by Grania
It’s time to take a look at some of the weirder searches that brought people to this website. As always, we can expect some of humanity’s baser proclivities to shine. In fact, it seems to have taken a distinctly scatological turn this month.
- theories that disprove evolution – none, zip, nada. There are hypotheses that could disprove evolution if there was any evidence for them, but so far they have turned up empty.
- penis – in endless and varied iterations, as always, including jerry seinfeld penis size. That’s rather personal and probably none of your business. Here, go read some science.
- prager university full of shit – I hope not, sounds like a serious plumbing issue to me.
- man has sex with parrot – not likely, but you can’t put anything past humans. Poor parrot. Unless you mean parrot has sex with man, which has happened. It was also painful, don’t try this at home kids.
- screaming tennis players,why do they let maria sharapova scream in her tennis match? – ah, it was Wimbledon season again, wasn’t it? Yes, they are damned annoying. Just imagine the squawks and grunts and howls to be the result of really bad hemorrhoids and you will find the whole experience a lot more entertaining.
- is the supernatural scientifically possible? No, because then it would be natural, not supernatural by definition.
- is she male produce naturally? – I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for but you might try this link.
- my boyfriend says he cums in my mouth but i don’t taste or feel anything. is this possible? – Seriously TMI. It’s not impossible but he should probably see a GP about it.
Okay, and now I am going to go and put my brain into bleach for a bit. Never change, humanity.
Oh, laawdy.
Person who cannot taste or feel cum: not possible. Even if you cannot taste it (typically salty, I think), the memory of the texture is surely indelible: medium high surface tension and rather hydroscopic.
There are genuine medical issues resulting in minimal amounts of ejaculate though. Her story might be possible if that is the case.
~Grania
My 1st thoughts were: check the prostate. Turn around, bend over a little, and think about manly sports.
We had a lady arrive in clinic with precisely the opposite problem (copious amount, bad color/odor). She apparently asked the boyfriend about it (he had just returned from a tour of duty in SE Asia). He swore up and down that he hadn’t had sex for SO long, that his sperm went bad. Lucky for the both of them that she doubted that story, as a prolonged PPNG gonorrhea infection is nothing to… uh… sneeze at.
It still didn’t top the dude who dropped by for an HIV test decades ago… He was concerned about his penchant for ingesting his masturbatory productions. His biggest concern was whether he was at risk for giving himself HIV in doing so. Yes, humans can be really strange animals. I’ve stopped being surprised long, long ago.
When you use little brains you have for looking for the information in the proper places than bathroom stalls and your equally ignorant friends no wonder this persona was so ignorant about it. “Sperm going bad?” What is this a store shelf?” Jeeze, I’m use to finding out but then I am one of those misnamed “know-ti-alls” full of “unneeded information” like that.
Sex Ed. has been so whittled down or destroyed replaced with “just don’t do it or else you will die” kind of idiocies religious based and they are attacked constantly if they do have actual useful explicit sexual education it is appalling to me as we shrivel in education and expand in militarism elements of imperial religion.
There is a condition, I’m told, where ejaculate gets shot up the urethra towards the kidneys, rather than down the plumbing towards mucosa and intermittent daylight. Not a terribly severe condition in itself, though obviously detrimental to fertility.
Don’t some of the “tantric” schools of Indian bullshit actually train people in how to do this by some sort of massage?
Could be the boyfriend is just faking it. “Was it good for you, dear?” “Ahh, yes?”
If he’d been on the bash on Internet pornsites a bit too frequently recently…
cr
The video of the parrot and the photographer is great!
IIRC, it’s a biology (approx) professor, not just a photographer.
This one always bugs me, because it mistakes or confuses a group label for a phenomenon. Yes, things like telepathy, telekinesis, OBEs, faith healing, human resurrection, ghosts, voodoo curses, etc… are possible. But they have been debunked and our (not so) provisional conclusion is that they don’t occur; that such claims are false. They are provisionally false regardless of whether some individual chooses to label them ‘supernatural’ or ‘natural,’ because those words are just category labels, nothing more.
This is one area where the skeptics and secularists IMO often do a poor job of responding to theology apologists and woomeisters. Some ghost believer or faith healing apologist brings up the natural/supernatural question, and we fall for it. We follow them down that definitional rabbit hole, arguing the pros and cons of science labeling some phenomenon ‘natural’ when we confirm its existence. Avoid that; its a waste of time and exactly what your opponent wants you to focus on. What you should do when someone wants to argue the natural/supernatural label is to say: “it doesn’t matter what you label it, all the empirical evidence and theory points to there being no such thing as ghosts.”
It kinda reminds me of the ‘other ways of knowing’ argument. The theists want to keep that debate a high level, discussing whether such ways are theoretically possible. Don’t let them. Demand they specify a way of knowing, and then you can discuss whether that way is credible or not. The same is true here; forget having some high-level debate over whether supernatural phenomenon are possible in theory. Ask them to specify what phenomenon they wish to discuss, and I practically guarantee that science will have something informative to say about the existence or non-existence of that phenomenon.
Very good analysis! The “suoernatural” label is a gods-of-the-gaps apologetic attempt.
Whenever I see apologetics, I draw my pen.
“I draw my pen”
Escher shows exactly how that should be done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_Hands#/media/File:DrawingHands.jpg
== Yes, things like telepathy, telekinesis, OBEs, faith healing, human resurrection, ghosts, voodoo curses, etc… are possible ==
Logically possible, yes, but most of those listed violate known laws of physics. The only clear exception is telepathy, which I suspect violates laws that we don’t know about yet.
Physicist Sean Carroll would probably argue that telepathy violates known laws of physics, because to work it would require additional new particles within the detectable mass/energy range of our instruments that we don’t detect. IIRC his opinion is that any future revision to physics will have little to no impact on our understanding of human-scale phenomena. This is not to say that biology and chemistry are complete, just that there will be no telepathy waves or particles discovered in the future because they would have to operate within energy regimes that are already very well explored.
==would probably argue that telepathy violates known laws of physics, because to work it would require additional new particles ==
Really? That surprises me. I would have assumed that if telepathy worked, it would do so by detecting the electromagnetic radiation associated with certain thoughts, much like a radio wave and receiver. Seems like we’re already doing this on a crude level in the laboratory.
Neither EEG nor fMRI works by detecting EM radiation emitted by the brain. EEG works by conduction, with electrodes taped directly to the skin. fMRI works by detecting the absorption and re-emission of EM radiation injected into the brain.
This article describes an experimental instrument at MIT for detecting natural EM emissions from the brain. The signal is so weak (a billion times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field) it requires the sender to sit in a shielded room wearing a helmet covered with superconducting detectors.
So it seems very unlikely that natural EM emissions from the brain could serve as a basis for even short-range telepathy. Long-range EM telepathy between people miles (or continents) apart is clearly out of the question.
Ok, thanks for that. Even if the EM emssions had been stronger, I would have argued that the infrastructure needed to reconstruct the actual thought that generated them was formidable.
First we test it to see if it works beyond chance. If it does then we go on from there.
The particle that carries electromagnetic force is the photon. We can obviously detect those. 🙂
Telepathy (even with unknown fields or particles as the mediators) would violate energy conservation, it seems: the energy balance of living things is known.
Do you mean that sending thoughts requires a mysterious source of energy? I was assuming a model whereby the receiving brain is just picking up existing EMR from the sending brain.
You’d need a mysterious source, since there’s no receptors for any known source in any relevant location.
I was wondering what the Order of the British Empire had to do with the supernatural, then I realised what you meant by OBEs.
Well, I think there are two arguments to be had here. I think you’re right that when arguing with proponents of woo, the most effective tactic will be to ask them to get specific. After the make a specific, detailed claim, there will probably be many lines of attack that suddenly open up.
However, I don’t think the more philosophical, semantic argument is not worthwhile. Whether they’d admit it or not, I think woomeisters use “supernatural” as a synonym for “impossible”. If any of the alleged supernatural phenomena they flog were demonstrated to be a real part of our universe, I don’t think it would take too long, perhaps after an initial frisson of “I told you so”, for the given phenomenon to become just a ho-hum part of quotidian existence. Like cell phones. A person from 1000 would regard cell phones as supernatural, but woomeisters today do not. I think the subsumption of supernatural into natural is the way things really go.
In some cases you’re right but in others you’re wrong. Telekinetically moving micrograms with your mind would probably be a good example of something that (if it were a real phenomenon) becomes ho-hum. I can imagine object reading (if it worked – it doesn’t) taking its place next to DNA and fingerprint analysis in the forensic science toolbox, and everyone considering it a ‘natural phenomenon’ or ‘scientific’ technique if it ever became reproducible and testable. But in contrast, if prayer to a specific God worked, that would not be ho-hum. It would be taken as evidence for the theological correctness of that faith (by both believers and non-believers) and overturn our entire scientific understanding of how the universe works. Do you think that if sincere prayers to Jesus (and only Jesus) could regrow legs in a reproducible, confirmable fashion, that Christians would let anyone call this a “natural” phenomenon merely because it was reproducible and confirmable? No. Do you think in such a case scientists would say “hey, we’ve got a perfectly natural phenomenon here, there is nothing here we should call divine or beyond natural?” Probably not. They would acknowledge that there seems to be a divine, non-natural component to this phenomena.
Of course, no such cases exist. All miracle claims have failed to be reproducible. And so IMO the position “Yes, but if they succeeded, science would just call them natural and try and abscond with them anyway” is just sour grapes and apologetics.
If prayer to Jesus worked reproducibly and confirmably, then it would be subject to further analysis to tease out the precise “active ingredient” responsible for the therapeutic effect. We’d be able, by trial and error, to whittle the prayer down to the minimum effective phrasing (or to a small set of such phrases).
Successfully doing so, it seems to me, would demonstrate that “Jesus” is not a divine person who loves us, but a purely mechanical, mindless process that can be invoked at will with the correct incantation and is therefore subject to technological manipulation.
It sounds like you’re saying there is no possible evidence that you would accept as supporting theology, because literally any miracle could in principle be a ‘purely mechanical, mindless’ process. Is that your position?
It isn’t mine. Sure, that’s a possibility. But if we had data that matched a theological ‘hypothesis’ and stood up to credible confirmation, etc…, I think the scientific thing to do is to tentatively conclude that the hypothesis best supported at that time, by the evidence, is the theological one that made the prediction(s).
We may be arguing methodological naturalism (me) vs. philosophical naturalism (you) here.
I think the best argument against theories of divine agency and ‘supernatural’ forces is that those theories don’t in fact work. They aren’t predictive and/or they are blatantly wrong in their predictions. They are useless and unfruitful. They are failed hypotheses. The argument that there could, in principle, be some mechanical explanation for any possible divine miracle and therefore if we were faced with a predictive, fruitful, and successful theological hypothesis we should still reject it is, IMO, a much weaker argument.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to see an example of a “predictive, fruitful, and successful theological hypothesis” formulated coherently enough to be rigorously testable.
Notice that your hypothesis about “sincere prayers to Jesus” is not explicitly theological, since it makes no claims about the existence of God. It merely asserts that particular phrases, uttered in a particular brain state, will have the predicted therapeutic effect. The prediction itself is not an explanation of the effect, but the more reliable and repeatable the prediction, the more strongly it suggests a bottom-up explanation in terms of mindless particles and forces, rather than a top-down explanation in terms of personalities and purposes.
Think of it as a kind of Turing test: if Jesus wants to convince us he’s a real person and not an automaton, performing miracles reliably on demand is the wrong way to go about it.
So far no test of prayer to cure people have worked. Not a one. Yet it is so common place that people “give their prayers” to others when others are distressed or ill, etc. It can be looked upon as caring for someone else at least in thought.
==a purely mechanical, mindless process that can be invoked at will with the correct incantation and is therefore subject to technological manipulation.==
Which is the exact way that an infant views its parents. 😉
Perhaps the term “ho-hum” wasn’t a perfect fit, as I suppose there are things like glacial calving or the auroras that are pretty spectacular but also acknowledged to be completely natural.
I can imagine prayer (and xianity in general) becoming like that if it was ever demonstrated to be real: maybe pretty damn amazing, but still an accepted part of “quotidian existence”, as I wrote earlier.
If a deity were ever demonstrated, how could we not admit it into the realm of the natural, that is, the realm of the existent?
I see a battle between the occult or unknown, and the illumination of science upon it. The problem is it wipes away the aspect of some deity(ies) aren’t there. Unless they see every aspect of Nature as a representation of said entities works.
I think Jerry with disagree with Grania on this one. He spends considerable space in Faith vs. Fact discussing how science can and does investigate claims of the supernatural, and that’s how we know such claims are false. Not “by definition”, but because the evidence isn’t there.
Yes we have historically relentlessly scientifically tested supernatural claims.
Supernaturalists claim science dismisses such claims as part of some scientistic dogma, but the fact is we no longer take such claims seriously for the same reason we no longer take claims that the world is flat seriously. Been there done that.
For the record: There is a nice comment about Jerry Coyne’s _Faith vs. Fact_ in the current issue of “Scientific American” (August, 2015) p.83 Michael Shermer’s commentary.
Regards,
John
“Just imagine the squawks and grunts and howls to be the result of really bad hemorrhoids and you will find the whole experience a lot more entertaining.”
=D Much more amusing than imagining it is part of their money making shtick!
[I had to look up hemorrhoids and … yeesh! WTF, evolution?!]
It is one of the prices we pay for being deuterostomes with a closed circulatory system and body cavities.
Cheeses phuquing creyst.
If I remember I got here looking for ‘”Bart Ehrman” “Jesus”‘.
I think I got here via a mention of Jerry on Jason Rosenhouse’s blog.
And I got to Jason’s blog because Jerry highlighted it a few times.
Balance in the universe is maintained!
And I got here from a link in Dans Data, Dan being an Aussie geek who’s into video games, debunking woo, blowing stuff up and all manner of techy stuff. Also an atheist, as it happens.
s she male produce naturally?
AFAIK, there is no theoretical problem with an individual with both male and female sex organs self impregnating. However, there would appear to be certain mechanical problems associated with it that would make such natural impregnation impossible. However, it could be possible via IVF, although there would a problem with a natural birth (would probably require a Caesarian section). AFAIK, there is no evidence that this has ever happened.
Does boyfriend also promise the check is NOT in the mail?
Somebody explain to this fool that “Polly wanna cracker” ≠ Polly consents to sex with a redneck.
Watch the video though. Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine were filming a documentary about the kakapo; and well, to be honest, the kakapo is an optimistic moron,
~Grania
Dogs humping trouser legs…
cr
I had another strange one that found my site the other day: “How do I write about my opposition to FGM as a person of privilege.”
SMH.