An entirely appropriate summary of Stephen Meyer’s talk in Oklahoma

It was very simple: DIRP.

I knew ahead of time exactly what it was going to be: complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, therefore, DESIGN. It doesn’t follow. The logic is nonexistent. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect a competent person with a Ph.D. in philosophy to recognize, but no, it’s the same ol’ thing, trotted out every time they get up to speak.

COMPLEXITY DOES NOT IMPLY DESIGN. You can build up an awesome mess of complexity by accident, so you need to demonstrate something other than complexity to demonstrate intent.

Happy Blasphemy Day!

It’s that day when you’re supposed to express your irreverence (hey, wait a minute, isn’t that every day and every minute?), and if you think there is something you should do that’s better than just wandering around uttering foul imprecations against gods and their priests, try supporting the Irish campaign to get their blasphemy law off the books.

But whatever is done in the spirit of weakening religious dogma is fine with me. I had some plans, but I may have to do a belated blasphemy…it’s another day of travel for me.

Godless gang of Maine!

We had a fine evening here at Bates College in Maine, and here’s our group photo of the elites who gathered for calamari, Maine food, and beer afterwards. Note satanic red glowing eyes.

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(Click for larger image)

You may notice that some of us are wearing an interesting orange necklace. That’s a cephalopod from Noadi. Not only are they pretty, but I can guarantee that they ward off vampires.

Oh, and you can get an account of the talk here. It was all about blasphemy.

Maybe the media should interview this guy for “interesting” science

Since the mere majesty and grandeur of the natural world are insufficient to provide entertainment, perhaps science coverage in the media should become something like the Weekly World News. Arthur David Horn could be a major media star.

He now advocates the theory that modern man is not the result of a natural process of evolution, but that evolution was artificially aided by reptilian extraterrestrials. The reptilians bred mankind as servants and continue to rule the planet today, Horn said.

Reptilians have manipulated perceptions of world history and hold power over humankind through their influence over an elite and powerful group of humans, known as the Illuminati, Arthur said. Throughout human history, the reptilian beings have been recorded as dragons or gods.

I don’t think that was an example of media quote mangling, either. He was speaking at a meeting called a “Galactic Gathering,” organized by The Institute for the Study of Galactic Civilizations.

A plus on his side: there’s also a nice human interest story there.

The shift in Arthur’s focus came shortly after meeting Lynette, who was then a metaphysical healer, he said. After many conversations over the telephone, Arthur and Lynette finally met face-to-face in July of 1988 when they spent a week in Northern California’s Trinity Mountains searching for Sasquatch, commonly known as Bigfoot.

The couple never spotted the mythic creature, but fell in love, Lynette said. Only a few months later, they were married in the chapel on the CSU campus.

Awww. Woo Love.

Somebody pass his name on to Sharon Begley, who is manufacturing pseudo-controversies this week. She’s defending Lamarckism now, based on some work that suggests a plausible basis for multi-generation responses to the environment, a justification for some of the observations made by Kammerer on toads.

Genes for living on land seem to get “environmentally silenced in early embryos exposed to water,” says Vargas, who combed through Kammerer’s lab notes and whose analysis appears in the Journal of Experimental Zoology. “It has taken a painfully long time to properly acknowledge that environment can influence inheritance,” he told me. “I think academia has discouraged experiments testing environmental modification of inheritance,” because the inheritance of acquired characteristics—Lamarckism—drives the self-appointed evolution police crazy.

They might want to spend more time reading studies and less energy manning the barricades.

Aaaargh! Epigenetics is not Lamarckism! Also, Begley doesn’t seem to understand that the institution of science is extremely conservative, and rightly so: we ‘man the barricades’ because science isn’t like the Huffington Post, letting any wacky idea sail through unchallenged. There is a demand for rigor: show us the data, do the experiments, repeat until you’ve got a case that can’t be shot down by a lone skeptical first year grad student. Postulating reptoids guiding human evolution isn’t going to be credible until someone shoots one and writes a paper about the dissection, and Lamarckism is going to be sneered at until someone does the experiment that shows it.

I don’t think academia has been neglecting this field because of dogma, either. Epigenetics is hot right now (and again, it’s NOT Lamarckism!), and there’s some interesting work going on in the field of eco-devo. I also think that a replication of Kammerer’s work that demonstrated an actual effect would be easily publishable — I’d be interested in reading it, for sure.

We’re all the evolution police. It isn’t as sinister as Begley seems to imply: we just demand a little more evidence than speculation.

Richard Dawkins says we’re descended from FROGS!

Well, no, actually, he didn’t. But once again, he’s going to get misquoted by every creationist on the planet, thanks to Newsweek. They have an article about him and his book, and in a nice bold pull quote, here’s what they claim:

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Hey, frogs are highly derived amphibians; we certainly aren’t descended from them. Monkeys are closer to us than frogs, but they’re still cousins, not grandparents. Not only does that quote look silly to a creationist, it looks ridiculous to a scientist.

So what did Dawkins actually say? Why, that the whole simplistic imaginary chains of descent that creationists invent are wrong.

The silliest of all these “missing link” challenges are the following…”If people came from monkeys via frogs and fish, then why does the fossil record not contain a ‘fronkey’?”

If you ever wonder why scientists distrust the media, this is a nice clear example.

The Maher conundrum

Oh, boy. As many of you already know, the big AAI conference is taking place in LA at the end of this week — I’ll be there! — and they are giving Bill Maher an award. This is a problem. Maher made a provocative movie about religion this year, Religulous, and that’s the kind of thing we want to acknowledge and encourage, but at the same time…Maher is as loopy as they come on medical matters. He’s a conspiracy theorist who blames Big Pharma for controlling health care, thinks modern medicine is a failure, and promotes ‘alternative’ therapies that don’t work. It is a serious embarrassment.

I think it is an excellent idea to ask difficult questions and put Maher on the spot, as Orac has proposed, and the last thing any skeptic or rationalist should do is ask critics to be silent. However, we have a couple of small problems here.

One is that some people (not Orac) have been threatening to disrupt the proceedings at the meeting. Nope, not good: there is a difference between asking hard questions and interfering with the event so no one gets to ask questions. Let’s nip this one in the bud: do not show up at the meeting with the intent of turning it into something equivalent to those townhall teabagger shouting matches. I think you’re entirely right to be pissed off at Maher, but that doesn’t justify disruption.

Another problem is that Maher is going to be well insulated. He’s showing up for the award ceremony, which will NOT have time scheduled for a Q&A, and I think he’ll be vanishing right afterwards. We’re not likely to have an opportunity for discussion.

And yet another problem: people are barking at Richard Dawkins. Dawkins does not support quackery. This isn’t an issue on which he’ll disagree with any of you, but he’s also there to talk about his exciting new book, not about fake cancer cures. I suspect he’s not looking forward to a lot of time-wasting headaches over this issue, and if it sounds like it’s going to eat up all of his time with the public, he’ll probably do the rational thing and cut back on spending time with the public. This is not to be encouraged.

I have some suggestions.

I’m going to be printing out Orac’s excellent complaint, and if you’re going, you should, too. I’ll keep an eye on the comments in the next few days for more good questions.

If we get an opportunity in an open forum to pin Maher down on these questions, let’s do it. Let’s do it politely and according to the rules of the session. That’s fair game.

If you find yourself with a chance to ask Richard Dawkins questions, though, please stick to issues that interest him. If you ask him about acupuncture, he’s going to be as dismissive as all of us other skeptics, so there really isn’t much point to going on about it. Don’t waste an opportunity to converse with Dawkins on a bunch of annoying noise. OK?

However, I’ve probably got a greater likelihood of getting a shot at a private conversation with Richard Dawkins than most readers here; maybe, and this is a very thin maybe, I’ll even get an opportunity to collar Maher. I may also get a chance to talk with some of the other organizers of the conference. If that happens, I’ll pass along the complaints, and I’ll try to drill down and get some good answers for you…which, of course, I’ll post here.

I think that’s your best strategy for actually getting answers to the questions Orac is asking, rather than simply triggering a shouting match. While shouting matches are fun, we should want something a little more thoughtful out of these fellows.