For the Sake of Science

I swear next year is when I’m going to update this picture.

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The NFL is a really shady organization. First they release the Wells report, which was filled with bogus science, faulty logic, and an obvious agenda. Next, they smear Tom Brady over ‘destroying’ his cell phone – even though the NFL had all the information they requested AND Brady’s people offered to try to get them more (they declined). Now they’ve not only escalated their language from him being ‘generally aware’ of some scheme* to him being overtly involved, but they’re still leaking false reports to ESPN (which dutifully reports what their football overlords request they report). Fuck you, NFL.

*There was, in fact, never any scheme by anyone. The footballs were never deflated beyond the predictions of the ideal gas law. Moreover, Brady explicitly gave a copy of the rules to the refs so that they would know to keep the balls at the legal minimum of 12.5.

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I often hear people trumpeting that the Catholic Church supports science because it supports evolution. The usual rebuttal is a terrible one that points to the Church historically denying science, as if that bears any relevance whatsoever to whether or not it supports it now. Let’s stop with that line of bad argument and instead focus on what the Church currently believes – it turns out it, in fact, does not support evolution.

Evolution has no goal. It isn’t conscious. It operates on a combination of natural selection and random mutation (amongst a few other factors). This is necessarily focused on the level of the individual – or gene, if you want to go down that path, but we needn’t – and generation. An organism replicates or reproduces, passing its genes on to the next generation without regard to how well its great-great-great-great-great offspring will fare. Indeed, it isn’t even passing on its genes with regard to how will its own offspring will fare. It, of course, often does make an investment there, but its concern is in and of itself in the passing of its genes. Fundamentally, that is what matters in evolution. The genes that pass through the sieve of natural selection have done so for the sake of continuing to exist. We would be correct to think of the game as resetting in every generation.

What this means is that there is no long term goal within evolution. Genes have unconsciously seen to it that they will get themselves copied for as long as they can. If that ends with a quickly replicating bacterium or something toothy or something small and quick or something intelligent or something simply huge, then so be it. The only way in which it can be said that evolution has any sort of goal is to say that it has generational goals. These are not conscious and they do not come about with any sort of phenotypic effects in mind. That is, the goal is for genes to continue to exist; there is no goal for genes to produce any particular characteristic or trait. Evolution is truly incidental.

This matters in terms of the Catholic Church’s alleged acceptance of evolution because the Church, like most religions, believes that human are special and/or inevitable. We aren’t. As Stephen Jay Gould famously noted, if we re-ran the tape of life, we would get different results every time. The fact that we exist is incidental in the history of life. Change a few factors here or there and humans don’t exist. The same goes for every species. For instance, if an asteroid didn’t hit Earth 65 million years ago, dinosaurs would quite likely still roam the planet. The rise of the mammals probably wouldn’t have happened since we would have remained as small burrowing creatures that kept out of the way of all the big, toothy animals out there.

Human inevitability is necessary for virtually all religions, including Catholicism. If humans are only incidental, then we lose any sort of special status. That’s exactly what reality is, though. We know this for a fact. The only way to reconcile Catholicism and evolution is to say that God guided evolution towards humanity in a way which appears consistent with a natural process. For my money, that’s an unsatisfying God-of-the-Gaps explanation; in this argument, God is indistinguishable from nature.

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Remember when Steve Jobs got a very treatable form of cancer? He chose to go with the pretend/alternative medicine route. He died where most would have survived for quite some time. That was no surprise. Quackery breeds death. But what has been a nice surprise is Valerie Harper, the star of Rhoda and one of the co-stars on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In March of 2013 she emotionally announced that she had cancer and as a result had as little as 3 months to live. Well, thanks to actual medicine she’s cancer-free as of April of last year (with no negative public updates since).

Thank goodness for science, eh?

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The NFL recently released its report concerning “deflate gate”. The conclusion was that it was “more probable than not” that Tom Brady was “generally aware” if not outright involved in manipulating ball psi outside the allowed lower limit of 12.5 psi. Here are a few things no one wants to talk about:

• Three of the four balls the Colts used were under the minimum psi at halftime. The report curtly dismisses this.
• The report excluded interviews with Brady.
• Very early reports said most of the balls were well under the minimum, but a later report corrected this and said 10 of the 12 game balls were a few ticks under.
• Ball psi isn’t regularly measured. Refs “check” the balls and approve them before game time, but this mostly consists of a quick squeeze in all likelihood.
• Ball psi certainly isn’t measured at half-time, so there’s no data set for how balls might react between the start of the game and 30 (game) minutes later.
• It makes no sense to say psi is so important to Brady that he would cheat, yet one of the balls was 2 psi under while the others were merely ticks under. You don’t intentionally cheat for your star quarterback by flagrantly messing up. If psi is so important to him, then a 2 psi difference might wreck the game. It’s “more probable than not” that the equipment guys ballparked the psi measurements for the balls, making a genuine mistake on one of them.
• The research firm hired by the NFL has a shady past. It once concluded that oil waste in an Ecuadorean forest didn’t increase cancer rates. The study was commissioned by Chevron. Another time it concluded that second hand smoke doesn’t cause cancer. I’ll let you guess who commissioned that one. Another time it exonerated Toyota’s electronic systems after people found themselves suddenly and uncontrollably accelerating. Yep, you guessed it. Toyota paid for that one.

Here’s the worst part: the report concluded that science can’t account for the difference in claimed psi and measured psi for the ball measured at 10.6 psi. Except it can. Not that that single ball is a valid starting point in the first place. The conclusion here is a pretty obvious one. There’s no good evidence to indicate that anyone in the Patriots organization, including Tom Brady, did anything to intentionally deflate footballs below the league minimum. This is a witch hunt against a team that a lot of people already hate for being so successful over the years. The NFL has taken a beating this past year (no pun intended), so it’s desperate to do everything in its power to regain its reputation. Hiring a shady research firm to put out a bogus, science-free report is exactly what it needs, even if that sounds counter-intuitive. Now the league can say it has met the minimum required to dole out punishments; if Roger Goodell suspends the arguable face of the league, he comes across as stern, swift, and honorable. In reality, he’s just an asshole. Look, Pats haters, I’m pretty envious of Brady, too. He’s got the all-American dream. He’s a star quarterback that is quite literally the best the game has ever seen, he has a supermodel wife, he’s worth $100 million, he’s got just about a fistful of Super Bowl rings, and let’s be honest, plastic surgeons are probably asked every single day if they can make their clients look like him. But that’s no reason to buy into garbage reports from shady firms hired by a damaged league with an agenda.

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