Explaining denialism

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Michael

It’s ever so common to come across an evolution denier only to discover the person is also a global warming denier. This may be chalked up to ideology – American conservatism practically demands a god and it’s too pro-business to accept the science of global warming (or at least the predicted consequences). But another reason must often be sought; the denialism can extend beyond a conservative agenda. This includes HIV denial, vaccine denial, second-hand smoke denial, and a host of other forms. In fact, the anti-vax movement will often find sympathies on the left.

Some of the common underlying themes of denialism are alleging conspiracies, moving the goalposts in the face of evidence, and manufacturing evidence. In other words, it’s all very anti-scientific. But it isn’t necessarily an outright hostility towards science that causes this – though many conservatives suffer from such an affliction. Instead, it’s the way many people tend to think.

All denialisms appear to be attempts like this to regain a sense of agency over uncaring nature: blaming autism on vaccines rather than an unknown natural cause, insisting that humans were made by divine plan, rejecting the idea that actions we thought were okay, such as smoking and burning coal, have turned out to be dangerous.

This is not necessarily malicious, or even explicitly anti-science. Indeed, the alternative explanations are usually portrayed as scientific. Nor is it willfully dishonest. It only requires people to think the way most people do: in terms of anecdote, emotion and cognitive short cuts. Denialist explanations may be couched in sciency language, but they rest on anecdotal evidence and the emotional appeal of regaining control.

Emotional appeals are not always bad. When they are mixed with substance, they make for powerful rhetoric. But often, entire arguments are premised in emotion. Take creationism/intelligent design. It isn’t that there’s any evidence for it; many people recognize that natural selection is a blind process which builds piece by piece, bit by bit, thereby not being random and not being improbable, thus making all life the product of purely natural processes. God has no place to go but out. Since no science supports creationism/intelligent design, an emotional response is the result – to the detriment of science.

[Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut at Storrs] believes the instigators of denialist movements have more serious psychological problems than most of their followers. “They display all the features of paranoid personality disorder”, he says, including anger, intolerance of criticism, and what psychiatrists call a grandiose sense of their own importance. “Ultimately, their denialism is a mental health problem. That is why these movements all have the same features, especially the underlying conspiracy theory.”

Neither the ringleaders nor rank-and-file denialists are lying in the conventional sense, Kalichman says: they are trapped in what classic studies of neurosis call “suspicious thinking”. “The cognitive style of the denialist represents a warped sense of reality, which is why arguing with them gets you nowhere,” he says. “All people fit the world into their own sense of reality, but the suspicious person distorts reality with uncommon rigidity.”

The likes of Maloney and Moritz certainly fit this profile. Both have had some of the most radical reactions to criticism I’ve seen since grade school, they both are clearly angry (especially Maloney), and both actually have taken measures to expand their web presence upon its destruction by Pharyngula and FTSOS (Moritz on Facebook, Maloney everywhere else), apparently believing what they have to say is too important to be drowned out by facts, evidence, and other pesky things.

But this extends beyond those two. Many creationists fit this profile. Just wait for one to write an editorial to a paper. The emotion, the anger. Then respond. Watch for the screeching about tone, respect, not being nice enough. And I don’t mean to watch for those reactions from my style of writing (though I get those, too). The most tempered response is met with hostility.

But as damaging as denialism has been to science education, it has had more immediate, more serious consequences.

Denialism has already killed. AIDS denial has killed an estimated 330,000 South Africans. Tobacco denial delayed action to prevent smoking-related deaths. Vaccine denial has given a new lease of life to killer diseases like measles and polio. Meanwhile, climate change denial delays action to prevent warming. The backlash against efforts to fight the flu pandemic could discourage preparations for the next, potentially a more deadly one.

If science is the best way to understand the world and its dangers, and acting on that understanding requires popular support, then denial movements threaten us all.

Science is, in fact, the best way of knowing.

Filed under: Creationism, Politics and Social, Religions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Because it’s worth repeating

Posted on May 15, 2010 by Michael

A creationist in one of the comment sections recently repeated this old canard.

the dictionary says (among other things) that a theory is:
1. contemplation or speculation.
2. guess or conjecture.

there i go? again?
you just seem pretty intent on disparaging arguments but not refuting them.

This is yet another point where atheists and other non-deluded people are willing to be honest, all the while watching creationists do just the opposite. It’s like it’s just so damn inconvenient to come to a straight-forward, truthful understanding of basic concepts for the religious that lying has become okay for them; the ends justify the means.

So it is worthwhile to repeat, for the nth time, just what a theory is and is not.

Insofar as my theory that ice cream is great can be considered a theory, yes, creationism is a theory. But it is not in any way a scientific theory. The requirements to reach this high level are rigorous. For starters, what predictions does creationism make? What experiments can be carried out to falsify the hypothesis? Can others repeat these experiments? Are there other plausible explanations? Are there better explanations?

The word “theory”, as any educated, honest person knows, carries far more weight in science than it does for the lay public. In truth, the word gets mixed up in casual talk within science, even sometimes becoming conflated with “hypothesis”, but no one really blinks because the context allows for the use of shorthand. Think to Richard Dawkins’ style of writing. He uses personification all the time, especially when discussing natural selection. He will start out with qualifiers and scare quotes – “Natural selection ‘wants’ to weed out the bad genes” – but as he goes on, the reader comes to an understanding of the fact that the good doctor is bringing evolutionary biology to life via a particular way of writing. It becomes obvious that it is inappropriate to apply anthropomorphic qualities to what Dawkins is describing – and it is context that allows for this.

But in public forums or political circles, there can be no assumed knowledge of science and what its terms mean; it is a danger to allow for the use of loose language without qualification. That is why it is so important to distinguish between the lay definition of “theory” versus its scientific definition. In science it references something which has evidence, has been tested, has journal papers all about it, and usually there is a high degree of consensus. The Big Bang, evolution, global warming, plate tectonics – these are all theories. Creationists have no theories. They have no evidence, no reason, no logic, no testing, no raw data, no way to interpret any sort of observation in a way that holds any scientific significance.

Filed under: Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Deepak Chopra is not an intelligent person

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Michael

Deepak Chopra is capable of saying some of the most incoherent things imaginable.

The idea that we live in an intelligent universe has thrived for quite a while. It’s an important idea because it would explain many things, including how we got here. I keep my eye out for any bit of evidence to support the theory, and a beauty surfaced recently on the PBS program, Nature, entitled “Clever Monkeys.” It turns out that monkeys are far more than clever. They may be tapping into the basic fabric of the cosmos.

Wow! The whole wide cosmos? Goodness gracious. The rest of this article is going to be amazing!

But the red colobus [monkeys] recently made a life-altering discovery. They found that if they eat a bit of charcoal from the abandoned fires of local villagers, their indigestion is cured. This had made them happier monkeys, and as a result their numbers have dramatically increased; not only that, but they are free to explore other food sources. These advantages aren’t felt by the white-and-black colobus, who haven’t hit upon the charcoal-eating trick. New generations of red colobus learn the habit by having it passed on from mother to child.

Oh. A population of monkeys started eating something random (because that’s what monkeys do) and it helped settle their stomachs.

Again. Oh.

It’s amazing how much critical knowledge is contained in this one anecdote. Self-medication is well known, but here the red colobus has hit upon the same property in charcoal that emergency room doctors use when a patient arrives with acute poisoning. Medical science is able to explain how charcoal absorbs toxins in the stomach. Monkeys can’t explain anything or do laboratory research. It is completely untenable to claim that they eat substances at random until they hit upon just the one perfect remedy — such random behavior isn’t seen among them.

God damn it. They’re monkeys. They eat whatever is in front of them. And no, Chopra, they aren’t doing it with the intent of hitting “upon just the one perfect remedy”; they discovered they felt better after eating charcoal. That’s it.

But this is not an intelligent man. He continues.

What we are witnessing is an intelligent discovery on the part of creatures who stand far below Homo sapiens on the evolutionary chain, and that discovery is being passed on from mother to child without genetic adaptation. To me, this means that quite a blow has been struck for intelligence being innate in the universe. It suggests that evolution itself has never been random but is guided by the principle of intelligence — not “intelligent design,” which is a red herring supplied by religious conservatives. The intelligent universe is a cutting-edge idea, not a throwback to scripture. As a theory, it gives us a much more elegant explanation for many things that are clumsily explained by falling back on randomness to explain every new development in Nature.

So many things wrong. Brain explode.

1) Homo sapiens do not stand atop any chain. In fact, there is no chain. Those monkeys are perfectly well adapted in their intelligence for the sake of being monkeys. Evolutionary success is not measured in particular characteristics or traits (should one want to compare species), but rather in survivability and longevity.

2) This does not indicate any sort of intelligent guidance. It indicates that monkeys eat a lot of crap. Sometimes that crap makes them feel good.

3) This is not an example of evolution. Chopra has no grasp of the concept.

At the moment, evolutionary theory refuses to abandon the notion of random selection, and geneticists cling stubbornly to the doctrine of random mutations to explain why new things appear in the unfolding story of life.

Evolutionary theory is so much more than Chopra knows. Selection is not random, plenty of mechanisms exist which help to explain the appearance of new characteristics and traits, and again, he hasn’t even offered an example of evolution in the first place. But just to be clear, he eventually comes right out and says it:

We all have a stake in this argument, however. Seeing the red colobus evolve before our eyes cannot be denied.

No, no, no, no.

Rather than saying that a larger brain made intelligence possible, why not say the opposite, that intelligence dictated a larger brain so that it could expand?

Because you have no evidence for the ridiculous claim that inherently says natural selection has foresight?

This guy is such a fucking joke.

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: , , , , , | 12 Comments »

Origins of vision

Posted on March 14, 2010 by Michael

Vision likely originated as simple eyespots in simple organisms. It also is traced back to jellyfish and their own simplistic eyespots, which are actually still present in some manner today. That is, jellyfish have areas of photoreceptor cells which don’t allow vision as we know it (they don’t even have brains), but they do allow a sensation of particular wavelengths of light to be perceived. These wavelengths often indicate depth (and maybe predators), which in turn may indicate food source (pelagic jellyfish don’t tend to get to plump).

Recent research has discovered the genetic pathway involved in light sensitivity in a close relative of the jellyfish.

“We determined which genetic ‘gateway,’ or ion channel, in the hydra is involved in light sensitivity,” said senior author Todd H. Oakley, assistant professor in UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. “This is the same gateway that is used in human vision.”

This allows for a prediction using evolution: all organisms alive today which share a common ancestry with hydras will share this same genetic gateway. Organisms like flies, as the article points out, do not share this ancestry with vertebrates and as such do not share this genetic gateway. If they did share it, then wow. Creationists could actually trot out their improbability arguments.

“This work picks up on earlier studies of the hydra in my lab, and continues to challenge the misunderstanding that evolution represents a ladder-like march of progress, with humans at the pinnacle,” said Oakley. “Instead, it illustrates how all organisms — humans included — are a complex mix of ancient and new characteristics.”

Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments »

Beating a creationist

Posted on February 14, 2010 by Michael

It seems that every time a creationist opens his mouth it gets shut up – not because THERE’S A BIG CRAZY CONSPIRACY!, but because creationists hate evidence, hate facts, and hate reality. Get a bunch of creationists together to make a crappy movie and the smackdowns get even better.

The latest Intelligent Design film, called ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’, attempts to examine a problem that vexed poor Charles Darwin in 1859 – the puzzle of what we now call the ‘Cambrian explosion’. As an Oxford palaeontologist who has been working on this problem since 1966, I have been asked for my opinion on the veracity of its claims. Below are outlined some of what I take to be its more laughable misunderstandings.

1. The film makes a familiar mistake. There is a misplaced fixation upon beasts of the Burgess Shale. So antiquated is this view that the screenplay for this film could have been written by teachers in 1954, or even by Mack Sennett at Keystone studios in 1912, just after the Burgess Shale biota was first reported by Walcott. It needs to be remembered that the Burgess Shale appears far too late in the fossil record to tell us much about emergence of animals. Modern data shows that the explosion of modern phyla was beginning by about 545 Ma ago, with forms like Cloudina and Sabellidites. Since the Burgess Shale is a mere 505 Ma old, this gives us palaeontologists some 40 million years to play with. What a gift!

2. A rich fossil record of early animal remains has been discovered from near the end of the Ediacaran period at about 545 Ma to the appearance of calcified trilobites and echinoderms in the Chengjiang biota, some 520 Ma ago. This transitional period, variously known as the Tommotian or Fortunian Stage, contains examples of transitional forms. For example, Halkieria and Maikhanella are probable stem group ‘molluscs’ with multi-element shells; Eccentrotheca and Camenella are taken to be stem group ‘brachiopods’ with multi-element shells. Dozens of scientists have been writing about these materials in recent years. Some 20 million years of evolution has thereby been ignored. Or censored.

3. The first great mass extinction took place about 520 million years ago, during the Botomian and Toyonian Stages – well before the Burgess Shale. A rich diversity of reef building animals disappeared forever. These included archaeocyathan sponges and many small shelly fossils. But there is no mention of this. Did the film producers suffer amnesia at this point in the story? Or did that great prankster – the Intelligent Designer – make some big mistakes? If so, why call Her intelligent?

4. The film makes another common mistake. When Darwin referred to the need for many small steps in evolution, he did not say whether these steps had to be either fast or slow. Small steps can be made very quickly indeed – as with virus evolution today.

5. The film appears to have been shot within the walls of Cambridge University UK, with interviews taking place in the Sedgwick Museum, or around colleges such as St John’s and King’s College. Some think they perceive some blue highlights around the faces here, suggesting blue-screen shots in which the Cambridge settings have been imposed later. Whether real or false, this gives to the film a wholly spurious authority; rhe impression of a forgery.

For those interested, some of these evolutionary developments can be followed in my recent book on Darwin’s Dilemma, called Darwin’s Lost World (OUP, 2009), which takes the reader back from the Burgess Shale to the earliest multicellular organisms. Research into this fascinating interval remains wide open and is only just beginning. The Cambrian explosion was a real and entirely natural event, as was the wave of extinctions that followed. What a wonderful world!

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Tetrapods pushed back 18 million years

Posted on January 6, 2010 by Michael

The oldest tracks of four-legged animals have been discovered in Poland.

Rocks from a disused quarry record the “footprints” of unknown creatures that lived about 397 million years ago.

Scientists tell the journal Nature that the fossil trackways even retain the impressions left by the “toes” on the animals’ feet.

The team says the find means that land vertebrates appeared millions of years earlier than previously supposed.

This is especially interesting because Tiktaalik was discovered by Neil Shubin based upon a lack of land animals 390 million years ago but a prevalence 360 million years ago. He specifically looked for a place likely to have fossils that was 375 million years old in order to discover his transitional fossil. This new information doesn’t mean that he just got lucky – one would still expect to find transitional forms prior to true land animals – but a little luck was involved. (It was actually involved no matter what he wanted to find and when he wanted to find it because fossilization is so rare anyway.)

One important fact to note about Tiktaalik is that it likely lived in freshwater. This is key because a marine environment is less conducive to a full move onto land than a freshwater lake or river, and Tiktaalik shows evidence that it is closely related to later fully land animals. Think about it for a moment and it becomes obvious: you need to be able to drink freshwater, not salt water, in order to fully utilize the land. If your ancestors lived in freshwater, then the first transition has been made for you. That means the owners of these newly discovered footprints represent a transition of sorts, but they were still very much tied to a marine life, unlike Shubin’s discovery.

Filed under: Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , | 12 Comments »

Devil cancer update

Posted on January 3, 2010 by Michael

The devastating cancer spreading through the Tasmanian devil population has so far met resistance in at least one devil (Cedric), and possibly in his brother (Clinky).

Both were injected with dead tumours by scientists. Clinky produced no antibodies, but Cedric did and appears to have built-in defences against the mystery illness.

The experiments have now moved up a gear.

Researcher Alex Kriess says the pair have had live cancer cells inserted into their faces.

“They haven’t developed a tumour so far,” he said. “We injected very few cells so it might take a while until they develop anything that we can see.”

The next step is to see why Cedric may be resistant to the disease, which Jerry Coyne has deemed “can be regarded as a separate organism, genetically free to undergo independent evolution.” (The syntax is correct, but for clarity, it’s the disease that can be regarded as a separate organism.)

The most interesting aspect of all this is that Cedric comes from the side of the island not yet especially devastated by the disease. As more research is done, it will be interesting to find out if there is any sort of special history with cancer, even this specific cancer, that Cedric’s part of the island has had. That could be one driving cause behind the genetic difference to consider in addition to simple drift or geographical barriers.

Image via Jerry Coyne

Filed under: Evolution, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Water on the Moon

Posted on November 14, 2009 by Michael

NASA discovered there is plenty of water on the moon.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. So the thrilling discovery announced Friday sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

“We found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount,” Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, told reporters as he held up a white water bucket for emphasis.

He said the 25 gallons of water the lunar crash kicked up was only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact.

This is equivalent to roughly a bathtub’s worth of water from this double-impact.

One part of me wants to endlessly speculate at the possibility of microbial life. But all reason and rationality tell me to be cautious. Water does not automatically mean life (especially when its frozen).

…but what if it does mean life, at least in this case? Would the world realize the utter significance of this discovery? Not since Darwin described evolution by natural selection has there been such an important find.

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics, News, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Greatest Show on Earth

Posted on September 4, 2009 by Michael

Dawkins gives an intro to his new book (which I have already pre-ordered).

Filed under: Evidence, Evolution, News | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Giberson

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Michael

Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk have a column stating that they are scientists and they believe in both God and evolution.

We are scientists, grateful for the freedom to earn Ph.D.s and become members of the scientific community. And we are religious believers, grateful for the freedom to celebrate our religion, without censorship. Like most scientists who believe in God, we find no contradiction between the scientific understanding of the world, and the belief that God created that world.

Most of the article is just an emphasis on this basic statement. I was hoping to get a substantial post out of this when I first saw it, but I’m scavenging here.

We are trained scientists who believe in God, but we also believe that science provides reliable information about nature. We don’t view evolution as sinister and atheistic. We think it is simply God’s way of creating. Yet we can still sleep soundly at night, with Bibles on our nightstands, resting atop the latest copy of Scientific American.

It isn’t surprising that they use “and” rather than “or” between sinister and atheistic. Christians love to associate atheism with all sorts of evil things. Don’t believe it.

Our belief that God creates through evolution is a satisfying claim uniting our faith and our science. This is good news.

This is only good news for those who have long realized that religion and science are at odds, but who wish to bring the two together, ignoring all the issues raised. For instance, how can one maintain that prayer can affect the natural world, yet then ignore the scientific studies which show that, no, that is not true. Or, alternatively, claim that science cannot measure the supposed effects of prayer. Of course it can! The claim is that X occurs in the natural world. If that’s the case, it is always subject to study using the scientific method. The natural world (i.e., reality) is science’s realm. Enter your fairy tales into it and you leave the safe haven of the supernatural, mythical world.

There is nothing satisfying about a claim uniting Christianity (or any religion) and science. One makes claims about the natural world without evidence while the other is predicated on the very idea that evidence is absolutely critical in determining the truth of anything, especially counter-intuitive or improbable claims. There are only two gods which can work with science: a hands-off deity and a god which only works through natural laws. The first is pretty harmless. The claim is simply that God X set the Universe in motion. That temporarily satisfies the first cause-question, though it quickly falls apart when one asks “Well, what created God X?”. The other god, the one that works purely through natural laws, is only superfluous. This one can have theology around it and thus can be quite dangerous. However, as far as science goes, its use is as good as me saying that fairies guided every particle into place at all times. There’s no evidence for my fantastic claim, but it doesn’t technically interfere with what science says. But, of course, a god which causes virgin births, turns water into wine, and floods the entire Earth is far from being compatible with science. Very, very far.

Huh, look at that. Turns out even the short dumb things the New Creationists say can generate a lot of rebuttal.

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

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