Danger, aquarists, danger!

I’m sure this happens all the time.

A 2cm long fish apparently found it’s way into the penis of a 14-year-old boy from India in a bizarre medical case.

The patient was admitted to hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling urine and acute urinary retention spanning a 24-hour period. According to the boy, the fish slipped into his penis while he was cleaning his aquarium at home.

This is precisely why, when I’m cleaning the bank of tanks in my lab, I make sure to keep my pants on.

(via Rev. BigDumbChimp, who always finds stories like this.)

I’ll be condescending when condescension is deserved

And deserved it is, in this remarkably ignorant article by a creationist named Peter Heck. It starts out very, very badly.

It never ceases to amaze me how intellectually condescending evolutionary naturalists can be. Keep in mind, these are folks who believe that an indescribably tiny wad of nothingness exploded into a fully functional, structured, and ordered universe of orbiting planets and complex creatures without any supernatural agency involved. They are the ones who cling to a theory known as spontaneous generation – the notion that dead matter can just suddenly pop to life. They are the ones who champion a man (Charles Darwin) who suggested that Africans were more closely related to gorillas than Caucasians. They are the ones who believe that a wolf-like animal with hooves took to the water, lost its legs, and morphed into a whale (Cetaceans). If anyone should go easy on the intellectual condescension, it’s these people. But they don’t.

Wow. Let’s begin at the top.

Scientists believe that the universe began in the Big Bang because a large body of astronomical observation and mathematical work provides evidence that it happened. It’s odd, it’s counterintuitive to us short-lived humans who don’t see a large enough span of time to see changes on an astronomical scale, and there certainly are a lot of unanswered questions about what was going on in the first instant of our origin…but the physics all points in that direction. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who believe the universe was poofed into existence pretty much as it is right now by a snap of a god’s fingers 6,000 years ago, and the reason they think that is because priests of a tribe of nomadic goat-herders said so. Who should be intellectually condescending here?

Biologists recognize that the basis of life is chemistry — that we are the product of some wonderfully interesting biochemical reactions. We do not believe in spontaneous generation, but we do know that the boundary between biology and chemistry is very, very fuzzy indeed, and that there was a transition in the history of life where chemical replicators gradually acquired sufficient complexity that they became the basis for life. Again, this is the product of evidence and experiment: we see molecular indicators of the common origin of all life, and that we see even in our own cells the hallmarks of a history with a much simpler origin. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who believe a god independently created each species fixed and eternal, and that there are few enough of these unchangeable forms that they could all be loaded on a big boat. Why do they think so? Because a few Jewish poets and mystics scribbled down a page and a half of metaphor in an old book. Who should be intellectually condescending here?

Charles Darwin had complex views on race (I recommend Desmond and Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) for a good overview). He did have the common biases of his time, and certainly did believe that white Europeans were the best and most advanced of all peoples. However, the creationists of the time also shared those views, and in many cases were much worse. Louis Agassiz, for instance, thought that black and white people were independently created; he found Darwin’s view, that Europeans shared blood ancestry with Africans, to be repugnant in the extreme. The views of the religious were divided between slavery-promoting, black-denigrating believers in plural origins who thought blacks were marked as inferior by their god, and abolitionists who read the Bible as describing a brotherhood of all peoples. Darwin’s idea of evolution actually provided scientific support for the unity camp — and he himself found slavery abhorrent. To claim that Darwin was deplorable because he was a racist is both a gross misreading of history (nothing new to creationists) and a logical fallacy (also nothing new), since his views on race have nothing to do with the validity of his scientific ideas. Who should be intellectually condescending here?

The evolution of whales is also a matter of fact and evidence. We have the fossils; we can see a pattern of change across geological time, from those hooved terrestrial quadrupeds to flippered ambush predators adapted to living in the shallows to four-flippered, paddle-tailed swimmers to obligate water-dwellers with flukes and no hind limbs, with many stages in between. It is a beautiful and strongly-supported example of macroevolutionary change. So yes, we believe it — you’d have to be blind to ignore the testimony of the rocks. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who are shown the succession of forms and retreat to arguments that they’re just the animals who missed Noah’s big boat. The reason they think so is because a century of ludicrous apologists for fundamentalist faith have been frantically denying the emerging evidence. Who should be intellectually condescending here?

The rest of Heck’s article professes to cite specific instances of evolutionary problems. Swine flu isn’t an example of evolution — it’s just microevolution. He makes up stories to support his claim.

If Darwin was right, we should be able to observe and replicate gene mutations that yield new information nearly everywhere we look. We simply cannot.

But we do. All the time. The mechanisms are documented and demonstrated, and we even have thorough experimental confirmation of the acquisition of new genetic properties in evolving populations.

Heck continues his creationist twaddle with more outrageous claims.

Meanwhile, what we can find are innumerable cases of destructive gene mutations, where we end up with less genetic information than what was originally present. Take the recent discovery of perfectly preserved octopus remains. The discovery revealed that these ancient octopi actually had more genetic information than do modern octopi. Call it “Darwin in reverse.” Both horizontal and destructive mutations support the creationist model…and both devastate Darwin’s.

Errm, what? I wrote about those Cretaceous octopods — there was absolutely nothing in the work to quantify genetic information. What they revealed was a pattern of change — that macroevolution thing that Heck denies — in support of evolutionary explanations for octopus origins. And evolutionary models do not demand any direction for information; lineages can be streamlined and simplified, or they can become more elaborate and complicated. Everything is in response to local opportunities.

Who should be intellectually condescending here? I think the side that presents the evidence, actually seeks out new knowledge to test their conclusions, and actually demonstrates some knowledge and scholarship deserves to be a little uppity and arrogant. It’s the people like Peter Heck, who are utterly ignorant of the science, mangle what little they know, and actively mislead people about the evidence who might deserve a little condescension. My only reservation about that is that I tend to favor treating ignorant, lying twerps with open contempt instead.

Charlotte Allen really is angry at us

Oh, no. I spent a long day traveling, getting my daughter to the airport in Minneapolis so she could fly off to Phoenix for 10 weeks of research (she has arrived, and seems a bit shocked to be in a desert), and then I drove all the way back. I sit down to see what has happened in the world, and discover that Charlotte Allen hates me. She doesn’t like you much, either. And she got her little tirade published in the LA Times. Let’s take a look and see what she doesn’t like about us.

Her opening is clear. She thinks we’re “crashing bores”. A hint for Ms. Allen: never start an essay by declaring your subject to be boring. Either your readers will stop at that point, or they’ll read on and discover that despite your claim, you seem to be concerned enough to write on at excessive length about something that is supposedly boring.

Second paragraph: she says something about Eagleton. I read Eagleton’s book, and didn’t recognize her summation (Dawkins and Hitchens indulged in “a philosophically primitive opposition of faith and reason that assumes that if science can’t prove something, it doesn’t exist”), either from the Eagleton book or from the statements of either Hitchens or Dawkins. This line of argument doesn’t last beyond one paragraph, however — perhaps because there is no way she can defend it — and she quickly drops any pretense of wanting to engage a substantive argument. Instead, she tells us more specifically why we’re boring.

My problem with atheists is their tiresome — and way old — insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What — did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?

Well, personally, I don’t feel that I’m opressed. I’ve pointed out before that it’s awfully easy for an atheist to just keep his or her mouth shut and pass for a believer. My usual theme instead is to show what a botch theists have made of the country, and how hypocritical they are, and how absurd their beliefs are. But otherwise, yes, we do have de facto discrimination against the godless in America; we have some blatant examples, and of course there is the obvious fact that one must be a professing believer to get elected to office in most places in this country. All Allen musters against this evidence is the claim that atheists are a tiny minority (which makes it all right to discriminate, I guess?), and there are only six states with anti-atheist clauses in their constitutions. Logic…not her strong suit.

As for the claim that we’re fixated on the “fine points of Christianity”, I don’t think so. Atheists are more concerned with the basics: where is the evidence for a god, any god? Some of us are a bit fascinated with the Christian obsession with the details of ritual and dogma in the absence of any reason to accept their core beliefs, but that’s not our weird fixation, Ms. Allen — it’s yours.

Then there is an incoherent middle where she just flames on about how mean atheists are (I call them all horrible names, you see), never seeming to notice that all she is doing is spouting angry vitriol about atheists. Gripe, gripe, gripe. The only time she even tries to state what the position of theists might be is in her closing paragraph, and again, she’s oblivious to the problem with her position.

What atheists don’t seem to realize is that even for believers, faith is never easy in this world of injustice, pain and delusion. Even for believers, God exists just beyond the scrim of the senses. So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?

Yes? We know you work hard to maintain a belief in a loving, personal god in the absence of evidence and the existence of facts that contradict you. We agree with you that it is remarkably unlikely and difficult to understand. We also agree that the existence of god is something you can’t sense — we can’t sense it either. Whenever we engage you seriously this is the same stuff we get, over and over again: we’re just supposed to believe in the absence of your ability to explain why we should.

There simply isn’t anything to engage in Allen’s howl of outrage. I’m a little surprised that something so shallow and empty could get published in the LA Times at all, especially with Charlotte Allen’s track record. My only previous encounter with her was an astonishing rant in the Washington Post, in which she flatly claimed that women were dumber than men. Seriously. While claiming there was no difference in average intelligence.

It should be impossible to take this raving crazy loon seriously, but somehow she’s getting published in major newspapers. That’s the real mystery.

God’s own war

President George W. Bush was a god-fearing child given control of our military apparatus…or perhaps he was a child manipulated by a military that found religion a convenient hook. Frank Rich describes the internal propaganda used during the war. What I find shocking is that Bush received regular intelligence briefings with covers that invoked a combination of G.I. Joe war imagery and militaristic bible verses.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

Well, now they’ve leaked. Here’s an example.

i-1f1264c9531da2cec67e2464fb1a766e-gods_own_war.jpeg

It’s appalling on so many levels: that Rumsfeld thought that polishing up his report with the jingoistic equivalent of a clear plastic binder would win him points; that it apparently worked; that religion was used to promote war in the White House; that it was used despite the fact that it could worsen our chances of success. And we still have Dick Cheney doing a cheerful media tour encouraging us to support torture, which really wasn’t torture, but if it was, it was good for us.

We lived under the rule of monsters for eight years. We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, we need to fight back in the courts to condemn these people and their actions.

Radio reminder

Sunday’s episode of Atheists Talk radio may just annoy me — they’re going to be talking about a local joint Bible study between atheists and a Methodist church. There are some atheists who like to dig into the Bible, but I’m not one of them — been there, done that, found it to be worthless drivel. Maybe you’ll find it more interesting than I do.

The second half is more promising, with an interview with a board member of the UM student group, Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists. Yay students!

Also tomorrow, I’m getting rid of my daughter — we have to drive in to the Minneapolis airport to toss her on a plane to Arizona, where she’s going for a summer internship in biomedical informatics. I may find myself at Q. Cumbers restaurant to check out their intelligently designed salad bar in the morning, where the Bible-studying atheists can correct my ways. Any other local people care to join in?

As I’ve mentioned before, I really truly want to win an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind. You’ve been clicking on this link every day, haven’t you? Click a few more times if you haven’t.

These are “evolutionary leaders”?

I was sent a petition to call for conscious evolution. I have no idea what this means. I don’t think the creators of this petition have the slightest idea, either. I don’t even understand the point of pledging to “elevate consciousness”. I do know that these loons seem to like the word “evolution” an awful lot, abusing the term to the point where I want to just slap it out of their hands and tell them “NO! Not until you learn what it actually means.”

And, of course, it is somehow being appropriated by these kooks to imply something about spirituality. Here’s the fluff they write.

We now realize that we are affecting our own evolution by everything we do. This knowledge awakens in us the aspiration to become more conscious through subjective practices including meditation, reflection, prayer, intuition, creativity, and conscious choice making that accelerate our evolution in the direction of unity consciousness and inspire us to deeply align our collective vision.

Gaah! What vacuous nonsense! This is written by a group of people who call themselves “the evolutionary leaders” — what they actually are is an assortment of pop New Age con artists who primarily make a living peddling books that sell ridiculous woo to a mass market.

I signed the pledge, mainly because they ask for your recommendations for what they can do to promote ‘consciousness evolution’. Here’s what I told them.

Teach critical thinking. Laugh at woo-meisters who push vapid idiocy like meditation and prayer and spirituality. Turn away from the lies of religion. Point out the bullshit in the empty noises of people like Deepak Chopra. Learn something about evolution, which has nothing to do with the fuzzy, sloppy, lazy goo these so-called “evolutionary leaders” are babbling about.

I’m #39,109 — I won’t be surprised if my signature is expunged.