The pumpkin argument

John Holbo has uncovered an old argument against atheists, one that might have oozed languidly from the fermenting brain of Ray Comfort. But no! This is from a 19th century book of poetry! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ray steals it soon, though.

Basically, it’s an invented disagreement. An imaginary atheist argues that in a well-designed universe, large oak trees ought to bear pumpkin-sized fruit, while little ground-hugging shrubberies out to have acorn-sized fruit. This is easily dismissed by the poet by having an acorn fall on the atheist’s head.

Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
Thy whimseys would have work’d no more,
Nor skull have kept them in.

It even has an illustration of a weeping atheist, which John thinks might look like me, back in my youth in 1792, when I hadn’t grown the beard yet and was fond of tricorn hats, and was always being pelted with acorns by puritans.

An account of the transmission of a nasty infection across the Atlantic

The Guardian has a well-done article on British creationism, which looks from here like a low-rent, twee version of the rampant excesses of our American idiocy (We’re #1!). It also looks very familiar, with the same dead arguments and the same old delusions.

We also get new twists on old tropes. Remember the horrible New Scientist cover that we knew was going to be abused by the creationists? It is.

“I am guided ultimately by the parameters that the Bible lays down,” admits John Peet, travelling secretary of the Biblical Creation Society. He estimates that 90% of the congregation at the Chertsey Street baptist church in Guildford, where he worships and where I hear him address the “creation club”, are young earthers. The theme of pastor John Benton’s sermon in the evening is “Genesis and Evolution: Do They Fit Together?” He holds up a recent New Scientist cover, headlined “Darwin was wrong,” as evidence that the scientific base for evolution is crumbling, that the Darwinian tree of life can be uprooted.

I’ve got my copy of that issue, and you dedicated warriors against creationism might want to pick one up soon. One simple strategy to counter that nonsense is to ask if they read anything more than the title, so that you can open it up and show that they are lying about the science.

That cover was a mistake, and it is one more headache for us to deal with it…but as we all know, creationists will misuse anything to suit their agenda. They (and also, unfortunately, many defenders of evolution) like to blame atheism for creationism, too.

Mackay, too, is clutching a copy of that issue of New Scientist when I meet him. This is manna from heaven – the science establishment offering up gifts to the creationists. They also claim that the aggression of the new atheists is helping them. They paint Dawkins as a “recruiting sergeant” for creationism because he links evolutionary thinking with atheism. “He has been a real help to the ministry, ” says Randall Hardy.

Creationists argue that the new atheists are fuelling the dogmatism; Richard Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford and a theistic evolutionary, last week threw that accusation back at them. “Creationists totally misunderstand the Bible,” he said. “Genesis is in the business of story, myth, poetry, metaphor. They [creationists and atheists] feed off one another. The debate has an unreality about it. Those of us who are not fundamentalists can’t find a place.”

Atheism and evolution are linked because science provides an evidence-based, rational account of origins that makes the myths of faith superfluous. If the fact that many scientists have abandoned the crutch of religion makes you flee from reason to embrace the absurdities of the creationists, you weren’t a friend of science in the first place. These are people who claim the existence of a cure makes them love their disease all the more.

As for Mr Harries, I can understand how he can’t find a place — he’s got nothing but vapor wafted about by furiously waving hands to stand upon. Of course the book of Genesis is a pile of metaphor and myth — so is the whole freaking Bible. But a metaphor for what? It’s all very nice to stagger away from the literalist interpretation of the bible — I sympathize, it’s what we atheists have all done — but then we’re left with this curious pile of pages that is a collection of very badly done history, bizarre behavioral proscriptions, uneven poetry, unbelievable fairy tales, and utterly insane politics and prophecy, which people believe fervently and which, even among those apologists who excuse it as mere “metaphor”, is endorsed as a guide to moral behavior and eternal life.

If he finds the debate unreal, think how we people free of the god delusion see it: a minority of lunatics espousing the kinds of silliness described in the Guardian article, which is hard enough for us to believe, with a majority of gawping fish on the sidelines trying desperately to avoid any association with the creationist kooks while averting their eyes from the rational people fighting their battles for them because they know, deep down, that their feeble apologetics for a “metaphor” they believe in makes the bewildered middle-of-the-roaders just as ridiculous as the creationists.

You aren’t doing it right

Muzzammil Hassan had a great idea: he established a television station to run programming that would counter stereotypes about Muslims. That sounds like a fine plan…but then his wife asked for a divorce, and his response was to murder and decapitate her, which rather confirms a particularly nasty stereotype.

Unless, perhaps, it’s not a stereotype, but simply a fact that Islam is a patriarchal religion of misogyny.

Café Scientifique this week, and next week

The Minneapolis Café Scientifique is taking place tomorrow evening: and it’s all about spiders in love. I want to go, but I’m still digging out from under my accumulated work.

I will be at the Café next week, here in Morris — I’m giving half of it, and Lynn Fellman will be giving the other half. We’ll be talking about genetics and genealogy, and reconstructing deep ancestry from your genes. Should be fun! Come to one or the other!

Francis Collins will be so disappointed

Collins has argued that one piece of evidence for god is the human moral sense, which he claims could not have evolved. I guess we’re going to have to call monkeys our brothers and sisters then, since researchers have found that monkeys have a sense of morality. (Let me guess; he’ll just push the magic moment of ensoulment back another 30 million years.) Furthermore, they have explanations for how altruism could have evolved.

Some researchers believe we could owe our consciences to climate change and, in particular, to a period of intense global warming between 50,000 and 800,000 years ago. The proto-humans living in the forests had to adapt to living on hostile open plains, where they would have been easy prey for formidable predators such as big cats.

This would have forced them to devise rules for hunting in groups and sharing food.

Christopher Boehm, director of the Jane Goodall Research Center, part of the University of Southern California’s anthropology department, believes such humans devised codes to stop bigger, stronger males hogging all the food.

“To ensure fair meat distribution, hunting bands had to gang up physically against alpha males,” he said. This theory has been borne out by studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes.

In research released at the AAAS he argued that under such a system those who broke the rules would have been killed, their “amoral” genes lost to posterity. By contrast, those who abided by the rules would have had many more children.

It’s a little glib and speculative, but it’s enough to shut down the claim that morality couldn’t have evolved.

I also have deep reservations about some of the claims in the article.

Other studies have confirmed that the strength of a person’s conscience depends partly on their genes. Several researchers have shown, for example, that the children of habitual criminals will often become criminals too – even when they have had no contact with their biological parents.

Ugh. Criminality is too flexible and too easily influenced by the environment — strip me of my income and throw me on the streets, and I’ll become a criminal, too, if it keeps me and my family from going hungry. But then, I suppose anyone could claim those are just the genes of my roots in the lower socioeconomic classes.

What did I talk about in St. Paul this weekend?

This was kind of a lost weekend for me — Darwin Day on Thursday, Columbus on Saturday, St. Paul on Sunday, with all the flitting about through the air and on freeways in between, so I’m a bit swamped now on Monday morning, struggling to catch up with all the real important stuff that I get paid for in my job, and that I usually get done on the weekend. So no, Greg, I don’t have much to say about our panel discussion on evolution/creation education on Sunday — you’ll have to do it for me!

It was a good discussion, though, with a whole gang of UM educators up front talking about our diverse strategies for dealing with creationism in the classroom. The one thing I think we missed, and that Greg brought up several times, is more input from high school teachers. What we can do in a university and what others can do in a public school are very different, and I actually think the high school experience is more formative and more important.

Good work, Australia!

You’ve eliminated measles in Australia.

High take-up rates of the infant measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine has led to the elimination of the endemic measles virus in Australia, immunisation experts say.

Researchers from the University of Sydney, writing in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, claim that in 2005 and 2007, Australia satisfied the main criteria of having a low level of measles infection, with less than one case per million people.

Cool. Now if only certain people would stop making up nonsense about vaccinations…

Unfortunately, there are occasional setbacks.

A total of 125 cases were reported in 2006 – equivalent to six cases per million – but more than half of these were attributed to a outbreak linked to the tour of a foreign spiritual group.

A “spiritual group”? It was a Hindu spiritualist who traveled around, dispensing hugs…and a deadly disease. Keep that in mind next time some mystic claims to be completely harmless.