5 Ways 9/11 Truthers Are Like Creationists

On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories By Means of Natural Stupidity

Happy 9/11 anniversary everyone! This year is going to be extra special because we have ten fingers and we’ve set up our numerical system based on that arbitrary amount. The news media is going to capitalize on this hard: Fox News has a special on it about how George W. Bush killed Osama bin Laden on September 12 with only night-vision goggles and a sword. MSNBC has one about how we antagonized the Muslim world by locking up “suspected terrorists” indefinitely without charges and invading a few Middle Eastern countries. And the most outrageous of the tragedy opportunists are planning a march in Manhattan to mark the 10 year anniversary of everyone’s favorite act of mass murder.

Well, there’s no way we at The BEAST are going to pass on this moneymaking opportunity, so here are some ways in which everyone’s favorite paranoid conspiracy nuts are like a different group of paranoid conspiracy nuts. Enjoy!

Science via internet petitions

There are a lot of petitions on the internet tubes. It’s rare that they accomplish anything, but usually they at least have a clear purpose. And then you’ve got groups like the Discovery Institute and Patriots Question 9/11.

Back in 2001 the Discovery Institute released a statement titled A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism. It was signed by over 700 scientists (as of 2007) who claimed to be “skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.”

Patriots Question 9/11 has also been compiling signatures, except each person who signs is supposed to write their own statement. This might be more democratic, but it also kind of defeats the purpose of having a petition in the first place. Everyone’s signing their name to different positions. So we’re talking about a spectrum of beliefs ranging from the somewhat reasonable, “I have significant criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report,” all the way over to collecting-your-piss-in-jars insane, “There were no planes, those were holographs.” They’ve only appeared to have gathered around 3500 signatures worldwide. On the internet.

The first problem with this approach is that you can’t successfully promote a scientific hypothesis by collecting signatures. You win these kinds of arguments by using evidence. And while it’s worthwhile to note when there’s an overwhelming consensus of relevant experts on a matter, these internet petitions use the widest possible definition of “scientist” or “engineer” conceivable. Are you a college freshman who happened to check off Engineering as a major on your admissions paperwork? Great! You qualify as an expert and your crackpot opinions about how George W. Bush done did that there 9/11 and a magical being created itself and then created all life on Earth somehow matters, according to the morons at Patriots Question 9/11 and the DI.

Even if the petition gatherers limited themselves to the relevant experts and emphasized the point that their petitions do not qualify as evidence, they would still fail. According to Denis Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers in their book Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, the 700 signatures gathered by the DI only represents 0.023% of scientists in the world. That means that 99.977% of scientists either have no problem with “Darwinism” or are too embarrassed to associate themselves with the clowns at the Discovery Institute.

Science via Mystery-mongering

Another logical fallacy both groups enjoy using is the appeal to ignorance. Here is how the retarded man-child Ann Coulter reiterates the same creationist PRATT she read in one of Michael Behe’s books:

It is a mathematical impossibility, for example, that all 30 to 40 parts of the cell’s flagellum — forget the 200 parts of the cilium! — could all arise at once by random mutation.

Once you get past the lie (i.e. that it really is mathematically impossible for the bacterial flagellum to evolve), we’re left with a standard God of the Gaps argument: If scientists can’t demonstrate exactly how it evolved, it must have been created. If evolutionary theory fails, then creationist beliefs win by default. It’s a shame that it never seems to work the other way around; that whenever creationist arguments fail, evolution is automatically vindicated.

But what makes this an even worse argument is the fact that empirical experiments have shown how the flagellum and the cilium (!) evolved. As I understand it, what gives these structures the illusion of design is something called interlocking complexity. Interlocking complexity means that you have several components of a structure, each of which appear to be useless on its own relative to the function of the overall structure. But — and this is the important part creationists can’t seem to comprehend — each of the components had a function on its own which was completely divorced from what it would do as a part of a greater whole.

Ken Miller made this point in a much better way than I could in his expert testimony at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case. The creationist Michael Behe used a mousetrap as an analogy for his beliefs about the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, claiming that each part of a mousetrap would be useless on its own and therefore the mousetrap must have been designed by an intelligent agent. Miller pointed out several uses for each part of a mousetrap, including by using a partial mousetrap as a clip for his tie during the proceedings. Even in the world of metaphor the creationists’ arguments end up turning on themselves.

But now I’ve strayed far from the original point, which was that demonstrating that we don’t know something, even if done successfully, can’t possibly prove anything beyond the fact that we don’t know something. It shouldn’t need to be said, but apparently it does. You can’t go directly from “I don’t know X” to “I can explain X with Y theory,” unless you have some evidence to support Y.

My favorite way the appeal to ignorance is used in 9/11 Troofer lore has to do with WTC Building 7 (nevar forget!). Truthers love to point out that the BBC reported its collapse 20 minutes before it actually happened. Even worse, the BBC report in question actually shows the building in the background standing upright and totally not collapsed. So how did the BBC know it was going to happen?

Again, troofers don’t seem to know. It’s a mystery! But obviously the conspiracy must have told the BBC that this was all part of the plan, because, well, whatever. It’s not like they could have discovered the building collapsed without being involved in the conspiracy.

And like the flagellum and cillia, this is yet another supposed mystery conspiracy nuts are trying to exploit which isn’t really much of a mystery at all. Even in the Alex Jones article linked to above, a hint is given as to how things actually went down:

As we have documented before, firefighters, police and first responders were all told to get back from the building because it was about to be brought down.

If you change the last three words to “collapse,” you get a perfect explanation for the BBC’s blunder in this one sentence. There was already significant damage to Building 7. The word of its probable collapse was making the rounds. Chaos and confusion ruled the day. Add in an overzealous BBC news team playing the odds poorly and you get a seemingly prophetic news report.

I know, it’s so sinister, isn’t it?

Whether you’re talking about our genes or our politics, nobody likes the idea of being subject to random forces. We like to be a part of a narrative. It’s comforting to think that we’re part of a deity’s plan. It’s also kind of comforting to think that evil plans are afoot, and we’re part of a team of underdogs who will thwart them. As Michael Shermer likes to point out, we are “story-telling animals.” But the reality of our situation isn’t dependent on those desires and sometimes not knowing something just means that we don’t know.

You don’t have to be racist to be a creationist or a truther, but it can’t hurt

A few years back I went to the Answers in Genesis Creationist “Museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky. We kind of rushed through the actual exhibits because we had other priorities, but I do recall looking over this one, which PZ Myers later elaborated upon:

So Babel refers to the famous Tower of Babel story from Genesis where God got butthurt by a giant phallic tower so he divided humanity by language and, apparently, race. Hilariously enough, Ham plans on building a replica of the tower next to his fake museum. And this graphic is supposed to explain the origin of real-life human races based on that mythology.

If you click to embiggen the image above, you’ll see that the “Descendants of Ham” end up in Africa. Ham is one of Noah’s sons who, in Genesis 9, saw his father drunk and naked and so he dealt with the resultant trauma by cursing his own son. I’m sure it all made perfect sense in those days.

The idea that Ham’s descendants were then cursed, where they then traveled to Africa has been used to justify all kinds of awful treatment of those of African descent, including slavery. It was especially common in the 18th and 19th centuries, and remains so among the Mormons. To be fair, Ken Ham and AiG claim to oppose racism. But they still can’t bring themselves to denounce the myths which supported it so strongly for so many centuries.

The racism you can sometimes find in the 9/11 “truth” movement focuses more on Teh J00z. I’d really rather not link to it, but if you do a Google search for “9/11 truth Jews,” one of the results you’ll get on the first page is a YouTube video series called “Lies from the Jews in the 9/11 Truth Movement.” Apparently that refers to the supposed disinformation agents among the Troofers — government agents paid to spread lies about what Troofers believe with the intention of discrediting them. That’s a brand of anti-Semitic paranoia that goes beyond even the beliefs about 9/11 being a “Zionist plot” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion variety.

In that same Google search you’ll find on the front page a blogspot website which in my opinion is just too detailed to be a Poe, despite the 4chan-ish title, “Jews did 9/11.” It repeats all kinds of hateful lies about how Jews working in the WTC buildings were warned not to come to work and were then seen driving around in a van with decals on it celebrating the attacks. One of the articles is a McCarthyite list called “Jews in High Places,” as if being Jewish were like being a convicted child molester or something.

I could easily go on, but you get the picture. And this isn’t to say that every single person who shares these weird beliefs about the origin of species and 9/11 also need to have weird beliefs about race. But when you open the floodgates of irrationality, there’s not much to stop one from accepting all of that garbage.

Phony ‘peer reviewed’ journals

One of the easiest and most effective way of demonstrating the failures of both 9/11 conspiracy theories and evolution denialism is to point out that neither group seems willing to submit their “research” to peer review in a serious publication the way every real scientist does. Here is how U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton described this tendency among creationists in the decision for McLean v Arkansas Board of Education (emphasis mine):

The scientific community consists of individuals and groups, nationally and internationally, who work independently in such varied fields as biology, paleontology, geology, and astronomy. Their work is published and subject to review and testing by their peers. The journals for publication are both numerous and varied. There is, however, not one recognized scientific journal which has published an article espousing the creation science theory described in Section 4(a). Some of the State’s witnesses suggested that the scientific community was “close-minded” on the subject of creationism and that explained the lack of acceptance of the creation science arguments. Yet no witness produced a scientific article for which publication has been refused. Perhaps some members of the scientific community are resistant to new ideas. It is, however, inconceivable that such a loose knit group of independent thinkers in all the varied fields of science could, or would, so effectively censor new scientific thought.

Notice the Judge doesn’t say that the submitted papers to relevant journals have been rejected for good reasons, or that creationists have simply failed to respond to the reasons for which their studies were rejected. Creationists just hadn’t been turning in any studies at all, presumably because they just assume that the peer reviewers really are as close-minded as they themselves are. And not only have they not been turning in their homework, they expect to get an A+ for the assignment. And if they don’t get it, well, they’ll go to court to try to make sure they do.

As you might guess based on the above quote, the creationists lost the McLean case.  And they keep on losing, just like truthers keep losing in the court of public opinion. Since both groups are scared to death of scrutiny and claim to believe that the scientific community is conspiring against them, they make their own fake peer reviewed journals.

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The reason I’m calling these “peer reviewed journals” fake is because both of them are devoted to covering research which comes to a certain conclusion, instead of covering research within a certain field. The creationist one even says as much in the subtitle: “Building the creation model.” It’s not “Discovering the creation model” or “Studying the creation model.” They have to build the creation model on the pages of their little newsletters because the only thing you find in nature is the evolution model.

Just Lying

When ignorance, petitions, and racism fail to convince people of your weird beliefs, you can always just lie to try to make your point. My favorite creationist lie is an extreme example of quote-mining. Here is a selection from On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin creationists love to cite:

“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”

Wow, so Darwin thought the eye couldn’t have evolved… Sounds pretty amazing, right? And it’s right there in his most famous book. If that’s all you know of what Darwin thought about the evolution of the eye, it should be pretty telling. Those evolutionists must be pretty stupid to read that in their science book and still believe in evolution.

You might think something like that unless you read what immediately follows:

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

As you can see, the earlier Darwin quote was taken out of its context. Darwin was originally commenting on the superficial appearance of absurdity in his claim that all complex organs evolved from simpler ones. I have this pet peeve – and religious people seem most guilty of this – claiming that a quote they don’t happen to like was taken “out of context.” Whenever you hear that claim being made, you should ask the person making it what context they are talking about. Because 99 times out of 100, you’ll find that they don’t even know what it means to take a quote out of context. It’s just a kneejerk reaction. Go ahead – tell your religious friend about your favorite cruel and inhumane passage from the Bible or the Koran and ask them what they think about it, and chances are they’ll claim it’s taken out of context. And yet many will have no problem with actually taking Darwin out of context.

My favorite 9/11 Troofer lie is that 7 of the 9/11 hijackers are still alive. The BBC actually reported this on September 23, 2001. It really would be a serious blow to the “official story” if it were actually true. I remember hearing about it and having suspicions of my own.

But if you read to the end of the article, you’ll find a link to an editorial retraction of this story. The BBC cites “confusion” as the reason for their initial error and they denounce the conspiracy theories surrounding their report.

“The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names.”

Back when I was silly enough to argue with these people on internet forums, this issue was brought up. The person I was discussing it with said that the BBC’s later response was a “mainstream media opinion blog,” while her citation – the same one which linked to the correction – was objective reportage. So according to this Troofer, the BBC was totally credible when they were reporting something she happened to like, but suddenly became a part of the world gubbamint’s conspiracy machine of false flag terrorist oppression when they changed their position due to gathering more evidence. And when they say the hijackers were alive, that’s a fact; but when they say they’re dead, that’s just their opinion.

And that wasn’t an isolated incident. When I was searching for those citations, the first result on the Google Machine was for the popular Troofer website WhatReallyHappened.com, which repeats the exact same lie about 7 of the hijackers being alive without any information on the relevant updates from the BBC.

Everyone makes mistakes. Just twice in this very article we’ve got two big mistakes from a news organization as esteemed as the BBC. It happens. But when it does, the right thing to do, the adult thing to do, is to admit it and change your mind accordingly. That’s why people mock creationists and Troofers. They’d rather break than bend. They care more about coming to a conclusion which matches their ideology than one which matches the evidence. So if you’re a member of one of these groups and resent being lumped in with the other, you should remember that you did it to yourself.

5 Effects that cause people to believe in nonsense

Originally posted at the BEAST

All of us humans are the result of an unconscious biological process called evolution. Based on the conditions at the time, lots of different pressures selected for certain traits. And after those conditions changed – for example most of us don’t need to prioritize escaping from predators on the savannah anymore – all of the selected-for traits remained. We can’t just say, “Hey! Now that we have houses and locked doors and stuff, I don’t need to wake up in the middle of the night whenever there’s a loud noise because chances are very good that it isn’t a fucking tiger here to eat me and dismember my children!”

Nowadays, lots of these psychological traits have become a target for charlatans and frauds out to scheme you out of your time and money. Here are a few of them to bear in mind the next time one of them approaches you.

The Forer Effect

Carnies like this one depend on at least 60 suckers born per
hour in order to raise a family of four.

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What it is:

Also known as the Barnum effect, the Forer effect describes our tendency to think that descriptions of a large group are directed at ourselves personally. Bertram Forer performed an experiment on his students where he gave a personality type description to his students, leading them to believe that each were custom designed for each individual when in fact they were all reading the same description. Here’s a snippet:

While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.

People love flattery, and when it’s restrained within some bounds of reason they’ll just eat it right up. This is why you never see astrology newspaper columns which describe what a colossal douchebag Pisces can be, even though we know that there are people of that “sign” who fit that description perfectly.

What it can lead to:

Astrology, Tarot, and most personality tests.

Worst case scenario:

A friendly stranger on the street approaches you and offers you tickets for a “free movie.” Afterwards, she asks you some innocuous-sounding questions while you hold on to a metal bar attached to something which looks like a lie detector, but isn’t. You go on what you believe to be another “date” at her office, where a man in a sailor suit does a high-pressure sales pitch for some excessively overpriced literature. Before you know it, you’re paying a cultish authoritarian institution for the privilege relaying all of your most deviant sexual fantasies to an official record which is then stored away for blackmail purposes in the event that you try to escape. Yes, you have just joined the Church of Scientology.

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The Placebo Effect

“By harnessing my body’s ‘natural energy field,’ this worthless bracelet can help me–ow, my back!”

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What it is:

We usually think of the Placebo Effect as when we feel better after seeing a doctor, solely from their “bedside manner,” or when subjective and/or psychosomatic symptoms are relieved by something the patient believes is effective medicine, but actually is just a sugar pill. That’s definitely a part of it, but the Placebo Effect also plays a part in the perception of the medical practitioner, not just the patient.

So not only can the Placebo Effect cause patients / customers to be deceived into thinking that an ineffective treatment works, it can do the same to the people who are trying to use science to solve that same problem. So the people doing the studies on, say, homeopathy, can also be Placebo’d by perceiving an improvement in a condition when there isn’t one. This goes a long way towards explaining why certain implausible methods occasionally get written up in respected, peer reviewed publications with vaguely promising results.

What it can lead to:

“Alternative medicine” like homeopathy, acupuncture, most chiropractic, naturopathy, Reiki, psychic surgery, and whatever other form of bogus “treatment” the quack industry invents.

Worst case scenario:

Your dog is scratched by a rabid raccoon, so you head off to your local alt-med store for some homeopathic rabies cure for dogs (hey, homeopathy cured that cold you had for 11 days, so this will work too, right?). After administering it a few times, your pet’s condition seems to be improving…until it bites off your hands. It dies the next day. Also: You can no longer masturbate.

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The Ideomotor Effect

So there’s this guy.

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What it is:

It’s very difficult to keep completely still. We’re pretty much always making these involuntary movements. And when you hold, say, a pen, it’s going to move a little even if you were to try very hard to keep it motionless. It’s so subtle that some don’t even believe that they themselves are causing the movements in the object in question.

So if someone can convince themselves that a stick will twitch when they’re standing near a bomb, and if they can then convince a Middle Eastern government to buy $85 million worth of these magical sticks, then the lives of everyone using one of these fake bomb detectors is put at risk.

What it can lead to:

Dowsing, facilitated communication, automatic writing.

Worst case scenario:

Your kids are having trouble saying goodbye to Grandma, so you pick them up a Ouija board. The next night, they “receive” a message from Grandma telling them to take your car to the cemetery. They’re arrested for driving underage. You’re charged with negligence. Your wife leaves you and takes the children. And your house. You end up dying cold and alone.

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The Clever Hans Effect

Wilbur’s tragic mental illness was exploited to create a classic ’60s sitcom

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What it is:

Clever Hans was a horse in Germany who lived about 100 years ago. His owner, a guy named Wilhelm von Osten, claimed that Hans was able to do simple math by stamping his foot, which would be a pretty amazing breakthrough in the cognitive abilities of non-human animals if it were true. However, as a study by psychologist Oskar Pfungs demonstrated, what was actually happening was that the crowd watching would unconsciously cue the horse as to when to stop stomping his foot. So instead of adding, say, 7 and 9, the horse would stop stomping his foot after 16 times which is when the crowd’s demeanor would change. The audience was what poker players would call an easy mark.

This kind of observer bias also carries over into psychological studies where surveys are used. People and horses alike are eager to give those performing a study what they believe they want to see instead of a real, honest reaction.

What it can lead to:

Believing that animals are communicating with you.

Worst case scenario:

David Berkowitz and his neighbor’s demon-possessed dog.

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The Availability Heuristic (Availability Bias)

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“As the ethnic and religious majority, we are under constant threat of oppression.”

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What it is:

In general, people don’t deal very well with statistics. Especially when those statistics show that an overhyped phenomenon is much less common than we’d believe solely from news media coverage. We tend to conjure up examples of things which come easily to mind and think about them as if they were common occurrences even when they’re not.

So for example, we here in the US spend a huge amount of money doing something which our political leaders call “fighting terrorism,” while those same political leaders simultaneously tell us that we cannot have a single-payer health care system like the rest of the industrialized world because it is “too expensive.” Someone unfamiliar with any of the statistics of harm caused by terrorism and by a lack of health care coverage might be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that terrorism kills more Americans than not having health insurance. But that’s clearly not the case. It’s just that we prioritize “fighting terrorism” to such an insanely out of proportion degree because it’s easier for us to be rattled emotionally by dramatic, violent events like 9/11. We just aren’t wired to be so moved by more mundane causes of death, even when they’re much more common.

It’s only been very recently in human history that we’ve been able to compile statistics on a large scale. For most of our time here, what comes easiest to mind was really all we had to go on. But that’s not necessarily the most accurate portrayal of reality.

What it can lead to:

Pretty much anything that can be summarized in a cheap, stupid soundbite or a random anecdote.

Worst case scenario:

You hear about The Secret from Oprah, and then waste your money on the book. You learn that you can have whatever you want just by visualizing it. You are arrested, for stealing other people’s property, and raped in prison.

REPOST: Monkey Music

A few years ago, perceptual scientist Josh McDermott of MIT and Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser published a study (and here’s a laymen’s report on the report – YO DAWG I HERD U LIKE REPORTS) which dealt with the origins of music. From the abstract:

We claim that theories of the origins of music will be usefully constrained if we can determine which aspects of music perception are innate, and, of those, which are uniquely human and specific to music… Our research suggests that many rudimentary acoustic preferences, such as those for consonant over dissonant intervals, may be unique to humans.

And, of course, being scientists, they tested this hypothesis by trapping marmoset monkeys in a maze and blaring music at them. First the two ends of the maze were set up so that speakers were playing a Russian lullaby at one end and “German techno” (I heard it, it was actually jungle/drum n’ bass) at the other. And this time, the monkeys congregated near the Russian lullaby.

The next time, a control group of sorts was set up so that the German techno was replaced with no music at all. And given that choice between the Russian lullaby and nothing, the monkeys gathered near the silent speaker. So the tenative conclusion was that music is more innately a human phenomenon and that we could be uniquely hard-wired towards liking music in a way that other primates are not. This made me sad for some irrational reason. It would be cool if monkeys liked music.

But this study, like most good ones, really raised more new questions than it did answer old ones. So, for example, the monkeys used in the experiment were marmosets, or “New World monkeys,” which are more distantly related to us than, say, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. The common ancestor we share with marmosets lived around 44 million years ago, and the common ancestor we share with both chimpanzees and bonobos lived only around 5-7 million years ago. So it could be that a predisposition to music is something which arose after our branch of the evolutionary tree forked away from the marmosets- somewhere between 44 and 5 million years ago. Or, it could be that (and this is where we finally get to something new) McDermott and Hauser just weren’t using the right kind of music in their studies.

In a study in the new issue of Biology Letters, which just came out yesterday and is not yet online (although you can read reports on the study from Science News, Science Daily, and Scientific American), University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Charles Snowdon teamed up with composer/cellist David Teie of the University of Maryland to run an experiment similar to the 2006 McDermott/Hauser study with an important twist. Instead of playing ordinary music, Teie created a musical composition for cello and vocals based on the tamarin calls, which is the animal on which they were experimenting. For the sake of being pedantic, the common ancestor we share with tamarins lived around the same time as the one we share with marmoset monkeys (38-49 million years ago), so this is pretty close to being a standardized test relative to the earlier one.

And the tamarins liked their custom-made music. They apparently were much calmer and groomed each other more. Snowdon says this kind of music should be used in zoos to give the monkeys a better quality of life in captivity. But that could be bad for business for the zoos, since said music is incredibly annoying to us. Don’t take my word for it though, you can listen to it at the Science News link in the above paragraph.

Velociraptors will eviscerate us all

You guys remember Jurassic Park? OK, do you remember how the discovery of bugs encased in amber inevitably led to a horrible disasters? That’s right; it led to Jurassic Park II: The Lost World and *shudder*Jurassic Park III. But the trivia buffs out there might also remember that it also led to hermaphroditic dinosaurs almost killing Jeff Goldblum.

Now the Wired Science blog is reporting that scientists in India have discovered a whole bunch of amber with 50 million year old insects encased in them. And they might be able to find some DNA of other species within the samples, which they might then be able to analyze. The point being, it’s definitely Velociraptors the Mayans were talking about with their 2012 end of the world business.

Sure, that sounds crazy, especially since Velociraptors went extinct about 25,000,000 years before this amber existed, but who’s to say that there weren’t any 25 million year old bugs back then? Were you there? Then shut up and be afraid of Velociraptors already.

Wired is also claiming that they haven’t gotten any information on non-insect species. FOR NOW. And here’s one of the pics of the ancient bugs:

RE-POST: Canadian scientist aims to turn chickens into dinosaurs, destroy and/or enslave all humans

So here’s the plan:

1. Be Canadian.
2. Be a scientist.
3. Get a chicken embryo.
4. Turn it into a dinosaur.
5. ????????????????????
6. PROFIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here is the lede from PhysOrg (8/25):

“After years spent hunting for the buried remains of prehistoric animals, a Canadian paleontologist now plans to manipulate chicken embryos to show he can create a dinosaur.”

Read MOAR and MOAR and MOAR!

So this guy’s name is Hans Larsson. That’s his real name. No word yet on whether or not he wears all black, speaks in an Eastern European accent, and shows no human emotion – although judging from his name and what he is up to, all of these things most definitely must be absolutely true. Just look at what he looks like probably looks like I think he might look like based on a quick google images search:

My understanding of this stuff is really crude, but I’ll give it a shot. Basically what happens is that when an embryo of any species is developing, its genome starts to be regulated mostly by Hox genes. Here is a rap video about Hox genes. You may listen to the music while reading the rest of this post with my permission.

So for example, since we share a common ancestry with other apes, the capacity to grow a tail is in our genes. It’s just that for most of us, outside of places like Kentucky and India, that gene gets regulated so that we don’t actually grow a tail. At least, not usually:

But if you wanted a human to grow a tail, theoretically you could go into the genome of a developing embryo and tinker around with the Hox genes so that they don’t inhibit that particular part of our genome as it normally would. I’m sure it’s a bit more difficult than that sounds since it would need to be done at a specific developmental period and in the right way, but that’s the gist of evo-devo (evolutionary development) as I understand it.

So this Hans Larsson character is doing this with chickens now, trying to deregulate old genetic material shared with the common ancestor of chickens and dinosaurs. This kind of thing has sort of already been done specifically in the form of developing chickens with teeth. Yeah, that’s right: Chickens with fucking teeth.

Unfortunately this doesn’t mean we can create our own army of unholy chickenosauruses to wreak havoc on Ken Ham’s Creationist “Museum” or to perform some other worthy endeavor. It’s probably going to be very inexact and application-free, at least for a while now. But hang in there – with any luck, Hans and his assistant Igor Ivan Ivanovich (that is very likely his name) will soon be facepalming or shouting up to the nighttime sky something like, “Nooooes! What have I done?” as mobs of the townsfolk with torches and pitchforks scramble in a futile effort to stop the madness before THE CHICKENOSAURS SLAUGHTER US ALL AND SKULLFUCK OUR CORPSES OMG OMG WTF WTF EVERYBODY PANIC RUN FOR YOUR LIVES NOW!!!!!!!!!

The 5 Best Cases of Religious Schadenfreude

[reposted at The BEAST]

Schadenfreude isn’t even the best word to describe what you feel when you hear about cases like these. It’s a very specific kind of schadenfreude: one where you know that the subject’s irrational beliefs somehow shaped their own downfall, so that their own life becomes a case study against the very worldview they had adopted. We’re all happy that Hitler killed himself in the end, but how much sweeter would it have been if rumors of him being part Jewish had sent him to his own gas chambers? Clearly, that would have been awesome. So let’s look at some cases like that.

Paul Ingram

What he believed:

Paul Ingram was a chief civil deputy of the Olympia, Washington’s sheriff’s office and the Chairman of the local Republican Party. He was also a fundamentalist Christian, and one day one of his daughters returned from a church “retreat” with “recovered memories” of Satanic ritual abuse by, among others, her father.

This was in the late 1980s, during the height of the “Satanic panic,” when stories like Ingram’s were about as common as stories of Mexicans invading Texas ranches are today. When the accused denied any such abuse, the accusers would claim that the abuser was repressing their own memories just as the victim had. That would mean that it’s time for a “therapy” session so that the accused could recover their memories and confess. On the other hand, if the accused confessed immediately, they were also seen as guilty. Much like the old witch hunts from centuries ago, all accused were presumed guilty and there was no way for them to prove their innocence.

Since Ingram was generally supportive of this idea that there were rings of Satanic cults raping and torturing their own children, he was open to the idea that he himself had been involved but had suppressed his memories. His pastor and a court-appointed “therapist” supported this hypothesis and kept him in the dark when skeptical investigators challenged the accusations.

The Schadenfreude:

Ingram acquired a Christian attorney with limited experience in criminal law, who let Ingram plead guilty. Pretty much immediately after being sentenced, the reality of his situation started to dawn on him and he tried to withdraw his guilty plea with the aid of a legitimate law firm. The motion was denied, and Ingram went to prison. He remained there for the next 15 years and was released in 2003. Further details of the case are available here.

Kent Hovind

What he believes:

Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind is primarily known as a Young Earth Creationist (YEC), but he believes just about any crazy ideas he hears about. Even as YECs go, Hovind’s the worst of the worst. Exhibit A: Answers in Genesis has a list of arguments they wish other YECs would stop using because they’re so easy to refute that even my old friend Ken Ham is embarrassed by them. Most of them were and still are old favorites of “Dr. Dino,” so he responded to what he saw as AIG’s unreasonable attempt at quality control (an “overreaction”) with a long, psychotic rant (deleted from his site but archived here), buffered with his customers’ testimonials of his “integrity.”

Here he is with Sasha Baren Cohen on his Ali G Show, doing his standard creationist shtick.

And if you’re on a road trip, or have a few hours to kill, you really have to listen to this hilarious debate on the Infidel Guy show between Hovind and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci.

But you miss out on the whole picture here unless you take into account some of Hovind’s other lesser-known beliefs. Hovind’s also a rabid conspiracy theorist. And when you think about it, this is pretty much necessary for creationists as well as any other science deniers. There would have to be a vast conspiracy afoot for evolution to be both false and widely accepted by the vast majority of scientists in relevant fields. And when you give credibility to the idea that most scientists are lying about their work in order to promote what Hovind sees as their religion, it’s not too much of a stretch to apply that same paranoid approach to politics.

So for example, Hovind believes that flu vaccines are a plot to make people dependent on the government. And it’s not just any government, but a “one world government” (as opposed to a multiple worlds government, I guess). And this “one world government” is going to be run by Freemasons and Catholics and Muslims and Jews. Also the trails that airplanes leave are really made of poisonous chemicals to kill most of the global population, but somehow magically spare the lives of the “one world government” conspirators.

I could go on in this vein for a while, but I’ll spare the reader and cut straight to the most relevant of Hovind’s conspiracy theories – you don’t have to pay taxes! See, the Bible doesn’t say anything about a federal income tax. It just says that you have to render unto Caesar that which is Caeser’s. But Caesar has been dead for thousands of years, so that is just ancient history. How could Kent Hovind pay Caesar? He couldn’t, that’s how.

The Schadenfreude:

In January of 2007, Hovind began serving a ten year sentence after being convicted on 58 counts of federal crimes. He remains in prison today, where he writes e-mail to God and whines about what he perceives as his own martyrdom. Unlike Paul Ingram, Hovind remains committed to the same worldview which has caused him so much harm.

He cried like a little baby at his sentencing, begging that he be allowed to “just go home” and to have his friends pay his back taxes so he could continue preaching. The courts were having none of it, and they rejected all of his appeals – probably because they were the ravings of a deranged lunatic. Later his property at the Dinosaur Adventure Land – Hovind’s lame attempt at a creationist Disneyworld in Pensacola – was confiscated by federal authorities. Hovind is scheduled to be released in 2015.

Joseph Smith

What he believed:

So this is the Mormon guy. You probably already know the story of the magical stones and the golden tablets and how he met an angel while meditating on a mountaintop and all that Lord of the Rings crap. What you might not know is that starting a weird cult like the LDS Church took a few trial runs before it all really took hold in Utah.

Joseph Smith never even made it to Utah. It was his successor, Brigham Young, who had established Utah as home of the Mormons. While Smith was in charge, the LDS Church was a roving band of wanderers who tried settling every now and then until they were driven out by the local communities. Smith took his snake oil show on the road from Palmyra, NY to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, each time declaring that the new Mormon home was some kind of holy land. And each time they had to leave it was because their beliefs were just too fucking crazy for words.

The Schadenfreude:

By the time Smith made it to Illinois, his ego was getting to be a liability. He became the mayor of a small town and took charge of a militia, which he then used to try to suppress a local newspaper which printed things the LDS Church did not like. Since he had to worry about that pesky First Amendment, the governor of Illionois at the time came after Smith and put him in jail.

While awaiting trial, Smith’s followers attempted a jailbreak. They sneaked a gun into prison and Smith tried to shoot his way out. This turned out to be a bad idea, even for the mid 19th century. He was shot and killed during the escape attempt.

Hulda Regehr Clark

What she believed:

Hulda Clark was a notorious quack who believed that she could cure all diseases. Her primary focus was on cancer – that is ALL cancers. One of her books was called The Cure of All Cancers. Another was called The Cure For HIV/AIDS. Another was called The Cure For All Diseases.

Clark called herself a naturopath, which is a bullshit term alternative medicine practitioners use. She had a problem with conventional Western medicine (a.k.a. medicine) because medical practitioners, especially ones critical of Clark, are “arrogant.” Someone who wrote a book called The Cure For All Diseases is calling someone else arrogant. Let that settle in your mind for a minute.

The Schadenfreude:

Clark had her problems with the Federal Trade Commission and the Food & Drug Administration, as well as local authorities for practicing medicine without a license; but as you can probably tell from the use of past tense in this section, the real hilarity was when she died. Of cancer – which, if you remember from the above is something she claimed she could cure.

Yanadi Kondaiah

What he believed:

This one is easily my favorite, and the simplest. Kondaiah was a “holy man” in India who claimed to have a magical leg. He claimed it had “healing power.” He also made claims to be able to predict the future, but the article’s not exactly clear on whether or not that power came from his leg.

The Schadenfreude:

Some enterprising folks asked themselves why they should pay to make wishes on a holy man’s leg when they can amputate it for free. And so that’s what they did. First they got him drunk. Then he passed out. Then the two men hacked off his leg with a hunting knife and hauled it off. Hilarity ensued.

Baba Brinkman – Rap Guide to Human Nature (2010)

Baba Brinkman has a new album out. He is releasing it in a way that you can choose what you pay for it, which seems to be the hip new-ish thing for more independent artists.

This one focuses more on evolutionary psychology, which was explored a little bit on his last album, The Rap Guide to Evolution. It’s a field that gets a lot of criticism, and rightly so. We can find the fossils and even some DNA of our ancestors by digging up samples, but we don’t get much insight on ancient hominid consciousness from them. It’s fun to hypothesize about how our current personality quirks and odd behaviors might have been based on how earlier humans evolved on the Serengeti, but that largely fails when it comes to putting those hypotheses to a good test. And as a result, there’s less quality control and you tend to see people misusing the field in order to further one or another social or political agenda.

I’m not saying that’s what this album does, but it’s a good reason to take this kind of stuff with a grain of salt whether you hear it on a rap album or from someone in a more serious venue.

Similar:

• Baba Brinkman – The Rap Guide to Evolution
• Baba Brinkman – Off That
• MC Frontalot
• MC Frontalot – Zero Day
• 3.5* ’til Infinity

Russian creationists

New Scientist has this article about something an Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church said about how evolution “should be taught to children as one of several theories, but children should know of other theories too.” They’re pointing out that this is a lot like the “Teach the controversy” approach creationists here in America advocate as part of their “wedge strategy” and how that contrasts with the history of the godless commies of the Soviet Union.

But here’s the thing: Russians being wrong about evolution is not a new phenomenon. It’s not even necessarily a religious or post-Cold War one, either.

Way back around the early 19th century, there was this French naturalist called Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His view was that species evolved, but since they didn’t know shit about genes back then he was completely wrong about how that happened. Lamarck thought traits acquired throughout an individual’s lifetime could be passed on to future generations along with traits which were originally inherited when the individual’s parents reproduced. So a crude way of putting it is that if you have a rat born with large eyes whom for some reason had its tail cut off, according to Lamarck the rat’s progeny should have large eyes and short tails. Also giraffes apparently got their long necks by stretching for food in tall trees, and then passing that stretchiness on to their offspring, according to Lamarck. To be fair, Darwin didn’t know shit about genes either and he was wrong about how units of heredity worked too, but in less significant ways.

Anyway, by the early 20th century Mendel‘s theory of genetics merged with Darwin’s theory on the origin of species and that’s kind of the founding of modern biology. But – and this is where we get back to Russia – at the same time a “geneticist” called Trofim Lysenko starting reviving a hyper-politicized version of Lamackism in the Soviet Union. He managed to convince the political leadership that the accepted theory of genetics was wrong. And he did that not with scientific evidence, but by appealing to its consistency with the prevalent political philosophy of the country.

Funnily enough, if you read the Wedge Document, you’ll see that that’s exactly the approach creationists at the Discovery Institute are now using. Instead of basing theories on facts, they want to base theories on ideologies. For the Discovery Institute, their problem with Darwinian evolution is that it’s too materialistic. For Stalin and Lysenko, their problem with Darwinian evolution was that it wasn’t advocating the exact right kind of materialism. Both camps care(d) more about the implications of scientific theories than about whether or not they were true.

Another weird similarity between modern creationists and Stalin-era pseudoscientists is this weird tendency to try very hard to associate complex issues with a single person. So for creationists, evolutionary biology isn’t just that; it’s DARWINISM. And for Lysenko, genetics wasn’t just genetics, it was ”Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism.” But then again, you get that with lots of issues which attract kooks – health care reform is “Obamacare,” global warming is really all about Al Gore, etc…

Anyway, even though it apparently helps to spread pseudoscience if you wear funny costumes and have religious beliefs, it’s not completely necessary. The right dichotomy here is between following evidence and following ideology. A lot of times religion has something to do with it, but that’s not the beginning and end of the problem with attacks on science.

The anthropic principle

There are really two different anthropic principles; the ‘strong’ one and the ‘weak’ one. The latter is pretty much a tautology. If the most basic laws of the Universe would different, then the Universe itself would look differently. There’s not much controversy there, it’s pretty straightforward. So here I’ll be focusing on the ‘strong’ anthropic principle.

As you might’ve guessed, the strong anthropic principle goes a bit further than the weak one. Lurking behind it is this assumption that the balance of natural laws in such a way as to produce life (specifically our own lives) must be maintained by some intelligent entity with a plan for humanity, as if it somehow knew we would exist some 13.7 billion years before our time when the physical constants were established. The physicists/cosmologists John D Barrow and Frank Tipler expressed this in their 1986 book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle:

There exists one possible Universe ‘designed’ with the goal of generating and sustaining ‘observers.’

Now we know that even just with materials found here on Earth and without any intelligent input whatsoever, natural processes can produce things which look very much like they have a purpose or a goal. For example:

That looks like it was designed by humans in order to accommodate travel from one area to another. But the reality is that it formed naturally without any intelligent input. The point here to remember is that we should be careful to avoid being deluded into seeing a goal or a purpose where there isn’t any. The fact that there are living things in Virginia which can use the natural bridge pictured above doesn’t necessarily mean that it was created for that specific goal. Similarly, we can’t assume that our existence was presupposed just because we happen to exist.

The only reason we can even think about an anthropic principle is because we’re already here. If different physical constants could also produce life in different Universes, then they’d be wondering the same thing. It’s only by necessity that we only hear about how great our Universe was to produce us. Other Universes in a multi-verse could also produce life by saying how awesome their own particular physical constants were to produce them.

The late British science fiction author Douglas Adams had come up with one of the best responses along these lines:

“[I]magine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

The point that Adams got to towards the end of that quote is what makes the strong anthropic principle not just nonsense, but dangerous nonsense. If the Universe or a God or whatever had us in mind as the lead in some epic cosmic plan, then we don’t really need to worry about environmental destruction or extinction by meteors or anything like that. It takes that responsibility out of our hands – and we as a species seem to like not having much responsibility in general.

Even against our own interests, we’re predisposed to accept the strong anthropic principle (or anthropo-centric principle, as Carl Sagan put it). We’d like to be special and the pinnacle of existence, and at the same time we’d like for a Big Brother to protect us from dangers, even dangers we might inflict upon ourselves. We’re so compelled by this combination of protection and self-aggrandizement that even unscrupulous leaders in politics, religion, and economics who might not have even heard of the anthropic principle make some crude use of it for their own purposes.

For more on the history and problems on these issues, I’d reccommend Massimo Pigliucci’s recent writings on the subject.

Similar:

• Paley’s Watchmaker
• Pascal’s Wager

Paley’s Watchmaker

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (…) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (…) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
–William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)

That’s how this teleological argument for the existence of God was most famously articulated. It’s also known as the argument from design. Like Pascal’s Wager, it’s one of those bits of theology that’s often repeated ad nauseum by laypersons, and usually ones who’ve never read the original citation above. And also like Pascal’s Wager, there are so many problems with it that it’s difficult to know where exactly to begin.

Paley wants to equate the natural world with the hypothetical watch left in the forest. He doesn’t draw the connection between the two. He just asserts that the two are similar in that they were both clearly designed. But whether or not they’re similar and therefore designed is exactly the question Paley’s trying to answer. So just claiming that they are is circular reasoning.

Furthermore, if the watch and the natural world were so similar then we wouldn’t even notice the watch in the first place. It wouldn’t stick out amongst the backdrop of the rest of the landscape which “might as well have been there forever.” If Paley’s assertion held water, we’d just be walking along and take no more notice of the watch than we do of a blade of grass or a bird because they would both have “every manifestation of design.”

But we do notice the watch. We can look at something which is obviously designed and know that it’s designed because we have at least some prior knowledge of watch design. Frankly, I know next to nothing about that subject, but I can at least look at a watch and recognize it as something we humans have made for a very long time. Even just going by the blog post so far we can know they’ve been manufactured for at least a few hundred years already.

You don’t even need Darwin and evolution to refute the watchmaker argument on these grounds. All that needs to be pointed out is something like this:

“A tree bestows order and organisation on that tree which springs from it, without knowing the order; an animal in the same manner on its offspring; a bird on its nest; and instances of this kind are even more frequent in the world than those of order, which arise from reason and contrivance. To say, that all this order in animals and vegetables proceeds ultimately from design, is begging the question; nor can that great point be ascertained otherwise than by proving, a priori, both that order is, from its nature, inseparably attached to thought; and that it can never of itself, or from original unknown principles, belong to matter.”
-David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1776)

So in crasser terms, there’s really no reason to even accept Paley’s assertion that every manifestation of design we rightfully notice in the watch also exists in the natural world. And even putting aside the self-refuting nature of his argument, the hypothetical watch he’s talking about didn’t really have a single watchmaker.

Sure, maybe a few centuries ago watches were designed and made one by one by a single individual in their workshop. But if the analogy to the Universe as a whole is to hold, that watchmaker would have had to have made their watch de novo. And this clearly could not be what happened.

Let’s take this a little more seriously and really think about this watchmaker who made the watch Paley discovered in the forest. At some point in his life, he decided to make watches for a living. Maybe his father taught him how, or maybe he took on an apprenticeship. But either way he learned from earlier watch designs and from others who had also made watches. A deity like the one Paley describes could not have any counterpoint to this passing on of skills unless it were watching other gods making other Universes and learning tricks of the Universe-making trade from them.

This watch which is made by a watchmaker is just one part of a long history of people who worked on devices meant to keep track of time. In earlier times, there was no second hand on a typical clock. Earlier than that, there was no minute hand. And even earlier still, no mechanics at all were used because all we had were sticks in the mud which then cast a shadow.

Watches, in other words, are the result of a gradual process where efficient parts are selected for and clumsy, inaccurate, and wasteful parts are selected against. And if you go back far enough in time, you get a point of origin which is perfectly explained by natural phenomenon.

So even if you give Paley a pass on the self-refuting part of his argument, it still fails again when it points directly to an unguided evolutionary explanation of the natural world and all its complexities and directly away from supernatural design.

Scientists coming to Buffalo

Neil deGrasse Tyson is speaking at the Center for the Arts for UB’s Distinguished Speakers Series on Wednesday, March 31.

Jane Goodall is speaking at Canisius College’s Koessler Athletic Center on Wednesday, April 14.

Huge prehistoric crocodiles will eat us all

New Scientist is reporting that the newly identified Crocodylus anthropophagus probably ate human ancestors. They lived around 1.8 million years ago in Africa and were 7.5 meters (about 25 feet) long.

By contrast, what is supposed to be the largest living crocodile in Africa is only 6.1 meters (20 feet) long. His name is Gustave. There are apparently some crocodiles in India which are larger than Gustave, but still smaller than C. anthropophagus was. Here is a slideshow of examples:

There are a bunch of anatomical differences between these fossils and current crocodiles, and this kind of flies in the face of this idea that the genetic frequencies of crocodiles haven’t changed much over geological time and they’re basically all the same as their ancestors since Jesus made them along with all the other fish of the sea 6000 years ago.

So they found fossils of human ancestors with cut marks which matched up with the bite of C. anthropophagus. Maybe they were just being territorial, but the team who made the discovery thinks that the fossil remains were the victims of attacks by smaller crocodiles, while the larger adult ones would just totally fuck up and eat a whole humanoid.

Darwin Day petition

The people who organize Darwin Day are now doing this petition to encourage Obama to make Darwin’s birthday officially recognized. Here is the link to the petition where you can find the text of the proposed proclamation. And here is the text of the letter to which you’d be signing:

Dear President Obama,

As an American who values scientific inquiry and integrity, I urge you to issue a presidential proclamation recognizing Darwin Day on February 12. Darwin Day is celebrated every year on the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday in 1809, and is a day in which people gather together to commemorate his life and work. Charles Darwin was the first to propose the groundbreaking scientific theory of evolution by natural selection—a theory that has done more to unify and bring understanding to the life sciences than any other—and Darwin Day is a celebration of this discovery and of scientific progress.

I believe that issuing this proclamation will send a powerful message that scientific discovery and integrity in our society are top priorities—priorities that are needed now more than ever as extremists with narrow ideological agendas are attempting to undermine science in our schools.

Please stand with me and countless others who value science and discovery by issuing the following or a similar proclamation on Darwin Day.

I don’t want to say for sure that this won’t happen, and probably signing it won’t change Obama’s mind on his consistent position of giving in to crazy and/or ill-informed people at every opportunity. But in the spirit of honest inquiry we’ll need real data to confirm that hypothesis, and we can’t get real data unless YOU AND EVERYONE YOU KNOW signs this petition.

More evolution rap

Similar:

• Baba Brinkman
• Regulatin’ Genes

The naturalistic fallacy