Yecke update

You may recall that I’d mentioned how Cheri Yecke was hiring a company called “reputationdefender” to expunge unflattering references from the net. One of her targets was Wesley Elsberry, who had reported that she was in favor of allowing local school districts to elect to teach creationism (this is not permissible in Minnesota). She claims that’s false; unfortunately for her, Wesley has found a video recording of her at that time proposing exactly that. Ooops. So Yecke is trying to get her own words removed from the net? How interesting.

In a related issue, I’d mocked the whole premise of “reputationdefender” — they claimed to be able to get any offending article on the web taken down for only $20, using “proprietary” techniques. There’s no word yet on exactly what their techniques were, but another, similar company has had their procedures exposed. They sent letters to the host of the offending article.

This letter is being sent to you in the name of more than 500 businesses. No matter where you go, we will cause you a problem. Your life is in danger until you comply with our demands. This is your last warning.

Your neighbors already know about your criminal dealings and how you are making many people loose (sic) their business. You will soon be beaten to a pulp and pounced into the ground six feet under with a baseball bat and sleg (sic) hammer. You will soon be sorry not just from what I am capable of doing to you, but what other members will do as soon as they know exactly where you are. Its (sic) just a matter of time until I get to you.

That didn’t work, so they sent another one.

We warned you ed magedson. Did you hear the gun shots last night? Because of you innocent people will die. Your tenants, family members and those that work with you. Think we’re joking? I told you that your site will be down and it is. That is all we want and we will not hurt anyone.

This was not the same company that Yecke hired, and I haven’t heard that Wesley received any mail with a similar tone. It’s still about what I expected the only effective way of getting an article removed from the web might be: extortion.

I must protest!

The ScienceBlogs buzz today is on Atheism and Civil Rights, and the opening blurb gets it wrong.

Richard Dawkins and other contemporary atheists have argued recently that America’s faithless are subject to discrimination akin to that faced by women, racial minorities, and homosexuals. But is atheism better understood as a civil rights issue, or a public image problem?

Nisbet has successfully “framed” Richard Dawkins in the old sense of the word. He has not made that claim. I haven’t made that claim, unless you’re taking “akin” in the weakest, most meaningless sense of the word. So ignore the blurb, unless you’re looking for another example of how “framing” skills can distort a debate.

Any Alabama readers? You might want to skip this one — we’re laughing at your state

I guess y’all are having a drought, and your farmers are worried. I sympathize, and I do hope you get some good healthy summer storms soon. But, well, your governor is a dufus.

With the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.

Riley encouraged Alabamians to pray “individually and in their houses of worship.”

“Throughout our history, Alabamians have turned in prayer to God to humbly ask for his blessings and to hold us steady during times of difficulty,” Riley said. “This drought is without question a time of great difficulty.”

Shhh. I’m going to tell you two secrets.

One: prayer doesn’t work. Never does. Besides, if it’s Georgia putting a curse on you, they outvote you in God’s eyes.

Two: when I lived in Eugene, we used to make trips to Bend, Oregon to vacation — they always advertise about how they only get like 8 days of rain a year. It always rained when we visited. Therefore, if you really want it to rain, you ought to fly me in and parade me around the state. I have big rain ju-ju.

I’m sure we can come up with lots of incantations and rituals that various cultures have invented to conjure rain. You should try them all. It can’t hurt, after all.

No rambos in the halls of academe, please

The Nevada System of Higher Education wants to arm their faculty. That’s insane. We have rare instances of students going on a shooting spree; I don’t see how turning the classroom into a firefight is going to stop that, and I also have a suspicion that any homicidal maniacs will henceforth simply put “shoot the professor” first on their to-do list. The other concern: how often has this happened at your university?

  • Dishevelled, out-of-breath student bursts into the room in the middle of class — he overslept.
  • Angry student storms into your office, red in the face and furious about his exam.
  • Walking across the campus late at night, a dark figure steps out from behind a building and raises his hand … to say hello.

Those kinds of events are routine, and don’t bother me at all. But let’s foster a climate of fear of our murderous students, slip a firearm into our pockets, and wait. It won’t happen often, but all it will take is one jittery professor and one deadly incident, and try to imagine your university dealing with the parents. And that kind of hasty stupidity is going to be more common than the “vicious gunman foiled by hail of professorial bullets” story, I’m sure. It’s trading one unlikely danger for a more common one, and it isn’t even going to stop the problem — lone gunmen violating a school must expect to end up dead, and if it’s in a gunfight, all the greater the glory.

At the very least, it’s going to send the message to our students that they’d better not make any sudden moves around their lethal professors. It’s a violation of the trust they should have in us, so no, rather than arming myself, I think I’d rather call the police if there is a violent threat … that’s better than becoming a klutzy threat all on my own. My job is to teach, not play Bruce Willis.

“Polarizing” is a dirty word, so atheists should surrender

At last, I get it. I understand what “framing” is. It’s pandering to the status quo, the petty conventions, and the bigotry of the majority. It means don’t rock the boat, don’t be different, don’t stand up for your beliefs. It means CONFORM. You will get other people to support you if you just abandon your principles and adopt theirs. That’s the clear message I get from Matt Nisbet now.

Forget it. If this is “framing,” it’s useless—it’s a tool for opposing change.

[Read more…]

Wonderfully ‘radical’ editorial in Nature

Albert Mohler might be freaking out at some of the new biotechnologies, but he missed a big one, one that might give him nightmares: synthetic biology. This week’s Nature has a very fine editorial on a subject that’s probably going to be more troubling to the religious than evolution, in a few years. We’re on the verge of being able to create life in the laboratory.*

Synthetic biology provides a welcome antidote to chronic vitalism.
Many a technology has at some time or another been deemed an affront to God, but perhaps none invites the accusation as directly as synthetic biology. Only a deity predisposed to cut-and-paste would suffer any serious challenge from genetic engineering as it has been practised in the past. But the efforts to design living organisms from scratch —; either with a wholly artificial genome made by DNA synthesis technology or, more ambitiously, by using non-natural, bespoke molecular machinery —; really might seem to justify the suggestion, made recently by the ETC Group, an environmental pressure group based in Ottawa, Canada, that “for the first time, God has competition”.

That accusation was levelled at scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, based on the suspicion that they had synthesized an organism with an artificial genome in the laboratory. The suspicion was unfounded, but this feat will surely be achieved in the next few years, judging from the advances reported earlier this month at the Kavli Futures Symposium in Ilulissat, Greenland, on the convergence of synthetic biology and nanotechnology, and the progress towards artificial cells.

What’s particularly refreshing about the article is that it downplays the creation of life in the lab—it’s going to be an impressive technical achievement, but it will not be a “momentous step.” There is no wide chasm between chemistry and life, and crossing that threshold shouldn’t (and won’t, I expect, unless the politicking is particularly effective) be a Nobel-winning accomplishment, nor is it going to surprise anyone. In the next generation, it’s going to be taken for granted as just part of biochemistry, just like no organic chemists are shaken up by the routine synthesis of urea anymore.

It ought to shake up the social consciousness, though: another bastion of vitalism will have fallen. It ought to shift a few attitudes about some common issues, too.

Synthetic biology’s view of life as a molecular process lacking moral thresholds at the level of the cell is a powerful one. And it can and perhaps should be invoked to challenge characterizations of life that are sometimes used to defend religious dogma about the embryo. If this view undermines the notion that a ‘divine spark’ abruptly gives value to a fertilized egg —; recognizing as it does that the formation of a new being is gradual, contingent and precarious —; then the role of the term ‘life’ in that debate might acquire the ambiguity that it has always warranted.

Biology is just going to get more and more fun.

*First person to recite that pathetic “get your own dirt” joke is going to be rewarded with disemvowelment.