Kamloops: Day 2

May 18, 2014 • 7:09 am

Yesterday was the first full day of the meeting (Imagine No Religion 4; schedule here), and I have to say that this is among the top secular meetings I’ve ever attended. The talks are good, the people are friendly, and, of critical importance, they serve great noms.

The meeting began early, with a continental breakfast (a good one; they had black raspberry smoothies!) at 7:45, followed by the opening remarks, and then the first talk, by Hemant “The Friendly Atheist” Mehta,  at 9.

As we filed into the lecture hall with our plates (there are tables), Dan Barker, a talented pianist, was playing on an electronic piano (or whatever you call those things). You may know that Barker, co-President of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, is a talented musician who made a partial living, when he was a Christian preacher, by writing Christian songs. He still gets royalties from those songs. Here’s a photo of him tickling the ivories, but he was shortly joined by a saxophonist and they did an awesome jazz duet of “Imagine No Religion”. I have a video of that which I’ll post when I return to Chicago. It was a great start to the day:

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During the announcements, Bill Ligertwood, the main organizer, told us that all the speakers would be getting hand-knitted Flying Spaghetti Monsters as a gift, along with an INR4 coffee cup. I was excited, for the woman knitting them was sitting right behind me, and I could see them (she spends all day at the conference producing them, and you can also buy one for $20 Canadian). The folks sitting next to me bought one, but I’ll get one free, maybe with extra meatballs! Here’s one:

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I’d never heard Hemant talk before, but he was a lively and engaging speaker. His topic was how atheist don’t fact-check their claims nearly as closely as they should, especially being skeptics. He gave several humorous examples, including fabricated but widely-quoted statements from Jefferson and Hitchens (e.g., Islamophobia is a “word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons”; a quote used by Sam Harris in his interview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali).  His lesson also included statistics that are widely bruited about, including that 1% of the prison population are atheists (it’s actually less than that—0.2% as I recall). Hemant follows up many dubious claims by extensive emailing and phone-calling, but I wonder how, with his job as a high school teacher, he finds the time! I vowed to do such checks more often, but I think I’ve done a fairly good job checking claims, and corrected myself where I was wrong. It’s simply impossible, at least with my day job, to follow up everyone’s quote and claim by sending emails or calling everyone, but I always issue retractions if something proves incorrect. But Hemant put the fear of Ceiling Cat into me.

Here’s Hemant speaking (picture quality will be poor as I was seated far from the podium and flashes were useless; this is hand-held at low shutter speed sans flash):

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At 10 a.m. Wanda Morris, CEO of Dying with Dignity Canada, gave a moving and passionate talk about her work, illustrated with some examples of Canadians who, though terminally ill and in pain, weren’t allowed to die by their government. She outlined the proposal she has before parliament about allowing assisted suicide, and noted that it may well pass in at least Quebec, and then perhaps spread to the rest of Canada.

A measure like that was very narrowly defeated in Massachusetts recently, although initially 70% of the residents were in favor of it. But then the Roman Catholic church—with its big coffers—and other religious organizations put on a big anti-euthanasia campaign, and the measure was defeated 51%-49%.  It is unconscionable, and barbaric, that these religious organizations would rather see someone who wants a peaceful death suffer an agonizing one. The Catholics think that suffering is somehow redemptive, but they have no right to force their religious sentiments on the rest of us.  Morris showed several misleading (indeed, lying) commercials put out by the anti-euthanasia groups.  Here she is:

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Jerry DeWitt, the ex-pentacostal preacher from Louisiana and author of the book Hope after Faith, is a sort of hero to me. After publicly leaving the faith (persuaded to do so by Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker asking him to appear on their FFRF radio show, where he “outed himself”), he was divorced by his wife, shunned by his friends, and given death threats. Yet he vowed not to buckle under, and to remain in the small Louisiana town where he had once preached.  If you’ve seen him on YouTube, you’ll know that his talks are real stemwinders, delivered in a Southern-preacher style cadence and occasionally punctuated with his trademark “Can I get a Darwin?”  He gave a moving talk about being honest with oneself, and how that conferred on him a kind of freedom—a freedom to love himself and not depend on the approbation of others. (It was almost Buddhist in some places.)

I didn’t take a picture of DeWitt because I filmed him, especially the moving parts that he emoted so forcefully; I’ll put that up as a video when I return to Chicago.  DeWitt also, when asked in the Q&A, admitted that he sometimes still speaks in tongues, but only when excited and alone, and wanting to still the “monkey chatter” in his head. This is exactly what Dan Barker told me at dinner the other night: Dan, too, will speak in tongues as he used to do as a preacher, but only when alone. Both he and DeWitt consider it as a form of meditation, and highly effective—something I found fascinating.

Next the philosopher Chris DiCarlo, another engaging speaker, gave a lecture of what people mean by “fairness,” how it’s instantiated in humans and animals (he showed the famous capuchin “give me a grape clip“; do watch it if you haven’t seen it) and offered some proposals for improving fairness, including when driving your car in rush hour. Here’s DiCarlo, who ran our panel on free will the other night:

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Up next was Annie Laurie Gaylor, who talked about the Freedom from Religion Foundation, how they came to be, and some recent court cases, including the disasterious Supreme Court decision allowing prayer in Greece, New York. But she also described some recent FFRF victories, including a no-prayer-before-town-meetings case they won in California, which was brought under state law and so is not subject to the Supreme Court decision.

With her calm and unflappable demeanor, Annie Laurie is a great spokesperson for what I consider the best secular organization in North America (I think it’s also the largest):

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I spoke last, on in the incompatibility of science and religion, and I think it went okay, though of course I couldn’t take a picture. It wasn’t filmed, as they’re not doing that here. I referred to Lawrence Krauss as “Larry Krauss” at one point, and he was in the audience.  Afterwards he let it drop that he’d prefer to be known as “Lawrence” (I thought I’d heard people call him “Larry” before), so be aware of that.

I got Lawrence, as well as Dan and Annie Laurie, to sign my Baihu-pawprinted and Kelly Houle-illuminated copy of WEIT, which now has autographs of many major secularists and scientists, including Steve Weinberg, Janna Levin, Richard Dawkins, Steve Pinker, Rebecca Goldstein, Sean Carroll, Dan Dennett, and so on. It will be auctioned off this summer or fall on eBay, with the proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders. Believe me, this is an awesome book, which I’d dearly love to keep ,but it will help sick people more than me. The illunations by Kelly Houle, including gold leaf and some natural-history drawings, are spectacular.

Dinner was buffet style, and I ate with Carolyn Porco, whom I’d never met (we both gave talks at the AAI convention in 2009). Porco is of course a well known astronomer and expert on planetary imaging, which she’ll talk about today. She’s planning on writing a lavishly illustrated book, along the lines of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, but hasn’t yet found the time. (Publishers: be alert; this will be a good one.) I found her very likeable, without a touch of pomposity, and she has the no-nonsense demeanor, as she described herself, of a “hot-blooded Italian from New York.” I’m looking forward to her talk.

After dinner there was a screening of the movie “The Unbelievers” with commentary afterward by Krauss and the filmmakers Gus and Luke Holwerda. The film was very watchable for secularists, but, given its hagiography of atheism, I wonder how well it will go down with the religulous. Sadly, I was so exhausted that I repaired to bed after the movie, so can’t report on the Q&A. Krauss is great in these informal discussions, and I’m sorry I missed it.

Today’s speakers include Darrell Ray (“Sex and secularism: What 10,000 atheists told us about their sex lives after religion”), Dan Barker (topic not revealed yet), Porco (“A decade of Saturn: The search for meaning”), Christine Shellska (“Rhetoric as a tool to advance skepticism”), Margaret Downey (“Every freethinker has a story”), and Seth Andrews (“The copycats: How religion steals the best ideas.”) The formal end of the conference is the keynote talk by Genie Scott, “Why do people reject good science? Reflections on the evolution and climate science wars.”

I fly out tomorrow morning and hope I won’t encounter problems with the security lines at Calgary.

 

 

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 18, 2014 • 5:58 am

It is Sunday, right?  (One loses track of time ensconced in a hotel.) Things are getting back to business in Dobrzyn, or at least Hili, confined to trees by the d*g Cyrus, has rediscovered an old interest:

Hili: This bird is behaving strangely.
A: What is it doing?
Hili: It is chirping provocatively.

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In Polish:
Hili: Ten ptaszek dziwnie się zachowuje.
Ja: A co on takiego robi?
Hili: Bardzo prowokacyjnie ćwierka.

 

How close are we to the Rapture? Pretty damn close!

May 17, 2014 • 12:25 pm

At first I thought this was a joke, but as is so often true with religious websites, I don’t think it is. It’s a site called The Rapture Index, and is meant to tell us how close we are (despite the disclaimers) to being taken up to heaven—or left behind.

Here’s the explanation, and the home page for the site, full of information about the Rapture, is here.

The Purpose For This Index

The Rapture Index has two functions: one is to factor together a number of related end time components into a cohesive indicator, and the other is to standardize those components to eliminate the wide variance that currently exists with prophecy reporting.

The Rapture Index is by no means meant to predict the rapture, however, the index is designed to measure the type of activity that could act as a precursor to the rapture.

You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we’re moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.

Rapture Index of 100 and Below:  Slow prophetic activity
Rapture Index of 100 to 130:     Moderate prophetic activity 
Rapture Index of 130 to 160:    Heavy prophetic activity 
Rapture Index above 160:        Fasten your seat belts 

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Today's reading is below. The indices are hilarious, from False Christs [how do they get that number?] to "Gog [Russia]. And "civil rights" indicate an oncoming rapture?

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As you see, we’re at 187 today, which means “fasten your seat belts”!  Jesus will be here soon, and for sure this meeting I’m at will be Left Behind.

h/t: Merilee

Allen Orr slams Nicholas Wade’s new book

May 17, 2014 • 8:20 am

Allen Orr, my first Ph.D. student, has developed a thriving career as a popular book reviewer, and in this week’s New York Review of Books, he critique’s Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.

I made a few comments on this book a few days ago, saying that it was in the main pretty bad, though one part, the presentation of the case for genetic differentiation of human populations, was not too bad. But Wade’s main thesis was that differences between human societies, as well as rapid changes within human societies, was due to evolutionary change mediated by natural selection. That  latter contention, I claimed, had no evidence behind it, though Wade argued otherwise.  I did not, and do not, recommend that you read the book.

I’m pleased to see that in Orr’s review, “Stretch genes,” he says pretty much exactly what I thought, though much more incisively. Here are some quotes from his piece:

A Troublesome Inheritance cleaves neatly into two parts. The first is a review of what recent studies of the genome reveal about our evolution, including the emergence of racial differences. The second part considers the part that genetic differences among races may play in behavior and in the social institutions embraced by various races. These two parts fare very differently.

…..So what has study of the human genome over the last decade revealed? Wade’s chief conclusion here is that human evolution has been “recent, copious and regional.” The facts are fairly straightforward. The continental races of human beings differ somewhat from one other at the level of DNA sequence. As Wade emphasizes, these differences are “slight and subtle” but they can nonetheless be detected by geneticists who now have access to many genome sequences from around the planet.

The central fact is that genetic differences among human beings who derive from different continents are statistical. Geneticists might find that a variant of a given gene is found in 79 percent of Europeans but in only, say, 58 percent of East Asians. Only rarely do all Europeans carry a genetic variant that does not appear in all East Asians. But across our vast genomes, these statistical differences add up, and geneticists have little difficulty concluding that one person’s genome looks European and another person’s looks East Asian. To put the conclusion more technically, the genomes of various human beings fall into several reasonably well-defined clusters when analyzed statistically, and these clusters generally correspond to continent of origin. In this statistical sense, races are real.

This is what I also claimed, and of course got slammed by the race-denialists who are motivated largely by politics.  To a biologist, races are simply genetically differentiated populations, and human populations are genetically differentiated.  Although it’s a subjective exercise to say how many races there are, human genetic differentiation seems to cluster largely by continent, as you’d expect if that differentiation evolved in allopatry (geographic isolation). As Orr notes:

As people dispersed about the planet, they ultimately settled into the five great “continental races”: Africans (sub-Sahara), East Asians, Caucasians (Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East), Australians, and Native Americans. Some of these groups are younger than others (America was peopled only in the last 15,000 years), but this division provides, Wade says, a reasonably realistic portrait of how human genetic diversity is partitioned geographically. Because of their geographic isolation from one another, these groups of human beings necessarily evolved mostly independently over the last tens of thousands of years. During this period of independent evolution, much of what we think of as characteristically human arose, including agriculture and settlement in permanent villages.

Finally, Orr takes the book to task for its big claims about the genetic underpinnings of human social differences, which are unsubstantiated:

These are big claims and you’d surely expect Wade to provide some pretty impressive, if recondite, evidence for them from the new science of genomics. And here’s where things get odd. Hard evidence for Wade’s thesis is nearly nonexistent. Odder still, Wade concedes as much at the start of A Troublesome Inheritance:

“Readers should be fully aware that in chapters 6 through 10 they are leaving the world of hard science and entering into a much more speculative arena at the interface of history, economics and human evolution.”

It perhaps would have been best if this sentence had been reprinted at the top of each page in chapters 6 through 10.

One of the most frustrating features of A Troublesome Inheritance is that Wade wants to have it both ways. At one moment, he will concede that he writes in a “speculative arena” and, at the next, he will issue pseudofactual pronouncements (“social behavior, of Chinese and others, is genetically shaped”). This strategy lets Wade move in a kind of intellectual no-man’s-land where he gets to look like he’s doing science (so many facts about genomes!) while covering himself with caveats that, well, it’s all speculative.

Which might lead you to wonder: If Wade has little or no hard evidence for his evolutionary thesis, how does he hope to convince his readers to take it seriously? Part of the answer is by offering captivating narratives about how recent human evolution could have played out, as we saw earlier with the transition to permanent settlement.

This is the problem with Wade’s book: it presents a sweeping hypothesis about the selective basis of human social differences ( a touchy subject), but gives virtually no evidence to support it. If you like stories, it’s fine; if you like science, it’s not so fine. Wade sometimes offers disclaimers, but the reader’s impression will be that he really is presenting scientific findings. It’s an bad piece of scientific journalism, and the next-to-last paragraph above sums up the problem neatly.

By all means read Orr’s review at the link above (it’s free), but I can’t say I’d urge readers to buy the book. It might read okay to those who don’t know a lot about evolution, but to an evolutionary biologist, or a sociologist who knows about genetics as well as the cultural malleability of societies, it is a frustrating and ultimately irresponsible book.

 

Meeting report: Imagine No Religion

May 17, 2014 • 7:28 am

I’ll be busy at the Imagine No Religion 4 meeting today (this conference is srs bsns, though there’s lot of opportunity for socializing). The attendees at this meeting are older than those at the usual atheist meeting: the demographic reminds me of the Freedom from Religion Foundation annual meeting. Although one would like to see more young people, this also means that the attendees expect meat instead of drama: serious and thought-provoking talks. I like that, for I favor meetings that are mostly devoted to interacting and learning rather than drinking, socializing, and dissing other atheists. We’ll try to give the audience some meat (or for you vegetarians, tofurkey).

This is the view from my room:

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We had a lovely dinner for the speakers last night, with good company and terrific noms. First the noms—a buffet:

One of the three dessert tables (remember, there are only about 15 speakers!):

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Seafood: shrimp, mussels, salmon, and so on:

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Moar desserts!

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Ribs!

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Remedy for ribs!

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Salads and stuff:

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The roast-beef carving station (make mine rare):

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Last night’s panel was on free will, in which moderator  Chris diCarlo, Ish Haji (a philosopher from Calgary), Lawrence Krauss (the “mystery guest”), and myself hashed out the issue for an hour (Chris and I are “hard determinists,” Ish a compatibilist, and Lawrence, well, it[‘s hard to tell. We had no libertarian free willers, as Chris, who organized the panel, couldn’t find one, despite a year of asking.

Our discussion was vigorous, by which I mean sometimes contentious. Ish made a number of statements about science that Krauss found offensive (e.g. “science has nothing to say about the concept of causation; it’s a philosophical concept”), and Krauss, believe me, showed his disdain.  At one point Ish claimed that common sense deludes us, pointing to the table and said we were under the misconception that the table was solid. At that point Krauss climbed on our table and began pounding it, demonstrating that it was solid.

The avid audience interest and participation in the Q&A were surprising to me, as discussions of free will can be tedious or arcane. I did get into it a bit with Krauss, who maintained that yes, all our actions are completely determined, and wouldn’t even grant the possibility of quantum indeterminacy affecting the course of our actions or of cosmological history, since he said that “quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory.”

That’s true, but quantum events may change the way life unfolds if you were to “replay the tape of life.” Or so I think. But that has nothing to do with whether we make “free” decisions.

Krauss also claimed, despite his pure determinism, that we still have a form of free will, simply because we act like we do, so it makes no difference at all whether we “could have chosen otherwise.” I took issue with that on two counts. First, if if determinism reigns and dualism doesn’t, then that viewpoint has enormous implications for how we treat people—and punish them. Second, I noted that the Libet experiment, Soon et al. experiment, and others like them show that there is a difference between thinking we have free will and knowing that things are determined: experiments from brain scans are beginning to show that some decisions can be predicted before people are conscious of having made them. Krauss’s response, I think, was lame: he said those experiments predict behaviors with imperfect accuracy (I think it’s 60-80%). But that imperfection is irrelevant, for it shows that there is a difference between our thinking we can do otherwise and studies showing that we aren’t as free to do otherwise as we think. It was an engaging discussion, and Krauss took several opportunities to tell Ish that he completely misunderstood science (Krauss pulls no punches), which of course offended the philosopher.

Some of the speakers from last night’s dinner are in the photos below:

Jerry DeWitt, apostate preacher (“Can I get a Darwin?”) and Wanda Morris (CEO of Dying with Dignity Canada):

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Carolyn Porco (astronomer) and Margaret Downey (secular activist):

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L to R: Ish, Bill Ligertwood the organizer, Genie Scott, Chris Dicarlo, and his wife (whose name I’ve forgotten; apologies):

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Seth Andrews (ex-Christian and podcaster: “The Thinking Atheist”) and Darrell Ray (author and outspoken secularist):

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I’ll have a lot more photos later, I hope.

You can see today’s schedule here, and it ends with a screening of “The Unbelievers” with the filmmakers Gus and Luke Howarda as well as Lawrence Krauss (one of the stars along with Richard Dawkins, who, sadly, isn’t here).

 

 

Caturday felid trifecta: Cat tries to pwn music, epid cat leaps, and cat missing in Japanese tsunami turns up after three years

May 17, 2014 • 6:33 am

Ceiling Cat has smiled on you: you get three awesome felid items today. The first is a cat video from Russia, which for some reason (I suspect the deep Russhian love for the “kot”) is producing some of the finest internet cat videos. This one has the Russian title below, which some reader should interpret. I know only the first word.  The cat, however, is trying to pwn the music coming out of the speak. Aside: for some reason many Russian cats appear to be gray with round heads.

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Here is a series of epic cat leaps, many of which are FAILS:

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Finally, from the Torygraph and the Asahi Shimbum, a heartening report of a cat in Japan who, after being lost for three years in the tsunami, was reunited with its owners.

From the Torygraph:

A cat that vanished three years ago during Japan’s 2011 tsunami disaster has been unexpectedly reunited with its owners.

The black cat, called Suika, was thought to have died after disappearing on March 11, 2011 – the day of the earthquake and tsunami – from his home in Ofunato, Iwate prefecture.

Kazuko and Takeo Yamagishi, his owners, spent three months searching for the cat across the city, which was badly hit by the tsunami, before abandoning any hope that he may have survived the disaster.

However, in a rare happy twist more than three years on, the cat was recently spotted in a neighbouring town and taken to the authorities before the owners were tracked down via its collar information, according to Japanese media.

Although the owners are still unsure as to where the cat has been for the past three years, their joy was evident as they were reunited at Ofunato Health Centre.

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Kazuko, left, and Takeo Yamagishi get to hold their pet cat, Suika in Ofunato, Japan Photo: The Asahi Shimbun

From the Shimbum

On April 10 this year, a couple spotted a black cat curled up in a cedar forest in Rikuzentakata, another disaster-hit municipality in the prefecture. They took in the cat, which wore a collar and was friendly, and reported the animal to the Ofunato Health Center.

Days went by with no one showing up to claim the cat. So the center decided to print the cat’s picture in a local newspaper.

When an employee was taking the cat’s photo on the morning of May 9, he noticed faded letters and numbers on the collar. He deciphered the name as “Yamagishi” and made out the numbers. They turned out to be the cellphone number of Takeo Yamagishi.

It is unclear how Suika survived the ordeal and how long he had stayed in Rikuzentakata, which is 15 kilometers from Ofunato.

But a bell on his collar indicated that someone had taken care of him.

Suika looked content with his eyes closed and back in the arms of Takeshi and Kazuko.

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This cat looks pretty sanguine. (Photo: Wataru Sekita)

h/t: Chris, Barry, Tw**t from Rowan Hooper via Matthew Cobb