2010: FTSOS in review, July to September

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Michael

This is the third installment of the 2010 review of FTSOS. See the first two here and here.

July:
Some of the smaller posts I’ve made that I think deserve a little more attention are the ones where I emphasize that biology is all about shape. The article I wrote about the fight against HIV is one of those posts. Research earlier this year found at least one location on HIV molecules that remains a consistent shape between individual viruses. This is important because HIV’s ability to be differently shaped in different parts of a single body makes it difficult to combat.

I also wrote about the difference between atheists, new atheists, and anti-theists. One of the public relation problems for atheism is that it is viewed as a dirty word. People assume it means absolute certainty, and that is seen as arrogant. It’s ironic because belief in God usually comes with certainty and that isn’t seen as being so arrogant, but I digress. Atheism is not certainty. Furthermore, where it is involved in new atheism and anti-theism, atheism acts as a descriptive base; new atheism and anti-theism are normative positions.

One of my all-time favorite posts is the one about photolyase and cancer. Photolyase is a protein that captures light and uses two of its constituents (a single proton and single electron) to force contorted nucleotides back into place. It is not present in humans, but is common in plants and other animals, helping to keep their genes functioning properly. This may be one reason we’re more susceptible to cancer than many of our fellow organisms.

August:
This was a skimpy month for FTSOS. I was away on a couple vacations for the bulk of the month, so the majority of the posts were either from my “Thought of the day” series or they were pictures/YouTube videos. But for what was there, I couldn’t resist pointing out and expanding on a fantastic quote from the judge who said Prop 8 in California is unconstitutional. In his quote he said a ban on gays getting married fails to advance any rational cause. I compared that sentiment to the idea that the majority cannot be allowed to discriminate simply because it is the majority.

I also made a post about a website devoted to philosophical thought experiments. The thought experiment I chose to highlight was Judith Jarvis Thompson’s Trolley Problem. My big motivator was a recent discussion with another blogger who laughably claimed that the trolley experiment was merely a logistical exercise, not an exercise about morality. To date he is still the only person in the world to believe that.

I also went through a few theistic arguments that are obviously failures. The most notable in my mind is the argument that says everything has a cause, therefore the Universe had a cause. There are two major problems with this. First, then why not just say a sort of ‘exo-nature’ caused the Universe? There is no need for consciousness – in fact, that only makes the theistic argument less probable. Second, the whole basis for this argument rests in the idea that forces result in reactions. For instance, if I push a chair, that chair moves; I applied a force. This is basic physics. But the whole shebang of forces and equal and opposite reactions? We’re talking about the science of what we know that happens within the Universe. And all we know necessarily breaks down prior to the Big Bang. The First Cause argument cannot be used because it rests about an unwarranted extension of science. Religion abusing science? Crazy, I know.

September:
The beginning of September was just as skimpy as the end of August because I was still on vacation. But while I never gave a huge post on the subject, the defining moment of the month (and year and decade and…) for me was my hike of Kilimanjaro. I have started writing about it at this point – just not for FTSOS. But in lieu of that you can read the account of the journey from my fellow group member and current Facebook buddy Jim Hodgson.

I also gave a very lengthy post on why prostitution ought to be legal. No one seemed to care, but I put a lot of effort into, so I thought I would mention it here. Basically, we make the practice illegal because of our own discomfort with sex as a society. We also draw false correlations between it and other illegal activities: of course one illegal thing will bring with it other illegal things if it’s something people want. Finally, for the safety and health of all involved, it would be better to legalize and regulate prostitution than keep the old system we have now.

One of the most popular posts on FTSOS that people found via search engines was the one where I lamented low science and math scores in the United States. A lack of funding relative to other areas, hostility towards science, and a general anti-intellectual trend in the U.S. all contribute to the decline of America on the world stage in education.

Another lament was my post about the anti-vax crowd causing deaths. The fact is, people who advocate against vaccines or for made-up alternatives to vaccines are making the world a more dangerous place, making people sick and even causing deaths. Get vaccinated – and, if you have them, especially get your children vaccinated.

Once again I really want to highlight a fourth post here. In this case, it is the one I made about the Problem of Evil. This has forever been an issue that no Christian (or other relevant believer) has been able to resolve. If God is good and evil exists, then we need to answer why. Appealing to free will fails because while God is necessarily good, free will does not need to necessarily exist. In other words, God is required to be good; he is not required to create free will.

Expect October to December tomorrow.

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2010: FTSOS in review, April to June

Posted on December 29, 2010 by Michael

Here is the second installment of the 2010 FTSOS review. See the first installment here.

April:
Easily the top post of the month (in fact, it is number 5 all time) was the one about the topless march in Farmington. It resulted in a lot of people clicking the Photography tab on FTSOS in search of all the topless women who were marching through the small town of Farmington up here in Maine. Because I guess topless women are rare.

When I set up this blog, I never had the intention of giving a good focus to quacks and charlatans. But I just had to write about the scumbag Lawrence Stowe. The guy was caught on a CBS special stealing from the sick and desperate. He was ought ruining lives and families, laughing all the way to the bank. The guy is easily one of the biggest pieces of shit about whom I have ever read.

There was also the issue of FTSOS commenter Jack Hudson chiding a family member of mine through texts. I made mention of the issue on his blog, but he very quickly edited my comment so as not to reflect his misdeed. As a result – and being someone who hates dishonesty – I had to make a post on FTSOS explaining what had happened. This caused Jack to first deny his actions and then vow never to return to this blog. I later granted the small possibility that he was not guilty, but that did nothing to dampen the hissy-fit. Of course, since the texts came from Minnesota (which is where Jack lives) and since they all referenced a specific Facebook interaction he had with my family member, I had to remain unwilling to retract anything. I stand by that.

May:
The big science news of the month was that Craig Venter created synthetic DNA that worked when put in a cell. It is a phenomenal technical achievement that opens up the door to a whole world of synthetic creations. We can now, at least in theory, go into a computer program, change a few amino acids and come up with new genes and gene products. I suspect this will prove invaluable to cancer research.

About midway through the month I decided to tackle, for the nth time, the idea of objective morality. The truth is, even if theists are right that there is an objective morality, they do not arrive at their conclusions objectively. People are always picking and choosing what they want to believe, how to interpret the things they use for their beliefs, and how those things fit into what they already believe. As I said back in May, even a claim of objective morality is a subjective position.

I also talked about the fact that atheism has never been responsible for an act of evil. Two things arise from this. First, people often go back to that old chestnut, “Ideas don’t hurt people! People hurt people!” Of course, this just ignores the fact that people are composed of ideas. If we are not willing to say that ideas lead to actions, then it is no longer clear that we can even say ideas are good or bad. And what does it even mean to say people – explicitly not ideas – are responsible for actions? If people are not just packages of ideas, then what are they? What does it mean to say “Joe punched Suzy” if we deny that underlying that statement is that Joe had the idea to move his fist towards Suzy? Second, people will point to Stalin, Hitler, etc and say “What about those atheists?” This is silly first because Hitler was an evolution-denying, Christian creationist. The silliness then continues when we look at Stalin (and any other leader who was an atheist) because atheism is not a normative position. Since it is purely descriptive, it does not result in any “ought” or “ought not”; it says nothing of what we should or should not do. Stalin and co never acted out of atheism. It is not logically possible.

June:
The most popular post of the month had to be the one where I told people not to talk to the cops. If the police suspect a person of something, it serves the interests of the police, not the suspect, to get a discussion going. The job of the police is to find out information they can use against people. And even innocent people are at risk. The best way to avoid the whole mess? Don’t talk to the cops. Seriously.

In the race for governor of Maine, we learned that the eventual winner of the election, Republican Paul LePage, is a creationist. He later danced, obfuscated, and dodged the issue. The fact is, the guy is not going to object one bit when some Maine school board thinks it will be a good idea to teach creationism to students.

In skin cancer news, researchers found a certain drug, ipilimumab, which allows the immune system to run free and more effectively fight cancer. Responses to the drug were impressive for those with late stage skin cancers and it is hoped that the treatments can be improved. It was thought the FDA might approve the drug for use this year, but it looks like the decision date is going to be March 26, 2011.

Expect July to September tomorrow.

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The dishonest fool

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Michael

I really didn’t want to make another post about this guy. Really. I promise. But I can’t stand dishonesty. And I literally have never encountered a more fundamentally dishonest person than Jack Hudson. I don’t need to recount the details; we’ve seen it before from this guy. I’m just going to quickly point out what happened, show you the evidence, and move on.

I recently made a post where the Catholic Church said it prefers that a real, living human being face certain death rather than let doctors do the ethical thing and end a sure-to-be-deadly pregnancy. The Church disassociated itself from an Arizona hospital as a result. I would have just ignored the incident if it didn’t constitute a textbook case of Double Effect. But since I love philosophy (having recently completed all the credits needed for the part of my degree that is in it), I felt compelled to write about it.

What I also felt compelled to do was link back to a post by Jack where he completely misunderstood a basic-as-hell thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem. He claimed that one issue with the thought experiment was that it was unrealistic. In fact, he said it all really came down to a logistical problem. Anyone familiar with philosophical thought experiments knows they often are supposed to be unrealistic. The big point is to see how far we’re willing to go with our ethical positions and theories. And anyone specifically familiar with the Trolley Problem knows logistics has nothing to do with it. This doesn’t even rise to the stuff of Phi 101.

And what was Jack’s response to the link-back? Well, I’ve outed him for a lot of his dishonest doings, including when he became upset over a public Facebook discussion and texted my cousin dozens of times. It’s only natural that he has an interest in people not finding their way back to my blog from his. (Let’s ignore that 15-30% of his blog hits have come from FTSOS in the first place.) So his first response was to delete the pingback that showed up on his blog from here. Fine. I expected that, it’s his blog, and it isn’t important. But his next action? He deleted every single one of his posts where we had discussed his philosophical shortcomings.

But you say, “Drats, Michael! You claim he deleted all his posts, but how do we know that’s true?” Well, I’m glad you asked. As it turns out, he put my comments in moderation, failing to or choosing not to delete them. (I’m sure they’ll disappear quickly – I’ve got the screen shots.) What this means is that while Jack’s readers are unable to see anything, all my posts are still visible to me. And here’s the proof.

The circled part in the second picture is where I was quoting Jack when he claimed that the Trolley Problem was one of logistics. And in case anyone has any trouble reading it:

You are actually confusing a moral problem with a logistical problem, as I said before – it would be morally right to save everyone if it were in my power to do so. It would be morally evil to intentionally harm people – logistically I do what I can to help as many people as possible, and as one person is intent on hanging out on a train track where he has the possibility of getting hit by a train, he gets harmed in my attempt to help others.

I guess the entire field of philosophy has been confused on this one for about 35 years. Thank goodness Jack Hudson rolled on up to let us all know where the error stood.

Okay, so maybe this wasn’t the quick post I promised, but it needs to be here. As I said, I can’t stand dishonesty. But I like to think I’m a pretty nice guy, so I’m going to give Jack the same advice I gave a certain ‘doctor’ about a million times (I just hope it takes for Jack): If you stop doing dishonest things, I will stop making a spectacle of them. It’s really that simple. Just as with that ‘doctor’, my posts are responses. Don’t like them? Then don’t give me anything to which to respond.

This isn’t that hard.

Update: With the weird exception of the comments in moderation (thanks for making it easy to expose your lies, Jack!), it appears that Jack Censorship Hudson has actually deleted all my posts (or at least all I have checked). As a prize, here are some of the things Jack Dishonest Hudson (he wears many hats) has said.

On making physical threats over a joke:

You know Michael, I almost never feel compelled to deal with anyone physically, but you are very lucky your puny little bank teller body is in Maine, because i would kick your butt from one side of the room to the other if you said that to my face. Of course you wouldn’t because you are a coward.

Jack Dishonest Hudson later claimed that he never makes personal attacks. I’m pretty sure threatening to physically attack someone counts as a “personal”.

On a family member of mine (read each line as being separate from the next):

I mean Ty is a pitiable figure who incites disgust and perhaps some concern about his mental stability,

It appears this is a pathetic bid for publicity for your failing comedy career

Oh, and anytime you are in Minnesota (not that anyone here would be so incredibly stupid to hire you) – stop on by, and we will have a little talk about who the coward is here.

What people would I have that would want to call a pathetic drug addled excuse for a comedian?

Tyler is a Chris Farley wanna-be, except not as funny, and not nearly in as good a shape.

Fact is, it doesn’t matter, because since he couldn’t afford to come to Minnesota anyway – and he would have to figure out where it is. So I am not too worried, and the fact that you are concerned about humanism while enabling your cousin’s lifestyle is fiairly pathetic.

Dream on Chris Farley, dream on.

So Ty, I have always heard the best comedy is the product of lonliness and poverty. Is that a myth, or are you just an exception to that rule?

So, given all the incredible accomplishments in your life, to what do you attribute the current need to don a clown suit and work the neighborhood birthday parties?

Two things. First, Jack Dishonest Hudson made a claim in that same thread that he was civil. I guess he couldn’t access dictionary.com that day. Second, what I really hated about the direction of that whole debacle was the chest-thumping contest Jack Insecure Hudson was trying to have. Aside from it being an awful show of school yard boyishness, it wasn’t even credible. If you don’t work out, if you aren’t in shape, if you don’t regularly play sports, and you’re middle aged, you are not healthy enough to show any young whippersnapper what’s-what. And I say that out of a disdain for the immorality of not trying to be healthy, not from the well of immaturity from which Jack LittleKid Hudson was drawing that day.

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Cowardice

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Michael

We all know Jack Hudson. He’s an intellectual coward who hates gays because he’s personally insecure with his own (immature) sexuality. He once texted my cousin several dozen times from several different track phones because of a Facebook tiff. His writing leaves a lot to be desired. He willingly lies about evolution and Hitler (you know, Hitler – the guy who was a Christian creationist). One has to wonder why he doesn’t argue that the theory of gravity leads to V2 rockets. (I’m kidding. It’s obvious that such an argument doesn’t fuel his fundamentally dishonest agenda.) He is confused about his own ideas on what morality is. He will constantly quote from either FTSOS, status updates on the FTSOS Facebook page, or even from random people on that Facebook page. He doesn’t get really simple things. He even believes that Judith Jarvis Thompson’s analysis of the Trolley Problem is an issue of logistics, showing his utter ignorance of philosophy and thought experiments. (This is one of the most risible things he has ever said.) A high percentage of his posts are just responses to FTSOS posts – except, since he is literally the most dishonest person with which I have ever personally interacted, he refuses to cite me as his reference. When (for the nth time) he was called on his aversion to honesty, he continued with his lies and claimed he doesn’t get his cues from me. However, once I listed out at least five posts going back only a month and a half which showed his responses to original posts I was making, he was finally caught by the evidence, causing him to feebly fess up. He is laughably ignorant of biology, refusing to read papers he is dishonestly citing in his posts; this is understandable since he only has a few basic biology courses under his belt from over 20 years ago, not any substantial education in the field. And, best of all, he makes physical threats based upon jokes. I find this one the most entertaining because it reminds me of something a psychology graduate student friend of mine told me. He told me of a counseling session he had with some troubled youths. They asked him, ‘Hey, man, wouldn’t you be offended if someone said somethin’ about yo’ momma?”, referring to “Your Momma” jokes. My friend, being intelligent, of course said he wouldn’t be offended. The jokes are insignificant and without any real meaning. The troubled youths were amazed by this. Apparently vague, unimportant, mild, trivial jokes are really good at offending poorly educated people. And that was the case with Jack when I made a quip about his excessive weight.

You know Michael, I almost never feel compelled to deal with anyone physically, but you are very lucky your puny little bank teller body is in Maine, because i would kick your butt from one side of the room to the other if you said that to my face. Of course you wouldn’t because you are a coward.

For someone who pretends to be morally superior because of his false beliefs, Jack is awfully violent.

I’ve waited to bring up this quote last in all my links because I have linked to it in the past on Jack’s blog. He quickly deleted it. It’s obvious he’s embarrassed by what he said. He ought to be. But the correct, adult response is to just apologize in that case. I did. It isn’t that hard. Being wrong once in awhile or making a mistake here or there is part of being human. But maybe Jack is just trying to emulate the temper tantrums of Jesus, I don’t know.

The reason I’m making this post is simply because of Jack’s penchant for censorship. He’s as linguistically immature as he is sexually immature. He has a habit of deleting any naughty word that shows up where he has editing control. I disagree with him on that because he’s bastardizing not only language but also the intent of other writers. He’s in the wrong. But now he has taken everything up a notch. Not content with deleting individual words he finds offensive, he has taken to deleting absolutely any post I make on his blog. Part of the reason stems from his childishness. Part of the reason stems from the fact that he has never won a single debate in his entire life and it upsets him to get intellectually destroyed so often. Part of the reason stems from the fact that I’m sure he wanted to enjoy me typing out my responses only to find I had wasted my time; he could have just blocked my IP. (Perhaps I should have realized I was wasting my time when I first encountered the guy’s terrible – and fundamentally dishonest – arguments. Or, as he would say, arguements.)

What really makes me sad about all this, though, is that Jack is from Minnesota. I’m not going to hate an entire state because of one foolish liar, but man. It’s the home of PZ Myers and – far, far more importantly – the birthplace of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s a shame he has to be such a black mark on an otherwise fine location.

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

Butchering science

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Michael

Creationists hate science. They hate its conclusions, they hate its methods, they hate that it doesn’t support their silly beliefs. It’s that hatred that motivates them to butcher scientific articles and papers.

One recent butchering comes from Jack Hudson. I’m sure regulars here remember him. If not, it isn’t important. He’s a creationist with a background in introductory biology courses from 20 years ago. It’s doubtful he has much experience reading scientific papers, but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

In his post he butchers two articles. I’m going to focus on the first one, but I’ll briefly mention the second one. In that one researchers found that some negative mutations don’t change the protein sequence yet they are still negative. This one is simple. The entire sequence of a gene is not devoted to just the protein sequence. A mutation can therefore change one aspect of a gene without changing another – but it can still change another process that is important in forming proteins. Alter shape in one place and you have a good chance of seeing change somewhere else as a result. Biology is still all about shape.

The second paper, though. Woo. What a doozy of a butchering. First let me summarize the paper.

In asexual populations alleles can become fixed rather quickly. Their evolution is more straight forward because they aren’t mixing and matching genes. They produce offspring with the exact same genome, less there be a mutation. If there is a mutation, it can become fixed because things are generally less complicated with asexual populations and thus more black and white. Is this mutation good or bad? As the paper says and as Jack repeats upon hearing the term for the first time, alleles sweep through a population.

But when it comes to sexually reproducing populations, things become more complicated. And this is what the paper is about. The question is, do alleles sweep through populations in sexually reproducing populations like they do in asexual populations? The answer is no.

Now, if we’re to believe Jack, this means that evolution has failed because, why, evolution predicts an advantageous allele to reach 100% fixation, of course. Except it isn’t so black and white with sexually reproducing populations. (Nor does evolution predict that anyway.)

What the researchers did was study over 600 generations of fruit flies. They let them breed naturally, but then selected out the eggs which were produced the most quickly. This led to significantly faster reproducing populations. They then tracked specific alleles to see if they would become fixed. What they found was that they don’t.

Signatures of selection are qualitatively different than what has been observed in asexual species; in our sexual populations, adaptation is not associated with ‘classic’ sweeps whereby newly arising, unconditionally advantageous mutations become fixed. More parsimonious explanations include ‘incomplete’ sweep models, in which mutations have not had enough time to fix, and ‘soft’ sweep models, in which selection acts on pre-existing, common genetic variants. We conclude that, at least for life history characters such as development time, unconditionally advantageous alleles rarely arise, are associated with small net fitness gains or cannot fix because selection coefficients change over time.

The conclusion here is that selection for a particular trait in sexually reproducing populations acts upon many different aspects and genetic variants within the genome, not merely a single gene or SNP.

This suggests that selection does not readily expunge genetic variation in sexual populations, a finding which in turn should motivate efforts to discover why this is seemingly the case.

This is the actual conclusion of the paper. To put it another way (and to repeat myself), advantageous variants do not wipe out other genetic variants in a sexually reproducing population, instead acting on variation in a more subtle and complicated way. The big conclusion here is that there is a difference in how genes become fixed (or not fixed) in asexual populations versus sexually reproducing populations.

And Jack’s conclusion?

In short, if the activity failed to occur in the lab under optimal conditions, it is unlikely that traits are going to be transmitted this way in nature.

The traits are still being transmitted through natural selection working on variation. Jack’s conclusion has little to no connection to anything from the paper. In fact, it is abundantly clear that he read an article somewhere, figured out how to butcher it, and then went and read a few lines from the original paper.

I’ve said in the past that what takes a creationist 30 seconds to say takes an educated person 3 hours to correct. This post and the research required for it didn’t take that long, but the sentiment remains true – it’s a real hassle to untangle the carelessly mushed writings of a creationist.

Filed under: Creationism, Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Jack gets it wrong again

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Michael

In another bigoted tirade, Jack Hudson has said some genuinely stupid things. Specifically, he talks about the recent Supreme Court ruling against a bigoted Christian group.

It is notable that certain Christian beliefs would be contrary to the tenets of a gay advocacy group as well, and for such a group to exclude Christians who didn’t agree with the purpose would be exactly the same. Just as avowed Republicans could be excluded from a student Democrat group, or an avowed capitalist from the Young Communist League. Diversity on campus derives not from forcing every group to admit members who oppose the primary purpose of a group, but from allowing all sorts of groups to advocate on behalf of their own beliefs and interests. Forcing a Jewish organization to accept Neo-Nazi’s or a feminist group to be taken over by men is not to enhance ‘diversity’ but to subdue the messages and purposes of those groups. In the same way the policy of Hasting’s Law College abrogates the fundamental rights of CLS to express and advocate on behalf of a particular point of view – which incidentally is exactly the precedent held by previous Supreme Court rulings like Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston and Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. Both these decisions affirmed the right to association and its importance in preserving our 1st amendment rights.

This is all about making fine distinctions, something Jack and most Christians are unable to do, so I understand why he would make the mistakes he does.

This recent ruling was based upon Hasting Law school’s policy of non-discrimination. That policy said every group must allow everyone to join up if it wants funding and other school-based benefits. Jack points out that this could result in the message of any group being subdued by a bunch of individuals hostile to a particular group’s message joining up. This is true, it could. But that isn’t relevant. The Supreme Court wasn’t ruling on the effectiveness of Hasting Law’s policy, but whether it was constitutional or not.

Jack next points out that the school’s policy prevents the Christian group from expressing its views. This is blatantly false. The group can express its views all it wants, wherever it wants, for however long it wants. It just can’t get funding.

Finally, Jack points to two cases where the Supreme Court held that groups could exclude members who held contrary views. Again, with the lack of distinctions. Both of those cases dealt with private organizations. This recent case deals with forcing a public school to offer special treatment to a religious group. In other words, the conclusion of the first two cases is that the KKK can exclude black people all it wants. The conclusion of this recent case is that bigoted groups are allowed to organize, but a public institution is under no obligation to offer it funding or other benefits. But then people like Jack probably like the idea of funding bigoted, racist, or otherwise discriminatory groups because LIBERTY! LIBERTY! LIBERTY!

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Racism through proxy

Posted on June 12, 2010 by Michael

Didn’t you know? The racist past of 20th century America wasn’t based upon cultural oppression, poor education and high illiteracy, the loss the economic viability of slavery, religious tolerance and encouragement for slave holding, segregation, rural isolation, or any of those well-known things. Nah. It was based upon eugenics.

Frequently, when seeking a legal precedent for same-sex marriage, advocates will cite the Supreme Court’s rulings against anti-miscegenation laws. Those laws, which existed in a number of states in the early half of the 20th century, prevented people of different races from marrying. The primary Supreme Court ruling in question was Loving v. Virginia which effectively rendered unconstitutional all laws against interracial marriage. Interestingly the specific law it dealt with, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, wasn’t based on ‘racism’ per se, but on scientific ideas of eugenics, an idea derived from Darwin’s evolutionary theory, a product of the scientific and legal consensus in the 20′s and 30′s.

You got that? Racism – that thing that existed long before the abolitionist Darwin came along – wasn’t really the basis for the Racial Integrity Act. Heck, how can a law be racist if people try to justify in other ways? I mean, no one wanted to quiet down all those civil right leaders because they were black; it was really because they were uppity. Or all those women who wanted to vote? Well, gee, let’s be fair. No one was against them voting because they were women; it was really because they were hysterical. Or those Injuns. Golly shucks, it wasn’t because they looked different and dressed funny; it was really because they were so savage.

What the above blogger – to no one’s surprise, I’m sure, Jack Hudson – is willfully missing is that eugenics was never much of a scientific idea as it applied to humans. When it comes to animals, we use it frequently because we put less value on the lives of, say, livestock. That makes it more acceptable to say it is of high value for a cow to produce copious amounts of milk; we haven’t given the cow much value in the first place, so we have no particularly diminished anything. With humans, we tend to start with a high base value. Whether that’s right or wrong is another question, but it’s what people tend to do.

Let’s say we have two sorts of scales. We have a universal scale we use to measure species against each other. It’s a rather detestable, arbitrary scale, but the reality is that we unconsciously use it all the time (it’s okay to torture a moth, but not a bird, usually). Then we have a local scale which measures individuals against each other. Say each scale runs 1 (low) to 10 (high). On the universal scale we almost always rank humans as having the highest value of 10. We may, however, rank other animals very highly. A baboon, for example, may be a 9. This provides for two distinct base lines; we start humans at a high base value than other animals.

This high base value comes with a number of usual stipulations. Treat all humans fairly, all humans deserve freedom, do not kill any human, etc. But once we apply the local scale, we may put restrictions based upon actions and behaviors. Deranged killers do not deserve their freedom. On the universal scale they’re still a 10 by virtue of being human, but they may rank as a 1 on the local scale.

What eugenics did was change the fundamental ranking of humans; it altered our universal scale ranking. No longer were humans 10 simply by being human. They were instead ranked by the same arbitrary measures used to place baboons and leopards below humans in the first place.

But in order to get to the point of ranking humans as non-humans based upon race – and this is a crazy one – racism had to exist. The prejudices and bigotry of civilizations did not spring from any scientific idea: look at the Christian-induced Dark Ages. A severe lack of science did nothing to stop the de-valuing of individual human lives.

In the time during and after Darwin, racism flourished. From this – not evidence, knowledge of genetics, or any known mechanisms of evolution – eugenics arose. Science was the faux veneer abused to make it all look legitimate. Evolution had nothing to do with the matter. But even if it did, this is all an ugly, dishonest, creationist rhetorical tool. Associate evolution with something bad and, well, it just must be wrong! Just ignore the fact that evolution is a scientific fact, void of anthropomorphic values, while eugenics is nothing but a reflection of racist values.

The rest of this ugly, ill conceived post goes on to quote a philosopher of bigotry, Francis J. Beckwith, about same-sex marriage.

“It is clear then that the miscegenation/same-sex analogy does not work. For if the purpose of anti-miscegenation laws was racial purity, such a purpose only makes sense if people of different races have the ability by nature to marry each other. And given the fact that such marriages were a common law liberty, the anti-miscegenation laws presuppose this truth. But opponents of same-sex marriage ground their viewpoint in precisely the opposite belief: people of the same gender do not have the ability by nature to marry each other since gender complementarity is a necessary condition for marriage. Supporters of anti-miscegenation laws believed in their cause precisely because they understood that when male and female are joined in matrimony they may beget racially-mixed progeny, and these children, along with their parents, will participate in civil society and influence its cultural trajectory.

Most of the emphasis is in the original piece itself, but note mine in bold. By nature. You know what that is? It’s an invocation of Natural Law theory. That’s the silly little theory that says the good is what is natural. What it really tries to do is say that human action is bad because it presupposes that humans are somehow not a part of Nature. But it isn’t honest enough to come out and say it. And what’s worse, it is entirely impotent to explain why same-sex marriage is bad but flying across the country in a giant metal tube is good.

Beckwith is saying the analogy drawn between anti-miscegenation laws and anti-gay marriage laws fails because the former was meant to prevent reproduction while the latter has a different basis. This misses the whole point of the analogy. Historically it’s very important to understand the reasons behind discrimination. Practically it matters less: discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. How one wants to rationalize bigotry doesn’t really matter, what with Lady Justice being blind and all.

But if Beckwith really wants to disseminate the reasons for gay discrimination, the reality is that bigots place their opposition to marriage equality in their religious-based sexual immaturity, their ignorance of what it means to be gay, and the one big thought that goes through their minds, “Yucky!”.

Filed under: Creationism, Rights, Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Unbelievable: The Sistine Chapel

Posted on May 29, 2010 by Michael

This is one of the more amazing things I’ve seen on the Internet lately. It’s an interactive view of The Sistine Chapel. I guess the Catholic Church can do some things right.

And despite the incorrect generalizations in his post, I will note that this is via Jack.

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

Morality does not come from God

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Michael

At least that’s what Jack Hudson has finally admitted.

All morality starts with a set of facts about the world one believes to be true.

Surely, being a creationist, Jack is attempting to make a false equivalence between his faith and the objective determination of what is known to be true via science, but let’s ignore that old rhetoric. He has actually acknowledged (even though he probably still doesn’t get it) that morality is derived from internal perceptions of the world, predicated on the notion that internal consistency is worthwhile. That’s one reason religion remains so strong: it often is not internally consistent, but it is consistent over large spans of time (until secular morality takes over, such as when slavery was rebuked throughout various times and places in history). This consistency is a viable substitute for reasoned consistency, something to which secular ethical theories lay primary claim.

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

You’re a coward, Jack Hudson

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Michael

In continuing his Ken Ham tactics of creationist cowardice, Jack Hudson is quoting from other blogs without linking directly to them. Maybe he’s afraid his following of 3 fellow creationists won’t be able to handle it?

Saying, “Nothing can be caused by atheism because there is nothing within atheism TO cause anything.” is like saying that cutting the breaks on a car won’t cause it to crash because brakes don’t cause cars to move, accelerators do.

This is a direct quote from a commenter on FTSOS’ Facebook Page. In most circles, not giving credit where credit is due is known as plagiarism. But then, it’s okay to lie so long as it’s for Jesus.

It may be true that atheism didn’t cause Maoists, and Stalinists, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Ill and Fidel Castro to kill, torture and imprison tens of millions of people; however it was certainly atheism that allowed them the freedom to completely disregard human rights and human worth and reduce entire populations down to political chattel. This isn’t a matter of conjecture, but history and fact.

This isn’t history; it’s just poor lying. Jack starts by admitting that the arguments he has been parading around the Internet for years are wrong – atheism didn’t cause Mao or Stalin or anyone else to act in any way – but then he pretends like atheism somehow allows for more evil. It doesn’t, that’s non-sense, and it runs counter to the extensive arguments that have been presented on FTSOS without addressing any of them. Atheism is a descriptive claim. It literally cannot allow or disallow for good or evil any more than a claim that rocks exist allows for anything. Jack, like so many other dumb Americans, is incapable of distinguishing between descriptive and normative claims.

Of course, New Atheism, being primarily an emotional response, is not concerned with either history or facts.

This non-sequitur does a couple things. First, it aims to cry “You’re emotional!”, thereby evoking an emotional response. It is an attempt to bring people to emotion because the reality of the situation is that people like Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, and Richard Dawkins just aren’t going there. Maybe if people like Jack lie enough then a sliver of emotion will push through, thus justifying his lying claim. (Maybe he was also trying to get an emotional response when he texted my cousin.) Second, Jack’s lie is assuming that emotion is somehow invalid. It isn’t. Emotion is an important aspect of the human experience and it can act as an aide in argumentation. Look at John Kerry and George Bush in their ’04 debates. Kerry destroyed Bush on the facts, and I think was later vindicated by the rest of Bush’s failed presidency, but Bush came out looking much better in the latter debates because he was emotionally assertive in his responses. That alone wouldn’t have won him points – he did present actual arguments, and those acted as the primary catalyst to his improved debate image – but they were key in his success (and the country’s failure, but I digress).

The funny thing about all this cowardice is that it was Jack who actually influenced me to use my real name on the Internet. In some ancient message board he would point out that anonymity was an excuse to hide from one’s words. This was a reference to my use of a secondary name in an effort to finish a discussion that had begun under a different name. In reality, I was forced into doing this because the board had banned my first name (how dare I say homosexuality wasn’t a choice!) and it would have been stupid and pointless to come out and say “Look! I’m the guy you just banned!”, so Jack’s criticisms actually made no sense whatsoever in that context. However, his broad point was an important one (again, just not to the situation, despite his silliness). It seemed to me his was saying, ‘Own up to what you say’, and I agree with the sentiment. It’s just ironic that he now rejects it.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

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