When will this genetic determinism dinosaur die already?

Robert Plomin, a psychologist, has a new book out, and it looks like he intentionally picked the title to a) make him look stupid, b) align with the alt-right, or c) stir up controversy for sales, because jeez, it’s possibly one of the most backward, unaware, ignorant titles yet: Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are. What do you do with a book that has a title that is so wrong?

I guess you ask Nathaniel Comfort to review it.

And yet, here we are again with Blueprint, by educational psychologist Robert Plomin. Although Plomin frequently uses more civil, progressive language than did his predecessors, the book’s message is vintage genetic determinism: “DNA isn’t all that matters but it matters more than everything else put together”. “Nice parents have nice children because they are all nice genetically.” And it’s not just any nucleic acid that matters; it is human chromosomal DNA. Sorry, microbiologists, epigeneticists, RNA experts, developmental biologists: you’re not part of Plomin’s picture.

Crude hereditarianism often re-emerges after major advances in biological knowledge: Darwinism begat eugenics; Mendelism begat worse eugenics. The flowering of medical genetics in the 1950s led to the notorious, now-debunked idea that men with an extra Y chromosome (XYY genotype) were prone to violence. Hereditarian books such as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) and Nicholas Wade’s 2014 A Troublesome Inheritance (see N. Comfort Nature 513, 306–307; 2014) exploited their respective scientific and cultural moments, leveraging the cultural authority of science to advance a discredited, undemocratic agenda. Although Blueprint is cut from different ideological cloth, the consequences could be just as grave.

It seems that Plomin believes GATTACA was a documentary for a utopia. You might be wondering what the consequences could be.

Ultimately, if unintentionally, Blueprint is a road map for regressive social policy. Nothing here seems overtly hostile, to schoolchildren or anyone else. But Plomin’s argument provides live ammunition for those who would abandon proven methods of improving academic achievement among socio-economically deprived children. His utopia is a forensic world, dictated by polygenic algorithms and the whims of those who know how to use them. People would be defined at birth by their DNA. Expectations would be set, and opportunities, resources and experiences would be doled out — and withheld — a priori, before anyone has had a chance to show their mettle.

To paraphrase Lewontin in his 1970 critique of Jensen’s argument, Plomin has made it pretty clear what kind of world he wants.

I oppose him.

An argument from consequences is a fallacy, but the real meat of the review is that Plomin’s evidence is bad, that he consistently misinterprets it, and that he’s ignorant of the broader scope of factors affecting intelligence. It’s also bad science in that he clearly has a desired outcome and is selectively picking his evidence to validate it.

When someone abuses science to justify maintaining their privilege, that’s a dystopian future for the rest of us, and I’ll oppose it too.

Ken Ham, innumerate evolutionist

I visited both the Creation “Museum” and the Ark Park, and one thing that leapt off the displays to me, and to other biologists I’ve shown these things to, is that Ken Ham has evolved to become a kind of hyper-evolutionist. Take a look at this illustration from Answers in Genesis, for instance.

Now compare it to this diagram of cat evolution.

Not that different, are they? They’re both tree diagrams, they both show an ancestral form diverging into multiple modern species, they both imply change and evolution. AiG’s is more cartoony and simplified, the real evolutionary diagram has more species, but the differences are more of style than substance, except for one little thing.

The time scale on the evolution image is 20 million years.

The time scale on the AiG image is 4 thousand years.

It’s weird. Answers in Genesis has gradually gone from complete denial of any evolution at all to arguing for so much evolution so fast that it’s enough to make a population geneticist choke. Does his audience care? I guess not. They’re not used to recognizing the implications in a quantitative chart, I guess, and see no conflict at all in ol’ Ken Ham waving his hands at a phylogram on steroids while claiming evolution is false.

Naturalis Historia has a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon, with a very nice wrap-up.

Would you recognize many of the animals that boarded Noah’s Ark? Not according to Ken Ham and his colleagues. The ark contained only the common ancestors to the great diversity of animals you see today. Giraffes on the ark? No. Chimpanzees? No. Lions? No. etc… One cat pair evolved into more than 100 species of cats most of which went extinct just a few hundred years after the Flood. Yes, Ken Ham has fully embraced Post-Flood Rapid Evolution as a mechanism of creating the amazing variation we see today. As he falls further down the slippery slope into the rabbit hole of radical hyper-evolution Ken Ham is, ironically, more accepting of naturalistic speciation (Darwinian evolution) than Old Earth advocates such as Hugh Ross.

Talk me out of this (or into it)

I’m considering dropping in on some creationists speaking at the Twin Cities campus next week.

Dave and Mary Jo Nutting have been to Minnesota before, but I didn’t bother going — but I wasn’t on sabbatical back then. The Alpha Omega Institute is a rather nutty organization, so maybe I should scribble up some notes on them.

What do you think? I’m on the fence, so I’ll let the comments decide. Also, would any of my Twin Cities peeps want to make an evening of it?

Panic in Spider City

I didn’t update yesterday, and nothing much today either, because I’m new to this spider business and have lots to learn — like planning ahead. I’ve got all these vials full of spider babies right now, and they have eaten all of my flies, every one. I set up four more bottles of flies a bit more than a week ago, and they’re at the stage where I’ve got lots of pupae but the adults haven’t eclosed yet, which should happen any day now. But it means my babies are hungry right now, and I’ve got nothing to give them.

I’m a bad spider daddy.

I set up a bunch more fly bottles today and will start staggering production every 3 or 4 days, but wow, when you’ve got a few hundred spiderlings, the logistics of keeping them supplied with flies is a little more involved than I expected. Also, I don’t quite have the rhythm yet. The goal is to raise just enough to maintain a small colony at a stable productive size, and right now I’m producing to excess because I’m uncertain about mortality and how quickly they’ll be consistently reproducing. At a guess, they reproduce a lot faster than I expected!

The movies in Morris this past week

Last week, I didn’t write up my impressions of The Meg because it was just too depressing. I was first dismayed at the opening sequence and set up because it postulates that there is a whole new, ancient, isolated biome at the bottom of a deep ocean trench, over 10 thousand meters down, and nothing makes sense. There are giant sharks prowling around this lightless, constricted deep? Why? How? They explore it with a surprisingly roomy manned submersible, which is almost plausible — people have gone down almost 11,000 meters in a bathyscaphe — but why, in this modern day, wouldn’t the preliminary observations have been made with an ROV? There’s also a scene where a submarine is damaged by a monster shark at this depth, and…

…it explodes in a giant fireball.

If you don’t get why that was incredibly stupid, then maybe this is the movie for you. I just couldn’t get past the absence of any acknowledgment of pressure in a movie that has subs shuttling like yo-yos between the bottom of the ocean and the surface, and that has a giant shark found in a marginal habitat that can survive being squirted straight up to terrorize coastal waters.

I guess there were supposed to be some jump scares in there, but I was unable to recover any ability to suspend disbelief after the first 5 minutes. Also, I just didn’t care about any of the characters, except to hope they got eaten. I was mostly disappointed there, too. It made me so cranky I even wanted the stupid little dog to get inhaled, and once again, no joy.

This week, I saw Operation Finale, which wasn’t bad at all. It’s basically a vehicle for the two stars, Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley, to reverberate off each other, and they were both good. It’s the tale of the Israeli operation to extract Adolph Eichmann from Argentina in the early 1960s so that he could face justice for his role in engineering the Holocaust, so it’s very much a good vs. evil story…but it’s a complex difficult good vs. a deceitful, slimy evil, so it isn’t at all cartoonish.

It helps that I hate Nazis. I didn’t have much trouble believing this story.

Also playing this week: The Predator. I just said no. It’s getting easier to avoid some bad movies now that we have a two screen theater and have more choices.

Usually more choices, that is. Next week we’re getting Unbroken: Path to Redemption, some treacly Christian movie directed by Harold Cronk, of the God’s Not Dead series. That’s a fuck no from me. The other choice is The Nun, a supernatural horror movie, which makes for an interesting combination. I’m just hoping some devout Christian fanatic attends both on the basis of the titles, and ends up running screaming from the theater. As for me, though, it looks like I’ll be sitting out the next week.

It’s a technical term

I was reading outside my discipline, which is always good for a surprise. It was a paper titled “Something’s Going on Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories“, which isn’t that far outside my interests, and was actually rather interesting. Here’s the abstract:

Research on individual-difference factors predicting belief in conspiracy theories has proceeded along several independent lines that converge on a profile of conspiracy believers as individuals who are relatively untrusting, ideologically eccentric, concerned about personal safety, and prone to perceiving agency in actions and profundity in bullshit. The present research represents the first attempt at an integrative approach to testing the independent contributions of these diverse factors to conspiratorial thinking. Two studies (N=1,253) found that schizotypy, dangerous-world beliefs, and bullshit receptivity independently and additively predict endorsement of generic (i.e., nonpartisan) conspiracy beliefs. Results suggest that “hyperactive” agency detection and political orientation (and related variables) might also play a role. The studies found no effects of situational threats (mortality salience or a sense of powerlessness)—though it remains to be seen whether real-world instantiations of situational threats might move some people to seek refuge in conspiratorial ideation.

One phrase leapt off the page at me: “bullshit receptivity”. This is a thing? They have a way to measure it? They do!

Bullshit receptivity. Participants’ receptivity to superficially profound statements was measured using the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (Pennycook et al., 2015). This measure consists of nine seemingly impressive statements that follow rules of syntax and contain fancy words, but do not have any intentional meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”; “Imagination is inside exponential space time events”). Participants rated each of the items’ profoundness on a scale from 1 (Not at all profound) to 5 (Very profound). They were given the following definition of profound for reference: “of deep meaning; of great and broadly inclusive significance.”

I love the name. I love that they have to define “profound” for their subjects. I also found their result interesting:

Exploratory regression analyses showed that the association between agency detection and conspiracy belief dropped most markedly when controlling for bullshit receptivity (and to some extent dangerous world beliefs). This suggests that a tendency toward agency detection might contribute to bullshit receptivity, or that they share a common psychological substrate in relation to their association with conspiracy belief.

Spurious belief in agency and conspiracies is associated with an acceptance of pseudo-profundities? I am not surprised. That explains a lot.

Now I want to see the Bullshit Receptivity measured in fans of Deepak Chopra and Jordan Peterson. It’s got to be off the scale.

I’m worried about David Silverman

He may have joined a cult.

He’s the new executive director for a shiny new organization, Transformative Humanists of America, which may not be so new: their web pages sometimes refer to themselves as humanist.com, which seems to be some kind of generic humanist forum. But they’ve gotten together and put together a nearly unreadable mass of words. I’m not sure what they’re all about, but what they seem to consider their main selling point is their mediocrity.

Society is fracturing at an alarming rate with the right hemorrhaging integrity while the Left is cannibalizing itself. As a result the majority middle is increasingly apathetic, disillusioned and without a home. Most people are good, which means suffering is increasing at our own hand. Transformative Humanism can and will help reunify society so we can get back to the business of the Greater Good.

They’ve got a whole section on the Extremism Horseshoe. Yup. Horseshoe theory again. The idea that the left is just as evil as the right, but those who straddle the fence are the best people. Politics are just the worst.

Trump took over and he was more polarizing than Obama had been. Now the left is doing anything it can to make Trump fail, even if it is good for the country. Just imagine the dehumanization and echo chambers that are in effect when we cheer for the failure of nuclear arms talks with North Korea! Trump is a pussy-grabber, so he hates women, so all of his supporters hate women to some degree – that is what the left is saying – dehumanizing en masse, shouting in their echo chambers, and indeed posting things like “please unfriend me if you support Trump”.

How dare you dehumanize Donald Trump for dehumanizing women and minorities! Don’t you realize that makes you as bad as he is?

I tried to figure out what “transformative humanism” is, but the section on “About transformative humanism” wasn’t at all helpful.

Humanism is not a religion, and therefore, is secular by default, like golf is secular. You can be a religious or nonreligious golfer, and you can be a religious or nonreligious Humanist. The rules in golf are secular, because they have no religious position, and the secular morality that we champion here at Humanist.com are also devoid of religion. “Secular Humanist” organizations by definition are exclusionary, divisive, and can be pretty hostile to religious people, but we at Humanist.com are doing this right. Everyone who agrees with our secular reasoning and wants to be a good person by the definition we set forth, is invited, whatever your opinion is on God.

Wait a minute…they differentiate themselves from other organizations that are hostile to religion, but they hired David Silverman as their director? The David Silverman I saw at the World Humanist Congress a few years ago, in which he pissed off a fair number of humanists for aggressively telling them they were all actually atheists, and they ought not to be pretending otherwise? Dave Silverman, Firebrand Atheist? I am mystified.

But maybe this explains the association. It has a whole section that emphasizes forgiveness, and condemns that whole social networking thing.

On-line, with echo chambers in full effect, redemption is often hard to come by. The ability for people to just disconnect from others makes redemption easy, because dehumanized ostracized people are easily replaced, so there is very little incentive for anyone to go through the process that goes against their outgrouping brain and take someone back in, even if they deserve it. Additionally, the outward, proud ostracization that accompanies the echo tunnels creates the Culture of Fear, making it incredibly scary for people who disagree with the outgrouping to voice their support for the ostracized person for fear of being outgrouped themselves. So the silent majority sits in fear of the social extremist minority and the latter rules and the former sits in fearful silence.

Then there’s the section on civil discourse that starts with a quote from Steven Pinker.

“Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause.”

― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

If there is one place where the need for social improvement is most evident, it is the area of civil discourse. All over the country and all throughout the Internet, the apparent demise of calm civil discussions and their replacement with hate, extreme labeling and dismissal, and intellectual echo chambers dominates those of us who miss such ideals.

Yeah! The left and right are indistinguishable, just look at the hateful extremism that condemns people like Donald Trump. We need calm civil discussions to deal with Nazis…oh, fuck it. This is just another centrist gang of status quo warriors who want to adopt rules that promote stasis and acceptance of whatever the assholes at the top tell us to do. We may be sliding into a pit, but don’t you dare criticize the people who pushed us in, and you will accept your fate graciously. Namaste.

I find it hard to believe that Silverman has joined these do-nothing wankers, but he himself announced it. I guess it’s all about desperately trying to retain relevance, although I don’t think he’ll find it with these do-nothing babblers.

They really do go on and on at painful length without saying anything. For instance, I read their Who and What We Are page to try and find out who was behind it, who the organizers are. They don’t say! It’s just more platitudes, with a little rebuking of the Left, but nothing specific. It’s tediously empty of any specific content.

You know what else it’s missing? Any mention of major social issues, like racism or misogyny. I guess they’re taking the middle ground on that, too. There’s nothing about science, or concern for the environment — I guess they don’t want to risk colliding with the righties they want to woo! Nothing about politics other than “why can’t we all get along”? No concern about church/state separation. Its only message seems to be that they won’t criticize anyone for being far right reactionary assholes, therefore you should join them.

I don’t think the American Humanist Association has to fear any competition here.

No poors allowed

Our administration wants to slide in new rules to keep those poor people out of the country.

In a 447-page proposed rule issued on Friday, the administration proposes sharply limiting legal immigration for those that aren’t already wealthy and privileged.

The proposed rule would favor granting permanent legal status to immigrants who make more than 250% of the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that means an income of $62,750 per year.

This exceeds the median household income in the United States.

I will only accept this if it is applied retroactively, meaning Trump’s immigrant grandfather and all of his descendants must leave immediately. It means I’ll also have to move to Norway or Sweden, but that’s a small price to pay.

Why free speech is sometimes a curse

John Oliver rips into the Republican efforts to prop up Kavanaugh in the first 9 minutes, but go ahead and watch the rest where he describes Facebook as a toilet. A lot of it is spent on how Facebook blithely allowed inflammatory hate speech to flow in Myanmar, with the excuse that they didn’t have enough people fluent in the language to police it, but I have to say — they allow it fo flow pretty freely in English, too.