Synapostasy

Thanks!

2010-04-24T23:59:00.001-04:00

Synapostasy has officially come to an end. It was time for us to move on to new and different things.

Comments are now closed, but all the archives remain in place for your perusal. For more of my writing and other projects, please feel free to check out http://www.aarongolas.com/.

On behalf of Ben and myself, thanks for reading!

Sex, Babies, and the RCC

2009-06-01T10:52:00.003-04:00

Is it not interesting that men whose religion forbids them to have sex should be so vehement that nobody else should have what they cannot? (And, if they have it, they certainly shouldn't enjoy it)

Is it not also interesting that the women who are forbidden to bear children by that same religion are so vehement that the rest of the world should have as many babies as possible?

I wonder what the Western world would be like if the positions had been reversed? That is, if celibate priests were of a more vicarious mindset, exhorting people to have all the sex that they themselves can't have - and if nuns, conversely, were the dogs-in-a-manger, taking out their childless frustrations on the world by urging better birth control.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

2009-04-24T15:52:00.003-04:00

An obligatory David Bowie video to accompany the post title:

Synapostasy is two years old today. (There's no telling what that is in blog years.) When Ben and I, emboldened by "The God Delusion" and the New Humanism conference at Harvard, began this blog back in 2007, it was intended to be a joint exercise in atheist activism and scholarship. We've drifted quite a bit from our initial "mission statement," in some ways, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I know I've expanded into general skepticism topics, and have embellished with some science topics or bits of fun from time to time.

After all, we, the authors, have changed, too. In the past two years, we've graduated from college. I found a job. I got married! And looking back at the archives, I feel a bit of a disconnect from some of what I've written before.

Blogging has been unhappily sporadic of late, for which I apologize. Let me assure you that I haven't been idle. The past few months, I've taken it upon myself to expand upon the single computer science course I took at Dartmouth and become more proficient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and most recently a smattering of PHP. This has ultimately culminated in my decision to try my hand at hosting my own website. After some fiddling with WordPress, it's up and running for real. I officially unveiled Scion Gradient yesterday.

The freedom of having my own personal site is exhilarating, and so far I thoroughly enjoy using the WordPress platform. A new start may be precisely the change I needed to rejuvenate my writing. I wasn't necessarily planning to use that site to start a new blog, but the siren call is so strong...

Ben and I have yet to discuss what this development means for the future of Synapostasy. One way or another, more changes are in store. Stay tuned.

GAUDEO!

2009-04-12T22:14:00.004-04:00

Iesus Nazarenus Mortus Manet!

Fancy Suit

2009-03-19T19:40:00.001-04:00

It's been a while since I've paid any attention to OneNewsNow, the online "news" presence for the conservative Christian fundamentalist American Family Association. Part of it was their garish web design with ads that kept crashing my web browser. As juicy as the ignorance in the headlines might be, it's hard to comment on an article that you can't read. Another part was simple fundie fatigue. It didn't help any when they signed on Michelle Malkin as an editorialist.

So what ends the drought? A startling admission does. ONN (not to be confused with the Onion News Network, a far superior outlet to which I have no qualms about linking) posted an article yesterday about a lesbian high school senior in a "small farming community" in Indiana who wanted to wear a tuxedo to her prom. The school initially insisted that girls wear dresses, but relented when the ACLU filed a lawsuit on the girl's behalf, much to the chagrin of local Denizens of an Idyllic Paradise of Strict Heteronormity from a more Innocent Time. Hooray!

Now, I mentioned that the girl was a lesbian, which I'm sure was very important to the AFA, but it should be irrelevant. A tuxedo is legitimate formal attire, and should be an option available to either gender regardless of their motives for choosing it. You know who looks good in the right tuxedo? Just about everybody. Seriously, I'd take a straight girl in a tuxedo over half the monstrosities that pass for prom dresses.

What's notable about the ONN article, though, apart from the standard homophobia and knee-jerk ACLU bashing, is the uniquely candid perspective of AFA Indiana executive director Micah Clark:

Clark points out parents need to be aware that there are very few standards that schools can take a stand for and win in court. He adds that it is a sign of the times when even small, rural schools in conservative areas are not immune to the onslaught of the gay agenda.

Why, yes, Mr. Clark. It is a sign of the times when bigotry can no longer hide, even in the backwaters. And I, for one, couldn't be happier.

Some Kinda Druid Dudes Lifting the Veil

2009-03-18T09:34:00.002-04:00

St. Patrick's Day has never been one of my favorite of holidays, to be honest. Not that I have anything really against the holiday itself... any excuse for a party, right? But for the longest time, I wasn't even sure what it was supposed to be celebrating, apart from cheesy decorations and drinking to excess, neither of which particularly appealed to me. One might think to take refuge from the modern debauch by focusing more on what the holiday is ostensibly supposed to be celebrating, but the truth is, there's nary a bit in the St. Patrick story worth celebrating. St. Patrick was a missionary, well-known in legend for having driven the snakes out of Ireland.

And by snakes, I mean the native Druids.

The effects of missionary creep can be tragic enough, but it was doubly so in the case of the Druids, because they left nothing behind. The Druids remain an intractable mystery, and that's a goddamned shame. That culture is gone. A whole culture, gone, and with hardly a trace remaining apart from a few peat bog mummies and a handful of Roman writings (a source of limited value, to be sure).

Which is not to say that the Druids were a bunch of saints (so to speak); that's not the point, though I'll note that the human sacrifice business is heavily disputed. That's the tragedy, that we don't know. We just don't know. Too often, when an oral tradition died, so did the memory of it. They survive as figures of legend, especially in Irish literature, but we don't know anything about them.

But I suppose it was worth it in the end. After all, Christianity in Ireland has worked out so well for everyone involved. And Patrick got to return to the island that kidnapped him with the ultimate revenge.

Therefore, this St. Patrick's Day, I wore green and black, to mark the holiday in solidarity with the Druids. And I didn't touch a drop of alcohol all day. Though that was more due to the fact that we're out of whiskey in the house...

I mean, solidarity.

Hand Jive

2009-03-11T14:12:00.003-04:00

A reminder that good hygiene isn't restricted to laboratory practices:

Once again, via yeah-it's-high-time-I-dropped-this-from-my-feed-reader FailBlog.

Once Burned, Twice Shy

2009-03-10T23:59:00.002-04:00

I am surrounded by things that will kill me. I'm not even talking about any of the deadly pathogens we study (this time). The spot of trouble I had was with a fairly mundane experiment.

The other week, I had to perform roughly two hundred gel purifications in preparation for a cloning experiment. First, you load a mixed DNA sample (in my case, the products of a PCR) onto an agarose gel and apply electric current to separate the DNA into bands based on size (a process called gel electrophoresis). Then, if there's a specific piece of DNA that you're interested in manipulating further (for instance, the pieces of DNA I wanted to clone), you can just cut the band of corresponding size out of the gel and extract the DNA from it using a special filter.

It's a straightforward and common practice, but you do have to be a little careful when running an agarose gel. To visualize the DNA, you stain the gel with ethidium bromide (EtBr), a chemical that becomes fluorescent when it binds to DNA. Its proclivity for binding DNA is all well and good for the sake of running the gel, but you don't want it coming in contact with your skin. It can induce DNA mutations, and is therefore suspected to be a carcinogen.

I take care not to get EtBr on my skin. I don't want cancer.

I guess I should have been more careful about the radiation burns, then.

Okay, so that sounds melodramatic, but that's technically what happened. You see, EtBr fluoresces under ultraviolet light. In order to cut all the bands out of my gels, I had to spend a fair deal of time standing over gels lit from below by a UV light box. Before you scold me, I was actually wearing a UV shield and safety glasses over my face. It wasn't until I was washing my face that night, however, that I realized the face shield hadn't given my neck much coverage. So yeah, I wound up with a mild sunburn on my neck (and a bit of color in my face... the shield doesn't give perfect protection). It was a little sore for a few days (I actually got a cold around the same time, so my throat was sore inside and out!), but otherwise no serious harm done. Good for a chuckle at my own expense, and a reminder that I'm a trained professional who deals with some dangerous stuff.

So now I know better than to lounge in front of the UV box without a scarf and/or a turtleneck. Hey, at least I wasn't performing protein electrophoresis. Proteins are run on a polyacrylamide gel instead of agarose. Polyacrylamide is mostly harmless, but non-polymerized acrylamide is a pretty serious neurotoxin.

I love science. Excitement around every corner.

The Unheard Atheists

2009-01-28T21:10:00.009-05:00

In which I argue for the necessity of my discipline, and rediscover my purpose in blogging.

The argument that an atheistic, rationalist worldview is inherently better and more true than a religious one will not be won decisively if we continue to compare the two solely on their ability to create a coherent, compelling, and intelligible reading of the world around us.

Of course we rationalists believe that the materialist cosmos described by modern science is the only one that conforms to the evidence at our disposal -- that it is the most compelling, plausible, and structurally elegant system man has yet discovered. But when you take a religion on its own terms and within the confines of its own language, you will find that it too projects an elegant, internally-justifying, and altogether coherent view of the world. And, moreover, we atheists who refuse to appreciate the internal consistency of the religious worldview are hamstrung by our own cherry-picking attitude, one that pounces on the blatantly contradictory and easily-refutable anachronisms that, for most modern religious people, have been smoothed over by generation upon generation of increasingly sophisticated apologists. For example, I consider myself very well versed in the standard refutations of Christianity as well as the history of the Hebrew scriptures (having studied the religion of the ancient Israelites for the better part of four years before moving on to East Asian religions) -- but when it came to arguing with a very erudite and very fervent Episcopalian friend of mine, I actually found myself hard-pressed to find any chinks in her armor, so well had the broader theological project of her religion caulked the holes inherent to her scriptural foundation. The bottom line - and this is a line that religious apologists have used against us against us time and again to great effect - is that science and religion can, each in their own way and none more correct than the other, describe the world we inhabit in a coherent and sensical way. Of course we know this isn't empirically valid, but the inter-subjective agreement to disagree favored by the more educated theists has an infuriating ability to stymy most of us in debate.

The key to winning the Atheism/Theism debate is to take a step back, to stop trying to compare the two on their ability to describe the world (the origin of life, the necessity of social order, the problem of suffering, the meaning of existence), but instead to assess their ability to account for the other. We can trumpet the descriptive value of empiricism until we're blue in the face, proffering cohesive explanations of the origins of life, the universe, and everything -- but until we also start to explain the entirely human origins of religion itself, the theist will still be able to take refuge in his relativist, agree-to-disagree, two-different-ways-of-interpreting-life position.

You see, most of the greatest and most vocal Atheists of today - Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers immediately jump to mind - are in the natural sciences. Which means that they are entirely qualified to explain why religion is empirically wrong about the nature of the universe, but completely ill-equipped to account for the origin, purpose, and function of religion in human society. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing but respect and a great deal of admiration for these men, and the new Atheism would be in dire straits without them. But when they turn their prodigious biological talents to the question of religion, it is obvious that they are out of their discipline. Then the new Atheists dismiss religion with their own ad hoc psychological theories - as a crutch, as an evolutionary holdover, as a tool of coercion, as primitive psychiatry - their dismissals ring hollow. The problem with the new Atheist movement is that it gives all of its attention to scholars with evidence that contradicts religion, but none at all to those scholars whose entire enterprise essentially undermines religion by explaining it in scientific terms.

And it's not like these scholars don't exist. The University of Chicago defines the academic discipline of the History of Religions as one that:

approaches religion as an exclusively human phenomenon, via the methods of the social sciences and the humanities. It is concerned to theorize at a high level of generalization, informed by broadly comparative and empirical research, and to carry out high level empirical research informed by theoretical reflection. ... Irreverent by temperament and sometimes on principle, it insists that [a] the Western monotheisms should not be the only paradigms and/or objects of legitimate study, [b] religion cannot be reduced to belief, but also includes issues of practices, institutions, communities, habits and other factors that often operate below the level of consciousness, and [c] interpretation involves critical probing and systematic interrogation of the idealized self-representations of any religious phenomenon.

What better ally can we have than this field? Why is it that the only vocal atheists out there are biologists? Speaking as a person whose own natal faith - which was left completely unthreatened by my complete acceptance of Darwinian evolution - took only one semester in the History of Religions to be completely overthrown, I want to know how we can afford not to have these scholars at our vanguard?

There are many and complex reasons, of course, not the least of which is political: no religious scholar wants to scare away the people who can most benefit from his classes by developing a reputation as one of the staunch godless - let alone jeopardize his tenure. Moreover, religionists understandably don't tend to be as interested in annihilating the thing that gives them a job. But still, for every hundred of those professors, can't we have our own Dawkins or Meyers?

I certainly don't make myself out to be any such person. Not yet, at any rate. There's still too much to learn. But until then, I'll try and continue to bring this perspective to my own blogging.

Leave the science to Aaron -- I've got to be the religionist.

Ever As Before: Creationists Still Resist Antibiotic Resistance

2009-01-27T12:37:00.001-05:00

It's hard to believe that it's been over a year since I wrote about creationists' arguments against using antibiotic resistance in bacteria as an example of evolution. The creationists' refrain, if you don't remember, is typically:

1) “The genes for resistance are not the result of random mutation; they’ve been there all along, we just didn’t notice them!”
2) “Even if resistance DOES occasionally result from random mutation, it doesn’t count as evolution, because there’s always a price to be paid for gaining resistance.”

Both points are complete balderdash, as I've written before. In short: Evolution is about change in populations--neither for better nor for worse, rather simply for different--by any of several mechanisms. But if you're hung up on random mutation, then we have ample evidence that antibiotic resistance can be the result of random mutation. And if you're hung up on seeing mutations that improve general fitness of resistant bacteria, then, hell, we've got that, too.

I dipped into my archives for this one because the creationists have been dipping into theirs. The Young-Earth Creationist (or "YUCK" for short) evangelist website Answers in Genesis is, once again, trumpeting the first argument, this time by means of a moldering little article from May 2007. Looking at a population of bacteria under antibiotic selection, yuckmeister Ken Ham and his cronies want you to "recognize that the resistance is already present in the bacterial population" and therefore not an example of "the addition of completely different kinds of genetic information." Sound familiar? And apparently that was insightful enough to be worth repeating over a year and a half later.

I guess that's to be expected, though. Some of the nonsense they recycle is thousands of years old.

Isn't Anybody Gonna Help That Poor Man?

2009-01-20T00:15:00.002-05:00

A preview of the inauguration festivities?

Changes

2009-01-19T23:35:00.001-05:00

I remember, at the start of 2nd grade in the autumn of '92, being given a sheet of paper with three faces on it: George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. I remember having no idea who any of them were, circling George Bush's face after learning that he was already the president, deciding that I
was in no position to change things.

To my detriment, I never paid much attention to current events when I was growing up, least of all to politics. I didn't understand a lick of Operations Desert Storm or Desert Shield. I didn't know the difference between Watergate and Whitewater. (The fact that the latter was often referred to as "Whitewatergate" didn't help. Seriously, for the children, we need to quit it with the "-gate" suffix.) All I knew about the Monica Lewinsky scandal was that it was sexual in nature, and therefore not
something I should know the details of. (I did wonder, though, what exactly a cigar or a blue dress had to do with anything.)

But I remember the 2000 election. That must have been when I really started paying attention. I remember helping my mom vote as usual--she, my brothers, and I all crammed into one of those massive verdigris-colored voting machines--but with a purpose other than just to help flip switches and point out which politicians had the silliest names. I remember staying up to watch the election results that night. I remember the confusion of the following morning.

Which means that the bulk of my world-aware life--and certainly the entirety of my "adult" life--to this point has belonged to the era of George W. Bush. I don't really remember what life was like before what has come to be known by many as the Worst Presidency. And I don't know yet what life will be like after it.

Optimistic as I'd like to be, the uncertainty of the road ahead is unnerving. Starting tomorrow, things will be different. I just hope they're different enough to repair the damage done.

AstrLOLogy

2009-01-13T17:21:00.003-05:00

The predictive power of astrology is kinda like... like...

(Via the increasingly repetitive, yet still occasionally chuckle-worthy, FailBlog)

Bibliophilia

2009-01-12T23:31:00.001-05:00

The time has come for me to undertake a long-neglected rite of passage. I am going to read a book.

Not just any book, mind you. Written long before my time by a British academic, this particular book had a profound impact on the world, and it is to my unyielding shame that I have yet to read it. Like many, I already know quite a bit about its contents, but I've never actually experienced it firsthand. It's time for that to change.

Yes, tonight is the night that I finally start reading The Lord of the Rings.

In my defense, I read The Hobbit back in middle school, and I had every intention of reading The Lord of the Rings immediately thereafter. However, my brother's copy was lost by a friend, and before we could obtain a replacement I was well into some other book. The opportunity passed, and I never found my way back 'round to it, until now.

There are a great many books to be read on my list right now, and I have every intention of taking this year as an opportunity to rekindle my old reading habits. What better way to start than with the epic that defined high fantasy?

Read more. Write more. Make more. Make something of myself. That is my charge. Yes, this will be a good year.

Now, then. Concerning hobbits...

Oh, I'm going to enjoy this.

Evolution and the Economy, Redux

2008-12-18T11:25:00.004-05:00

A few months ago, I wrote a rather incoherent post about the economy. I had a good point, but I made it badly, and it's been nagging me ever since. Well, just now, doing dishes, the answer came to me. Here's hoping it works better this time:

Conservative on the Economy:

"The economy is far too complex for human beings to control effectively. All attempts to create a more perfect economy through design (i.e. Communism) have ended in dismal failure. The only way to create a functional, prosperous economy is to let market forces decide everything."

Conservative on the Origin of Life:

"It's impossible for something as perfect and complex as a human being to exist without an intelligent creator behind it. It is impossible to conceive of how something so complex can work so well together without some element of design. There is no way that dispassionate, natural forces could create something so streamlined and elegant."

An elegant little bit of hypocrisy, innit? The argument from personal incredulity was flimsy enough already -- but to argue that dispassionate selection could never create a human being, but is nevertheless the *only* way to create a functional economy is absolutely galling.

So-called fiscal-conservatives are more Darwinian, methinks, than they would care to admit.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-12T11:06:00.002-05:00

I've said it once before, and I'll say it again: we're doing it wrong.

You might think that taking a pluralistic approach to the holidays is a good idea. The Christmas Tree is a Christian symbol, so for parity's sake, wherever there's a Christmas Tree there also has to be a Chanukah Bush, an 'Eid Palm, a Kwanzaa Rock, a Buddha Bonsai, a Shiva Spruce... And then we start insisting on our own representations and put up an Atheist sign, a Festivus Pole, a Pastafarian Manicotti, and what have you, and then everybody's all up in arms about who gets to be in the public sphere and who's trampling on whose rights and nobody gets to have fun because we're all too busy fighting with each other to enjoy the egg nog.

This is ridiculous.

Problem 1: By siding with the people who insist on equal time for non-Christian religious symbols on public display, we are helping to reinforce the idea that it doesn't matter what religion you are -- as long as you are one. By fighting for the rights of minority religions to have public displays, we're not helping to create a more equal society, we're fighting for the equality of all religions, leaving us freethinkers as the obvious scapegoats when the rest of the faithful unite in self-righteous solidarity.

Problem 2: By fighting against public displays of Christmas Trees and the like, we're effectively reinforcing the Christianization of Christmas. Christmas already is a secular event, and we need to make sure we keep it that way. Take the Japanese, for example: Christmas is *huge* with them, but Christians only amount to about a tenth of one percent of their entire population. Granted, their historical relationship with Christianity has been, on the whole, more desirable than ours, but even in America Christmas isn't really about Baby Jeezus. As I've mentioned before, most Christmas and Advent sermons are all about not forgetting the 'real' meaning of Christmas -- and the fact that people need to be reminded of this by their pastors means that they have other things in mind when they think about Christmas.

We will never win if we try to ban Christmas from the public sphere. Never. It means too much to too many people - especially the secular, apathetic Christians to whom we should be reaching out the most. We need to stand with the moderates on this one. We need to say OK to Christmas Trees, but no to Nativity Scenes. Secular Christmas is something we can and should all get behind - a season of showing people we love them, gathering with friends, and being good to each other regardless of the reason. Let the religious fight about why we do so, and let the rest of us just have some goodwill and holiday cheer.

And don't act like petulant children about words. If English-speaking Christians can call their highest holy day by the name of a pagan goddess, then we freethinkers can bear to call the festival we grew up with by the name of Christmas. It's an accident of linguistic history that we call it Christmas instead of Weinachten, Noel, or Jul - nothing more. Let's focus on what Christmas has come to mean to all of us, instead of what it has traditionally meant to some.

Have a Very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Loath to Admit It, but Denyse and I Share Genes

2008-12-10T02:00:00.001-05:00

Normally, I don't bother to give Denyse O'Leary and her Shady Valley Link-Farm & Dairy the time of day. But seeing as how it's the middle of the night, and how her latest prattle at Uncommon Descent contains a particularly glaring nugget of stupid, I'll make an exception. Don't worry, I'll keep it brief.

Ms. O'Leary regularly tries to make hay of a perceived conflict between altruistic behavior and evolution. Her strategy seems to consist of alternating between heartwarming tales of good deeds and gross ignorance of actual science. This time, she invokes acts of heroism during the recent attacks in Mumbai, and then follows it up with some truly ignorant genetics:

[A]ltruism would mean helping one’s own kinfolk in order to preserve one’s own genes - which one shares with them (= Dawkins’s ” “selfish gene”). That really doesn’t apply to situations where people help strangers at the risk of their own lives.

Purely for the sake of this statement, let's assume that altruism evolved so the individual would work to preserve his kin and thereby preserve their shared genes. Did it ever occur to O'Leary that two strangers might share some genes in common? Like, the vast, vast majority of them? We are, after all, all distant kin. Hell, I'm preserving a fair number of my genes by feeding my cat.1

Poor, short-sighted O'Leary...

1 Though, if that's the goal, getting him neutered was probably a step in the wrong direction...

Carter and the Dragonslayers

2008-12-09T00:24:00.004-05:00

My brother, a college senior aspiring to veterinary medicine, spent four weeks this past summer working on a pair of wildlife reserves in Uganda and Kenya. He had the time of his life, as should any young man seeing the world and fulfilling a lifelong dream to boot. And he managed not to get into too much trouble while doing so. (As he put it, "I promise I was in nearly complete control of almost all of the situations I found myself in some of the time.")

However, all was not beer and skittles and charging rhinoceroses. To manage the trip, he had to put up with the threat of parasites. A particular friend to the little things that creepeth within one's flesh, my brother is not. But I guess when you get the chance to dart lions on the savannah, you deal.

Anyway, at one point he expressed concern that he might have contracted guinea worms. He didn't contract guinea worms (at least, not that we know of), he was just being momentarily paranoid.

In a few years, he might never again have to worry about contracting guinea worms. Former President Jimmy Carter announced this past Friday that cases of dracunculiasis (guinea worm disease) have hit an all-time worldwide low (AP):

Only 4,410 cases were reported worldwide during the first ten months of this year, all in six African countries. Nearly 80 percent were in Sudan, according to The Carter Center, a nonprofit founded by Carter and his wife that helps fight disease and champions voting and human rights around the world.

That total is a dramatic drop from the 3.5 million cases in 20 nations that were reported when The Carter Center's eradication campaign began in 1986. It's also less than half the 9,585 cases reported by individual nations in 2007.

"Our record on Guinea worm for the last few years has been steadily and rapidly downward," Carter said.

Health experts hope that next year may see the last reported cases of the parasitic illness, which would make it the second infection — after smallpox — to be eliminated from the world.

Mind you, there is no vaccine against guinea worms, nor is there any medicine to treat them. The eradication of this disease is being carried out via simple education and sanitation.

The only way to eradicate guinea worms is to interrupt their life cycle. The good news is, since guinea worms only infect humans, not other animals, once the disease is gone from the human population, it's gone for good. There can be no environmental reserves of the parasite.

Infection starts when a person drinks water containing copepods (itty-bitty planktonic crustaceans) infected with guinea worm larvae. Once in the person's stomach, the guinea worm larvae burrow out into the abdominal cavity, where they spend several months growing, maturing, and mating. The males die after mating. The females, now three feet long or so and almost as thick as a spaghetti noodle, need to deliver their young to a water source. To that end, they burrow down the host's leg and form an excruciating blister on the surface of the host's foot. As soon as the foot touches water, thousands of larvae are released to continue the cycle.

There are two main strategies, therefore, to preventing guinea worm disease from spreading:
1) Limit exposure by educating people about the disease and developing safe sources of drinking water (providing water filters, digging wells, etc.)
2) Prevent spread of the next cycle through good sanitation. Teach people to recognize signs of the disease, to identify it early and prevent those afflicted with emerging guinea worms from coming in contact with the water.

Dracunculiasis a devastating affliction. It cripples the host and causes incredible pain. And the only way to remove the worm is to wrap it around a stick (or, nowadays, a piece of gauze) and slowly, over the course of weeks, pull the three-foot worm out through the blister, with the afflicted having to endure burning pain all the while. Hence the worm's nickname, "the fiery serpent," and disease name dracunculiasis, Latin for "affliction with little dragons" and perhaps the most kickass of all parasite names.

It is also an ancient affliction. Guinea worms have been found in calcified Egyptian mummies. The symbol of medicine, the Rod of Asklepios, is thought by many to be representative of the method of guinea worm extraction.

And now, it's almost gone. By sheer know-how and concerted effort, a disease that has plagued humans since before the time of the pharaohs is being driven to the brink of extinction.

I'm giddy. I'm eager to hear what the Carter Center has to report next year.

(Tip o' the hat to Effect Measure.)

Memetics: Firsts of the Firsts of the Months of 2008

2008-12-06T23:32:00.001-05:00

It's funny, the things that stick with us. What with Grandpop's funeral and all, I completely forgot to make note of a certain date. Sara and I were at PharynguFest Boston last night at the Cambridge Brewing Company.

Every time I pass a Reformed Church of Christ, I think to myself, "I wonder what a Delinquent Church of Christ looks like." I'm not crazy about public debates; they seem to me to give too much power and import to rhetorical tricks rather than honest academic pursuit.

Apologies for the unannounced absence. I considered avoiding comment on this one, but the pun was too good to pass up.

Stumbled across this the other night. It's fairly remarkable... since having seen Dinesh D'Souza in a live debate, I've felt much less compelled to shred the inanity he posts to his blog. How can you live like that?

Miss me? Clockwise from left: the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus.

~*~

Tip of the hat to some science bloggers. If you have a blog of your own, then play along: go through your archives, and post the first sentence of the first post of each month of the past year.

Planets By the Naked Eye

2008-12-01T23:49:00.003-05:00

Clockwise from left: the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus. Taken from Cambridge, MA, at roughly 5 PM EST, 1 December 2008, with a 1.3-megapixel camera phone.

As astronomy pictures go, this is a pretty darn wimpy one. But so help me, every once in a while I look at the sky, and the sense of what's physically out there really hits me.

On Nutrition

2008-11-27T09:14:00.003-05:00

On one of America's Mighty Food Holidays, a note to any vegetarians (or aspiring vegetarians) out there: Please feed your babies.

(From A Softer World)

Sharing Skepticism in Chiropractic

2008-11-26T13:25:00.002-05:00

I've been wary of chiropractors for almost as long as I've been a self-identified skeptic. I frequented one throughout high school, never bothering to question the principles behind it, nor even its efficacy. I just assumed it was doing me good. Now I know that the practice is founded upon pseudoscience, that at best chiropractors can be physical therapists with delusions of grandeur.

But it wasn't until last spring that I learned that, not only is chiropractic ineffective, it also carries potential for serious injury. Specifically, chiropractic neck adjustment is linked to a specific type of stroke. (For more reading, Science-Based Medicine published further articles on chiropractic and stroke throughout the summer.)

This news troubled me greatly. I had never been warned about the risk by my chiropractor. And even if the risk of stroke is small, the risk is being taken for zero demonstrated benefit. Members of my family still see a chiropractor; concerned for their safety, I shared this news with them. It wasn't particularly well-received; as I feared, I came across as something of a Chicken Little. There was some acknowledgment that it might be a risk for others, but supposedly our chiropractor was different.

Some time later, I got a chance to try again. A friend of mine was having tension in his back, and was persuaded by his boss to visit a chiropractor. He had a good experience, and expressed interest in making a habit out of chiropractic visits.

I simply pointed out to him that the majority of chiropractic is based on pseudoscience, and can put you at risk for anything from wasted money to serious injury. So if he wanted to pursue a chiropractor, I'd recommend consulting Chirobase (a project of Quackwatch) so he'd at least know how to find a good one.

The information on Chirobase was enough to turn him off neck adjustments for sure, and possibly off chiropractors entirely.

I used a different kind of message, yes. But more importantly, I had a different kind of audience. My friend was already interested in learning more about chiropractic. All I did was to point him toward an excellent resource on the subject. But how do we get people to question, who aren't already questioning? Is it even possible, or do we just have to wait them out?

Skeptics have the facts on their side. That's what it means to be a skeptic; we go where the data leads us. That's a major advantage, but it won't do us any good unless we have our audience's attention.

Youtuberisms

2008-11-25T13:18:00.003-05:00

Dear Unidentified YouTube Algorithm,

I know you mean well. But just because I spend an afternoon watching one or seven "Kim Possible" clips, doesn't mean I'm a 13-years-old girl. Therefore, in the future, please refrain from putting compilations of "Best Animated Kisses of all times" in my Recommended Videos queue, at least while my wife is looking over my shoulder.

Cheers,
--Aaron--

JUST MARRIED (In a Secular Ceremony)!

2008-11-18T11:37:00.003-05:00

Miss me? ;-)

Okay, so technically Sara and I have been "just married" for over a month now. I wish I could say we've been spending the past few weeks on an extended honeymoon, but alas, there truly is no rest for the weary. We stayed up north for a couple days after the wedding, and then it was back to the ol' grind. I'd have written sooner, but I've been preoccupied with some pressing personal issues, and meanwhile been trying my damnedest to enjoy my marriage in spite of them. However, those issues have since been addressed, so maybe I can finally spare some attention once again for some recreational writing.

Sara and I were married the afternoon of October 11, 2008, in Rollins Chapel at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Our close friend Benjamin Cox here served as officiant.

I'd be lying if I said the day went perfectly. But it was still one of the best days of my life. Family has always been incredibly important to me, especially so since my realization to atheism. I'm so glad my family was there for us, and I can't remember ever feeling closer to them than I did that
day. And I'm so proud to be able to include Sara among them.

Naturally, being atheists, Sara and I weren't interested in a religious ceremony. However, we both have a great affinity for ceremony and tradition. We definitely wanted something more personal than simply bringing witnesses before a Justice of the Peace. Furthermore, we wanted a ceremony that reflected the value we both place upon family.

So, with Ben's help, we wrote our own ceremony, and I think we came up with a damn fine one. I'd like to share it with you, so even if you couldn't be at the wedding, you might at least get a sense of what the ceremony was like.1

And if you're planning your own atheist wedding, congratulations, and I hope that maybe this helps as an example.

OUTLINE

Entrance
Welcome, Presentation of Bride and Groom
Introductory Remarks
Exchange of Baskets (Cherokee custom)
Gifts of Bread, Salt, and Wine (Polish custom)
Message to the Parents (reading)
Couple Partakes of Bread and Wine (reading)
Exchange of Vows
Exchange of Rings
Oath of Affirmation
Pronouncement of Marriage
Presentation of the Couple

CEREMONY

Guests are seated. Officiant enters.
Groom, followed by Groomsmen, enter from the side.
Bridesmaids proceed down center aisle to music.
Bride enters to music, is escorted down center aisle by her parents.

Officiant: Welcome. Friends and loved ones, we are gathered here today to witness the union of Aaron Golas and Sara Bersché. It is through their deep and abiding love for each other that they stand before you today, and it is through their deep and abiding love for all of you that they have asked you here to bear witness to their heartfelt vows of marriage.
Who presents this couple in marriage?

Parents: We do!

Officiant: Sara and Aaron have chosen an appropriate setting for the public affirmation of love they are about to undertake. Four years ago on this campus, they first found in each other a sense of shared purpose, friendship, and love which has grown so strong that they return here now to unite their lives in marriage. May the love and joy we all share with them today sanctify this place, that it may house their wedding as it nurtured their relationship at the start.

Aaron and Sara, you have come to love each other deeply and sincerely. In this ceremony, you celebrate your commitment and your love for each other and dedicate yourselves to your individual growth and partnership.

For marriage is a partnership, a commitment reinforced by love, of equals who discover that they are more fulfilled together than they are apart. Two people who choose the partnership of marriage need many skills to make it work. They need patience, kindness, generosity, good humor, and the ability to compromise. They need persistence, nurturing, trust, discretion, and the willingness to be vulnerable. But almost nothing offers a greater possibility for living life well. Life is richer when experience is shared, and good lovers bring out the best in each other. In a good relationship, the partners are aware of how much they need each other — of how much they transform each other. Joy, laughter, caring, tenderness, and hope are the gifts of love. In the presence of love, we feel our power and experience life in a new way. And you are partners in love who enjoy life more fully because you have found each other.

In this spirit of partnership, and in keeping with the custom of the bride’s Cherokee heritage, I invite the parents to come forward with baskets, lovingly prepared by the bride and groom as tokens of that which they bring to their union.

Mothers of the Bride and Groom stand and approach the altar, each holding a small basket.

Officiant: [To the Bride:] Sara, what do you provide for this union of marriage?

Mother of the Bride hands the Bride her basket of corn, and stands to the side.

Bride: I provide these things to my husband and home. They are a symbol that I will care for you and love you always.

Officiant: [To the Groom:] Aaron, what do you provide for this union of marriage?

Mother of the Groom hands the Groom his basket of meat, and stands to the side.

Groom: I provide these things to my wife and home. They are a symbol that I will provide, love and protect our family always.

Bride and Groom exchange baskets and lay them upon the sides of the altar.

Officiant: In keeping with the custom of the groom’s Polish heritage, the parents are now welcomed to present gifts of food and drink to their children.

Fathers of the Bride and Groom stand and approach the altar.

Officiant: [To couple:] Your parents offer you this loaf of bread and portion of salt. The bread represents your parents' hope that you will never experience hunger or need. The salt is to remind you that your lives may be difficult and you must learn together to cope with life's struggles.

Father of the Groom hands rye bread and salt to the Groom, who sets them upon the altar.

Officiant: [To couple:] Your parents now offer you a gift of wine. With this wine, your parents hope that you will never thirst and that you will have a life of good health and cheer and share the company of many good friends.

Father of the Bride hands decanter of tokaji to the Bride, who sets it upon the altar.

Officiant: Aaron and Sara’s union brings together two family traditions, two systems of roots, in the hope that a new family tree may become strong and fruitful.

The parents may now join in kissing the bride and groom as a welcome to the family and as a sign of their love and unity.

Parents of the Bride and Groom now kiss their own child, then their new child, before returning to their seats.

Officiant: Parents. Through your love you gave your children life, and with your constant love they prospered. They stand here today the fruits of your care, your hard work, and sacrifice, and for these things they are very, truly grateful.

But now, standing here together, having come of their own free will, they must begin their lives anew.

And so I say to you now, in the words of the poet Khalil Gibran:
“Your Children are not Your Children

They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself...
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts...
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth...
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies,
so he loves also the bow that is stable.”

Will you, David and Linda, Brian and Lydia, encourage Sara and Aaron in their marriage, celebrate with them the decision they have made to choose each other, and continue to stand beside them, yet not between them?

Parents: We will!

Officiant: Having been presented with these gifts of bread and wine, let us now invite the Bride and Groom to partake of them, together, again in the words of the poet Khalil Gibran:

As the poem is read, the Bride and Groom each pour a glass of wine and offer it to the other. They then break their loaves of bread and offer a piece to the other, sprinkling the bread with salt. They eat of the bread, and drink the wine.

Officiant: Aaron and Sara:
“You were born together,
and together you shall be forevermore...
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Let it rather be a moving sea between
the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. ***
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. ***
Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone
though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together.
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress
grow not in each other's shadow.”

Officiant: The Bride and Groom will now express their promises to each other.

Groom: I, Aaron, take you, Sara, as my wife. I do solemnly avow my love for you. I will comfort you, keep you, love you, defend you in sickness or in health, in riches or poverty, in sorrow or joy, seeking only to be with you until my dying day. All these things I pledge upon my honor, and with my earnest and complete devotion, I give you my love.

Bride: I, Sara, take you, Aaron, as my husband. I do solemnly avow my love for you. I will comfort you, keep you, love you, defend you in sickness or in health, in riches or poverty, in sorrow or joy, seeking only to be with you until my dying day. All these things I pledge upon my honor, and with my earnest and complete devotion, I give you my love.

Officiant: Traditionally, the passage to the status of husband and wife is marked by the exchange of rings. These rings are a symbol of the unbroken circle of love. Love freely given has no beginning and no end. Love freely given has no giver and no receiver - for each is the giver and each is the receiver. May these rings remind you always of the vows you have taken here today.

Exchange of rings. Groom receives ring from his Best Men, Bride from her Matron of Honor.

Groom: This ring is a symbol of my love and faithfulness, and with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you, and pledge to you my love and life.

Bride: This ring is a symbol of my love and faithfulness, and with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you, and pledge to you my love and life.

Officiant: Do you, Aaron, take Sara, whom you have promised to love and cherish, to be your lawfully wedded wife?

Groom: I do.

Officiant: Do you, Sara, take Aaron, whom you have promised to love and cherish, to be your lawfully wedded husband?

Bride: I do.

Officiant: Intimacy is what makes a marriage. Not a ceremony, not a word, not a piece of paper from the state. A wedding ceremony is only the outward symbol, a public announcement of that which is already within. While the powers vested in me by the State have given me the great privilege of rendering your union legal, yours is a bond that law can neither create nor destroy. May the confidence, trust, and affection you have for each other on this day, and all days, be the testament to your enduring love for each other as you go forth upon your journey of life together with all that it has to offer.

The poet Homer wrote, “There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.” Aaron and Sara, having witnessed the proof of your love for each other in your vows of marriage on this, the eleventh of October, Two Thousand and Eight, all who are assembled here now joyfully invite you to embrace as husband and wife.

Smooches!!!!

Officiant: Ladies and gentlemen, Aaron and Sara Golas!

Organ voluntary (Widor's Toccata from Symphony No.5) as audience applauds. Bride and Groom exit down center aisle. Exeunt omnia.

1 For a real sense of what it was like at our wedding, pretend you've been waiting over an hour for the bride to show up before beginning the ceremony. :-P

Why Obama is no Buzz Windrip

2008-11-05T12:09:00.003-05:00

Wherein I out myself as a rabid merito-classist.

Buzz Windrip, chief villain of Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here, rides a grassroots tidal wave of popular support to the White House. His promises of soft socialism to an economically uncertain American people win him an unprecedented landslide. But his big government quickly turns sour, and before they knew it, Americans found themselves living in a fascist state.

The paranoid middle class seems convinced that Obama's grassroots origins and liberal economic plans are going to have a similar effect.

This is absolute bollocks.

It is only incidental that Lewis' Windrip was a Democrat and a liberal. It is also only incidental that the Nazis began as a socialist party. Fascism does not categorically draw its support from either the right or the left. Rather, fascism feeds on the xenophobic, chest-beating, self-righteous paranoia of the poorly-educated, rural, lower-middle classes. In the 1930's, it just so happened that that segment of the American population voted Democrat. But these days, that same demographic is widely known as the Republican base. It doesn't matter whether you're promising greater individual autonomy or a stronger central government - it matters whether you're turning the uppity busybodies of the nation into a band of nationalist thugs.

Obama didn't win because he rallied the vast unwashed -- weilding the poor and ignorant like a cudgel these days is the Republicans' strategy of choice. Obama won because he managed to mobilize the well-educated and the prosperous in record numbers.

More Serenity

2008-10-10T01:29:00.001-04:00

Waiting for Sara to call me back, so I've got a minute to get a few more thoughts down.

The best thing about all this is, it doesn't feel like anything is really changing. It'll be a wild, wonderful weekend, but then we'll head back home and pick up where we left off. I figure that's a really good sign; our relationship is already in the right place. The rest is just paperwork.

Oh, but there will be a might party, have no doubt about that.

And I think we have a lovely ceremony planned. That's the one thing that has me nervous; not the marriage, but the wedding. (Better than the reverse, I know.) We've written our own ceremony. Ben here is officiating. It's a trifle terrifying, not having anyone authoritative to tell us what we're supposed to do (the answer "anything you want" isn't particularly comforting to the chronically indecisive). But we've done our research, and we've incorporated traditional elements. I think we've got something really nice worked out. (There will be details, fear not.)

But all is in order. Tokaji has been procured. Rings are packed, and my are they lovely. My best friend Brendan is here now; he's three months into a year-long
teaching gig in Japan, but he made it back for the wedding. Tux gets picked up first thing tomorrow morning, and then it's off to Hanover for the rehearsal, and then...

The leaves in are at their peak color this weekend, and the weather should be delightful. My word, we COULD NOT have chosen a better time to get married in New England.

Okay, time to talk to the bride, then sleep. Surprisingly tired. More to come...

Serenity

2008-10-10T00:57:00.001-04:00

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. I'm afraid I've been rather preoccupied.

I'm getting married in less than 48 hours, y'see...

Daily Double Standard: God and the Economy

2008-10-01T11:04:00.004-04:00

"How can you live like that? How can we be expected to be moral without religion? Is it just every man for himself otherwise? Is it just survival of the fittest? We couldn't possibly live like that."

Sound familiar? If you're out to any of your friends and family of faith, then at some point I'm sure you've gone through this tired old debate. No: social species like humans have developed codes of behavior (read: culture) that ensure our mutual survival and prosperity through cooperation; no, religion is not a necessary precondition for the ideology that in order to survive and prosper we must work for our collective good. Yes, a society built on selfishness and individual gain would absolutely crumble, but religion is not the only reason that people will work together for a common goal - and in fact has often had the exact opposite effect.

So far nothing new here.

But what I find the most hypocritical about this misguided belief is that the people who think that people would have no reason to play nice if it weren't for the constant surveillance and intervention of a great cosmic overlord are often the very same ones who think that regulation of the economy should be avoided at all costs.

How can someone possibly think that the strategy of "every man for himself and to hell with the rest of you" will create a healthy, well-functioning economy, but a chaotic and horrific society? Especially since white-collar crime feels so much more 'victimless' to the perpetrator than, say, assault and battery. Does that mean it's somehow easier to resist the temptation to shift a decimal place than it is to pull the trigger on another human being? "I'm completely above unscrupulous banking, and I would never dream of cooking my books -- but it's sure a good thing there's a God up there threatening me with hellfire, because otherwise I couldn't help shooting orphans in the face!" I don't know about you, but I would find it much more difficult to kill a man than to cheat on my taxes.

Can anyone out there sincerely believe that human beings would casually rape, murder, and pillage each other without God, but that we unfailingly exercise the utmost self-restraint and fiscal responsibility in our business dealings even if there are no serious consequences for dishonest dealing?

Make up your minds, right-wing christo-fascist wackaloons, because you can't have it both ways. Dishonest dealing and murder aren't all that different - people suffer both ways for the uninhibited greed and selfishness of others. So what's it going to be: are we inherently good people, or aren't we? Do we need someone or something telling us to mind all our Ps and Qs by fiat, or should we take Darwin to heart, take as much for ourselves as we can get and let the chips fall where they may?

Or maybe, just maybe, we can all come together and agree on a set of principles - a 'social contract' if you will - whereby we will agree to comport ourselves, in everyday life and in business dealings alike. Compliance with these principles achieves optimal benefits, harmony, and prosperity for all, and deviance is interpreted as a breach of contract and will be punished accordingly. Doesn't that sound nice?

Oh wait. We already have that. They're called laws.

More Confusion from Dishy Dizzy

2008-09-17T16:16:00.001-04:00

It's fairly remarkable... since having seen Dinesh D'Souza in a live debate, I've felt much less compelled to shred the inanity he posts to his blog. I guess it's hard to get angry at someone once you've seen in person just how pathetic they are. It feels, as they say, as though a weight has been lifted, and my "heart pressure" is likely the better for it.

Nonetheless, he continues to spew the stupid (already this month he's creamed his slacks over Sarah Palin and poked PZ with a stick), so what the hecks, let's have a look. Today, D'Souza is extolling the virtues of the latest book to critique the New Atheists, Michael Novak's No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers. I haven't read the book myself, but from the description it sounds like it's right up D'Souza's alley: No one can know the truth about God, so let's go with Christianity because it sounds nice.

To illustrate the point about everyone's being in the darkness, D'Souza cites a curious example. He writes:

One of Novak's especially attractive qualities is his ability to find common ground with his opponents. Here he begins by conceding to the atheist that "we are all in the same darkness." No one-not even Moses or Abraham-has set his eyes on God. Novak rejects the certitudes of both the religious fundamentalist and the militant atheist. He intends to explore what he calls "the dark and windswept open spaces between unbelief and belief."

Now, you won't find any argument from me that there's no evidence that anyone in real life has seen God. But to bring Moses into it? It's unclear whether the reference came from Novak's book or D'Souza, but D'Souza clearly endorses it.

I guess Moses couldn't see this elephant, either... (photo by John Spooner on Flickr)

The problem is, according to the Bible, Moses has seen God (for the relevant text, start here). Sure, you may quibble that Moses never got to see God's face, because no man may look upon the face of YHWH and live. But Moses still got to see God's backside (and they were chatting it up all the while), and that's a far sight better than anyone today can muster.

And even without looking at God's face directly, Moses was a member of God's "Mr. Miracle" brigade. Most of the stuff Moses saw, heard, and did, were it to ever happen in real life, would be good enough to make me convert (to Judaism, of course... I mean, what's so great about Christianity?). Invoking the central priest of a millenia-old desert mythology as an example of a modern, sophisticated theological mind is an odd move.

Furthermore, I'd note that the fact that no one has seen God isn't exactly a problem for atheists. I guess he's trying to demonstrate that both sides come to conclusions in the face of uncertainty and conflicting evidence, but he's only demonstrated conflict for his own side.

The rest is similar to the Courtier's Reply. Novak and D'Souza tell us atheists that we just don't "get" it:

"For a believer," Novak writes, "It does not take a prolonged thought experiment to imagine oneself an unbeliever." The believer knows full well where the atheist is coming from. By contrast, Novak suggests, atheists like Hitchens seem to have no empathetic understanding whatsoever of genuine religious conviction. They have no sense of what belief must be like from within.

This critique is particularly hilarious to see endorsed by D'Souza, who back in April couldn't manage to answer the simple question of what it would take to make him change his position on God. (Barker, on the other hand, had no trouble answering what kind of evidence it would take to get him to believe.) Though I can't speak for Hitchens in particular, there are millions of atheists who understand very intimately what it's like to feel "genuine religious conviction," because that's what we came from. As for how easily the general believer can see the world from the atheists' perspective, well, let's just say that remains to be demonstrated.

Next comes a likening of religion to literature; both require a suspension of disbelief for immersion in the story and true appreciation. Again: no argument from me that religion requires a suspension of disbelief. And again, and more blatantly: this is just the Courtier's Reply. We're not here to discuss the literary merits of "Macbeth," we're here to discuss whether it's historically accurate. Theology and religion can at times be very interesting, but it's not what this conversation is about.

Digest the rest at your peril (if you can find it... you won't get a link from me). I'll just end with this: kudos to Richard Dawkins for refusing to debate D'Souza. Because at the end of the day, all Dishy's bluster is just about inflating his own ego. In particular, I noted this little bit of projection from D'Souza's post:

Novak expresses admiration for some of the leading atheists, notably Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. (He seems less enamored with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.)

For the record, Harris hasn't (to my knowledge) debated Dinesh, either.

Viral

2008-08-26T23:43:00.001-04:00

July 18, a brief little AP article popped up in the New York Times (Pakistan: Polio Found in Baby):

An 8-month-old Pakistani girl has tested positive for polio in an area where militants have opposed vaccination, a World Health Organization official said. The infant, identified as Tanzila, is from Ali Gram in the Swat Valley, where Islamic fundamentalists have beaten polio vaccination teams and the last confirmed case of polio was in 2003, said Dr. Khalid Nawaz of the World Health Organization. Threats to health workers and fighting between government security forces and militants have disrupted vaccinations, he said.

Tragic. Polio is a grainy black-and-white photograph in a grade school textbook, of a room full of children in iron lungs, with a caption to the effect of, "THERE NOW, BUT FOR SCIENCE AND ACTION THEREUPON." It isn't something that's supposed to be happening to 8-month-old Pakistani girls in the twenty-first century. Yet here we are.

And here, it seems, we'll continue to be. At least Pakistan has violence. What's our excuse?

Earlier in July, Orac had reported that measles were, after fourteen years, once again endemic to the United Kingdom. Now this week comes a report that measles cases in the United States are the highest they've been in more than a decade. And the blame rests squarely with pseudoscience.

Growing up, whereas polio was the stuff of history, measles were the stuff of pretend. Old cartoon characters caught measles. Kids in stories would paint little red dots on their faces and claim measles so they could stay home from school. Hell, that's all I knew about the symptoms of measles--little red dots--and I wasn't even sure about that. I guess there was fever? Did it make you cough and sneeze? Did the little red dots itch? We didn't know, because we never caught it. Measles were the perfect imaginary ailment: a real-life contagious disease that anyone could catch. . . but no one ever caught it.

I have vaccination to thank for that.

But now, antivaccinationist cults are undermining one of the greatest advances in preventative medicine since soap.

Of the 131 cases of measles reported by the CDC in the United States in the first seven months of this year, 122 were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. The high incidence of the unvaccinated is disturbing enough. But what really enrages me is the fact that at least nine cases were vaccinated against measles. Vaccination rates in those communities are low enough not only to permit sizable outbreaks, but low enough for the virus to overcome herd immunity.

Public health is truly a public matter. We are in this together. Those who fail to vaccinate aren't just putting themselves and theirs at risk; they're putting us and ours at risk.

Pseudoscience is a scourge wherever it's found, but seldom are its ill effects so immediate and obvious as in the realm of public health.

Vaccines are safe and effective. Anyone who says differently is either grievously misinformed or an Avatar of Woe. The antivax mouthpieces have no excuse; it won't be long before Jenny McCarthy and David Kirby have real blood on their hands.

Speaking thereof, the Huffington Post saw fit to publish the AP's measles article in the same section ("Living," ironically) where they give Kirby and other pseudoscientists a soapbox. If that's some attempt to make amends, it's far too little, too late.

I'm incensed.

*sigh*

My (soon to be) sister-in-law and her husband had a baby recently. They'll be getting him fully vaccinated. At least there's that.

Comments

2008-08-11T14:06:00.001-04:00

So, apparently commenting was restricted to users with Blogger or OpenID accounts for a while there? Sorry about that... comments are back to being open to everybody.

Image and Personality Problems

2008-08-09T16:11:00.004-04:00

Matt Nisbet is inexcusable. His latest effort is an absolute hit piece on PZ Myers, disguised as an attempt to give advice to the atheist community: Two Images of Atheism: Hate versus Community

I tried posting a comment there yesterday, but it hasn't made it through moderation yet (and as more than 50 comments have since been posted, I doubt it ever will). So I'll take my points and expand them into a blog post.

My first and most salient point is not just about the attacks on PZ: Nisbet does not appear to have a very high opinion of the atheist community as a whole. Maybe he's just communicating poorly, but the guy is purportedly a communications expert. Nisbet says we atheists have an "image problem," and I doubt most people would disagree, in the sense that atheism is by and large still stigmatized. But Nisbet's whole post feeds into and reinforces those stigmas.

Take the very opening to his post:

Atheists have a major image problem. There's a reason that when people ask me what I believe I have to say with a smile: "I'm an atheist...but a friendly atheist."

If actions speak louder than words, then this line renders null everything else Nisbet tries to say. Remember, his whole excuse for this post was to offer his communications expertise to help us solve atheism's image problem. His own personal response, however, accepts and fortifies that very negative frame. It's the "but" that does it. It implies, "I'm a friendly atheist, unlike all the others." It's no different from saying, "I'm a Jew, but not a greedy Jew." He may think himself rather noble, setting an example as a paragon of peace and virtue. But rather than establishing himself as a counterexample to the stigma, he's content to make himself an exception to it. In doing so, he leaves the stigma unchallenged and throws the rest of us under the bus.

But then, it never really was about helping the atheist community, was it? Nisbet just wants to help himself (and maybe a few of his friends, like DJ Grothe), and has cravenly decided to do so at the expense of PZ (and the rest of us by extension).

You see, what Nisbet describes in his post isn't an image problem, it's a personality problem. He thinks religious people view us as mean and nasty because we are mean and nasty. And to illustrate that, he tries to drag PZ through the mud.

First there's that ridiculous picture of PZ looking jolly but disheveled at the top of Nisbet's post. PZ's own take:

My opinion of that photo: it's a bad photo that makes me look even homelier than usual, but it's a picture of me laughing and holding a toy panda.
I'm not angry, I'm not slapping small children, I'm not even stabbing any crackers -- so what exactly is Nisbet's point? That the face of atheism should be pretty and have good hair?

The only other notable thing about the photo is that PZ is wearing his Scarlet A t-shirt. So maybe the problem with atheism is that it identifies itself as atheism? Real helpful. But then, Nisbet's post ends with DJ Grothe in a sport jacket lecturing a bunch of bored-looking teenage girls. So maybe it really is all about the hair.

He calls the "New Atheism's" leading voices "usually angry, grumpy, uncharismatic male loners with a passion for attacking and ridiculing religious believers." Is he seriously trying to call the likes of Richard Dawkins (a smiling figure who's been frequenting British TV, including a guest appearance on "Doctor Who") and PZ Myers (who is at this moment joining some of the world's nicest, smartest skeptics on a cruise to the Galapagos) a bunch of "grumpy, uncharismatic... loners"?! That alone should make Nisbet a laughingstock.

He quotes the National Catholic Register, and buys into the bias instead of asking what we can do to dispell it.

Furthermore, by trying to equivilate PZ with hate for religious people, Nisbet is undermining a vital message that our side has to get across. As PhysioProf put it, expanding upon Greg Laden:

I mention this because it seems to be part of PZ Myers philosophy of critical tolerance. It is this part of his approach that allows vehemence and compassion about the same issues and the same people.
It is really, really, really important to understand that this principle applies in a more general way. One can simultaneously be angry about perceived flaws in something and yet care about it very deeply, and even love it. The idea that expression of harsh criticism entails that one “hates” the thing one criticizes is a pernicious rhetorical trick used to discount valid criticism and marginalize the individual who brings it.

So Matt Nisbet can go soak his head, and enjoy his status as the biggest concern troll of the hour. The image problem that atheism really faces is that we are perceived as being mean and nasty, when we really aren't. If Nisbet really want to help, he needs to offer something better than, "Stop being mean and nasty!

"And get a haircut, hippie!"

One More for the List

2008-08-05T13:33:00.002-04:00

Stumbled across this the other night. From Wikipedia:

Hrafnkels saga ([ˈr̥apncɛls ˌsaːɣa] (help·info)) is one of the Icelanders' sagas. It tells of struggles between chieftains and farmers in the east of Iceland in the 10th century. The eponymous main character, Hrafnkell, starts out his career as a fearsome duelist and a dedicated worshiper of the god Freyr. After suffering defeat, humiliation, and the destruction of his temple, he becomes an atheist. His character changes and he becomes more peaceful in dealing with others. After gradually rebuilding his power base for several years, he achieves revenge against his enemies and lives out the rest of his life as a powerful and respected chieftain. The saga has been interpreted as the story of a man who arrives at the conclusion that the true basis of power does not lie in the favor of the gods but in the loyalty of one's subordinates.

So I may have to add this one to the reading list, right next to the Poetic Edda. I've been doing quite a bit of browsing of Norse myth lately. Those guys could tell some stories. I much prefer a good campfire story to nebulous modern theology.

Host-Age Crisis, or: Mass Hysteria

2008-07-18T02:49:00.001-04:00

I considered avoiding comment on this one, but the pun was too good to pass up.*

So some kid smuggled a sanctified wafer out of Mass, a bunch of angry Catholics tried to ruin his life, PZ stood up for the kid, Bill Donohue took notice, and then the Internet exploded?

Like PZ, I'm absolutely sickened over what happened to Webster Cook. For committing a bit of harmless blasphemy, his life and academic career have been threatened. Let's not forget what this affair is originally about.

PZ doesn't need me to defend him, but I need to vent my spleen here. I'm fed up with the arguments levied against PZ. And I'm not just talking about the ones coming from angry Catholics; I'm including a number of prominent bloggers and journalists who have denounced the death threats but have taken the opportunity to scold PZ for being "rude" to Catholics. (I'm not even going to touch on Matt "Scienceblogs.com Would Be Better Off Without PZ" Nisbet.) So at the risk of drawing this fiasco out further by adding another blog post to the mix (ah, no one cares what I'll say anyway... so, sorry in advance for ranting and rambling):

First of all, yes, it is just "a [goddamn/fracking] cracker." Jesus.

But this is not about proving that it's a goddamn cracker. Those who think PZ's threat to desecrate a communion wafer isn't productive because it doesn't address the scientific merit of transubstantiation are missing the point. It isn't about the belief itself, it's about the free expression of disbelief and the right of everyone to their own blasphemy.

And I'm sick of comments to the tune of, "Sure, it's just a cracker, but Catholics think it's the body of Jesus so you need to respect the emotional trauma they could go through if you mock them!" Uh huh, because Catholics are so weak and stupid that they need shielding from any criticism of their beliefs. If I were a Catholic, I'd probably find that more insulting than anything PZ said.

PZ is not a bigot; you can respect a person and their right to their beliefs, without respecting their beliefs.

Defiling the Host is not a hate crime, as that would require some criminal act to be committed.

Was PZ tactless in his defense of Cook? The Catholic League and its backers threatened a kid with death and expulsion, over a sliver of dough. Fuck tact.

Yes, this is just like the Danish Muhammad cartoon foofaraw. (I'm looking at you, Andrew Sullivan!) A radical group is attempting to force their definition of (and ramifications for) blasphemy upon someone who is making a peaceful statement.

Sneaking off with a Host is neither theft nor disruption of the service. It is not akin to stealing Torah scrolls or smooshing a child's birthday cake (both real examples of poor analogies I've seen). I know this, because palming a wafer does not in any way, shape, or form deprive the little old lady next to you from taking and enjoying her communion. Contrary to what Thomas Foley believes, PZ never asked anyone to "accost a priest" to get a Host.

And hey, riddle me this: if the Hosts are so precious, why do they hand them out to any schmuck who walks through the door and knows how to ask for one?

That's what PZ's challenge is about: demonstrating that Catholics don't rule the world, that there are people out here who don't cotton to the idea of transubstantiation, and that we have to share the same space. So Catholics have to either be more careful with their toys, or lighten up about them.

The only charge that can be levied against someone who merely removes a wafer from Mass is that they accepted communion under false pretenses. And the only applicable punishment for such a transgression is excommunication (literally, "no communion for you!"). That would be perfectly fair and well within the rights of the Church. But there is no excuse for threats against a person's life or livelihood.

*deep, cleansing breath*

At least some good came out of this: thanks to PZ's challenge, we get to meet Josh (who, fittingly, speaks in red letters).

You know, I'm contemplating going to Mass this Sunday with an aim to misbehave. Depends on whether Ben (a recovering Catholic) can accompany me as a guide, and whether I feel like spending a Sunday morning in an uncomfortable church pew for no good reason.

I don't reckon I'll take a wafer home with me, though. I wouldn't know what to do with it. I wouldn't want to go all "Aristocrats" on it, that would be crude and unimaginative. Having never been a Catholic myself, I have no personal history with the Host, so it wouldn't be satisfying to just keep it. And I don't know any of the evil secret Jewish rituals that make medievally-minded Catholics so paranoid. So if I go to Mass, I think I'll just perform a simple and grave blasphemy.

I'll take, eat and take, drink. No sleight of hand necessary, just foreknowledge of how the act goes down, which Ben was kind enough to provide:

It's reeeeeal easy. Unless you're taking it in the mouth(hee hee), you just:
-walk up
-stop in front of the priest
-hold your right hand under your left, palms up
-he holds up the cookie, mumbles, puts it in your hands
-you say "amen"

I think I can manage that much.

I wouldn't disrupt the service at all. I'd sit through the service most politely. I'd kneel, sit, and stand when I was s'posed to. I'd eat the wafer on the spot, as expected.

But, oh, I wouldn't be Catholic (not even ex-Catholic). And it's a most heinous no-no to administer communion to a non-Catholic.

I wonder what ol' Donohue would say about that.

* Seriously, is "Crackergate" the best they could come up with for this? The "[Scandal]gate" template has been done to death, and it's so doggone lazy...

Casting Bones

2008-06-26T12:39:00.003-04:00

There are times I wish I could believe in oracles.

Many societies throughout history have tried to find advice in the most unlikely of places. The Babylonians, for example, read liver spots to learn the future; the Shang dynasty Chinese cracked turtle shells; the Israelites cast lots; the Azande poisoned chickens; the Greeks and Romans had their oracles at Delphi. Despite the differences in the methods, the overall plan of an oracle is always the same: you address your question to the gods, you perform an action with an uncertain outcome (what will the liver look like? how will the shell crack? will the chicken die?), and then you interpret the results and act accordingly.

Now, of course the pattern of tea leaves on a saucer isn't going to tell us anything we didn't already know. The oracles are completely random, and the interpretation thereof is completely arbitrary.

But in many ways that's the beauty of the oracle. True: you will bring whatever interpretation to the oracle that you want. Any sufficiently ambiguous sign can always be twisted to suit your purposes. But the fact that you're consulting an oracle means you must now justify your own thought processes against the supposed divine truth of the oracle.

This process, I would argue, can be a great aid to decision-making. If the oracle justifies what you already thought was the correct course of action, then you will pursue it with less temerity, believing that the gods sanction your undertaking. If the oracle shakes your resolve, then you clearly had reservations in the first place and would be wise to reconsider your plans. And if you find yourself changing the oracle's interpretation to suit your own desires, then the decision was already made long before you inquired of the gods.

In other words, oracles are in many ways like Rorschach tests. They are forms without content. Instead of having an intrinsic meaning, their interpretation comes entirely from the mind of the beholder, who by supplying his own interpretation makes transparent certain thought processes that may otherwise have remained invisible. The oracle throws a grain of sand into the indecisive mind around which the pearl of a decision can coagulate.

But of course, it doesn't work at all if you don't believe that the signs are divinely inspired. At the moment, I am personally wrestling with a difficult decision. And, over the past few days, all 'signs' have been pointing to the same answer. But because I know that those signs are coming from my own mind and my own decision-making process, they are of little use to me. Granted, the fact that my unconscious mind seems to be unanimous should be an indication of how to proceed - but I don't know whether that consensus came about because my answer is the right one, or just the answer I want to hear.

A little bit of self-delusion, in other words, can be an antidote for indecision.

The Morning and the Evening Star

2008-06-19T11:33:00.004-04:00

In the time since I last posted (--awkward silence, shuffle shuffle--), I finally sat down to read Sinclair Lewis' novel Elmer Gantry (1927). I can't recommend it highly enough - and not simply because Lewis' lambasting of Fundagelicalism is razor-sharp, which it is, but because the author is a true master at portraying truly, vitally human characters in all their tragic, hypocritical, self-deluded glory.

I also had a chance to watch the film version (1960). Although like most adaptations of great novels it differs considerably from the text, the film isn't just an incomplete, shoddy rip-off of a brilliant original. The film is an artfully, powerfully-constructed whole that is worthy in its own right. Burt Lancaster captures Gantry's infuriating ambivalence, his mercurial hypocrisy, perfectly. You never can tell how much or how often he means what he's saying, how he justifies what he does and how he preaches - and that's precisely the feeling that Lewis created in the original. And the monologue by a (much changed) Jim Lefferts will make you want to stand up and cheer - none the less because of how daring it was to make such a statement in the heart of the red scare.

But of the many things I've taken away from these works of art, I find one to be particularly upsetting. The copy of Gantry that I read was borrowed from the Div School library - and throughout the entire book, I couldn't help but imagine the internal monologues of the seminarians who came before me as they read along with Lewis. They all, I'm sure, went along similar lines. "Oh how dreadful Gantry is. Such a hypocrite. Such a disgusting misuse of the Bible. His interpretation of Christianity is so crass, so self-serving, so puerile. He's not a true Christian like I am. Well done, Sinclair Lewis, for pointing out the follies and excesses of this brand of Christianity -- but I wish he wouldn't take it so far. The author clearly doesn't understand what true Christianity is all about. The poor misguided man. I shall pray for him."

In other words, it's the classic 'no true Scotsman' argument that every liberal theist uses like a get-out-of-jail free card whenever they're confronted by someone doing ugly things with their religion. Now, I'll agree heartily that the New Atheists are not altogether unfairly criticized for focusing their efforts exclusively on the straw man of biblical literalism -- which no 'enlightened' Christian has believed for a century. When we do this, we are guilty of misrepresenting Christianity in toto. But that's not to say that liberal Christianity is blameless. Far from it! By focusing solely on the wackjobs, we've been missing out on an opportunity to hold the liberal religious accountable for their own faults, and allowing them to keep playing the Scotsman card as often as they care to. To my knowledge, none of us has seriously engaged the liberal theists in debate in their own terms, and it's high time we stopped picking on the backwoods pea-brains who most Christians even disavow and started tackling the more polite, urbane superstitions of the more modern, well-educated believers.

It's a shame I don't know any. (Strange, that - since the Div school is crawling with them. Too bad I'm such a crotchety grump.)

But it's a project to keep on the back burner until a good subject comes along.

For Science!

2008-06-18T12:42:00.004-04:00

Zach at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal never fails to disappoint:

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Uncommon Descent. Patrick posted the above comic this morning under the title "Darwinist Behavior in a Nutshell."

Let's see, exploiting the public's general bewilderment with, yet hard-earned respect for, science to promote your own bizarre agenda? Daahhh, yep, that's us Darwinists to a "t".

Oh, and stealing the artist's bandwidth (as opposed to hosting the image yourself) without even providing any mention whatsoever of the source of the comic, let alone a link? That's us, too. We evilutionists are just a bunch of naked thieves.

I laughed at the comic yesterday. I laugh again today!

Keep Them Bloggies Rollin', Rawhide!

2008-06-12T19:37:00.002-04:00

Apologies for the unannounced absence. There were travels and movings and difficulties getting Internet to the new apartment. But I'm back now!

Blog developments were not at a complete standstill over the past month. A link to Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll has been part of our sidebar for some time now. Well, Synapostasy is finally a part of the list! Click on the Atheist Blogroll icon to find out how you can join, or check out these recently updated blogroll members (also available in the sidebar; must have JavaScript enabled):

Chiropractic Warnings, or: Trouble Communicating Skepticism

2008-05-09T23:38:00.004-04:00

I get the feeling that I'm very bad at discussing skepticism-related issues with my family. I always fear that either I'm too timid, or in passion and urgency I lose credibility. This is a case of the latter, if either. Maybe you can take a look and let me know what you think.

This is a particularly difficult case, because we know the object of my skepticism personally: Kent, neighbor and chiropractic kinesiologist. I know that some chiropractors are evidence-based and honest about the limits of chiropractic adjustment; Kent is not one of those chiropractors. As far as I know, he subscribes to both Vertebral Subluxation (the idea that body ailments are caused by nerve blockages, which can be cured by mechanical adjustment) and Applied Kinesiology (the idea that muscle strength can be used to diagnose and prescribe treatment for body ailments). I recall he once adjusted my mother, claiming to be treating her allergies. Normally I wouldn't have made too big a deal over this. I'm not likely to use a chiropractor ever again, but Kent's a good person with some probable talents as a physical therapist; I wouldn't begrudge my family's visiting him, despite some of the kooky theories he practices.

But this article from Science-Based Medicine has been staring me in the face for the past week and a half, and I couldn't bring myself to say "what's the harm?" anymore. The article describes a specific statistical correlation (with mechanism) between neck adjustment and basilar stroke.

So today I finally got up the nerve to compose and send the following email to certain members of my family. The damage is already done, but feedback is still appreciated.

And consider this addressed to you, too, if you happen to visit a chiropractor.

NEVER LET A CHIROPRACTOR TOUCH YOUR NECK.

Chiropractic adjustment can kill you. I'm not exaggerating.

I've recently learned about a specific risk associated with chiropractic neck adjustment. The vertebral arteries that pass through the neck actually loop through holes on the sides of the neck vertebrae. This tethering kinks the vertebral arteries, and makes them particularly susceptible to injury. If the artery tears, it causes a type of brain stem stroke called a basilar stroke, which often strikes young (average early 40s) and can be fatal.

There is a clear link between chiropractic neck adjustment and basilar stroke. A quick, forceful thrust from a chiropractor stretches the artery rapidly and can induce tearing. Sometimes the stroke occurs immediately and the victim collapses on the chiropractor's table, whereas other times the damage is delayed.

It is estimated that 20% of basilar strokes are attributable to chiropractic adjustment (about 1,300 cases per year in the US). However, the link has not been properly studied; in the past, few doctors asked their stroke patients about their chiropractic history, and so many cases have gone unreported.

I don't know about you, but I've never heard any warning from Kent (or any chiropractor) about the risks associated with neck adjustment.

Maybe the risk is small. But here's a dirty little secret: neck adjustment has NO demonstrable benefit whatsoever. It derives from the chiropractic principle of subluxation (supposed nerve blockages caused by abnormalities of the spine), which is pure pseudoscience. So even the most minuscule risk isn't worth taking.

The bottom line is, chiropractic neck adjustment does no good, but can sometimes do incredible harm. I love you all, and would hate to see you come to any unnecessary harm. Please, I beg of you, do not let any chiropractor touch your neck. Never, ever. Not even Kent. He may tell you the benefits outweigh the risk, but he's wrong, and he can't force you to let him adjust your neck. It's your body, take care of it.

For more information on the link between chiropractic and stroke, see this link: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=94

Love to you all,
--Aaron--

Not-Monsters Adding Not-Poison to Sugar

2008-05-08T23:00:00.003-04:00

Andrew Kimbrell is a goddamn bio-Luddite, one of many.

It embarrasses me that certain liberals can be so staunchly and irrationally opposed to technology, based upon paranoia over corporate interest, a weirdly conservative adherence to the simple purity of "Nature," and their own naked ignorance. One of the major victims of bio-Luddite oppression is genetically modified (GM) foods, sometimes referred to as "Frankenfoods" (but not by me).

In a column today in the Huffington Post, Kimbrell sows paranoia over a specific GM crop, the Roundup Ready sugar beet developed by Monsanto. These sugar beets are genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup.

GM opponents often have a hard time explaining just what makes GM food so dangerous. Sometimes it's argued that the introduced genes themselves are somehow pollutive, despite the fact that it's all the same adenine guanine cytosine thymine, baby. Kimbrell makes a particularly poor argument here, based on glyphosate:

At the request of Monsanto, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency increased the allowable amount of glyphosate residues on sugar beetroots by a whopping 5,000% -- glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup. Sugar is extracted from the beet's root and the inevitable result is more glyphosate in our sugar. This is not good news for those who want to enjoy their chocolate morsels without the threat of ingesting toxic weed killer.

He then goes on about how seed farmers could start making seeds from Roundup Ready sugar beets so the GM crop spreads, and how sugar from GM beets gets mixed in with regular beets, and how GM beet pollen could contaminate other crops' genetics, and how there could be a huge consumer backlash, and how Big Science is putting poison in your dear mother's chocolates OMG!!!

Notice a problem here? How about the fact that the glyphosate isn't coming from the beets, moron!

I repeat, these GM beets do not produce glyphosate. What they do is allow farmers to use glyphosate on their crops with greater confidence in killing off weeds and maintaining good crop yield. The GM beets may increase the incentive to use glyphosate, but if that's a problem, then can be kept in check by regulation. Kimbrell's glyphosate beef isn't with the beets, it's with the EPA's change in tolerable glyphosate limits.

But is that even a legitimate concern? He makes it sound as if Monsanto asked, "Could we please put deadly poison on our beets?", and the EPA said, "Sure, since you asked so nicely!" This is just a guess, but I'd bet the EPA actually looked at some of the science behind glyphosate and its associated risks before raising the tolerable limit.

Glyphosate actually appears to be a very safe chemical. (Please forgive me for referencing Wikipedia here, but seriously, it just goes to show that you don't need to dig too deep to uncover the stupid.) It acts by inhibiting an enzyme in plants called 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS). Normally, EPSPS kicks off a pathway to synthesize aromatic amino acids like phenylalanine, tryptophan, and tyrosine. In the presence of glyphosate, this pathway is inhibited, so the plants can't make these amino acids, and therefore die. The GM beets contain a copy of the EPSPS gene found in a strain of Agrobacterium. EPSPS made from this gene is resistant to glyphosate, so the aromatic amino acid synthesis pathway is uninhibited. The gene is already widely used in GM soybeans.

Glyphosate does not have this kind of effect in animals because we don't have that synthesis pathway; we get aromatic amino acids from our diet. And at a glance, the evidence seems to suggest minimal other side effects from glyphosate. The EPA would know better than I.

So Kimbrell is getting his knickers in a twist over genetically modified sugar beets that aren't producing a dangerous chemical that actually isn't that dangerous. Yeah... Next time he wants to play bioethics, maybe he should get the "bio-" part straight first.

Flyover Country

2008-05-06T01:30:00.002-04:00

I recently started reading James (The Amaz!ng) Randi's "Flim Flam", and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. One of my favorite bits of debunktastic trivia so far comes from the chapter on the Bermuda Triangle (p. 45). The promoters of "the Legend" apparently like to cite as an example a British York Transport flight from the Azores destined for Jamaica that went down in 1953. What they fail to mention, however, is that this flight was bound for Jamaica via Newfoundland, and that it was during this first leg of the journey that the plane crashed, 900 miles north of the Triangle!

Anyway, I mention that mostly as a lead-in to this fantastic Onion article: 30 Years Of Man's Life Disappear In Mysterious 'Kansas Rectangle'. I especially love the comments from the token skeptic towards the end.

Head Case

2008-05-06T01:09:00.002-04:00

Alison Rose Levy, Huffington Post blogger and self-proclaimed "Ms. Integrative Health", fell down and hurt her poor head last week. She apparently wound up getting eight stitches (that's right, in a real emergency room, from a real health care technician). But her "health" response didn't end there:

. . . I accessed homeopathy to address the shock and bruising and acupuncture to strengthen my body's immune response. I used a natural silver homeopathic ointment to prevent infection, and health coaching for the feelings of sadness and fear that arose from this scary incident, while Gyrotonics helped rebalance my bones, muscles, and structure. Currently, I'm doing followup with DNA supportive nutraceuticals and energy medicine tools to minimize scarring and help the tissues rebuild rapidly.

All of this taken together has diminished the shiner of all times in just a week. . .

I have to admit, that is pretty impressive. Without all that treatment, it could have taken up to seven days for the bruising to fade. Even as it was, she still had to "integrate" concealer (undiluted, I assume... has anyone attempted marketing homeopathic makeup?) into her regimen.

Best to go through all those motions anyway, just in case. Because, after all, " it's not just about sifting through information, it's about learning to discern what works for you. And that is individual." Translation: Anecdotal evidence is the only evidence. Do what you feel like, devil the cost and reality be damned.

And this is far from the worst woo the HuffPo peddles.

Debatable

2008-05-01T01:14:00.001-04:00

I'm not crazy about public debates; they seem to me to give too much power and import to rhetorical tricks rather than honest academic pursuit.

And any regular readers (and maybe a few passing readers) of this blog probably suspect that I loathe Dinesh D'Souza, not least of all because of the bad name he gives my beloved alma mater.

So it was with great trepidation that I attended the debate at Harvard last week between Dan Barker (author, former preacher, and co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation) and Dinesh D'Souza (contemptible ghoul). But boy, was I happily surprised. Sure, I had to sit through Dinesh's speaking, and I can now confidently say that he is as much of a condescending, pseudo-intellectual twerp (I'm trying to be polite, really) in person as he is in print. But it was worth it to see him make a fool of himself standing next to Barker.

From where I was sitting, Dan Barker mopped the floor with D'Souza. (D'Souza obviously thought differently... I refuse to link to his blog, especially to a post so trivial, but apparently that was "Atheist Bashing Week," which he compared to Black History Month.) I don't merely mean in terms of the arguments made; D'Souza is trying to defend Christianity, and is thus doomed to failure. Dan Barker was well-spoken, humble yet confident, intelligent, professional. D'Souza was arrogant and incompetent. He regularly and repeatedly equivocated and dodged questions. As Rebecca Watson notes, he made a lot of the same crap points he always makes, despite having now been corrected publicly numerous times. He joked a couple times about how he was going to thrash Barker in the debate. He made numerous comments about Barker that bordered on the ad hominem, mostly trying to paint him as a fool or hypocrite for having given up being a preacher. Maybe he was trying to appear confident, but he came across as an asshole. And Barker was there to answer him at every opportunity with calm poise, making D'Souza look even more ridiculous.

One of the most asinine offenses was when D'Souza, in "answering" a question about morality, invented a hypothetical example in which Dan Barker stomped a puppy to death. Here's a tip for would-be debaters: You might be tempted, during a debate, to try building an unfavorable subconscious image of your opponent with a subtly incriminating hypothetical. But if your audience catches on to what you're trying to pull (which is more likely with increasing education of your audience and decreasing subtlety of your example), then chances are it'll backfire and you'll just look like a dishonest dick. (And crying "just kidding," if it comes to that, won't help.)

Oh, and don't forget his crack about how Richard Dawkins is an example of "why biologists shouldn't be let out of the lab" (paraphrased). I really appreciated that. Also, Dinesh apparently doesn't know how to pronounce "agape" (usually ah-GAH-pay, not AG-uh-pee) or "slough"* (sluff, not slŏw (rhymed with "cow")). And he says "if you will" WAY too often. (You know what? No, I won't.) And in case you were wondering: yes, D'Souza plugged his book during the debate.

But it wasn't just his demeanor that sucked. Just about everything out of his mouth was utter swill.

As noted, some questions he just didn't answer. For instance, both Barker and D'Souza were asked what it would take to change their stance on the existence of God. Barker answered the question easily, listing a number of different possible evidences that, if demonstrated, would support the God hypothesis. D'Souza, on the other hand, talked about how he gave up his faith initially (apparently he gave up what he called "Crayon Christianity" in college, but later discovered "Adult Christianity"), but never gave any indication as to what it would take to make him change his current beliefs.

Occasionally, the debaters were allowed to pose questions to each other. During the "morality" portion of the debate, Barker asked D'Souza (paraphrased), "If God told you, personally, to kill me, kill the unbeliever, would you do it?" D'Souza essentially replied by saying that God wouldn't tell him to do that, so if he heard a voice telling him to kill Barker then he would assume it was the Devil trying to trick him. This, of course, invites the question of how Dinesh chooses any trustworthy source for his inspiration or information about God.

At least a few of his points were of the "whenever you think of something good, Christianity will be there to take credit" variety. For example, as part of his opening statement he trundled out the old canard about how Christians invented science because without God there's no reason to assume a deterministic universe that operates according to rational laws. Never mind the fact that we observe a deterministic universe. (For more, see Rebecca's review above.)

He stuck by the ol' First Cause argument, equivocating around Barker's clear and correct rebuttal that the laws of causality as we know them don't apply to the origin of the universe, since causality depends upon space and time, neither of which existed "before" the universe.

He claimed Albert Einstein as an example of a religious scientist, despite the fact that Einstein stated very plainly that he did not believe in a personal God.

He continued the trend of calling the "New Atheists" intellectual weaklings, instead longing for the good ol' days of Bertrand Russell. Which is funny, because Dinesh seems awfully enthusiastic about debating the "New Atheists" anyway.

He remarked on how the godless atheists are trying to push religion out of the public square, trying to compare a statue of David Hume to a statue of Jesus. Because everyone knows it's safe to, say, name streets after famous atheists, but not religious figures.

On a related note, he accused academics and professors of abusing their roles as a sort of new clergy and arbiters of information to impose secularism upon their students. PZ tackled this "professor as authority" point recently, so I'll defer to him.

He made repeated references to "Darwinian primates," as if human beings were the ONLY creatures EVER to have social rules. This, of all his comments that night, probably made me the angriest. It shows such utter ignorance of and disrespect for humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom, I really don't know how to approach it.

I actually got to meet Dinesh personally after the debate. Well, sort of. Several times when I tried to join the post-debate conversation, Dinesh literally threw his hand in my face. And long before I could ask him any sort of question, he was gearing up to bolt for the door. He did get one jaw-dropping comment in before he ditched us: Apparently, he considers himself a proud advocate for science. Oh, is that why he's allowed to dismiss entire fields of science based on his flawed understanding of one experiment, as he did recently with the Miller-Urey experiment? Is that why he repeatedly rebukes scientists for daring to take a stand against creationism? Is that why science denialist William Dembski has such a hard-on for Dinesh lately (again, no linky for the stupid)?

Anyway, as he was taking off, I shook his hand, refrained from spitting in his eye, introduced myself as a fellow Dartmouth alumnus, and expressed my disappointment that we couldn't discuss some science since they so seldom let me out of the lab.

Overall, the experience was somewhat cathartic. D'Souza has been weighed, he has been measured, and he has been found wanting.

I still can't believe he's more than twenty years my senior. It doesn't look like he's developed a day past his freshman orientation at college.

PS - The debate was hosted by the Harvard Secular Society and others. It was student-moderated, and the students did a fantastic job of keeping things flowing. I'll say, though, that after a year I still think Greg Epstein (the Harvard Humanist Chaplain) seems like a great guy but is clearly not the world's most capable public speaker.

*Best use of the word "slough" I've ever encountered: page 106 of Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone"

Obuh-buh-bligatory Buh-Buh-Blogiversary

2008-04-24T23:58:00.001-04:00

I feel obliged to mention that it's been one year today since Ben and I started Synapostasy.

I'll resist the urge to get all introspective. Partly because I doubt there's much to get introspective over, but mostly because I've already got at least three other posts fighting for supremacy in my head, any one of which would be immensely more interesting than my contemplation of my navel (or Ben's navel, for that matter). I find that the more posts I want to write, the fewer I get around to writing. Maybe I'll overcome that in the coming year. (Oh crap, did that just count as introspection? Bad Aaron!)

Anyway, all I'll say is, if you're reading this, then *thumbs up*. Not just any *thumbs up*, either, we're talkin' like Fonzie *thumbs up*. And if you're not reading this, well, *thumbs up* anyway, because you're still cool.

Here's to another somewhat arbitrary length of time!

--"Hawkeye"

The Blasphemous H

2008-04-15T00:55:00.001-04:00

Ever wonder what the "H." stood for in "Jesus H. Christ"?

I betcha it stands for "Hussein."

(Wish I could take credit for that, but it was Sara's idea.)

Something by way of a more substantial post coming soon...

A Thought

2008-04-09T19:32:00.001-04:00

Every time I pass a Reformed Church of Christ, I think to myself, "I wonder what a Delinquent Church of Christ looks like."

Muslim Declares War on Atheists on Behalf of D'Souza

2008-03-29T02:36:00.001-04:00

So, remember a month ago when D'Souza tried twisting a letter from Muslim scholars to the pope as a call to rally against the atheist scourge? Well, to be fair, I never got to read the original letter (since he didn't link to it), so I don't know whether he was twisting their statements or referring to an unquoted passage. But none of that matters now, Dinesh need not twist any longer! King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is out there saying precisely what Dishy wants him to say. From the Christian Post (emphasis mine):

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called for a dialogue among monotheistic religions Monday, marking a first for the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom.
"I ask representatives of all the monotheistic religions to meet with their brothers in faith," Abdullah told delegates to a seminar on "Dialogue Among Civilizations between Japan and the Islamic World," according to the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA).
“If God wills it, we will then meet with our brothers from other religions, including those of the Torah and the Gospel... to come up with ways to safeguard humanity," he added.
Abdullah said the country’s top clerics have given him approval to pursue his idea and that he plans to get the opinion of Muslim leaders from other countries.
According to SPA, the Saudi king also intends to address the United Nations on the subject.
"We have lost sincerity, morals, fidelity and attachment to our religions and to humanity," Abdullah said Monday, deploring "the disintegration of the family and the rise of atheism in the world – a frightening phenomenon that all religions must confront and vanquish."

The funny thing is, the author of the article (Eric Young) calls this a message of tolerance. To a writer for the Christian Post, maybe. And it may seem like a small step forward for Saudi Arabia. But this is neither tolerance nor progress. This is scapegoating, and as such would forever exclude and alienate the atheist community. This sort of rhetoric must be categorically rejected by those to whom King Abdullah is reaching, lest they validate his bigoted position and dirty themselves in the process.

(Hat tip NoGodBlog. Also discussed at Skepchick)

Fieldwork Ethics: A Hypothetical Problem

2008-03-27T16:30:00.002-04:00

Consider the following problem that might arise for an Anthropologist in the field:

In the course of conducting your fieldwork, you manage to develop very important relationships with two native informants, without whom your research would be entirely impossible. One day, these two informants extend an open invitation for you to attend a performance of their culture's main religious ritual. Although there are no restrictions placed on who may attend the ritual, you know that active participation in it is restricted to those members of the in-caste who have gone through the proper rites of initiation. The penalty for violating this taboo is never articulated - largely because only people who have been initiated into the cult ever attend - and you suspect that violating it would cause the natives to be less favorably disposed to you, and might jeopardize the rapport you have built in the community. Luckily, in the course of your prior interviews you managed to learn precisely how to go about participating in the ritual, and are confident that you could pass as a member of the in-group without incurring suspicion (note that learning the ritual does NOT mean that you have been properly initiated, which you have not).

Now, enter the problem: your two informants are of different minds as to the extent of your involvement. Both of them agree that their invitation to attend is a gesture of friendship. However, Informant A believes in the strict adherence to taboo laws, and because he knows that you are not initiated he thinks you should only be allowed to watch. Informant B, however, believes that including you and letting you participate in the ritual is an appropriate gesture of friendship - one which he feels justified in making despite the fact that it is in violation of the rules of his society.

Therefore, if you go ahead and participate in the ritual anyway, your relationship with informant A will be irreparably damaged because you're flaunting the taboo. But a refusal to participate in the ritual on those grounds will be construed as a rejection of Informant B's gesture of friendship, and will irreparably damage your relationship with Informant B. If you refuse to attend as well as participate, then you will damage your relationship with both A and B. Finally, you could also go through the process of initiation - an option which would be acceptable to both A and B - but when you ask what it would entail, you discover that it would require you to engage in behaviors that you are ethically and aesthetically opposed to, and which would set you apart as a pariah in your own society when you eventually returned from the field.

In short, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place with no way out. You either have to ruin one or both of your relationships with native informants - which would be an irrecoverable loss - or you must sacrifice your own principles and lose the respect of your own society for the sake of averting conflict with your informants.

What would you do?

Seriously.

The Littlest Godwin and Other Education Stories

2008-03-17T03:57:00.002-04:00

A week or so ago, a panel of three judges of a California appellate court ruled unanimously over a child welfare case that parents in California needed teaching or tutoring credentials in order to homeschool their children. Now, I don't know much about this specific case or homeschooling in general, but on the face of it this seems ~~perfectly rational~~ intuitive to me. Requiring parents to have teaching credentials before they be allowed to teach? What a novel idea!

Homeschooling parents, however, are apparently up in arms. SNL's Weekend Update included a little blurb lampooning the protests (hat tip Crooks & Liars):

Many California parents who homeschool their children are upset by a California court ruling that may force their children to be taught by a credentialed teacher. Said one angry parent, "This is just like what the Nazis did to the Eskimos in the 1850s."

Ha ha! Oh, the hyperbole! So amusing!

But wait. Since homeschooling is so often used by evangelicals to protect their children from reality, it's only natural that a Christian "news" site like One News Now would pick up the story:

"We will not give up home schooling our child," she states. "If it means moving from out of state, however we have to do that, we will do it because that is what we feel that God has called us to do." Kathleen says she and her husband have not had much chance to discuss the issue beyond that basic decision.
Even Kathleen's nine-year-old son understands what is happening to parental rights in his home state. "He said to me, 'This is like that bad man,' which he couldn't think of his name, 'in Germany. That's what it reminds me of,'" she continues. "And I was surprised at his perception, that he actually considered that a comparison.

Adolf Hitler outlawed home schooling in Germany in 1938. The practice is still illegal in re-unified Germany to this day.

Many of the commenters on that article applaud Kathleen's son for having such insight on world history, and hail this as a victory for homeschooling. But I'm guessing he didn't come up with the Hitler comparison on his own; either he was taught it directly, or he overheard his parents talk about it in that context, or he had already been primed to invoke der Führer to smear his opponents in a different context (maybe against us evil-utionists! just one month 'til "Expelled" is released!). In any case, his mother/educator clearly approves of the comparison, which bespeaks ill of the education he's receiving.

Greg Laden links to some less Godwin-y articles on the homeschooling controversy here.

In other news...

A CDC study indicates that one in four teenage girls has an STD, with HPV being the most prevalent. Naturally, fundies see this as indication that we need more abstinence-based sex education. Never mind the fact that ignorance-only sex ed DOES NOT WORK, and more than likely is partly to blame for the current teen infection rate. I especially liked this quote in the article from National Abstinence Education Association official Valerie Huber:

"When we learn that one in four teen girls is infected with [an STD],
it becomes clear that the contraception-based approach taught in 75
percent of U.S. schools is failing young people."

Gee, one in four teen girls has an STD, and one in four teen girls isn't getting education about contraceptives? Hmmmm.... ;-)

Meanwhile, via Americans United, a recent study has revealed that students at Catholic schools perform no better than public school students in reading, and actually do worse in math. Just one more piece of evidence that government vouchers for private schools are NOT the way to improve education in America. Instead, we need to reform and reinforce public education.

And boy, could public education use some reinforcements. For instance, the Disco 'Tute is trying to push an "academic freedom" bill through the Florida legislature as a countermeasure to the recent inclusion of evolution (and exclusion of intelligent design) in the state science standards. All is not lost, though. Ben Stein tried to peddle his propaganda to Florida lawmakers, but the event tanked. And Casey Luskin has let slip that the academic freedom bill is about intelligent design after all, and the press noticed... oops! (As a side note, Luskin appears to be trying to make amends for his indiscretion by churning out
another article on how ID isn't creationism, this time with the help of
Mike LaSalle of right-wing site Men's News Daily. I'm not about to give MND a close read, but somehow I'm not
inclined to trust it as a source of commentary.) Here's hoping that the Academic Freedom Act withers and dies. This isn't about academic freedom, this is about academic integrity and responsibility.

But the real humdinger is going on in Oklahoma, where House Bill 2211, the "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act," threatens to undermine all that is education. In short, the bill is intended to make it so a student can get credit for a wrong answer, so long as that wrong answer is based on the student's religious beliefs. Teachers who ask the age of the Earth on a test would be required by law to mark answers of "6,000 years" as correct. Maybe it would work that way, maybe it wouldn't... there's a law like this already on the books in Texas, and it's just begging for a federal case. Bullshit like this makes me want to fly down to Oklahoma and apply as a science teacher; I'm mad as hell, and an angry letter to the Oklahoma legislature isn't cathartic enough. Sometimes you feel the need to inject a little reality right at the source.

This bill and others are being promoted by state Representative Sally Kern, a "hate filled, backwards bitch" (I really can't put it better than that) who (surprise, surprise) has been hiding a gay son.

This bill seems to be getting a fair share of attention, which is probably the best way to snuff it out. And snuffed out it must be.

Is our children learning? Not if some people can help it...

The Pies of March

2008-03-14T20:39:00.001-04:00

Sine, cosine, cosine, sine! Three-point-one-four-one-five-nine! Goooooooooo Π !

The fourteenth day of the third month of the year is declared Π Day, and Sara and I celebrated in the only way that is good and proper and decent:

That is a breakfast pie: egg, sausage, and cheese in pie format. You have no idea...

Celebrate a number? Why not? I make it a rule not to stand in the way of any holiday that promises baked goods, even if I share a tiny bit of sympathy with those who lament the fact that we don't celebrate Π Day on the twenty-eighth of June.

More on McCain

2008-03-13T21:05:00.002-04:00

Think Progress has called McCain out over Hagee's anti-gay comments, and good for them. This Hagee endorsement needs to stay in the news. It needs to remain an albatross around McCain's neck. It's time to set an example for any politician hoping to make quick gains by pandering to the evangelical fundamentalist right.

TP also notes that Hagee isn't the only questionable evangelist to whom McCain has been cozying up. The up-and-coming Rev. Rod Parsley, whom McCain has called his "spiritual guide," has been trying to rewrite American history as a glorious crusade against Islam. Once again, this isn't just about bigotry, we need to be pushing McCain for information on how this relates to his foreign policy objectives.

From among the comments to the posts above, a blast from the past. The ever astute Jon Stewart warned McCain of the perils of "crazy base world" back in 2006, shortly before McCain was to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty "University":

The Repudiation That Wasn't

2008-03-11T00:22:00.001-04:00

As you may have heard, two weeks ago presidential candidate John McCain received the endorsement of John Hagee, mega-evangelist and hateful fucking lunatic. This caused a little bit of a stir, considering that Hagee is (as noted before) a hateful fucking lunatic. In particular, it raised the ire of Catholic League president Bill Donohue, a man so easy to offend that he'd probably call his own Pope an anti-Catholic bigot if he thought he could get away with it. Hagee, you see, has made some disparaging remarks against the Catholic church in the past, calling it "the great whore" and "the apostate church" among other things. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, herself a Catholic, also condemned McCain for accepting Hagee's endorsement.

As the AP's Libby Quaid reported on Saturday, McCain finally went before the press on Friday and directly "repudiate[d] any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee's, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics."

That might sound like the end of it, right?

It shouldn't be.

Hagee's hateful fucking lunacy doesn't end with anti-Catholic bigotry. What about the fact that Hagee called Hurricane Katrina a punishment from God for gay pride parades in New Orleans? I bet he's said some juicy things about atheists, too. Or here's a big one: what about Hagee's explicit desire to expedite Armageddon via a preemptive military strike at Iran? McCain reportedly still praises Hagee's support of Israel; shouldn't we be holding his feet to the fire over that? That's more than some stupid, bigoted insult; that's an explicit desire to kill in the name of God.

Once upon a time, Senator McCain denounced the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the world. But over the past few years, he's been kissing the religious right's ring at every turn. Let us not forget that McCain actively pursued Hagee's endorsement.

This isn't really about McCain (for whom I had and have absolutely NO intention of voting). This is about Hagee and his ilk, and their supposed power over American politics. These people are hateful fucking lunatics, and it's high time that that be made crystal clear. In a just, sane world, McCain's pursuit and acquisition of Hagee's endorsement would cost him tenfold the votes he would gain.

. . . And as an aside, can I just say that I'm really, truly discouraged that Quaid thought it necessary to define "apostate" for her readers?

Paying My Elders Their Proper Respect

2008-03-09T22:59:00.002-04:00

Today was PZ's 51st birthday, so I spent all evening making him a little present:

Not too gaudy, I hope? I know he already has a few cephalothrones, but maybe he could use one for the den, or the summer cottage.

Anyway, go pay PZ a visit today, and tell 'im I sent ya. He could use the traffic (hur hur i bet im the only one who ever made that joke hur).

Seriously, though, PZ's an important fella, and he deserves his accolades. I forget exactly how I started reading his site, but it was shortly after I came out as an atheist. That definitely had an impact on my maturing godlessness (as I'm sure you can imagine), and we Pharyngula readers should all know how important development is. ;-)

Here's hoping I get a chance to meet him at TAM6!

I Done Been Saved!

2008-03-05T22:04:00.009-05:00

...or, at least, that's what some well-meaning (let's give them the benefit of the doubt, eh?) but completely unknown person in Charlottesville, VA wishes would happen.

You see, I came home from a hard morning of translating Biblical Hebrew (the irony!) to find this envelope in my mailbox

So I thought to myself: "Hey. I wonder who I know in Virginia who has the handwriting of a kindergartener or an 86-year-old with some kind of neurological disease?" I was, I fear, forever to be left in suspense, because the envelope contained no personal message and no identifying information of any kind. Just a copy of the following pamphlet (read at the peril of your sanity):

My Best Friend!

There's nothing in there of interest, and it's not really worth my time to try to pick apart. Just an example of the kind of logic that would only be compelling to someone already convinced. If you already think that you're condemned to damnation for one reason or another, then of course it makes sense to save yourself all that grief and aggravation by just saying "yeah! me too!" But chances are if you're already convinced of hellfire, you've also got the Jesus. They're a package deal, like the mafia.

Anyway, what I really can't figure out is: who in the world do I know in Virginia? The address they used is really the kicker, because it's wrong. If this fellow found me through my website (via my profile, via this blog), then they have no excuse for getting my address only partially right, because it's there as clear as day. But if they didn't find me through the interwubs, then the only thing I can think of is that they know me personally. I've got some family in West Virginia, and I think a few outliers in the Carolinas...but nobody in Charlottesville that I know of. I still haven't ruled out the possibility that Aaron sent it to me as a prank -- but I've yet to figure out how he could have gotten the VA postmark. He's sneaky, but not that sneaky.

In any case.

I ended up browsing the website of the publishing company for a while after finding the digital copy of the tract (I didn't feel like hooking up my scanner), and I made an interesting discovery. Apparently, it's part of their mission statement that they will send as many pamphlets as you would care to request free of charge in order to help spread the word of Jeezus.

Which got me thinking. I wonder how they make ends meet? They also have a donation page, of course, but I'm sure they don't have a 1:1 ratio of cash in/out. Chances are, they're breaking even at best, and probably losing money, which it seems they're willing to do as long as those pamphlets end up in the hands of real sinners, as opposed to, say, the bottom of sinners' rabbit cages, or the local recycling center. Imagine how terrible it would be if they received a whole bunch of orders for pamphlets which got used for confetti instead of evangelism. They might go out of business if it happened in enough volume -- and then nobody would ever feel the true joy of finding Jeezus in a pamphlet! I certainly hope none of my readers decides to order a bunch of pamphlets off of this convenient order form.

Book Get

2008-03-03T00:36:00.001-05:00

At the advice of Larry Moran, I've picked up a copy of Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It arrived in the mail the other day, and since it didn't have a dust jacket (I bought it slightly used), I covered it in an old grocery bag, just like we used to do in grade school:

Man, brown bag dust jackets are awesome. You can draw on them! Why don't I do this for all my books?!

For all the exposure to evolution I've had through my biology classes and elsewhere, I've been lacking a solid, dedicated study of the subject for its own sake at the kind of level offered by Structure. I'm hoping it will be a good launch point, if nothing else.

But enough talk... I'ma do some reading before bed!

Merriment!

2008-03-01T16:05:00.001-05:00

Sara and I were at PharynguFest Boston last night at the Cambridge Brewing Company. Were you there? You should have been. It was a good time. There were a LOT of Pharyngulites there... we eventually splintered off with Chris, Terra, Blake, Juri, Dion, and Liz, who took pictures!

Part of the conversation turned toward our religious upbringings and various deconversion stories. I let slip a little bit about what got me on the road to godlessness... I really need to write that memoir. :-P

Many thanks to Jeff (who, sadly, I didn't actually get to meet, I don't think) for organizing the whole shebang.

Not Dwelling

2008-02-27T00:56:00.002-05:00

Sometimes you just need to let things be.

Sal Cordova is apparently completely ignorant of the basic fundamentals of inheritance, has been trying to rewrite the laws of physics despite knowing nothing of electrodynamics (by his own admission), and wants to join the gang at Uncommonly Dense in dancing on Darwin's grave.

Everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has been trying to use what fMRI tells us about the function of the mind as an argument against connecting the mind to measures of brain function. (Luckily, Dr. Steven Novella is laying the appropriate smackdown.)

Over at Uncle Density, dacook is trying to suck the value out of his daughter's science project and replace it with his pseudoscience. (This one is just too sad for me to address... he obviously cares about his daughter and thinks he's helping, but he's crippling her education by indoctrinating her with intelligent design.)

And veteran link farmer Denyse O'Leary's response to a study showing that the religious landscape in America is changing, boiled down: "No it isn't! *folds arms petulantly*" I'd like to see the error bars on her complete lack of any evidence whatsoever to accompany her dismissal of the survey.

That's a whole lot of wrong. And it's got me a little down. But it's not worth losing sleep over, so I'm going to pass on the extensive commentary.

...Frack, it's already an hour past when I planned to be in bed.

D'Souza Declares War on Atheists on Behalf of Muslims

2008-02-26T01:02:00.001-05:00

The forces of unreason have been out in force lately. I've got some catching up to do.

Last week, Dinesh D'Souza once again proved himself to be a bigoted, self-absorbed twit. As is so often the case, he opens his article with a plug:

When I proposed in my book The Enemy at Home (newly out in paperback)

Must be nice, getting paid to self-advertise.

Anyway, D'Souza goes on to talk about a letter written last October from a bunch of Muslim scholars addressed to Pope B-16, and how they tried to reassure his Popeliness that they weren't trying to pick a fight with anyone:

"As Muslims," the letter goes, "we say to Christians that we are not
against them and that Islam is not against them--so long as they do not
wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them,
and drive them out of their homes." The letter was carefully worded so
that it did not confuse clashes of interests with a war against the
Muslim religion.

Sounds reasonable, right? Well, here's D'Souza's interpretation:

In effect, the Muslim leaders were saying that their religious quarrel is only with atheists and other enemies of Islam.

The Muslims are saying they won't war over religious issues, they'll only fight over social issues if necessary. D'Souza has them saying they won't war over religious issues with Christians, they'll only war against atheists (hand-in-hand with Christians, ideally). In case you're curious, the actual letter in question never references "atheists" once.

Those of you familiar with D'Souza's writing will recognize this as a recurring theme. All we have to do to prevent another terrorist attack on the United States is get rid of everything the terrorists (and Dinesh, conveniently) don't like: liberals, gays, and especially atheists. The Muslims love Christian, conservative Americans. So for our own good, we need to get rid of anyone who isn't Christian or conservative. D'Souza isn't persecuting atheists, he's just looking out for all Americans.

Goddamned fearmongering Christofascist.

Goat Theory: Part II

2008-02-20T10:51:00.003-05:00

In a previous post, I mentioned Goat Theory, and promised to elaborate.

In order to explain Goat Theory fully, I would essentially have to explain everything I've learned in my five years of studying religion, so I'll be as brief as possible in three easy steps:

1) Modern religion is not representative of religion as a whole as it has been practiced throughout human history. The modern "world religions" are what we call "confessional" - i.e. they postulate divine being(s) who are intimately concerned with the content of your character, your emotional states, and your internal life. They are intimately concerned with professing "belief" - whereas most religious systems have tended to be tacitly accepted, absorbed along with the rest of a cultural apparatus in the socialization of childhood. Confessional religion is a relatively late development in the history of religions, and one that is entirely historically conditioned (by the Protestant Reformation, specifically, which in turn exported the confessional mindset to other religions touched by colonial expansion).

2) The vast majority of people are secular. This is not to say that they are irrreligious - merely that they are predominantly occupied in mundane pursuits. We tend to forget, lounging on the sofa in our post-industrial world, that the time we spend doing things like contemplating ultimate truth, engaging in philosophical debates, and blogging, has traditionally been devoted to less frivolous pursuits like agricultural labor, warfare, fighting predators, cottage industry, and so on. Until the modern democratization of religion, theology remained the purview of priests and theologians - special castes of people who were only able to confront theological issues because their livelihoods were secured by the material support of the pious masses. The vast majority of people, on the other hand, have been far too occupied with securing the means of their own material welfare to worry about issues of heavy theological importance.

3) Therefore, when an average person engages in religious activities, he does so for mundane reasons. His prayers are for a successful crop; his magic is directed toward averting plague. He is concerned about the effect of jealousy in invoking misfortune; he worries about witchcraft; he propitiates his deity and makes donations to his religious establishment in exchange for a guarantee of divine protection. He probes his dreams for advice and warnings. He participates in religious activities to show solidarity with his community. He wears talismans to ensure longevity, fecundity, to ward off injury and harm. And in religions that posit a pleasant afterlife (and there are many that don't), the average person does what he can to ensure that he goes there after death. People don't always engage in these activities out of an abnormally high level of conviction; they do them out of the tacit assumption that this was the way to ensure the good life, the fear that failing to do these things might have disastrous consequences, and the unwillingness to run the risk of testing the phenomenon.

And, to come full circle, although I mentioned in the beginning that modern religion is an exceptional case, I ask the reader to take a look at the list above and tell me that it doesn't apply to the modern megachurch-goer as much as it does to an aboriginal Australian. These are universal concerns that do not go away no matter how complex or convoluted the religious tradition. Modern religions are only exceptional in their emphasis on "spirituality" "personal relationships with the deity" and other such hogwash - and it's something I keep trying to bring up in the theological debates I keep getting roped into over at the Div School. People there are always honking on about "Free Will this" and "Transubstantiation that" and "Predestined somethingorother" - and all I have to say is "yeah, sure. But what about my goat?" Because at the end of the day, people really still just care about their goats.

This, then, is what I mean when I talk about Goat Theory. I'm not implying that religious people have an unhealthy fascination with members of the species Capra aegagrus hircus (although I'm sure there were many ancients who felt about their goats the way PZ feels about his squids), but the security of their livelihoods, the soundness of their bodies and minds, the happiness and fecundity of their families, and freedom from physical harm. And that, Charlie Brown, is one of the most overlooked and most crucial aspects of religious life.

No More Comfort

2008-02-19T00:39:00.003-05:00

Well, that's it. I've had enough.

Perhaps you know about the blog of Ray Comfort (yes, the banana guy). If you don't, consider yourself lucky. You won't be finding a link here. Until today, I had it in my Google Reader (under the "christofascists-etc" label) as a guilty pleasure (well, a masochistic indulgence, not really a pleasure). Ray's writings are so... I'm not even sure there's an adequate word for the degree to which they are intellectually deadening in content and maddeningly smug in tone. It's a disaster from which I could not look away. It isn't even the stuff that's worth engaging with reasoned argument, though many have tried. All I could do was look on and shake my head in despair.

All that's over now; I've unsubscribed, and I'm sure my "heart pressure" will thank me for it. What did it take to push me over the edge? The words "chocolate cake." According to Ray, atheists don't like chocolate cake, because we don't make cynical comments about chocolate cake. Stupid as that sounds, it overlooks something even more important:

THE CAKE IS A LIE.

I could draw an analogy between imaginary cake and... oh, but I really don't care that much. Besides, I just finished a short stack of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies. I'm not hungry.

Friggin' Sweet

2008-02-15T23:36:00.001-05:00

Well don't I feel sheepish.

It's the day after Valentine's Day, so Sara and I thought we'd take advantage of the occasion and buy some discount chocolates at CVS. So we went to the store, and it wasn't entirely clear that the candy was on sale, but we loaded our arms anyway because candy is delicious.

As we got home and started unpacking our haul, Sara lamented that we should have dyed eggs. At that moment, it dawned on us: we were standing there holding bags of Easter candy, not discount Valentine's chocolates. Tricksy!

Jesus may think he's won this round, but the joke's on him. Now, while many are supposed to be fasting for Lent, we're enjoying sugary goodness. And just wait until you see what we have planned for Good Friday! (Hint: it's going to be the best Friday!)

Anyone? Anyone?

2008-02-15T17:53:00.003-05:00

The Disco 'Tute just posted a press release issued by Biola University, a private evangelical Christian institution in Los Angeles, concerning Ben Stein. Honestly, I haven't a clue what it's about. I read the first sentence, and could read no further:

Ben Stein, known from his lead role in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and his Comedy Central show Win Ben Stein’s Money, believes in liberty and truth.

Now, granted, it's been a little while since I've seen Ferris Bueller, but I'm pretty sure Matthew Broderick had the lead role in the movie. And Jeffrey Jones, as principal Ed Rooney, was the lead antagonist. I'd hesitate to call Stein's role as "Economics Teacher" a supporting one, let alone a lead.

I knew cdesign proponentsists tend to be disconnected from reality, but Jesus Christ...

Kissing Hank's Ass

2008-02-15T11:34:00.002-05:00

You all have probably seen this one already, but Robin just brought it to my attention the other day, and I thought it was worth a quick post.

Kissing Hank's Ass

A Weekend of Exciting Drink

2008-02-11T01:36:00.001-05:00

I am told that civilization was built upon beer. Well, this weekend I participated in a long and glorious tradition: on Friday night, I had my first beer. I'd long been wary of beer, given its popular image in America, but I'm willing to start giving a try to these "microbrews" I've heard so much about. My first was a dark Russian stout, with flavors of dark chocolate and coffee. I followed it up with a good English wassail.

I had a good first beer.

But that paled in comparison to the selection last night. For Christmas, Sara gave me a bottle of tokaji (pronounced "tow-KAI," spelling sometimes Anglicanized to "tokay"), a sweet "noble rot" wine from the Tokaj region of Hungary. As far as I'm concerned, tokaji is the most elegant and romantic wine in existence. It is a wine rich in history and tradition. Louis XIV of France famously referred to it as "Vinum Regum, Rex Vinorum" ("Wine of Kings, and King of Wines"). I first heard of "tokay" reading The Golden Compass, and ever since then I've dreamed of one day tasting it.

Well, last night we opened the bottle (sealed with wax, not foil). After a fantastic dinner of blackened tilapia served with spiced green beans and dinner rolls, we enjoyed a glass each of chilled tokaji with dessert, a chocolate-chip cheesecake spread with vanilla wafers. I've never had such a wine as this... beautiful amber color, sweet, almost like syrup, slightly tart flavor with tones of apricot and honey. I can't really think of anything to compare it to. It was phenomenal.

Sara and I have agreed that tokaji will be featured in our wedding ceremony. It will be an opportunity for us to take a number of old traditions and make them our own. But more on that as we get closer to October. ;-)

There is a great deal to be said for a good tradition.

Berlinski whines about peer review

2008-02-07T00:06:00.001-05:00

Yesterday at Uncommonly Dense, GildDodgen posted a number of quotes from an interview with David Berlinski, the Disco 'Tute fellow and purported mathematician whose master calculation for assessing evolution quantitatively (revealed in that same interview) amounted to counting (or rather, pretending to count) the differences between cows and whales. The first quote given, concerning the self-critical nature of science, struck me as particularly wrong and important to correct:

The idea that science is a uniquely self-critical institution is of
course preposterous. Scientists are no more self-critical than anyone
else. They hate to be criticized… Look, these people are only
human, they hate criticism — me too. The idea that scientists are
absolutely eager to be beaten up is one of the myths put out by
scientists, and it works splendidly so they can avoid criticism.

One of the great strengths of science is the concept of peer review. In short, before any group's work can be included in the body of published scientific literature, it must be reviewed by other scientists in the field. This way, errors of methodology or interpretation can be addressed and reduced. It's not a perfect system, but it works pretty darn well: success is determined by well-reasoned argument and reproducible evidence.

Peer review is not kind to cdesign propoentsists, considering their total lack of a sound scientific argument (for ID or against evolution), and so it's natural that they'd lash out against it. Berlisnki's comment is so wrong, it hurts. I may be looking at peer review with all the naïve idealism of a kid who's never submitted a paper to a journal, but even I can see he's off his rocker. Look, let's say for a second that he's right, and scientists hate to be criticized. Even if that were the case, that doesn't change the nature of science as a system.

If you want to be published in the scientific literature, you have to get through peer-review. There's no way around it. Sure, you can make propaganda videos, pressure school districts, write books... there are ways to get your idea out there that bypass peer review. But that doesn't make it science.

And with that as a ground rule, scientists have to be highly self-critical. Sure, scientists are only human, and we like to be right. That doesn't mean we won't submit ourselves to criticism to make sure we're right, especially when the nature of the system means our success depends on it.

Not that your standard creationist would care about any of that, anyway. They're convinced that peer review must be flawed, since their criticisms of evolution never get any traction in the scientific community. Remember, you can't spell "crank" without "persecution complex." But it isn't enough to reject an idea, you have to be able to levy legitimate criticism against it. There isn't any "Darwinist conspiracy;" creationist claims have simply been consistently and conclusively demonstrated to be WRONG.

A Bright Atheiversary

2008-02-04T00:01:00.001-05:00

What with Grandpop's funeral and all, I completely forgot to make note of a certain date. On January 7, 2007, I first officially came out to the world as an atheist on my old blog.

That isn't the date that I stopped believing in God, mind you, but rather the date that I stopped pretending that theism was still a viable option. I can't really name a specific moment when I stopped believing, but I (like Ben) am working on documenting the numerous factors that contributed to my eventual atheism (you'll find a few hints below), so keep an eye open for that.

The occasion of my (belated) atheiversary is as good a time as any to address the matter of The Brights. The day I came out, I also registered as a Bright. It was important to me, as a fledging apostate, that I be able to define my position clearly; naturally, I found a certain appeal in a group based solely on having a clear, concise definition of their worldview. I don't think I ever really bothered much with the term "bright" after that, and certainly after a year I'm pretty well-versed in bandying about the word "atheist" without fear. But having that handhold was important to me for those first few days.

I no longer particularly support The Brights' movement. Whatever you think of the choice of "bright" as a moniker, relabeling ourselves will not make people stop hating us; I feel we need to take a stand and find unity in the terms we already have. That said, I think the Brights have done an excellent job of giving new members an essential tool for affirming their identity by stating their definition clearly and repeatedly. And if that helps some new atheists (not to be confused with New Atheists(TM)) come out, then more power to them, I guess.

Anyway. Here, for posterity, is what I wrote just over a year ago. I hesitate to post it; I wasn't happy with how it came out then, and I'm even less happy with it now. :-P I don't know that I could have done a worse job of coming out... unless, of course, I hadn't come out and all. And that's why I am reposting it here: as a reminder that, even if I'm not always eloquent about it, I'm an atheist, and I'm not afraid to admit it.

Here's to a full year of godlessness, with many more to come!

In Which I Come Out as an Atheist
(7 Jan 2007)

The God Delusion is a fantastic book. Of course, I'd be inclined to say so, since it's precisely what I've been waiting for these past few months.

I can say with confidence now (and feel it is my duty to say) that I am an atheist.

I highly recommend that you read The God Delusion for yourselves. If you've been on the fence about your beliefs, it might help you sort out the different arguments. Even if you have no intention of abandoning your faith, at least you'll know where I'm coming from. Plus, it's an entertaining read; you've got to appreciate a scientist with a sense of humour.

To be fair, Dawkins did not convert me. I had already abandoned religion some time ago, after a thorough investigation of Intelligent Design and an increasing frustration with American Christian fundamentalism. The God Delusion contains much of what I had already known, but organized, clarified, and augmented with details, thus giving me the ability (and courage) to clearly express my worldview.

Last night I registered as a Bright with The-Brights.net. A Bright is "a person who has a naturalistic worldview (free of supernatural or mystical elements)." Brights include atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists, rationalists, and a multitude of other labels. Please give the site a look; you might very well be a Bright, and not even know it. Or maybe you know you're a Bright, but are afraid to admit it.

This is a hard post to write (I may never be happy with how it comes across, but I must publish it nonetheless). The way things stand today, as a declared atheist, I can pretty much kiss any hopes of running for political office goodbye. I'd have a better shot if I were Christian and openly gay. But that's precisely why I need to come out of my closet. I need to help turn public opinion around. By the most conservative estimates, atheists, agnostics, and those with no religious preference outnumber every religious affiliation in America save Christians, yet we suffer the most political discrimination. Maybe by the time I'm old enough to be president, we'll have changed the public stigma against atheism.

And so I say freely: I am an atheist. I am a Bright. If you are as well, then I encourage you to share the fact. The first step to achieving acceptance is to show the world that we are not ashamed.

--Aaron--

Religious Vocab! - "Tenet"

2008-01-31T15:19:00.000-05:00

It always irks me when people get this one wrong.

The correct word is:

tenet n. - An opinion, belief, or principle held to be true by someone or especially an organization.

Which is not to be confused with:

tenant n. - One who pays rent in return for the use of land, buildings, or other property owned by others; an occupant.

Or even (hilariously, as I saw today):

tenement n. - a building that is rented to multiple tenants, especially a low-rent, run-down one.

The only people with a license to talk about religious tenants are landlords.

That is all.

The Religiosity of Soviet Communism

2008-01-22T12:59:00.000-05:00

As we all know, one of the commonest arguments against atheism is that it was responsible for the atrocities of the old Red Menace. And of course we've heard the rebuttals: 1) that coincidence doesn't imply cause, and 2) that the dogma of Bolshevism and the personality cult of Lenin and Stalin are sociologically indistinguishable from religion - and that when we argue against "religion," it is in many ways a shorthand for "dogma and cult."

The reason I bring it up is because I was just reading a collection of Soviet jokes linked to by P.Z.Myers, and in the footnote of joke #1.7 I learned an interesting little factoid I thought I'd share. Apparently one of the "commonest statements of the official propaganda" of the soviet union was the phrase:

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin shall live.

Which immediately triggered my few remaining Catholic brain cells to regurgitate the phrase:

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

So, you ask: what the heck is a messianic promise doing in Stalinist propaganda? Aren't they supposed to be heartless godless atheist materialists with no belief in the supernatural? Did they really believe in the Second Coming of Lenin?

On the one hand, you could say that the phrase "Lenin shall live" was meant to be a metaphorical reference to the restoration of pure Leninist ideals - but you could just as easily turn around, as some liberal theologians do, and say the same about "Christ will come again." But on the other hand, just as the majority of Christians believe the statement literally, you can also bet that the Lenin Prophesy was, at some point and by some people, also taken at face value. With any written, canonical formula there will always be a spectrum of interpretation, from the literal to the figurative and everything in between. And so, ultimately, we see Lenin being treated as a religious figure despite the explicit atheism of his prescribed world order.

Highly dogmatic ideologies cannot help but coalesce around a central, charismatic figure who takes on the trappings of a god. This shouldn't be surprising. The Soviet people were forced to place their trust in Lenin, in the world he described and in the polity he shaped, even long after his death. Because if they didn't believe in Lenin's great vision, their already dubious society would crumble. But what happens when a large group of people put their faith and trust in a non-existent entity? He becomes a god. A god is not a god only because of his ontological status as a supernatural being (one who cannot be seen and who could make all our lives better in the blink of an eye but somehow never does). A god is also the receptacle of the wishes, hopes, faith, and trust that people place in him. And because the god can't speak for himself, he is what people say he is.

EDIT: From a piece of reading I did for a class this afternoon: on the subject of relics (material remains cum magical, religious objects) Stanley Tambiah has suggested that the charisma (in the Weberian sense) of a religious leader is or can be systematically concretized into his relics post mortem.¹ Thus, the Embalmed Body of Lenin plays the same functional role as the Shards of the True Cross, Shroud of Turin, the Eucharist etc.: they are all posthumous repositories for the aura of personality that accrued to the 'holy man' both during and after his life.

1. Stanley Tambiah, Buddhist Saints of the Forest (1984), 335. Cited in John Strong "Buddhist Relics in Comparative Perspective," in Embodying the Dharma, ed. Germano and Trainor (SUNY, 2004), 38.

Dictionary Discovery

2008-01-19T01:25:00.001-05:00

Ben alerted me to a fascinating little bit of trivia the other day. Since he's busy with finals, hopefully he won't mind if I blog this for him. :-)

He wrote to me saying:

SO on my list of terms for tomorrow's exam is the phrase "Cherethites and Pelethites", which when translated from Bible-speak means "Cretans and Philistines". Now, obviously it's referring to people from Crete and people from Philistia........but since 'Philistine' is now synonymous with 'boor', I wondered if the Bible's hatred for people from Crete could be the origin of the word "cretin".

But when I looked it up, the answer was *EVEN BETTER THAN I HOPED*

Here, via dicitonary.com, are the definitions for "cretin":

1. a person suffering from cretinism [severe hypothyroidism resulting in physical and mental stunting].
2. a stupid, obtuse, or mentally defective person.

And the etymology:

[French crétin, from French dialectal, deformed and mentally retarded person found in certain Alpine valleys, from Vulgar Latin *christiānus, Christian, human being, poor fellow, from Latin Chrīstiānus, Christian; see Christian.]

HAHA! How about that?

Among other things, I do believe this vindicates Shalini's somewhat enthusiastic use of the term to refer to creationists.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

2008-01-19T00:56:00.001-05:00

It started with Shelley at Retrospectacle. Evolving Thoughts' John Wilkins followed, and Kevin Z. of The Other 95% and Mike Haubrich of Tangled Up In Blue Guy solidified its memehood. And now I'm joining the fun.

It's quite the simple meme: share a poem that means something to you.

I've long been a fan of Robert Frost. Of all his work, this poem is particularly dear to me, because it is (in my opinion) one of the world's most misunderstood poems. Feel free to disagree with me, of course, but I stand firmly by my interpretation.

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The last stanza, especially the last three lines, are quoted regularly and have earned a place in our cultural lexicon. When you pay attention only to these lines, the poem becomes a celebration of individuality: you will find fulfillment by straying from the beaten path. As inspiring as that sentiment may be, however, it doesn't reflect the poem when considered in its entirety.

Though he'd prefer the less traveled road if given the option, the narrator states quite plainly that the the two paths before him are "worn... really about the same." The best he can do is pick one at random and hope for the best, because he knows that he won't return to try the other. Once his choice is made, he suddenly takes us "ages" into the future, where he imagines himself saying he made the right choice in choosing the less traveled road after all.

Why does Frost tell us the roads are equal, then say he took the one less traveled? One might think that perhaps the traveler was able to discern a difference between the roads after all, or that he simply got lucky in making the right choice. But both these interpretations, I think, ignore the most crucial piece of evidence: the title of the poem.

If this were simply a poem about individuality, Frost easily could have entitled it "The Road Less Traveled." But he didn't. Instead, the one thought looming literally over the whole poem is The Road Not Taken.

This poem is the tale of a man who wants to be an individual, a man who comes to a crossroads and must make a commitment. Yet once his decision is made, no matter how hard he tries to justify to himself that he made the right decision, there's still always the doubt hanging over his head, the regret that he'll never know what might have been.

And here am I, trying to find a career for myself.

Ghosts, Ghouls, and God

2008-01-12T21:56:00.000-05:00

EDIT: 14 Jan

For a while now, on and off, I've been trying to put together a biographical post about how I became an Atheist. It's turned out to be much, much larger than I had ever anticipated, and now I'm not really sure what I'll be able to do with it once it's finished. But in the meantime, I thought I would share a little piece I just wrote about a different side of the supernatural than the one we usually talk about here. If for no other reason, read it for the copious media links that may send you on a nice nostalgia trip.

The aspect of the supernatural that was the most influential in my early life is not the kind they tell you about in church.
I'm talking, of course, about all the little ghosts and ghouls that are everywhere you turn in our popular culture: vampires, skeletons, the undead...you name it, it freaked me the hell out. Now, growing up, I always thought of myself as being quite sanguine about most dangers in life, even life-threatening ones: car accidents, home invasion, tiger maulings, etc. I like to think I faced these prospects with all the hardy staunchness a boy in grade school could muster. But when it came to the other scary things that most boys my age took in stride, I went running. I even remember explaining it at the time: "if I can kill it, it doesn't bother me. It's just the stuff that's already dead..."
Thus, when my classmates were squealing with laughter over the simple, comical little ditty "The Ghost of John" in music class every October, I was busy covering my ears and shaking with abject terror. Despite being in his target age bracket at the height of his popularity, I never could pick up anything R.L. Stine ever wrote, nor could I ever sit through an entire episode of Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid of the Dark? (I knew the answer to that question already, thank-you-very-much). As though this weren't absurd enough, I was also terrified more than my fair share by the ghost of Jacob Marley every Christmas - and not just in his classic and genuinely creepy incarnation as Frank Finlay, either: Goofy and, later, Statler and Waldorf proved far more than I could handle (Oh, the chains! ::shudder::) Even on a show as benign as Sesame Street, the scene where Bert and Ernie dance with a reanimated Egyptian Mummy has burned itself into my memory as one of the most soul-crushingly ghastly things I've ever seen in my life. The same can be said of the Night on Bald Mountain sketch in Disney's Fantasia. Let's not even talk about the time my sister decided to take me to Spooky World. As icing on the cake, when I was seven my Father claimed to have been visited by the ghost of his then recently-deceased brother...in the room where I had been sleeping; needless to say (and I'm not making this up), after that particular event I didn't sleep quite as soundly again until approximately College.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point: getting abducted, squashed, thrown off a cliff, shot, stabbed - these were all things I could entertain in the abstract without so much as breaking a sweat. But just the thought of ghosts and skeletons could make me seriously lose my shit in a most uncomfortable way.

"So what?" you ask, "plenty of kids are afraid of the bogeyman. So you were a little weenie. Big deal." To which I respond with an emphatic YES! - I really was a giant weenie. But that's not the point. The point is how I dealt with it.
You see, my parents naturally found my crippling fear of the supernatural distressing, and did their best to help me conquer it. They told me over and over, with great patience and understanding, that the things that frightened me weren't real. If Pete Seeger's Abiyoyo the Giant existed anywhere on earth, surely modern man would have found him by now. There were no ghosts (Dad's brother notwithstanding), and skeletons never got up to walk around; there were no witches, no banshees, no devils, no monsters of any sort. They were simply all in my head.

And you know what? I accepted this explanation completely, and believed them implicitly. Their appeals to my rationality, my skepticism, my tiny little critical apparatus really worked, insofar as they helped me to understand that the things I was afraid of didn't have any objective reality.
But - and here's the crucial part - it didn't help one goddamned bit. I really, honestly knew with the same conviction that I know that objects fall and the earth is round, that there was absolutely no way that (for example) a skeletal hand could ever, ever reach up from underneath my bed to grab me while I was sleeping. But all the rational certainty in the world didn't mean squat to me, because once the mental image had taken hold, no amount of reason could ever eradicate it from my imagination. Eventually I managed to get over these crippling and totally irrational fears, but only through maturity and sheer force of will, because intellectually I had known all along that there was never anything to be afraid of. Even now (although by leaps and bounds less than when I was a child), if I let myself entertain creepy thoughts for long enough they will seize me in the same way, and despite having the keen mind of a seasoned materialist skeptic I'll be unable to think my way out of the jibbly-jibblies. I'm sure most of you can relate.

The reason I mention all of this is to explain how, very early on, I discovered that there there was a deep division between objective reality and the processes of my little mind, which conjured a world of horrible phantoms that were no less terrifying for their non-existence. (Sometimes I wonder if FDR wasn't talking about people like me back in his first inaugural address.) When I was scared I existed, simultaneously, in two different mentally-constructed worlds: one which was grounded in objective, observable reality, and the other that was dominated by the power of my imagination. After thinking on this for a while, I came to the understanding that human mental processes have the power to create fictions so powerful and so compelling that even a thoroughly rational person will have no choice but to act and react as though these fantasies were objectively real. His interactions with and emotional responses to the world, despite the grounding effect of reason, seem inevitably to give greater urgency to the more threatening world of the imagination.
Now I hope you all see how my rambling relates to religion. My own personal familiarity with the way this experience worked in my own mind is now a paradigm I use to try to understand how some intelligent and well-educated people can persist in their belief in god. Perhaps, for them, a religious world-view has the same effect and takes up the same mental real estate that ghosts did for me. Perhaps God, for them, lives so vividly in the imagination that, despite all rational evidence or belief to the contrary, they cannot help but act and react as though their fantasy were objectively real.

Love You, Grandpop

2008-01-04T21:48:00.001-05:00

It's funny, the things that stick with us. If I've ever addressed you as "mate," you have my grandfather (on my father's side) to thank for it. It's a mannerism he picked up in the Navy, one that is apparently easily passed from father to son. I imagine it'll only get more prevalent as I get older.

Grandpop passed away this morning. It's not really something I feel like talking at length about right now, but I'd feel remiss if I didn't at least mention it.

His health had been deteriorating for some time. Ultimately, when the last spell meant either being put on a respirator or simply being given drugs to ease the pain, he chose the latter, and I don't blame him. His wife and children were with him at the end, and he had the comfort of having seen his grandchildren just weeks prior at Christmas and Thanksgiving. All in all, there are worse ways to go.

Take care.

Bring tea for the Tillerman,
Steak for the son,
Wine for the woman who made the rain come.

Seagulls, sing your hearts away
'Cause while the sinners sin,
The children play.

Oh, Lord, how they play and play
For that happy day.
For that happy day.

(Cat Stevens tends to help when I'm feeling somber...)

Goat Theory: Part I

2007-12-28T01:41:00.001-05:00

If you know me at all, then chances are I've mentioned goat theory to you at least once. I've never been able to put it succinctly before, but now I don't have to. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has just done it for me better than I ever could have done myself. Observe:

I feel like I'm having this conversation all the damned time - especially at Div school. You may think that you're dealing with some intense abstract theological concept, but at the end of the day, most religious people throughout all time have really only cared about the wellbeing of their goat.

It's 2am now, and I'm tapped out for the night. I'll have more to say on Goat Theory in the future, but for the moment I'll leave you with one parting thought:

T-shirts. Make them. Now.

----------------------------------

EDIT: Goat Theory: Part II is up

Short and Sweet

2007-12-26T07:30:00.000-05:00

Happy Boxing Day! There Is No God!

Save Baby Jesus from the Fundies

2007-12-24T23:58:00.001-05:00

I didn't want to post about this before Christmas, since it's a lot less cheerful than I tried to make my last post. But I need to get this off my chest so I can get back to enjoying the holiday. (If Festivus is your bag, maybe you can consider this part of the Airing of Grievances.)

Christmas is not a Christian holiday. There are three main values critical and unique to Christianity: the teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. NONE of these values have anything to do with Christmas.

Christmas is about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men; it is a celebration of generosity and camaraderie, the very values upon which families, communities, and civilizations hinge. We have many myths and symbols to reflect these values, including the Nativity scene.

Fundies don't give a damn about the values of Christmas. They're just trying to use our culture's most popular holiday as a propaganda campaign for Christianity. It's sickening.

Worst of all is their obsession with the Crucifixion. Today, driving to my grandparents' house for dinner, we passed a church with the following bulletin posted out front: "Two thousand years ago, God's gift to mankind was hung on a tree." Last week, Ray Comfort (yes, that Ray Comfort) posted an absolutely abhorrent rewrite of "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" on his new blog:

Hark the herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled"
Joyful, all ye nations rise
What will happen when you die?
Will you go to Heaven or Hell?
Jesus knows! “Emmanuel.”
. . .
That's why Jesus Christ was sent
To be saved you must repent
Died on the cross for all your sin
Repent and put your trust in Him

Christmas is a celebration of life, but Christians have an unholy obsession with death. They murder Jesus in sacrifice to their god, in the hopes that they can follow him to heaven. To draw a connection between that avatar of death and the child of the Nativity is downright obscene. And to think there are those who say atheists have no qualms about killing babies!

I hate Christianity, and I want to keep it as far as possible from my holiday.

Happy Christmas, one and all. In the midst of this season of death and hibernation, please indulge in a celebration of life.

Come In, and Know Me Better Man

2007-12-24T04:16:00.001-05:00

Happy Christmas, one and all! The joyous day is mere hours away!

This is going to be my first Christmas as a professed, vocal, out-and-out atheist, and sweet Baby Jesus am I excited! I love Christmas. And as Ben alluded to in his Christmas post, Christmas is a secular holiday, so I'm allowed to love it. It would be foolish of us to give it up and leave it for the religious nuts to apprehend once more.

In fact, I'm going to go further than most atheists might and say that I still really like the Nativity, and will do my part to make it part of secular Christmas culture.

Solstice celebrations date back to time immemorial. In the dead of winter it gets dark, cold, and scary... so we gather together and throw a big party to remind each other that at least we're not alone, and for a little while maybe harsh reality doesn't seem so bad.

When I was young ("and they packed me off to school"), I often wondered why my family and other Christians didn't celebrate Chanukah or Passover. After all, Christianity had its roots in Judaism, and so weren't their holidays our holidays as well? As is so often the case with questions of this nature, I never got a decent answer from anyone. But now I know better: we didn't celebrate Chanukah because we already celebrated Christmas, and likewise for Easter and Passover. The supposed religious meaning behind the celebrations didn't mean bupkis. It's all the same holiday, no matter what you call it. I call it Christmas, because it's the dominant name in my family and culture. And I like it.

We as a culture have accumulated a number of traditions over the millennia: mistletoe, evergreen trees, yule logs, Santa Claus, Charles Dickens, gift exchange, carols, cookies, all the trappings of the season. Many of our traditions have roots in some religion or another, but that's not why they've stuck around. We keep our traditions because they're important to us; we find something meaningful in them.

The myth of the Nativity is one that I like to keep around, because I find meaning in it that's completely independent of the Christian faith I've long since abandoned.

The imagery is beautiful: It's a beautiful starry night, and a young couple has a beautiful new baby boy. All the people around, shepherds and magi alike (and even the lesser creatures, like sheep and angels) gather around to share in the family's joy, because who doesn't love a baby? It's a time not only for a family to come closer together, but also for complete strangers to revel in our common humanity.

And for just a little while, we can all get together and pretend that one stupid little baby is going to make everything all right. It is the beginning of peace on Earth, and goodwill toward men.

This baby is not the savior of whom Christians speak all year. Jesus was a conjurer and rabbi who supposedly performed miracles, accumulated a cult following, told people how to live their lives, and had to be martyred in order to save mankind after death. The Christ child of the Nativity, on the other hand, is just a baby, and as soon as he's born, the entire world is born anew.

It's not as if Christianity came up with this picture in the first place, either. Rebirth motifs were a staple of myth long before Christianity, especially in conjunction with the winter solstice. For instance, in ancient Russia, every year at about this time the goddess-type Rozhanitsy would give birth to the god-type Rod. (Aside: Some scholars believe Rod to have been highest of all Russian gods. I tend to side with those who think this is more a side-effect of Russia's baptism to Christianity. After the baptism, Rod and Rozhanitsy became Jesus and Mary at Christmas, and Rod gradually began to acquire some of Jesus' other traits in the collective memory of the Russians.) The same rules that applied to the holiday also apply to the Nativity scene. A newborn baby by any other name is still going to be symbolic of the season and our cultural history. I call him Baby Jesus, because that's the dominant name within my family and culture. And I like it.

It's why I like the more "religious" Christmas carols so much. I, personally, have no real taste for the likes of "Jingle Bells" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Give me a hearty round of "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" or "O Come, All Ye Faithful" any day of the season. I like my carols with a little gravitas, thank you very much. It isn't just the music and the poetry of the lyrics that move me; it's the spirit of the myth they embody. (That, and on some level I think I just like a little pomp and circumstance.)

Baby Jesus is much more representative of my values than that other great figure of secular Christmas myth, Santa Claus. (And this is coming from a guy who still has a handwritten letter from "Santa" tucked away somewhere.) Santa is more like Jesus than Baby Jesus is; he's a supernatural deus ex machina that uses his magical power to shower blessings upon those of his choosing. Baby Jesus is more like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present; he can show us what happens when people are charitable to one another, but it's up to us to act on that revelation for ourselves.

Maybe I'm a little biased, having grown up in Nazareth, PA, just a few miles from Bethlehem. Maybe the Nativity reminds me of home a little more than it does other people. Nevertheless, I see no reason to shy away from celebrating the myth of the Nativity; don't let it be taken for granted that the Christ child advertises for Christianity. In my mind, Baby Jesus is no more a part of Christianity than Saint Nicholas. So let the preachers and their flock have Jesus and their piece in Heaven; I'm happy just playing with the baby and celebrating peace on Earth.

~*~ Happy Christmas ~*~

Creationist Resistance to Antibiotic Resistance, Part II

2007-12-21T12:54:00.001-05:00

When last we left our story of evolution and antibiotic resistance, we looked at the importance of random mutation to the development of resistance. Now that we’ve addressed (at least in a small way) the origin of these resistance genes, we can take a look at their greater role in evolution.

Commenter Dan Gaston got us off to a great start on the last post, noting that lateral gene transfer is in fact a primary mechanism of bacterial evolution, even though it doesn’t explain the origin of the genes being transferred.

At the end of the day, evolution is about change, plain and simple. Creationists don’t seem to realize this, as evidenced by their second objection to resistance as evidence of evolution: “If resistance DOES result from random mutation, it doesn’t count as evolution, because there’s always a price to be paid for gaining resistance.”

This is the sort of approach taken by Michael F. Behe, who likens the development of resistance genes to “trench warfare” and genome degradation, rather than an “arms race” of increasing buildup. Like many things that Behe believes, this is baloney.

First of all, it misses the point of evolution, which (as I said before) is change. Whether or not these changes meet Behe’s mystical criteria for “increasing complexity” doesn’t matter. It’s still evolution.

But more importantly, it’s short-sighted. As we’ll see, evolution of resistance means more than just having a resistance gene.

One thing is true about the creationists’ claim: in the majority of cases, resistance comes with a cost. Antibiotics work by disrupting some normal process within the cell. Resistance genes can operate by two different mechanisms: they can either disrupt the normal cellular process so the antibiotic can’t target it anymore, or they can create new proteins that actively do something to inhibit the antibiotic (like export it or degrade it). The latter is typically a plasmid-bound resistance gene, the former more typical of chromosomal mutations. But in the absence of antibiotic, these resistance mechanisms tend to lead to decreased growth. Mutations that disrupt antibiotic activity also decrease the efficiency of the targeted cellular process; proteins synthesized from plasmid might have a side effect on normal cell function; even just copying an unused plasmid is a waste of energy. From am medical perspective, this suggests that when antibiotic resistance crops up, we can just take away the antibiotic for a little while and the antibiotic-sensitive bacteria will eventually outbreed the resistant bacteria, and we can start over.

Behe and other creationists quit there and call it a day. But the problem is that all these studies of the cost of resistance were performed in naïve bacteria. That is, one minute the bacteria didn’t have the resistance gene, the next minute they did, and we looked at the difference.

What would happen if we let the bacteria and their new resistance genes get accustomed to each other for a while? Evolution would predict that, in the absence of antibiotics, there would be pressure to ameliorate the cost of resistance through mutation. Either you get rid of the resistance gene causing the problem, or you keep the resistance gene but acquire new cost-compensatory mutations that reduce its side effects.

Several studies were performed to test that hypothesis. Richard Lenski published a great review article in 1998 covering several of them.[1] You can read it for yourself here [PDF]; I’ll do my best to summarize some of the major findings.

Cost-compensation of plasmid-bound resistance:

A strain of E. coli was transformed with a plasmid carrying resistance to the antibiotics tetracycline and chloramphenicol. For this generation of bacteria, the cells with the plasmid were slightly less fit than those without (in the absence of antibiotics).

The researchers then grew the plasmid-carrying bacteria for 500 generations (75 days) in a culture containing chloramphenicol, to make sure the cells didn’t just ditch the plasmid. They then took those bacteria out of the chloramphenicol and isolated a colony of cells without the plasmid. For this generation of bacteria, the cells with the plasmid were slightly more fit than those without!

Further study showed that it was the bacterial chromosome that had changed, not the plasmid. Over just five hundred generations, enough cost-compensatory mutations had accumulated on the bacterial genome to make the resistance plasmid a boon rather than a bane, even in the absence of antibiotic.

Cost-compensation of chromosomal resistance mutations:

Here, researchers started with mutations of rpsL, a gene that encodes part of the bacterial ribosome (a little blob that synthesizes protein), that result in streptomycin resistance in E. coli. Streptomycin is a type of antibiotic called an aminoglycoside; it binds to the ribosome, preventing protein synthesis and killing the cell. Certain rpsL mutations prevent streptomycin from binding to the ribosome, thus making the cell streptomycin-resistant. However, this change to the ribosome also slows the rate of peptide (protein) elongation.

The researchers grew streptomycin-resistant bacteria in the absence of streptomycin (since it’s on the chromosome, not a plasmid, they don’t have to worry about the gene just being lost), and after a mere 180 generations they found that the rate of peptide elongation was back up to what it had been in wild-type cells. What’s more, they found that the bacteria still had the mutation conferring streptomycin resistance. Rather than mutating back to wild-type, the cells had acquired cost-compensatory mutations elsewhere in the chromosome.

These two studies indicate that fighting antibiotic resistance would be a LOT harder than was previously thought. It isn’t as easy as just taking away the antibiotic and letting the resistant bacteria fade into obscurity. Rather than ditch their costly genes for resistance, the bacteria are evolving cost-compensatory mutations so they can have their cake and eat it, too.

Hm… multiple naturally-selected mutations leading to a benefit with little or no noticeable cost? Sounds like evolution to me.

PS - One final note on the matter of antibiotic resistance, via Greg Laden: apparently there is some hesitation on the part of biomedical journals to refer to the “evolution” of antibiotic resistance, preferring instead to use terms like “emergence.” Head over to Greg’s place to check it out.

Resource:
[1] Lenski, R.E. (1998). Bacterial evolution and the cost of antibiotic resistance. International Microbiology, 1(4), 265-270.

Reality Is Not Subject to Vote

2007-12-18T12:19:00.001-05:00

Today, we have more evidence that creationist attacks on evolution are scientifically bankrupt, and are nothing more than a desperate appeal to the opinion of a misinformed public.

Last week, PZ Myers reported on comments by Florida Board of Education member Linda Taylor:

[Quoting Taylor:] I would support teaching evolution, but with all its warts. I think that some of the facts have been questioned by evolutionists themselves. I would want them taught as theories. That's important. They could be challenged by others and the kids could then be taught critical thinking and they can make their own choices.
Thank you, Linda Taylor. Warts: name two. Theory: define the term. Answer the following multiple choice question:
Who is best qualified to make informed choices about complex scientific theories?

A: Scientists with years of training in the subject, and qualified science teachers who understand the fundamentals of the theory.
B: Creationists who won't even commit to an estimate of the age of the earth.
C: Members of the board of education who have absolutely no training in the sciences.
D: Children who are just being introduced to the topic for the first time, haven't read any of the primary literature, and who are entirely dependent on the competence of the instructors who have given them an outline of the general story.

Today, creationist fuckwit Michael Egnor posts a response:

Because this is a democracy and Myers doesn’t actually get to dictate the choices, the question is really ‘fill in the blank,’ not multiple choice.

Here’s my suggestion for the answer to the question "Who is best qualified to make informed choices about complex scientific theories in public schools in Florida?":

The people of Florida, through their elected school boards.

Darwinists like Myers find democracy so frustrating.

Yes, because clearly the average Florida voter spends every other day simply immersed in the primary biology literature! They know so much about biology, it hurts!

Democracy doesn't get to determine science; the best it can do is decide how we (at the level of government and society) respond to science. No matter how much the creationists want everyone to get together and say evolution is wrong, you can't vote away reality.

We need government officials who recognize that distinction. Good leadership doesn't mean knowing all the answers. It means knowing where to find the answers and how to employ them. A responsible school board must defer to the scientific community, not public opinion nor their own meager understanding, for advice concerning the teaching of evolution. That's what PZ's questions are meant to demonstrate: The school board members most qualified to decide policy are those who recognize that scientists are most qualified to decide science.

The creationists, of course, don't want responsible leadership. Their only hope is that ignorance breeds ignorance, which is why they are constantly trying to sabotage our children's education.

Creationist Resistance to Antibiotic Resistance, Part I

2007-12-17T10:13:00.003-05:00

Earlier last week, GilDodgen of Uncommon Descent wrote about his plans to revolutionize medicine and save us all from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He exhibits some spectacularly BAD logic, even for a cdesign proponentsist. For a few excellent takes on WHY he is so stupid, check out these fine bloggers:

Humble Monkey
Sandwalk
Respectful Insolence
Panda’s Thumb
ERV

Now, I don’t want to go into Dodgen’s points and claims specifically; those have already been torn to ribbons in the links above. Instead, I want to address the more general trend of creationist denial regarding antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Resistance to antibiotics (henceforth just “resistance”) is one of the starkest examples we have of the power of evolution by natural selection of random mutation. So it only stands to reason that creationists will fall over each other to deny that resistance has anything to do with evolution. To do so, they employ two main ~~talking points~~ lies (embodied in this *shudder* Answers in Genesis article):

1) “The genes for resistance are not the result of random mutation; they’ve been there all along, we just didn’t notice them!”

2) “Even if resistance DOES occasionally result from random mutation, it doesn’t count as evolution, because there’s always a price to be paid for gaining resistance.”

We’ll deal with that first lie today.

Even if the creationist grudgingly admits the importance of natural selection to the growth of a resistant population, they vehemently deny that what’s being selected is the result of random mutation. Instead, they say that either there were a handful of resistant bacteria around to begin with, or they inherited the genes for resistance from a different kind of bacteria via lateral gene transfer. Dodgen’s post falls into this camp, sort of, since he’s downplaying the power of random mutation. Another, perhaps clearer, example would be a recent UD post by idnet.com.au discussing divergence of E. coli in the human gut versus that of the baboon. Although resistance is not specifically addressed, it is claimed that any new genes found in either population of bacteria must be the result of lateral gene transfer.

Real science, of course, is chock FULL of examples of the power of random mutation. Let’s look at just one example: Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in patients with cystic fibrosis, from a paper published by Antonio Oliver et. al. in the journal Science in 2000.[1] (See that little BPR3 icon? That’s the sign that things are about to get good.)

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a genetic disorder resulting from a mutation in the gene encoding the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR). Normally, CFTR adjusts ion concentrations in order to make water flow out of the cell via osmosis. In the lung, this source of water is what keeps your mucus nice and wet and fluid. But if CFTR is broken, the mucus in the lung (and elsewhere, such as the GI tract) becomes dry and super-thick, causing all kinds of hell for the CF patient’s body.

P. aeruginosa is an opportunistic bacteria; it can't and won't infect a healthy adult. It can, however, cause serious infection in certain scenarios if exposure is high and the host's defenses are already down. Two major targets for serious acute (short-term) infection are mechanically ventilated patients and victims of serious burn wounds. But for patients with CF, P. aeruginosa instead causes chronic (long-term) infection. For most such patients, it’s not the CF that kills you, it’s the Pseudomonas.

As it turns out, P. aeruginosa infections from CF lungs show a lot more colony diversity than colonies grown from patients with acute infections. Oliver’s group hypothesized that this diversity was due to the conditions within the CF lung, which as a result of hyperosmolar viscous mucus is highly compartmentalized and continually changing. Such an environment would favor the growth of bacteria that could keep on their toes, so to speak, quickly and readily adapting to changing environmental niches within the lung. And evolutionary biology predicts that, in order to adapt to that kind of environment, you have to be really good at mutating.

So the experimenters collected a whole bunch of P. aeruginosa samples from 30 CF patients, and a whole bunch of P. aeruginosa samples from 75 patients with acute infections, and compared the mutation frequencies of those isolates. Both the CF and non-CF patients had a whole bunch of P. aeruginosa isolates with low mutation frequencies. But in addition, the CF patients had a whole bunch of isolates with mutation frequencies 100 times as great! Genetic analysis of these mutator isolates over several years indicated that they were all different and persistent; these were bacteria that evolved into mutators within the host and stuck around, and not mutators transmitted between patients. Further investigation demonstrated that, for several of the mutator isolates, one or more error-avoidance genes were mutated or deleted altogether, explaining their high mutation rate.

This is the point in the presentation when a creationist might say, “Aha! Nothing new was created; mutation was only capable of breaking genes that were already there!” But this is only the first half of the story; as we’ll see, the mutator phenotype opens the doors to further beneficial mutations.

You see, cells normally keep those error-avoidance genes around for a reason. If the mutator phenotype is so prevalent in CF patients, it must be conferring some advantage in that environment. That is, given the conditions of the CF lung, it’s apparently more important to be able to get beneficial mutations than to prevent detrimental ones.

Patients with P. aeruginosa infections, especially those with CF, are subject to extensive treatment with a broad range of antibiotics. So the experimenters took a look at whether the mutator phenotype had any effect on the evolution of antibiotic resistance:

This is the key figure for our discussion. In case you can’t tell, black bars are mutator strains from CF patients, grey bars are non-mutator strains from CF patients, and white bars are strains from non-CF patients (all non-mutator). For a broad range of antibiotics, mutator strains showed a much higher frequency of antibiotic resistance compared to non-mutator strains.

The only way this makes sense is if antibiotic resistance is the result of naturally-selected random mutation. Mutator strains have higher mutation rates, and are therefore more likely to acquire the mutations necessary for resistance. The non-CF non-mutators serve as a control. The important comparison is between CF mutators and CF non-mutators, because they had everything in common except their mutation rate. They were derived from the same ancestral strains that first infected the patient. They were subject to the same antibiotic therapies. They grew in the same environment, shared space with the same other species of bacteria, and therefore had the same potential for lateral gene transfer. If resistance were the result of anything other than mutation, then we should see no statistical difference between the black and grey bars. But we do see a difference.

That’s evolution. The CF lung is a dynamic environment with different selective pressures than sites of other, acute infections. CF lungs favor selection of bacteria that can mutate rapidly. This increased rate of mutation results in other selectable beneficent mutations, such as resistance to antibiotics.

It’s important to note that Oliver and company weren’t trying to convince anyone that bacteria evolve; real scientists understood that already. They were trying to use that understanding to save people’s lives. Their insight into how a Pseudomonas infection behaves within the lung is the first step to fighting that infection. Armchair physicians who don’t understand antibiotics and deny the power of random mutation are of no help to the dying.

Next time we’ll look at that second creationist claim, and what random mutation can do to bacteria that are already resistant to antibiotics. That’s when things get really intense.

Resource:
[1] Oliver, A. (2000). High Frequency of Hypermutable Pseudomonas aeruginosa in Cystic Fibrosis Lung Infection. Science, 288(5469), 1251-1253. DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5469.1251

Not Really a Review, More Like a Short List of Grievances

2007-12-08T15:35:00.001-05:00

Last night I saw "The Golden Compass" with Ben and his girlfriend, Robin.

I didn't like the film adaptation of "The Golden Compass." Not at all, really.

I wanted to like it, I really did. Partly because, as an atheist, I want to give the film as much positive publicity as possible. Partly because my brother (also named Ben) thinks I'm the world's biggest film cynic, just because I have standards. But mostly because the "His Dark Materials" trilogy constitutes three of my favorite books ever, and I want to see it well-represented.

This film was very much a disappointment, not only paling in comparison to the books, but also a poor movie on its own. I don't want to go into too many details, lest I get into spoiler territory. But the biggest problem was definitely the pacing. This is really a story that would have taken three movies to tell well. There was no development of anything. In trying to keep as many details from the book as possible, the director threw away any change of giving those details meaning. And everything was incredibly rushed.

For example, no one seems to notice when an important glass of wine has been spilled and shattered. Lyra and Pan spend about thirty seconds with Mrs. Coulter before they start complaining about how they're never going North. The great meeting of all the gyptian nation takes place on a single boat, to save time and space. Out of the blue, a witch asks a question about her former lover, and it comes across as completely ridiculous because we don't know anything about either character to give a damn about their backstories.

But the most tragic victims of the film were the bears. First of all, so help me, I love Sir Ian McKellen, but I did not buy for one minute that he was the bear prince of Scandinavia. And in the movie, they say Iorek is in exile because he lost in single combat with another bear. That's the exact opposite of how it went in the book. Iorek was exiled because he accidentally killed an opponent (an important parallel to Lord Asriel that was also absent from the movie). That's a pretty drastic change in character, if you ask me.

But beyond Iorek, the bears had absolutely no purpose in the film. They had no character, no substance... they weren't even relevant to the plot anymore, because Lord Asriel's circumstances were changed for the film. And that's tragic, because Pullman wrote the bears into an elegant foil for what it means to be human, with our strengths and limitations. There wasn't hide nor hair of that subtext anywhere in the movie. This may be heresy, but I almost wonder whether it would have been worth it to leave the bears of Svalbard out of the movie altogether. They could have given more time and care to developing other elements of the story.

I'll say this for the film, though: Sam Elliott as Lee Scoresby was fantastic. I only wish he had had a chance to do more with the character. Also, I wish they had given him a real balloon, as opposed to more of the same rigid ion-propulsion technocrap that everyone else used in the movie. (Notice: it takes more than brass baubles to make something steampunk, damnit!)

And most importantly, the movie is a big ol' advertisement for the books. I wouldn't hold out for any movie sequel, though. You don't dodge the last three chapters of "The Golden Compass" if you're planning to do anything with "The Subtle Knife."

Oh well. Maybe somewhere down the line a visionary will revisit the material and give it the cinema treatment it deserves. (Hopefully that'll be before Sam Elliott retires.)

Merry Christmas

2007-12-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

Well, folks, it's that time of year again. There's snow on the sidewalk, wreaths on every lamppost, and toys in every window. Everything is decked out, lit up, turned on - and everyone seems to be walking around with a smile on their face (or, if you're in Cambridge, with a smile hiding beneath their manic end-of-the-semester caffeine scowl). But there's another sign of the season that comes every year - one that I'm always much less happy to see. And that's the rhetoric of the so-called "War on Christmas".

Did you know there was a war on Christmas? Apparently there is. (I guess it's just a bad time to be a concept; I'm talking to you, 'terrorism'.) And what's even more disturbing is the fact that I'm supposedly to blame for it. Yes, dear readers, you heard right - and if you hold the same non-theistic worldview that I do, then you're to blame too. Because this war isn't being waged by people whose only lesson learned from The Grinch was that a successful assault on the holiday requires more manpower than just a fuzzy green curmudgeon and his adorable little dog - apparently it's being waged by us. And by "us", of course, I mean the Godless Jewish Communist Fag Flag-Burning Freedom Hating Pinko Liberal Satans out there. Because, really, at the end of the day, all the forces of progressivism and liberalism are the same, aren't they? (For those of you keeping score, that was sarcasm)

Now, we all know where the problem comes from. For the last bunch of years, America has realized that, whether it likes it or not, it's living in a pluralistic society. Naturally, when this pluralism expresses itself, the people who were in cultural power (WASPs) are upset by it. (To be fair, let's face it, we would be upset too; imagine us heathens all living in Norway, or some other even more godless state, and having a group of immigrant Christians come and insist on putting up a manger scene on our town hall. There'd be heck to pay.) And so this all naturally gives the impression to the cultural majority that all the people who care about equal rights for all Americans are all in a conspiracy to get rid of "Merry Christmas" so as not to offend minority sensibilities, and replace it with something generalized, politically correct, and therefore meaningless.

But there's a catch. You see, I love Christmas. It has been my favorite time of year since before I could walk, and it still is. And even though I don't put up a manger anymore, and sometimes I wince whenever I sing a Christmas Carol that mentions Jesus (although that doesn't stop me from singing them. It helps if they're in other languages), I still put up a tree the day after Thanksgiving, there's a wreath in my window flanked by stockings, and I wouldn't have it any other way. So I object to the fact that I'm being blamed for hating Christmas and seeking to plot its ruin - almost as much as I object to the fact that nasty, reactionary assholes (read: Bill O'Reilly) are spoiling Christmas for me with their crotchety saber-rattling.

Because, you see, we Atheists aren't originally responsible for the "religious correctness" that is most at fault for this so-called War on Christmas. That particular honor belongs, as such honors often do, solely to the religious. After all, let's not forget that the first shots fired in the War on Christmas were fired in an altercation over the public display of religious icons. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever had a problem with the Christmas tree in the town square. It was the nativity scene on government property that made some people antsy. And then, after a while, there was a court battle, and then there were Menorahs on government property. And before long, we have Kwanzaa lights, Diwali lights, Ramadan somethingorothers, and "Happy Holidays" dominating the public discourse.

You know what this says to me? This is not a war between the secular and the religious. This, like all the other wars that man has ever fought, is a war between religions. And while Atheists will agree that having state-funded Jesus idols all up in their face is rather offensive and unconstitutional, the absolute last solution that we would ever endorse would be that instead of one type of religious icon, we replace it with an icon representing every single religious group in America!

Now I can understand both sides. As a Christmas-lover myself, I resent being told that I can't wish people a Merry Christmas while knowing that it will be received in the spirit it is intended. Yet I can certainly understand the feeling of the minority religions as well; being non-Christian myself, I would and do hate to see my elected representatives explicitly espousing faith biases that I do not share.

But the thing that everyone fails to understand is that the entity that most people celebrate as "Christmas" has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus, apart from circumstance. I don't know about you all, but for me, most of what I ever learned about Christmas was secular - and I was raised Catholic. The meaning of Christmas, as far as I'm concerned, is the social gospel of Charles Dickens: that charity and generosity are the cornerstones of civilized society, and the measure of a person is his willingness to do good for his fellow man. It is joy and peace and love, family, and thankfulness. It is a celebration of the good things that life has given us. Even religious Christmas carols, when you come to think of it, mention Jesus only insofar as he is thought to be the bringer of these things: peace on earth, good will towards all mankind. Never mind that the Christians think that we must justify our altruism with God, whereas we godless justify it for the sake of each other. We all agree that peace, love, and prosperity is the central focus.

And the funniest thing to me is the fact that the Christian clergy have already recognized the fact that this holiday isn't all about Jesus - and they've been worried about it for years. Every single year for as long as I can remember, ministers have been saying two things to their congregations during Christmas: 1) "We're open 52 weeks a year, you know" and 2) "Don't succumb to the commercialization and secularization of the holiday; Jesus is the reason for the season." This points to the simple fact that most people are already much more secular than their religious leaders want them to be. They want their Santa Claus and they want their Egg Nog, they want their presents and their holiday specials and their gingerbread and mistletoe, and if they also want a little bit of religious pageantry, it's clear that most of them want it only on the eve of the great festival. Otherwise it's Rudolph and Frosty all the way.

And yet when people who don't understand that "Merry Christmas" is really *not* a religious statement nine times out of ten force a stilted, pluralistically-friendly "Happy Holidays" on these people - the ones who just want to celebrate the major festival of their culture in peace - it's only natural that these already secularized folks are going to get pushed into the religious camp. You can bet that when someone lashes out against "Happy Holidays" they aren't thinking of their Lord and Saviour^TM -- they're remembering all those years as a little kid opening up presents on Christmas morning, and thinking about a world in which that kind of magic and joy and love is deprived from their children. "What?" they cry, "The Communist Atheist Jews are trying to take Santa Claus away from my little kid??!? Over my dead body!" And thus we have the war on Christmas. The dogma of religious pluralism is forcing already secularized moderates into the clutches of the radical religious all because somebody seems to think that red and green were Jesus' favorite colors.

So how can we fix it all? Is there a way that we can preserve Christmas as our cultural holiday, while at the same time not infringing on the rights and sensibilities of the religiously inclined? I think we can - and, predictably, I think the model for this can be found on Sesame Street. Specifically, I'm referring to the classic 1978 Christmas Eve on Sesame Street. In this film, the Sesame Street gang does what they do best: demonstrate how an incredibly diverse group of people and other things can get along so well together that they all spontaneously know the words and dance steps to all the show-stopping numbers. Now, the vast majority of the story arc of this special has to do with the secular mythology of Christmas, viz. Santa Claus and his chimney-descent abilities. And all of the musical numbers stress the secular message of Christmas, for example:

Christmas means the spirit of giving
Peace and joy to you,
The goodness of loving,
The gladness of living;
These are Christmas too.

Everything that everyone says is about joy and love and being good to each other. No Jesus there - but nevertheless, they call it Christmas. In other words, it's the perfect model for a pluralistic, secular existence in which nobody feels they have to restrain their joy.

But the most meaningful and hopeful thing for me came in a brief exchange between Mr. Hooper and Bob. Now, for those of you who don't remember, Mr. Hooper is Jewish, and Bob - well, I think I heard somewhere that he was a minister in real life, but I think maybe I'm getting him confused with Fred Rogers. Not important. Anyway, there's one point in the story where Mr. Hooper (who, by the way, has decorated his shop for Christmas, because he recognizes the secular nature of the holiday) runs into Bob on the street while on his way to play O. Henry to Bert and Ernie's Jim and Della . After a brief exchange, Bob, knowing that Mr. Hooper is Jewish, wishes him a Happy Hanukkah - a sentiment that Mr. Hooper demonstrably appreciates, and reciprocates by heartily wishing Bob a Merry Christmas. Now, I don't know whether Mr. Hooper is referring to an explicitly religious aspect of Christmas for Bob, or merely thanking Bob for his sensitivity...but in either case, I have always seen this exchange as the model for a Holiday Greeting Etiquette. Use "Merry Christmas" for everyone, if you so choose, because the holiday is secular. However, use religion-specific greetings with people who you know celebrate such holidays exclusively. And if you get corrected on accidentally wishing a Jew or a Muslim a "Merry Christmas," apologize, tell them you meant no offense, explain that you use the word to describe the secular holiday, but that you will remember their preference for the future. Maybe if we do that enough - maybe if we can make everybody understand that you don't have to be Christian to celebrate Christmas - and we can all just sit down and enjoy the tinsel.

So please, this holiday season, if you're so inclined, don't feel like you can't wish people a Merry Christmas. Because, after all, what's in a name? I'm sick to death of hearing people say, (to quote an email I just received forwarded from someone else's grandmother):

This is a Christmas tree.
It is not a Hanukkah bush,
it is not an Allah plant,
it is not a Holiday hedge.
It is a Christmas tree.
Say it... CHRISTmas , CHRISTmas , CHRISTmas
Yes. CHRISTmas - celebrating the Birth of Jesus Christ!!!

After all, depending on who you are, there's about as much Christ in Christmas as there is Thor in Thursday. It's really just a linguistic accident that the English language has happened to preserve "Christ" in the name for this holiday at all. If we were in France, we would be wishing each other Joyeux Noel. In Germany, Froeliche Weinachten, and in Norway God Jul. And as far as I'm concerned, if English-speaking Christians can suffer to call their highest holy day after the name of the pre-Christian goddess Easter, then there's no reason for us Atheists to shy away from the word Christmas.

So that's my two cents. Make of it what you will.

Happy Christmas to you all.
The war can be over, if you want it.

Thinking Out Loud

2007-12-05T10:55:00.000-05:00

When you all are faced with a really tough choice, and after long deliberation you finally make up your mind, do you ever have the impulse to run out and justify that decision to every person you meet? As though by convincing them that you made the right choice you'll convince yourself?

Well, I think I've just come to a decision, and I hope you'll indulge me a little self-justification.

You see, I've spent the last three years studying the Hebrew Bible. And it's been fun, and really rewarding. But because my interests (i.e. showing that the Ancient Israelites were really just a bunch of wacky Iron Age polytheists) are in such stark conflict with what most people want to hear ("everything in the Bible is true, and we have archaeology to prove it!"), this means that for the rest of my professional career, my message will necessarily be a negative one. Just by the fact of how the discipline works, I will be challenging people's cherished assumptions about their own identity on a daily basis. And as much as I like challenging people to think critically about their own traditions (As Penn Gilette once said "Go ahead. Read the Bible - because the world needs more Atheists"), that's just not a battle I want to be fighting every day until I retire.

You see, although I am an Atheist, that identity is secondary to my identity as a Religionist. In fact, I only arrived at my conclusion that there was no god after I became fascinated with the diversity of humanity's religious manifestations. I derive my greatest intellectual satisfaction from understanding how religion works -- not from refuting or demolishing it. Yes: I think it is harmful and backwards in my own society - but in the societies of others or of the distant past, I find much in it to be excited about. Lately, the only thing I've been able to be excited about is being an angry Atheist, thanks to the professional discussions I'm forced to have - but that's not who I am or who I want to be. If I stay within the field of the Hebrew Bible I will be putting myself in a place where I can only be angry at people for not putting aside their biases to do real scholarship - rather than trying to get people excited about studying something new and different, which is what I always wanted to do in the first place.

Which leads me to the alternative: there are a number of options on my plate right now - and obviously I can't pick one until I shop around and see what clicks - but for the moment I'm seriously considering one or more religions of the Indo-European family. That is to say: the Indian Vedic tradition, Pre-Zoroastrian Persia, Hittite religion, Greek Religion, Slavic religion, Germanic religion, and Celtic religion. I feel like these traditions would a) give me the necessary cultural variety I crave, b) allow me to speak as I like without worrying about the tenure-consequences of offending a student of faith, and most importantly c) allow me to study something simultaneously very familiar and very foreign. Because this I-E religious strain both was superseded by the modern axial traditions, and in many cases survived at a folk level after the introduction of these traditions, this would also allow me to study my dual interest in ancient polytheism *and* heterodox behavior among later ethical religions. In other words, I can finally go back to "hey, look at that. Isn't that cool? Why do you suppose they did that?" instead of "don't be stupid. You're reading that text wrong. Your hermeneutic is flawed, and you're letting your faith cloud your judgment."

Now, all I have to do is finish out this semester, and let the fun begin.

An Inconvenient Truth about Christian Ethics

2007-12-03T12:40:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I received an anonymous comment on my post about Tillich. My response ended up much longer than it ought to have been, so I'm including it as a post unto itself, because I think it is useful to see the kinds of real-world popular theologies that are out there. The anonymous poster writes:

The central tenet of Christianity is that we should act as Jesus would.

What we think Jesus would do is,at best, only loosely related to whether we think Jesus actually existed and did what he is said to have done.

The "truth-value" of the central tenet is T. We should act as Jesus would.

The respondent seems to be going along with Tillich's modernist interpretation: i.e. that the existenz/nonexistenz of a historical Jesus is a moot point because the heart of the Christian message is the moral example that we attribute to Jesus.

Fair enough. I see in this similarities to the Deist Christianity of, say, Thomas Jefferson - for whom Jesus was just a man with some pretty good ideas of how to act toward each other.

But my question, to play Devil's advocate, is this: if Jesus never existed, then from where does this moral example come? Who attributed these sayings and actions to a man who didn't exist, and why?

Furthermore, even if a historical Jesus did indeed exist (and I believe he probably did, although he was probably nothing like he appears in the Gospels), it is still a very difficult, if not impossible, task to determine what he would have done in any given circumstance. Like it or not, attempting to predict what a given person - fictional or not - would do in a given situation is intrinsically an interpretive, speculative exercise. Thanks to the free will that people are always touting, we can predict human responses with no certainty. And given the propensity of people to find justifications for their actions, there's a whole host of possibly-questionable things one can argue that Jesus would have endorsed, but that we will simply never know for certain.

Now, of course one will argue that this is one of the tasks of theology: to make educated guesses about moral choices given a limited set of holy precedents. And again I say fair enough. But what I would like to bring to your attention is the fact that these guesses must be dictated at least in part by the zeitgeist. Because the actual Jesus is apparently less important than the kinds of behavior people think he would be ok with - and because we can't exactly call him up and ask him - then ultimately the decisions of moral/immoral good/bad are in the hands of the people who claim to speak for him.

So far so good: that's organized religion for you. There's a caste of divine functionaries who are believed to have the ability to speak on behalf of the departed precedent-setter.

But (and this is coming full-circle now) if one claims that there needn't have been an actual Jesus, or that Jesus' divinity is not an important part of the equation, then those people who claim to speak on his authority therefore have no divine backing - seemingly by their own admission. Instead, we have a bunch of people arguing about whether a fictional character would approve of or engage in such-and-such a behavior.

So why, then, can't we cut out the middleman, and instead have these debates about whether such and such a thing is acceptable in the abstract? Why can't we have secular ethics without the distraction of a fictitious a desert mendicant peering over our shoulders? If Jesus' existence or divinity is not important, then one's choice of him as a role model is completely arbitrary (albeit culturally determined) - and the ethics attributed to him in any given era are the morals of that era, and not the other way around.

Smörgåsbord!

2007-12-02T18:24:00.001-05:00

Hot damn! Back on the seventh of November, I pickled a jar of garlic. Yesterday, I finally got to taste it. And it was delicious.

So naturally, today I pickled two more pounds of garlic. Should be ready just in time for Christmas.

In case you want to try it yourself, here's the recipe I used. I used a chili pepper instead of a large red bell pepper, though, and mustard seed instead of ground dry mustard.

Now, I think I'm going to make a burrito. Because I can cook.

Of Petards and Retards

2007-11-13T00:26:00.001-05:00

Two tales tonight of morons caught with their pants down.

First, poor BarryA at UncommonlyDense. He caught wind of the Blog Readability Test, a tool that uses some unknown criteria to report a web site's "reading level." BarryA thought he would use this little webtoy to go nyah-nyah at UD's nemeses at the Panda's Thumb:

Just for fun I inserted UD and it came back “High School,” which means that the general discussion at this blog is at a high school level. I then inserted Pandas Thumb and it came back “Elementary School.”

Make of this what you will.

Not that this little test actually means anything, but unfortunately for BarryA, he got it wrong anyway. Hetyped in the wrong URL. Pandasthumb.com, an unregistered domain, returns the "Elementary School" result. But the actual Panda's Thumb site, pandasthumb.org, returns "College (postgrad)."

Typical of a cdesign proponentsist, to jump at the first inkling of a conclusion that favors their preconceived notions, without checking to see if the conclusion is at all valid. Did he really expect a site that talks about science all day to return an "Elementary School" rating? Did no warning bells go off at all before he rushed to blog about it?

Other bloggers, as well as commenters on the UD post, have already pointed out his error. In response, BarryA says in the comments:

You are right. Ouch; I’ve been hoisted on my own petard.

*sigh* You lose again, Barry. The saying is "hoist by one's own petard." A petard is a little bomb, characteristic of mediæval siege warfare. To be hoist by one's own petard means to be blown up by your own tool of destruction. To be hoist on your own petard means, well... very little.

It's a little thing, to be sure, but I like the phrase too much to see it abused like that.

Let's move on to the next stupid, shall we?

Dinesh D'Souza.

*retch*

In his latest screed, D'Souza blames us atheists for spreading lies (LIES, I SAY!) about Christianity:

Have you heard the one about how the dumb, ignorant Christians for
centuries regarded the earth as flat until brilliant scientists like
Galileo came along with their new telescopes and other inventions to
show that it is round? This account of scientific progress can be found
in textbooks and it has also cemented itself in the popular mind.

The only problem with the story is that it is entirely false. It is
a made-up yarn that is supposed to illustrate the so-called war between
science and religion.

D'Souza's one to talk about made-up yarns. Galileo had nothing to do with demonstrating Earth was round; he provided evidence for a heliocentric model of the solar system! Of all the strawmen I've ever seen, this is one of the flimsiest and most disfigured.

Of course, given all the comments to that effect that D'Souza received on his blog, he had to add some sort of response:

Postscript: No sooner did I post than the atheists were in there,
seeking to divert attention from their Flat Earth myth by claiming that
Galileo is actually famous for being the first to demonstrate the truth
of heliocentrism. Even here, they are wrong on two counts: a) It was
Copernicus who advocated heliocentrism more than a half-century before
Galileo and b) Galileo's proofs of heliocentrism were mostly wrong. For
instance, Galileo argued that one reason we know the earth goes around
the sun is because of the ocean tides. Galileo thought it was the
earth's motion that caused the water in the oceans to slosh around!
Actually, the tides are the result of the moon's gravitational force
acting upon the earth. So Galileo was right about heliocentrism, but
largely for the wrong reasons. Count on our "enlightened" atheists to
keep getting their facts wrong.

So instead of admitting his mistake and apologizing, D'Souza has decided that Galileo hasn't contributed jack squat to science anyway. Classy.

There's a big difference between "advocat[ing] heliocentrism" and "demonstrat[ing] the truth of heliocentrism." Copernicus had a lot of fancy-dancy math to show people, but Galileo put forth observable evidence for it. As for that stuff about the tides, way to take one factoid and call it representative of Galileo's entire argument. I... I cannot believe that D'Souza is actually trying to belittle Galileo's contributions to science.

I find this especially amusing in light of the first issue of Dartmouth's new Christian magazine, the "Apologia." You see, they're trying to recast Galileo as a good Christian who deserved to be persecuted by the Church because he hurt the pope's feelings. I wonder how they'd respond if they knew their new hero was just a lucky moron who got on the good side of the atheists who write the history books.

Deconstructing Tillich

2007-11-08T15:21:00.000-05:00

In my German for Theological Reading course over the Summer, I had to translate the following passage:

Tillich fragte sich: "wie die christliche Lehre zu verstehen ware, wenn die Nichtezistenz des historichen Jesus wahrscheinlich wurde." Tillich kam zu der erkenntnis: "Nicht der historische Jesus, sondern das biblische Christusbild is das Fundament des christlichen glaubens."

Which, roughly, equates to the following:

[Theologian Paul] Tillich wondered: "how are the Christian teachings to be understood, if it is likely that 'the historical Jesus' never existed?" Tillich came to the conclusion that "it is not the historical Jesus, but rather the biblical picture of the Church which is the foundation of Christian belief.

I have to wonder if Tillich realized how hollow this sounds: that a religion that is entirely based around the fact that a certain fellow existed simultaneously as both god and man is not impaired by the likelihood that such a man never existed.

This statement is very interesting to me, because in this Tillich and I are in complete agreement: as far as religions are concerned, there needs to be absolutely no historical truth, or even a historical basis for their claims. All belief systems create reality by consensus: for the Christians, that consensus is that there was a fellow called Jesus who set some important ethical standards and performed some miracles, was literally of divine parentage, and died in order to let people into paradise. Whether or not these claims are historically true is immaterial as far as the religion itself is concerned, because its adherents take it to be true.

But the only reason I can make that statement is because I have nothing at stake in Christianity; looking at the phenomenon from the outside, I can say that Christianity is about whatever the Christians say it is about, and nothing else. But what I really want to know is how a believing, practicing Christian can deny the literal truth-value of his most sacred proposition? Put another way, I wonder how Tillich can make this statement and not instantly lose his faith?
In asking this question and finding the answer that he does, Tillich is essentially ripping out the Rappaportian cornerstone on which his entire faith-system is built.* The consensus-effect of Christian belief only works everyone believes (or claims to believe) in the literal truth-value of the central tenet, from which the rest of the faith derives. That's why "faith" is such a buzz-word among Christians: they realize that their beliefs are kind of wacky, but they also recognize (perhaps subconsciously) that questioning those beliefs will lead to chaos in their society (incidentally, that's why they're so afraid of us Atheists, too). And so you have people touting their faith to the heavens: it's like a game where whoever can convince himself the most completely of a silly idea wins. The more demonstratively you suffer for it, the better! (People willing to die for their convictions get bonus points!)

Now, anyone who sees that the historicity of the Jesus figure is immaterial to the Christian faith but paradoxically remains a Christian nevertheless is trying to have his cake and eat it too. Such a man demonstrates his preference of belief over the conclusions of logic, and is shrinking away from an uncomfortable realization to which his conceptual pursuit has taken him. Tillich, in other words, is an intellectual coward.

But more importantly, Tillich's comment I think says a great deal about the Christian response to modern Biblical research. In fact, when I was starting out here at the Div School in September, I overheard a conversation wherein a good friend of mine (an aspiring Catholic Theologian) was trying to define "Systematic Theology" to another student. It's been a while now, so I don't remember his exact words - but when he was finished, I asked the following:

So, let me get this straight. If I may paraphrase, the job of the systematic theologian is to try to pick up the pieces and salvage the god hypothesis after secular Biblical Scholars come in with their facts, potsherds, and scientific method, and ruin your little theological house of cards?

TO which he responded (and for this I love him):

Yeah. Pretty much.

If the historical Jesus never was, or was nothing like the Jesus of later Christianity, then the whole thing is founded on a lie. But Christianity is about far more than the Jesus fellow: it's a culture, it's a history, it's a way of life, it's a linguistic idiom, it's a way of contextualizing one's experience of living in the world. Many Christians can't just abandon it - so what can they do? The answer of Systematic Theology has been to try to save it with endless layers of intellectual band-aids and the compromise of liberal theology. But this, as we know, has its own share of problems. Perhaps this too is a call for a (non-Theological) Humanist version of Christianity?

*Anthropologist Roy Rappaport wrote a fantastic paper once (whose title escapes me at present) whose thesis was essentially thus: that at the heart of every religious belief system is a central, paradoxical, supernatural claim; that the power of this central image derived from the fact that it was illogical; therefore the fact that it was illogical meant that it could not be logically falsified; and thus all other statements of truth value in a society were made in reference to that central symbol (i.e. swearing to a god as a way of making an oath). The direct result of this thesis, for our purposes, is that people who question that central tenet (*cough cough*) threaten to destabilize the entire culture, because if the truth value of the central proposal is called into question, then all derivative claims can no longer be trusted. I don't do the theory justice, and I'm not sure I agree with everything he says, but he brings up some very interesting points that are always worth considering.

A Minor Irritation

2007-11-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

So: my dear, darling Divinity school just came out with its staff/student/faculty directory the other day, and (being narcissistic and wondering how my ID photo looked in grainy black and white) I of course decided to look up my name.

The photo was about as good as could be expected (read: not), so no surprises there. But I was incredibly irritated by the fact that under the religious tradition category they had listed me as "No Denominational Affiliation."

Now, I remember very, very clearly designating "Other: Atheist" (Atheist was never an actual choice) on every form I ever filled out for HDS. Now, as always, I don't want to be one of those angry, loud atheists...but believing as I do that we ought to have the right to be open and unashamed of our non-theistic identity, then I have to be willing to own the label and any consequences it may entail. Which is why it bothers me so much that the administrators seem to have decided that I didn't really mean to be open about my beliefs and have them listed along with my contact information. As though they felt they had to be ashamed of my atheism on my behalf.

Moreover, many many of my classmates opted not to have their denominations published - so not only is my information incorrect (well...misleading), but it seems to be an emphatic statement of fabulous agnosticism or fear of commitment (so non-committal that I'm even apparently afraid to be a Unitarian!).

I had hoped that perhaps there might be other atheists hiding in the woodworks here, who might be surprised and pleased to see a fellow free-thinker in their ranks. Maybe we could get together and have those interesting talks about religion that I had always hoped I'd have in grad school, but which have been entirely lacking for the last two months. But alas - such is not to be.

Still, I don't want to be a dick about it, so I'm not going to try to bring it to administrative attention. But I felt I needed to share that little bit of frustration with you all, if only for my own peace of mind.

Dinesh D'Lusional

2007-11-08T13:11:00.001-05:00

I think it may have been a mistake to subscribe to Dinesh D'Souza's blog (it's in the "christofascists" folder in my Google Reader). This can't be good for my ~~heart~~ blood pressure.

The blog is basically one big advertisement/masturbation session over his new book, What's So Great About Christianity. (Don't be misled by the title. From the looks of it, the book is much less about why Christianity is supposedly good and much more about why atheism is supposedly bad.) I was going to give D'Souza the benefit of the doubt and go buy a copy of his book (mostly so I could make angry notes in the margins), but there's no way I'm shelling out thirty dollars for that shitbrick. There's probably nothing in there I haven't heard before anyway... just the same tired old apologetics and smears of atheism, cobbled together by someone I hate who, to my embarrassment, happens to share my alma mater.

But that's okay, because I don't need to give any money to the Hindenburg (Blake, that one made my day!) to give his writing a thrashing... there's plenty of fodder on his blog, much of it excerpted from the book.

And sometimes, it's just too easy. Here's a quote from a recent post:

Yes, I know that some of today's leading atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have advanced degrees. By itself this proves nothing, since we all know people who are educated beyond their intelligence.

I'm pretty sure that has applied to D'Souza since his freshman fall at Dartmouth.

I seems to be a favorite theme with D'Lusional that atheists--especially contemporary atheists--are all stupid, which means poor li'l Dinesh doesn't have a worthy opponent. He has another post up today to that extent, wherein he writes:

He bought into the atheist canard that somehow theism is inconsistent with reason and science. Of course Boyle and Keppler [sic] and Copernicus and Newton didn't think so, but somehow biology major Sam Harris and literary essayist Christopher Hitchens think they know something that these great scientists didn't.

Here's the thing, Dinesh: Hitchens and Harris DO know something those scientists didn't. They know a hell of a lot more than those scientists did. So do I. And so, perhaps, do you.

The most modern of those four, Sir Isaac Newton, died in 1727. That means the four scientists D'Souza lists knew about neither general relativity nor quantum mechanics. They didn't know about atomic theory, and they didn't have the periodic table of elements. They didn't know about the expansion of the universe, cosmic microwave background radiation, cosmological redshift, the Big Bang. They didn't know about Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism. Newton and maybe Boyle might have known about Hooke's and von Leeuwenhoek's observations of cells, but they knew nothing of cell theory as credited to Schwann, Schleiden, and Virchow. They didn't know about the role of DNA in the cell, much less its structure. They didn't know about evolution. They didn't know anything about the science of psychology. They didn't know jack.

Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton are recognized as having been great minds NOT because they were prophets with magical Knowledge of All. We remember them because they were great puzzlers who drew strong conclusions from what evidence they had. Nowadays, we have a vastly expanded reservoir of data from which to draw new conclusions. I'm not going to say Newton would be an atheist if he were alive today, because some people prefer to blind themselves to certain evidences (especially when it comes to religion) and for all I know Newton might have done the same. Newton was kind of a dick. But the data available does not support the truth of Christianity as a conclusion.

So fuck you, Dinesh.

Here now, to help me blow off a little more steam, are Tony Montana and friends:

Worst. Mad Lib. Ever.

2007-11-06T16:23:00.001-05:00

I just stumbled across an ad for the Personal Promise Bible, a sort of vanity publication where you give them your name and they print a bible that makes specific references to you. For example, if your name is Betty Lou:

Even when Betty Lou was dead in her trespasses, God made her alive together with Christ (by grace Betty Lou has been saved), and raised Betty Lou up with Him and made Betty Lou to sit with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:5-6)

Now imagine a whole bible like that. I'm not sure what's creepier, a personalized bible or the fact that there's apparently a demand out there for personalized bibles.

Not that I'd want to give these freaks any money, but I have to say, the opportunity for mischief is sacrilicious. I wonder if they screen for pranksters. Just imagine...

Toilet, believing in Him, shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved Toilet, that He gave His one and only Son, that Toilet, believing in Him, should not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:15-16)

I'd get that sucker leather-bound.

Jewbuntu

2007-11-05T23:36:00.001-05:00

So I spent most of last night and today trying to install the latest "fglrx" driver in Ubuntu so my graphics card would have some improved functionality, but to no avail. I'm stuck with the out-of-date one for now. I guess I'll just have to be patient until issues are resolved... at least there's always Windows to fall back on.

It looks like Tim Mills (a.k.a. the Friendly Humanist) has been busy with Ubuntu as well. He's apparently been exploring some of the various Ubuntu distributions and spinoffs. In particular, he's found two custom distribution packages: Ubuntu CE (Christian Edition) and Ubuntu ME (Muslim Edition).

I'm sorry, but can I just say, the Ubuntu CE logo is lame:

The standard Ubuntu logo with a Jesus fish in the middle? They couldn't be more creative than that?

The Muslims at least put in a little more effort:

But what really strikes me about all this is, there doesn't seem to be any custom alternative for the third of the big three Abrahamic religions. Where's the operating system for Jews?!

I'm not much of a Linux programmer (or a Jew), or else I'd get cracking on a chosen OS for His chosen people myself. I can, however, at least contribute a logo design:

Doesn't that just make you want to convert? From Windows, that is. ;-)

SCIENCE AGAIN!

2007-11-03T15:55:00.001-04:00

I SAID SCIENCE AGAIN!

I've just accepted a position as research assistant with the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT. I'm going to be a professional scientist!

The lab in which I'll be working is dedicated to creating deletion libraries for a few different bacteria, including Mycobacterium (the pathogen responsible for tuberculosis) and Pseudomonas (an opportunistic pathogen--meaning it tends only to cause problems if you're already sick--that's especially fond of causing respiratory infections in people with cystic fibrosis). Creating a deletion library means deleting a single gene from the bacterial chromosome, and repeating the process for every gene in the genome. So in the end you have thousands of bacterial colonies, each with a different single gene deleted.

What's really great about this particular project is that we'll be making our deletion library freely available to other researchers. So if a researcher somewhere is interested in a specific gene and wants to know what happens when it's deleted, they don't need to go through creating the deletion themselves, they can just look up the gene in our library and request a sample.

How excited am I to be making that kind of contribution to the scientific community?

Pretty damn excited.

But how, you may be wondering, does one delete a gene from a chromosome? The trick is homologous recombination. If two strands of DNA have a region that matches the other in sequence, that region is said to be homologous between the two. In a cell, two homologous DNA regions can line up, break at the same place, switch pieces, and fuse back together; this is called homologous recombination, or "crossing-over."

Let's say the section of chromosome in which we're interested looks like this:

. . . ====[ Upstream DNA ][ GENE ][ Downstream DNA ]==== . . .

We can build a plasmid (little circle of DNA, kind of like a mini-chromosome for bacteria) that has a section looking like this:

. . . ====[ Upstream DNA ][ Downstream DNA ]==== . . .

(For ease of visualization later, DNA from the chromosome is red and DNA from the plasmid is green.) We can stick that plasmid in the bacteria, and hope for homologous recombination between the chromosome and the plasmid. Recombination only occurs in a few of the cells, though, so we need a means of selecting for those cells that do cross-over.

We need two different recombination events to occur, one on either side of the gene. So we'll stick two marker genes on our plasmid: a strength (like resistance to ampicillin, an antibiotic) and a weakness (like a gene that makes sucrose toxic). First we grow the bacteria on plates containing ampicillin; only those cells that have the plasmid (meaning they've had one cross-over event) will survive. Then we take those survivors and grow them on plates containing sucrose; now only those cells that got rid of the plasmid (meaning they had a second cross-over event) will survive.

So after two rounds of selection, the bacterial chromosomes hopefully look something like this:

. . . ====[ Upstream DNA ][ Downstream DNA ]==== . . .

However, that assumes that one recombination event occurred in the upstream region and one occurred in the downstream region. If both events occurred in the same region, then the chromosome could look like:

. . . ====[ Upstream DNA ][ GENE ][ Downstream DNA ]==== . . .

or

. . . ====[ Upstream DNA ][ GENE ][ Downstream DNA ]==== . . .

So after all that selection, about 50% of our bacteria colonies still have the gene! We therefore need to add one more step: we pick a bunch of bacteria colonies and sequence that part of the chromosome to see if the gene was deleted successfully. The colonies that pass sequencing get added to our deletion library!

So that's how you delete a single gene from a bacterial chromosome. Part of my job will be figuring out how to optimize that process to handle tens or hundreds of genes at once. That means I get to use robots!

This is going to be awesome.

(Oh, and in case you were curious, the opening to this post comes from this Homestar Runner cartoon.)

I Have a Friend in Vincent

2007-11-01T01:00:00.001-04:00

Sara and I have been watching through Season One of "The Muppet Show" on DVD, and tonight the episode that just happened to come up was the one guest-starring Vincent Price. How incredibly appropriate for Hallowe'en! And even if it weren't Hallowe'en, who doesn't love Vincent Price?

But all is not well, for apparently the Season One release cuts out an entire scene from this episode. Now, that's bad enough in of itself. But dear friends, do you know what scene was omitted? Why, none other than Vincent's big closing number.

The bastards. THE FUCKING BASTARDS! ZOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!

You have no idea how upset that makes me. I mean, what decent person leaves a man's big musical number on the cutting room floor? So much for the "complete" first season. Just one more reason to loathe Disney executives.

Thankfully, the episode is included in its entirety in the "Best of the Muppet Show" DVD collection, which I also own. And of course, there's always the magic of the Internet. So now let's take a moment to enjoy Vincent's big finish. Together. As a family.

Mermaids, Werewolves, Vampires, and Catholic Saints

2007-10-31T02:23:00.001-04:00

Of those four, the mediaeval Russians thought one group were heroes and the other three were unholy abominations. Any guesses? Hint: the mediaeval Russians were Eastern Orthodox, not Catholic.

In honour of Hallowe'en, let's take a look at a few modern mythological monsters and how their counterparts were viewed by the mediaeval Russians. Because you know, once you get past the threat some of them pose to the survival and progress of humanity, religious beliefs can actually be really cool. I mean, people believe some crazy stuff for crazy reasons.

(Today's post draws from what I learned in "Russian 13: Vampires, Witches, & Firebirds," Dartmouth College, Fall 2006.)

Mermaids were hyper-erotic members of the undead

The Russian word for "mermaid" is rusalka (plural rusalki). Today, "rusalki" refers to the same sweet little fish-tailed good-natured water nymphs of the Hans Andersen variety that most of us think of when we think of mermaids. But such was not always the case. "Real" rusalki were members of the undead. One became a rusalka by dying a "bad death"--that is, one for which no death ritual could be performed, either because there was no body over which to perform the ritual (for example, victims of drowning) or protocols dictate that the rituals may not be granted to the deceased (for example, if the deceased was a suicide or a heretic).

Rusalki were almost exclusively female, lived in bodies of water (particularly lakes and rivers) but could wander out of water into the forest, generally looked like ordinary human beings (ie, no fish limbs, sorry Ariel), and usually wore nothing or next-to-nothing. They ran the gamut from gorgeous to hideous, but one universal theme prevailed in most accounts: rusalki had huge breasts. Pendulous breasts. We're talking boom-boom-what-knockers-thank-you-doctor breasts.

Although not particularly bad-natured, rusalki were highly dangerous due to their apparent naivete. Death by rusalka typically happened in one of two ways, both highly erotic. The first way was simply for a rusalka to lure a man into the water with promises of sexy sex, where he would drown (to the rusalka's disappointment... she liked sexy sex as much as her victim did). The second way was much more interesting; the rusalka (and sometimes a friend or two) would wander into the woods, find a sleeping man, and tickle him. Often with their breasts. Now, that sounds like a good time, but the rusalki just didn't know when to quit. They would tickle their victims to death. They get an "A" for effort, but seriously... Worst. Foreplay. Ever.

So to avoid death-by-mermaid, stay away from water, be chaste, and don't engage in any tickle fights with buxom undead.

Werewolves were the good guys

We typically think of werewolves as being cursed... but in mediaeval Russian folklore, lycanthropism was the mark of a hero. Such heroes could usually transform into animals at will; wolves were most popular, but bears ran a close second. Connections have been drawn between werewolves and both the ancient cthonic god Volos and the leshii ("forest master"). Among the more notable suspected werewolves of Russian folklore were King Vseslav and epic hero Volkh Vseslavevich. (More on all those guys in a later post.)

So there's no need to worry about wolfsbane or silver bullets or full moons or all that hooey. Werewolves were the good guys.

Vampires had OCD (and I would have been one!)

Vampires in Russian folklore were a lot like the vampires we think of now: members of the undead that rise at night and steal the blood/life essence from the living. Like the rusalki, vampires were the result of a "bad death." There was especially a connection between heretics and vampires. It is thought that this was largely a response to church persecution of heretics. The peasantry invented horrifying vampire myths to justify the church's otherwise irrational fear and hatred of heretics. So if I were to go back to mediaeval Russia, I would be hunted by the church and then pegged as a vampire. Yay!

The best sure-fire way to get rid of a vampire was to cut off the head and incinerate the body. But for corpses suspected of being vampires, other tricks would work as well; your prime directive was to keep the vampire from getting out of its grave. A stake through the heart won't destroy a vampire like you might think, but a stake through the heart and into the ground will keep him pinned in place, kinda like a macabre butterfly collection. If you don't have a long stake handy, breaking the kneecaps or cutting the leg tendons would work in a pinch. But my favorite method for keeping a vampire in bed is to pour a pile of grain, sand, or salt on the grave. The idea was, when the vampire woke up, he would see the pile of sand or whatever and would be compelled to count every single grain. Because apparently, Russian vampires all had OCD. By the time he was done counting, then, the sun would be rising and he would have to go right back into his grave. (I bet you never realized how true to life Sesame Street's Count von Count was!)

CATHOLIC SAINTS! SPOOKY SPOOKY!

So here's the thing about the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. They differ on how they treat undecayed flesh. For Catholics, if a body doesn't decay, that's an indication that the body is blessed by God and the deceased was probably a saint. For Eastern Orthodox, a corpse that doesn't decay goes against the natural order and must therefore be an unholy abomination (lack of decay is one warning sign that a corpse is actually a vampire).

So stay away from Catholic churches this All Hallow's Eve. But of course, you should stay away from Catholic churches all the time. ;-)

Dresden Codak Lives!

2007-10-27T14:52:00.001-04:00

Genius rationalist cartoonist Aaron "Dresden Codak" Diaz is finally going full-time with his comic. This makes me so very happy.

Don't know Dresden Codak? For shame! Here are two of my favorites to get you started: Dungeons & Discourse and Epilogue.

(Of course, now that he's quit his day job, it's up to us to keep him alive. I think I have to add the "Historical Preenactment Society" t-shirt to my Christmas list.)

Feelin' Gutsy

2007-10-25T14:54:00.001-04:00

Sorry about that unexpected little hiatus. Out of curiosity, I've finally decided to give Linux a shot (Greg Laden would be pleased). So after some practice on Sara's old laptop, some experimentation on mine, a package of recovery CDs from Lenovo, and a few too many late nights, I've finally got my laptop set up as a dual boot of Windows Vista and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), and I am most excited.

I've still got some bugs to work out in Ubuntu, but everything's stable enough on both operating systems now that I can spend a few minutes at my computer doing something other than managing an update or installation, or waiting for the machine to restart, or googling a solution for my wireless driver, or some such nonsense. So let the blogging recommence!

(PS - I don't know Ben's excuse for not writing lately. I mean, all he has to worry about these days is grad school! :-P)

Cephalopod Awareness Day!

2007-10-08T23:20:00.001-04:00

Sara and I are celebrating our 3-year anniversary today. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention the other significance to October 8th... it's International Cephalopod Awareness Day!

We had been planning to go to the New England Aquarium today, but the work week left us too tired and with aching feet, so our field trip is postponed. However, we did have fried squid as an appetizer at dinner (they say that ancient warriors would eat their enemies' hearts in order to absorb their courage), and Sara got me the perfect anniversary present: a copy of Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss.

Among other things, I'm excited to use that book as a drawing reference. Actually, for the past few weeks I've been planning a cephalopod-centric project that should hopefully be seeing some light in the near future. In the meantime, here's a quick look at how I like to draw an octopus.

The most important thing to understand (from this cartoonist's perspective) is construction, an understanding of how all the different parts fit together. Once you understand the construction of your subject, you can draw it in any pose at any angle you want, and then flesh it out from there. My biggest breakthrough in cartooning octopi was realizing that they were constructed of three basic parts.

First, let's look at a diagram of octopus anatomy, courtesy of the Internet:

I really like this diagram, but it's a little more complicated than we need it to be. Let's simplify things a bit:

There, that's better. There are three main parts of the octopus--the mantle, the head, and the arms. The mantle contains most of the organs and makes up the bulk of the octopus. The head houses the eyes and brain. The arms radiate out from the bottom of the head, with the mouth at the center. We can use these three parts to lay out a quick sketch of a pose:

Note that we can change the relative sizes and positions of the parts to give our octopus a different character. Why, we can even make a whole 'nother kind of cephalopod... say, a squid:

It's all the same, mantle connected to head connected to arms. Once we have our basic layout, we can use that to sketch and clean up an outline, adding whatever details we want:

I know that's just a really quick rundown, but hopefully you found it at least slightly interesting and/or useful. Happy Cephalopod Awareness Day!

Skeptics in the Pub

2007-10-07T11:40:00.001-04:00

The Internet came to life a little bit last Thursday night, as Rebecca of Skepchick hosted a small gathering at John Harvard's for drinks and conversation. It's always great to meet new people, especially people as cool as these.

It looks like Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, is going to be a monthly event now, so if you're in the area and didn't make it to this session, keep a weather eye open for the next one.

Rebecca has a couple pictures of the gathering here.

The Rest of the Asshats

2007-10-04T01:43:00.001-04:00

Blah. Work threw off my bloggin' groove. Here are the rest of the asshats from last Thursday, plus a couple extra that have cropped up in the meantime.

First, Jena 6 prosecutor DA Reed Walters, who during a press conference said that the only reason the peaceful protests of the previous week didn't turn violent was because of the "direct intervention of Jesus." The demonization of the out-group is sickening. It's an age-old tactic... If your enemy does something good, take the credit; if you do something bad, blame it on your enemy.

Next, Senator Sam Brownback, who (according to *shudder* One News Now) has introduced legislation that would force women considering abortion to get an ultrasound. Brownback is trying to sell it as a way of providing information to the woman so she can make an informed decision... but there's no information value to this. We aren't talking about ultrasound to determine fetus health, or any medical condition. Furthermore, the bill doesn't require that the woman look at the ultrasound--only that one be taken. And since there's nothing stopping women now from getting ultrasounds taken if they so choose, that means there's no practical difference in "information available" to the woman. It's purely about scare tactics, a legal way of accumulating blackmail photos. "If you get that abortion, we'll show yer fam'ly the pitchure and tell 'em you killed a baaaay-bee!"

Next in line: John McCain says America is a Christian nation and doesn't want a president who believes in "the Islam." So, so wrong. I'll say this, though: a lot of the people ragging on McCain are invoking the "no religious test" clause in the Constitution. It's a great clause and all, but it's not really relevant. McCain isn't saying a non-Christian couldn't theoretically be allowed to take office; he's just of the opinion that such a candidate wouldn't be good for the job. His position of only voting for Christians is his perogative; it isn't un-Constitutional, it's just fucked up. I can't believe I almost liked McCain once upon a time... in the past year or two, he has done nothing but pander to the fundie nutjobs of the Religious Right.

Our final asshats (for now), WaPo's On Faith series asked about Christopher Hitchens last week:
Best-selling atheist Christopher Hitchens wrote: 'Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.' Why is he right or wrong?
The question itelf was fairly tame. But it opened the floodgates for accusations of "fundamentalist atheism" (or "secular fundamentalism," or other variations). The question du jour for On Faith has since changed (to discuss John McCain, in fact), but you can see an example of the former here. Apparently it bears repeating: passion is not the same thing as fundamentalism or militancy. Just... no.

*deep breath*

All done for now. That's quite enough of that.

Thursday's Asshats on Friday: Tim Russert

2007-09-28T16:00:00.001-04:00

Normally I'm proud when my alma mater gets mention in the news, as anyone should be. But right now, I'm just embarrassed that this happened at Dartmouth (though not terribly surprised). At the most recent Democratic presidential debate, moderator Tim Russert asked the candidates to name their favorite Bible verse. (Watch it at Crooks and Liars)

The question itself is bad enough--totally irrelevant, serving only to reinforce Christian dominionism. (Good thing for Russert there weren't any Hindus on the stage.) But even worse was that not a single candidate took Russert to task for asking it.

I didn't see my choice for the next president of the United States on that stage, anyway.

Thursday's Asshats on Friday: Archbishop Chimoio

2007-09-28T15:46:00.001-04:00

Last night, I mentioned that I heard some news stories yesterday and just didn't want to deal with them. Well now I've had a fair night's sleep (despite more splitting headaches), and Sara and I got to lay some smackdown in Age of Empires II (the Huns were no match for my Aztec priests). So I'm ready to tackle some asshattery.

First on the agenda, Archbishop Chimoio of Mozambique is telling deadly lies about AIDS and condoms. Apparently it isn't enough anymore to lie and say condoms don't help prevent AIDS; now they're going so far as to say some European condoms cause AIDS.

This story has already made the rounds online. I'd just like to add that, if allegations like "I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus [HIV] on purpose" had any minutest shred of truth to them, then a sane, moral person would be trying to put an end to such a practice instead of leveraging it as a propaganda tactic. But the Catholic leadership aren't sane, moral people.

Yes, abstaining from sex is an effective way to avoid getting AIDS. But in any situation, particularly fighting a pandemic, your strategies need to be practical as well as effective. Condoms are practical and effective, abstinence is not.

I also found this little pair of statistics interesting:

The BBC's Jose Tembe in the capital, Maputo, says it is estimated that 16.2% of Mozambique's 19m inhabitants are HIV positive.
. . .
Some 17.5% of Mozambicans are Catholic.

I wonder if there's a significant overlap...