The dinosaur deniers

So now apparently it's a thing amongst the devoutly religious not only to believe that evolution is false, but that dinosaurs never existed.

I'm not making this up.  According to Chris Matyszczyk over at CNet, there's a whole movement within Christian fundamentalism to "disprove the existence of dinosaurs," and, especially, to stop children from being exposed to information about them.

There's a group, apparently, called Christians Against Dinosaurs, and Matyszczyk investigated them, initially thinking that they had to be some sort of The Onion-esque satire group.  Sadly, Matyszczyk found that they're real.  And serious.

"I'm getting sick and tired of dinosaurs being forced on our children," said one member of Christians Against Dinosaurs in an online video you can watch on the above link if you can stand faceplanting multiple times.  "I for one do not want my children being taught lies. Did you know that nobody had even heard of dinosaurs before the 1800s, when they were invented by curio-hungry Victorians?...  Dinosaurs are a very bad example for children.  At my children's school, several children were left in tears after one of their classmates (who had evidently been exposed to dinosaurs), became bestially-minded and ran around the classroom roaring and pretending to be a dinosaur.  Then he bit three children on the face."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The invention of dinosaur fossils by "curio-hungry Victorians" would have come as a great shock to 3rd century Chinese historian Chang Qu, who describes the discovery of what he called "dragon bones" at a site that would later prove to be a rich paleontological site of Jurassic-era fossils.  Equally shocked would have been 17th-century British naturalist Robert Plot, who described the fossilized femur of a Megalosaurus in his book The Natural History of Oxfordshire.

Sadly, though, Christians Against Dinosaurs is not some kind of isolated wacko splinter group.  There's a whole movement afoot to discredit all fossils.  Consider the post over at Clues Forum entitled "The (Non-religious) Dinosaur Hoax Question," wherein we find out that because fossils are "rock in rock," the paleontologists are simply taking blocks of rock and carving them into whatever shape they want, and then saying, "Look!  A fossil!"  Here's a sample:

Fossils, then, are basically bones that have turned into a sort of rock. They are rocks that mimic the form of a bone that is now long gone. Many of the dino bones on display in museums are bone-shaped rocks essentially. The problem I have with this is that, according to many cable TV “science” shows I have watched over the years, these dinosaur fossils are often found embedded in rock. So, we're talking about digging out rocks imbedded in rock and we must trust that those who prepared these fossils for display have correctly carved away the non-bone rock from the real bone rock. But, in our hoax-filled world of fake science, doesn't this rock-in-rock situation make it rather easy for creative interpretations of what the animal really looked like? And, once a particular animal is “approved” by the gods of the scientific community, wouldn't all subsequent representations of that same animal have to conform with that standard?

I think what bothers me most about this is the phrase "our hoax-filled world of fake science."  Does this guy really think that scientists are getting grants to sit around making shit up?  And because all of the other scientists are in on it, no one blows the whistle?

Oh, and then the guy does this whole thing about how the discovery of fossilized Velociraptor claws are suspect because they look "just like bear claws."  Can I just ask one question?

Wouldn't you expect bear claws and Velociraptor claws to be similarly-shaped, because otherwise they wouldn't be called "claws"?

The most mind-blowing thing about this is how simple it would be to destroy the whole "argument," if this guy was really interested in finding out answers.  All he'd have to do is two things: (1) volunteer to go on a paleontological dig, and (2) talk to any scientist about how peer review is done.  But no, that's apparently too much to ask.

Much easier to sit at home talking out of your ass about "non-bone rock and real bone rock."

And then, then, the guy has the audacity to refer to himself as "skeptical."  This use of the word (as in "climate change skeptic") just makes me want to punch a wall.  "Skeptical" does not mean "someone who disbelieves in random stuff."  It means "keeping your mind open until sufficient evidence is obtained."

And don't even get me started about how the author calls his disbelief-o-thon a "theory."

But back to Christians Against Dinosaurs.  The group has a Facebook page, wherein we are told, "We all know God never created dinosaurs, and its great to have a place we can all celebrate this... I only hope that it serves as an outlet for others too afraid to speak out about their doubts in the field of paleontology.  It is healthy to question the world around us and not just take the word of science as gospel."

The last sentence of which should win some kind of Unintentional Irony Award.

Oh, yeah, and on the Facebook page we also find out that "The Museum Industry Complex are [sic] ruthless."  The rest of us, apparently, are simply shills for the Paleontological Mafia.  Jack Horner, then, would be the Don Corleone of the dinosaur world, and if we try to interfere with his research, we stand a good chance of waking up with the severed head of a T. rex in our bed.

So anyway.  The latest in the world of reality denial; don't argue that extinct species died in the Great Flood, argue that they never existed in the first place.  I wonder what's next?  Maybe deciding that all of us science-types don't exist, either.  The whole world is populated by a few thousand holy people, and everything else is imaginary, placed there by Satan to trip up the true believers.

If you're going to deny reality, hell, why not go all the way?

Blocking the paradigm shift

Yesterday, something rather unusual happened; I left an educational staff development day without feeling like I needed to kick a small innocent furry woodland animal out of sheer frustration.

Usually, calling these things "a waste of time" is a tremendous understatement, but in yesterday's installment we were given a talk by Dr. Willard Daggett, the CEO of the International Center for Leadership in Education, and I left with a great many things to think about.

Daggett himself has not been immune from controversy, something about which you can form your own opinions after an easy Google search.  But that's not what I want to look at here.  His talk yesterday centered around moving from what he calls the "Urgent Issues" -- things like the Common Core Standards, APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review, the "teacher grading" system), state-mandated standardized tests, and budget cuts -- to looking at what most of us think of as the second-tier "Important Issues."

Those "Important Issues," Daggett says, are the ones that should be moved to the front of the line.  They include: the increasing gap between what schools do and what colleges and business leaders want; the rate at which colleges report students underperforming, needing remediation, and dropping out before graduating; and competition in the global marketplace with college graduates in technical fields who are better educated than the ones that the United States is producing.

In dealing with all of these, Daggett says, educators have been more reactive than proactive.  We keep doing things the same old way, even if the "same old way" isn't working so well.  We have ignored the research about how children learn, about what makes the content rigorous and relevant, about how to increase literacy and mathematical ability.

But the most important thing he said, in my mind, was when he started talking about how we teach our content areas as a disconnected series of facts.  I'm guilty of this myself; I've heard that in an introductory biology class, students learn more new vocabulary than they do in the first year of a foreign language.  We're shy on application and problem solving, and focus instead on teaching (and testing students on) a fact salad that has little connection to the real world.

It's time, he told us, to look at other ways of doing what we do.

I found myself unable to argue with much of what he said.  And this is despite the reputation I have for being something of an opinionated gadfly.  He showed a slide that he said represented how people feel who propose making major changes to schools:

The cat, of course, is the one who is proposing the changes, and the line of German Shepherds the school staff.  He used his laser pointer to point out the dog in the middle who looks like he's about to run out and eat the cat for dinner, and said, "And I'm sure that everyone in this room knows which faculty member's face should be on that dog."  At which point more than one of my colleagues looked in my direction.

So as I said, it's a minor wonder that I didn't get angry.  Because much of what he was saying is a stinging indictment of what I've spent the last 28 years doing, and Dr. Daggett had facts and statistics to bolster his contentions.

But here's the problem, something that I mentioned to him during a break, and for which he didn't have a very good answer.

How can teachers, administrators, and school boards institute a major paradigm shift when (1) students and teachers are still being evaluated on the same old metric of regurgitation-based standardized tests, and (2) legislators are still tying the funding of schools to students' scores on those tests?

Most of us recognized the problem before yesterday; the reason that Dr. Daggett's speech didn't raise more hackles is that the majority of the people in the room already know the scope of the problem (even if they may not have known the specifics he brought up).  But we're caught between knowing that the world is changing, and that we're not meeting student needs very well, and a leadership that demands that we assess student achievement the same way we've been doing for the past fifty years.

It's not the teachers who are blocking the paradigm shift.  It's the people in the State Department of Education who are designing all of the assessments, and the state legislature that is holding the purse strings.

But it was one of the last things he said that made me sit up and frown a little.  He told a personal anecdote about a family member who had had emergency surgery for a life-threatening injury, and compared the way surgeons are treated in hospitals with the way teachers are treated in schools.  "Teachers," he concluded, "are the equivalent of the front-line surgeons in hospitals.  We should treat teachers like surgeons."

All well and good to say.  We have a governor here in New York State who trusts teachers so little that we're not even allowed to grade our own final exams, because of worry that we'll cheat.  We have to fight tooth and nail for every pay increase we get, while the state aid that pays our salaries is cut every year, and the governor has mandated a property tax cap so that school boards couldn't even raise the tax levy if they wanted to.  We're at the whim of a Board of Regents that is so out of touch with what is happening in schools that they have publicly stated that standardized test scores should comprise 50% of a teacher's final "grade," and that if the teacher doesn't meet the benchmark on that 50%, the other 50% -- evaluation by administrators, classroom visits, and so on -- doesn't matter.

Hell, they don't even trust the administrators.  The latest proposal is to have classroom observations done by outside evaluators, to keep the principals from cheating.

Treat us like surgeons?  We're so far from that level of respect and (dare I mention it) salary that the comparison almost made me laugh out loud.  The distrust and disrespect current government leaders have for the teaching profession, and the resultant stress on teachers, is one major reason why we're hemorrhaging talent -- the best and brightest are finding other careers.  Consider, for example, the loss of Stacie Starr, winner of a 2014 Teacher of the Year award in Ohio, who in her resignation speech said, "I can’t do it anymore, not in this ‘drill ‘em and kill ‘em’ atmosphere.  I don’t think anyone understands that in this environment if your child cannot quickly grasp material, study like a robot and pass all of these tests, they will not survive."

So while I thought Dr. Daggett had some good ideas, we were left with no real direction for solutions.  The situation won't change until the leadership does, and I don't see that happening any time soon.  Until then, we're doing just what the State Departments of Education are mandating that the children do; focusing on disconnected details, and avoiding any application of what we know to the real world.

A glowing report from Georgia

It may sound biased of me, but I think one thing should be an ironclad requirement for holding public office: an adequate understanding of science.

Yes, I know that politics doesn't always connect directly to science.  But I would respectfully submit that science as a means of knowledge, as a way of sorting fact from fiction, is such a critical capacity that no leader should be deficient in it.  Science teaches you a protocol for understanding evidence-based inference, which then can be applied to any area you like.

Add that to the fact that there are realms of policymaking that require an explicit understanding of science -- environmental, medical, and educational policy come to mind -- and this gives us a powerful reason to expect that our elected officials understand not only how science is done, but to have a basic grasp of its fundamental rules.

Instead, we have people like Georgia State RepresentativeTom Kirby (R-Loganville).

Kirby just introduced a bill into the Georgia House of Representatives that is specifically to prevent anyone from creating a glow-in-the-dark human/jellyfish hybrid.  Because evidently that's a thing that they do, down there in Georgia.  And not only do they do it, they do it often enough that Representative Kirby wants a law passed to put an end to the practice.

"We in Georgia are taking the lead on this issue," Kirby states on his website.  "Human life at all stages is precious including as an embryo.  We need to get out in front of the science and technology, before it becomes something no one wants.  The mixing of Human Embryos with Jellyfish cells to create a glow in the dark human, we say not in Georgia.  This bill is about protecting Human Life while maintaining good, valid research that does not destroy life."

What could have precipitated this?

My guess is that someone told Representative Kirby that researchers had experimented with inserting a gene for a jellyfish fluorescence protein into the embryos of cats, creating kittens with phosphorescent skin.

Glow kitties [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then, Kirby asked one of his aides, "But... could they do this with human embryos?"  And the aide said, "It's possible."  And Kirby said, "We've got to put a stop to this!"

What bugs me about this is that not only does Representative Kirby apparently have little understanding of how the process works (it has nothing to do with "mixing embryos with jellyfish cells"), he doesn't understand the point of making the glow cats in the first place.  It wasn't just to create demonic-looking cats (can you imagine waking up at night to see one of those staring at you?).  It also wasn't because scientists were thinking, "Ha ha!  Now we can create an army of Glowing Humans that will take over the world!"

The reason this research was done was primarily medical.  The problem with genetic modification is getting an inserted gene to express at the right time and place; so learning how to control the process, generating an animal that not only expressed the glowing protein, but expressed it in sufficient quantities and in one tissue only (the skin), showed that we can potentially do analogous procedures in humans.

Note that I say "analogous," not "identical."  This kind of targeted gene therapy could eliminate protein-deficiency genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency), and hemophilia.  It works on the same principle; insert the gene into human cells, along with a robust tissue-specific promoter that allows the gene to turn on in the right tissue type.  If all goes well, we could see life-threatening genetic disorders not simply treated, but eliminated.

Of course, I doubt that Representative Kirby understands that.  Anyone who is at the "human-jellyfish hybrid" stage of science comprehension is light years away from getting even the basics of how genetic research works.  

And Kirby himself admitted he didn't know what the hell he was talking about.  "I've had people tell me it is [possible], but I haven't verified that for sure," he told reporters.  "It's time we either get in front of it, or we're going to be chasing our tails."

Can I just ask you one question, Representative Kirby?  Why the fuck would you propose a bill regarding something you "haven't verified" and clearly don't have sufficient IQ to understand?

But members of Congress seldom let those sorts of considerations stand in their way.  So now we have a bill on the floor of congress in Georgia to prevent scientists from creating something that (1) they didn't intend to create anyhow, and (2) is impossible to do in the way the bill describes.  Good use of our policymakers' time and taxpayer dollars, isn't it?

I know it must be hard to be an elected official.  It's not only a job I would never want, but one for which I am clearly not qualified.  But I do have one thing going for me; when I don't know what I'm talking about, I generally shut the hell up.  

Not so, apparently, if you're in politics.  In politics, you're allowed to have an opinion about everything, whether or not you understand it.  And then you can use that opinion to craft legislation.  Once more convincing me of the necessity of demanding, as a nation, that our leaders have at least a basic comprehension of science before they start interfering with laws that govern how it's done.

Atheism, anti-theism, and murder

There's this thing called the No True Scotsman fallacy.  In its more innocent forms, it manifests as a redefinition of terms if you're challenged, to obviate the possibility of your being called out as wrong.  "That's not what I meant, here's what I meant," is the message.

A more sinister form occurs when the term you're redefining has to do with ethnic, political, or religious identification.  It's this use that gives the fallacy its name; "No true Scotsman would do such a thing!" And we're seeing it right now over and over among atheists, who are struggling to understand why One Of Our Own killed three young Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, the three Chapel Hill victims [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Craig Stephen Hicks, now under arrest for the murders, calls himself an "anti-theist," a term that many atheists relish.  They not only disbelieve in god themselves, they are actively against religion, and would prefer it if religious beliefs vanished entirely.  Hicks's Facebook posts ask questions such as "why radical Christians and radical Muslims are so opposed to each others’ influence when they agree about so many ideological issues?"  He has posted and tweeted texts and pictures mocking religion, and is a fan of The Atheist Experience and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

It's easy enough to say that psychopathy does not respect lines of belief, nationality, or ethnicity, and that's true enough.  But if that's all we say -- if we call Hicks a psychopath and then turn our attention elsewhere -- we've accepted a facile explanation, and (more importantly) lost an opportunity for self-reflection.

The truth of the matter is, atheists and anti-theists are sometimes vicious and hateful in their diatribes against religion, blurring the lines between railing against the beliefs and demonizing the believers.  Consider the following quotes:

Sam Harris: "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death." 

Richard Dawkins: "[I] often say Islam is the greatest force for evil today." 

Lawrence Krauss: "Maybe these odious religious thugs [Islamic religious leaders in London] will get their comeuppance?" 

Christopher Hitchens: "The death toll [in the Middle East] is not nearly high enough... too many [jihadists] have escaped."

Now, I've deliberately taken these quotes out of context, but that's to illustrate part of the problem; when we speak or write publicly, that's going to happen.  It is absolutely critical for public figures to be as careful as humanly possible, because there are people reading our words, and reading into our words -- and then acting on them.

I still admire people like Harris, Dawkins, Krauss, and Hitchens for their unflinching demand that the tenets of religion be questioned and its hegemony no longer accepted as a given.  But words have consequences, and when someone like Craig Hicks reads quotes like the above, and decides that the upshot is that Muslims everywhere deserve death, it is incumbent upon us not to shrug it away, but to do some serious self-analysis.

People are complex animals, and there are some who use their religious beliefs to perpetrate actions that are truly evil.  ("Jihadi John" comes to mind, the British-accented ISIS member who has been filmed beheading innocent captives.)  Most of us, though, are not that one-sided.  We have our religious beliefs (or lack of them), and they incite us to some good actions, some bad actions, and a lot that are neutral.  Most of the time we act how we act for reasons that have nothing to do with our opinion about the existence of a deity.  Most importantly, we all come to our understanding of how the universe works in our own way; problems crop up only when people start demanding that everyone take the same path at the same time.

And truthfully, even as a diehard atheist myself, I have a hard time convincing myself that the world would be a better place if religion had never existed.  Yes, I know about all of the evils perpetrated in its name.  But would we really be better off without Bach's Mass in B Minor and Tallis's Spem in Alium?  Would the world be as beautiful without Yorkminster, Rouen Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral?  Would it have been better if the temples at Angkor Wat and Karnak and Tikal and Xochicalco had never been built?  Is the comfort and solace that many derive from their religious beliefs to be dismissed as inconsequential?

More to the point, if I object to the religious trying to force their beliefs on me, why should I have the right to eradicate the beliefs of others?

These are not easy questions to answer.  And whether Hicks was acting out of pure psychopathy, or because he took various anti-theists' words about the eradication of religion as a literal command, or for some other reason entirely, is perhaps impossible to determine.  One thing is clear, however; if Hicks's irreligion was the motive for his murder of three innocent young people, that action is just as morally reprehensible as Jihadi John's use of his religion to justify the murders he's committed.

What is equally clear, however, is that we atheists have just as much of a responsibility to be careful about how we speak and write as the religious do.  And taking the disingenuous route of saying that Craig Stephen Hicks is "No True Atheist" is a complete cop-out.

Note:  Deah Barakat, one of Hicks' victims, had begun a charity to pay for dental care for Middle Eastern refugees.  If you want to donate to his charity as a way of honoring his memory and that of his wife and her sister who were slain with him, here's the link.

Bias, served warm

Of all of the logical fallacies, the most completely maddening one is confirmation bias.

This term refers to the tendency of people to accept minimal or flawed evidence without question if it supports what they already believed to be true.  And the "Ha ha, see, I told you I was right" attitude it engenders makes me want to punch a wall.  I suppose I should be more forgiving, because we're all prone to it, in some measure; we all have our preconceived notions, our unexamined biases.

But when it starts driving global science policy, it's a much, much bigger problem.

Take the piece by Christopher Booker in The Telegraph that appeared last Friday, called "The Fiddling With Temperature Data is the Biggest Scientific Scandal Ever."  In it, Booker calls into question the temperature data that scientists are using to support a near-universal consensus on global climate change.

Booker writes:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified... 

...(Paul) Homewood (of the blog Not A Lot Of People Know That) checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three.  In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).  They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken.  Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

In other words: the scientists are manipulating the data to create a global warming panic (for no apparent reason I can see), and you shouldn't trust the data itself, because it's already been fudged:

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

This article has sorted people neatly into two camps.

I've already seen the Booker article posted several times on Twitter and Facebook, usually with a snide comment along the lines of, "See?  We told you that climate change wasn't real!"  The other half of the time it's posted along with commentary that is barely printable, by people who recognize that Booker is, to put not too fine a point on it, full of shit.

Here's how John Timmer, who unlike Christopher Booker actually has a Ph.D. in (and understands) science, deflated the "Biggest Scientific Scandal Ever" over at Ars Technica:

(T)he raw data from temperature measurements around the world aren't just dumped into global temperature reconstructions as-is. Instead, they're processed first. To the more conspiracy minded, you can replace "processed" with "fraudulently manipulated to make it look warmer." 

Why do they have to be processed at all? Because almost none of the records are continuous. Weather stations have moved, they've changed the time of day where the temperature-of-record is taken, and they've replaced old thermometers with more modern equipment. All of these events create discontinuities in the record of each location, and the processing is used to get things into alignment, creating a single, unified record.

Most importantly, does this processing reflect reality, or is it really a case of "suspicious one-way adjustments?"  Timmer writes:

Does it work? The team behind the Berkeley Earth project performed a different analysis in which they didn't process to create a single record and instead treated the discontinuities as breaks that defined separate temperature records. Their results were indistinguishable from the normal analysis... 

(P)eople like Booker (and the blogger whose work he's promoting) repeatedly try to take advantage of the public's limited attention to this topic. I happen to be aware of things like Berkeley Earth and the same arguments surfacing in 2013 simply because I covered them at the time and therefore read up on them in detail. The public won't have that knowledge, so Booker's claims can sound like a damaging revelation—and completely new. 

They're not. But I'll bet that if 2015 sets a temperature record, I'll be able to rerun this story with little more than the names changed.

But I'm sure Booker, who is a notorious climate change denier and who claims that "asbestos is as harmless as talcum powder" and that evolutionary biologists "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions," knows this.  It's not like such information isn't readily available.  I found Timmer's article simply by Googling "Booker global warming debunked."

Which means, of course, that Booker is being disingenuous at best, and lying outright at worst.

Map of summed worldwide temperature anomalies over the past 60 years.  Note the proportion of red to blue on this map.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But the most terrible part of the whole thing is, as Timmer points out, what it does to the perceptions of scientists by the general public.  The people who already tended to disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change, whether for reasons of political bias or because of ignorance of the science itself, now have another piece of ammunition to lob at any lawmaker who proposes trying to do something about it.  Confirmation bias here could well be devastating.

Because outside, the world is continuing to warm, the climate to destabilize, the environment to degrade.  2014 was (despite Booker's inaccuracy-ridden screed) the warmest year on record.  The jury isn't even out any more; the world is warming up, and human activities are the cause.  We have created a positive feedback loop with the environment, in the form of warming seas and warming tundra, which is releasing methane into the atmosphere, warming us further.  Some climate scientists think we've already passed the tipping point, so perhaps Booker and his ilk are right in saying that we shouldn't do anything about climate change -- not because it's nonexistent, but because it's already too late.

But I guess it all boils down to who you believe: a journalist with a degree in history (Booker) or the views of nearly all of the trained climatologists in the world.  And if that's even a choice, then we're talking about confirmation bias on a level that might itself set world records.

The loveliest of all was the unicorn

It is probably my own lack of tolerance, empathy, and compassion that makes me laugh out loud when I hear the "arguments" people use to support biblical literalism.

I mean, they can think what they want, right?  No amount of railing by the likes of me is going to rid the world of wacko counterfactual thinking, much as I'd like to live in my own fool's paradise in thinking I'm making a dent.  So why not just ignore 'em?

Of course, I can't, as you well know if you've been following this blog for very long.  The biblical literalists still have too powerful a voice in American politics to be dismissed as inconsequential.  It'd be nice if we were in a place where Bronze-Age mythology wasn't driving legislation and educational policy, but we're not there, yet.  That's why my laugh directed at two stories I ran across yesterday rings a little hollow.

In the first, we have Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, who despite her summa cum laude bachelor's degree in chemistry and a medical doctorate from Vanderbilt, believes in unicorns because the bible says they exist.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Apparently, since the bible mentions unicorns, to disbelieve in them is to "demean god's word."  She cites Isaiah 34:7 ("And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness"), a passage that I not only find funny because of its mention of a nonexistent animal, but because of the phrase "fat with fatness."  I think this is a pretty cool use of language, and one that we should emulate.  We should say that a cow is not just big, it's "big with bigness."  The night henceforth will be described as "dark with darkness."  The ocean is "wet with wetness."

But I digress.

Mitchell says that the unicorn could have existed because there are other one-horned animals, such as the rhinoceros and the narwhal.  (Yes, I know that the narwhal's spike is a tooth, not a horn.  Mitchell doesn't let facts intrude on her explanation, and neither should you.)  Then she goes on to say that the unicorn could have been the aurochs, an extinct species of wild ox.

But oxen have two horns, you're probably thinking.  Mitchell says that this can be explained because if you look at an ox from the side, it looks like it has only one horn.  There's archaeological evidence of this, in carvings of oxen from the side "on Ashurnasirpal II’s palace relief and Esarhaddon’s stone prism," and lo, those carvings show oxen in profile with only one horn visible, as hath been revealed by Dr. Mitchell.

This ox also hath wings, which may be a problem for Dr. Mitchell's argument.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You have to wonder how Dr. Mitchell would explain that the bible also says that bats are birds (Leviticus 11:13-19), that the Earth doesn't move (Psalms 93:1), and that in one place it says that men and women were created simultaneously (Genesis 1:27) and only a few verses later, it says that god made men first (Genesis 2:7).

I dunno.  Maybe the contradictions and inaccuracies look different if you look at them from the side.

The second story comes from our old friend Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, who has his knickers in a twist over a resolution in Congress to consider February 12 as "Darwin Day."  Ham, of course, thinks this is a bad idea, and has given a countersuggestion; let's call February 12 "Darwin Was Wrong Day:"

Secularists are becoming increasingly aggressive and intolerant in promoting their anti-God philosophy.  Evolutionary ideas provide the foundation for this worldview because they seemingly allow mankind the ability to explain the existence of life and the universe without God.  As Christians, we need to be bold in proclaiming the truth of God’s Word to a hurting (groaning, Romans 8:22) world.  This year, on February 12, instead of celebrating Darwin’s anti-God religion, we can take this opportunity to show the world that Darwin’s ideas about our supposed evolutionary origins were wrong, and that God’s Word is true, from the very beginning.  Let’s make February 12 Darwin Was Wrong Day and point people to the truth of God’s Word.

Well, I'm not sure we secularists are "aggressive and intolerant" about evolution so much as we are "right."  To return to the point I began with, it's hard not to be intolerant when (1) you have mountains of evidence on your side, and (2) the people arguing against you are determined to have their views drive national policy.

A funny thing happens, though, when you put the Mitchell story and the Ham story together.  We have the former putting forth the loony view that all of the inaccuracies and contradictions in the bible can be resolved and explained (and the ones I mentioned are only scratching the surface), along with a demand that everyone believe that the bible is literally, word-for-word true anyhow (and should be used as a primary source in science classrooms).

It's to be hoped, however, that more and more people are realizing how impossible it is to reconcile the contradictions, and that therefore biblical literalism fails right at the starting gate.  Maybe that's why people like Mitchell and Ham are becoming more strident; they sense that they're losing ground.

Or maybe they're just "crazy with craziness."

The random comment department

Two news stories I came across this weekend are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, a paper in the Journal of Advertising, by Ioannis Kareklas, Darrel Muehling, and T. J. Weber of Washington State University, tells a frightening but unsurprising story.  Their study shows that people who are presented with data about vaccination safety are more likely to consider online comments from random individuals as credible than they are information from institutions like the Center for Disease Control.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's how the experiment was set up:

Participants were led to believe that the pro-vaccination PSA was sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while the anti-vaccination PSA was sponsored by the National Vaccine Information Council (NVIC). Both PSAs were designed to look like they appeared on each organization's respective website to enhance validity. 

The PSAs were followed by comments from fictitious online commenters who either expressed pro- or anti-vaccination viewpoints. Participants weren't told anything about who the commenters were, and unisex names were used to avoid potential gender biases.

The researchers then presented participants with a questionnaire to determine how (or if) their views on vaccination had changed.

"The results kind of blew us away," said Kareklas in a press release.  "People were trusting the random online commenters just as much as the PSA itself."

Which, as I said, is disheartening but unsurprising, given that people like Jenny McCarthy are the public version of a Random Online Commenter.

Kareklas et al. followed this up with a second study, to see if the commenters were believed even more strongly if they were identified as doctors (as opposed to one of two other professions).  The commenters who were self-identified doctors had an even stronger effect -- i.e., they outweighed the CDC information even more.

Which explains "Dr." Andrew Wakefield.

And this brings me to the second story, which comes out of Kansas -- where a bill has been introduced into the legislature that would prevent professionals from mentioning their titles or credentials in opinion articles and letters to the editor.

The story about how House Bill 2234 was introduced is interesting in and of itself.  The bill was offered into committee by Representative Virgil Peck (R-Tyro), but Peck initially denied having done so.

"I introduce bills in committee sometimes when I’m asked out of courtesy," Peck said.  "It’s not because I have any skin in the game or I care about it.  I’m not even sure I introduced it, but if he said I did, I did."

Our leaders, ladies and gentlemen.  "Not even sure" what bills they introduce regarding issues they don't care about.

While on the one hand, the Kareklas study does point out the danger -- if someone thinks you're a doctor (for example), they're more likely to be swayed by your comments even if you're wrong -- in what universe is the public better off not knowing the background of the person whose words they're reading?

Representative John Carmichael (D-Wichita) nailed it.  With regards to the bill, he said, "If you are in fact a professor at The University of Kansas, that is part of your identity and part of your resume.  To muzzle an academic in identifying him or herself, and their accomplishment, not only does it have the effect of denying them their right to free speech, it also denies the public the right to understand who is commenting and what their, perhaps, bias or interest might be."

And that last bit is the important part.  My views on education -- which I throw out frequently and often vehemently -- are clearly affected by the fact that I'm a public school teacher.  Whether that makes me more or less credible would, I suppose, depend on your viewpoint.  But how on earth would you be better informed by not knowing what my profession is, by having less information with which to evaluate what I've said?

The Kareklas study and the bill introduced by Virgil "What Bill Did I Just Introduce?" Peck highlight one tremendously important thing, however; the general public is incredibly bad at critical reading.  One of the most important things you can do, when you read (or listen to) media, is to weigh what's being said against the facts and evidence, and consider the possibility of bias and appeal to authority.  The Kareklas study shows that we're pretty terrible at the former, and the Kansas bill proposes to eliminate our ability even to attempt the latter.

All making it even more important that children be taught critical thinking skills.  Because if adults don't consider information from the Center for Disease Control to have more credibility than opinions coming from an online commenter, there's something seriously wrong.