RIP Isabella

June 25, 2017 • 6:16 pm
Reader Eric has just lost his beloved cat Isabella, and requested that I honor her memory by posting her story and photo on this site. I am glad to oblige:
I’m a long-time reader (and occasional poster) of WEIT.  I have some sad news and request to make. Today, my Ex and I had to put our longtime friend and companion to sleep, her cat Isabella. Izzy lived 17 1/2 years in five locations in three states, catching many mice despite being mostly an indoor cat.  She was a bit persnickety around any adults but me and my ex, but was loving and loyal to us and gentle and kind to the kids despite many pulled tails and other indignities. Attached is a (blurry, bad) picture of her.  If you would be so good as to post it, I would be greatly honored. I have had the pleasure of living with six different cats during my life. All had their weird and wonderful personalities, but I will always remember Izzy for her habit of “standing watch” over my kid starting when he was about 3 months old. She was constantly just a few feet away from wherever he was and, when he learned to walk, she would follow him two steps behind, just where he couldn’t see her, a mama cat with a human baby.  We will miss you, Iz!
I send my condolences, as I expect any reader would who has shared their life with a cat. Here’s Iz:
SAMSUNG

Bret Weinstein talks with Gad Saad

June 25, 2017 • 1:30 pm

This hourlong conversation between Gad Saad and Bret Weinstein, apostate professor of evolutionary biology at The Evergreen State College, is worth a listen. Weinstein shows himself to be thoughtful and articulate, and deals with many of questions that have arisen among this website’s readers. One in particular is whether the requested “absence” of whites from campus on the “Day of Absence” was voluntary (as Weinstein’s detractors maintain) or coerced, though not overtly. Weinstein gives the answer starting at 6:47. Weinstein also has a few choice words—critical ones—for the administration, students, and most of the faculty of his College, and argues that what happened at his school is a harbinger of things to come, and so we should pay attention to it.

And it looks as if he won’t be there in the future, though he’s not explicit about that. I hope some other school snaps up him and his wife Heather, also a whole-organism biologist.

This is just part I of the video, and I haven’t found part II.  Like many of you, my patience for long discussion videos is limited. This one is an exception, and I recommend it.

The anti-science views of third-wave feminists

June 25, 2017 • 12:30 pm

Because of its connections with postmodernism, third-wave feminism has sometimes shown a disturbing trend of doing down science. That, of course, is because postmodernism rejects objective truth, valuing feelings and “lived experience” over science, which it sees as not only un-objective, but as a tool and embodiment of the patriarchy. This attitude was, of course, mocked by Sokal in his famous Social Text hoax paper, and you can find plenty of examples in his books. One will stand for all: feminist philosopher of science Sondra Harding characterized Newton’s Principia Mathematica as a “rape manual”. I could give more, but why bother? You can find them on your own.

Of course not all third-wave feminists reject the objectivity of science, or the notion that there are real truths about the cosmos that can be found via science. But there are enough of them to disturb me, as I see this attitude as even worse than creationism. Creationists, after all, reject just one scientific theory—evolution—while accepting nearly all other findings of science. But those who claim that the scientific enterprise is useless at finding truth cast aspersions on all of science. I wonder if people like Ellen Granfield, who have that attitude, use cellphones, get immunizations, or take antibiotics.

Last November, Granfield wrote a piece at Everyday Feminism called “This history reveals that science isn’t nearly as objective as you think.” The “history” is simply the history of science, rewritten by Granfield and others of her ilk to cast aspersions on science because—horrors!—its conclusions sometimes change! That means, to them, that science is neither reliable nor objective. So, here are the three ways Granfield takes down science (quotes are indented, bold is her emphasis):

1.) Science isn’t objective. 

Modern, mainstream science finds itself deeply embedded in a supposedly objective, quantifiable worldview – one that is at best faulty, and at worst, is a form of scientism which denies new findings.

The Nobel Prize physicist Brian Josephson calls it “pathological disbelief” – a rebuffing of facts when the facts don’t fit the prescribed program of the science community writ large.

In a lecture given at a Nobel Laureates’ meeting in 2004, Josephson rallied against “science by consensus …anything goes among the physics community – cosmic wormholes, time travel, just so long as it keeps its distance from anything mystical or New Age-ish.”

He points to the theory of continental drift – proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912 – which was long maligned and ridiculed. It has, of course, long since been accepted, but more than twenty years after his death.

Josephson points to this story as a stark reminder that the course of human history is not governed by objective truth of any kind, especially in the history of science; the truth is always shifting.

I wonder if Josephson takes advantage of the findings of science. If he really believes what he says—and I doubt he meant it the way Granfield does—then he shouldn’t be going to doctors or using GPS devices. The canard that because some conclusions change, science is a futile endeavor, ignores the fact that some findings of science haven’t changed (last time I looked, benzene still had six carbon and six hydrogen atoms, and DNA remained a double helix), and that it’s the very nature of science that its conclusions are provisional rather than set in stone for all time.

2.) Evolution is bunk. Granfield, it seems, agrees with the creationists, and that’s not an exaggeration:

One of the most obvious examples of scientism today is the theory of evolution, which is still upheld as the dominant explanation of how life generates itself. The problem is that biologists still can’t answer the most basic of questions involved, including the origin of life itself, sexual reproduction, or how species originate.

Mainstream science – despite declaring again and again that this theory explains these functions – in truth merely describes biological phenomena involved in ecosystem diversity.

The political fight over curriculum between religious Fundamentalists and neo-Darwinists has pushed any meaningful discussion of this topic off the table, as mainstream science remains stubbornly fearful of giving up ground if they admit that there are serious controversies raging around the theory of evolution as the catch-all explanation for our current existence.

It leaves no room for the possibility of Intelligent Design Theory, which posits “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause.” IDT is often made synonymous with creationism – neo-Darwinists argue that it’s just Creationism in disguise – but there are many scientists and philosophers alike that believe IDT is just as compelling a theory as evolution for “the way things are.”

“Ecosystem diversity”? In the passage above she’s espousing a Postmodernism of the Gaps argument: because we don’t yet understand things like how life began, or why organisms have sex, then evolution is crap. Well, there was a time when we didn’t have any idea how creatures changed over time, and why—the time before Darwin. Does Granfield really reject neo-Darwinism? If she does, her fellow feminists should run like hell away from her. She is, it seems, a creationist of sorts, since she approves of Intelligent Design, and doesn’t understand that it really is a form of creationism: a supernatural being directing evolution.

Nor does Granfield know anythging about “how species originate”. If she did, she’d realize that we understand plenty, and that the writer of this website wrote a big book showing what we know about it.

3.) Woo is better. I won’t summarize Granfield’s fulminating approbation for the Gaia Hypothesis, the consciousness of all matter, or the advantage of cardiac thinking, but here are a very few quotes:

The field of science is ripe with compelling counternarratives to evolution that we’re choosing to ignore, from the symbiosis between microbes and minerals that together formed earth’s diversity as shown by Robert Hazen, to Tyler Volk’s understanding of bacteria using metapatterns to generate themselves into ever more complex life, to species diversity that stabilize living ecosystems.

There’s also Lewis Thomas‘ theory that humanity could be a complex form of microbial life the planet produced in order to seed itself into the solar system.

and

As nature writer Stephen Buhner eloquently illustrates in his book The Secret Teachings of Plants, it’s now believed that when we stop thinking and start feeling with the heart, our physiological functioning becomes more balanced and calm; neuronal discharge in the brain comes into phase with the heart and lungs in a process called heart coherence.

More than half our heart cells are neural, the heart’s nervous system wired to the brain’s amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, and cortex. The heart has its own memory and is the primary organ of sense; the brain is secondary and responsive.

We feel the world first, but when we believe – and are told, again and again – that the brain is the center of our being, our perception of our humanity and the world becomes stymied.

Oy! What is she talking about?

and

Perhaps the most egregious of all aspects of scientism is the denial of intelligence in the natural world – by everyone from evolutionary biologists to theoretical physicists—as fundamental to the universe. Many aspects of mainstream, modern science are heated battles over such an acknowledgement.

Shivers of despair course through mainstream science in its dogged quest to disprove design in the universe: Jeremy Narby’s argument that all life is sentient in Intelligence in Nature; Stephen Buhner’s Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm; the concept of an innate intelligence behind the enigma of the carbon atom and the conditions for life Paul Davies explored in The Goldilocks Enigma; the argument that if the Big Bang had been precisely any more or less powerful, atoms could never have formed; Lynn Margulis and symbiogenesis; James Lovelock and the Gaia Hypothesis. . . .

. . . The dominant belief that science itself is predicated on a denial of intelligence in the universe and the superior power of quantifiable observation is fallacious; historians are being forced to admit this as evidence comes to light that the greatest minds science has known – from Copernicus to Newton – believed in and based their work on intelligent design.

Enough. Lunchtime is almost here and I don’t want my stomach upset. Just let me finish by giving the final sentence of Granfield’s travesty—a call to reject scientific authority and find the truth in your own way, presumably through thinking with your heart rather than your brain. All those scientists, well, they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about:

It [getting insights about nature] means finding the truth on your own, not waiting for others to tell you what is right or wrong, because there is no such thing as objectivity, especially in science.

That attitude is not only stupid but dangerous. Shame on Everyday Feminism for pushing such pablum.

Anti-Semitism of the day: Chicago lesbians ban “Jewish pride” flag from their Dyke March

June 25, 2017 • 10:45 am

I am deeply ashamed of Chicago’s gay community today.

From both the left-wing Israel paper Haaretz and the Windy City Media Group, we get a disturbing report: at yesterday’s “Dyke March” in Chicago, a parade celebrating lesbian and LGBT pride and achievements, Jewish lesbians carrying the “Jewish pride” flag were asked to leave.  Why? Because the flag “triggered” some of the participants, and apparently because some participants considered the march implicitly “anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian”. Here, from Pink News, is what the Jewish Pride flag looks like. It’s basically the Gay Pride flag with a star of David on it, a symbol of Judaism. Note that it is not the Israeli flag. (These pictures are from the annual Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv; photos by Jack Guez):


What went down? Let the Jewish lesbians speak, as reported in Windy City Media:

. . . .asked to leave by Collective members of the Dyke march were three people carrying Jewish Pride flags (a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the center).

According to one of those individuals—A Wider Bridge Midwest Manager Laurel Grauer—she and her friends were approached a number of times in the park because they were holding the flag.

“It was a flag from my congregation which celebrates my queer, Jewish identity which I have done for over a decade marching in the Dyke March with the same flag,” she told Windy City Times.

She added that she lost count of the number of people who harassed her.

One Dyke March collective member asked by Windy City Times for a response, said the women were told to leave because the flags “made people feel unsafe,” that the march was “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Palestinian.”

“They were telling me to leave because my flag was a trigger to people that they found offensive,” Grauer said. “Prior to this [march] I had never been harassed or asked to leave and I had always carried the flag with me.”

Another of those individuals asked to leave was an Iranian Jew Eleanor Shoshany-Anderson.

“I was here as a proud Jew in all of my identities,” Shoshany-Anderson asserted. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional. I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I fell that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”

As of time of midnight Saturday, Windy City Times received no official statement from Dyke March organizers. However, social media posts in support of their decision claimed that a rainbow flag with a Star of David is a form of pink washing (a theory postulated by a City University of New York professor which claims that Israeli support of LGBTQ communities is designed to detract attention from civil and human rights abuses of Palestinian people.)

What a crock! Can you actually believe those people who found a gay pride flag with a Star of David “triggering” or, worse, “made them feel unsafe”? That’s crap, of course: the reason the flagbearers were asked to leave is because Israel is demonized as an “apartheid state” by many on the Ctrl-Left. But that’s just a cover for the anti-Semitism implicit (and explicit) in “anti-Zionism”. Further, the flagbearers weren’t Israeli, but Americans and Iranians!

Sadly, I read this as anti-Semitism on the part of the gay and lesbian community. The flag was a Gay Pride flag with a Star of David, not an Israeli flag, though you could, I suppose, say that it was a “pinkwashed” Israeli flag. But the bearers said it symbolized their Judaism and their lesbian pride, not a jingoistic pride in Israel.

The Star of David has always been a universal symbol if Judaism, used by Jews on their Torah covers, menorahs, and worn around their necks well before 1948 —and, on armbands and patches, was used to mark people as Jews under the Nazis. Putting it on a Gay Pride flag should raise no alarums—unless you’re anti-Semitic.

Further, the attitude that Israel has no right to exist, as espoused by leaders of the BDS movement and those who call themselves anti-Zionists, is also anti-Semitic. The singling out of Israel as the most demonic and oppressive of states, to the extent that even a Jewish Pride flag can be “triggering” since it’s seen as “pro-Zionist” and “anti-Palestinian— is also anti-Semitic, as there are nations in the same region that are not only more oppressive, but where homosexuality is a capital offense! But apparently to the Left those countries get a pass, for they’re inhabited by people of color. Try being a gay in Iran or Afghanistan or Palestine, or waving a “Jewish pride” flag in Kabul or Baghdad! You’d probably wind up dead.

The “pinkwashing” canard is equally ridiculous: Israelis really do favor and have gay rights, and many Muslim countries don’t. To excuse that, gays and Leftists claim that Israel’s gay-friendliness is a ruse concocted by the government to falsely show its liberalism and hide its “apartheid” policies. That’s a risible conspiracy theory. The more parsimonious explanation, and one supported by the data, is that Israelis really do have a liberal stance on gays.

What this shows is that the gay community, at least in Chicago, has bought fully into identity politics, to the extent that those who are Jewish must hide their identity lest they “trigger” others. And, without any evidence, the lesbians asked to were automatically assumed to accept (and endorse) the policies of the Israeli government. Even flaunting the Star of David is enough to trigger someone, though I suppose it was perfectly okay to wave the flags of Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan, all of which all bear Islamic symbols. I wonder how an “Iranian Pride” flag would have fared?

And so we learn that there is anti-Semitism in Chicago’s gay community, that being gay ranks higher than being Jewish on the “oppressed” hierarchy, and that gays can be just as intolerant as Saudi Muslims when it comes to Jews.

I’m in full sympathy with gay people’s struggle for their rights and for societal acceptance, but I condemn in the strongest possible terms this expression of—yes, let’s call it what it is—anti-Semitism.

h/t: Orli

Ken Ham blames secularists for financial failures of the Ark Park

June 25, 2017 • 9:00 am

This story about two weeks old, but has been revived and supplemented by recent articles at Alternet,  The Raw Story, and The Friendly Atheist. The Ark Park (or rather “The Ark Experience”) apparently, isn’t the great success it was touted to be by Ken Ham and his organization Answers in Genesis. On the Answers in Genesis website. the Hamster admitted, in a piece called “The secularist media war against the Ark continues” (June 13), that the expected boosting of the local economy didn’t occur:

Recently, a number of articles in the mainstream media, on blogs, and on well-known secularist group websites have attempted to spread propaganda to brainwash the public into thinking our Ark Encounter attraction is a dismal failure. Sadly, they are influencing business investors and others in such a negative way that they may prevent Grant County, Kentucky, from achieving the economic recovery that its officials and residents have been seeking.

To be fair, one article in a local newspaper did get some its facts wrong, reporting, for instance, that a local restaurant closed down for lack of business when, in fact, its sewer pipes were being replaced. But the fact remains, as Alternet notes, the injection of dollars into Grant County, Kentucky businesses has failed to materialize.

“The ‘fake news’ angle used by Ham doesn’t exactly hold water. As Patheos notes, while one recent article did err on two small points related to the Ark Encounter, local business owners haven’t challenged accounts that their profit margins haven’t been raised by Ham’s project,” Alternet reported. “Estimates for the park’s annual draw were between 1.4 and 2.2 million visitors annually. Now approaching the one-year anniversary of its grand opening, park co-founder Mike Zovath said visitor tallies will hit 1 million as of July. But that figure can’t be confirmed by outside sources.”

Despite Ham’s claims, local leaders are adamant that the taxpayer subsidies are not trickling down to the taxpayers.

“I think the Ark’s done well [laughter] and I’m glad for them on that,” Grant County Judge Executive Steve Wood told WKYT. “But it’s not done us good at all.”

See more about the financial woes of the area in a piece in the May 24th Washington Post.

There have been reports of the Ark Park’s giant parking lot being largely empty on weekends, and that’s not really a surprise to me. By all accounts the Ark, which is already showing physical wear (how did the original survive all that flooding?), isn’t that exciting: a walk-through of a replica interior filled with cheesy animals (including, of course, dinosaurs), accompanied by animal sounds from loudspeakers. How many people want to pay $40 for an adult ticket and $28 bucks for each kid to see that? At least the Creation Museum has a variety of diverse lies to hold the believer’s attention.

It’s worth noting three things. First, in what seems to me a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Park was financed largely by taxpayers. As The Daily Kos reported in 2014:

Besides the 510-foor replica of Noah’s Ark, the Ark Encounter project is unique in that it has received: “preliminary approval for $18 million in state tax incentives to offset the cost of the park’s construction; a 75 percent property tax break over 30 years from the City of Williamstown (a town of about 3,000 near where the park will be located); an $11-million road upgrade in a rural area that would almost exclusively facilitate traffic going to and from the park; a $200,000 gift from the Grant County Industrial Development Authority to make sure the project stays in that county; 100 acres of reduced-price land and, finally $62 million municipal bond issue from Williamstown that Ham claims has kept the project from sinking,” Simon Brown reported in the October issue of Church & State, a publication of the Washington, D.C. –based American United for the Separation of Church and State. [JAC: Ham claims that the city isn’t responsible for backing the bonds; Answers in Genesis is. Even if that’s the case, though, the other tax breaks still stand.]

According to Brown, “the bonds received junk status, which is the lowest possible rating for an investment. … [making] it highly unlikely that anyone who buys them will actually get money back.” Although the bonds “initially sold poorly,” Ham announced earlier this year that “the bond offering had succeeded.”

Hemant adds this:

Grant County (which Williamstown is in) gave Ham’s team 98 acres of land for $1. (That’s not a typo. Just a single dollar.)

Second, though Ham promised that the Park would create at least 900 jobs (3000 if you include the whole region), those jobs with the Ark Park itself—and I don’t know how many actually materialized—require that employees “confirm agreement with Ark Encounter’s Statement of Faith“. As Slate reported, the Statement of Faith is onerous:

AiG’s statement of faith is no mere loyalty oath: It’s a four-part theological declaration mandating that all signatories accept dozens of fundamentalist Christian principles. Employees at Ark Encounter don’t just have to believe in God; they have to believe in Christ, the Holy Spirit, Satan (as “the personal spiritual adversary of both God and mankind”), Adam and Eve, “the Great Flood of Genesis,” a 6,000-year-old Earth, and the eternal damnation of “those who do not believe in Christ.” All employees must follow “the duty of Christians” and attend “a local Bible believing church.” Just for good measure, employees must oppose abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, and trans rights.

Yes, those are the jobs created in part by taxpayers, and the employees have to swear that they oppose things that are legal in Kentucky. I suppose the oath itself is legal, but I doubt that government financing of the Ark Park is.

Finally, who’s to blame? I would have expected Ham to say “Satan,” but it’s the secularists—which I suppose is the same thing. As the Answers in Genesis website notes:

Why so many lies and misinformation? Simply because we are in a spiritual battle, and the intolerant secularists are so upset with such world-class attraction like the Ark (and Creation Museum) that publicly proclaim a Christian message. They will resort to whatever tactics they deem necessary to try to malign the attractions.

What we’re really intolerant of is that both the Creation Museum and the “Ark Experience” (the real name of the Ark Park) are purveying lies to people, miseducating children and bringing in the bucks while doing so. They can proclaim their Christian message (also largely lies) as much as they want, but when they start teaching kids a completely wrongheaded view of history, both human and evolutionary, then my knickers really get twisted. We don’t need financial information to malign the Ark Park. Even if it were a success, as I gather the Creation Museum is, I’d still find the whole exercise reprehensible—an exercise in harmful religious propaganda. Only Ham’s own delusions keep him from seeing how harmful he’s been to science education.

I’m curious, though, why, if God is omnipotent, he didn’t make The Ark Experience a big success.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 25, 2017 • 7:45 am

Today we have some nice insect and plant photos taken by Stephen Barnard in Idaho. His captions are indented:

A few photos from the wildflower field. I don’t know the species of the insects.

First, a Blue Flax (Linum lewisii) blossom. This plant visually dominates the garden (if you can call it a garden).

A bumblebee (Bombus sp.) in flight. Noticed how laden it is with nectar and pollen.

Three different flies. The last one is tiny, iridescent, and I think quite beautiful.

Finally, a small wasp preying on some sort of larva.

Another insect from the “garden”. Honeybee (Apis mellifera) on a wild rose.