Epsilon Clue

Here’s the video of a talk PZ Myers gave at George Mason University last year, at an event organized by the GMU Rational Response Squad.

It’s possible that you might be able to catch a glimpse of me there.

(HT Shelley.)

I tend to be rather cynical about events like the United We Serve kickoff, in which cabinet secretaries let themselves be photographed doing community service type jobs, such as Trade Representative Kirk feeding homeless people at a soup kitchen, HUD secretary Donovan helping to rebuild a home destroyed by hurricane Katrina, and so forth. I always imagine them tossing their apron or gloves on the ground and rushing off the moment the cameras have left.

But then there’s Rep. Tom Davis’s advice to a radio show caller who said she couldn’t get health insurance because she’s 60 years old and has diabetes. He started by saying that he sympathizes with her, because hey, his 401(k) took a beating as well.

So maybe the sorts of photo-ops I mentioned above can be good, in that they force people at the highest levels of government to mingle with the hoi polloi and at least look like they’re doing something approaching manual labor, for as long as the cameras are rolling.

And while they may be and remain patricians who will never have to do another hour’s manual work in their life, and who will never want for money, at least they may gain enough of a clue to realize that there are people out there with real problems, ones that they can’t fix just by finding a better stockbroker or cutting down on how often they eat out.

I hope that’s not too much to ask.

A woman in Colorado says she was evicted from her apartment for keeping her Easter decorations up too long.

I think I’m leaning toward her side, even though from the brief description it sounds as though her display was unutterably tacky, simply because I want to live in the sort of country where people can show the world just how much taste they lack. And because tacky is fun, in a tacky sort of way.

But the bit that caught my eye was:

“An Easter decoration is a religious statement and should be protected — even if it is just bunnies,” said her attorney, John Pineau.

Bunnies are a religious display? Who knew?

Remember Expelled, the wretched movie starring Ben Stein in which he argued that science — and evolution in particular — causes things like the Holocaust?

Now, at BeliefNet, David Klinghoffer has an article in which he insinuates the same claim about von Brunn, the guy who recently walked into the Holocaust museum downtown and started shooting.

[Quoting von Brunn]:

[T]o the astonishment of the world, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, who emphasized genetics and the homogeneity of the Aryan race, led Germany to an amazing spiritual and economic recovery.

No, he doesn’t cite Darwin by name in the part of his book that’s readable online — the first 6 of 12 chapters. But do you get the general drift? And you want to tell me that ideas don’t have consequences?

Must we go over this again? For one thing, an idea is not responsible for those who believe in it. For another, Klinghoffer isn’t making an argument against the truth of evolutionary ideas, only against their usefulness.

For another thing, the reference to “genetics” is as connected to evolution as it is to animal husbandry, an art that’s been around for thousands of years. Von Brunn’s screeds against miscegenation are rooted in ideas much, much older than Darwin: plain old-fashioned racism, the idea that people outside of one’s clan/nation/whatever are worse, and contact with them is a Bad Thing.

And finally, “is” does not imply “ought”. Science, the search for explanations about how the physical universe works, can tell you that if you do X, then Y will result. The question of whether Y ought to happen is a separate one.

It’s true that if one were to kill people with certain alleles, that the relative frequency of those alleles would decrease in the population. But science does not answer the question, “Should we go around killing people with genes we don’t like?”, any more than the scientific fact that a person falling out of a 10th story window onto pavement will die implies that one should go around pushing people out of windows.

In a follow-up post, Klinghoffer asks,

If in his crazed manifesto he had somehow found support for his thinking not in evolution but in intelligent design, do you think we would have heard nothing about it from the media as in fact we’ve heard nothing (except from me) about his evolutionary thoughts? What if he had based his hate explicitly on Biblical literalist creationism? Or on Roman Catholicism? Or Evangelical Protestantism? Or Orthodox Judaism? Would that similarly have been hushed up?

Klinghoffer himself talks about “the role of evolutionary doctrine, however distorted, in his rationale for racism”. So right off the bat, we’re not talking about sound arguments one way or another. So yeah, if von Brunn had said something like “The pope told me that Jews killed God’s prophet Muhammad, so their descendants should be killed for that”, then it would be unfair to blame his actions on Catholicism.

However, we can contrast this with the case of George Tiller’s murder, where a plausible rationale runs like this: “Abortion is murder. Tiller performs abortions. Therefore, Tiller is a murderer. Killing Tiller would prevent him from performing abortions. Therefore, one murder would prevent countless others. Therefore, Tiller should be killed.”

And indeed there’s been a lot of discussion about whether (or how much) the “pro-life” movement is to blame for Tiller’s death.

But really, there’s a better way to answer Klinghoffer’s question: get a representative sample of killers, find out how many of them use ID or creationism or Catholicism or whatever to rationalize their murders, and see how much attention the media paid to it.

I must give Klinghoffer points for condemning von Brunn as a sick whackjob, which is more than I can say for the fucks at Stormfront. When last looked, on the day of the shooting (I haven’t gone back because I had to clean myself off with bleach and my eyes and intestines are still burning), the general reaction was “He shouldn’t have done that, because it’ll be incredibly bad PR for us.” Even the pro-lifers had the decency to jump on George Tiller’s murderer with “Dude! You don’t go around killing people!”

Okay, so I’m a geek. When I saw a story in the Washington Post Maryland RSS feed with the headline “Chesapeake Beach Can’t Raise Taxon Bingo Machines”

I wondered what Taxon Bingo would look like, and had to whip this up:

(The headline has been fixed in the full article, but remains in the RSS feed.

Original image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The latest new project by the Disco Tute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture is faithandevolution.org.

Evidently the new creationists are feeling threatened not only by their traditional enemy, outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, but by people like Ken Miller and Francis Collins, who are not only outspoken devout theists, but are also respected biologists who aren’t shy about pointing out that ID is a load of dingo’s kidneys.

The “About” page says:

According to noted biologist Richard Dawkins, Darwinian evolution makes it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist. According to Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, evolution is perfectly compatible with his Christian faith. Who is right? And why does it matter? This website is designed to help you find out.

Which leads me to wonder whether they’re being disingenuous as usual, or whether they’re so stupid as to miss the point that Dawkins’s and Collins’s views don’t conflict with each other?

Positive Atheism gives a fuller version of Dawkins’s “intellectually fulfilled atheist” quotation:

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: “I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.” I can’t help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, page 6

I think that’s pretty clear: you can be an atheist without understanding how life evolves. But the theory of evolution answers one nagging question.

I don’t have a similar quotation summarizing Collins’s views, but judging by the jacket blurb of The Language of God, it seems clear that he’s able to reconcile Christianity with evolution.

It seems pretty clear to me that the two are orthogonal to each other. If you’re an atheist, science can help answer questions; if you’re a Christian and like being one, that doesn’t mean you have to reject science. Understanding evolution allows you to go either way. So the DI’s site is setting up a conflict where none exists.

Stupid, ignorant, or deceptive? Hm, tough choice.

(Update, May 29: Fixed thinko.)

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, which took away gays’ right to get married in that state. This sucks, which obviously means that it constitutes judicial activism. (Update, May 27: Yup: BillDo describes the suit as “homosexual radicals sought to do an end-run around the democratic process and have unelected judges overrule the express will of the people.“)

Okay, I realize that the question before the court wasn’t “should gays be allowed to marry?”, but something more narrow, about whether the referendum was phrased properly, in a way that doesn’t require the legislature to intervene. I know nothing about California law, so I can’t comment on whether I agree with the court on this more narrow question.

While the court was debating this, of course, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and Maine moved to legalize gay marriage, and DC voted to recognize marriages from other states. So I’m pretty confident that California will follow suit soon enough.

Meanwhile, in Bizarro World the Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman presents a novel argument against gay marriage. And by “argument”, I mean “words and sentences furiously and randomly strung together in the despearate hope that some of it might form an argument.” I can’t even summarize it. Though if I had to, it’d probably be “`gay’ means happy, and married people shouldn’t be happy”.

The fact is that marriage is part of a much larger institution, which defines the particular shape and character of marriage: the kinship system. […]

The first [effect of marriage within the kinship system] is the most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage. This is why marriage between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society ever known. Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood–and sexual accessibility–is defined.
[…]

This most profound aspect of marriage–protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex–is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage.

That’s right, folks: if you’re a woman, and you marry another woman, you’re not allowed to tell your wife that she’s not allowed to sleep around. Glad that’s settled.

Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one’s few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints. There is no particular reason to ban sexual intercourse between brothers, a father and a son of consenting age, or mother and daughter. There are no questions of ritual pollution: Will a hip Rabbi refuse to marry a Jewish man–even a Cohen–to a Gentile man? Do Irish women avoid Italian women? A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships.

Oh, noes! If teh gays are allowed to marry, we might get Irish and Italians marrying! The horror!

Now to live in such a system, in which sexual intercourse can be illicit, is a great nuisance. Many of us feel that licit sexuality loses, moreover, a bit of its oomph. Gay lovers live merrily free of this system. Can we imagine Frank’s family and friends warning him that “If Joe were serious, he would put a ring on your finger”? Do we ask Vera to stop stringing Sally along? Gay sexual practice is not sortable into these categories–licit-if-married but illicit-if-not (children adopted by a gay man or hygienically conceived by a lesbian mom can never be regarded as illegitimate). Neither does gay copulation become in any way more permissible, more noble after marriage. It is a scandal that homosexual intercourse should ever have been illegal, but having become legal, there remains no extra sanction–the kind which fathers with shotguns enforce upon heterosexual lovers. I am not aware of any gay marriage activist who suggests that gay men and women should create a new category of disapproval for their own sexual relationships, after so recently having been freed from the onerous and bigoted legal blight on homosexual acts. But without social disapproval of unmarried sex–what kind of madman would seek marriage?

(emphasis added)

Do I detect someone with unresolved issues?

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.

Oh, and guess who’s going to be sleeping on the couch tonight:

Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system–a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender.

(emphasis added)

Believe it or not, there’s even more where that came from. As far as I can tell, Schulman’s point is that marriage means something, and people who choose to get married aren’t allowed to decide what their marriage means or should be like, because… well, he doesn’t really say. History, presumably. Or maybe quantum.

Furthermore, marriage is an unhappy affair, and gays should feel relieved, rather than discriminated against, that they have been spared it.

(via Tom Smith and Sadly, No.)

Back in the stone age, when I was a student, there was this thing called Usenet, which had a newsgroup called talk.origins, where creationists and evolution proponents argued.

I saw a pattern emerge: the evolution side had a number of people who produced data to back up their claims, like experimental results, pictures of fossils, and so forth. The creationism side, on the other hand, seemed to have a surfeit of people providing excuses why the evolutionists were wrong, and why creationism couldn’t be tested the way the evolutionists said.

For all the IDists’ protests that ID isn’t just Creationism 2.0, it seems they haven’t changed their MO all that much.

Case in point: PZ forwarded a video that challenged creationists to come up with a gene that doesn’t have evolutionary precursors.

The response at UD is entirely dismissive:

So, has Myers indeed stumbled upon a true significant challenge for ID? Or, has he simply stumbled, as he so often does, over his own misconceptions and metaphysics? I vote for the latter.

There are a lot more words in that post, but they all boil down to: no, ID can’t be tested that way. No, we’re not going to tell you how to test ID, and we sure as hell aren’t going to perform any experiments of our own. But you should still take us seriously because we say so.

While in Israel, pope Benny said:

“Those deeply moving encounters brought back memories of my visit three years ago to the death camp at Auschwitz, where so many Jews - mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends - were brutally exterminated under a godless regime.”

Yeah, “godless”.

Now, I’m no historian, and my knowledge of religion in Nazi Germany comes from such places as Wikipedia and The Straight Dope, and it looks as though the situation is about as clear as mud: yes, there were people like Martin Niemöller, but there were also Catholic priests and bishops who didn’t seem to have a problem with the Nazi regime. And Hitler certainly paid lip service to religion a lot. And as far as I know, no one was ever excommunicated for participating in the Holocaust.

Oh, and, of course, there’s the matter of Benny’s own membership in the Hitler Youth.

At any rate, the situation is certainly nowhere near as clear as “Nazi Germany was a godless regime.” In fact, one could easily make the case that Nazi Germany (and the Soviet Union) had a lot of the uglier aspects of religion: cult of personality, adherence to dogma, sworn fealty to the authorities, and so forth.

But maybe The Ratz is simply using the word “godless” as synonymous with “evil”. In which case, I hope he won’t mind if I use “Catholic” as a synonym for “pederast”.

On a lighter note, Jesus and Mo informs us that Catholics have condemned reiki (aka magic massage):

But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine in late March dismissed reiki as superstition incompatible with Christian belief or scientific teaching, and said it is inappropriate for use in Catholic institutions, including hospitals, retreat centers and schools.

From the Catholic Committee on Doctrine’s Guidelines for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy:

[F]rom the time of the Apostles the Church has interceded on behalf of the sick through the invocation of the name of the Lord Jesus, asking for healing through the power of the Holy Spirit, whether in the form of the sacramental laying on of hands and anointing with oil or of simple prayers for healing, which often include an appeal to the saints for their aid.
[…]

[A] Catholic who puts his or her trust in Reiki would be operating in the realm of superstition, the no-man’s-land that is neither faith nor science.

(emphasis added)

Clearly, “faith” here means “the good kind of superstition”.

The English language desperately needs the word “Backpfeifengesicht“, meaning “a face badly in need of a fist”.

(from Cracked.com, item #7.)

PS: Yeah, I know UD says “slapped” instead of “fist”, but what the hell do they know?