I am underwhelmed

Perhaps I’m not as disappointed as Greg, but I am unimpressed with the ‘presidential’ debate at the AAAS. What we had was two assistants to the Clinton and Obama campaigns (the Republicans were complete no-shows) pop in to run through some canned promises. There was no debate. There was no commitment from the candidates themselves.

I think that the ScienceDebate2008 idea is a great one, and the failing is really on the part of the candidates and the parties themselves. Obama will happily leap to appease the faith-heads of an organization like Call to Renewal; Clinton thinks the Decorah First Methodist Church is an appropriate campaign venue; the Republicans traditionally kowtow to training grounds for anti-science morons like Bob Jones University; but none of them could invest a day speaking to scientists at one of the biggest science conferences in the country, sponsored by a prestigious organization like AAAS? Their priorities are clearly screwed up.

A presidential science debate is a grand idea. What we need to do now, though, is not praise them for a pathetic, back-handed, minimal effort, but rake them all over the coals for their inadequacies.

More empty posturing from Ruloff and Mathis

The producers of Expelled aren’t exactly the brightest bunch. Their latest blog entry is a silly whine about me.

Paul is one of the stars in the film EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. He’s probably remembering all of the things that he said on camera, when we interviewed him and faithfully recorded it all. That couldn’t be making him feel very good.

Their movie is doomed if they’re relying on my star power to draw in the audiences … and I’ve noticed that all the early reviews found my performance so unmemorable that they failed to remember what I said. (Trust me, it’s the only thing I’m looking for in the reviews, and I even wrote to ask one reviewer if he’d noticed me — he hadn’t.) And actually, I don’t remember precisely what I said in the interview, nor am I concerned about it. I get interviewed on this stuff all the time, and I say what I think without concern. If they’d like to release the complete recording of my interview, I’d be happy to host it unedited; if it’s so damning, they should be thrilled to do so.

But mainly, I’m baffled. They’ve got Eugenie Scott and Richard Dawkins in the movie — and they’re playing up the role of some obscure guy with a blog? And it’s a “modest science-blog” at that!

Now it appears that the associate professor Myers is regretful, and lashing out against the film again in his modest science-blog, “Pharyngula,” attempting to mitigate the inevitable criticism of his performance, in advance. His latest is a vein-popping, eyes – bulging, 3,000 word, eleven-screen diatribe posted on his website, a “critique” of a simple eight-hundred word editorial that the producers of EXPELLED wrote on Darwin Day.

From his lengthy, over-the-top screed, we can’t really sort out what it is that upset him so, but one thing is painfully obvious: he is literally sweating over the upcoming release of our film.

Hmmm. That “vein-popping, eyes – bulging, 3,000 word, eleven-screen diatribe” actually went through the false claims in their mere editorial fairly thoroughly, pointing out the errors. If they want to complain that they made so many egregious mistakes that it took 3,000 words to document most of them, that’s fine by me.

They don’t seem very perceptive, though. I am not at all “upset” or “sweating” over their movie, or my interview. There was a lot of similar babbling after the movie was announced that I was going to sue them, which was similarly incomprehensible and completely divorced from what I was actually thinking; they seem to believe that I’m sitting here raging over having my words reported in a movie, when every day I’m openly and immoderately arguing against religion right here on the web, without a pseudonym and without reservation. Their movie can only fall far short of portraying the depth of my contempt for the charlatans of creationism. I know full well what criticisms I’m going to get about my performance in this movie: I will be told that I don’t come across as sufficiently fire-breathing in person.

The reason I wrote that criticism of their editorial was simple. They’re liars. They lied. They’re ignorant. They made up crap.

It’s actually rather funny how often the purveyors of nonsense make complaints that someone has made a lengthy criticism of their distortions, in which the whole issue is not the substance of the criticism, but the mere fact that a criticism has been made. Go ahead, search in vain throughout their blog entry, and you’ll discover that they completely ignored every point I made, and their entire argument is reduced to the fact that there were 3000 words in my article.

The 2008 Twin Cities Creation Science Fair

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t make it to the Twin Cities Creation Science fair this weekend, and Greg Laden didn’t either, which must explain why the TCCSA wasn’t afraid to post photos of the 2008 Creation Science Fair this time around. One UM professor did stop by, though, and we have his personal account.

As a perfect example of ID inanity, one student demonstrated irreducible complexity by taking a motor apart and showing that it didn’t work any more. Thank you, Michael Behe, for trying to make your feeble “insight” a part of the science curriculum.

It was the usual mixed mess we get even in secular science fairs: a lot of clueless students who don’t know how to do science, exhibit failures of logic, and who don’t really understand what they are doing, mixed up with a few kids who have the potential to be real science stars. This particular event is especially depressing, though, because the organizers impose all kinds of bizarre unscientific constraints on the kids (A bible verse on every poster? Come on.) and it doesn’t really matter how much potential a kid has — it’s going to be poisoned and stunted by a carefully fostered environment of ignorance that favors the appearance of science over any attempt at genuine inquiry.

I tell myself every year that I should go see this thing. Every year I feel the same sad discouragement at the prospect — it’s like going to witness a famine of the mind, with young children as victims, and I don’t think I could bear it.

Perks!

sci-blog.png

This is actually a disappointment. I was sure that scienceblogging gave one lightning quick driving reflexes, phenomenal sexual performance, the powers of the anti-christ, and the ability to write perfect copy with the first draft, but this comic seems to be implying that scienceblogging only gives you an excuse for falling short in those areas. Of course, I already have all of those abilities even without the scienceblogging biz, so this comic must be referring to all those other bloggers. Yeah, that’s it. I’ll keep telling myself that.

(via Chris Rowan, who got it from aphantic)

Lusty atheism

Greta Christina hosts the Carnival of the Godless this week, which means the atheism is laced with sex. This is an avenue for recruiting people to the atheist cause that has not been adequately pursued.

Although there is something to be said for goddesses: the Sunday Sermonette is a hymn from Janis. Whoa, but she could sing. We also learn that the Reveres were young doctors in 1969, had a chance to go to Woodstock, and skipped it because it was going to rain. I missed it, too, but my excuse is a little better: I was 12 years old and on the opposite side of the country. I was a fan of Janis at that time, though, and I swear, that woman accelerated the onset of puberty for me by at least two years.

A familiar pattern

Apparently, there was some panel on the repellent practice of “framing science” at AAAS recently, which I’m sure the principals will consider a triumph, despite their refusal to have any dissenting voices there to speak.

It reminds me of something.

Recall the recent episode with the creationist, Geoffrey Simmons? He had a strategy for winning arguments: it was to get an exclusive hour on the radio to make his case without those troubling critics. He crowed victory afterwards, too.

Let’s go to church!

One of the most common arguments against the New Atheists is to claim that they’re railing against a straw man — that religion is benign and thoughful and rational. I’ll agree that some individuals within religion are like that, but religion itself is a poisonous nest that encourages lunacy. Here’s one example: take a look at Steve Foss Ministries. In particular, watch the video titled “I-55 Revival explostion of POWER “, which has it all. Babbling idiots talking in tongues, people spazzing out in a frenzy, and worst of all, the minister and parents urging children to join in the insanity.

This crap is going on everywhere in this country. Maybe most moderate Christians aren’t joining in directly, but they sure are good about closing their eyes to it.

I-55 Revival explostion of POWER

The Natural History of Nonsense

I received a fascinating pdf of a book from the author of the Cape Cod History page — it’s by Bergen Evans, was published in 1946, and is titled The Natural History of Nonsense. As far as I’ve read yet, it’s a wonderful example of rational thinking, and makes one wonder why this kind of writing isn’t more representative of American popular literature.

Here’s a short sample from the chapter titled “Adam’s Navel,” which is about the curious history of the omphalos theory, and it also gets into some of the mixed signals our country was sending about race and intelligence.

This ingenious theory, that the real “use or office” of
Adam’s navel was to tempt men into the sin of being sensible, was
revived in 1857 by Philip Henry Gosse, the naturalist, as an
analogy to prove that while the fossils which the paleontologists
had discovered seemed to imply organic evolution, God might
have so arranged them at the Creation in older to damn nineteenth-century skeptics. Gosse had a few followers among the Plymouth
Brethren, but most men greeted his suggestion with shouts of
derision. It was inconceivable that God would have baited a trap
for anything so respectable as the Royal Society. And anyway,
they said, Adam’s navel was as dead as a doornail.

But they were wrong. Although it was no longer a fashionable topic among the learned, it must have continued as a
subject for speculation among millions. For in 1944 it suddenly
raised its head in no less august surroundings than the Congress of
the United States, when a subcommittee of the House Military
Affairs Committee, under the chairmanship of Representative
Durham of North Carolina, opposed the distribution of The Races of Mankind to our soldiers on the ground
(among other reasons) that in one of its illustrations “Adam and
Eve are depicted with navels.”

The Honorable Gentlemen’s motives for raising this particular objection can only be surmised. Perhaps they were
uncertain of orthography and of the scope of their duties and in
consequence assumed that Navel Affairs came under their
jurisdiction; but the chances are that they were just laying down a
smoke screen, for the pamphlet in question, a thirty-page booklet
prepared by two Columbia professors, contained information that
almost any politician would feel it his duty to conceal. It stated that
the concept of race is based largely on prejudice, that most of us
are of mixed blood, and that nonphysical racial characteristics are
probably the product of environment. And, most horrible of all, it
chose to illustrate this last assertion from tests given by the United
States Army in World War I which indicated that the average
intelligence of Negroes from some Northern states was higher than
the average intelligence of whites from some Southern states.

The OCR on this scan is very well done, and it’s only a 1.2M download despite being the whole book — let’s try not to bring the guy’s server to its knees, though.

Plant and animal development compared

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Since I wrote about the wacky creationist who couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that plants and animals are related, and since I generally do a poor job of discussing that important kingdom of the plants (I admit it, I’m a metazoan bigot…but I do try to overcome my biases), I thought I’d briefly mention an older review by Elliot Meyerowitz that compares developmental processes in plants and animals. The main message is that developmental processes, the mechanisms that assemble the multicellular whole, are very different in the two groups and are non-homologous, but don’t get confused: the basic cellular processes are homologous, and there’s no doubt that we are related. The emphasis in this paper, though, is the evidence that plants and animals independently evolved multicellular developmental strategies. There is some convergence, but the tools in the toolbox are different.

[Read more…]

Carnivalia and an open thread

Carnivals!

A Tangled Bank announcement!

The Tangled Bank

The next Tangled Bank will be at Greg Laden’s place, so send those links in to me or [email protected] before Wednesday!

A reminder!

Don’t forget to tune in to Atheist Talk at 9am tomorrow morning. The topic of the day: Lori Lipman Brown, lobbyist for the Secular Coalition of America, will be interviewed.

An open thread!