Alex Tsakiris: woomeister and coward

February 15, 2012 • 9:22 pm

Well, after my fractious interview at Skeptiko with Alex Tsakiris, in which he failed to get me to admit to the existence of any number of woo-ish phenomena, he got lambasted in the comments, something he’s not used to from his usual gaggle of ESPers, near-death-experiencers, and quantum wowsers. What does he do when faced with an onslaught of rationalism?

First, he posts his final list of talking points, resembling the self-serving, post-production introduction and conclusion he added to our interview:

and then he immediately closes the thread:

The man has shown himself to be not only a poseur who pretends to know something about evolution when in fact he’s deeply and willfully ignorant, but also a rank coward. He just can’t face dissent. I wouldn’t put it past him to expunge the whole piece.

I don’t regret having done the interview.  I didn’t get to promulgate much evolutionary biology, which was my original plan, but I got the rare chance, purely inadvertently, to expose the man for the fraud and ignoramus he is.  I call that a good day’s work.

A sheep-herding rabbit

February 15, 2012 • 10:10 am

I’ve stolen this from Grrlscientist at the Guardian, who posted on “Champis, the sheep-herding rabbit” last Saturday.  It’s about a European rabbit who acts like a sheepdog. (Note: the music, “Run, rabbit, run” is a bit annoying.)

I take no responsibility for the claim that this lagomorph is deliberately herding the sheep. Perhaps he just has an affinity for sheep, and they run away when they see the bunny approach. (That testifies, at least, that the adjective “sheepish” is accurate!). But it sure looks as if he’s trying to keep the sheep under control.

UPDATE: I’ve since learned that Champis appeared at HuffPo, too, where it’s explained that he’s Swedish, 5 years old, and that he may indeed be herding sheep:

Greta Vigren said she first noted his talent last spring when they let out the sheep to graze for the first time after the long Swedish winter.

“He just started to behave like a sheepdog,” she recalled, adding that while he likes to round up the sheep, he is consistent about leaving the farm’s hens alone, treating them more gently.

“He’s like a king for the whole group. He thinks he rules over both the sheep and the hens. He has a very big ego.”

Dan Westman, a sheepdog breeder who shot and posted the video of his friends’ bunny, said he was in awe when he first witnessed the phenomenon, noting Champis does the job even better than most dogs would.

“It’s really incredible, it’s a herding rabbit,” he said. “He rounds them up, and if they get close to escaping through the gate he sometimes stops them,” he said.

“I mean I work with sheepdogs and know how hard this is. There are very few dogs that could do what this rabbit does.”

Westman, who’s known both Champis and its owners for years, said the beige little mix-breed bunny had never been trained for the job but seemed to have learned the ropes all on his own.

“He’s probably picked some of it up from watching the dogs,” he said.

I can imagine a new t.v. show on the BBC: “A man and his bunny.”

You go, bunny!

h/t: Diane G.

My fractious interview for Skeptiko

February 15, 2012 • 6:38 am

Note: For some reason this was posted out of order, and I’ve deleted the original post.  I apologize, and ask readers who commented on the original post to repeat their comments below.

_______

Well, this is certainly the most contentious interview I’ve ever had, and it’s with Alex Tsakiris at Skeptiko.  The “discussion” is 57 minutes long, and things get pretty heated (it’s both recorded and transcribed; I’d recommend listening to get the full flavor).

When I first agreed to the interview, I was told we’d talk mainly about my book and about evolutionary biology.  Several readers acquainted with the show warned me that Alex was a woo-meister who was into things like parapsychology and near-death experiences. Forewarned, I emailed Alex and he verified that we would indeed talk about evolution with perhaps a bit of discussion on the side about free will. He told me I wasn’t going to be “sandbagged.” LOL!

It quickly became clear in the interview, though, that he wasn’t much interested in evolution; listen to Alex’s introduction to the interview, which he recorded after he talked to me:

In this episode of Skeptiko we’re going to dig into evolutionary biology.  Now I have to tell you: I’ve never been that interested in really exploring evolutionary biology. And the reason is that from the very beginning, I saw that issues of consciousness being [sic] much more central to these core Big Picture Science Questions that we want to talk about. I mean, “consciousness” trumps “evolution” when we want to ask the question [sic] of ‘Who are we really?,’ ‘Where did we come from,’ ‘What happens to us after we die?'” Consciousness more directly gets to those questions. And the people who are on the cutting edge of consciousness research, really, I think, have a lot more to say about these things. So for example, when we look at former guests like Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his “morphic residence theory” [sic: it’s morphic resonance theory]. . .[moar woo omitted]. . . Well, when you look at the impact of what the theory like morphic residence [sic] is in evolutionary biology, well, it kind of relegates evolutionary biology to a mere sideshow in this larger question of “How did we come to be who we are?”

The man has a habit of inserting his own summaries, recorded post facto, at the end and beginning of the podcast. That, of course, gives him the last say.

Tsakiris was full of misconceptions about evolution—misconceptions to which he clung tenaciously.  He was almost obsessed with the idea that Alfred Russel Wallace isn’t just given too little credit for his contributions to evolutionary biology, but that he was in fact more important than Darwin in bringing about the acceptance of evolution.  He was confused about group selection, which he sees as the reigning paradigm among evolutionists of how natural selection works. Tsakiris also wanted to talk about how quantum mechanics negates modern evolutionary theory, about the evils of materialism, about “quantum entanglement of neurons” (!) and about precognition.

Anyway, I wasn’t in any mood to put up with either woo or Alex’s many distortions of evolutionary biology and its history, and I’m afraid I went a bit Hitchens on him. Too bad—but he deserved it. I hate it when hosts ask you on to talk about your field and then wind up using the discussion as a platform to expound their own ideas, especially when they’re crazy ideas.

Lesson #1: Having the word “Skeptik” in your blog or podcast title doesn’t mean you’re skeptical.

Lesson #2:  Tsakiris needs to learn more about evolution if he’s going to interview an evolutionary biologist.

Lesson #3: Do your homework before you agree to go on a radio show.

Lesson #4: To those who contemplate going on this ridiculous show: Tsakiris isn’t really interested in what his guests have to say unless they agree with him, and that rules out most rational people. Otherwise, he uses an “interview” as a chance to pontificate, exactly the wrong strategy for an interviewer.

You can listen here (press “play it” halfway down the page).  Expect a lot of woo-sters to show up in the comments.

Guest post: Could it be. . . . Satan?

February 15, 2012 • 5:35 am

Reader Sigmund, who keeps a weather eye on the BioLogos site, has contributed a guest post about one of the more ludicrous items on that site, which indicts none other than Beelzebub for the spread of naturalism and scientific materialism.

BioLogos reveals the author behind modern theoretical cosmology

by Sigmund

The effort to teach evangelicals the correct way to read the Bible carries on apace.

Mark H. Mann, a theologian from Point Loma Nazarene University, continues his series of posts defending the BioLogos-approved method of integrating religion and scienc, contributing a new installment entitled Let’s Not Surrender Science to the Secular World, Part 6

Not surprisingly, Mann takes the standard apologetic approach of claiming that the Bible is a mixture of literal and poetic writings:

”.  . scripture is complex and revealed within a variety of social and historical contexts and using a variety of literary styles. Therefore, in order to understand what God is saying in scripture we must take account of both the context and genre in which a particular passage was revealed.”

Needless to say, Mann doesn’t present a reliable method to distinguish which parts are metaphor and which are literal.  Mann instead chooses to contrast the biblical tales of creation and destruction with those of other contemporary or earlier Middle Eastern religions.

“in Gilgamesh, the gods decide to destroy humanity simply because humans have become so numerous that their noise is now bothersome to the gods! How different from the story of Noah in which God brings the flood in judgment against human violence and wickedness (Gen 6:5, 11).”

[JAC: note that almost immediately thereafter, Mann says this:

Moreover, the God revealed in the Bible is a God of love and care for all creation. He desires the well being of all of his creatures (Gen. 1:22; see also Gen. 9:8-12), and especially the humans, whom he provides care for even when they have responded with acts of disobedience and disrespect.

If that’s the case, why did he drown nearly everyone?]

Mann, amazingly, reads the flood story as evidence for the moral goodness of the God of the bible, in contrast to all those other pagan deities!

“There is a moral purpose—the preservation of justice and righteousness in creation—behind the biblical God’s actions that is completely lacking among the gods of the other ancient Near Eastern peoples.”

But allowing allegorical interpretations of the most awkward passages of Genesis (in light of modern scientific discoveries) enables Mann to sidestep many of the most embarrassing interpretations of natural history that the literal approach requires.

“Nor do we have to speculate wildly about the past existence of ice domes in the sky, primal light in the sky before the formation of the sun and moon, or dinosaurs roaming the earth with humans, all for which there is absolutely no credible evidence and which ultimately only serves the purpose of aligning our current understanding of the world with that held by people thousands of years ago who simply could not understand the world as we do because they did not yet have the tools to observe and study it that we now have.”

Well, there’s no credible evidence for the various miracles attributed to Jesus either, but somehow that doesn’t figure into his thinking.

Finally, Mann, perhaps feeling sorry for his evangelical audience, decides to throw them a little red meat, confirming their suspicions about who is really behind the latest scientific ideas about cosmology and the big bang.

“Nor do Christians, using scientific tools, need to buy into Satan’s lie that a universe that appears to function in an orderly, natural way came into being and functions as it does all by itself.”

Yes!! It is indeed the red, pointy-tailed, and hornéd beast who is behind the idea of naturalism!

Well, him and Laurence Krauss.

Britain in danger from “militant secularists” :-)

February 14, 2012 • 12:15 pm

Shoot me if I don’t know who Baroness Warsi is, but she’s made a dire pronouncement in the pages of The Telegraph: Britain is being overtaken by militant secularists. The good Baroness is leading a ministerial delegation from the UK to the Vatican (apparently reciprocating for the Pope’s visit in 2010), and she writes about it in a dire piece Telegraph piece called “We stand side by side with the Pope in fighting for faith.”  Here are Baroness Warsi’s worries about creeping secularism:

My fear today is that a militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies. We see it in any number of things: when signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; when states won’t fund faith schools; and where religion is sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere.

It seems astonishing to me that those who wrote the European Constitution made no mention of God or Christianity. When I denounced this tendency two days before the Holy Father’s State Visit in September 2010, saying that government should “do God”, I received countless messages of support. The overwhelming message was: “At last someone has said it”.

This woman is mad.  She wants to de-secularize European governments, with special mention of Christianity?  Remember, she’s head of an official UK government mission. She goes on:

That so many people felt moved to write showed just how uneasy they were at the rising tide of secularism.

For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity because they were frightened of the concept of multiple identities.

That’s why in the 20th century, one of the first acts of totalitarian regimes was the targeting of organised religion. . .

When we look at the deep distrust between some communities today, there is no doubt that faith has a key role to play in bridging these divides. If people understand that accepting a person of another faith isn’t a threat to their own, they can unite in fighting bigotry and work together to create a more just world.

The retort is so obvious it’s hardly worth mentioning: the biggest source of intolerance in the world is not secularism, but religion.  Because each faith thinks it has a lock on the truth, it perforce must see the others as wrong. And since there’s no objective way to adjudicate what’s true (something we do have in science), the enmity persists.  Which secularists deny people a right to their religious identity? Have I ever said that a Catholic has no right to be a Catholic, or no right to profess what he or she believes? No, what I claim is not the right to deny people their beliefs, but the right to criticize those beliefs when they seem irrational, harmful, or unfounded.

Here’s what the Torygraph says about the upcoming visit.  Cameron is a real faith-head!:

[Warsi’s] speech represents one of the most strident defences of the importance of religion by a serving British minister. It comes days after the High Court ruled that local councils could not hold prayers during meetings. There have also been recent cases of public sector workers being banned from displaying Christian symbols at work.

David Cameron welcomed the visit. He said: “Our relationship with the Holy See is an important one and it speaks powerfully of the positive contribution faith can make to all societies.

“Sayeeda Warsi has consistently made the case for a deeper understanding of faith by the British Government so I am delighted that she will be taking this message to the Vatican personally.”

And, finally, the Telegraph‘s own view, as expressed in its editorial “Faith must not be driven from Britain’s public life“:

Our history and culture are formed by the Christian faith. The way we are governed is linked directly to the schism in the Church almost half a millennium ago: in England, we have an Established Church of which the head of state is the Supreme Governor.

Yeah, but you UK guys don’t need an Established Church any longer.  Sometimes traditions are valueless. The editorial continues:

It is all too easy to forget this – largely because politically correct fawning by public bodies over the sensitivities of other faiths has left many Christians feeling inhibited about asserting and celebrating their own beliefs. It has also left many wondering exactly when it was that Britain stopped being a Christian country. Combine that with the aggressive intolerance of the militant secularists, and it is little wonder that the Church of England frequently feels beleaguered.

Last week, we had the perfect illustration of this baleful process, when the National Secular Society succeeded in a High Court attempt to prevent Bideford Town Council doing something it had done for centuries – holding a short prayer service at the start of its meetings. The atheist former councillor who pressed the case argued that the council had no right to “impose” its religious views on him, conveniently ignoring the fact that no one had forced him to attend the prayers, and failing totally to see that it was he who was seeking to impose his views on others, not the other way round.

For once I can say that this: that type of religiosity is foreign to many Americans.  It’s illegal in our country to start government meetings with prayers, for the U.S. government, by Constitutional decree, is strictly neutral on the issue of religion.  (That doesn’t mean, of course, that the faithful don’t try to circumvent this!) It would be equally illegal to start a public meeting with an atheist “prayer” or “reading.”  By prohibiting any religious or antireligious observance at civil events, the government (at least, our government) is not imposing atheist views on others; it’s imposing religious neutrality on civil functions.

For a humorous palliative, go read Crispian Jago’s parody at Science, Reason, and Critical Thinking, “Militant reason a threat to fantasy, warns Warsi.” It’s hilarious; here’s the beginning, and it gets funnier:

Ancient myths are being “sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere”, Conservative co-chairwoman Baroness Warsi whined in an article for the Daily Telegraph.

The Muslim peer said Europe needed to become “more confident and more comfortable with its middle eastern fairy tales “.

h/t: Grania Spingies

♥Say it with kittehs ♥

February 14, 2012 • 7:33 am

If your inamorato or inamorata likes cats, perhaps he/she would appreciate one of these photos for Valentine’s day.  And be sure to check out today’s Google logo (click on it to hear a song).

Or, if they’re more primate-inclined, here’s an appropriate valentine:

Finally, for a bit of science today, Steve Novella explains the biochemistry of love in “Love is in the brain” at NeuroLogical Blog.

Gazzaniga on free will

February 14, 2012 • 6:34 am

Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains.  We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses.

Michael Gazzaniga is a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind. He’s written a gazillion books and many articles on cognitive neuroscience, and has a special interest in cognitive functions of split-brain patients.

And over at Big Think, he takes on the idea of free will in a 3.25-minute talk called “Brains are automatic, but people are free.” The title shows that he’s clearly a compatibilist, but what form does he accept? I can’t embed the talk here, but watch it.  I have excerpted the crucial bit (most of the presentation) below.

Gazzaniga’s talk

“If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it would never dawn on you to say, ‘Well, now, this thing needs free will!’ What are you talking about?

What we’re knowing is, we’re learning and appreciating the ways in which we produce our perception, our cognition, our consciousness and all the rest of that. And why do you want something in there that seems to be independent of all that?

The central part of free will that people want to hold on to is the sense that that therefore makes you responsible for your actions, so it’s the idea of personal responsibility.  And I think that’s very important and I don’t think that all this mechanistic work on the brain in any way threatens that.

We learn that responsibility is to be understood at the social level—the deal of rules that we work out living together. So the metaphor I like to use is cars and traffic. We can study cars and all their physical relationships and know exactly how that works; it in no way prepares us to understand traffic, when they all get together and start interacting: that’s another level of organization and description of these elements interacting.

So the same is it with brains. We can understand brains to the nth degree, and that’s fine and that’s what we’re doing, but it’s not going to, in any way, interfere with the fact that taking responsibility in a social network is done at that level.

So the way I sum it up is that brains are automatic but people are free—because people are joining the social group and in that group are laws to live by.  And it’s interesting that every social network—whether it’s artifactual, Internet, or people—accountability is essential or the whole thing just falls apart. You gotta have it.”

No one has anything to worry about, I don’t think, from science in terms of whatever we discover about our nature, and however good we get at describing it: it’s not going to impact that essential value that everybody has to be held accountable, because it’s at a totally different level. And it’s in the social level, which is so crucial and important for the human race.”

I agree with Gazzaniga’s determinism, which he expresses at the outset, but I don’t have any idea what he means by saying “people are free.”  That appears to be a statement that sounds good but is manufactured post facto to put a shiny patina on “accountability” (notice he doesn’t use the term “moral responsibility”, though he uses “responsibility”).  Or maybe he just wants to save the term “free”, as in “free will.”

And yes, for our society to function smoothly we need to punish criminals to prevent further malfeasance and to set examples for other people.  I’m with him 100% here.

Where we diverge is in two places.  First, apparently contra Gazzaniga, I do think science will impact the nature of accountability: how people are treated when they perform bad actions.  If we truly believe, as Gazzaniga does, that we don’t have a “free choice” in what we do, doesn’t that have any implications for punishment? Surely it does, for the legal system already gives special treatment to those whose actions seem to have been compelled by things over which they have ‘no control,’ like organic disease or mental illness.  If we’re also compelled by things whose etiology is less clear, wouldn’t we want to know that, too? And wouldn’t that have some effect on the way we try to punish or rehabilitate people? I find it hard to conceive that the answer is “no.”

Second, I don’t see why on Earth he uses the word “free”?  Why are people “free” if their actions are determined? The phrase “Brains are automatic, but people are free” may sound appealing, but it seems to lack content. We can consider them free if somehow helps us psychologically in assigning responsibility, but we can also assign responsibility if we consider ourselves “unfree” in the deterministic sense.  If you committed a crime, you are responsible for that crime, whether or not you had a choice to do it.  You have to be punished for societal protection and deterrence of yourself and others.

Responsibility isn’t threatened by science, but moral responsibility is. If people want to hold onto that, then they are threatened by science.

And it’s time to get rid of the term “free will.”  “Responsibility for an act” seems an adequate replacement, one less freighted with historical baggage.

h/t: Ant