Grandpa the pig

It bears mention that having a Ph.D. (or other advanced credentials) is no guarantee against being a complete wingnut.  This topic comes up because of a website link sent to me by a regular reader of Skeptophilia that was authored by Eugene McCarthy, Ph.D. in genetics, and author of Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World.

It starts off reasonably enough; McCarthy describes the fact that, contrary to our perception of species as being little watertight compartments, hybridization (and thus gene flow between species) is rather common.  Not all hybrids are sterile, like the familiar example of the mule; a lot of them are back-fertile to either parental species (an example is the "Brewster's Warbler," which was once thought to be a separate species and is now known to be a hybrid between the Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers).

So McCarthy asks an interesting question: are humans a hybrid?  The answer, apparently, is yes; recent studies have shown that most human populations show the genetic signature of three ancestral populations -- modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.  (Biologists disagree, however, as to whether these three represent different species -- a distinction that, in reality, probably doesn't mean very much.  The concept of species is one of the hardest-to-pin-down terms in all of biological science.)

But, unfortunately, it isn't this intermixing between three proto-hominins that McCarthy is talking about.  He thinks we're a much more interesting hybrid than that.  He gives his evidence first: humans have low fertility, and males produce a great many abnormal sperm (kind of a surprise given our reproductive success -- you have to wonder, if this is true, how there can be seven billion of us).

What?  You want more evidence than that?  Sorry, that's it.  Guys produce lots of abnormal sperm, and allegedly we have low fertility.  So we're hybrids.  That's enough, right?

Of course right.  So now, if we're hybrids, we have to figure out which two species gave rise to humans.  One of them, McCarthy says, was clearly something like a chimp.  But he states, in all apparent seriousness, "Many characteristics that clearly distinguish humans from chimps have been noted by various authorities over the years."  Can't argue with that.  But then he goes right off the edge of the cliff:

One fact, however, suggests the need for an open mind: as it turns out, many features that distinguish humans from chimpanzees also distinguish them from all other primates. Features found in human beings, but not in other primates, cannot be accounted for by hybridization of a primate with some other primate. If hybridization is to explain such features, the cross will have to be between a chimpanzee and a nonprimate — an unusual, distant cross to create an unusual creature.

If this sets alarm bells off, good -- because this would require a fertile hybrid being produced from a mating of animals not just from two different genera, or two different families, but two different orders.  Entirely possible, McCarthy says, despite the fact that there is not a single example -- not one -- of an interordinal hybrid known from nature.  Anywhere.  That includes animals, plants, fungi, and so on.

Nevertheless, that doesn't stop McCarthy:

Looking at a subset of the listed traits [unique features of humans are listed in the sidebar on page two of his website; there are too many to list here], however, it's clear that the other parent in this hypothetical cross that produced the first human would be an intelligent animal with a protrusive, cartilaginous nose, a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, short digits, and a naked skin. It would be terrestrial, not arboreal, and adaptable to a wide range of foods and environments. 

So, let's not dillydally any more; if a chimp is one of our parental species, what's the other?

What is this other animal that has all these traits? The answer is Sus scrofa, the ordinary pig. What are we to think of this fact? If we conclude that pigs did in fact cross with apes to produce the human race, then an avalanche of old ideas must crash to the earth. But, of course, the usual response to any new perspective is "That can't be right, because I don't already believe it." This is the very response that many people had when Darwin first proposed that humans might be descended from apes, an idea that was perceived as ridiculous, or even as subversive and dangerous. And yet, today this exact viewpoint is widely entertained. Its wide acceptance can be attributed primarily to the established fact that humans hold many traits in common with primates. That's what made it convincing... Let us take it as our hypothesis, then, that humans are the product of ancient hybridization between pig and chimpanzee.

So, basically, the logic is, "people laughed at Darwin, and he turned out to be right, so if people laugh at me, I must be right?"

But I don't want to be accused of jumping to conclusions ("That can't be right, because I don't already believe it"), so I took what I think is a critical look at the list of allegedly unique features of humans -- ones that, in McCarthy's view, must have come from our other, non-primate parental species.  And most of them have to do with quantities and sizes -- "sparse" hair, "large amounts" of elastic fiber in the skin, "richly" vascularized dermis, "narrow" eye opening, "heavy" eyelashes, and so on.  Traits involving quantities and sizes are highly responsive to selective pressures, the idea being once you have genes for the production of a feature, it is relatively straightforward to evolve to produce more or less of it.

Of the features he claims are found only in humans and pigs, it appears that in several cases, he is simply wrong.  Take multipyramidal kidneys -- he is correct that only humans have this feature amongst primates, but it is hardly unique in the mammalian world.  Besides humans and pigs, elephants have multipyramidal kidneys, as do bears, rhinoceroses, bison, and "nearly all marine mammals," according to a paper by M. F. Williams (available here).  Williams' contention is that multipyramidal kidneys evolved in animals that lived in coastal or marine environments in order to deal with high levels of salt -- and that each of these lineages evolved it independently, as it represents a unique feature on separate, distantly related branches of the phylogenetic tree (evolutionary biologists call these features "apomorphies").

Then, of course, he has some things on the list of allegedly unique human characteristics that are simply weird.  "Particular about place of defecation?"  (Has he ever owned a cat?)  "Snuggling?"  "Extended male copulation time?"  "Good swimmer?"

I'm sorry, Dr. McCarthy, but I'm calling bullshit on this.

Now, please understand; it's not like I have any particular problem with our having a checkered ancestry.  I'm an evolutionary biologist by training, for cryin' in the sink, I know we're animals.  But the idea that Homo sapiens arose when a chimp had sex with a pig... that stretches credulity too far.

Even if you do have a Ph.D.

Human/alien sex and impossible blood types

As I have mentioned before, my commitment to a rationalist approach is not because I think that odd explanations are impossible.  Ockham's Razor, after all, is a rule of thumb, not an unbreakable law.  Sometimes nature is weird and messy; sometimes it is counterintuitive; sometimes the convoluted explanation turns out to be correct.

Still, it's frustrating to see the ease with which some people jump to a bizarre conclusion.  Witness the contention, currently making the round of social media such as Facebook, that you should have your blood type checked and do a little standard genetic analysis, because you may have an "impossible blood type" -- one that is impossible, given the blood types of your parents.

Which means that you were actually sired by an alien from another planet.

Okay, let's just step back from this claim for a moment.

First, here's a short statistical genetics lesson to refresh the basics with folks who may not remember high school biology too well.

Let's say we have a couple who has just conceived a baby.  The man is AB- and the woman O-.  The ABO antigen group and the Rh (negative or positive) antigen inherit independently, so we can consider them separately.  The fact that the man is AB and the woman O means that, given Mendel's Law of Inheritance, the baby will have gotten one allele from each parent.  The dad can pass on an A or a B (but not both); the mom can only pass on an O (O is recessive, so she has two copies of the O allele).  The baby therefore could have a blood type of A or B, and in fact has a 50% likelihood of one versus the other.  As the Rh negative allele is recessive, we know each parent has two copies of the Rh negative allele; the baby can only be Rh negative him (or her) self.  Thus, the baby could be A- or B-; all other blood types are impossible.

Recently, though, we have a claim spinning its way around the internet that there are folks out there who do have "impossible blood types" -- children with blood types that could not occur, according to standard statistical genetics, from the pair of parents who produced them.  And these children, the claim says, are the results of aliens abducting, and then impregnating, human women.

And my response is:  Really?

There are two much better explanations as to why a child may have an "impossible blood type" (or any other "impossible" combination of genetic traits) than assuming that the mother of the child was beamed up to a waiting spaceship to engage in some hot human/alien sex.

The first is that there is a perfectly natural, albeit rather peculiar, genetic explanation for the odd result.  I know of two genetic conditions that result in abnormal blood type inheritance -- Bombay syndrome (in which another gene "cancels" the blood type the child inherited, causing an aberrant type O) and cis-AB (in which because of an improper crossover event, the child inherits both the A and the B antigen from the same parent -- so the child is an AB regardless of what the other parent contributed).  Both of these conditions are rather rare, but each certainly gives a natural explanation for the odd results in the claim.

The other explanation is even more likely, but is one I hesitate to bring up -- and that is that the child might not be the biological offspring of that father.  Euphemistically-named "non-paternity events" -- cases where a child is not the biological offspring of the man who thinks he sired it -- are more common than you'd think.  Genetic testing in America, Canada, and western Europe give amazingly consistent results, averaging 1% of the children tested being the result of extramarital sex -- and that's excluding children who are adopted or who are known to be the product of a previous relationship.

So one child out of a hundred isn't the genetic offspring of the man who claims to have done the deed.  No aliens necessary, although an explanation from the mother may be.

So, anyhow, it's not that I think that aliens are impossible.  It's not even that I think that it's impossible that they've visited the Earth, although I do think it's unlikely.  Even more unlikely is that the aliens are so out-of-control horny that the first thing they do upon arrival is to look around for some human women to hook up with.  So as an explanation of why some children have unexpected blood types, it kind of sucks.  Why the people who made this claim -- and those who are now forwarding it endlessly around the internet -- think this makes better sense than some perfectly natural explanation, such as a genetic aberration or the baby being sired by the mailman -- makes no sense to me at all.  Unless, perhaps, these people would fancy having an illicit liaison with Mr. Spock themselves, and think that if they wish upon a star, their dream will come true.

The abominable cotton-polyester blend

So, a couple of days ago, in my post about how gays cause wildfires, I commented on how the biblical literalists seem to focus on specific commands from the Old Testament (such as the prohibition on homosexual acts) and ignore others entirely (such as the prohibition on eating shellfish).  I suggested that I might amuse myself that day by breaking some weird, arbitrary biblical commands, such as the prohibition against wearing clothing made of two different kinds of thread woven together, a command that was apparently so important that it was mentioned twice (Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11).

Well, imagine my surprise when I found out that these verses have recently been the subject of an intense discussion on the Christianity subreddit.  I'm to be forgiven for not having seen it; I tend to avoid this subreddit, suspecting that even if I went there as a lurker, the more rabid members would somehow realize it, and shouts of "BURN THE UNBELIEVER!" would echo down the fiber optics cables of the internet.

But fortunately for me, a regular reader of Skeptophilia saw it and sent me the link.  And you should read the whole thread.  It's a doozy.

First, though, let's take a look at what the actual biblical passages say:

Leviticus 19:19:  "You are to keep My statutes. You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment upon you of two kinds of material mixed together."

Deuteronomy 22:11: "You shall not wear a material mixed of wool and linen together."

So, the second one seems only to be concerned with wool and linen, leaving you the option of a nice cotton-polyester blend, but the first one seems to indicate that this would be An Abomination In God's Eyes as well.

There's no mention of what the penalty is for all of this naughty stuff.  I'd imagine stoning to death, since that seems to be the penalty for damn near everything.  Maybe just flogging, especially if it's only socks or something.

Anyhow, this all seems pretty straightforward (albeit bizarre), so I was kind of confused when I saw that the title of the thread on the Christianity subreddit was "Help understanding Leviticus 19:19."  My general opinion is, if you need help understanding this passage, you probably would be out of your depth with Green Eggs and Ham.  It's not that hard, really.  Don't wear clothes made of two kinds of material.  End of story.

But I was wrong.  Here are some of the bits of commentary on the passage, as laid out by the readers of the Christianity subreddit:

Linen is a plant derivative, wool an animal derivative. And how we should not allow our nature to overcome our humanity is the basic message behind this commandment.

You have to look at it in historical context. Linen was often used back then for religious purposes (like curtains in the tabernacle, or the priest's garments, or the temple veil). Wool, on the other hand, was the more common fabric. This law is often taken as symbolism for mixing the secular with the sacred.

I would like to point out how there is much less resistance to taking this passage less literally than other parts of Leviticus. Coincidentally, 90% of the world is not fundamentally disgusted by the image of wool and linen being mixed. Hmmmm.

I watched a lecture that mentioned Jesus and the Mosaic laws(@ 21:00) just this afternoon. The presenter was making the case that Jesus must not have been clear on how/if the laws would have applied to gentiles, otherwise there wouldn't be so much debate about it now.

Mosaic law spoke to external behaviors. Jesus spoke to internal states of mind. It's why he was always going, "You have heard it said such and such, but I tell you some other thing." An exegesis of sorts...  This is a very utilitarian way to look at it. Sure, the "do not do such and such" seems like a wet paint sign at first, but when you understand that it speaks to the idea of thinking healthy vs. unhealthy thoughts, that really brings it all together. And it turns out it was for my benefit after all.

There are a lot of laws about not mixing different kinds of things to remind the Israelites that they're a particular people, called out to be different from everyone around them.

Sure, it's meant to be taken literally. The question that nobody ever asks, with regard to Leviticus, is by whom? Leviticus is the set of rules written for the priest class formed after the disaster at Sinai. The tribe of Levi was the only one to stand with Moses, so from then on all priests came from his tribe. Leviticus are the rules written to prevent those priests from falling into error. 

So, I'm reading through all of this, and I'm thinking; don't these people realize that all they're doing is taking the passage, and then making shit up?

If you read something in the bible you don't like, you rationalize it.  Or say "it had a historical context that doesn't apply now."  Or say it was meant for someone else.  Or say that Jesus superseded it.  Or whatever.  All of it just strikes me as special pleading; I want to be able to discriminate against gays and claim a biblical basis for it (after all, because some people find gays "fundamentally disgusting") but I still want to be able to eat my shrimp alfredo and roast pork.  So the parts I like are the inerrant word of god, and the parts I don't like are just some arbitrary rules that Jesus gave us a pass on anyhow.

It reminded me of a joke that was sent to me by a Jewish friend, regarding the kosher law.  Apparently God and Moses had a conversation on Mt. Sinai:

God:  And remember, Moses, in the laws of keeping Kosher, never cook a calf in its mother's milk. It is cruel.

Moses:  I see!  So what you are saying  is that we should never eat milk and meat together.

God:  No, what I'm saying is, never cook a calf in its mother's milk.  It is cruel.

Moses:  Oh, Lord forgive my ignorance! What you are really saying is we should wait six hours after eating meat to drink milk so the two are not in our stomachs, right?

God:  No, Moses, what I'm saying is, don't cook a calf in its mother's milk.

Moses:  Oh, Lord! Please don't strike me down for my stupidity! What you mean is we should have a separate set of dishes for milk and a separate set for meat and if we make a mistake we have to bury that dish in the dirt outside...

God:  Do whatever the fuck you want, Moses.

All of this is wryly funny in light of the latest intrusion of religion into American politics, in the person of California state senator Mimi Walters, who has just announced she is running for the House seat to be vacated by the retirement of Representative John Campbell.  [Source]  Walters' biggest financial backer is Fieldstead & Co., run by Christian reconstructionist and general wingnut Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, who publicly advocated "total integration of biblical law into our lives."

Presumably, this "biblical law" also includes 1 Timothy 2:12:  "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet."  So you have to wonder how Ms. Walters, should she be elected, will ever get anything done.  Which, honestly, might not be a bad thing.

The Vampire Beast of Bladenboro

So, today we're going to investigate a topic that I know is weighing heavily on all of your minds: is the Vampire Beast of North Carolina back?

Yesterday, in the delightfully wacky weird news outlet Who Forted?, writer Dana Matthews tells the tale of a bizarre beast that troubled the good citizens of Bladen County, North Carolina in 1953.  Matthews says, about the first round of attacks:

In 1953 the Bladenboro Newspaper covered a story about a strange creature that had blamed for the deaths of numerous dogs, draining them of their blood. Local eyewitnesses who spotted the beast claimed it possessed the body of a bear, the head of a cat, and that when it opened its mouth to growl it made the sound of a woman screaming.

The creature then proceeded to vanish for fifty years.  Attacks didn't begin again until 2003.  This makes you wonder what it was eating all that time, doesn't it?  Be that as it may, the second round of deaths sounded pretty much like the first:

The bizarre animal exsanguination began again in 2003, only this time it seemed the creature had broadened his horizons and was now killing in a 150-miles radius beyond Bladenboro.  During its second blood-run, the Vampire Beast of North Carolina was managing to slay even the bulkiest of Pit Bulls with ease and many Bladenboro residents claimed to have found strange tracks around their dead pets that even wildlife biologists couldn’t explain.

Pretty scary stuff.  So imagine the terror of the residents when, just last week, the Vampire Beast got hungry this time after only a ten-year hiatus, and it all started up again:

According to a report by paranormal investigator Thomas Byers, on June 15^th 2013, Bladenboro, NC resident Misty Turner and her son Tyler contacted local police after something visited their farm in the dead of night, killing three of their horses and a large Bull Mastiff dog. Misty’s son Tyler found the horses after the barking dog had alerted the family to the fact that something was skulking around the property. The dog continued to bark for quite some time, obsessed with the dense wooded area alongside the farm.

Arriving police and veterinarians were shocked to discover that the horses had died from very deep puncture wounds to the neck. Even more shocking was that it seemed that the purpose of the marks was to allow the blood to be drained from the animals. The horses were also reported to have been wet with sweat, almost as if they had been running hard to avoid whatever was chasing them down.

The following evening, much to the Turner’s display, their dog was also killed in the exact same fashion, with two puncture marks to the neck, found with its blood drained. Misty claims to have seen the thing that had killed her animals as it was running from the lifeless body of her pet. Her description of the creature matched the same eyewitness reports of the Vampire Beast reported in 1953.

We are also treated to an artist's rendition of the Vampire Beast, in case your imagination hadn't been sufficiently stirred by the eyewitness description:

I'm guessing that the bats are artistic license and don't actually follow the Vampire Beast around, but I could be wrong.

Well, no offense to the people of Bladenboro, but I tend to be doubtful about all of this.  The whole story -- reports of animal killings and exsanguination, strange wounds, unnamed veterinarians and wildlife biologists admitting bafflement, a mysterious beast that is supposedly responsible -- sounds much like the alleged depredations of El Chupacabra, coupled with all of the cattle mutilation stories you hear (variously attributed to satanists, aliens, or monsters).  And I suspect that if anyone really does do a thorough investigation, the whole thing won't hold water, at least not as an "unexplained monster attack."

The problem is that ordinary animal attacks often lead to rather oddball wounds.  A study done by the Washington County (Arkansas) Sheriff's Department, in response to claims of bizarre livestock mutilation, found the following [Source]:

They placed a dead cow in a field and had observers watch what happened over the next 48 hours. When they reported that bloating led to incision-like tears in the skin and that blowflies and maggots had cleaned out the soft tissue so that the carcass looked exactly like those that had been attributed to aliens or satanic cultists, they were generally ignored by the community of true believers.

Claims of exsanguination -- removal of all of the blood from a dead or dying animal -- have never been substantiated.  According to Benjamin Radford, whose book Tracking the Chupacabra: the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore was a finalist for the ForeWord Review Book of the Year and was called a "slam-dunk debunk" by The Skeptical Inquirer, the apparent exsanguination has a completely natural cause:

The apparent loss of blood could be explained by internal hemorrhaging and pooling of blood at the bottom of the corpse.  The attribution of the attacks on livestock to a vampiric entity can be explained by the puncture wounds resulting from the canine teeth left by most predators, who often instinctively go for the neck, according to taxidermist Jerry Ayer.

Put another way, once the heart stops pushing the blood around, the blood settles downward due to gravity, and the upper parts -- the parts immediately accessible to anyone investigating the case -- appear to be completely devoid of blood when cut open.

So, sorry to puncture your scary, monster-shaped balloon, but it looks like the Vampire Beast is just a plain old beast of some kind.  Not that this should go uninvestigated, mind you; if I had my horses killed by some large predatory animal, I'd want to do something about it.  Horses were attacked by rabid bobcats in Florida in 2010 and again in 2011 -- if I had to place a bet on what was responsible for the Bladenboro attacks, it'd be that.

Anyhow, that's our news from the cryptozoological world.  At least this story was more interesting that the latest from Melba Ketchum, who is once again blathering on about how she really did know what she was doing, there really is a Bigfoot, and all of the people who are criticizing her are big ol' poopyheads.  Given the choice, I'd rather face a Vampire Beast than a delusional geneticist any day of the week.

The creation of Adam

I am absolutely fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence.

Now, let me be up front that I don't know the first thing about the technical side of it.  I am so low on the technological knowledge scale that I am barely capable of operating a cellphone.  A former principal I worked for used to call me "The Dinosaur," and said (correctly) that I would have been perfectly comfortable teaching in an 18th century lecture hall.

Be that as it may, I find it astonishing how close we're getting to an artificial brain that even the doubters will have no choice but to call "intelligent."  For example, meet Adam Z1, who is the subject of a crowdsourced fund-raising campaign on IndieGoGo:

Make sure you watch the video on the site -- a discussion between Adam and his creators.

Adam is the brainchild of roboticist David Hanson.  And now, Hanson wants to get some funding to work with some of the world's experts in AI -- Ben Goertzel, Mark Tilden, and Gino Yu -- to design a brain that will be "as smart as a three-year-old human."

The sales pitch, which is written as if it were coming from Adam himself, outlines what Hanson and his colleagues are trying to do:

Some of my robot brothers and sisters are already pretty good at what they do -- building stuff in factories and vacuuming the floor and flying planes and so forth.

But as my AI guru friends keep telling me, these bots are all missing one thing: COMMON SENSE.

They're what my buddy Ben Goertzel would call "narrow AI" systems -- they're good at doing one particular kind of thing, but they don't really understand the world, they don't know what they're doing and why.

After getting what is referred to as a "toddler brain," here are a few things that Adam might be able to do:

PLAY WITH TOYS!!! ... I'm really looking forward to this.  I want to build stuff with blocks -- build towers with blocks and knock them down, build walls to keep you out ... all the good stuff!

DRAW PICTURES ON MY IPAD ... That's right, they're going to buy me an iPad.  Pretty cool, huh?   And they'll teach me to draw pictures on it -- pictures out of my mind, and pictures of what I'm seeing and doing.  Before long I'll be a better artist than David!

TALK TO HUMANS ABOUT WHAT I'M DOING  ...  Yeah, you may have guessed already, but I've gotten some help with my human friends in writing this crowdfunding pitch.   But once I've got my new OpenCog-powered brain, I'll be able to tell you about what I'm doing all on my own....  They tell me this is called "experientially grounded language understanding and generation."  I hope I'll understand what that means one day.

RESPOND TO HUMAN EMOTIONS WITH MY OWN EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS  ...  You're gonna love this one!  I have one heck of a cute little face already, and it can show a load of different expressions.  My new brain will let me understand what emotion one of you meat creatures is showing on your face, and feel a bit of what you're feeling, and show my own feeling right back atcha.   This is most of the reason why my daddy David Hanson gave me such a cute face in the first place.  I may not be very smart yet, but it's obvious even to me that a robot that could THINK but not FEEL wouldn't be a very good thing.  I want to understand EVERYTHING -- including all you wonderful people....

MAKE PLANS AND FOLLOW THEM ... AND CHANGE THEM WHEN I NEED TO....   Right now I have to admit I'm a pretty laid back little robot.  I spend most of my time just sitting around waiting for something cool to happen -- like for someone to give me a better brain so I can figure out something else to do!  But once I've got my new brain, I've got big plans, I'll tell you!  And they tell me OpenCog has some pretty good planning and reasoning software, that I'll be able to use to plan out what I do.   I'll start small, sure -- planning stuff to build, and what to say to people, and so forth.  But once I get some practice, the sky's the limit! 

Now, let me say first that I think that this is all very cool, and if you can afford to, you should consider contributing to their campaign.  But I have to add, in the interest of honesty, that mostly what I felt when I watched the video on their site is... creeped out.  Adam Z1, for all of his child-like attributes, falls for me squarely into the Uncanny Valley.  Quite honestly, while watching Adam, I wasn't reminded so much of any friendly toddlers I've known as I was of a certain... movie character:

I kept expecting Adam to say, "I would like to have friends very much... so that I can KILL THEM.  And then TAKE OVER THE WORLD."

But leaving aside my gut reaction for a moment, this does bring up the question of what Artificial Intelligence really is.  The topic has been debated at length, and most people seem to fall into one of two camps:

1) If it responds intelligently -- learns, reacts flexibly, processes new information correctly, and participates in higher-order behavior (problem solving, creativity, play) -- then it is de facto intelligent.  It doesn't matter whether that intelligence is seated in a biological, organic machine such as a brain, or in a mechanical device such as a computer.  This is the approach taken by people who buy the idea of the Turing Test, named after computer pioneer Alan Turing, which basically says that if a prospective artificial intelligence can fool a panel of sufficiently intelligent humans, then it's intelligent.

2) Any mechanical, computer-based system will never be intelligent, because at its basis it is a deterministic system that is limited by the underpinning of what the machine can do.  Humans, these folks say, have "something more" that will never be emulated by a computer -- a sense of self that the spiritually-minded amongst us might call a "soul."  Proponents of this take on Artificial Intelligence tend to like American philosopher John Searle, who compared computers to someone in a locked room mechanistically translating passages in English into Chinese, using an English-to-Chinese dictionary.  The output might look intelligent, it might even fool you, but the person in the room has no true understanding of what he is doing.  He is simply converting one string of characters into another using a set of fixed rules.

Predictably, I'm in Turing's camp all the way, largely because I don't think it's ever been demonstrated that our brains are anything more than very sophisticated string-converters.  If you could convince me that humans themselves have that "something more," I might be willing to admit that Searle et al. have a point.  But for right now, I am very much of the opinion that Artificial Intelligence, of a level that would pass the Turing test, is only a matter of time.

So best of luck to David Hanson and his team.  And also best of luck to Adam in his quest to become... a real boy.  Even if what he's currently doing is nothing more than responding in a pre-programmed way, it will be interesting to see what will happen when the best brains in robotics take a crack at giving him an upgrade.

Gays, god, and forest fires

Many of you have undoubtedly been following the news of the horrific wildfires, last week in Colorado and this week in Arizona.  Thus far these fires have cost millions of dollars in damages and at least 21 lives, 19 of whom were members of an elite firefighting team who died this weekend in a blaze near Phoenix.

These fires are thought to have multiple causes.  The southwest saw record or near-record temperatures last week, coupled with low rainfall.  Some people also attribute the severity of the fires, especially in Colorado, to the population explosion of the pine bark beetle, which has killed huge stands of ponderosa pines all through the Rocky Mountains.  But in so attributing the fires to these reasons, people are ignoring the role of the most powerful natural-disaster-creating force known to man:

Gays.

Yes, gays.  According to Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner, the recent fires are god's wrath against the people of Colorado for their liberal attitudes toward homosexuality.

In an interview on Generations Radio, the two ministers were clearly in agreement about what was going on here.  Said Buehner, "Why Colorado Springs?  Understand that Colorado itself is a state that is begging for God's judgment.  How did we do that?...  Our legislative session opened up this year and their very first order of business, their most pressing order of business..."  Swanson then interrupted with, "... they could hardly wait, they could hardly wait..."  And Buehner finished, "Like the first day, was to pass a Civil Union Bill, which is an uncivil bill."

And, of course, the whole thing wouldn't be complete without some mention of gay guys kissing, in this case State Senate Majority Leader Mark Ferrendino kissing his partner when they found out that the Civil Union Bill had passed, a photograph of which appeared on the front page of the Denver Post.  Said Swanson:

"When you have a state where the House leadership is performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post two months ago?  Does God read the Denver Post?  Do you think He picks up a copy of the Denver Post?  He gets it.  God gets the Denver Post."

Delivered right to His Almighty Doorstep, I'm sure.

Then, the question came up as to why, if god was trying to smite Colorado for supporting gays, the fires hit the religious and conservative areas near Colorado Springs, rather than far more liberal bastions of Denver or Boulder.  Buehner said, "Judgment begins in the House of God," as if that made complete sense, and added that the fact that god hadn't yet destroyed the entire state was an "act of grace."
 
What strikes me about all of this is that god, for all of his supposedly omnipotent smiting power, so often chooses to smite parts of the world with disasters that they pretty much already had happening beforehand.  He sends earthquakes to places that are on fault lines and near subduction zones, hurricanes to the Gulf Coast and US Atlantic Seaboard, tornadoes to the American midwest, and catastrophic forest fires to the southwestern United States and the arid parts of southern Europe.  Funny thing, that.  If I didn't know better, I would think that this meant that these events are purely... natural.

The other thing that crosses my mind, here, is that if gays really are behind all of this, maybe they should flex their muscles a little.  Hey, if you have this kind of power, why not enjoy it, especially since god's aim seems to be a bit off?  You guys could be the next generation of Mad Scientists -- but instead of rubbing your hands together and cackling maniacally before firing up your Laser Cannons, all you do is stand around and kiss, and god smites, say, Omaha.

It'd be even better if you could figure out how to target this force a little better.  Wouldn't it be cool if, for example, you could kiss and have god send a tornado to destroy the Westboro Baptist Church?  If I thought that would happen, I would happily kiss a guy, and I'm not even gay.

So anyhow, that's today's news from the Wacko Fringe Religion Department.  As I've pointed out before, however crazy this stuff sounds to nonbelievers -- and even, I hope, to most sensible Christians -- it really is completely consistent with the behavior of god as laid out in the Old Testament.  So these guys, however they seem like they're in dire need of jackets with extra long sleeves, are actually just preaching what the Holy Book says.

I'm not saying it's sensible, mind you.  I still think the folks who believe this stuff are crazy as bedbugs.  All I'm saying is that it's consistent.

Anyhow, I guess I'll wind things up here.  It's time for me to go take a shower and get dressed, which will offer me several more opportunities to break some Old Testament rules.  Maybe if I wear a shirt woven from two different kinds of thread (such an important rule that it was mentioned twice, Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11) then god will smite Ann Coulter.

Hey, it's worth a try. 

Naveena Shine and the revision of worldviews

Being a woo-woo apparently means never having to admit that you're wrong.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will undoubtedly remember my post last month about "Naveena Shine," a Seattle guru who wanted to demonstrate to the world that it was possible to live on nothing but sunlight and water.  Shine, who is evidently under the impression that she is a house plant, finally discontinued her month-long fast last week after losing 33 pounds.

But did Shine do what any sensible person would do in this situation, namely, to say, "Wow, I guess I was wrong!  Humans do need food after all!  What a goober I was!"?

Of course she didn't.  Oh, she starts out sounding uncertain enough.  Shine wrote on her Facebook page:

After 47 days [actually, the post was written after 44 days] I still feel really good, weight loss is slowing and all seems well.  However, I still have no evidence that I am actually living on light and it could well be slow starvation.  Now that I am ending the experiment I will never know.

But soon afterwards, she turns positively militant:

A doctor can't see living on light because he looks through different lenses...  From the feedback I am getting, it is becoming patently clear that most of the world is by no means ready to receive the information I am attempting to produce.  Even if it were true that a person can 'live on light' and I were successful in demonstrating that, I see that it would be synonymous with putting a non-driver behind the wheel of a huge truck.  It would be an accident in the making.

About her decision to end her fast, she says:

There are many, many complex reasons for ending this experiment...  I received a simple message from the universe that it is time to stop.  Because I'm closing it doesn't mean to say there's any failure here.  I'm looking healthy, I feel healthy, bouncing with energy, none of those dire predictions that people were saying were going to happen happened.

No, obviously everything is completely A-OK with you!  Losing 33 pounds in four weeks is perfectly normal!

So, this ended the way all of us thought it would; she finally realized that she couldn't go through with it.

What always interests me in these sorts of situations whether the person in question actually knows that what (s)he is saying is false -- i.e., whether (s)he is lying or simply delusional.  I wonder the same thing about "Psychic Sally Morgan" who, appallingly, just won a £125,000 libel case in England against The Sun, who had called her out for receiving information at a "psychic reading" through a headset.  "I got lots of loving care from my family and fans and that’s the only thing that got me through," Morgan said in an interview with the very paper she sued, excerpted in an article that was just published two days ago.  "Now, when I look back at how I felt, I think it wasn’t such a bad thing. I have even more empathy for the people I give readings to now. I really feel like I’m one of them."

 There is, apparently, a fairly thin line between belief, self-delusion, and outright charlatanism, and it can be awfully difficult to tell the difference between them.

What bothers me about all of these sorts of beliefs is how difficult they are to challenge.  In science, it's a case of The Best Model Wins; if your theory fits the available evidence better than mine does, mine simply has to be scrapped.  I may not be happy about it, but that's the way it goes. 

Here, though, there's always an argument, always a rationalization, always a way around admitting that you're simply deluding yourself and your followers.  Naveena Shine gets ample evidence that she can't live on light and water?  It's not that she's wrong; the doctors who advised her to give up and have a cheeseburger are "looking through lenses."  It's the fault of the unenlightened masses who aren't "ready to receive the information she is attempting to produce."  Tell Sally Morgan that she is a skilled cold reader who is defrauding her fans?  She sues you for libel.  Anything but revise their worldviews; anything but publicly admit that what they are claiming is simply false.

In the case of Shine, the damage is minimal.  Almost no one took her seriously, even at the beginning.  In the case of other woo-woo claims -- psychics, mediums, homeopaths, astrologers -- the cost, both literally and figuratively, is far higher.  These people take your money and give you nothing in return (especially the homeopaths!).

And if you challenge them, you can be sure of one thing; they will never, ever admit that they were wrong.