Faith in the facts

I keep waiting for a day to go by in which someone in the Trump administration doesn't say something completely batshit insane.

The latest person to try to reach the summit of Mount Lunacy is Dr. Mark Green, nominee for Army Secretary, who apparently got his Ph.D. from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.  Because besides such bizarre statements as "the government exists... to crush evil," particularly evil in the form of transgender people who are just looking for a quiet place to pee, Green has gone on record as saying that he not only doesn't accept evolution, he doesn't believe in...

... the Theory of Relativity.

In a speech that focused not on what he would do in his role as Army Secretary, but on The Universe According To Mark Green, he said, "The theory of relativity is a theory and some people accept it, but that requires somewhat of a degree of faith."

No.  No, no, no.  Faith is exactly what it doesn't take.  Although religious folks will probably disagree with me on this definition, faith is essentially believing in stuff for which you have no evidence; and as such, I've never really understood the distinction between "faith" and "delusion."  All that it takes to accept the Theory of Relativity is understanding the evidence that has been amassed in its favor.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And at this point, the evidence is overwhelming.  Given its staggering conclusions -- weirdness like time dilation, the speed of light being the ultimate universal speed limit, and warped space -- it is understandable that after it was published, scientists wanted to make sure that Einstein was right.  So they immediately began designing experiments to test Einstein's theoretical predictions.

Needless to say, every single one of the experiments has supported that Einstein was 100% correct.  Every time there's some sort of suspected glitch -- like six years ago, when physicists at CERN thought they had detected a faster-than-light neutrino -- it's turned out to be an experimental error or an uncontrolled variable.  At this point, media should simply have a one-click method for punching in the headline "EINSTEIN VINDICATED AGAIN" whenever this sort of thing happens.

What is funniest about all of this is that the technology Green would be overseeing, as Army Secretary, includes SatNav guidance systems that use GPS coordinates -- which have to take relativistic effects into account.  If you decide that you "don't have enough faith" to accept relativity, your navigational systems will gradually drift out of sync with the Earth (i.e., with reality), and your multi-million-dollar tanks will end up driving directly off of cliffs.

So you need exactly zero faith to accept relativity.  Or evolution, or cosmology, or plate tectonics, or radioisotope dating, or any of the other scientifically sound models that Green and his ilk tend to jettison.  All you need to do is to take the time to learn some science.  What does take faith, however, is accepting that anyone who has as little knowledge of the real world as Mark Green does has any business running an entire branch of the military.

Anyhow, there you have it: our "alternative fact" of the day.  It's almost as good as the "alternative fact" of the day before, which came straight from Dear Leader Trump, to wit: Andrew Jackson was a good guy with a "big heart" who "was really angry about what he saw happening with the Civil War."  Oh, and the Civil War could "have all been worked out," and that "people don't ask the question" about why the Civil War started.

Except, of course, for the thousands of historians who have been writing about the causes of the Civil War for decades.  And Andrew "Big Heart" Jackson was responsible for the forced deportation of fifteen thousand Native Americans from their ancestral homes, in one of the biggest forced relocations ever perpetrated, and in which a quarter of them died of disease, starvation, and exposure.

Oh, yeah, and I don't think Jackson was particularly angry about the Civil War, given that he died sixteen years before it started.

So it'd be nice if our leaders would stop saying things that turn the United States into a world-wide laughingstock.  I'm planning on going to Ecuador this summer, and I'd really like it if I don't have to tell the Ecuadorians I meet that just because I'm an American doesn't mean I'm an ignorant, raving loon.  Thank you.

Andrew Jackson was half African, and other urban legends

Did you know that daddy-long-legs have an incredibly poisonous venom, so poisonous that they'd be the most deadly spider in the world, except their mandibles are so weak that they can't pierce human skin and inject it into you?

Did you know that you shouldn't throw rice at weddings, because birds will eat it, and then it will swell up in their stomachs and their stomachs will rupture and it will kill them?

Well, if you answered "No," good, because as it turns out, neither of these is true.  The first one still makes the rounds despite its being entirely false -- not only did Mythbusters debunk it, but technically, daddy-long-legs aren't even true spiders (they belong to an arachnid group called "harvestmen").  As far as the birds, if that were true, it would make it hard to explain why there are a number of bird species who are major pests in rice fields -- they are presumably not taking the rice they steal home and cooking it in tiny rice pots before serving.

These old-wives'-tales, or urban legends, or whatever you want to call them, are still out there, and I still periodically get asked about them by students.  But we have one advantage, these days, as compared to when I was young -- we now have the internet as a giant fact-checking device.

I've done a good bit of railing against the internet as being a conduit for bullshit, but used properly, it does have one truly wonderful function; if you have access to a computer, you can get nearly instantaneous access to information for the purpose of verifying claims.  For example, take a look at the following website, "The Seven Black Presidents Before Obama," which (despite being written in 2008) is still circulating today.  (In fact, I just saw it for the first time two days ago as a Facebook post.)

In case you don't feel like reading it, the gist is that there were seven earlier US Presidents -- Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower, and a pre-George-Washington guy who was supposedly the first actual president, a gentleman named John Hanson -- who had significant amounts of African ancestry.  And we're not just talking about one African ancestor way back; the site claims that Andrew Jackson, for example, was the son of an Irish woman by an African American father.

Well, the whole thing set my skepti-senses ringing immediately.  For one thing, among the "evidence" given (if I can dignify it by that name) is that Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor," and we all know that "Moor" is an old name for North Africans.  (If that's the way it worked, I suppose President Bush was descended from a hedgerow.)  Now, if this had been handed around thirty years ago, and you doubted it, your only recourse would have been a painstaking search through the encyclopedia, or, failing that, a trip to the library.  As for me, it took me a grand total of fifteen seconds to find this page -- wherein each of the claims is analyzed, to be summed up as follows:  "Historians' and biographers' studies of these presidents have not supported such claims, nor have the claims above been peer-reviewed.  They are generally ignored by scholars."  (They also note that Coolidge's mother's maiden name, Moor, can not only mean "dark or swarthy," but also refers to a geographical feature common in the British Isles, and that there are tens of thousands of people named Moor(e) who aren't of African descent.)

The whole John Hanson thing, by the way, seems to be an outright fabrication that conflates John Hanson of Maryland (a Caucasian who was the president of the Continental Congress during the American Revolution) with a John Hanson who was an African American who went to Liberia in the 1800s and served as a senator there.  The two were (obviously) different men.  [Source]

So, the bottom lines is that we have even less excuse these days for (1) not checking what we're told, and (2) believing bullshit.  Now, that's not to say that there isn't lots of bullshit out there on the internet.  For example, 95% of the nonsense I rail about daily on this blog comes from the 'web.  But there's an easy solution; the simplest way to find the good stuff is to append the word "skeptic" or "debunk" after what you're searching for on Google.  That's what I did with the "Black Presidents" thing -- I just Googled "Seven Black Presidents Before Obama Debunk" and it brought up the page I linked above (and also a Snopes.com page that had basically the same information).

Anyhow, that's my musings on critical thinking for today.  It looks like, in fact, Barack Obama really is the first African-American president, unless you count the fact that in reality we're all from Africa if you go back far enough.  It did get me thinking, though, that what'll be even more interesting is if the College of Cardinals selects an African pope, which is looking like a possibility.  Wouldn't it be cool to have the Catholic Church not run by an old, homophobic, bigoted white guy?  An old, homophobic, bigoted black guy would be at least a step in the right direction.