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.

Reading this will affect your brain

Baroness Susan Greenfield has been spouting off some bad neuroscience, I’m afraid. She’s on an anti-social-networking-software, anti-computer-games, anti-computer crusade that sounds a bit familiar — it’s just like the anti-TV tirades I’ve heard for 40-some years — and a little bit new — computers are bad because they are “changing the workings of the brain“. Ooooh.

But to put that in perspective, the brain is a plastic organ that is supposed to rewire itself in response to experience. It’s what they do. The alternative is to have a fixed reaction pattern that doesn’t improve itself, which would be far worse. Greenfield is throwing around neuroscientific jargon to scare people.

So yes, using computers all the time and chatting in the comments sections of weird web sites will modify the circuitry of the brain and have consequences that will affect the way you think. Maybe I should put a disclaimer on the text boxes on this site. However, there are events that will scramble your brains even more: for example, falling in love. I don’t want to imagine the frantic rewiring that has to go on inside your head in response to that, or the way it can change the way you see the entire rest of the world, for good or bad, for the whole of your life.

Or, for an even more sweeping event that had distinct evolutionary consequences, look at the effect of changing from a hunter-gatherer mode of existence, to an agrarian/urban and modern way of life. We get less exercise because of that, suffer from near-sightedness, increased the incidence of infectious disease, and warped our whole pattern of activity in radical ways. Not only do neural pathways have to develop in different ways to cope with different environments, but there was almost certainly selection for urban-compatible brains—people have died of the effects of that shift. Will Baroness Greenfield give up her book-writin’, lecturin’ ways to fire-harden a pointy stick, don a burlap bag, and dedicate her life to hunting rabbits?

The Octopus reimagined

Warren Ellis set his readers to a task: to draw an old pulp comic book character, the Octopus. The Octopus had a stunning description.

One of the more outré of the pulp characters-and given the genre, that’s quite saying something, believe me-the Octopus was actually the villain of the piece in his single issue, The Octopus v1 #4, 1939, written by…well, it’s not exactly clear. It might be Norvel Page, or it might be Ejler and Edith Jacobsen. A rather over-the-top mad scientist, the Octopus worked from a big city hospital and plotted world conquest. His appearance might explain his desire to dominate the world; he’s sea-green, with four “suction-cupped weaving tentacles” set above “hideously malformed” legs. He wears a small mask, and behind it can be seen two enormous, luminous, purple eyes. He was the leader of the Purple Eyes, a cult bent on world domination and mass destruction. The Octopus’ chosen method was an “ultra-violet ray” which devolved men and women and turned them into deformed, life-hating monsters hungry for human flesh and glowing with “ultraviolet purple.” Against the Octopus was set Jeffrey Fairchild, a young millionaire philanthropist (he eventually stopped the Octopus, of course). He had three identities. The first was Jeffrey Fairchild, hospital administrator. The second was was kindly Dr. Skull, the old man who made a practice of helping the poor in the slums. (His good works didn’t help him when everyone thought that he was the Octopus, however) In his other identity he was the “Skull Killer,” who fought crime and left a skull-imprint, ala the Spider, on his enemies. Fairchild was assisted by Carol Endicott, Dr. Skull’s nurse.

There were a lot of submissions, but so far I like this one best:

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I thought about cheating and just sending in a photo of myself, but darn it, my eyes aren’t purple.

Daniel Hauser might live now

Daniel Hauser, the 13 year old Minnesota boy with the dual affliction of Hodgkin lymphoma and idiots for parents, has been told that he can’t refuse effective medical treatments.

In a 58-page ruling Friday, Brown County District Judge John Rodenberg found that Daniel Hauser has been “medically neglected” and is in need of child protection services.

Rodenberg said Daniel will stay in the custody of his parents, but Colleen and Anthony Hauser have until May 19 to get an updated chest X-ray for their son and select an oncologist.

The judge wrote that Daniel has only a “rudimentary understanding at best of the risks and benefits of chemotherapy. … he does not believe he is ill currently. The fact is that he is very ill currently.”

I might feel differently about this if the kid had been well informed and was consciously making a decision to die, but he wants to live and has been lied to by the deluded pseudo-Indian religious kooks he has for parents, and by the quacks who have been giving him medical advice.

A challenge to the Discovery Institute

A nice, specific request: name a gene that shows no signs of an evolutionary origin.

The argument has long been highly asymmetric. Scientist find a gene, and what do they do? Figure out what it does, and dig into the databases to find its relatives within that organism or in other species. Creationists claim genes can’t be created without the intervention of a designer, and what do they do? Nothing.

Another hypersensitive Catholic

The persecution complex runs deep. Here’s another another example of laughable letter to the editor, complaining about a story that referred to “wafers and wine”:

…the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t now, nor has it ever offered a wafer and wine as Communion. We do offer the body and blood of Jesus Christ, which in John’s gospel he proclaims to be our source of life in Him. To refer to the Eucharist as a wafer and wine is to demean the value of this sacrament, seemingly equating it to an evening snack.

I suggest that Mr. Kush apologize for his lack of respect to Bishop Reilly and the faith of the Roman Catholic Church.

Shall newspapers take this complaint to heart and henceforth refer to communion as a cannibal orgy of consumption of an imaginary dead god’s flesh and blood? That would at least spell out their beliefs.

I think I’ll stick to calling it just a cracker, though.

Gloat, everyone!

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. James Dobson gives up.

I want to tell you up front that we’re not going to ask you to do anything, to make a phone call or to write a letter or anything.

There is nothing you can do at this time about what is taking place because there is simply no limit to what the left can do at this time. Anything they want, they get and so we can’t stop them.

We tried with [Health and Human Services Secretary] Kathleen Sebelius and sent thousands of phone calls and emails to the Senate and they didn’t pay any attention to it because they don’t have to. And so what you can do is pray, pray for this great nation… As I see it, there is no other answer. There’s no other answer, short term.

Oh, no…wait. They’re going to start praying? Don’t do that! When they’ve got the power of their almighty god behind them, they’ll be unstoppable! Please, conservapublitards, don’t do that. Don’t spend all your time on your knees, praying. That would give you such an unfair advantage! Play fair!

Heidi Klum has a rival

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She’s beautiful and German. She’s also naked, with very large breasts, and she isn’t wearing any underwear — in fact, she’s posing almost obscenely, and has rather prominent labia in view. She’s also 35,000 years old and has no head.

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A few other interesting details: she doesn’t seem to be entirely naked— there are markings like bands and hatchmarks that are suggestive of some kind of clothing. More attention was paid to carving the hands, which have 5 and 4 fingers marked out, than to the head, which is nonexistent. In its place, there is a well-polished, carved loop, suggesting that she was probabl worn as a pendant. She’s also carved out of something you can’t get anymore, mammoth ivory.

These Venus figurines have been found in many places in Europe, but this is the oldest one yet discovered. You have to wonder what they were for. Crude stone-age porn, whittled out by horny, bored mammoth hunters? Fertility fetishes worn by women trying to get pregnant? Symbols of some complicated body of religious belief now completely lost to us? Imagine if, tens of thousands of years from now, archaeologists who have lost all records of our civilization were digging around in Europe and kept unearthing one of our common kinds of statuary—figures of a tormented dead man, arms outstretched, strange wounds carved into hands, feet, and side. It would probably make about as much sense as these fascinating Venus symbols.

Conard NJ (2009) A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in Southwestern Germany. Nature 459:248-252.