Jeffrey Medkeff, the Blue Collar Scientist, died a few days ago. I never met him, but I feel that I’ve lost a friend.

Jeff was a regular reader of BoF. You may have seen some of the comments he left here on various articles earlier this year. I apparently gave him a lot of article ideas. He mentioned this blog no fewer than seven times on his own blog in the half year that it was running.

I very much wanted to go to TAM 5.5 in January, because there were a lot of people I wanted to see again and/or meet for the first time. My job (actually, the lack thereof) prevented that. Jeff mentioned on his blog that he went, and I thought “Oh, crap! I could have met the BCS, too! Oh well, I’m sure he’ll be at TAM 6 in June.” I looked forward to that over the next several months. Then at the beginning of June, we heard that he had cancer. Naturally, he didn’t make it to TAM 6. I’m sorry I never got to meet him.

Of the comments he left here, I especially liked one of them. In my first article on The Coral Ridge Hour, I wrote:

The only real connection between evolution and Nazi-ism is that a few people misunderstood evolution, and they misapplied their distorted knowledge to the social sciences. Darwin is not responsible for the misunderstanding and misuse of his theory….

Jeff corrected me, effectively saying “No. Don’t even concede that, because not even that much is true!” Here’s what he wrote in the comments:

I don’t mean to be contentious, but even though it is technically correct, this is too generous to the evolution-denying religious whackos who want to link Darwin and/or evolution to Hitler and Nazism. Let me explain….

By Darwin’s time, it was already understood that species could change with time. This knowledge was put into practice in selective breeding of crops, flowers, livestock, puppy dogs, and so on, which had been done for centuries by Darwin’s time.

Darwin’s great insight, his big innovation and contribution to biology, was showing that nature itself served as a selective breeding engine — that instead of a human breeder making the choices about which organisms got to reproduce, in the wild it was nature that made such “decisions,” whether this was a result of the size and hardness of seeds that birds were eating, or the influence of storms, or what have you.

So yes, these people misunderstood evolution, and applied their misunderstanding in an evil way. But they didn’t misunderstand Darwin — they were, and are today, too ignorant to even know what Darwin was talking about, and what his contribution to science entailed. The Nazis applied the principles of deliberate, human-controlled selective breeding programs to what they thought were the problems of their society. Stupid people who know less than nothing about evolution somehow decided this was related to Charles Darwin.

The point I’m trying to make is that the evolutionary denialists — who are demonstrably (and sickeningly) gleefully happy about Nazism and the killing of six million people because it shows evolution is evil — are actually ignorant at a profoundly more fundamental level than they are usually called out for.

Jeff was an astronomer, yet he showed by this comment that he was far more than that. He understood evolution too, and the history of science, and he was an excellent science communicator. We have all lost an ally.

One of my pet peeves is people who think that aliens built the pyramids. Frankly, as a member of the human race, I’m quite insulted. We’re an amazingly ingenious lot. If there’s a problem to solve, we generally get around to figuring it out.

Vaccines? We invented those. Rocketships and submarines? We made those too. Radio, television, and satellites? We solved all of those. Ziplock bags? That was us too.

Even in the ancient world, we were masters of our domain (so to speak). Agriculture? We did that! Irrigation? Humans! Domestication of livestock? Nailed it! Gods and religion? Another human invention. (That last one probably should have stayed in the workshop a little longer, though.)

That’s why it’s so insulting to have some uneducated twat try to deny us one of our greatest achievements: The construction of massive pyramids with little more than levers, wheels, and inclined planes.

The pyramids really weren’t that difficult to build, from an engineering perspective. Sure, there were definitely a few tough problems that had to be solved. There are several pyramids in Egypt that show the earlier attempts. They weren’t so good. But the engineers learned. Once the problems were solved, it was just a matter of implementation. And that is the true marvel of the ancient world.

Managing a project on that scale with the huge workforce and supply problems they had would have been impossible if not for that other human invention: Bureaucracy. Yes, that’s one thing the Egyptians had (made possible by another invention: Writing). Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracy doesn’t guarantee inefficiency. It’s often impossible to get things done without it.

But There ARE Real Limits

I was thinking about this pyramid situation just last week. You see, there are real limits in the universe. As far as we know, you can’t go faster than light. You can’t get any colder than zero Kelvin. And you can’t convince a creationist that he’s wrong.

My recent article, “Reality Denialism and the Limits of Belief“, grew out of this situation. I realized that the reason some people think that humans couldn’t have built the pyramids is because those people have a misconception of what life was like back then. They don’t appreciate how sophisticated Egyptian society already was, and they don’t appreciate just how much work you can do without power tools. That makes a human construction of the pyramids beyond the technical limit of belief for the human-made-pyramid deniers. Since they can’t conceive of any way humans could have done it, the only other explanation that makes sense is aliens. Aliens always have advanced technology with flashing lights and cool whirring sounds. Surely, somebody who has flashing lights and cool whirring sounds can build anything.

But as I said, there are universal limits. I was confronted with this when I had to fix my iPod. You may recall my earlier article about how God works in mysterious ways, such as through iPod repair. The little Toshiba hard drive I ordered arrived last week. I knew, of course, that the thing had to be smaller than the iPod, in order to fit inside of it:

As you can see, the hard drive is a bit narrower and shorter than the iPod.

OK. So far, so good. But check out this side view:

Are you freakin’ kidding me?! That’s a god-damned hard drive, and it’s barely the thickness of a couple of quarters! I just assumed that the thing would be almost as thick as the iPod. Sure, there has to be room for the logic board, but they can make those fairly thin. In fact, the hard drive goes between two layers of foam, which they use for shock absorption. So the inside of your iPod is so spacious that they have room for the logic board, the battery, the hard drive, and two freakin’ layers of foam!

I don’t think you comprehend what’s going on here. The significance of what I’m saying. The ramifications for human society.

Do you have any idea how big a gigabyte is? Sure, it’s a billion bytes. But do you comprehend just how big a billion is?

• One billion seconds ago was the year 1976 CE. (There were still liberals in America!)
• One billion minutes ago was the year 106 CE. (John McCain wasn’t even born!)
• One billion hours ago was the year 112,147 BCE. (Humans were living in caves!)
• One billion days ago was the year 2,737,718 BCE. (Humans didn’t even exist!)

So a gigabyte is huge. And there’s thirty of them in that tiny drive!

Some things go beyond the credible.

I don’t care how ingenious we are. We can’t be that good.

This hard drive has to be alien technology. That’s the only possible explanation.

After all, it makes a cool whirring sound.

There are a few crackpots out there who think we never went to the moon. I have identified two factors at play here. I call them the Technical Limit of Belief (TLB) and the Social Limit of Belief (SLB). When you cross both lines, you have a reality denier.

Getting to the moon was a tremendous technical hurdle. Some people think we weren’t up to the task. It’s beyond their comprehension that we humans were actually clever enough to surmount the massive scientific and engineering challenges. That’s the Technical Limit of Belief that their minds can’t cross.

You also have to remember that the moon landings were right around (slightly before, actually) the time of Watergate.

For you young saplings out there, you probably can’t comprehend just how demoralized the country was at that point. That also coincided with our humiliating defeat in Iraq Vietnam (sorry, I sometimes type the wrong synonym). Inflation was raging. There was an Arab oil embargo, so you couldn’t buy gas. Being an American at that point just didn’t have the same uplifting feeling that it did at the end of WWII or the 1950s. People had had all of the optimism and hope beaten out of them. In that climate, being able to do something amazing like going to the freakin’ moon!! might have seemed out of place when measured against all of the other failures that were the Nixon era.

It was very easy to believe in a government conspiracy. After all, Watergate was a real conspiracy, and it was a big one. Nothing was as it seemed back then. You couldn’t trust the government, so believing the government when it said we went to the moon was beyond the Social Limit of Belief for some people.

When you cross somebody’s TLB and SLB, you create a denier of reality.

Global Warming

But what about deniers of other realities? I’m guessing that in every case, you’ll find both a TLB and an SLB at work. Interestingly, as I look at some of these cases, it’s the Social Limit of Belief that’s driving the denialism, and they’re merely using their Technical Limit of Belief as the excuse.

Take global warming for example. There are at least two types of deniers here, with a fair amount of overlap. In one camp are the economic and political conservatives. They like things to remain the same, because they’ve benefitted financially or politically. If society changes its behavior to fight global warming, their gravy train is threatened. They have a stake in global warming not being true. That stake is their SLB. Also, it is mostly liberals who are campaigning for aggressive measures against global warming. This also puts off conservatives, so that’s a second SLB for them. I was in the audience when staunch libertarian Penn Jillette said that he doubted global warming because Al Gore claimed it was real. Penn announced to the world what his SLB is.

Another camp is the religious and social conservatives. I’ve been having difficulty figuring out why these people insist that global warming isn’t real. The only explanation I have is that if the liberals say it’s true, then it must be false! I think by conceding global warming, they will have to go along with the liberal programs to combat it. They can’t let the liberals have that power. They might use it to push their other agendas as well. So for these people, giving in to the liberals is their SLB.

For both camps, then, the TLB is a mere afterthought. The social ramifications of global warming being real are too awful to contemplate, so the science must be wrong. It has to be. They can’t cross that SLB, so they paint a TLB line on the ground and refuse to cross it.

Evolution

The evolution deniers are all in one camp. They’re religious ultra-conservatives. They believe that the Bible is true. They don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t fit that blueprint. They pretend that this is a Christian country founded upon the Ten Commandments. They pretend that morality is externally defined by a deity and handed down from on high. Living in a world where those things aren’t true is way too scary for them. That is their Social Limit of Belief. In order to make the SLB hold up, they decide that the science must be wrong. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you show them or how much you try to educate them. They cannot allow that information into their brain. They cannot cross that TLB, because that would make their SLB, and their whole safe worldview, collapse.

Woo Hoo!

What about believers of “woo”, or all of the crazy anti-science things like astrology, homeopathy, dowsing, ESP, etc.? There’s probably a variety of explanations here.

For some, poor scientific knowledge and critical thinking skills mean that their Technical Limit of Belief is very close indeed.

Other people make decisions intuitively or emotionally, and don’t consider the logical side of things so much. There is nothing wrong with this! That’s just the way their brains are wired. But the result is that their TLB will be fairly close. It’s not so much a limit of belief so much as a place they just don’t visit often.

On the social side of things, consider medical scams (such as anything that uses the word “detoxification”!). Some people have had bad experiences with real medicine. As a result, they’ll say things such as “doctors don’t know anything” or “everything is controlled by the drug companies”. They don’t like the medical establishment and refuse to go there. That’s their SLB.

Or for another example, think of the paranormal. Ghosts, angels, “spirit guides”, etc. are appealing to many folks. They like the idea of a world that has those things in it. You can’t debunk a ghost photograph to those people. They want ghostly realms to be real, so crossing into the skeptical realm isn’t a place they’re willing to go. That is their SLB.

Conclusion

I suspect that if we explore this idea further, we’ll find that in every case of reality denialism, there are both Technical and Social Limits of Belief. One might weigh heavier than the other, and in some cases one is just there as a convenient rationalization for the other, but I think that you will always find both.

If you want to combat a particular reality denialism, you need to identify both the Technical Limit of Belief and the Social Limit of Belief that are at play. Find out which is dominant and focus your tactics against that one. If both are equally responsible for the belief, then you need to have tactics to fight both.

I’m leaving for TAM 6 in a couple of days, so I won’t be able to post much this week. I’ll cheat by posting a couple of great videos.

The first one was recommended by Sarah. It’s called “Noah’s Ark and the Cheetah”. It’s made by DonExodus2, who has a lot of other great videos that you should check out. In this video, we see how the lack of genetic diversity in the cheetah disproves Noah’s Ark.

(YouTube page is here)

Next we have a video by one of my old favorites, cdk007. This one is the last of a five-part series called “Why Young-Earth Creationists Must Deny Gravity”. If you enjoy it, you should look up the other four.

(YouTube page is here)

Creatards frequently like to drop by this site for a friendly chat. If you are inclined to extend the classic BoF hospitality to them, you might find yourself in a light discussion of trivial matters.

To assist in your enjoyment, the Watcher recently posted an article about debating tactics. It’s an excellent introduction that is worth reading. He also links to a good discussion of logical fallacies.

Phil Plait has a good writeup on some recent space news. He writes that the Murchison meteorite:

…which fell on Australia in 1969, has been found to contain purines and pyrimidines, which are crucial to a large number of biological molecules like DNA, RNA, and ATP….
…
Now the good part: scientists studying the Murchison meteorite have determined that the purines and pyrimidines — specifically, uracil and xanthine — have a non-terrestrial origin. In other words, the molecules in this meteorite, so crucial for life, were actually formed in outer space and fell to Earth.

Fundies like to yelp a lot that evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life. That’s right. We never claimed it did. The next time I hear that from a fundie, I’m going to reply “And Jesus didn’t invent popcorn!” That’s just as nonsensical of a statement.

The origin of life on Earth is an awfully good question, but we haven’t exactly figured out how it happened. Somehow, we had to go from the simple molecules that existed on the early Earth—such as carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, etc.—and get to the more complex molecules that are part of living systems.

Some scientists think that environmental conditions on Earth were sufficient to turn the simple inorganic molecules into complex organic molecules. The most famous experiment to test this hypothesis was the Miller-Urey experiment. That experiment did change the inorganic starting material into organic compounds, including amino acids. You can read about the arguments for and against those results elsewhere, but similar experiments with different conditions have been run in the decades since. In many of these experiments, organic compounds were produced. These results indicate that the formation of organic molecules in the early days of Earth is a realistic and plausible hypothesis.

Another hypothesis is that the complex organic molecules formed elsewhere in the universe and rained down upon the Earth in a hail of meteors, asteroids, and comets. This idea is known as panspermia. The discovery of organic molecules in the Murchison meteorite shows that the panspermia hypothesis is also plausible.

It’s important to realize that this discovery does not prove panspermia. All it shows is that organic molecules can form elsewhere. So now we have two good hypotheses about the origin of life.

I know it can be hard sometimes to tell the difference between science and religion, so to help you figure it out, I present this easy study aid.

I found this over at the excellent but dormant Red State Rabbble. I had to overshrink the thing to make it fit within my margins. You can see the original version here.

The Amazing Meeting 6 is now less than two weeks away. Is anyone out there planning to attend? Speak up here! Is anybody interested in getting together for a BoF meetup at some point during that weekend? My time there is limited to Thursday night through Saturday night. I won’t be attending any of the optional shows, so my evenings will be open. Maybe if there are other blog groups that are getting together, we can merge our parties into a group of four!