

Shouldn’t all of this be elementary and taken for granted by teachers, and maybe made part of standard training? I ask because I never did, and it’s taken years of gradual awakening to see what’s going on. It’s also because I’m looking over the midterm status of my students and wondering what I can do to reach some of them who are struggling. I know it’s not because they can’t, but because something I’m doing is failing to communicate.

Needs more milkweed.

By the way, my colleague at UMM, Margaret Kuchenreuther, was recently on our local gardening show,
Prairie Yard and Garden, to talk about the plants and the monarchs. You can watch it here!

PlosOne has published an article on the Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living. There’s nothing wrong with the data that I can see, but the authors do make a surprising leap in the abstract and conclusion.

In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years. Moreover, functional explanations for the mechanical architecture of the muscular-articular connection of the human hand can also aid in developing multifunctional robotic hands by designing them with similar basic architecture.

The paper is a technical structure and function analysis of the bones and muscles of the human hand. There’s nothing in the paper that probes the creator for their intent and goals of proper design, or that assesses the the hypothesis of design vs. evolution — in fact, they seem to want to have it both ways, ascribing its functional adaptedness to both.

The authors are from the Institute of Rehabilitation and Medical Robotics, State Key Lab of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. Engineers. Somehow, I am not surprised.

But be prepared: this is the kind of thing creationists love to cite, and I expect it will make it to the Discovery Institute’s list of ID-friendly scientific publications. Just note that it says nothing to support the god hypothesis at all.

I did like one of the comments there.

Humans occasionally use their hand as a tool of masturbation, one of “a multitude of daily tasks” performed “in a comfortable way”.

Clearly, the divine purpose of the human hand is masturbation. I look forward to their analysis of the proper design by the Creator of the human tongue. Unfortunately, all the evidence says the human penis was a botched design, as the development of multifunctional robotic penises has completely abandoned the original inspiration and seems to be pursuing an evolutionary path rooted in the Hitachi Magic Wand.

Clearly, the best place for the mysterious island lair of a super-villain who likes invertebrates has to be Christmas Island. So cuddly!

I wonder if I could swap our cat for one?

Then stop praising the accuracy of Idiocracy. I loathe that movie, and right now I’m seeing a lot of smug Democrats talking about how it’s coming true.

No. Idiocracy is a movie that assumes all the premises of social Darwinism and eugenics are true. Try watching it and noticing how it thinks evolution works. Poor people are biologically inferior and inherently stupid, and since they’re breeding madly, they’ll overwhelm the superior, intelligent, responsible people who restrain themselves. It assumes that the poor are stupid, and the stupid are poor.

It is especially ironic that people are praising its veracity now because of Trump and the Republican presidential slate. Do I need to point out that these terrible people are the products of good schools and are loaded with cash? Donald Trump is a billionaire and the others are millionaires backed by other obscenely rich billionaires…yet somehow, ignorant, pampered, selfish lower class people are going to poison the gene pool with their substandard genetics, swamping out the potential of the human species?

Others have noted the fallacious premise driving the movie.

The origin story for Idiocracy’s future world of half-wits is that uneducated people in the early 2000s are having kids and smart people don’t reproduce enough. It’s clear from the film that the intelligent people are wealthy, while the uneducated people are poor. So we’re starting from a position of believing that wealthy people are inherently more intelligent and, by extension, deserve their wealth. This link between intelligence and wealth is perhaps the most dangerous idea of the film and pretty quickly slips into advocating for some form of soft eugenics to build a better world.

If only we could get rid of the uneducated Americans (read: redneck poors) and we’ll have the opportunity to live in a utopian world filled with smart and civilized people. Of course, everyone here in 2014 making a reference to Idiocracy as a pseudo-documentary identifies with the soon-to-be-extinct intelligent class. They believe it’s the “others” — the dumb, impoverished people — that are ruining America with their binging on crap TV and crap internet and crap food.

This is pure, unadulterated social darwinism. It’s a movie that reassures its viewers that because you’re smart enough to see how stupid rednecks are, you are one of the good, worthy people who ought to be rewarded and encouraged to have more children. It is your responsibility to reproduce, lest those feeble-minded nitwits have more children than you.

It’s also a message that resonates with certain atheists.

It’s also a message at the heart of many racists: we must protect the pure Whites before they are outbred by all the Mud People!

I’ve complained about this belief before. It’s shameful to see so-called progressives in the 21st century praising a movie that promotes the ideas of eugenics, and that Nazis would have found perfectly copacetic.

Uh-oh. A television station in the Philippines recently aired a program on human evolution. I don’t speak a word of Filipino^*, so I can’t judge directly, but skimming through it it seemed to show evidence and discuss reasonable dates and was definitely enthusiastically sciencey, so it seemed like a good thing to me. But the Philippines, like the United States, is one of those countries with a fanatically Christian component to their population, and you can guess how some people reacted.

One commenter noted, Kung tayo ay galing sa unggoy bkit may unggoy pa hanggang ngayon? kht anong gawin ng science hnd parin nito kayang sukatin at abutin ang kapangyarihan ng ating Diyos (If we descended from monkeys, how come there are monkeys up to this day? No matter what Science does, it cannot measure the power of our God).

I had to laugh. This is one of the worst arguments ever against evolution — just yesterday, I challenged my introductory biology class with a list of common rebuttals to evolution, and this was one of the easier ones for them to knock down — and here it is, getting recycled in the Philippines.

This next one is just a variant:

Yet another commenter also stated, Unggoy pala sina Adam and Eve? Kalukuhan to di naman sa Africa ginawa ng dios ang unang tao… Ang scientists kailan lang pinanganak yan kaya mas maniwala tayo sa Bible kasi mas nauna ‘to (So Adam and Eve are monkeys? This is idiocy, as the first human were not created in Africa. Scientists were only born recently so we must believe in the Bible because it came first).

I wonder how this person would react to the news that there was no Adam and Eve, no individuals that founded the whole human species? There were populations, not named people. They also weren’t monkeys.

As I get older, though, I admit to appreciating more and more the argument that those born first are more correct than the young whippersnappers.

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^*By the way, Freethoughtblogs would love to represent freethinkers from the Philippines. Apply!