Elf Sternberg

Daniel Akst's article in The American, Science and the Chattering Classes, falls into that commonplace journalistic sin, handwringing over the stupidity of the masses without offering anything but a pablum response to a given problem.

The problem is scientific illiteracy. Akst writes,

With its great stress on specialization, capitalism has eroded the kind of homely technological skills Americans typically possessed a generation ago. Most of us no longer work on our own cars, for instance, and given electronic fuel injection and other newfangled features, we probably couldn’t even if we wanted to. Heck, a lot of us can’t even cook our own food.

That last part is what made steam come out of my ears, as you can imagine. Most people can't cook their own food? Most people can't apply heat to meat and vegetables and see what happens?

Akst ends his piece with this:

The challenge for business, whose products will contain more and more technology as time goes on, is to increase the general level of comfort in science without making people feel they’re being taken for a ride. More and better science in the schools would be a great start.

This, too, is outrageous: it is not in the best interests of most businesses for the common people to understand the science behind their products. If the average man did, he might not be so worried, as Akst points out, about the surfactants is vaccines, or the use of gamma radiation to pasteurize food, but he also wouldn't be taken for a ride by the billion and one forms of woo out there, and wouldn't spend a billion and one dollars on cures for "subluxation" and "toxification," wouldn't spend money on Big Placebo, and would actually realize that the best cure for half of our population's medical issues is a half-hour walk every day in the park. Near trees and birds and water. (Yeah, I know, Weil's guilty of massive amounts of woo, but the whole "being out in nature daily reduces depression" thing is pretty well backed up.)

Schooling and business are at odds with each other. Businesses exist to propogate beliefs in the quality of their products. Education exists to replace belief with facts. To put the two hand-in-hand like that is, I guess, the educational equivalent of homeotherapy: the idea that tiny droplets of knowledge in an ocean of bullshit will somehow multiply, magically, turning indoctrinated children into self-willed Jeffersonian citizens.

But really, "Most people can't cook their own food?" How sad is that? It doesn't take science to learn how to cook your own food: it takes curiosity and a willingness to ocassionally burn a dish. You can order take-out only if you fail. This isn't a failure of science; it's a failure of culture.

Bizarre. Is ClownHall losing its touch? I was tooling around the radio and landed on AM 1590, "Freedom Radio," a wholly-owned outlet of Clownhall and its blowhards. In a brief bumper right after the Mark Levin (!) show, one of those practiced, learned voices comes on and starts talking about how "our Earth is situated in a place that's just right, it's not too hot, it's not too cold, so what does this mean?" and I rolled my eyes briefly. It's Clownhall, so it had to be an Intelligent Design pitch

But no! Instead, he went through the investigatory possibilities: the Rare Earth phenomenon (in a universe this big, the probability that there are such lovely worlds is low but possible-- has to be possible, we're here, aren't we-- but rare enough we're not likely to spot one with a telescope ever again), or are planets like ours commonplace and we're just now developing the tools necessary to see them, or could it be that life can live in places that don't match the Terrestrial habitable zone? "And this is why we advocate for the exploration of space!"

I was boggled. Someone at Clownhall remembered their meds that evening, I guess.

One of the classic creationist canards is the old, "Until someone brings me a fossil of type Y, I have no reason to believe in the transition of X to Z. Where is the Y fossil?" The half-man, half-monkey, or as Congressman Jack King (R-GA) recently demanded, half man, half fish, and half-newt all rolled into one.

Well, if you go to the Biblical view, you'll see that, in the Garden of Eden, the serpent was a very odd thing. It talked, for one thing. For another, after the Fall God curses it to "crawl on your belly and eat the dust," implying that it had limbs of some kind. It probably looked like a Sleestak from Land of the Lost.

Therefore, I have a challenge for Representative Jack King: Until you bring me the fossilized skeleton of a Sleestak, I have no reason to believe the Book of Genesis to be true.

Bible Scholar Bruce Waltke was expelled from the Reformed Theology Seminary for saying the following:

If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult -- some odd group that is not really interacting with the world.

But... but... Teach the Controversy!

He's right, though. And it's not just the whole "weird cult" aspect that he ought to be concerned about: it's the systematic gnawing at the foundation of America's success: it's inquisitiveness, it's can-do, it's science and technology, that's the real long-term damage.

It's fascinating watching the Christianist writers during this first week of the new year. My favorite so far, Renew America's Michael Bresciani's article in which he trots out the classic fantasies: nothing humanity could do could the end the Earth, because only God can do that, therefore global warming is a myth. Barak Obama is apparently a brilliant evil mastermind and a naive clueless idiot.

But my favorite is still this:

Cronies of Darwinism fare no better. If we look like monkeys we must have come from monkeys the millions of missing links notwithstanding. The Darwin scheme has seen its better day since the advent of creation science but why give it up?

Muahahahahah. How's that research program coming? When was the last time an agricultural or pharmaceutical company used either Creation Science or "Intelligent Design" to treat cancer or cure obesity?

Creation Science hasn't helped a single child overcome disease. And I won't hold my breath.

Ben Stein is whining today, "It's not my fault!" Unfortunately for Ben, yes it is.

Ben begins with this classic piece of deception:

The first real super problem I had was when the movie I narrated and co-wrote, Expelled--No Intelligence Allowed, was in progress. ... Expelled was a plea for open discussion of the possibility that life might have started with an Intelligent Designer. This idea, that freedom of academic discussion on an issue as to which there is avid scientific disagreement has value, seems obvious to me. But it drives the atheists and neo-Darwinists crazy and they responded viciously.

Ben is simply lying, but I can't tell if he's lying to himself along with his readers. After all, there is no "avid scientific disagreement"; it would seem that even the most ardent Intelligent Design advocate has given up and instead has taken to whining that the very definition of "science" is unfair because it doesn't allow for supernaturalism. This whining focuses on biology because it's combinatorially difficult to analyze biological systems and so it's the easiest place to find gaps in which God might hide; these people never talk about the intelligent design of physical or chemical systems.

Ben is mendacious when he implies that that's all Expelled was. It was a polemic, one that (again with the Godwin alert) interspersed images of Darwin and Hitler and mis-stated the various "persecution" cases of Robert Sternberg, Nathaniel Abraham, and others. It's well-documented that he lied to many of the biologists he interviewed about the nature of the film he was making in order to get "gotcha" editables that could be chopped up to present their subjects in the worst possible manner.

Ben's whining is particularly hilarious given that Intelligent Design founder William Dembski's class in ID at the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary gives credit for internet trolling: "provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you've made on "hostile" websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade)." (This is just one of several gems, including the precious "Why are materials so ready to embrace Darwinian evolution, eugenics, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia as a package deal?") Dembski graciously offered PZ Meyers the deal that he would tell his students to stop trolling if Meyers' people would stop responding in nasty ways to the trollers. PZ mockingly declined.

Ben was fired because of his association with a "free credit score" group that, he claims, has a "perfect record" with consumer protection agencies. A simple search for "Freescore.com scam" will show up dozens of public complaints about the company he shilled for. Freescore is so bad Reuters editors let Felix Salmon go all-out in ripping Stein a new one, and leads us to note that Freescore.com is a member of the "Adaptive Marketing" group, which apparently specializes in this kind of nonsense. (Holy Chao, Adaptive Marketing is the info clearing house for ${ETHICS_VIOLATION}! And the WaPo editors let it go! Man, I'm glad I didn't go to work there now.)

While Ben states that he never once mentioned the company in his column, the fact that he put his weight as the "Everybody's Business" NYT columnist behind his appearances for a credit product certainly does seem like a conflict of interest.

Ben closes with this thought:

It's sad that the Internet has become a backyard gossip freeway for the whole world's sick people to pour out their neuroses. Too many sick people out there on the web for comfort.

I have made as many mistakes as a person not in custody can make. I make no claims to anything even remotely like perfection or even desirability as a role model. It is just that in this case, I didn't do anything wrong. In my life, I have done plenty wrong. I am not the master. I am the servant and a poor one at that.

Waaaah! It's not my fault!

Yes, Ben, it is your fault. You've made poor choices. You've been mocked repeatedly for your failure to understand the basic macroeconomics you purported to write about, and you even illustrated your terrible judgement as a parent more than once. Remember this?

I very much fear that my son, more up-to-date than I am in almost every way, is more of a modern-day American than I am. To hustle and scuffle for a deal is something he cannot even imagine. To not be able to eat at any restaurant he feels like eating at is just not on his wavelength. Of course, that's my fault. (I have learned that everything bad that happens anywhere is my fault.) (NYT, Jan 24, 2008)

Uh, yes, Ben, that is your failure.

In related news, Matt Taibbi has been getting a lot of praise and blame in which he used Goldman Sachs as a proxy for all that is wrong with Wall Street culture. Dean Starkman warns people not to dismiss him-- he's doing the work economics journalists are supposed to do, except all of them are too close to the power and money now to do the yeoman's work Taibi has done.

I mention this because in December of 2007, Stein declared that yes, Goldman Sachs runs the universe, and when Sach's cheif economist said that bad days were looming, Stein scoffed and claimed that Sachs was using its phenomenal size and power to drive stock prices in the direction in wanted. Stein pointed to a paper about what would happen if a bank's losses were so great it had to cannibalize its capital to survive and that such an event would bring down the heavily interconnected market. Stein called the paper "not a serious overview of the situation." He also claimed (in August of 2007) that "the stock market is cheap on a price-earnings basis, profits are fabulous... and in the long run, both here and abroad, stocks are a lovely place to be," and in April of 2008 said, "as a matter of definition, we simply cannot be in a recession at all." Accuracy and insight are not requirements to be a New York Times columnist, I take it.

As an economist, a pitchman, and an ideologue, Ben Stein will simply go down in history as one of the Stupidest Men Alive.

In this case, I'm perfectly happy to be one of the "sick people" cheering as the SS Ben Stein goes down, flaming, with no desert island in sight.

I had been ambivalent about the Lucy exhibit from the beginning. I was one of those people who signed the petition last year begging the University of Houston to cancel the Lucy tour on the grounds that Lucy was a research specimen too fragile and too rare to have wandering the world. I know that museum-quality shippers are the best in the business, but accidents happen. The petitioners (PZ Myers among them) have reversed themselves on any boycotts because the exhibition was doing so poorly we feared it would send a signal to museums around the world that science displays were not financially viable. So off we went.

After picking up Kouryou-chan from her dance class, the three of us (Yamaraashi-chan was at her mother's and had indicated she wasn't interested anyway) stopped for a quick teriyaki dinner and then off to the museum. The weather outside was very cold, and waiting in line for 15 minutes was an exercise in staying warm. The line was quite long, and the elderly gentleman in front of us joked about how Kouryou-chan was not much bigger than Lucy herself.

The Empire of Auxum

What they don't emphasize in much of the material is the deal made between the government of Ethiopia, which owns Lucy, and the University of Houston: in order to get Lucy into the exhibit, at least half the exhibit had to be on the history and culture of Ethiopia. This annoyed Omaha, but to tell the truth I was fascinated by it. I'd only barely ever heard of The Auxum Empire before, although contemporaries of it describe is being as large, as educated, and as influential over its region as Imperial China or Imperial Rome. Reading up on the history, I become even more impressed, so much so that I strongly suspect it has disappeared from the mainstream historical memory (when was the last The History Channel did a show on it?) because, in case we forgot, those people were black. (A search of Discovery.com shows that the only mentions of Auxum are in relation to their claim to have the original Ark of the Covenant. Paging Doctor Jones...)

Minor parenting fail

Kouryou-chan wandered through the exhibit with a sketchbook in hand, drawing what she could. I saw another woman in her mid-20s doing the same thing, and introduced her and Kouryou-chan. My intent was to validate to Kouryou-chan what she was doing; instead, she became distraught that her drawings weren't nearly as good. She kept at it with our encouragement, but some of the fire had gone out of her.

An interesting attribution

There was a section on the religions of Ethiopia, and one display caught my eye. It was a panel on Ge'ez, the written language of worship used through Ethiopia. The audio portion was from a university professor, but the image of a page of Ge'ez had this attribution on the bottom of it: Written Ge'ez sample provided by Wikipedia. That's an interesting attribution.

AD and BC vs. CE and BCE

As I walked through the section on Ethiopian Christianity, I heard three women talking, and one of them said "A lot of these say CE. Those back there said BCE. What does that mean?" I interrupted to explain that they meant "Common Era" and "Before the Common Era," and were the same as "AD" and "BC." Archaeologists use CE and BCE these days mostly because Jewish and Islamic antiquarians preferred the religiously neutral terms to the Christianity-oriented Anno Domini. "Oh," said one woman with a bit of a huff, "It's all just political correctness."

I couldn't disagree with her.

The Paleoanthropology part

We made our into the Paleoanthropology section. There was a woman from the center there with the unenviable task of explaining how morphology lets us understand and place the bones found during evolutionary history. The questions were coming from an older couple who didn't seem to grasp both the undirectness of the process and the sheer idea of deep time.

After hearing and reading a brief discussion of the methods of paleoanthropology, we walked up a broad, darkened ramp to the Lucy exhibit proper, and in the middle of the ramp, each under its own light, was a skull. Each skull was from a different ancestor, showing where we had pieces to fit into the puzzle and where we had reconstructed the skull from the best available evidence. The skull of Heidelbergensis was especially menacing with its almost human shape but for the emphasized, almost angry brow. Striation from the fossilization process made it seem even more dangerous.

We gots Hobbitses

At the midpoint of the ramp it turned back toward the secure room, and on the wall against the back of the landing was a display of the best tree of descent we had for genus Homo. I pointed to the display on the right and pointed out Homo florensis, telling Kouryou-chan "Those are Hobbits."

"They are?" she said, her eyes going wide. Omaha has been reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to Kouryou-chan for some weeks now. I explained that florensis was an offshoot of human descent that had died out half a million years ago, but the examples we had of them were short and stout, so the researchers nicknamed them "Hobbits." They weren't really, of course, but that was the nickname that had stuck.

The Lucy Room

We then went into the Lucy room. This was a round room with two guards in it to let you know they were serious about protecting her. Three-quarters of the wall had been dedicated to a massive mural showing humanity's slow emergence from primitive apes all the way up to H. sapiens. In the center a box held what remained of Lucy, and two upright reconstructions, one showing the bones in relative positions, the other a complete reconstruction showing a best-guess as to what Lucy might have looked like.

Kouryou-chan asked to be picked up so she could be toe-to-toe with Lucy. "She is smaller than I am!" she said, and immediately wrote that down.

A group of men had formed around the Lucy box itself, and were discussing the features that caused scientists to believe she stood upright. One they missed was the muscle grooves on the pelvis itself, which indicated that it was used for balancing and standing, not just for powered forward locomotion, as we find on a chimp. There was an animated display downstairs showing just that, and I even mimed the difference. "Must have missed that," the younger guy said. It was actually a fun kind of conversation.

There really isn't all that much to Lucy herself. A handful of bones reverently laid out in a box barely four feet long. They're fascinating in the way all very old things like this are fascinating, a glimpse of our past, but I needed a concrete, founded context it which to make sense of it all, and it was the surrounding materials, the explanations, the way evidence and conjecture fit together affirmatively, that made the whole display interesting. Not the bones themselves.

One of the things that makes as show like this fun is eavesdropping on other conversations. I listened to two women talking about the Lucy display and a friend of theirs whom they couldn't convince to come. "She's very religious," one said. "We were playing Apples-to-Apples, and when the greet card read 'Things That Don't Exist,' she put down 'Fossils.' I think... I think she knows they do exist, but she can't figure out how to fit God into that knowledge so she has to, I think, act like they don't."

One thing I liked most about the the "emergence of man" display was the way it worded the section on modern man. Written with a wry tone as if telling space aliens about us, it mentioned that Homo sapiens has occupied nearly its entire globe and may even sometimes be found in orbit. "This species," it went on to say, "has developed to the point where it has its own specialists, called paleonanthropologists, who look back on its history and attempt to discern its own past. It is the only species on Earth to do so." The last panel contained a mirror.

Kouryou-chan was exhausted, her feet aching and tired, by the time we got back to the car. It was already past her bedtime. All in all, the trip was completely worth the time and money.

Washington State has a lively public initiative process. Below is the list of state intiatives, as worded on the Secretary of State's website, filed in the current electoral season. Look at it closely and tell me if you see something amiss:

• Initiative 1032 concerns state, county and city revenue.
• Initiative 1033 concerns state, county and city revenue.
• Initiative 1035 concerns state, county and city revenue.
• Initiative 1040 concerns a supreme ruler of the universe.
• Initiative 1041 concerns driver instruction permit requirements.
• Initiative 1042 concerns charges relating to motor vehicles.
• Initiative 1044 concerns taxes on business receipts.
• Initiative 1045 concerns a state-run health insurance program.
• Initiative 1046 concerns safety equipment.

Yeah, okay, I bolded it for you. You have to read it all, though, 'cause initiative author Kimberlie Struiksma has written quite a hoot! Here's a taste:

Our government has been instituted among us, with our consent, for the purpose of protecting and maintaining our liberties. According to the founding documents of our democratic society, our liberties are true and valid because they are endowed by a higher power. By contending that a higher power does not exist, our government removes the source of, invalidates, and consequently denies the people of the United States our liberty. Thus, by denying the existence of a higher power our government defeats its purpose. It is therefore unconstitutional for the government, as opposed to individual citizens, of the state of washing to deny or attempt to refute the existence of a Creator, the one responsible for Blessing us with liberty, the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.
...
Respecting no establishment of religion, yet with respect to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, whose existence has been declared in the preamble to the Constitution of the state of Washington, the state shall make no appropriation for nor apply any public moneys or property in support of anything, specifically including but not limited to, any display, exercise, instruction, textbook, scientific endeavor, circulated document, or research project which denies or attempts to refute the existence of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

Yeah, this one would never survive judicial review. I'm really surprised that the Discovery Institute isn't all over this like blowflies in a cowfield. I mean, one of her targets is evolutionary biology. See that entry above about "scientific endeavors?":

"Scientific endeavor" means any act, idea, theory, intervention, conference, organization having to do with science.

It's like Intelligent Design gold!

Apparently, though, her attempt to ban evolution, which is one of her explicit goals, is at odds with her mentor, Tom Hoyle of the "Bible and Science Ministries," a well-known creation science outlet. He said in an interview on the topic: "You don't have to mention God, you can simply emphasize the fact that wow, nature is awesome, it's very well designed and that macroevolution is an insufficient mechanism to explain all this stuff." Every time someone says "macroevolution," you have to ask him what that means: it's not a term that biologists use very often, because there's no working definition that draws a clear distinction. As for "very well designed," I have to wonder if Hoyle has ever had tendonitis, hemorrhoids, or allergies.

PZ Myers recently attended a symposium on "Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin," which sounds kinda neat. At the pro-Intelligent Design website "Evolution News and Views," creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor reacted with a screed entitled, "Is PZ Myers Attending a Conference on Eugenics?" Egnor has exactly zero evidence that anything on eugenics was presented on the symposium, and nothing vaguely like it appears on the schedule; this is just another unfair attempt by Egnor to once again hang the faux anvil of eugenics around Darwin's neck, something he's done fairly regularly.

But PZ, having an ego the size of a planet, spends his time focused on what Egnor said about him and eugenics, and in the process misses the absolutely insane 'graf at the bottom:

Fairy tales about the origin of illnesses and adaptations are worthless to medicine. The materialistic philosophical basis for Darwinism and the inference that humans evolved by natural selection have been catastrophic to medicine. Any genuine insight claimed by Darwinists, such as the dynamics of antibiotic resistance or of heterozygote advantage in such diseases as sickle cell anemia and malaria, is really gained by the relevant basic sciences.

If there's any evidence than an alternative worldview to one of straightforward materialism leads to bizarre conclusions, Egnor's is it. How are we going to understand the mechanism of adaptation that leads to the emergence of new infections if we have to consider a constant, deliberate interference by conscious mechanisms?

The basic consequence of Egnor's dismissal of human evolution by natural selection is this: we have no reason to believe animal studies are worth anything. If common descent with modification by natural selection is not valid, then any commonalities we have with any other species is pure coincidence. Animal models work because... well, just because. We don't know why they work.

Egnor's dismissal leads us to this dismal conclusion: we are subject to infection and disease because some conscious demonic influence is constantly at work, making diseases nastier and more effective.

At least one creationist has been honest enough to admit this: Michael Behe, in his latest book, actually touts malaria as being too "exquisite" to have evolved, and therefore all of the suffering malaria inflicts on human beings is proof that an "intelligent designer" exists.

For Behe and Egnor, the designer is wicked beyond redemption.

Interesting. The Discovery Institute has stopped allowing people into their offices by default. As of last week, you must now ring the intercom and have the secretary buzz you in. I wonder why. I can't imagine that Expelled generates that much controversy; mostly we're just laughing at how inept it all is.