Evolution Proven False?

This seems as good a time as any to examine the tendency of nut-jobs (religious and otherwise) to grab onto minor controversies within the ranks of their opposition and distort them out of all proportion.

The inspiration for today’s posting comes from Jerry Coyne, who pointed me in the direction of this article in The New York Times, with a further reinforcement from a favorite Youtuber of mine, Coffee With Claire.

The NYT story highlights a case of recently discovered academic fraud within the field of social psychology and the faked data of a Dutch researcher. Claire’s latest YouTube offering reminded me of how it will be misused by anti-science zealots as proof that all of “science” is just one big scam, by invoking the logical fallacy of composition (what is true of the part is necessarily true of the whole). Claire does an excellent take-down of this knuckle dragging God slobberer. His YouTube handle is noimplant4me and his video exemplifying the well worn logical fallacy of composition is here.

Claire rightly notes that noimplant4me fails to mention that in every instance of scientific fraud, it is other scientists who are responsible for policing and catching the miscreants. In the case of noimplant4me, this misuse of logic is aimed at supporting the house of cards that is young earth creationism, but I’ve also seen similar scientific shenanigans leveraged in support of global warning denial.

My noting this tendency will likely have little effect on those who continue to misuse it. That said, I think it is worth mentioning that in this latest example of fraud within the field of social psychology, not much of consequence was really affected. The studies under scrutiny were of the touchy-feely variety and the results, much like religious texts, were manipulated by a man of ignoble character into a framework that fit social convention.

I don’t want to pile on the social psychologists too hard. Sure, most of what they study looks to be about as useful as the beard on my Aunt Bess, but at the end of the day, it’s experts in this field who are responsible for having to make a comprehensible analysis of crazy cultural shit like #atheismplus, so I’ll cut them some slack.

Evolution has not been proven false.

Enjoy.

GOP Irrelevancy

Good morning all,

First off. housekeeping. Woke up 55 years old this morning. Happy birthday to me.

I’m just old enough to remember when all the “lazy blacks” in Detroit were so busy making cars that that moniker didn’t work so well.   A lot of people I remember fondly from my youth had good union jobs and lived well. Then Reagan came along and garrotted the unions in 1980.  Many believe Reagan also killed Disco, but Disco never died. Reagan stuffed it in a duffel bag and sent it to Guantanamo.

In any event, the country has been on a Republican built road-to-Hell since then.  Republican greed totally destroyed any chance for those of my generation to implement the dreams and ideals we all grew up cherishing.  Our fathers had just landed on the moon and we were poised for Mars just about the time the crazy old man got hold of the wheel and steered us off into the direction of Star Wars instead.

There’s still a ray of hope for our children and grandchildren, if we don’t allow them to drown in the slime pit of oil dependency and warmongering the Republicans have built into our system.  We’ll see.

Big shout out to all the Walmart workers who stood against the corporate tyrants.  Walmart can’t compete in an environment where civility and fair play are honored above institutional profits.  They fizzled here in Germany after pissing a billion dollars away, and at the end of the day, they weren’t even able to offer lower prices than their competitors!!

How Can the Republicans Regain Relevance?

Having graduated from high school in Fort Dodge Iowa (1976 – State of Iowa Scholar), I can say with some authority that what the Republicans need to do to become relevant again. I expect my suggestions to be received by the GOP with all the enthusiasm and applause as pre-election Nate Silver polls, but it might help if somebody from the great plains, who isn’t a highly paid (bought off) beltway insider adds a main-street view. I am pretty sure I have mentioned these things before, but the Republicans weren’t listening to me then and they likely won’t listen to me now, but if ever there was a time when Googling “mainstream viewpoints” and “U.S. voters” might interest a Republican, this seems a likely moment in time for that occurrence.

Republicans need to drop their crazy ideas on reproductive freedoms. This last election cycle saw things spin so far into crazy town that there were candidates actually advancing the cause of rapist’s rights in having their unholy offspring borne by our mothers, wives and daughters. I have a memory of Mississippi trying to outlaw condoms, but that might have been spin from their “rights of the zygote” legislation that failed, even in the bastion of the Baptist holy land. At the end of the day, the Republican adoption of the Christian Bible as a handbook for political and scientific guidance is as ill-advised, un-American and disgusting. Relying on faith over facts is not a road to success into the future.

Modern Republicanism is now 20 percent politics and 80 percent fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionism. This is something they used to know enough to hide because they knew it was a losing minority position. I remember noting the TRUE percent of “lunatic fringe” Christians when Pat Robertson ran for president. IIRC, it was about five percent, and I doubt the actual numbers are higher today (40% of US now “non-religious”).

What the Relignicans lack in numbers they try to make up for in astroturf and echo chambers. Fox (Faux) News is HELPING elect Democrats now that everybody isn’t afraid to laugh at the Naked Emperor.

I have an iPad mini to unwrap.

Happy Birthday to Me.

Enjoy.

Can Math Really be Trusted?

As the creationist movement continues it’s march into public school classrooms all over the US (thanks to Texas FFS??), it behooves all parents to consider the motives and implications of those who are championing this cause.

If you are one of the eighty million Jeebus Camp supporters the answer to the question, “Can math really be trusted?” is not something you need look any further than your Bible to answer.  Why, you ask?

Without written proof from the divine, devout believers are nervous to trust even their own observation that there are an “equal” number of fingers on each of their own “two” hands.

If the Bible said otherwise, then they would assume that their personal observations were being influenced by demonic forces that (somehow) needed expunging.  The emperor runs naked in their kingdom with no fear of over exposure.  The native instincts of any youth who might see it otherwise are squelched at Jesus Camps, which seem to inflict the exact type of emotional mayhem on the participants as the Jihadi variety we are more akin to being shown on US television, though I’m sure they would argue otherwise.  But I digress.  Can we trust math?

I mostly trust math, but then I am considered mostly a godless atheist by many of my fellow countrymen.  Because I lack the necessary fervor to engage in cheer-leading for supernatural causes (or genuflecting to imagined creationist deities), my personal “faith” curries about as much favor in the US as Mitt Romney these days (or alternatively the Mormon idea that beer, coffee, Coca Cola, tea and hot chocolate are all a gateway drugs to Hell).  I love the math. It is the math that is telling me Romney and the Republicans are going to be tossed on their butts in spectacular fashion come Nov 7. #cleansweep

To the minor extent that I don’t trust mathematics, I blame Richard Feynman. I doubt he is very well known in Christian Fundamentalist groups because of his personal views on God.

I decided to check into the issue of how the evangelical fundamentalists in the US feel about math, since it is so obvious that they have total disregard for many of the physical sciences that are entirely reliant on it, with evolution and evolutionary biology being a particular thorn in the side of the lunatic fringe (80 million) activist evangelicals.  Upon review, I found the Bible to be as hazy on the subject of math as it is on just above every other subject.  Questions involving Jeebus the carpenter making misstatements on math are brushed aside, explained as a consequence of his situational humanity.  Pi is three in the Bible because God was rounding to the first digit for brevity’s sake (remember, this is a guy that supposedly created everything else in just six days so he was used to taking shortcuts).

Believe me when I tell you that the “field” of Christian Apologetics is truly getting a workout these days, and the number of people “employed” in that regard is an astonishing thing to behold.  God literally has an army of people out there making apologies for all the crap he did in the Bible that no morally sound and reasonably minded imperfect human would ever imagine.  Takes a great mental leap to “faith away” the ancient slaughter of innocent women and children by the “loving” deity you propose to extoll.

For the Christian Fundamentalist, mathematics is a good thing when it is used in science to cure Grandma’s cancer.  On the other hand, they view work done in fields of math and science that undermine their belief system as an inevitable (evil) consequence of man’s sinful nature.  A desire to know too much.

Rick Santorum, one of the more virulent and high profile of their genre, and a fellow whose Christian belief system leads him to want to impose national laws forcing our wives and daughters to carry the illegitimate spawn of rapists to term, recently stated that people who “know too much” are of no value in his vision of America’s Republican future.  The problem for people like Mr. Santorum, Mr Romney, and the rest of the American Taliban that supports them, is that they have now overly expanded and demonized the group of people who “know too much” to include nearly the entirety of the US voting population.  At the end of the day, I am left to conclude that these folks definitely have more reverence for the crazy ideals they trumpet than the math of public polling that clearly shows how out of touch they are with the electorate they wish to represent.  #cleansweep.

Enjoy.

Mendacious Intellectual Pornography

I’m not sure he coined the phrase, but John Kwok is vigorously promoting the term “mendacious intellectual pornography’ in regards to Intelligent Design/Creationism.  I think it should also apply to all the statements by torture supporters as well.
Enjoy.