I was prescient

November 19, 2013 • 6:16 am

I came across one of my old pieces from the New Republic, “The faith that dare not speak its name,” a longish piece on Intelligent Design that started out as a review of the ID textbook Of Pandas and People but evolved into a general critique of ID and an analysis of the upcoming Dover trial. (This was published on August 22, 2005).

At the end of the article was a prediction:

Barring a miracle, the Dover Area School District will lose its case. Anyone who bothers to study ID and its evolution from earlier and more overtly religious forms of creationism will find it an unscientific, faith-based theory ultimately resting on the doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity. Its presentation in schools thus violates both the Constitution and the principles of good education. There is no secular reason why evolutionary biology, among all the sciences, should be singled out for a school-mandated disclaimer. But the real losers will be the people of Dover, who will likely be saddled with huge legal bills and either a substantial cut in the school budget or a substantial hike in property taxes. We can also expect that, if they lose, the IDers will re-group and return in a new disguise even less obviously religious. I await the formation of the Right to Teach Problems with Evolution Movement.

I was right on both counts: Dover lost and its citizens had to foot a million-dollar-plus legal bill—that was a no-brainer—and in predicting that creationists would regroup and use a new strategy: try to make schools teach the “problems” with evolution.  Indeed, that’s what many creationists, including those vetting the textbooks in Texas, are doing, for they can’t directly push either creationism or ID in schools, as that would violate the First Amendment. So, as we saw in the letter from Baptist pastor David Sweet a few days ago, they lie, contending that evolutionary theory is riddled with holes and that we biologists are in a huge conspiracy to cover that up. They, of course, fail to see the beam in their own eye, for what’s really filled with holes is the Bible.  And there’s a giant conspiracy to say that those holes are metaphors.

Verily I say unto you: the prophesies of Professor Ceiling Cat are many and wondrous, and far more accurate than those of the Bible. Jesus, for instance, never came into his kingdom during the lifetime of his contemporaries (Matthew 16:28).


Ratite boots

November 19, 2013 • 5:32 am

It’s not easy to find full-ostrich boots.  Surprisingly, ostrich is one of the toughest hides there is, and these boots, Lucchese “San Antonios,” probably from the 1970s, are built like a tank. And they have seven rows of nice stitching.

Boots 1

boots 2

Yup, it’s ostrich all the way down.Picture 2

The Deepak, part II: Chopra goes after “militant skeptics” like Dawkins and Harris

November 18, 2013 • 2:30 pm

Deepak Chopra’s rant against “militant skeptics” (i.e., those who dare question his woo and obscurantism) continues on SFGate with “Part 3 of the rise and fall of militant skepticism,” coauthored with Jordan Flesher. I’ll give you just one delectable chunk of woo from this deeply muddled (but wealthy) quack. I’ve put the money quotes in bold:

In a word, while Dawkins makes a crude claim that the five senses are reliable indicators of what is real, Harris makes a sophisticated claim in the same area, by assuming that the human brain, a physical object that evolved over millennia, is reliable as the model for everything that happens inside our minds. But if the five senses can’t be trusted, neither can the brain, which processes the input of our sense organs and fashions them into a three-dimensional model of the world. The model isn’t the same as reality. At best it is only provisional; at worst it may be very far from the truth, as witness hundreds of models from the past that have been thoroughly exploded (e.g., the Earth is the center of creation, blood washes back and forth in the body like the tide, etc.)

Harris may argue that the scientific method can “stand on its own” apart from the nervous system of the experimenter via the use of technological systems that run on the logic and language of mathematics, etc. However, the data which computers churn out still has to come in contact with the nervous system of the scientist in order for a theory of morality and human consciousness to be constructed. (The deep question of whether mathematics is universal or somehow mediated by the human nervous system has yet to be answered with any certainty.)

If Harris hadn’t stretched his assumptions to the breaking point, he wouldn’t have revealed that he was making the same mistakes when arguing against God. For God, of all things, exists on the cusp between what we know, what we think we know, and what is indisputably real. An arthritis patient’s pain is indisputably real, even though subjective – in fact, it is real because it is subjective. There is no scientific proof that a report by a mystic that she feels the presence of God isn’t real, and the subjectivity of the experience is the measure of its realness, not the measure of its illusory quality.

In a word, Harris and Dawkins, by turning their backs and scorning subjectivity, have fallen into traps of their own devising. Militant skepticism builds upon their mistakes, amplifies them, and employs scurrilous personal attacks to cover over their own intellectual flaws. In the end, the militant movement will collapse, not because the people who like God outnumber the people who dislike fear, and are suspicious of God. Skepticism’s agenda is doomed because its thinking is basically unsound.

Where is that damn cusp? I want to see it!

That second bit, about subjectivity equaling realness, is the basic fallacy of all religion, and the reason why science wins; for science has ways of separating what you want to be true from what is really true. There is, after all, a difference between pain, God, and the Moon, which Chopra thinks doesn’t exist unless people are looking at it). You could, I suppose, claim that scientific truths are mass delusions, but then why do they make verifiable predictions? Are those “subjective” too? And does a mentally ill person who’s sure he’s God mean that he really is God?

And. . . TWI**ER WARS:

Picture 5Sam is not impressed:

Picture 5

And Michael Shermer gets in a few licks, too:

Picture 2

The Deepak, part I: Chopra goes after Professor Ceiling Cat

November 18, 2013 • 12:07 pm

I have deeply affronted The Deepak with my recent piece in The New Republic criticizing him and Rupert Sheldrake.  Chopra has written an outraged letter to the magazine, flaunting his impeccable scientific credentials, and I have replied. You can read the exchange at TNR‘s online piece, “Deepak Chopra responds to pseudoscience allegations. Jerry Coyne fires back.”

I must say that I quite like my response. It will make the old quack even more peevish.

What I like about Chopra is that despite his air of amiability, he’s really got a thin skin and can’t help responding. And that just gets him in more trouble. He also angers very easily when criticized, as we saw in his recent debate with Dawkins.

Proverb: The greedy squirrel loses a nut

November 18, 2013 • 11:05 am

I have a game I play with my squirrels now. I lure one to the windowsill with peanuts and black oil sunflower seeds, and then, when it’s done nommng those and wants more, I approach the window with a hazelnut and an almond (big treats for a squirrel). I brandish the nuts behind the window, and the squirrel outside sees them and gets excited, pressing his paws against the glass. I then open the window, which scares the squirrel a few feet away (it ducks around the ledge near the windowsill), and I place the hazelnut and the almond on the sill.  I then close the window and wait for the fun.

At this time of year the squirrels appear to be caching more nuts than they eat, for winter is coming on and they need to store their noms.  When there’s a surfeit of big nuts, they try to cram as many in their mouths as they can before they run off to hide them. (I’ve seen a squirrel put three peanuts in its mouth at once.)  But this is nearly impossible with a hazelnut and an almond, as both don’t easily fit in a squirrel maw. But that doesn’t stop them from trying, and it’s hilarious to watch.

This guy wants to carry both nuts away, but goes through buccal acrobatics to get the nuts into his mouth. He finally succeeds, but then drops the hazelnut off the ledge as he runs away.

Aren’t I mean?

There are a number of fables throughout the world about similar costs of being greedy.

U. S. congressman: God promises that global warming won’t happen

November 18, 2013 • 9:38 am

John Shimkus is a U.S. congressman representing Illinois’s 15th District, in the southern part of the state. He is a climate-change denialist and constantly makes dumb statements based on his reading of the Bible.  Now you can argue that, in the following video from 2009, he’s merely using the Bible to defend economic interests, but he may actually believe that God promised Noah that his flood would be the last one. If this isn’t a conflict between what science tells us and what religion tells us, I don’t know what is.

This is from a March 25, 2009 hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. I have a bunch more statements from congressmen (yes, all men, and all Republicans) denying global warming on Biblical grounds, but this one is on video: