I mentioned that Dennett, Dawkins, and I had dinner together tonight. Someone — and all we know from the waiter was that it was a woman — sent a nice bottle of wine to our table. I know I speak for both Dan and Richard when I say thank you, anonymous lady! It was appreciated!
One other exhibit in the hall was for Evolutionary Genealogy, an excellent site run by Len Eisenberg of Ashland, Oregon. I was in Ashland a while back and got a tour of the geology walk he installed there, which is phenomenal — look it up if you’re ever in town.
He’s selling posters and t-shirts to support his work in evolution education. One of the hooks he uses to get people interested is to talk about relationships in the great big family of life on earth, and he estimates the number of generations that separate us from any organism you might be interested in. He’s got nice shirts that show how closely related you are to that animal; wouldn’t you know Jerry Coyne got in there early and snatched up the kitty-cat shirt? I got a dragonfly, because invertebrates are always much cooler.
Can I call it a ceremony? It wasn’t very ceremonious at all.
We sat down first to watch a live video stream of Bill Maher’s show, with special guest Richard Dawkins. It was good, it was funny, it was abrasive, and Maher didn’t say anything crazy at all. Dawkins did not get much of an opportunity to say much, again; that’s a problem with some of these shows, like Colbert, where the personality of the host leaves little room for the guests. Dawkins acquitted himself well, though.
After the Maher show, we got to listen to Mr Deity. This was pretty darned cool; not only did he show video clips, but the whole cast was there, and they recreated a couple of the episodes live. We learned that Lucy is, in real life, married to Mr Deity, which would seem to mean that Satan is actually Mrs Deity. The theological implications of this revelation were not discussed, but should have been. Mr Deity is also an ex-Mormon, yet another bit of theological dynamite that will no doubt shake all of organized religion to its core.
Maher and Dawkins arrived near the end of Mr Deity’s talk, and I know that’s what everyone wants to hear about. I was seated at the same table with Maher, but sadly, there was no opportunity to have a conversation with him. Dawkins introduced him, he gave a short speech, he got surrounded by a photograph-taking mob, he left.
The good news for all the critics of this choice is that Dawkins pulled no punches. In his introduction, he praised Religulous and thanked Maher for his contributions to freethought, but he also very clearly and unambiguously stated that some of his beliefs about medicine were simply crazy. He did a good job of walking a difficult tightrope; he made it clear that the award was granted for some specific worthy matters, his humorous approach to religion, while carefully dissociating the AAI from any endorsement of crackpot medicine. It won’t be enough, I know, but the effort was made, and talking to Dawkins afterwards there was no question but that Maher’s quackery was highly objectionable. I also got the impression that he felt the critics of the award were making good and reasonable points, and that he felt the awkwardness of the decision.
Maher’s talk was hilarious, too. He’s definitely one of us in his opposition to religion’s influence on the culture, if nothing else.
OK, and just to make you all jealous, I went out to dinner afterwards with Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett. If it makes you feel better, Dan had some criticisms of my talk — I was arguing that it’s a mistake to talk about design in evolution, Dan wants to salvage the word from the hands of creationists and thinks we can talk about design without implying intent at all. I am not convinced, but he does make an interesting case.
I almost forgot! We started off the day with a panel discussion for the Dogma Free America podcast. It was me, Sunsara Taylor, and William B. Davis (the ‘cigarette man’ on the X-Files, skeptics!), which made for an interestingly diverse group. Check out the podcast when it is available.
This was definitely the weirdest talk of the meeting so far.
Bisheff was discussing Tom Paine, that fascinating patriot and rabble-rouser of the American Revolution. Atheists love the guy; he wasn’t one of us, since he was a deist, but he was a real firebrand in his opposition to organized religion. I think a historical analysis of this important figure in American history is the kind of thing we ought to encourage in freethought meetings; we aren’t all about finding contradictions in the Bible and going rah-rah for science, you know.
Unfortunately, this was a very academic talk, following the convention of formal papers in many branches of the humanities: he stood up there at the podium and read from a paper. Yikes. He lost a lot of people early, who just walked out of him in boredom, I’m sorry to say. I’m especially sorry since they missed the weird turn it took later.
Bisheff wanted to emphasize that Paine was not an atheist (which was fine, since he wasn’t), and went on to discuss some of his ideas about science, and nature, and god, and the afterlife. Again, not a problem, since he had those ideas…except that Bisheff seemed to want to regard them uncritically, as good ways of looking at the world, and he seemed to be enjoying taking a few potshots at atheists. And I’m sorry, but Paine, as described here, had some wacky beliefs.
He tried to justify some of the ‘spiritual’ views by claiming that they were like the premises of mathematics, lacking an empirical foundation and not susceptible to proof by materialists, because they reside in a plane outside of mere worldly matters. That was annoying enough in its lack of connection to reality, but then he proceeded to tell us about true science and scientists. Apparently, a true scientist of the future (we aren’t ready for this yet) will incorporate the mystical as well as the natural in his vision of the universe.
That woke me up from the snooze of the talk format.
I eventually asked him a few questions. I suggested that science is a rather pragmatic and methodological practice, so I’d like to know how we were to study the mystical. I also told him that while I didn’t disagree that Paine had these spiritual views, it would be truer to the freethought that he endorsed if we did not simply accept the opinions of Tom Paine, but that a critical analysis would be far more interesting.
I got a rather rambling reply back. Apparently Tom Paine was a proponent of transcendental science, whatever that was. Bisheff tried to give an example, and talked about a study of baby babbling that showed that some fraction weren’t actually babbling, but were speaking in the tongue of some ancient Buddhist sect. We just weren’t ready to comprehend this fact, and scientists run away from such a phenomenon that we can’t explain. Yeah, we were somehow talking about reincarnation.
The person next to me wondered if we’d somehow wandered into a Templeton seminar. I have to agree, it was crazy inappropriate. However, I would like to be the first to endorse the award of a posthumous Templeton Prize to Thomas Paine, hero of the American Revolution. It seems only fair.
I walked into this talk a little late, and was initially unimpressed. Richert was an atheist who fought in Viet Nam, and a lot of the talk was a rather rambling reminiscence with photos of the war; I didn’t quite see the point. At the end, though, it was very affecting. He talked about incidents that made an impression on him: a friend who survived a harrowing firefight, and attributed his survival to a beneficent god; and a few days later, an innocent Vietnamese baby who was killed by shrapnel from a grenade. He made the point that there was no loving god who could have so cruelly thrown away the life of a child, while granting survival to a soldier fighting in the country. Sad stuff with some real emotional punch.
Yes, there are atheists in foxholes. And they seem to be a little more appreciative of the tragedy of war than the blithe Christians.
As soon as you walk into the conference hall, you can’t miss the big posters of a semi-nude Toni Marano. She’s selling videos to help with pilates training, and also does “lifestyle intervention”. I just have to say…good for her. It’s an unfortunate fact that atheist conventions are sometimes a little too gray and stodgy, and she’s bringing a little life to the meeting.
Along similar lines, I’m seeing more young people and more women in attendance; not enough of either, but still a good sign of a healthy, growing movement.
So what do you think? Should I buy one of her dvds?
I’ve been very, very busy today, so I’m bringing you a few belated comments about the Atheist Alliance International convention. I have to be brief, unfortunately; tomorrow is another busy day, which will be starting with a session with Mr Deity, so I need to get some sleep sometime.
I met Russell Blackford! He’s a very nice fellow, especially since he gave a talk I could agree with 100%. He was discussing the virtues of blasphemy; he actually made an argument that we have a kind of moral responsibility to blaspheme. He addressed a couple of ideas, actually; one was the issue of how we know whether religious beliefs aren’t true (quickly dismissed; religion is incompatible with the results of rational inquiry), and spent more time with the question of why we atheists should regard it as urgent to loudly say that religious beliefs aren’t true. He discussed the recent attempts by the UN to add special protections to religious belief, which actually contradict personal liberties, and also showed that existing UN guidelines already compromise free speech.
You people should be reading his blog, you know. Good stuff.
What a day to be stuck in airplanes for hours on end; I had to slurp in a bunch of files on my iPhone and then look at them on that itty-bitty screen, just to catch up on the story of Ardipithecus. Fortunately, you can just read Carl Zimmer’s excellent summary to find out what’s cool about it.
For a summary of a summary: it’s another transitional fossil in our lineage. Ardipithecus ramidus is old, 4.4 million years or so — so it’s well before Lucy and the australopithecines. The latest result is a thorough analysis of a large number of collected specimens that shows it is an interesting mosaic of traits: it was bipedal, but not quite so well adapted to terrestrial locomotion as we are, and it had feet with an opposable big toe. And of course it had a small brain, only a little larger than a chimpanzee’s.
Ardipithecus is clearly different from (but related!) to us, and it’s also very different from a chimpanzee. One thing I’m finding baffling in all the commentary is the argument that this somehow shows that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees would have been very unchimpanzee-like, and perhaps closer in morphology to us than to modern chimps. I’m not buying it. Has anybody actually ever suggested that chimpanzees have been in a state of relative stasis for 6 million years? Chimps have evolved in parallel with us for all of that time, so that argument is addressing a non-controversy, or at least, an argument that should have been recognized as silly all along.
We’re also going to have to push the fossil record back another couple of million years to get to that last common ancestor, and there’s no reason to presume that Ardi’s ancestors weren’t also rather different from Ardi. We also need to know more about the breadth of the primate family tree at that time; was Ardi a weirdly specialized sub-branch, or actually representative of a wider trend in the ape species that would lead to us? I think this image is a nice way to illustrate Ardipithecus‘s place in the family tree.
Don’t get me wrong: Ardipithecus is a magnificent addition to our family album, and the author’s of the multiple papers that have come out have done a very impressive job of analysis and documentation. We can all jump up and down with joy at these new data, and we can rightly point to this species and say, “Transitional form! Boo-ya, creationists!”
Unfortunately, I’m also seeing the press mangling the story already. National Geographic says, Oldest “Human” Skeleton Found—Disproves “Missing Link”, which is annoying. The article itself isn’t bad, but can we just kill the “missing link” nonsense altogether? It’s as if the only way some science journalists can grasp a new discovery is by relating it to a misbegotten misconception.
The prize for the very worst coverage has to go to Metro News and the Torstar News Service (is that from the Toronto Star?). They put up an article titled New theory may answer missing link question, which opens with the bizarre assertion, Man didn’t descend from apes. There is no new theory here. There is new evidence and further data documenting the details of one lineage’s descent. And if you put the phrase “missing link” in your headline any more, we’re going to have to put a silly hat on your editors and make them sit in a corner.
But the very worst part is this misinterpretation of the suggestion that the LCA of humans and chimps would have had characters we consider human-like. I guarantee you that this will be the core of the creationist response to Ardi in the near future.
The four-foot, 110-pound female’s skeleton and physiological characteristics bear a closer resemblance to modern-day humans than to contemporary apes, meaning they evolved from humanlike creatures — not the other way around.
Brace yourself, gang. The creationists are going to be claiming that this shows humans were created first, and all of these other hairy beasts the paleontologists are digging up are just degenerate spawn of the Fall.
