Do better. Please just do better.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks in the community of science bloggers, with the abrupt downfall of Bora Zivkovic, a very well liked (I consider him a friend) and influential leader. If you haven’t been following it, here’s a summary and timeline of recent events. The simple version of the whole story is that one of the major pioneers of science blogging and one of the people most instrumental in forging a community online has been found to have abused his privileges to sexually harass women members.

I’ve been processing how I feel about it all. As I say, Bora is a long-term friend; I remember when he joined us at Scienceblogs, and I also remember meeting him for the first time — he was a genuinely enthusiastic proponent of bringing people together and building a new platform for science communication. So this is a real tragedy that he has managed to undermine his own talents.

At the same time, though, here’s what I feel now: discouragement and despair and cynicism. We’ve been through this before in the skeptic/atheist communities. It was beginning to be my expectation that any grand attempt at building new organizations and improving communication was eventually going to collapse into the sewer of patriarchal sexual politics — that this pattern of sexual inequity was hardwired into the culture as a whole, and anything rising up out of it was going to be infected with the taint and eventually succumb to it. Same ol’, same ol’, I thought — the hard slog is never going to end.

But I was surprised: the science community’s response has been strong and appropriate. There’s no excusing his behavior, and rising up and demanding better is exactly what needed to be done, painful as it was. And they did it. There’s hope? Really? The struggle might actually lead to progress?

There has been a lot of writing on this topic in the last few weeks, but I thought Scicurious captured it particularly well.

Bora is not the man I thought he was. And the science communication community was not the place I thought it was.

The whole week has been full of downs. But toward the end. I started to see #ripples of hope. Not just the hashtag (though that alone is brilliant), but from other bloggers, saying, we can, in the future, be better. We want to be better. We WILL be better. People taking decisive action.

And I have been incredibly impressed with many of my colleagues. Yes, people fought, and jumped to conclusions, and etc. But there have been no death threats or rape threats, and compared to some communities I’ve seen…well I’m impressed. I always thought I wrote with and worked with some amazingly good people. Now, I KNOW it.

I contrast that with the atheist community. We also have some amazingly good people — as I travel around, I run into them all the time, at all levels of organization, and all doing good work — but we also have a substantial number of amazingly awful people…and as it turns out, it doesn’t take many sexist jerks clawing at the structure of your organization to distract and disrupt and impede progress. We have enough atheist asshats to provide shelter and support to exploiters — and too many of us are willing to overlook the content of our leaders’ characters, as long as they are willing to say the right words about the sacred atheist cause.

I’ve been astounded at how many people demand that we plaster over an atheist’s human flaws simply because, well, he’s The Man. We’ve been building up a body of revered saints, rather than recognizing that every one of us is human and needs to be held accountable. Face reality: if Bora had chosen to be a leader of the atheist community, rather than the online science community, right now there would be a huge battle going on, with loud voices shouting that “He only talked to these women; aren’t they strong enough to resist?” And the women who spoke out would be flooded with death threats and rape threats, and would be endlessly lampooned on our little hate nests scattered about the internet. Youtube would be full of videos expressing outrage that a Good Man should have been chastised by the Shrill Harpies of Feminism.

We’ve all seen it. Every atheist woman who dares to challenge the privileged status quo and ask for a little respect gets the treatment: just ask Rebecca Watson, or Jen McCreight, or Ophelia Benson. So I feel mixed: there is the despair at the failure of atheism to motivate real change, and hope that the science online community will set a model for everyone to follow.

But I also fear that atheism’s problems are rooted too deeply. This community is full of people who are already convinced that they are better than everyone else. But to be a good person, you have to always want to be better than yourself right now.

Who do you trust to tell you lies?

Here’s a simple experiment: separate two people. Give one person, the sender information about two packets of money, a small sum and a larger sum. Let them then tell the other person, the receiver, about the two packets, and give them the choice of which one they can have. Will the sender lie or not, in order to trick the receiver into picking the smaller packet?

The result in college students in Canada is that roughly 50% of the subjects lie. Before we go on, be sure to put this in context: this result is only valid in one particular culture. Related economic tests have found that there are many other cultures that value giving over receiving, and that would skew the interpretation of this one, so we’re not looking at broader human properties, but solely at the properties of products of one narrow culture. OK? OK.

The interesting result is a finer breakdown of the individuals who were more likely to lie. Mostly, no consistent associations were found, except that membership in any of these three groups were more likely to predict lying: a) Business majors, b) children of divorce, and c) people who say religion is important in their lives. I’m sorry, business majors, but (a) doesn’t surprise me at all. (b) I would not expect; I wondered if financial insecurity played a role, but they report no correlation with socioeconomic status or student debt. Hmmm.

Again, (c) does not surprise me in the slightest. I’ve known too many Christians. Sorry, believers, you’re not all bad, but man have you got a lot of hypocrites in your ranks. I would actually expect that because parasites are more likely to choose to blend in with the dominant group.

I would suggest a variation on the experiment, though. Pair the senders; I’d guess that those students professing a strong religious belief would show a strong reversal, being far less likely to lie, if a co-believer were there to witness. On the other hand, I’d bet that two business majors acting as senders would high-five each other with a successful lie. Put a couple of Libertarians in there, though, and they’d grab both packets and sneak out of the room.

Yeah, I have a hierarchy of well-earned cynicism.

The most depressing thing I’ve read today

Ten years ago, Ivan Macfadyen sailed across the Pacific Ocean. He repeated the voyage recently, and was shocked at the changes: the sea was empty of fish, and thick with garbage. He describes the painful experience, and also sees the trawlers stripping the reefs naked.

The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.

"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.

"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That’s what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day’s by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.

Waste and destruction. Does humanity deserve to continue?

How about a new rule: no idiots allowed in our parks?

This is appalling: a couple of Boy Scout leaders knocked over a rock formation in Goblin Valley. And they were so stupid that they recorded the act and put it on youtube. Here it is; skip it if you don’t think you could bear watching a couple of man-children whooping and hollering while they vandalize a state park.

They now claim that they were acting to protect visitors to the park from a hazard, that the rock could have fallen at any time and hurt someone. Well, golly, I guess that means they ought to go romping through the park and knocking over all those amazing teetering rock formations. Maybe a little dynamite, just to be sure?

My turn

Today is the last day of the Paradigm Symposium, which is good — I don’t know how much more my poor brain could take. But this afternoon, after lunch, it’s my turn to speak. And I’ve been doing my homework, looking into what kinds of things paranormalists often believe about biology and evolution, and it’s been a long exercise in face-palming. They’re all over the map, but there are some common threads: the idea that evolution is inadequate (even while they rather blandly accept it for everything other than humans) and that aliens had to somehow assist us to reach the state we’re in now. Again, there isn’t one simple, coherent formula to describe their ideas — they’re not like the creationists who neatly fall into a few categories — and their hypotheses wobble all over the place. Some believe humans are the aliens, that we immigrated here to Planet Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. Others believe that we’re hybrids, the product of mating between alien star-lords that we called gods and the common stock. Others think that no, it was planned modification of the ape genetic line by high-tech aliens, who intentionally inserted special genes into our cells to give us higher powers. And some are willing to say we evolved naturally here, but the aliens showed up to give us a technological boost, planting only ideas in human culture. So I’ve got a great big moving target to deal with, and I suspect that if I shoot down one hypothesis people will just glibly shift to one of the other excuses.

Here’s an example of the kind of nonsense I have to deal with.

Why is it that ancient native, cultures all around the world, from the Americas to Africa and Australia speak of advanced ETs ‘seeding’ humanity on earth? How is it that such apparently primitive peoples had in-depth accurate knowledge of constellations such as Sirius – which cannot be seen with the naked eye – several thousand years ago?

It is in my knowing that originally, a group of spiritually and technologically advanced ETs seeded humanity with the apparently ‘benevolent intent’ of mankind becoming ‘custodians’ of Mother Earth and working to live in balance with her. That’s why so many of the original tribal cultures such as the North American Indians, The Mayans, The African Dogon, The Tibetans and the Australian Aborigines all lived largely in harmony with the earth and at balance with nature.

I love that phrase, “It is in my knowing.” So meaningless, so pompous, so vacuous. You also get a taste of that benign assumption that any alien intervention was friendly in intent, and that “tribal cultures” are one with the Earth Mother. No, these cultures had relatively small population sizes and so did not impose any stresses on their environment that the environment could not handle, but give ’em a chance, and they could overwhelm a place just about as well as Europeans — look at Easter Island, for instance. We are all of us just people.

But that optimism also hides some profound ignorance and some nasty racism. On the ignorance side, this passage is about as annoyingly stupid as anything I’ve heard from creationists:

When Official Science delved deeper [into the question of why humans have 46 chromosomes while other apes have 48], it realised that the reason we have two less, is because the second and third chromosomes have been fused into one. It tries to explain this by saying such a mutation could happen naturally and points to other evidence in nature such as butterflies. Indeed such spontaneous mutation can happen, but what they’re not saying (and quietly brushing under the carpet), is that although this ‘mutation’ offers no natural evolutionary advantage whatsoever, it appears in EVERY SINGLE HUMAN!

How could that be? This fusing of the chromosomes is not what makes us human, and it does not offer any ‘natural’ evolutionary advantage (I’ll return to this in a moment). Yet we all have the mutation? If we supposedly evolved from Hominoids (like Neanderthal) and this mutation offers no advantage, then you’d expect to see some humans with 48 chromosomes and some with 46, but not ALL with 46!

But when you delve deeper into the chromosome story it gets even more curious. Each chromosome has three parts to it: both ends and a middle. Now in eight of the other human chromosomes, there has been an inversion of the middle part – it’s been ‘spun around’. Again, these inversions offer no natural evolutionary advantage – they don’t change the genetic material – yet ALL eight supposed ‘mutations’ appear in ALL humans.

Now you don’t need to be a mathematician to know, that the odds for all nine mutations to happen spontaneously, where no natural evolutionary advantage was gained, and for that to happen to both the original human male and female, at exactly the same time, and in exactly the same place, and for them to breed and produce the entire human offspring is so unlikely, the odds are literally zillions to one!

“Literally zillions to one!” Heh.

Just look at that raging typological thinking, though. This person apparently can’t grasp the idea of long, slow periods of gradual change in relatively neutral properties: it all had to happen all at once. Zing! All at once, all of the differences between humans and chimpanzees had to occur.

And here’s the underlying nastiness. This same post includes the video below with no qualification. It’s a smug little conversation between two racist assholes of the genus Newageius concluding that human races are soooo different that they must have been independently transplanted to earth from different alien worlds.

If you don’t want to listen to the whole awful thing (and I don’t blame you), here’s a representative comment from youtube that nicely illustrates what we’re dealing with.

My studies have actually yielded the idea that there are four basic structures that the Multi-racial structures evolve from: Africans, Asians, Europeans and Native Americans. These will coencide with the colors of the Medicine Wheel being Black, White, Yellow and Red. As with paint in art, you can derive many colors from four basic colors. Cells Are solar systems. We’re making all of this harder than it has to be. Chakra Systems. LOOK for crying out loud.

I can’t possibly address all of this bullshit in one hour; I also don’t assume that most of the audience agrees with this particular brand of lunacy. So I’m going to be giving a very simplified introduction to the human genome and properties of the human population that show that we are entirely children of Earth. Baby steps. Basics first. We’ll see how it goes.

A shame

Ken Ham is very proud to have spent a half-million dollars to buy a genuine, rare allosaur skeleton, which will now be locked up in a non-research institution and used to gull the rubes. It’s all part of their grand plan to pretend to be a scientific institution, while doing everything in their power to corrupt the public understanding of science.

What a shame.

And of course they’re going to use it to lie to visitors. Here’s what Andrew Snelling, their pet pseudoscientist, says about it.

As a geologist, Dr. Snelling added that unlike the way most of the Morrison Formation bones had been found scattered and mixed, the intact skeleton of this allosaur is testimony to extremely rapid burial, which is a confirmation of the global catastrophe of a Flood a few thousand years ago.

Lovely logic. Because the bones this one example were unscattered, it somehow supports their claim that it was killed 4000 years ago in a global flood. What? There’s nothing in the distribution of the bones that can be said to support a particular age for the specimen, and even if it were killed in a flood, floods do happen — it says nothing about a global catastrophe.

And if unmixed bones equal Recent Global Flood, what does it say that they admit that “most of the Morrison Formation bones had been found scattered and mixed”?

The rest of the press release is revealing in that it mentions that money for this grand exhibit, and another half-million dollars, came from one family — one very, very rich family — with far more money than sense. Just another demonstration that being an idiot does not interfere with the process of getting rich.

Friday Cephalopod: Wonderporn!

Oooh, those glossy thick pages. The bright colors that pop. The action shots. The extreme closeups. I admit it: I have an addiction to aquarist magazines. You’ve gotta check out CORAL: the reef & marine aquarium magazine, especially this issue, the one with the big bold feature on “WRASSES”. Turn to page 70. Oooh, baby. Wonderpus action, with the camera right up in the sweet spot.

Insertion! Hooah!

insertion

Money shot. Mmmm.

moneyshot

Was it good for you, too?

I get email

It’s from another physics and Christianity crank. I wish he’d go bug Paul Davies; I’m a biologist, not a cosmologist.

Atheists are superstitious

1. There is no rational reason to reject the Our Lord Jesus Christ since it is scientifically demonstrated He is Divine and the One and Only True God. Only unscientific minds would reject empirical scientific evidence.

2. The universe is geocentric. Every experiment designed to measure the speed of the earth through space has always returned a speed of zero just as the Bible claimed all along. Only prejudicial minds reject scientific facts. Your leading Pagan cosmology writers offer biases with no scientific proof . Unbeknownst to you is the fact that no one in all history has ever proven that the Earth moves in space. As an honest scientist Lincoln Barnett admits in his book endorsed by Einstein “…nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion.” (Lincoln Barnet, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, p. 73.) Einstein invented his relativity mythology to counter the Michelson-Morley experiments and other innumerable successor experiments demonstrating the earth is immobile in space and at the center of the universe.

“So which is real, the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case our normal view versus that of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe, for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun to be at rest.” (The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, 2010, pp. 41-42) Hawking cannot face the empirical scientific evidence that Geocentrism is scientifically proven and heliocentrism disproven. In his bias he ridiculously opts to put the two systems on the same level.

3. That the myth of Copernicanism is the foundation for modern man’s independence from God is a connection that was recognized by the editor of the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. When confronted in the late 1970s with the model of cosmology promoted by the evolutionist well-known physicist George F.R. Ellis – it promoted geocentrism – Paul C. W. Davies, the editor of Nature, was forced to reply: “His new theory seems quite consistent with our astronomical observations, even though it clashes with the thought that we are godless and making it on our own.” (P.C.W. Davies, “Cosmic Heresy?” Nature, 273:336, 1978. In the same article Davies admits: “…as we see only redshifts whichever direction we look in the sky, the only way in which this could be consistent with a gravitational explanation is if the Earth is situated at the center of an inhomogeneous Universe.” Confirming Davies’s agnosticism is a letter he wrote to Dr. Robert Sungenis on Aug. 9th, 2004, stating: “I have long argued against the notion of any sort of God who resides within time, and who preceded the universe.” Davies, however, is honest enough to admit he cannot lightly dismiss Ellis’ science and mathematics that connect the Earth with the center of the universe.

So in addition to being a friend to the Templeton Foundation, a coauthor on the arsenic life paper, and proponent of a bad cancer theory, Davies was, once upon a time, speculating about geocentrism? Somehow I’m not surprised. Here’s the “Cosmic heresy?” paper.

Hey, if Nature can publish kooky weird speculations, who am I to say Jesus ain’t science?

Science you can use!

It’s not to late to sign up to attend the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, where you can witness this presentation:

Abstract: E9.00003 : Urinal Dynamics

In response to harsh and repeated criticisms from our mothers and several failed relationships with women, we present the splash dynamics of a simulated human male urine stream impacting rigid and free surfaces. Our study aims to reduce undesired splashing that may result from lavatory usage. Experiments are performed at a pressure and flow rate that would be expected from healthy male subjects. (Lapides, J., Fundamentals of Urology, W.B. Saunders, Philadelphia, 1976.) For a rigid surface, the effects of stream breakup and surface impact angle on lateral and vertical droplet ejection distances are measured using high-speed photography and image processing. For free surface impact, the effects of velocity and fluid depth on droplet ejection distances are measured. Guided by our results, techniques for splash reduction are proposed.

Like, aim?

I think I have acquired some insight into the mind of our weird foster cat. She always comes racing into the bathroom when I’m trying to use it, and she peers intently at streams of water and will hop onto the toilet to stare fixedly at the vortex when it flushes. She’s just a wanna-be fluid dynamics physicist!