I just watched the latest episode of Moyers & Company with Bill Moyers. He interviewed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a forthcoming book titled The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. It was a fascinating program. I recommend it, if you haven’t watched it already.

This part of Moyers’ intro sort of sums up Haidt’s premise:

His ideas are controversial but they make you think. Haidt says, for example, that liberals misunderstand conservatives more than the other way around, and that while conservatives see self-sufficiency as a profound moral value for individuals, liberals are more focused on a public code of care and equity.

The thing about any of the social sciences is that they’re tricky to study. You can stick water in a beaker on a hot plate to measure its boiling point, but how do you measure a society’s boiling point? The social sciences are littered with the corpses of theories, plausible and crazy alike, that attempted to explain why we behave (individually or collectively) the way we do.

This Haidt guy has some interesting ideas. Is there any truth to them? I don’t know. I like things that can be measured objectively, and this isn’t it. I know I’m more partial to the ideas of George Lakoff, but I don’t know that he’s right either.

Haidt’s ideas are based on his Moral Foundations Theory. He describes it on its website:

In brief, the theory proposes that six (or more) innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. [emphasis added]

These six foundations are:

1. Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2. Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]
3. Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.
4. Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
5. Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
6. Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

When they asked liberals and conservatives how strongly they felt about those issues, this is how it came out:

I guess my biggest concern is how neutrally the questions were worded. It’s extremely difficult to write bias-free questions. Even his choice of labels raises some questions. In the list above, the first word of each pair is clearly the “better” or more desirable trait. But when I see the word “authority”, for example, I have an immediate negative reaction.

I’ve always disrespected authority. And what is “legitimate authority” anyway? There is very little in this country. The politicians have authority by virtue of occupying the roles defined in the Constitution, but it is not legitimate in my view. They have not earned that authority. They bought it with massive campaign contributions from Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, and a few other unelected billionaires.

Or maybe he is referring to actual legitimate authority, which would result from free and fair elections. I’m all in favor of that, but we don’t have too many of those.

I score low on one perception of the definition, but high on the other. Since I don’t know how free of bias (conscious or unconscious) his questions were worded, I don’t know how much stock to put in his results.

It sure is peculiar that the liberals are so extremely lopsided and the conservatives are so evenly distributed.

Despite my doubts, he nevertheless has some interesting things to say in the interview. It’s worth trying to listen with an open mind and learn what we can from it.

Oh, and notice at the end of the interview that he shares my opinion that the system is extremely broken. He is of the mistaken opinion that it is fixable, though.

That’s easy! It’s Anti-Science!

We’re surrounded by it. It’s everywhere! Just look. Here’s a bunch right here!

It obviously makes up the majority of the matter in the United States alone; therefore (and I’m extrapolating here), it must make up the majority of the matter in the rest of the universe.

Mystery solved.

For my next miracle, I will explain why so many women and minorities vote Republican.

OK, on second thought, maybe I can’t explain that one.

On the anti-science front, there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday about the quandary the Republican presidential hopefuls are in when they come out here to Silicon Valley:

But the Republican candidates’ views on climate change are being met with the most raised eyebrows in Silicon Valley, the mecca of political fundraising, tech innovation and venture capital dollars.
…
“In a valley of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, the science behind climate change is overwhelmingly accepted,” said Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents more than 325 of the region’s top companies.

That will hurt them a bit financially, but I suspect there is more than enough stupid money in the rest of the country to make up for it.

Fortunately, their irrational beliefs will also make it harder for almost any of these Republican to carry the state in 2012.

There is little doubt about climate change among likely California voters, 61 percent of whom believe that the effects of global warming have already begun, according to a July survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

It also might work against them, to some extent, in the rest of the country.

Nationally, 55 percent of Americans believe that global warming is a “serious personal threat,” according to a Gallup survey in August.

Here’s where it gets good:

The bad news for Republican presidential candidates: The Public Policy Institute survey found that 62 percent of independent voters, who are the swing voters in the state, believe that, too.

Of course, they always have the idiot core:

Thirty-two percent of California Republicans believe that the effects of global warming “will never happen,” the poll also found.

That’s just not enough to carry the state. If things were settled purely rationally (the way they ought to be!), the election would already be over in California. Just hand over those 55 electoral votes to Barack Obama!

In reality, since Obama is a thoroughly incompetent president, he’ll probably manage to hand over those 55 electoral votes to the Republicans.

An example of this is best illustrated by this tweet from God regarding the recent earthquake on the East Coast:

There was just a 5.8 earthquake in Washington. Obama wanted it to be 3.4, but the Republicans wanted 5.8, so he compromised.

But let’s get back to the Chronicle article:

Only one major Republican candidate has dared to challenge his party on these views. Last month, Jon Huntsman, a former U.S. ambassador to China and Utah governor, tweeted: “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

He is crazy. By Republican standards.

He has other problems, so I could never support Huntsman, but I still wish he’d be the Republican’s pick. Actually, I really wish they’d pick Michelle Bachmann. She’s so crazy that she probably couldn’t win the general election.

Since the Republicans will probably nominate someone else, My hope is for Huntsman. If they pick a “moderate” (by Republican standards), whoever that is will probably win. I’d rather we have a pro-science Republican in the White House than an anti-science Republican. All of the other GOP candidates are anti-science.

In addition to climate-change denial, all of the other candidates also deny evolution. The Chronicle article briefly touches on those views too.

Rick Perry has described himself as “a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect…”

OK, I can understand it being a matter of faith. But intellect?

…and has called evolution “a theory” with “some gaps in it.”

I think it’s his brain that has some gaps in it.

Mitt Romney appears to be taking a nuanced position. “I believe God is intelligent, and I believe he designed the creation,” he said.

He’s not taking a nuanced approach. That’s exactly what the Intelligent Design creationists are saying.

“And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

This actually shows that not only does Romney not understand evolution, he doesn’t understand Intelligent Design creationism! According to Michael Behe and the other pushers of this drug, evolution alone isn’t capable of creating us. God had to step in at critical points during our evolution and poof us to the next stage.

Michele Bachmann…

Who let the crazy woman in here? How did she get out of bed this morning? Didn’t anybody check her straps?

…has claimed that “hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes,” believe in intelligent design, as she does.

If by “hundreds and hundreds” she means “one or two” and by “many of them holding Nobel Prizes” she means “none of them”, then she’s absolutely correct!

But she said government shouldn’t take sides in scientific debates “when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.”

She’s right. Some scientists look at her brain scans and claim to see activity. Other scientists only see a wet gray sponge. The government shouldn’t take sides in that debate until we can cut her open and check. Evidence! We need more evidence, people!

Ron Paul said he does not accept the theory of evolution. “The creator that I know created us, each and every one of us, and created the universe, and the precise time and manner,” Paul has said, although he has also said there is no “absolute proof on either side.”

Science doesn’t work on absolute proof. It works on data. In the case of evolution, “absolute” refers to the absolute mountain of data we have supporting it. Where is any data supporting his claim?

Newt Gingrich…

Newt Gingrich!? Is that guy still around?

…has said, “I believe that creation as an act of faith is true, and I believe that science as a mechanical process is true.… Both can be true.”

What does that even mean? The universe had two origins? A created origin and a mechanical origin? When we finally look, the act of observing will make the entire universe collapse!

He says both should be taught in schools, evolution as a science and intelligent design “as a philosophy.”

ID creationism isn’t philosophy. It isn’t the intellectual equivalent of Plato or Kant. Just try to justify teaching creationism in the schools, Newt! You’ll discover you Kant.

Jon Huntsman is the only candidate in the GOP ranks who has taken a strong position in support of evolution, recently tweeting, “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Rick Santorum, who calls himself a fierce believer in creationism, jabbed back at Huntsman, saying, “I believe in Genesis 1:1 – God created the heavens and the earth. I don’t know exactly how God did it or exactly how long it took him, but I do know that he did it.”

And I do know that the Republicans are hell-bent on destroying science and science education. Lose your house in the Republican-caused Great Recession? Don’t worry! Just vote Republican a few more times, and we’ll all be living in nice warm caves again! Then we’ll be arguing over “teaching the controversy” and the “strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of fire.

When I was growing up, my family would sometimes go back to my grandfather’s farm in South Dakota for a couple of weeks in the summer. I loved that place. It was so different from the world I knew. It was so alien, in fact, that my grandparents didn’t even own a television.

In 1976, when I was in my early teens, we somehow managed to go back for six weeks (I’m not sure, but that might have been the summer of the spreader.). Interestingly, the prospect of spending a summer without a television didn’t bother me at all—except for one thing…

That was summer that NASA landed Viking 1 on Mars. That was a big event. It was NASA’s first robotic probe to land on Mars. Among the various scientific equipment aboard, it had a biology lab. They were looking for life on Mars! Microbial life seemed a very real possibility back then. This was our best chance to find it. And I was stuck in the middle of Buttsuck, South Dakota, miles from a television.

We drove there and back in our 1969 Chevy station wagon. It was decadent! It had air conditioning and seat belts. Our prior car, a 1965 Ford Mustang, had neither (Actually, I think the Mustang had seat belts in the front. I guess the rear passengers, like rabbits, were expendable.).

We’d stop for gas and food at the wonderful truck stops and tourist traps along the interstate. I loved to buy their postcards of giant grasshoppers:

… jack rabbits:

… fur-bearing trout:

… and, the most famous of all, of course, the jackalope:

A lot of the gift shops also sold this book:

It was filled with all sorts of fun trivia about U.S. history. It was a good book to read on the trip, so I bought it. Here are the titles of some of the short articles:

• The last man to invade U.S. ended up as a guest at a banquet
• She was first woman in United States to wear pants—by an act of Congress!
• Five presidents have had beards and all five were Republicans
• Famous ghosts still walk halls of White House
• The day president U.S. Grant was arrested for speeding

Some of this book’s trivia I later confirmed in other books. One or two I’ve found were common myths. But overall, it was a fun read.

I have a good memory. Looking through this book today, I see that I have actually retained most of these stories in my massive brain.

One of those articles that I always remembered was the story of the Millerites, which I have reproduced below. I remembered it during the recent Harold Camping laugh-fest.

Reading this article back then in the summer of ’76 was my first exposure to the concept of the doomsday cult. I had always known that there were crazy fundies perpetually predicting the end of the world. Until that point, I never knew that some of them were insane enough to actually abandon work, leave their fields unplanted, and sit on a hillside waiting to be raptured.

Welcome to the real America, kid. Ugly, isn’t it? (I wonder what I would have thought if I had known that 30 years later, I’d embark upon a 5+ year quest to document and expose the dangers of this insanity.)

So for your enlightenment, here is the article that I read that summer 35 years ago:

I love the last two words of that title: “It Didn’t!” Really? I would have thought he wouldn’t have needed to tell us. (At the very least, he should have preceded it with the words “Spoiler Alert!”)

That article doesn’t tell the entire story, though (and it gets a few of the minor details wrong). Those people didn’t just “[start] life all over again”. Nor did they learn their lesson. They became the Seventh Day Adventists.

Thinking back now on that article, I see a similarity between what I wanted to do that summer in 1976 and what the Millerites wanted to do in their day. Yet in that similarity I see an even bigger difference.

Both of us looked to the heavens.

The Millerites, though, were looking to a delusion of the past and hoping for the demise of mankind.

I was looking to man-made robot on Mars and dreaming of our future.

BroadSnark brought something to my attention a few days ago that I’ve been meaning to write a quick post about.

Milton Diamond, who just retired from the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii, published an article last year in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry.

The article is titled “Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review”. Here is the abstract. I have emphasized one of its important conclusions:

A vocal segment of the population has serious concerns about the effect of pornography in society and challenges its public use and acceptance. This manuscript reviews the major issues associated with the availability of sexually explicit material.

It has been found everywhere scientifically investigated that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased.

It is further been found that sexual erotica has not only wide spread personal acceptance and use but general tolerance for its availability to adults. This attitude is seen by both men and women and not only in urban communities but also in reputed conservative ones as well. Further this finding holds nationally in the United States and in widely different countries around the world.

Indeed, no country where this matter has been scientifically studied has yet been found to think pornography ought be restricted from adults. The only consistent finding is that adults prefer to have the material restricted from children’s production or use.

BroadSnark pulls out a few of the juiciest details from the article itself:

• rapists were more likely than non-rapists in the prison population to having been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster
• rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of “normal” males
• sex offenders requesting treatment commonly disclose that pornography helps them contain their abnormal sexuality within imagination as a fantasy instead of their aggressively acting out in real life
• what does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing

BroadSnark also gives us the appropriate conclusion that may be drawn from these findings:

In short, if you want less rape and child molestation, you would be better off banning religion than porn.

Francis Crick co-discovered, with James D. Watson and Rosalind Franklin, the structure of DNA in 1953.

Wikipedia has an entire section of his article titled “Views on Religion”. That section starts off with:

Crick once joked, “Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.”

To which I ask: How do we know he was joking?

The article mentions his book Of Molecules and Men:

[H]e wondered: at what point during biological evolution did the first organism have a soul?

This is one of my problems with Christianity. It places humans apart from animals as distinct and special. This belief then affects how we treat the other species we share the world with.

More specifically, can anyone answer the question? Were souls just floating around out in the ether waiting for humans to evolve?

If they weren’t waiting specifically for humans to evolve, then they must also latch onto any other passing organism, just like all other generalized parasites do.

If they were waiting specifically for humans, that would imply directed evolution or foreknowledge of events. I suppose if you’re religious, you can wave your arms and say “That’s it!” That answer doesn’t work for the rest of us.

And if souls were waiting for humans specifically, when did they jump in? Were they sitting around the African savannah watching our ancestors? Cheering and jeering them on?

“Evolve, dammit!”

“No! Not behind the bush! That’s where the lion is! You’ll never pass on your genes if you do that!”

The waiting must have been tedious:

“Well how about that one? It’s called ‘Lucy’. That’s a good name.”

“Nah. It only has a cranial capacity of 400 cc. Where would I hang the Van Gogh?”

Then later:

“Look! There’s a Homo!”

“They have as much right to marry as anyone else!”

“No! The others were Australopithecines. This one is more modern. Surely we can inhabit this one!”

“Maybe, but do you really want to live in something called Homo erectus?”

So if the souls were waiting specifically for Homo sapiens to evolve, when did they jump in? There are no sharp boundaries between species. The parents weren’t Homo erectus and their children Homo sapiens. It was a fluid and gradual transition. So how did the souls know when the species was ripe, and when did that happen?

Returning to the Wikipedia article, Crick wondered:

At what moment does a baby get a soul?

That, of course, seems to be the heart of the abortion debate. Fundies don’t seem to have a problem killing non-human life. They seem to use the alleged existence of the soul as the defining characteristic.

Crick stated his view that the idea of a non-material soul that could enter a body and then persist after death is just that, an imagined idea. For Crick, the mind is a product of physical brain activity and the brain had evolved by natural means over millions of years.

This view is held by many scientists, of course.

Crick felt that a new scientific world view was rapidly being established, and predicted that once the detailed workings of the brain were eventually revealed, erroneous Christian concepts about the nature of humans and the world would no longer be tenable; traditional conceptions of the “soul” would be replaced by a new understanding of the physical basis of mind.

The brain is amazingly complex. I’m not convinced we’ll ever have it completely figured out. Assume that we do. I know that won’t make “erroneous Christian concepts… [un]tenable”. We’ve known for quite a while that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but that hasn’t made young-Earth creationism go away.

Wikipedia also says:

Crick suggested that it might be possible to find chemical changes in the brain that were molecular correlates of the act of prayer. He speculated that there might be a detectable change in the level of some neurotransmitter or neurohormone when people pray.

From Book Scans

This field of study is now known as neurotheology.

That Was All Foreplay

Anyway, all of the above is just background material to what I really wanted to write about: Sex!

I somehow came across a website called TheBestColleges.org. It’s an odd mix of useful info and trivia.

In the trivia department is an article titled “7 Generous College Donations (With Insane Strings Attached)”. I disagree. The strings aren’t insane, just a little quirky.

The last “generous” donation is by our old friend Francis Crick. They write:

Francis Crick, famed English molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner for discovering the DNA molecule…

They have a factual error right out the gate. DNA was already known. He co-discovered its structure.

…was offered a fellowship (a senior office in British Universities) at the newly opened Churchill College, a constituent college of Cambridge University. However Crick, a staunch and rabid atheist…

Another error! People love to label any outspoken atheist as rabid. He was not. I happen to know he was vaccinated.

…only accepted the honor on the basis that a chapel would never be built at Churchill, a supposed center of science and technology. Much to his chagrin though, a donation was later made to the school for the sole purpose of establishing a place of worship on her campus which was accepted and Crick’s Nightmare was built.

That’s so typical. There’s always somebody out there who is so massively offended by the existence of a public institution that isn’t contaminated by religion that they have to do the infecting themselves. We need a vaccine for that.

Anticipating Crick’s tempter tantrum…

Don’t you love how they characterize his objections?

…Winston Churchill himself (the chairman) attempted to smooth things over by advising him that no one need enter the chapel unless they wished to do so and thus the building could simply be ignored. Crick replied to that letter with a donation to the school of 10 guineas for the establishment of a brothel to operate under the same logic which, sadly for future generations of Churchill’s students, was denied.

Seems logical to me.

You’re probably aware that abandoned land mines from our species’ countless, pointless wars remain a huge problem throughout the world. The civilized world got together in 1999 and banned these barbaric weapons. The United States, of course, refused.

In Africa, that continent’s numerous civil wars have left huge tracts of land dangerously littered with land mines that continue to kill at random and without warning.

One of the charities I support is officially called APOPO, but they are marketing themselves as Hero Rat. It’s much catchier! They train the African Giant Pouched Rat (which is a bit larger than our buddies here at home) to sniff out land mines. Rats are highly intelligent and have an excellent sense of smell. They’re also too light to set off a mine if they walk over it. This combination of traits makes them ideally suited to this task.

The Economist recently put together a little slideshow about APOPO’s work:

I wonder sometimes if this blog serves any beneficial purpose at all. It probably doesn’t, you know. I should at least try to directly prevent a little misery in the world by occasionally bringing the efforts of this organization to your attention.

They’re a small foreign charity, so donating to them is actually just a tiny bit more involved than it is with larger organizations. If you’re a U.S. resident, donating directly to them is not tax deductible. Blame the IRS and our serpentine tax laws for that one. However, you can donate to them through an intermediate charity, and that is tax deductible.

You have two choices. You can go directly to their website, click the Donate button, and then follow the instructions for your country.

The simpler way is to go to Global Giving and donate to Hero Rat’s Tuberculosis project. That’s the way I do it. That’s also where the link in my sidebar will take you.

Instead of throwing up your hands in frustration at how screwed up the world is, here’s your chance to help unscrew a small part of it.

I haven’t been trying to neglect the blog lately. I was hoping to cut back to two or three articles per week, not two or three weeks per article. It’s amazing how merely re-prioritizing the blog from #1 hobby to #2 hobby has robbed it of so much attention. The photography class I’m taking ends in March, so this isn’t permanent.

The latest edition of the Skeptics’ Circle has just arrived at The SkeptVet Blog. It’s definitely a good one. It’s jammed full of great articles. You need to go check it out.

The best article of the bunch is “Discovery Channel: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” by Akusai at Action Skeptics. I gave up my cable TV almost two years ago, so I still have favorable memories of the Discovery Channel. This was the home of Mythbusters, after all. Sure, many of the Discovery Channel’s shows had succumbed to the Least Common Denominator, but at least they didn’t have any of those horrible ghost-hunting shows. Then lately I started hearing about some horrid dreck called Ghost Lab. And it’s on the Discovery Channel! How depressing.

Anyway, Akusai fills us in on what little is still good on the Discovery Channel. He lists Mythbusters first, but even that is apparently sliding. Say it isn’t so!

He also mentions a show I’ve never heard of: Time Warp. Apparently the program is full of all sorts of amazing footage of ordinary things photographed in high-speed video. That sounds like a great show. In fact, I was experimenting with high-speed photography myself last Sunday (See result above. That was shot at 1/2000th of a second.).

Akusai then goes on to tell us about the Bad and the Ugly on the Discovery Channel. Some of it sounds very ugly. If you’re as disgusted as I am with the dumbing-down of science television, you should go read “Discovery Channel: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. After that, check out the remainder of the Skeptics’ Circle.

[Here is the next installment of my experience at the Darwin Was Wrong lie-fest put on by Logos Research Associates. You can start from the beginning of this story in Part 1, or you can jump to the first speaker in Part 4. You can also watch the videos of this conference at the Logos website (not recommended for the sane).]

The first talk of the morning was given by Marcus Ross, and it was titled “Darwin Was Wrong about the Fossil Record”. Here is how Logos describes this talk:

In Origin, Darwin admitted that the fossil evidence contradicted his theory, but he hoped future discoveries would come to his rescue. Now, 150 years later, the problem of missing intermediates is even more glaring.

Who is this guy? It turns out we’ve met him before. This is the guy who made headlines in 2007 for lying in order to get a PhD (See brief BoF article here. See longer, better Larry Moran article here.).

Ross is a young-Earth creationist. He believes the Earth is 6000 to 10,000 years old, yet he wrote his PhD thesis as if he actually understood the true age of the Earth (4.5 billion years).

He does not understand geology at all. If he did, he would know the true age of the Earth. Therefore, he has failed geology and did not deserve the degree. University of Rhode Island was too cowardly to stand up for academic integrity and gave him the degree so he’d go away quietly and not make trouble. They have devalued their graduate program, and they have disrespected everybody who has ever earned a degree there.

University of Rhode Island is an academic whore.

Marcus Ross is an academic fraud. And a john. He paid URI money for the empty pleasure of a cheap degree, and he infected URI with the venereal disease of creationism.

Now that we know who we’re dealing with, let’s look at what he had to say.

He told us that he would cover three main topics:

1. The use of fossils in geology
2. Looking back: Darwin’s views on the fossil record
3. Our present understanding

The Use Of Fossils In Geology

He said fossils are used for four purposes:

• Organismal reconstruction
• Environmental reconstruction
• Correlation/Biostratigraphy
• Reconstruction of evolutionary lineages

Prior to Origin of Species, fossils had only been used for the first three functions. Once Origin appeared, all the God-hating atheists out there realized they could put together a fake natural history based on the fossils, thereby “proving” that God doesn’t exist.

He didn’t phrase it the way I’ve described it, but it’s clear that this is what he means. He told us how all of the strata containing all of these fossils were laid down during Noah’s Flood. All these freakish-looking prehistoric critters were just wandering around the world minding their own business, and the next thing you know — FLUSH! — a giant flood wipes them all out. Apparently velociraptors, triceratops, and tyrannosaurs were not on Noah’s list of “clean animals” or on his list of “everything else”.

According to Ross and some of the other speakers at this event, atheistic evilutionists just draw lines connecting similar-looking fossils and claim that X must have evolved into Y, because they look similar, and X was in a lower strata than Y. Yet according to Ross and friends, all of these critters existed in that brief 2000-year pre-flood period.

Maybe he explained it and I missed it, but I don’t understand how Ross rationalizes these two issues:

1. Why are certain critters only associated with certain strata? This is true no matter where in the world they are found. Ross freely admitted these associations.
2. Why are the simpler critters (what we would call less evolved or an earlier species in a given evolutionary line) always in strata below the more complex critters (what we would call a later species in the same evolutionary line)?

Steve Austin presented diagrams purporting to show how dozens of layers (totaling hundreds of feet) of the Grand Canyon were deposited in a few hours. If everybody is intermingling and walking around at the same time, how do they sort out so nicely when the Flood comes?

He did show a diagram showing some of the geological eras:

• Cenozoic
• Mesozoic
• Paleozoic
• Proterozoic

He claims those middle two (Mesozoic and Paleozoic) happened during the Flood. My questions above would apply to those eras. There aren’t many fossils from the Proterozoic, but what about the gobs of fossils from the Cenozoic? If all of that is post-Flood, where did they come from? According to Ross’ timeline, all of those fossils would have to be from the last 4000 years. So nobody noticed the giraffe camels or bone-crushing dogs or elephant-sized ground sloths wandering around? Nobody thought they were the slightest bit strange and bothered to write about them?

Looking Back: Darwin’s Views On The Fossil Record

The next main point of his talk was what Darwin said about fossils. Darwin was concerned about the fossil record, so he devoted two chapters in Origin to it.

Ross then did some Darwin quote-mining.

We need a Godwin’s Law for Darwin quote-mining. Godwin’s Law itself is:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

However, the corollary is more appropriate here. Wikipedia describes it:

[T]here is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress.

Our new Creatard’s Law could be:

Any creationist quote-mining Darwin has automatically lost the argument.

Our Present Understanding

This was Ross’ final topic of his presentation. He gloated about gaps in the fossil record. Then he started talking about “baramins” and all of the different horse “kinds”. He said that all of the modern horse variants (zebra, donkey, quagga, zedonk, zorse, etc.) descended from that first created “kind” that Noah had on the Ark.

Here’s a question for all of the creationists out there. You people claim there are no transitional fossils. You people claim that any fossil that looks transitional is actually just a diseased specimen of a known species.

So how do you know that all of these different horse kinds descended from Noah’s horse? By your own definition, you have no transitional fossils to support your claim.

The only “horse kind” creationists can produce is the ass.

[And now, exactly one month since the last episode, here is the next installment of my experience at the Darwin Was Wrong lie-fest put on by Logos Research Associates. I’m writing this at 1:30 AM, so I’ll only cover the praying and singing that preceded the first talk of the day. Tonight, I hope to write up a description of the talk itself.

If you’ve come in late, you can start from the beginning of this story in Part 1, or you can jump to the first speaker in Part 4. You can also watch the videos of this conference at the Logos website (not recommended for the sane).]

I arrived at the church just five minutes late, but they’ve already started the program! Some guy was on stage saying something. Wait! Don’t start praying without me! I hurried to my seat. Made it! You can start praying now.

And they did.

After the prayer, the guy talked about how this was an historic event. Really? That you’ve got a church full of people praying and singing about Jesus and denying evolution?

Pathetic? Yes. Historic? No.

I looked around the church. It was sparsely attended this morning. Only about 25% of the seats were filled. Even the faithful don’t want to be at church at 8:30 on a Saturday morning.

The preacher guy left the stage. Hallelujah! The Jesus singers came out. Oh, crap! They started by singing “I’ll Fly Away”. That’s actually a good song, when it’s done right. They didn’t do it right.

Next, they asked everybody to stand for the performance of “Amazing Grace”. What is it with religious people and that song? I took this opportunity to run to the restroom. I got inside, and…

Oh, lord! They pipe the audio from the stage into the restroom! I can’t even get away from it in here! I discovered, however, that it acts as an excellent stimulant. Who needs Ex Lax?

By the time I got back to my seat, they were on to the next song. I scanned the auditorium and noticed some small kids sitting a few rows away. They were maybe 5 or 6 years old. Most of the lies that would be said that day would go over their heads. The lifetime of indoctrination won’t.

I looked at the video screens and noticed that they put the words to the song up there, so the congregation can sing along. Who needs hymn books? This is the 21st Century. We’ve got Jesus karaoke! The only thing missing is a bunch of drunk Japanese businessmen. Our congregation has them beat. We’re drunk on the Lord! (And not in a Catholic booze-and-crackers way.)

Did I just say “our congregation”? Oh no! The assimilation has begun! By the end of the day, I’ll be completely absorbed!

As I said above, “I’ll Fly Away” is a good song when it is done right. Behold the right doing:

This bad boy comes to us from 1959. It comes with a spinthariscope and a cloud chamber for two different ways of viewing radioactive decay; it comes with an electroscope for doing electroscopy things; and it also comes with two radiation sources: radium and uranium ore!

Drooling idiots who injure themselves with Nerf dart guns need not apply.

This was back in the day when men were men, and boys were men, and girls were men, too! This toy had balls! It was nuclear!

It was also very educational. Of course, these days you wouldn’t be able to sell something like this. “Oh, help! It’s nook-yoo-lur! Get it away from me! It’s almost as dangerous as the swine flu vaccine!”

I’ll have you know that most of the radiation this thing gave off was alpha, and that’s relatively harmless. As Wikipedia says:

In general, external alpha radiation is not harmful since alpha particles are effectively shielded by a few centimeters of air, a piece of paper, or the thin layer of dead skin cells.… If substances emitting alpha particles are ingested, inhaled, injected or introduced through the skin, then it could result in a measurable dose.

So as long as you keep this thing away from your baby sister who sticks everything in her mouth, you should be fine.

My only concern is that the source of that radiation was tiny amounts of radium and uranium ore, and I don’t know if there are any additional concerns around those materials (besides obvious careful handling).

But if you think that toy is frakkin’ stupendous, check out this puppy:

This mother-of-all-awesome-toys dates back to 1951.

If, back in those days, the U.S. government could have its soldiers stand above ground to witness a nuclear blast, and then march through fallout across the drop zone, it sure as hell could give its kids radioactive materials for Christmas.

To quote ORAU:

The set came with four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a geiger counter, a manual, a comic book… and a government manual “Prospecting for Uranium.”

You wouldn’t even be able to mail this toy today! Imagine trying to bring this to market in 2009.

This toy isn’t all roses, though. It’s a little backward. What do you notice here (aside from the fact that he seems to be enjoying being radiated a little too much)?

Based on the illustrations on the packaging, this toy is only for boys. I guess girls aren’t smart enough for this thing. Marie Curie will have to go back to doing the laundry.

The toy also comes with this order form for buying more fissionable material:

I was disappointed to read that the toy is useless today, because all of its radiation has decayed away. It would be really funny to send in this order form today, but the A.C. Gilbert Company went out of business more than 40 years ago. I guess there is no such thing as long-term support any more. Where is a guy supposed to buy radioactive materials these days? (Maybe I should mail this form to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and see what happens.)

They mentioned above that the kit also came with a comic book:

That’s right. Dagwood Bumstead splits the atom. Is that what Dithers & Co. has been doing all these years? They’re a defense contractor? And Dagwood is one of our top scientists? And we won the Cold War?

I noticed one last thing about this toy. As you’ll recall, Marie Curie died from exposure to radiation. That makes me wonder what happened to all the boys who had this kit. The illustration that comes with the kit makes it obvious. It made them gay:

[This is the latest installment of my experience at the Darwin Was Wrong lie-fest put on by Logos Research Associates. You can start from the beginning of this story in Part 1, or you can jump to the first speaker in Part 4. You can watch the videos of this conference at the Logos website (not recommended for the sane).]

Intermission!

At this point, they gave us a ten-minute break. I felt something hitting my shoulder. I looked, and discovered that chunks of my brain were falling out.

The Jesus singers came back out to torture us some more. I was willing to confess to plotting 9/11 just to make them stop.

I headed out to the lobby. Maybe the sulfurous stench of a public restroom would cauterize my neurons and make the agony stop.

I discovered a long line for the restroom. Big church. Small restroom. Not a very intelligent design.

Eventually, I made my way back to my seat. Intermission was over, so they were calling everyone back.

And then more Jesus music! Oh no. They want everyone to stand for the chorus! I looked around. Everybody stood up. Hell no! I’m not going to stand up for a song. They can pray around me all they want, but they can’t make me participate in their ritual. I’m here to observe. I’m not here to praise their God.

I stayed in my seat as the rest of the congregation stood and sang. I think I’m blowing my cover.

Steve Austin: Darwin Was Wrong about Geology

Here’s how Logos describes this talk:

Darwin was profoundly wrong about the origin of the Santa Cruz River Valley and the geologic record in general. His speculations of slow and gradual biological change were based on the false idea of slow and gradual geologic change.

I wasn’t able to dig up any information about Steve Austin on Wikipedia or Conservapedia, but I did manage to find his bio over at Creation Wiki. He is abusing three legitimate degrees from three legitimate schools: University of Washington (BS), San Jose State University (MS), and Pennsylvania State University (PhD). You’d think that with all of that real education, a real fact or two would manage to sneak into his brain.

You’d be wrong.

Austin stepped onto the stage. By way of introduction, he bragged about how he has a video on YouTube with 32,000 hits! He seemed to think that was a lot. Sorry, Steve. Get back to me when you have a video people actually want to look at. For example, here’s a cat in a bathtub, and it has more than 4.6 million hits.

I don’t want to see Austin’s crappy 32K YouTube video. That’s right, I’m only interested in a moist pussy. (Oh, shut up! I had to say it!)

Austin told us these would be his main points:

1. Darwin was a geologist
2. Darwin saw world-class geologic features
3. Darwin rejected catastrophism
4. Catastrophism prevails in the 21st century in spite of Darwin

Darwin Was a Geologist

Darwin himself said he was a geologist. I guess Austin is trying to show that Darwin was qualified to make the correct interpretations of what he saw, yet he didn’t. This is something Austin knows well. Steve Austin has three degrees in geology, yet he can’t make one correct interpretation!

Darwin Saw World-Class Geologic Features

Austin then said something about boulders and the Santa Cruz River Valley in Argentina. Darwin thought the boulders were deposited there by ice. Austin thinks there was a glacier dam that broke and carried the boulders down the river and dropped them on the beach. This guy sure loves his floods.

Darwin Rejected Catastrophism

Whatever he said here was so dull I mercifully omitted it from my notes.

Catastrophism Prevails in the 21st Century in Spite of Darwin

This is the argumentum ad populum (appeal to the majority) fallacy. Just because there are millions of ignorant fools out there who still believe in the flood myth doesn’t make it any less false.

Austin tried to tell us that Mount St. Helens “proves” that you can get lots of strata in just a few hours. He also tried to claim that the Grand Canyon was farted out of God’s anus after eating an especially large bean burrito. (Actually, all my notes say on this topic is “100 feet of strata in the Grand Canyon can be explained by one catastrophic event.” I’m guessing that he’s referring to the Divine Hershey Squirts in this case. It’s documented somewhere in one of the Gnostic Gospels. You can look it up!)

Austin then burned off the rest of his time by showing his wildly-(un)popular YouTube video. Hey, Steve! Show us something else! Can you get PornoTube on that thing?

That pretty much wrapped it up for Stone Cold Wrong Steve Austin. I did find it amusing that by claiming Mount St. Helens “proves” catastrophism, Austin did the very thing that the prior speaker, Thomas McMullen, warned against: Looking at a current event and extrapolating it back into the past. This is typical of creationists. They grasp at so many straws to prop up their fantasies that they end up contradicting themselves every time they open their mouths.

But Wait! We Can’t Leave Without Thanking God!

Steve Austin left the stage, and that was the end of the scheduled program for this evening. I was eager to run out of there before any more of my brain ended up on the floor. But then the MC came out and led the congregation in a prayer!

I don’t remember what he said. It was either mercifully short, or the language lobe of my brain was already rolling down the sloped floor toward the front of the room.

Somehow I managed to stagger out of there, call a cab, and get back to the hotel. Somehow I would need to find the strength to get up early the next morning and come back here for the next day’s session. And it wasn’t going to be a merciful half-day like today. It was going to last all day. But could I?

[Next: I have to get up early? To go to church?! What the hell was I thinking?!]

[This is the latest installment of my experience at the Darwin Was Wrong lie-fest put on by Logos Research Associates. You can start from the beginning of this story in Part 1, or you can jump to the first speaker in Part 4. You can watch the videos of this conference at the Logos website (not recommended for the sane).]

E. Thomas McMullen: Darwin Was Wrong about Science

Here’s how Logos describes this talk:

Darwin used creative speculation and unbounded extrapolation in place of scientific method. Darwin’s approach was the antithesis of good science.

This statement brought to you by the young-Earth creationists. The experts on good science!

Who is this McMullen guy? It’s hard to say, really. He’s so inconsequential that he doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry. He doesn’t even have a Conservapedia entry.

We do find something about him at ChristianAnswers.net. It tells us he has legitimate degrees from Washington State University, United States Air Force Air War College, Southern Methodist University, and Indiana University.

I couldn’t find much else. His name appears on a few creationist websites, but I didn’t see anything noteworthy one way or another. Let’s take a look at what he said that night at the conference.

McMullen started by telling us that there were four problems with Darwin’s science:

1. He was ideologically driven
2. He used heroic extrapolation
3. He used unbridled speculation
4. Science is limited in explaining past events

This guy was a dull and incompetent public speaker. He read from his pre-written script throughout his presentation. He hadn’t even practiced it much, because he frequently stumbled over common words. I’m guessing he hacked out his entire talk in one evening a couple of months ago and hadn’t looked at it since. If his talk managed to convert anybody, it wasn’t through his eloquence.

Skipping his lack of dynamism, let’s turn our attention just to what he had to say.

Darwin was Ideologically Driven

There are two sides to doing science, he told us: Theoretical (formulating testable ideas) and Descriptive (observing and studying nature).

McMullen made very sure to tell us that Darwin was not a scientist. He had a university degree, but not in any of the sciences. He was lucky to get the gig on the Beagle, since he was only an amateur naturalist. McMullen seemed to want us to really understand this point. Not a scientist. Just an amateur.

While on the Beagle, Darwin made tons of observations. This is that Descriptive science McMullen was telling us about. McMullen didn’t seem to have much of a problem with this part of Darwin’s work (except him being an “amateur”, of course).

McMullen made a big deal of Darwin believing in Charles Lyell’s Uniformitarianism.

Geology is outside my area of expertise. The last time I came near it was a geology class I took in high school. We took a great field trip along the Hayward Fault, looking at the damage that the constant slippage was doing to buildings and overpasses and other stuff. It was cool. I also got to watch one of my classmates eat raw meat! That was very cool.

So if you ask me today what I know of geology, I’ll tell you these things:

• There are three types of rock: Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary.
• You can hide earthquake damage long enough to sell your house, if you let ivy grow over the cracks.
• Watching a kid eat a raw hamburger is really cool!

I’ll have to let you read the Wikipedia article on Uniformitarianism and figure it out on your own. This seems to be the take-home message:

Thus the current scientific consensus is that Earth’s history is a slow, gradual process punctuated by occasional natural catastrophic events that have affected Earth and its inhabitants.

I get the impression that in Darwin and Lyell’s day, Uniformitarianism didn’t include the occasional catastrophic events; it was all about the slowness. You can see how this would be a problem for McMullen. Slow doesn’t work if you’re a young-Earth creationist. YECs require catastrophism, specifically one catastrophe 4000 years ago: Noah’s flood.

Therefore, the sub-topic we’re discussing here, “ideologically driven”, is indeed an accurate description of this talk, just not in the way that McMullen intended.

BTW, folks… I really shouldn’t say this next thing, because it will look like an ad hominem argument. I’m not using it that way. It has nothing to do with the validity of what McMullen is saying. My notes are incomplete in a couple of places, so I just watched the video to refresh my memory. Anyway, here it is: Remember when you were learning how to read in grade school and there was that slow kid in the class? You remember him.

He…

read…

out…

loud…

like…

this.

Listening to McMullen read his presentation is like listening to the slow kid in second grade read Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure. Go watch the video and tell me I’m wrong. The slow kid had an excuse. McMullen doesn’t. He’s smart and has several advanced degrees. He just needs to work on his presentation a bit, so people can focus on his message and not his delivery.

Getting back to McMullen’s message, which is what we’re interested in, one of the things that he said during this part of the talk was that Darwin had a hidden agenda. The Origin of Species “is a slow and materialistic side-attack on Christianity and the Bible”.

McMullen reminded us of the two sides of science: Theoretical and Descriptive. He told us that the theory you come up with has to be tested, and…

…that is where Darwinism falls short.… The best test of a theory is a test capable of proving it wrong.… A good theory is one capable of being falsified.

Throughout his talk, I had noticed that the woman sitting directly in front of me had been nodding her head after each of McMullen’s points. As he was saying this latest bit, I saw her head bouncing so much I thought she was a Christian bobble-head doll.

Anyway, McMullen seems to think that the theory of evolution is not falsifiable. That is simply not true. Evolution makes many predictions. Every time we sequence another species’ DNA or discover a new fossil or classify a new species, evolution is tested. The new data always fits (with minor adjustments, but that’s what science is all about). Evolution is tested every day in science, and it always passes.

Anyway, the guy droned on a bit longer about Darwin being ideologically driven. Throughout his talk, he frequently quote-mined Darwin. That’s how you know you’re dealing with a genuine creationist. Look for the quote-mining seal of approval! Accept no substitutes!

Darwin Used Heroic Extrapolation

McMullen finally came to his second point. By “heroic extrapolation”, he means that Darwin extrapolated into the past, beyond where he had data. McMullen used “living fossils” to “prove” this. His argument went like this:

• Some species didn’t change much over long periods of time (e.g., the horseshoe crab).
• Therefore, large change does not happen over long periods of time.
• Ipso facto, Darwin sucks, evolution is disproven, Christianity forever! WOOHOO!

Except, of course, McMullen is incapable of that much excitement.

There is more quote mining, though! Bobble-head lady is bouncing some more.

Darwin Used Unbridled Speculation (i.e., “story-telling”)

McMullen now told us that descent from a common ancestor is one example of this story telling. He claimed there was no proof. At this point, he quote mined Stephen Jay Gould. Britton’s Law! WOOT!! I called it! Eat my shorts, creationist! You’re so freakin’ predictable!

When he finished quote mining Gould, he went back to quote mining Darwin about the eye! Yes, the eye! That one has been debunked a million times before. That doesn’t matter, though. Mrs. Bobble-Head in front of me was bouncing so hard by this point her spring was about to snap.

Science is Limited in Explaining Past Events

McMullen told us that science can’t do history well. He then completely made up a straw man about how scientists would study a Civl War battlefield. He tried telling us that because scientists are unable to tell us the narrative of a battle (i.e., the exact sequence of events), that somehow proves that scientists can’t prove the theory of evolution.

He kept telling us that “scientists don’t do history well” and “They would need a time machine”, which “they don’t have”.

Ahh, but “WE” (meaning him and his YEC cronies) “have the history documented in the Bible.… This is our time machine.”

Well, thank dog for that. I was afraid you’d actually have to do some research and collect data and formulate a hypothesis and test it and collect more data and refine your hypothesis or falsify it and develop and test a new hypothesis.

Instead, you can just sit on your thumbs and sanctimoniously act like you know everything.

[Next: Six Million Dollar Lies]