Peter

mickwe:

World population by longitude and latitude (via World Population By Latitude, Longitude | Geekosystem)

I can’t remember now what chain of idle Facebook clicking led me to this video, but I’m glad I found it. This is Gerri Di Somma, pastor of Carmel:City Church, as well as Carmel:Christian School, Carmel:Bookshop, and other subdivisions of Carmel:Centre. For some reason, his organisation is obsessed with colons, possibly because he is full of shit.

(Jargon translator: “praying in the Holy Ghost” means praying in tongues)

I want you to know that knowledge never helped me. Counsellors never helped me. The banks never helped me. Medical science never helped me. When I was confronted with a major crisis in my life, it was praying in the Holy Ghost that helped me.

This is fascinating, because my family was on holiday with the Di Sommas in 1999 when Gerri was faced with a cancer scare. Unless by “I prayed in the Holy Ghost”, Mr. Di Somma actually means “I underwent surgery”, then I’m afraid my recollection of events is rather different.

Our families were holidaying together in South Africa, partly to attend a conference at Rhema South Africa, where Gerri had previously been a lecturer at the Bible school. While we were in Johannesburg, Gerri went for a medical and discovered that a mole on his face was cancerous.

My mum told me in hushed tones that this was happening, but that we wouldn’t be telling the congregation back home about it because we didn’t want them to worry. Then Gerri went into hospital and had the mole removed. By a doctor. A doctor who, presumably, used her knowledge of the same “medical science” the pastor now claims never helped him.

What’s most interesting is that Gerri Di Somma is as big an advocate of the Word of Faith doctrine of positive confession as anyone I’ve ever known. In fact, I’ve never known anyone else apply it so rigidly and with so little concession to common sense.

Positive confession is almost entirely based on a peculiar interpretation of Mark 11:24.

Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.

According to the Word of Faith, whenever you pray for anything in accordance with God’s Word, your prayer is answered immediately. Of course, God exists in the spiritual dimension and we in the physical, so receiving the manifestation of this answer to prayer can take time. It is the believer’s responsibility to see this manifestation take place. “Don’t blame God for your failure to receive” was an expression I heard more than once.

This meant that, as soon as you prayed for something, you had to talk (and act) as though it had already happened. Anything else would be a) saying that God didn’t keep his word, and b) displaying a lack of faith which would prevent the manifestation from occurring.

Following from this, Di Somma never allowed any member of his family to say they were sick. I once missed a Sunday because of flu, and I received a card from his daughter saying that she’d experienced some symptoms too, but “I will not let the devil lie to me”. I dutifully returned to the church band the following Sunday, and spent the entire service crouching on the stage because I was too ill to stand up.

So on this holiday in Johannesburg – the same one where Gerri had an operation for cancer – his wife went down with a virus, and Gerri wouldn’t allow her to take any painkillers. Only sick people take painkillers, and she was the healed of the Lord. My mum ended up sneaking her an aspirin before bed.

But you know what, I am confident that Gerri would pass a polygraph test about this. I spent enough time with him and his family (including his youngest daughter, who frequently went off-message) to be certain that he believes his own drivel.

That doesn’t stop this being a dangerous and irresponsible sermon. If you’ve got a problem, don’t do anything about it! Just hole yourself up in your room and pray in tongues! In fact, he only uttered one phrase that I agree with:

You need to understand that I stand before you not as a man of knowledge.

Amen, pastor.

Related posts:

• Why televangelists are not (all) con artists
• In which I receive a prophecy from a televangelist
• I am a cult survivor

The Economist's Pomegranate blog writes about the travails of Egypt's sukuk law, championed by the MB but blocked by al-Azhar in one of the many unintended consequences of the shoddy constitution:

Egypt’s finance minister, Al-Mursi Al-Sayed Hegazy, says sukuk issuance could generate $10 billion a year for the country. That is highly unlikely any time soon, considering the current junk status accorded by ratings agencies to Egypt’s ordinary bond issues. But given the severity of the country’s economic situation, the protracted IMF negotiations over a possible $4.8 billion loan (which Salafists have also attacked despite a proposed interest of only 2%), and growing global demand for Islamic banking, the scholars of Al Azhar might be wise to spare the hair-splitting. Egypt right now needs every piastre of money it can find.

Sukuks are a fine investment vehicle, but I differ on the view that al-Azhar is hair-splitting. The issue al-Azhar has taken up is that sukuks, by their very nature, involved the lender taking as collateral the investment project itself. Azhar opposes their use in state projects (as opposed to private ones) because public goods would risk falling into lenders' hands. Since this is precisely the kind of situation that led to Egypt coming under British overlordship, Azhar's position is not surprising — especially considering that considering the state of Egypt's finances, a default on sukuks is not unlikely. The real problem here is that the Muslim Brothers want to change the terms of sukuks so that such collaterals are avoided in the case of public projects. Except if that's the case, in Sharia terms this is not a sukuk anymore. It's something else. The Brothers cannot have their cake and eat it too, by claiming to implement Sharianomics and then bending these supposedly holy rules.

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Some hilarious language in this Brotherhood defense of Egyptian Ministry of Supply Bassem Ouda — which the opposition would like to see replaced by a neutral figure to prevent the MB from getting an electoral advantage through control of the ministry, particularly after allegations that state property was being distributed by the MB in electoral campaigning in January — but that is being spun here as an attack on a stalwart and heroic figure. Like all propaganda pieces, it sounds very silly, particularly when it claims Mr Ouda "invented" popular committees, to have "solved" the problem of flour smuggling, etc.

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I used to joke that Egyptians have their own reality distortion field, which once entered can lead you to believe that their country is center of the universe and where black is white, the patently untrue is brandied as incontrovertible fact, and a person will assure you of one thing when its opposite is plain to see in front of your very eyes. 

In the current media scene, the Egyptian reality distortion field has multiplied into (at least) two views of reality: one in which the Muslim Brotherhood is a savior that will guide the country to a Renaissance and Mohammed Morsi is geopolitical genius; another in which an Iranian-Israeli-American plot to install the Brotherhood threatens to unravel the country. The latter discourse is more shrill and insane, perhaps due to the fact that Islamists control a small minority of the print media in the country, that their numerous satellite channels have less compelling non-religious programming, and that their normal discourse is bizarre and nasty enough for the propaganda to be relatively tame. The two worlds co-exist and occasionally collide, a bit like the sci-fi show Fringe.

The latest salvo in a string of completely over-the-top anti-MB news "stories" this month is the allegation that State Security recorded conversations between Hamas and MB leaders during the 2011 uprising that showed Hamas had an operational around Tahrir Square. These recordings were recently presented to MB strongman Khairat al-Shater, the story goes,  Leading anti-MB commentators such as already calling it treason, even though the existence of these recordings (and the whole story) has been denied not only by Hamas and the Brothers, but also the ministry of interior. Still, most anti-MB media are running with it, as is anti-MB regional media such as al-Arabiya. It's not that some Hamas-MB contact during the uprising is unlikely, but the way this story has been spun goes far beyond that.

This comes after a month of stories such as the claim that Morsi has promised Sudan to return the Halayeb Triangle, continuous allegations that the MB is planning to get rid of Minister of Defense Abdelfattah al-Sisi, recurrent claims of a MB plot to settle Sinai with Palestinians, and much more of the sort. One might put it down to anti-MB hysteria, but what it really amounts to is a sustained campaign of destabilization via the private media, probably instigated by security agencies. It is becoming a very tiresome feature of the media-political landscape of Egypt, one that keeps the country constantly on edge.

A reader pointed me to a recent controversy about an astronomy class being taught at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.  The topic is being discussed at Jerry Coyne's blog, Why Evolution is True: “Science” course at Ball State University sneaks in religion.

Dr. Coyne documents the contents of the course syllabus and reading list which clearly promotes an Old-Earth Creationism/Intelligent Design theology.  Dr. Coyne argues that this is a violation of  church-state separation since Ball State is a publicly-supported university.

However, Lawrence Moran @ sandwalk (Is It Illegal to Teach Intelligent Design Creationism in American Universities?) suggests this may not be a church-state separation issue as:

1. the class is not a required class to graduate, so the analogy with American public schools breaks down, where often such a science class might be required to graduate;
2. allowing the state to dictate content, even when it is nonsense, may be an academic freedom issue.

I found these good arguments, but the key decision point for me was PZ Myers' take at Pharyngula on the topic:  I have to disagree with Jerry Coyne.  Quoting PZ:

No, sorry, not right — academic freedom is the issue here, and professors have to have the right to teach unpopular, controversial issues, even from an ignorant perspective. The first amendment does not apply; this is not a course students are required to take, and it’ss at a university, which students are not required to attend. It’s completely different from a public primary or secondary school. A bad course is an ethical problem, not a legal one. It’s also an issue that the university has to handle internally.

Myers raises the issue that these types of things happen occasionally at universities, where a (sometimes tenured) faculty member might go loopy and the university has to find the balance between preserving its reputation and its contractual obligations.

I've occasionally done some research on the professional history of the cranks I've dealt with or heard about through this blog.  I have frequently found evidence of the things PZ describes at these universities and professional institutions, where a faculty member goes off the deep end and the university can't fire them for contractual reasons.  The university often resorts to assigning the problematic faculty member to responsibilities where their craziness can't do much harm.

It is not an ideal solution, but it is a solution.

And on a different topic: Best Response to Creationism Ever!

This is a couple of years old, but it was recently sent around a skeptics list I'm on, and I don't think I've mentioned it before.  It is probably the simplest illustration of flawed creationist reasoning.

Think Outside The Box (The Cutest Response to Creationism Ever!)  Interesting that it appears on a site promoting christianity.   An earlier site: My [confined] Space: Religious Logic which has a link in the comments to the original image source

Emo Philips:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump.

I said, "Don't do it!"
He said, "Nobody loves me."
I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?"
He said, "A Christian."
I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me, too! What franchise?"
He said, "Baptist."
I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Baptist."
I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist."
I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region."
I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912."

I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over. 

--Nick

Warning: this will be a rant. So it’s not very nice.

When you’re about to graduate from college, people tend to ask you what you’re planning on doing with yourself afterwards. So I often tell people that I’m going to grad school to study social work.

Most people respond to this positively or at least neutrally, but there is a substantial minority of people do not. Every so often I’ll run into a dude (it’s usually a dude)–he might have an MBA or plans to get one, and he sneers at me, flashing his Rolex, and says, ”Social work, huh? Not gonna make a lot of money with that, are you?”

For starters, I just want to point out that this is a really quick way to reveal yourself to be a douchebag. You might not care that you’re revealing yourself as a douchebag, but then again, you might, especially since the way that this usually goes is that you’re flirting with me and perhaps hoping I’ll be impressed with your business acumen and earning potential. Nope!

In any case, though, I don’t understand why people think this is appropriate. How much money someone makes is a private matter, and you’d never think to make a comment like this to someone who’s already well into their career. But young people, apparently, do not deserve that sort of courtesy, so you should definitely feel free to pry into our financial situation at any time.

(To be clear: unless you are my parents, or other people from whom I might ever conceivably ask to borrow money, how much I make currently or in the future is none of your business.)

And I know everyone who makes these comments probably thinks they’re being incredibly original and edgy, but actually, people who go into fields like mine meet these douchebags all the time, so we’re quite aware of what people think about our earning potential. Even if we didn’t, though, it might shock you to know that people research these things when they make decisions about their career! Yup, college students planning for the future. Imagine that. When I was deciding about grad school, I checked starting and median salaries for people with the degree and license I hoped to get, including specifically in New York City. I also figured out how much my education will cost and now know how much and for how long I can expect to pay back my grad school loans.

Is this information pleasant? No, not really. But I already know it, and you don’t need to remind me. I’ll do just fine without your (random stranger’s) advice.

What’s funny is that some people seem completely incapable of realizing that not everyone cares all that much about how much money they make. I mean, yes, people should probably plan to be able to live on what they’ll be making. But that’s about all I care about that. Will I be able to live reasonably on it? Will I be able to occasionally buy myself nice things or take trips? Yup. It’d be nice to have more money, but I’m sure there are plenty of high-powered doctors and lawyers who would say that it’d be nice to work a few less hours. Just like they chose to make that tradeoff, I’m choosing to make this one.

It’s also important to note that I get very different responses when I say that I’m getting a degree in social work than when I say I’m going to be a therapist. In fact, I’m doing both; I’m getting that degree in order to be a more effective and more intersectional therapist. But when I tell people that I’m studying to become a therapist, that conjures up images of helping middle-class white ladies deal with their divorces. When I tell people I’m studying social work, that conjures up very different images. And generally they involve not making very much money.

There are, in fact, many things you can say when someone tells you they’re going to study social work that are not “Pfft, not gonna make a lot of money with that, are you?”. Here are a few:

• “Wow, that must be a difficult job. What made you decide to go into that field?”
• “Which populations would you want to work with?”
• “Do you want to open a private practice someday?”
• “Would you ever want to do social work research?”
• “So what is social work, exactly?”

Yes, you can have a conversation that’s not just about money! So if the first thing you can think of to say about my career plans is that, surprise surprise, they won’t make me much money, I feel sorry for you. Because not only are you a douchebag, but you’re a pretty unimaginative one at that, since it’s apparently impossible for you to even entertain the notion that there’s more to choosing a career than choosing how much money you’d like to make.

I love the idea of simulating evolution through computer models. The purpose of such an exercise is not so much to prove that evolution happened, or to prove that complexity can evolve from simple rulesets (though that’s certainly important), but to show that randomness and flexibility in solving tasks can create novel approaches that are more creative even than anything that intelligences like ourselves have worked out.

This particular example shows some behaviours from creatures built out of four types of blocks that emulate hopping, running and dragging themselves along a course, in a simulation where creatures that make it across a trial field quickest are rewarded by having more offspring in subsequent generations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ptOeByLA4

If you remember the Mona Lisa Project showing how randomly selected polygons can approximate a target image over time, that’s an example of brutal natural selection, where every iteration generates modifications on the last image’s “DNA” and selects the one of the two that is closer to the original. By default, with that kind of brutal evolution, you’re going to always and only select the one that’s closer, so you’re in a way directing evolution.

I decided that was too stringent, and wanted to prove that these same rules would work under more lenient conditions — e.g., ten offspring of an image with random mutations, and some of the less-adapted would randomly be killed. And I showed even more lenient selection criteria work. I also noticed a sort of punctuated equilibrium, sometimes resulting in evolutionarily novel and theoretically advantageous creatures emerging then being selected out completely by accident.

I really want to play around with the source code for this physics simulation, and/or build something similar myself. I’m sure I could introduce other types of blocks — like ones that give a creature lift if waved against air (e.g. pseudo-wings). Perhaps a hollow version of the hard-tissue structure, for creating hollow bones which are lightweight but brittle, and adding weight values to each block and incurring penalties based on how much space each creature takes up. Maybe even simulating creature failure, injuries due to flapping about senselessly, which impose huge penalties to reproductive fitness based on getting injured. Maybe rocky terrain, or water. So many things I’d like to see, just for the sake of seeing how a computer and a random number generator handles any given problem I throw at it.

I think BAHFest — the festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses — has been made entirely redundant. It’s an event to mock the absurdly adaptationist hypotheses put forward by some scientists, and it’s intended to be extravagantly ridiculous. But then, you look at some ideas that are inexplicably popular among scientists, and you realize…it’s a little too close to reality.

I’m speaking of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.

The Guardian is running yet another article on the goofy idea that we evolved from swimming apes, and that all of the unique features of our species are a product of adaptations to an aquatic lifestyle. It’s complete nonsense: there is no evidence of long-term residence of our species in the water, and the proponents tend to invent the most outrageous panglossian explanations, fitting data to the hypotheses instead of the other way around. At least this story has one new contrivance I’d never heard before. Take it away, Rhys Evans!

“Humans have particularly large sinuses, spaces in the skull between our cheeks, noses and foreheads,” he added. “But why do we have empty spaces in our heads? It makes no sense until we consider the evolutionary perspective. Then it becomes clear: our sinuses acted as buoyancy aids that helped keep our heads above water.”

<stunned silence>

But…but…but every mammal, as far as I know, has a head full of sinuses! Have you ever taken a mouse skull apart? They’re amazingly spongy. Here are some sections through a mouse skull to show you what I mean:

Coronal sections. There is a distinct osteomeatal complex within the nose that drains the true maxillary sinus as well as ethmoids. The true maxillary sinus is located lateral to the osteomeatal complex, and unlike the other sinuses, is lined by submucosal glands. This true maxillary sinus has a single ostium. Each nasal passage is separated by nasal septum. The posterior septum is deficient along its inferior aspect, and the two nasal passageways communicate freely just anterior to nasopharynx.

Isn’t that just beautiful? It’s fairly typical, too: mammals have these elaborate spaces to lighten the skull, humidify inspired air, and in some provide expanded surface area for olfaction — but I suspect the slight contribution of sinuses to those functions means that they’re actually a consequence of conserved developmental programs to build the skull. They’re there as a byproduct of developmental processes in which a scaffold is assembled first, and then thickens and fills in over time. The density of the skull is relatively easily regulated by modifying the timing of its development.

Just because they’re pretty, here’s another image of mouse skulls:

Plates 1 and 2 display three-dimensional computed tomography (CT) reconstructions of mouse skull in axial and lateral-oblique views. Plates A to F display coronal fine cut CT scan images, confirming our histologic planes of section.

So, did mice have an aquatic ancestor? Doesn’t this hypothesis imply that every mammal descended from an aquatic ancestor? (I shouldn’t ask that: my experience with AAH fanatics is that they joyfully answer “yes” to the question.)

I also wonder if these people ever go swimming. Somehow, my sinuses don’t seem to work very effectively as water wings.

Michael Crawford offers a familiar absurdity: the nutritional argument from docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). DHA is one of those omega-3 fatty acids that is used to build brains, and it’s found in high concentration in lots of seafood. The true zealots consider this indisputable proof that we evolved by eating lots of clams.

“It boosts brain growth in mammals. That is why a dolphin has a much bigger brain than a zebra, though they have roughly the same body sizes. The dolphin has a diet rich in DHA. The crucial point is that without a high DHA diet from seafood we could not have developed our big brains. We got smart from eating fish and living in water.

“More to the point, we now face a world in which sources of DHA – our fish stocks – are threatened. That has crucial consequences for our species. Without plentiful DHA, we face a future of increased mental illness and intellectual deterioration. We need to face up to that urgently. That is the real lesson of the aquatic ape theory.”

An experiment: let’s feed zebras bucketloads of DHA, and watch their brains expand to 3-5 pound blobs that give them advanced communications abilities!

Oh, wait. It won’t work. There’s such a thing as neuroplasticity, but brains aren’t quite that flexible. I’m willing to believe that increased availability of the building blocks of brains might remove a constraint on growth, but not that it’s causal, as Crawford claims. Even feeding many generations of zebras DHA isn’t going to affect brain size much at all…and there’s no evidence that terrestrial herbivores are in any way limited by the availability of DHA.

For one thing, they synthesize it. We humans synthesize it, too. We also get it from the herbivores we eat, and certain plants are rich in the precursors to DHA. Vegans have to pay attention to get their DHA requirements met, but it’s not particularly difficult, and you don’t see lifelong vegetarians walking around with itty-bitty pinheads.

There are good reasons to be deeply concerned about declining fish stocks, but preserving a resource vital to the formation of our brains isn’t one of them. There are many people around the world who don’t eat seafood — there are entire ethnic groups who haven’t touched the stuff for generations. There are big-brained primate species that virtually never eat fish. How do they survive? How do they avoid “mental illness and intellectual deterioration”? They get it from other dietary sources.

Mammals in general are larger brained than other animals, are we to use that as an argument that all mammals went through an aquatic stage in their evolution…oh, wait. I did it again. The True Believers will just say “YES!” to that.

Hey, boys and girls, does anyone remember the IDEA clubs? IDEA was short for Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness, and the plan was that they’d form all these advocacy groups at universities all over the country, and from there, take over the world! It was going to be a REVOLUTION…one driven by dishonest, conservative Christians who wanted to roll back the progressive agenda and install a devout theocracy in its place.

The IDEA club is where Casey Luskin got his reputation as a diligent little gerbil for the cause. He was one of the founders of the model organization at UC San Diego, which is highlighted on the main IDEA Center club page. Amusingly, it’s a dead link now.

Likewise, if you read the various blurbs on that site, there are ever-shifting numbers of these clubs around: they claim a high of 35 worldwide, and have a pull-down menu listing them all, but you will click in vain — it doesn’t work, and the links go nowhere. Elsewhere, they say they’ve got 25 active clubs, but at the bottom of the page there are a collection of links to them…they’ve got 10. All of them lead to empty placeholder pages on the IDEA center site, except one, which futilely tries to take you to a defunct Geocities site.

It’s a dismal and empty virtual ghost town. Visit it and listen carefully and you might hear the sad sighs of creationists long gone, and maybe occasionally the cackling, triumphant laughter of a rational human being passing by to gaze on the fading works of intelligent design, and gloat.

Meanwhile, the Secular Student Alliance has been booming, with 378 groups. The links actually work on their page.

Make the comparison. It’s clear where the momentum lies.

by Matthew Cobb

Jerry (see previous post) is rightfully pleased that the excellent Jab Amurad of the fabulous NPR programme Radiolab has mentioned WEIT’s twitter feed (@evolutoinistrue) in the NYT. Radiolab is marvellous (and I too have been on it in an adult-rated episode, along with fellow-Brits Steve Jones and Tim Birkhead…) so Jerry’s pleasure is quite justified.

BUT, like the curmudgeon he is (don’t forget, he calls this a WEBSITE when we all know it’s a BLOG – I’ll probably get banned for that), Jerry can’t resist griping about Twitter, suggesting it’s all about what you have for breakfast etc etc. Jerry, that is so 2007. Twitter today is MUCH more interesting, and even funny. My proof, the current spoof hashtag that’s keeping people all over the world busy on Sunday when they should be doing something else: #spaceape.

This arose earlier today as a spoof of the silly ‘aquatic ape’ hypothesis that Elaine Morgan popularised in the 1970s and which argues that the human lineage spent a long time in the sea, which claims to explain our (relative) lack of thick hair, fat distribution etc. This has resurfaced (excuse the pun) because in the Observer (aka the Sunday Guardian), Robin McKie has published an article about an upcoming conference on the topic, which got the folks at the Guardian, and many of the commenters very excited. I’m not going to go into the whole thing again (Greg posted a nice, brief piece with good links back in 2009, or you could look at today’s excellent post by Paolo Viscardi), but please feel free if you wish to chip in below.

Rather than get into unhelpful 140 character squabbles, the good people of Twitter decided to make fun of the whole basis of the idea (apparent correlations with no evidence) by suggesting that humans in fact evolved from space apes. Here are just a few of the recent ones (I particularly like the last one). You don’t need to be on Twitter, you can see it all here. [EDIT: The whole #spaceape thing was the idea of Brenna Hassett (@Brennawalks) on her BLOG].

The weekend is upon us, and your Curmudgeon is here to feed your spiritual hunger. To that end we are bringing you another inspiring video by the brilliant and articulate leader of David Rives Ministries.

The thing is titled Uniformitarianists: Scoffers? You will see that the rev is so intellectually versatile that he is able to discuss the foundations of Charles Lyell‘s work. Lyell, as you know, was the foremost geologist of his day, and a close friend of Charles Darwin.

The rev tells us that Lyell was a scoffer, who foolishly thought that understanding the present is the key to the past, which means that the world can be understood as the result of natural observable processes, rather than scriptural catastrophism (e.g., the Flood).

The video runs for only 80 seconds (before the commercial at the end), and you’ll find that it’s time well spent. You’ll be returning to this one again and again. After you’re recovered from the experience, go ahead and use the comments as an Intellectual Free Fire Zone.

Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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The Pew Trust quizzed 1000 randomly-selected people about general knowledge of Science and Technology and then invited people interested in the report to take the quiz, themselves.  The quiz, as well as the report is here. The results tend to be all over the map and only one of them has to do with the history of the earth.  I think that if you structured a quiz around that topic, the results would be much worse. 

For the quiz, almost 80% of people knew that the main role of red blood cells is to carry oxygen to the cells, while only 20% of those quizzed knew that nitrogen makes up most of atmospheric gas.  The only prehistorically-based question: "The continents have been moving over millions of years and will continue to move" was good, with 77% of people correctly answering it. The sobering take-away message, though, is that if you got all of them right (I did), you did better than 93% of those quizzed.  I wonder how people would do on the Dinosaur quiz (yesterday's post)?

I have said it before – these militant climate change denial/contrarian/pseudosceptics do live in a different world – or at least a different hemisphere (see Australia’s “New Normal?” and Climate contrarians/deniers are cherry picking again). But here I want to illustrate their behaviour in their denial internet echo chamber where they pass on every scrap of information supporting their conspiracy theories of the great “global warming hoax.”

The easy copy and paste key commands on computers has a lot to answer for.

Consider this latest bit of silliness at Richard Treadgold’s local blog – Climate Conversation Group. Richard Cumming, who Treadgold, or at least Richard Cumming himself, considers a very bright scientific investigator, is continually pasting links to scientific papers and other blogs in the echo chamber. Extensive quotes of abstracts and analysis.

His posting frequency is so high I sometimes think Richard Treadgold’s claim the blog receives more than 1,400,000 visits a year may be correct.*

Today he posted a link purportedly to a new paper in Nature Climate Change: Atmospheric verification of anthropogenic CO₂ emission trends by Roger J. Francey et al. It’s behind a pay wall so those without institutional access will have to make do with the abstract.

But see how Cumming presents this paper (in a comment on the ironically titled post by Treadgold “ IPCC created and controlled by activists). He implies an abstract completely different to the real abstract (see table below).

Abstract as implied by Richard Cumming at Climate Conversation Group blog

Actual abstract at Nature Climate Change, 3, 520–524, (2013)

New paper demonstrates temperature drives CO2 levels, not man-made CO2. A recent paper published in Nature Climate Change finds a disconnect between man-made CO2 and atmospheric levels of CO2, demonstrating that despite a sharp 25% increase in man-made CO2 emissions since 2003, the growth rate in atmospheric CO2 has slowed sharply since 2002/2003. The data shows that while the growth rate of man-made emissions was relatively stable from 1990-2003, the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 surged up to the record El Nino of 1997-1998. Conversely, growth in man-made emissions surged ~25% from 2003-2011, but growth in atmospheric CO2 has flatlined since 1999 along with global temperatures. The data demonstrates temperature drives CO2 levels due to ocean outgassing, man-made CO2 does not drive temperature, and that man is not the primary cause of the rise in CO2 levels.

International efforts to limit global warming and ocean acidification aim to slow the growth of atmospheric CO2, guided primarily by national and industry estimates of production and consumption of fossil fuels. Atmospheric verification of emissions is vital but present global inversion methods are inadequate for this purpose. We demonstrate a clear response in atmospheric CO2 coinciding with a sharp 2010 increase in Asian emissions but show persisting slowing mean CO2 growth from 2002/03. Growth and inter-hemispheric concentration difference during the onset and recovery of the Global Financial Crisis support a previous speculation that the reported 2000–2008 emissions surge is an artefact, most simply explained by a cumulative underestimation (~ 9 Pg C) of 1994–2007 emissions; in this case, post-2000 emissions would track mid-range of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emission scenarios. An alternative explanation requires changes in the northern terrestrial land sink that offset anthropogenic emission changes. We suggest atmospheric methods to help resolve this ambiguity.

Complete misrepresentation, or what!

Actually his implied abstract is just a blog post he has copied and pasted straight from The Hocky Shtick - a companion blog in the denial echo chamber.

A humourous aside though Richard Treadgold lapped up this brilliant bit of research copy and past by Cumming. He commented:

“A gamebreaker! The paper shows quite a different curve from the Mauna Loa graph so they must have used different data ;. . . . .this looks like dynamite.”

Poor soul. Treadgold doesn’t understand that this new paper plots atmospheric CO₂ flux – the rate of change of C – not the actual levels themselves as in the Mauna Loa graph (see below). Of course the curves will be different you fool!

So another climate change denial meme has been born – actually a double barreled one thanks to Treadgold’s little burst of joy:

1.  Francey’s paper “demonstrates temperature drives CO₂ levels, not man-made CO₂.”
2. It also proves that the classic plot for atmospheric CO₂ levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory may be a hoax!

Trouble is – both memes are completely wrong.

Let’s see if they have legs though. Which  will be the next blog in the echo chamber to pass the meme along?

As Richard Cumming commented somewhere else “The internet will do the rest.”

---

* We only have his word for that – he has never allowed public access to the statcounter he used to have installed and has recently removed it. He claimed there was something faulty with it because it gave him the wrong results!

Similar articles

Well this story is appearing all over. It is showing up (scraped word for word from this piece in the Huffington Post) on “end of the world” type sites. It is scary but even in PA, I’ve seen this phenomenon before. Whirlpool Video: Vortex In Latvian River Devours All That Enters. Set in Dviete, Latvia, near the banks of the Daugava River, the video depicts a mysterious whirlpool churning — and destroying — all that enters. Huge chunks of ice? Gone. Floating islands of debris? Annihilated. “Swallowing everything dragged towards its direction,” reads the description by Jānis Astičs, “this monstrous whirlpool looks as if a plug has been pulled from the ground beneath.” Here is the video: Upon first look at this, I immediately suspected what it might be. Then, other articles noted that comments in the Huffington Post piece may have hit on the same – it’s possible a result of the karstic bedrock underneath.  Openings exist in the solutioned bedrock underground. Connected passageways can drain water or loose surface material above. It appears that there has been significant rainfall or ice melt here. Spring is the prime time for sinkholes to form – the ground thaws, water washes [...]

About a week ago, Tina Dupuy wrote a column that was widely published: Save our schools from creationism. Here’s a sample:

… I don’t think creationism hurts children any more than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. These are myths we’re told as kids, find out they’re not true and go on to tell them to our own kids. It’s tradition; who cares? My mother had every right to fill my head with all of the weird ideas in hers (she also believes in the End of Days, which explains her love of Fox News).

It’s the teaching of creationism in schools that’s the issue. First off, you don’t “teach” creationism; you deny science, evidence and reason with a story. Second: Going to the doctor instead of praying is already putting faith in science over religion. That debate is over (unless you’re a Christian Scientist). “Teaching the controversy” is teaching two myths: creationism and that there’s a lack of scientific consensus on evolution. There’s a lack of political consensus on creationism, but that’s it.

For some reason that inspired several letters-to-the-editor all over the country. We didn’t think any of them were amusing enough for our “Creationist Wisdom” series, but there were so many that we can’t ignore them. We’ll give you excerpts from three, with bold font added by us. First, in the Bennington Banner of Bennington, Vermont, there’s this: Taking exception to Tina Dupuy column. It says:

Try to loosen up a little, Tina. The “lesser minds” such as Sir Issac Newton for example, or the thousands of contemporary learned peer reviewed scientists and physicians along with the majority of the inhabitants of Planet Earth who espouse spirituality of one type or another and agree that there might just be forces at work in this world that even “great minds” such as yours & your companions cannot explain, empathize with your repeated childhood traumas — particularly those ones revolving around Santa Claus.

Rather condescending. Then, in the Farmington Daily Times of Farmington, New Mexico, there’s this: We need creation taught in our schools. That one says:

It seems apparent that Ms. Dupuy believes the theory on evolution and only wants this to be taught in our schools. We, who believe in the creation truth, from God’s Word, would also like that only creation be taught in our schools.

[...]

The importance of an eternal punishment is too much to not investigate. To just believe what others tell you is foolish.

Indeed it is. One more excerpt from that letter:

I say, “Let us give our children the oppertunity [sic] to see the truth of our origin, existence and future.” We need creation taught in our schools.

Yes, that’s what we need.

The third letter is in the Oneida Daily Dispatch of Oneida, New York. That one is: Evolution remains only one theory. The letter-writer says:

In regards to the creationism column by Tina Dupuy on Sunday, April 14, irrational exuberance for a six-day creation story, most likely, does have a life of its own. However, it is also likely that it would be irrational exuberance, on the basis of a THEORY of evolution, to eliminate a higher power, i.e. God Almighty, when considering the matter of our origin and that of the universe.

Yeah, it’s only a theory — what’s that compared to God? Here’s more:

I believe it is preferable, and truly wise, to, by faith, believe that “In the beginning, God” and then go forward with that premise.

That certainly beats a theory any day. It ends like this:

Then, when looking toward the heavens on a clear starlit night, humbly consider the words [scripture quote].

As we said, none of those letters was very impressive, but perhaps the totality of them will compensate for that.

Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

The title of this poem is “Gate A4.”

Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.” I think this poem may be making the rounds, this week, but that’s as it should be. (via

awelltraveledwoman) (Source: oliviacirce, via awelltraveledwoman)

Certainly this is copyrighted, and you’ll honor that by making sure that the name of the poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, remains attached to it.

It’s National Poetry Month.

Analyzing this piece, I’m not sure where the greater poetry is, whether the meter, or the story.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. Kelly Sennholz, who Tweeted links.

Is this viral yet? (More, and resources):

• Still Amazed
• At the Academy of American Poets
• Biographical profile of Naomi Shihab Nye, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
• Humanities Roundtable discussion of the poem
• Spirituality and Practice
• Gratefulness.org
• National Poetry Month (poietes.wordpress.com)
• “WHEN DID YOU STOP BEING A POET?” Naomi Shihab Nye ~ the charm of and lesson in “One Boy Said” (musingbymoonlight.com)

Related articles

Filed under: Airlines, Poetry, Travel Tagged: Albuquerque, Gate A4, Naomi Shihab Nye, National Poetry Month, Poetry, Travel

Unless events should prove us to be spectacularly wrong, this will be our final post about the suit brought by David Coppedge, the creationist who claims he was wrongfully demoted and later fired by his employer because he was promoting Intelligent Design (ID) on the job. Coppedge used to work as a computer technician for Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is part of Caltech. He also maintains a creationist website — Creation-Evolution Headlines.

The last time we wrote about him was David Coppedge Case — Appeal or No Appeal?, when it seemed to us that the time for filing an appeal had already come and gone. But we weren’t certain of that, so we were appropriately cautious about declaring that the case was over.

Now another month has passed, and there’s been nothing in the news about the Coppedge case. His lawyer hasn’t said anything — if he has it’s escaped our news sweeps — and the Discoveroids seem to have tossed Coppedge down the memory hole. So it’s time we let go of this one. No more news sweeps, no more checking the court clerk’s website, no more anything.

What if we’re wrong? That’s happened before. We’ll admit it and accept reality. But until then, David Coppedge now joins that long and wandering cyber caravan of once-newsworthy creationists whose names made up our headlines, but who seem to have faded into the cosmic background radiation. Where are they now? Will we ever hear again about Ronda Storms, Don McLeroy, Kathy Martin, Kent Hovind, Anna Falling (remember her?), Rick Santorum, and so many others?

From our Curmudgeonly perspective, they now belong to that vast and ever-growing Legion of the Lost — people who live their lives in a fog of reality-denial, determined to compel others to join them in the darkness and accept their thinking as the norm.

Although we don’t want any harm to come to them, we nevertheless hope never to hear about them again. They’ve had their day; now they should gracefully retire from the arena — perhaps to live in a cave or on some distant mountaintop — and let others take their places in the never-ending reality wars. We’ll be here, to chronicle the controversy.

Meanwhile, this being a non-news sort of post, feel free to use the comments as an Intellectual Free-Fire Zone.

Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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I hadn’t known about this case, reported in today’s New York Times, but perhaps some of you had. It’s a fascinating tale about the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, who fudged data for dozens of papers—data comporting with people’s intuitive ideas about human nature—and became famous along the way.  He eventually got caught and fired.  He seems to mistake explanation for apology, and I think his only regret is that he got caught.

Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.

Stapel gives a lot of excuses but his apologies sound lame.  And while waiting for the investigations to end—get this—he published a book called Derailed, designed to get money by detailing his perfidy. Here’s an explanation but not an apology:

What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.” He named two psychologists he admired — John Cacioppo and Daniel Gilbert — neither of whom has been accused of fraud. “They give a talk in Berlin, two days later they give the same talk in Amsterdam, then they go to London. They are traveling salesmen selling their story.”

The duplicity started when he did a “priming” experiment as a young professor, showing subjects images of an attractive or less attractive female and asking them to rate their own attractiveness. He assumed that the prettier image would make the students, by comparison, rate themselves less attractive, but it didn’t work. He therefore decided to fudge the data to get the desired result. The laborious fudging—his results had to be significant, but not too big, lest they be suspicious—probably took longer than the experiment itself! Nevertheless, the new outcome jibed with what people intuited was true, and he became famous.

Other experiments followed, all faked, in which, for instance, he showed (i.e., fudged) data that white people waiting on a train platform would become more racist if they were surrounded by garbage. (They’d sit farther from a black person in a row of seats.) That was published in Science. Another fraudulent study purported to show that kids who colored a cartoon became more likely to share their candy if the cartoon character was depicted shedding a tear.

Stapel became famous because he got results that jibed with what people “wanted.” And the journal editors and reviewers liked them too.  The Times lays some blame at the door of those reviewers:

At the end of November, the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students. The students were not culpable, even though their work was now tarnished. The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding that Stapel’s fraud went undetected for so long because of “a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data.” If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it. The committees identified several practices as “sloppy science” — misuse of statistics, ignoring of data that do not conform to a desired hypothesis and the pursuit of a compelling story no matter how scientifically unsupported it may be.

Well, according to the article Stapel went to great lengths to make his data seem credible, and the writer of the piece, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, doesn’t seem to have looked at the manuscripts to see if sloppy practices were pervasive (I’d like to know what they were), but reviewers often don’t pore over manuscripts nearly as carefully as committees designed to detect fraud. I don’t blame the system nearly as much as I do Stapel here. I think his students are also at fault: how can you put your name on a Ph.D. dissertation if you didn’t collect the data yourself?

And if you read the piece, Stapel seems curiously unapologetic, like Jonah Lehrer when he got caught making up quotes. Yes, Stapel became depressed, but it seems more because he was found out, not because he committed fraud and ruined the careers of many of his students.

Fortunately, many psychology studies get repeated.  Daryl Bem’s study on precognition, which showed that subjects’ knowledge seemingly affected their behavior in the past (before they had that knowledge), ultimately proved unrepeatable.

I’ve always thought that there should be Institutes for Repeatability, where studies that yielded flashy or novel results should be repeated by independent investigators. Not only in psychology, of course, but also in areas where experiments usually aren’t repeated. Those include ecology and evolutionary biology which, unlike molecular biology, are fields in which successive studies don’t always build on earlier ones (that “building” often means repeating earlier work).  I’m not accusing my colleagues of widespread fraud, of course, but there’s a tendency to publish only positive results (ensuring that 5% of them are wrong), and the messiness of organismal biology means that whole-animal studies may be influenced by the vagaries of weather, location, the population chosen, or other factors that make the results hard to generalize.

My own guess—and this is pure speculation—is that about 30-40% of whol- organismal biology studies in ecology and evolution would not give the same results if repeated. Two classic studies of this type were Thoday and Gibson’s early work showing that a population of flies could split into two reproductively isolated units (in effect, species) when selected for divergent bristle numbers but still allowed to mate with each other. That paper was published in Nature, and yet 19 attempts to repeat it failed. Likewise, early studies showing that putting populations of fruit flies through “bottlenecks” (very small population sizes) could, after a number of generations, make those populations reproductively isolated from each other, suggesting that random genetic drift itself could contribute to speciation.  Repeats of those studies didn’t give the flashy results.

The lesson: if a study seems too good to be true, let someone else repeat it.  And give them funding to do so—something that no funding agency wants to do.

Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn’t the slightest smattering of background, and he keeps falling flat on his face. It’s hilarious! The Discovery Institute is so hard up for competent talent, though, that they keep letting him make a spectacle of his ignorance. I really, really hope Luskin lives a long time and keeps his job as a frontman for Intelligent Design creationism. He just makes me so happy. His latest tirade is inspired by the New York Times, which ran an article on highlights from the coelacanth genome. Luskin doesn’t think very deeply, so he keeps making these arguments that he thinks are terribly damaging to evolution because he doesn’t comprehend the significance of what he’s saying. For instance, he sneers at the fact that we keep finding conserved elements in the genome, because as we all know, there are lots of conserved elements. Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was found between Hox-gene-associated DNA across these organisms isn’t very surprising. Stop, Casey, and think. Here’s this fascinating observation, that we keep finding conserved genes and conserved regulatory regions between mice and fish, which ought to tell you something, and your argument against a specific example is that it isn’t rare? It really tells you something when your critics’ rebuttal to a piece of evidence is that you’ve got so much evidence for your position that they’re tuning out whenever you talk about the detais. This is Luskin’s approach to every example given in the NY Times article: ‘Yeah? So? There are homologous genes all over the place!’ I think Luskin might...
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Geologic language is very conducive to puns. It’s inevitable: you get two geologists together in the same room, they’re gonna let loose with some geo puns. It’s as certain as gabbro being called “black granite” by purveyors of quality countertops.

And we can keep it up past the point of reason. But we’re very gneiss about it.

Blue: I like rocks! I am a nerd!

Black: likes this

Purple: Geology rocks.

Green: Don’t take it for granite.

Green: Shale I continue?

Purple: Of quartz.

Green: Igneous is bliss.

Blue: Wow! I love this convo! Thanks for being so gneiss.

Green: It was sedimentary, my dear Blue.

Orange: You’re definitely one of the boulder people I know!

Yellow: Groaning!!!!! lol

Red: Don’t let erosion wear you down!

Cyan: Oh Blue, if you weren’t such a dol-i-mite make more fun of you!

Purple: I gravel at your feet, master of puns.

That is made of epic win. There’s some in there I hadn’t even heard! I’d better start rocking it, or someone might bring the hammer down.

(Thank you, I’ll be here all week…)

I just read an Answers in Genesis article whose argument is so simple and elegant I can’t believe I hadn’t heard it before. Namely, the article explains why it suddenly seems like there are gay people all over, when this wasn’t the case in the past—and it does so by bringing together the perfect conservative bogeyman of gay marriage, abortion, and the removal of school prayer. I have to admit it—I was impressed by the ingenuity.

Will God just turn a blind eye to this ongoing genocide? Has God been turning a blind eye to the fact that the Bible, creation, and prayer have been all but eliminated from public schools?

Furthermore, has God been turning a blind eye to the fact that Christian reminders like crosses, nativity scenes, and Ten Commandment displays have been thrown out of public places?

I don’t believe so. Why?

Well, after listening to the 2nd inaugural address by the head of this nation, President Obama, it’s obvious this nation is already under judgment!

During his speech, President Obama stated:

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law [applause] for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. [Applause.]

The hot-button issues of homosexual behavior and “gay” marriage continue to make news across the nation. But now, America’s president has declared his total support for “gay” marriage. He’s made it a priority of his leadership to promote it, according to his inaugural speech.

With the president’s strong support, we will now see an escalation of legislation around America to legalize “gay” marriage. Furthermore, there are indications that people who speak out against what the Bible clearly calls sin and an abomination will be treated as criminals.

With such a flagrant defiance of God’s clear Word, I maintain that these anti-God movements show that America is under judgment. I think of the passage:

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. (Romans 1:24–26)

The fact that men and women are abandoning the roles God created for them is a sign that God is judging. As Romans 1 above declares, He “gave them up.”

In other words, this article argues that God is making people gay as a judgement on America for abortion and the removal of prayer from schools. This argument is so simple and yet appears so internally consistent—I’ve been familiar with that Romans passage since childhood and I can’t believe I didn’t see this explanation coming.

On a more serious note, if this is God’s judgement, I’d say bring it. While televangelists declare every environmental disaster or major storm as God’s judgement on America, this particular judgement doesn’t appear to have so many bad side effects. Or any, really. My gay and lesbian friends—and my trans and bi friends—are normal people just like me, and the lives they lead aren’t any more lawless or unhappy than mine is. Seriously, if this is God’s judgement on America, I’d say God sucks at judgments.

Also, it seems that Answers in Genesis is unaware that there have always been individuals with same-sex attractions, though of course people have understood and constructed sexuality differently over time. I remember thinking, as a child, that the gay rights movement marked the origin of the existence of gay people, but then I grew up and read a book. (Wow, I’m feeling really snarky today!) Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that the increased visibility of LGBTQ individuals over the past isn’t a result of more people suddenly being gay, it’s a result of a movement that has helped increase public acceptance of LGBTQ individuals, which has naturally resulted in more people being willing to be out rather than hiding who they are.

And besides all of that, there have been many societies over the years where abortion has been accepted and visible and where no one has prayed to the God of the Bible, whether in schools or outside of them. Should we suspect rates of homosexuality to correlate with these things? I mean, isn’t that what you would expect if the gay is God’s punishment for abortion and lack of school prayer? I suppose some might claim that the two do correlate—that Ancient Rome had high levels of both abortion and homosexuality—but I’m guessing that an actual systematic study would find that this isn’t the case. (And even if it was the case, correlation does not prove causation.)

But all of that is a bit complicated, and for many people the narrative Answers in Genesis constructs here will be extremely appealing. I know I would have bought it immediately had I read it while still a conservative Christian. So you might want to be prepared to see it come up in the future so that you can respond with more than a dropped jaw. You’ve been warned!

Note #1: As a reader pointed out, this article conflicts with the belief held by many conservative Christians that people aren’t born gay but rather consciously choose that “lifestyle.” In the past at least, Answers in Genesis itself has subscribed to this position: see this article for instance.

Note #2: Another commenter has pointed out that abortion has always existed, and in every time and society. I think Answers in Genesis would respond by saying that today is different because the United States enforced it with a Supreme Court decision.

In Texas, Christian-themed bumper stickers outnumber all others by a huge number.

Some of the non-Christians have a better sense of humor, or at least a willingness to pun:

Of course, in order to get the homophone pun, and the joke, one needs to know a bit about world history and ancient Egyptian religions.  One faces the danger that people in the parking lot at the local Sam’s Club won’t know world history, won’t get the joke, and may take offense.

It’s a form of a test, to see who paid attention in world history and has a sense of humor, and who didn’t pay attention in world history.

I knew a librarian once, a good Christian woman, who hated those “Honk if you love Jesus” bumper stickers.  She said that she once sat on a crowded freeway and counted more than 25 of the things on cars that passed.  No one honked, however, and she feared that meant  people didn’t love Jesus.  Unintentional blasphemy by silence — only in Texas.

Honk if you don’t get the joke.  We’ll find a remedial world history class for you.

More:

• Bumper Stickers (first50.wordpress.com)
• Adam Carolla Mocks ‘Coexist’ Bumper Stickers, Says Terrorists ‘Hate Our Culture’ (breitbart.com)
• Bumper Sticker Wisdom (bodytheologyblog.wordpress.com)

Filed under: Humor, Religion, Texas Tagged: Bumper sticker, Humor, Isis, Religion, Texas

Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 141-143

We’re still in the middle of a long re-hash and review of Buck Williams’ relationship with the Israeli botanist Chaim Rosenzweig.

I’m happy to give the authors a pass on Rosenzweig’s miracle formula. They never really bother to describe it, and the explanations of its purpose and its effect are only ever presented in the sketchiest terms, but we can generously allow that bit to fall under the generally accepted rules for applied phlebotinum.

That’s the generic term for “the versatile substance that may be rubbed on almost anything to cause an effect needed by a plot.” Tim LaHaye’s “prophecies” and Jerry Jenkins “plot” require a miraculous formula that will make the desert bloom. Storytellers are entitled to be allowed such plot devices without being required to actually invent a working prototype. That’s part of the deal.

I’m not sure that deal applies to LaHaye as well as to Jenkins, though. It’s one thing to say, “I’m telling a story, and in this story there are wizards, or warp drives, or Kryptonian supermen, so please just accept those as part of the terms required for enjoying this story.” But it’s quite another thing to say, “The Word of God, as interpreted by me, declares that certain actual events are about to happen, here in reality, very soon, and these will in fact involve miraculous fertility formulas.” The willing suspension of disbelief is something we readers should grant to storytellers, but if the “Bible prophecies” of a “Bible prophet” require the suspension of disbelief, we should not be quite so willing.

It also would have been helpful if Jenkins had bothered to do a better job selling the phlebotinum of Rosenzweig’s miracle formula. Readers don’t ask for much in that regard — the judicious application of scientific-sounding terms like “ionized” or “molecular bonding” or some such would have been enough. (The “science” of phlebotinum doesn’t have to make perfect sense, it just has to sound sufficiently authoritative.)

Unfortunately for the authors, though, the rules of applied phlebotinum don’t apply to fundamental human nature. A storyteller can bend the laws of physics to allow humans to travel faster than light if the plot requires it, or she can invent whole new rules to allow humans to wield magic if that’s what the story needs. But those humans flying at warp-speed or practicing their wand-craft at Hogwarts still need to be recognizably human.

And that’s the problem with the Rosenzweig subplot. It doesn’t matter to readers that there’s not really any such thing as a magic formula to make the desert bloom. But it does matter, a great deal, that there has never been any such thing as humans who would respond to the existence of such a formula the way the alleged humans in these books do.

It had been Chaim Rosenzweig who had first mentioned the name Nicolae Carpathia to Buck. Buck had asked the old man if any of those who had been sent to court him about the formula had impressed him. Only one, Rosenzweig had told him; a young midlevel politician from the little country of Romania. Chaim had been taken with Carpathia’s pacifist views, his selfless demeanor, and his insistence that the formula had the potential to change the world and save lives.

So leaders from all over the world came to talk to Rosenzweig about the potential use of his miraculous agricultural formula, yet only one mentioned that it might be used to help feed the hungry.

No. That’s not possible. That’s less believable than warp-drives or wormholes or wizardry.

It also suggests so many missed opportunities. Nicolae could have persuaded Rosenzweig with a speech about turning stones into loaves of bread — echoing the words of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness and exploring a nice contrast between Christ and Antichrist. Or Nicolae could have made the case that employing Rosenzweig’s formula all over the world instead of just in the tiny state of Israel would be an effective way to recapture carbon in the atmosphere — thus saving the world from the worst potential effects of climate change. (The authors don’t believe in climate change, of course, but that’s all the more a reason to make fighting it a part of the Antichrist’s agenda.)

Buck could hardly remember when he had not been aware of Nicolae Carpathia, though his first exposure even to the name had been in that interview with Rosenzweig. Within days after the vanishings, the man who had seemingly overnight become president of Romania was a guest speaker at the United Nations. His brief address was so powerful, so magnetic, so impressive, that he had drawn a standing ovation even from the press — even from Buck. Of course, the world was in shock, terrified by the disappearances, and the time had been perfect for someone to step to the fore and offer a new international agenda for peace, harmony, and brotherhood.

Carpathia was thrust, ostensibly against his will, into power. He displaced the former secretary-general of the United Nations …

Again, there are impossibilities and implausibilities here that no amount of applied phlebotinum can fix. We read Carpathia’s speech at the U.N. and it was awful — an alphabetical listing of the nations of the world, in nine languages. Even that is fixable, I suppose, with an appeal to another bit of phlebotinum in these stories — Nicolae’s supernatural powers of spellbinding charisma and mind-control. But even if we grant that, there’s still the problem of the authors’ complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what the United Nations is and how it works.

In these books, the U.N. is not an international forum for diplomacy, but a federation of nations. The secretary-general of the U.N. is thus not a toothless diplomat impotently pleading for co-operation, but the most powerful person in the entire world. He is king over kings, president over presidents, prime minister over prime ministers. The U.N. secretary-general rules over and can over-rule any national leader, by fiat apparently. His word is law.

That’s so far removed from anything like reality that this plot development simply cannot be salvaged. And since this plot development is central to the plot of the series, it’s a fatal, un-fixable flaw that sinks the entire story.

If he were simply given free-rein as a storyteller, Jenkins might have been able to fix this. He could have explained that in the alternate universe in which this story is set, the United Nations isn’t like the U.N. we have, but that it instead works like the planetary hierarchy described here. Readers could have gone along with that.

But the rules of this series don’t allow for that. This story is, and must be, set in our world — in this world and in no other, with the same nations, institutions, economics, politics, physics, chemistry and human race we see all around us and read about in the newspaper. Jenkins can make minor cosmetic changes — turning Newsweek into Global Weekly, or turning United into Pan-Continental airlines — but he cannot change anything substantive, transforming the world of his story into a different place unrecognizable to residents of the real world and irreconcilable with the real world we know.

That’s non-negotiable, again, because these books are supposed to be a depiction of the fulfillment of LaHaye’s “Bible prophecies,” and those prophecies, if they are to mean anything, have to unfold in this world and not in some alternate universe with an alternate U.N.

What it really means, then, when we read that “Carpathia was thrust … into power [as] secretary-general of the United Nations” is that Jenkins story can be allowed to stagger along, but LaHaye’s prophecies are henceforth proved to be nonsense. They cannot be fulfilled in this world, only in the alternate universe of Jenkins’ story. And since we do not live in that alternate universe, we do not live in a world in which Tim LaHaye’s interpretation of the Bible is possible.

It’s also not obvious to me that a world “in shock,” from the instantaneous disintegration of every single child would be ripe “for someone to step to the fore and offer a new international agenda for peace, harmony, and brotherhood” as much as it would be ripe for an authoritarian tyrant who promised to avenge their loss and protect them from future harm. Nicolae’s kumbaya message might have persuaded some to trust him, but I think just after the vanishings he could have gained more popular support by standing up and saying, “Christ took your children. I am the Antichrist. I will make him pay. Who’s with me?”

Carpathia was thrust, ostensibly against his will, into power. He displaced the former secretary-general of the United Nations, reorganized it to include ten international mega-territories, renamed it the Global Community, moved it to Babylon (which was rebuilt and renamed New Babylon), and then set about disarming the entire globe.

There are seven verbs in that last sentence. Some of them are merely absurdities while the others are impossibilities. Several are both absurd and impossible.

And none of that can be fixed with an appeal to our willing suspension of disbelief. Poor Jenkins has been given an arbitrary list of “prophecies” that must be fulfilled, whether or not they make any sense. Why would Nicolae want or need to do any of that? Why would anyone else watch him do it without assuming he’d lost his mind? Jenkins’ only answer is the answer LaHaye supplies him: It’s what has been prophesied. And there’s no way to make any of that seem acceptable by reversing the polarity or reconfabulating the tachyon pulse or reassembling all the pieces of the lost amulet of power.

Jenkins half-heartedly tries to wave Rosenzweig’s formula like a magic wand that can transform all this nonsense into sense, but he winds up digging a deeper hole:

It had taken more than Carpathia’s charismatic personality to effect all this. He had a trump card. He had gotten to Rosenzweig. He had convinced the old man and his government that the key to the new world was Carpathia’s and the Global Community’s ability to broker Rosenzweig’s formula in exchange for compliance with international rules for disarmament. In exchange for a Carpathia-signed guarantee of at least seven years of protection from her enemies,* Israel licensed to him the formula that allowed him to extract any promise he needed from any country in the world. With the formula, Russia could grow grain in the frozen tundra of Siberia. Destitute African nations became hothouses of domestic food sources and agricultural exports.

And there, at the end of that paragraph, we get a tiny hint of the one way I can imagine that we could still salvage Jerry Jenkins’ plot.

The formula, Jenkins says, made it possible for every nation on earth to grow rich through “agricultural exports.” Now, we could just take that as further confirmation that Jenkins doesn’t have the first clue about real-world economics. “Export to who?” we could ask, and then laugh at the absurdity of the authors’ ignorance and incuriosity.

Or we could assume that the authors have thought this through and really mean what they’re suggesting. If every nation on Earth is now exporting agricultural products, that can only mean one thing: Extra-terrestrial markets for Earth produce.

And what would we Earthlings get in exchange for the “flowers and grains” that Rosenzweig’s miracle formula would allow us to sell to our new interplanetary trading partners? Unobtainium. Huge, vast amounts of unobtainium — more than any desperately plot-patching storyteller could ever dream of.

With that inexhaustible supply of pure unobtainium, the people of Earth would be able to fuel a planetary phlebotinumizer — a machine so powerful and so incomprehensible that it might even be used to make Tim LaHaye’s “Bible prophecies” slightly less absurd.

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* It’s not clear why a “guarantee of at least seven years of protection from her enemies” would mean anything to the state of Israel described in these books.

We were told — way back on page 8 of the first book — that:

The prosperity brought about by the miracle formula changed the course of history for Israel. Flush with cash and resources, Israel made peace with her neighbors.

So what’s the incentive to sign a treaty promising short-term protection from “enemies” that we’ve already been told don’t exist?

The only remaining “enemies” Israel had were Russia and Ethiopia, and those nations have already taken their best shot — exhausting their entire national arsenals and sacrificing their entire militaries in an all-out assault on Israel that failed to produce a single injury due to the explicit, miraculous intervention by the hand of God.

So here comes Nicolae Carpathia, asking Israel to trade him the miracle formula in exchange for a “guarantee of at least seven years of protection from her enemies.” But Israel has no remaining enemies. And the last enemy they did have was destroyed by the very hand of the Almighty. With God personally intervening to swat down any attack against them, what’s the appeal of a short-term non-aggression pledge from the president of Romania?

The journal Evolution and Education Outreach is a valuable resource to anyone interested in or teaching evolution. Fortunately, it’s just been made an open-access journal, so anyone can read it free online (link is here). While perusing the articles, I found one that I thought was really good for not only teaching students about macroevolution, but learning about one of its paradigmatic cases: the evolution of whales from their ancestors—small hoofed mammals.  The article, by Thewissen et al., is called “From land to water: the origin of whales, dolphins, and porpoises“, and you can download the pdf here.

Although the article is four years old, it’s not out of date and it’s easily accessible to non-scientists. I like it because it completely destroys the ID and claim notion that although there has been “microevolution” (minor changes in form within animal or plan lineages), we don’t see any cases of “macroevolution” (major transitions between “types” of animals or plants).  That notion is absolutely belied by the fossils, for we can see macroevolutionary transitions from fish to amphibians, amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to mammals, reptiles to birds, and so on.  And, of course, we have the macroevolutionary transition from our early ancestors—resembling (but not apeing)—modern chimps and gorillas, to modern humans.

I’ll let you read the article yourself, for it’s one piece on macroevolution that you should have under your belt. (If you want more, there’s Don Prothero’s wonderful book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, which describes many examples of evolution in the fossil record.) But there are two figures that I want to post just because they’re cool.

The first involves a vestigial trait in cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) that is seen only in the embryological state: whiskers. Cetaceans evolved from single whiskered common ancestor that lived on land land: an artiodactyl, or even-toed ungulates). In the course of becoming marine, though, the lineages lost their whiskers.  Nevertheless, they develop briefly in the embryo and then disappear. What better evidence for common ancestry of whales and terrestrial mammals? Here’s a photo from the paper:

And here’s something close to the terrestrial ancestor of the whale, the unlikely candidate Indohyus, a small, cat-sized mammal with separate toes, each of which ended in a hoof.  It’s thought to be related to the common ancestor of cetaceans because of its thickened wall in the middle ear (limited to modern whales, dolphins and porpoises), its dense bones, which would suit it for living part-time in water (heavy bones make it easier to wade), and chemical analysis of its teeth, which show an oxygen 16:18 isotope ratio characteristic of animals who live in the water:

Thewissen et al. mention a video I’ve posted before, showing how a terrestrial artiodactyl might become aquatic. It’s the African mouse deer (Hyemoscus aquaticus also called the “water chevrotain”), which, though terrestrial, stays near water and swims, fully submerged, to escape from predators. This remarkable video shows how the evolution of aquatic behavior might have started:

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Thewissen, J. G. M., L. Cooper, J. George, and S. Bajpai. 2009. From land to water: the origin of whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Evolution: Education and Outreach 2:272-288.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal features an argument between Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, with a cameo by Michael Lynch.

*I fear this may be a very inside evolutionary biology joke which greatly oversimplifies the positions held by all three individuals.