Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It wasn’t that long ago that it was illegal in many states for black people to marry white people — this was the same kind of sentiment promoted by people who are defending marriage from gays nowadays, and I hope it will someday soon look as unbelievable as those old laws. Old laws? They were only overturned on this day in 1967, in the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia!
Roy Zimmerman (with Laura Love, John McCutcheon, and Sandy O) has a song for this day, of course.
You can see the Lovings in this short news piece.
Aaargh! Obama screws up, very, very badly! I could forgive his religious leanings and vote for him, but denying civil rights to our citizens is not the kind of thing I can overlook. He must be hoping that the Republicans will nominate an extremely distasteful thug in the next election, so we’ll vote for him anyway.
A doctor in Nebraska, Dr. Leroy Carhart, has stepped forward and said he will train his staff to take over the important role lost when George Tiller was murdered. That’s courage, and I applaud what he is doing. I hope more doctors take on this essential task.
That’s the good news. The bad news? Look at what Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, a fellow who is obligated by his position to support the law, had to say.
I’m disgusted and I’m saddened, and I hate it that he’s here in Nebraska and I hate it that he’s in America. I mean, this guy is one sick individual.
I hate it that the people who enable murder can be found in positions where they are supposed to promote justice.
You can tell when the anti-intellectuals are in charge: they start throwing away investments in knowledge that took generations to build, all in the name of short-term economy. The latest instance: the state of Wyoming wants to shut down the University of Wyoming Geological Museum. It’s already been starved down to a minimal (well, more like inadequate) staffing level, and now the state just wants to erase it completely.
This doesn’t make sense. A museum is a repository of accumulated information — if you discard it this year because you don’t want to maintain it, you never get it back. It’s gone. You can’t decide at a later date when you’re more flush that maybe you’ll restore it, because you can’t, you have to start anew, and hope that future legislatures are a little more far-sighted than present ones. It frustrates me immensely to see academic infrastructure demolished because some bean-counter would rather throw away money on some waste of resources like abstinence-only education or locking recreational marijuana smokers in jail.
Read more about this travesty at Dinochick and Science Buzz, and sign the petition to save this resource.
Of course, as everyone knows, all flies are geneticists and evolutionists, which kind of deflates the joke.
Look here: Britain’s National Health Service threw away £12 million on homeopathic treatments. It’s a complete waste; millions were spent on teeny-tiny bottles of ‘special’ water that could have been had for pennies from the local water tap.
But hah! America is #1! We spent $2.5 billion on remedies that don’t work! Doesn’t that make you all feel so good right now? Now one might reasonably argue that paying all that money for clear negative results really isn’t that bad; good science doesn’t begin with your conclusion, and good studies can show that a hypothesis was wrong. Unfortunately, these were studies that a) were begun with no good reason to think they would work (the principles of sympathetic magic are not valid premises for research), and b) despite the fact that the treatments were disproven, quacks will continue to peddle them, and gullible people will continue to use them.
While I’m complaining about altie nonsense, remind me to never get in an auto accident in Maryland. I might get tucked into a helicopter and flown to this:
At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.
They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields.
Thanks, Rogue Medic, you’ve just increased my fear of hospitals.
Now they’re taking advantage of YouTube’s easy censorship to shut down a critique of Casey Luskin.
Jerry Coyne’s criticism of accommodationism by evolutionists seems to still be shaking a few trees and is generating an endless debate. Ken Miller has posted a long rebuttal. It’s mainly interesting for the way Miller flees from theism.
His first and only defense seems to be a denial of most of the implications of an interventionist deity…which is, of course, fine with me. He argues that all of his arguments about how a god could have intervened are carefully phrased in terms of conditional probabilities — he’s not describing what actually happened, but how a god might have meddled in the world, and then he openly states that any such interference would be beyond the ability of science to investigate. Well, OK. We could use the same logic to argue for the hypothetical role of elves in human history. I don’t see Miller or anyone else writing books about Finding Darwin’s Elves, however.
He then runs through various references from his books, and points out that he has been scrupulous about keeping the supernatural out of his explanations. This is true; whenever Miller talks about science, he’s careful not to play the “goddidit” gambit. He even says that you’d find “passages very much like that in some of Richard Dawkins’ books”, which is rather interesting and a point worth emphasizing. When scientists talk about evolution, it doesn’t matter whether you are a Miller or a Dawkins…the ideas are all the same. Note, however, that this occurs without Dawkins conceding a single point about a deity, while, as we see in his latest essay, Miller has to disavow any detection of divine tinkering at all.
It gets a little weird. Miller is reduced to embracing Dawkins and Carl Sagan, while claiming Coyne’s supporters are Bill Buckingham, Don McLeroy, and Phillip Johnson. Miller writes a book titled Finding Darwin’s God, but somehow he can claim this has nothing to do with mingling theism with evolution. It all reads as something rather disingenuous.
One thing I’d really like to have seen is something simple: is there anything that distinguishes the science of Coyne and Dawkins from that of Miller? Miller is quick to complain that his views have been twisted, but he only seems to want to say how everyone else is wrong, without clarifying exactly what his views on theistic explanations in evolution are. If they’re effectively excluded from scientific scrutiny, as he states, why should we bother with them at all? If any godly interventions would be indetectable, why shouldn’t we simply show the door to anyone who claims to have found reason to believe in them? Even more oddly, why should we credit any sectarian version of this interventionist deity — why Christian, or specifically Catholic, over any other supernatural tradition? Are we really supposed to accept that a vague deism and Catholicism are philosophically indistinguishable from one another?
Finally, two little details in his essay that bug me in particular.
In an essay in which he indignantly protests that his words have been twisted, he really ought to be more careful about twisting the words of others. He complains that Coyne argues that “Apparently, NAS and the NCSE ought to change their ways, come out of the intellectual closet, and admit that only one position is consistent with evolution — a philosophical naturalism that requires doctrinaire atheism on all questions of faith.”
I think if you actually read what Coyne wrote, he’s careful and explicit to say the exact opposite. He’s pointing out that those organizations have not been neutral, but have effectively endorsed a specific position favoring theistic evolution. He and I both have said that they should not demand atheistic purity, but that they should either stop making one-sided arguments for fluffy, boring, ‘innocuous’, and scientifically unsupportable theistic evolution, or they should be more careful to accurately represent the range of views of scientists, which includes atheists.
The final thing I find objectionable in the essay is Miller’s parting threat. I see this all the time, and seriously…every time, my lip curls in a sneer of disgust. It’s this genuinely stupid argument:
The tragedy of Coyne’s argument is the way in which it seeks to enlist science in a frankly philosophical crusade — a campaign to purge science of religionists in the name of doctrinal purity. That campaign will surely fail, but in so doing it may divert those of us who cherish science from a far more urgent task, especially in America today. That is the task of defending scientific rationalism from those who, in the name of religion would subvert it beyond all recognition. In that critical struggle, scientists who are also people of faith are critical allies, and we would do well not to turn those “Ardent Theists” away.
Set aside the claim that Coyne is on a crusade to purge biology — it’s a false assertion. What I really object to is the goofy “if you don’t be nice to god belief, the churchy scientists will take their ball home”. I metaphorically puke on the shoes of anyone who tries to make that argument.
Turn it around. Can you imagine atheist scientists saying that, if the NAS and NCSE keep talking the god talk, we’ll stop being allies in support of evolutionary biology and good science education? That we’ll be turned away and go do what, support Buckingham and McLeroy and Johnson? Pssht.
If theistic scientists are going to “turn away” from the science because of vigorous debate by the atheist contingent, then that gives the lie to the claim that they are not prioritizing their superstitions over science, and suggests that they aren’t really our allies in promoting good science. It’s a genuinely contemptible argument.
We have two cats, and one of them, Merle, is a shaggy long-haired black beast. And I mean, really shaggy, and shedding constantly. Our first defense against burglary, I think, is the thick clouds of cat fur floating through the atmosphere in our house.
Well, last week, I had enough. I opened the freezer in our kitchen and discovered that all the ice cubes were matted with black hairy clumps. It was disgusting. I’ve told Merle over and over that if she’s going to sneak into the good Scotch behind my back, fine, but she’s going to drink it neat, like a civilized person. So now I’ve taken care of her.
