Peanut Butter, The Atheist’s Nightmare! Really??

I’m aghast at the abject stupidity apparently being promoted as serious truth by these people.

“Evolution teaches that…”

Evolution teaches nothing. It is those who understand it who teach, and those who do not who mislead.

Why Don’t Mainstream Industries Use the Paranormal?

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I think that with some exceptions, like wealthy heads of state who employ handsomely paid astrologers, and the worldwide Alt-Med industry that rakes in billions of dollars in profits annually, among others, the practical world of for-profit industry has little use for non-scientific claims of fact.

Now, I’m well aware that there are people who believe these claims, but the point is that if any of these phenomena really worked, there would be a much wider use of them in mainstream industries than just a few rogue executives and employees bleeding funds on oil and mineral dowsing scams, or hiring mystics to enhance their mojo in anticipation of the next fiscal year’s budget plans.

Woo itself is big business, not because it works, but because people are gullible, and there are enough people who believe it works, who often literally buy into it for it to turn a healthy profit for those who style themselves merchants of openness, trust and goodwill.

Trust is a good thing, but real trust is based upon evidence, that of knowledge concerning those to be trusted, and it’s often unfortunately equated with credulity.

Uncritical acceptance of claims that causes one to ignore doubt, dismiss evidence, and the possibility of being mistaken is more than just harmless idle fancy, it’s dangerous to both one’s wealth and health.

Credulity is not trust, but a parody of it, benefiting the one having it not a bit, and the one exploiting it a lot. Anyone who tells you to just trust them and never think for yourself is not your friend, but someone with an agenda in mind that does not involve your physical or financial well-being.

If the claims of psychics, New Age gurus, free energy proponents and alternative medical practitioners really worked — if a treatment really did what it was claimed to and not just ride the coattails of the placebo effect and statistical regression to the mean, for example, — these ideas would be in much wider use by mainstream industries, not just by believers, because all things being equal, ideas that work have a tendency over time to see broader application than those that don’t.

I’m aware that not all things are equal though, because it’s entirely possible for a false idea to persist for hundreds or thousands of years and remain in use — The human tendency for belief in ineffective practices is without peer — bloodletting, trepaning, patent medicines, exorcisms, and infant sacrifices to petition the gods for an end to drought all come to mind.

The persistence of bad ideas over long historical periods is something endemic to our species, and it may one day kill us off if we aren’t wary.

That’s why the mere fact that a practice is ancient, or widely accepted, does not imply that it’s true. If it becomes widely used over a long time because it works, so much the better, but that is not necessarily the case.

You can fool employees, executives, and depending on demographics, potential customers, but you can’t fool the limits of the technology and labor that go into an industry’s goods and services.

This is why the military, despite that embarrassing waste of 20 million dollars known as Project Stargate does not use psychics as an effective means of intelligence gathering — note that I said ‘effective,’ that is, successfully gathering intelligence data more accurately than chance guessing.

To the best of my knowledge, and you may try to prove me wrong if you like, no energy utility company makes use of crystal or pyramid power to supply its customers, potentially inexhaustible sources of energy that would reap immense profits if they were used, and would certainly be a well-guarded secret to those who owned them…if they really worked.

Unlimited energy generated at almost no cost to producer = A powerful & profitable resource!

If prayer and faith could heal the sick and injured, if homeopathy or reiki worked, if quantum healing wasn’t just flapdoodle, they wouldn’t be alternatives to medicine, they wouldn’t even replace the practice of medicine — they would BE medicine, like every other treatment that has proven its worth by actually working.

We’ve been praying, worshiping, waving our hands, giving people the hairy eyeball, and making magic potions for thousands of years…If they really worked as claimed, we wouldn’t need modern medicine!

Ever.

These things would be supported by both reliable data and valid logic, though perhaps a logic different from those we know, and would not need specious argumentation and bad data to support them.

If the paranormal existed in fact — working, like science, no matter what anyone believed — then the world would be a very different place.

The paranormal would be normal…because it would be a testable, demonstrable part of reality.

…and that is why despite the ubiquity of belief in the paranormal, it remains at the fringes, not the mainstream, of science and technology-driven goods and service industries…

…because in most industries, you can certainly fool people, but not the facts of labor and resources that profitable business requires to turn a profit in selling a product more substantial than wishful thinking and false hope.

Related articles

• An Interview with Red Tani of the Filipino Freethinkers (randi.org)
• Indian Paranormal Beliefs (prophet666.com)
• Americans’ Beliefs in Paranormal Phenomena (Infographic) (livescience.com)
• Richard Wiseman discusses Paranormality on For Good Reason (randi.org)

Skeptefinitions: Pseudoscience & Antiscience

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This is the first in what I find to be increasingly needed on this site: a compilation of working definitions of the terms I use on the Call to refer to, well, just about anything I post on with even a vaguely technical nature that requires a more precise meaning than those same terms often used in common parlance.

I’ve found that most words are notoriously difficult to agree upon concerning how to define them, especially if used informally, drastically increasing the chances of misinterpretation and straw-persons, most of it avoidable if a specific set of meanings and usage are stipulated beforehand.

It’s not enough to rely on most published dictionaries to provide these, as even published sources can vary substantially in their wording, potentially distorting interpretations of that wording, and the cultural and historical context of the period and date they are published.

They are also ripe for quote-mining.

Many such words, even when the sources agree in the wording of their descriptions, have multiple ambiguous and even conflicting meanings, further muddying the waters of discussion, encouraging fallacies of equivocation and presumption.

In this series of posts, which I shall link back to periodically, are the operative meanings of those terms in the sense, or set of senses, that I use them on this blog, sometimes prefaced by…Let’s assume for the sake of argument…

Note that I may in this series repeat those stipulated definitions posted separately in previous articles, for ease of immediate reference and to avoid the hassle of opening browser tabs ad nauseam.

These are the meanings I use. Period. I’ll warn you: I may be a bit pedantic with this, but it’s important to be thorough:

• First, there is the specified meaning of the ever-so popular word, sometimes loaded, though not always, Pseudoscience:

n. Any tenet, doctrine, claim, or belief-system that attempts to present itself as science, but which does not abide by its benchmarks or criteria and makes often demonstrably false claims or in principle untestable or unfalsifiable ones, in rejecting scientific reasoning, method, or its process, and which because its claims are not in accord with compelling evidence must promote and perpetuate itself by way of a mix of fabricated propaganda, logical fallacies, conspiracy theory, and/or anecdotal reasoning.

If there’s any question, I don’t use this word for ideas with that have nothing to do with claims about physical reality, nor for unorthodox ideas that are genuinely scientific. If an idea makes no claim to be scientific, implicitly or explicitly, or it abides by the rules of science in the methods used to discover and test it, it ain’t pseudoscience. The term does have derogatory connotations, so I won’t be using it that much regarding specific doctrines.

• And then there is another that gets abused a lot, Antiscience:

n. Similar in some respects to pseudoscience, sometimes a sub-set of it, but focusing on denying and/or hindering scientific research for political, religious, economic, or other ideological ends and/or for financial gain by way of personal attacks, legislative bans and funding cuts, physical, psychological, or legal coercion, propaganda, logical fallacies, conspiratorial reasoning, out-of-context *gotcha!* anecdotal soundbites, and in extreme cases (look up Lysenkoism under Josef Stalin’s rule), the imprisonment, exile or capital punishment of the offending researcher. Primarily characterized by a rejection, implied, denied, or explicit, of the core scientific values of curiosity, empiricism, and progress through the advancement of objective knowledge.

I try to base my beliefs on objective reality, and it doesn’t matter whether that reality sits well with me, so I don’t use that last term on ideas that don’t meet the above criteria just because they make me uncomfortable.

But (with a big hat-tip to fellow blogger Lousy Canuck…)while I’m just as susceptible to bias and fallacies, and to accusations of these, as anyone else, I’m potentially just as susceptible to accusations of being a 500-foot tall Tyrannosaurus rex in a holographic human disguise with a bad habit of indulging in late night snacks of unrefined plutonium to fuel my atomic death-ray breath…

*Rawr!*

Such is life.

Richard Kent and his theory about the Brontosaurus

This is a new one courtesy of Potholer54.

Disclaimer: The air friction caused by laughing so hard from this may cause your mouth, nostrils and lungs to catch fire.

There. You’ve been warned.

Racism in Pseudoscience

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One of the ugliest traits shown by all too many of our species is ethnic and racial intolerance, and while distrust and dislike of genetic out-groups may have served a competitive survival function during our early history as a species, and even before we were human, it serves us today only as a means of instigating bigotry, ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and even today in some places, slavery is alive and well.

While it is trivially true that “illegal immigrant” is not a race, much of the furor and discrimination against illegal immigrants in the ‘States is ethnically motivated, and directed specifically at those of Hispanic/Latino descent, particularly immigrants from South and Central America.

Nor is “Muslim” a race, though there is a great deal of bigotry toward those of African and Middle-Eastern descent, those ethnicities commonly and traditionally associated in the U.S. with Islamic religious affiliation.

After all, this is the 21st century, and “Muslim” is in vogue as a veiled racial epithet, for the N-word is currently unfashionable, and would much too obviously peg the one using it for what they are.

There are some pseudosciences where racism is evident, as in pseudo-history doctrines that claim that our non-Caucasian predecessors, like the Maya, Egyptians, Inca, and the great sub-Saharan African civilizations were too stupid and backward to build their own monuments and otherwise achieve greatness on their own, but just HAD to have the help of alien space-gods, Atlanteans, or Atlantean space-gods (often from the Pleiades, no less!) to help them out.

Sometimes, it works the other way as well, when directed against those of European descent by those not so melanin-challenged.

To this on all sides I say, ‘utter nonsense’: our ancestors, ALL of them, were brilliant and fully capable of figuring things out on their own, or we wouldn’t be here today, building upon that foundation of their previous accomplishments.

This is, needless to say, just ugly, regardless of the skin-tones of those making the claims, for our global civilization rests upon the foundation of all those who came came before, whether those before were white, black or brown, and as interconnected as today’s world is, as a species, we stand or fall together.

Genius has existed in all eras, and knows no skin-tones.

Racism is even found in some claims of differences in intelligence between genetic sub-groups of humanity, and recently, with an enormous furor, fully justified in my view, about absurd claims that some racial groups are, and I quote, “less objectively attractive” than others.

WTF?? That’s ridiculous.

Frankly, I find those ladies of other ethnic groups to be generally more attractive than my own, but I’m under no illusion, or delusion, that the attractiveness or unattractiveness of any individual is at all objective, just a matter of taste and personal preference on my part.

Yes, if you must know, I support interracial marriage, because in my opinion, mixing the gene-pool tends to produce good-looking offspring.

There’s some evidence that the ethnic-religious-racial tribalism that leads to this sort of often dangerous nonsense is part of our innate psychological makeup, a carry-over from our ancient history as roving hominin bands on the plains of Africa for millions of years, but it’s something that we can, and I think should, outgrow, unlearn, and dispense with as hazardous psychological baggage, not something that is in any way unavoidable or necessary.

That’s my view at any rate.

* * *

Carl correctly notes in his response that Racism and Bigotry are not synonymous. But taking the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th paragraphs in context with the 1st, as I intended the entire post to be considered as a whole, it clearly denotes ethnic bigotry as something that racism leads to, not as one and the same thing. I am quite aware that there are forms of bigotry besides just the racial/ethnic, but those are not the subject of this post.

Also, he quite accurately notes that Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is quite varied from locale to locale, and although considered as a “race” on many application forms, and thought of in racial/ethnic terms by many, there is no such thing as a single, ethnically unified “Hispanic” population, as each region in Latin America has it’s own mix of indigenous and European-descended populations, that do not necessarily regard those of other locales as a ‘band of brothers.’ I did not intend to imply that they did, though I did not make this clear in the post above. My Bad.

Pseudoscience – More on what it is & what it ain’t

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No single, simple definition can possibly encompass a concept as varied and complex as pseudoscience; indeed, whole books could be written about the subject — and have been — like Massimo Pigliucci‘s excellent recent work, “Nonsense on Stilts,” which I highly recommend. But here are a few of the features that stand out the most at this point, and which at least indicate some of the red flags to look out for when hearing or reading of such ideas.

• Most such ideas involve the use of manifestly erroneous, often so flawed as to be not even be worthy of being called ‘wrong,’ theoretical statements and speculations about reality made on demonstrably poor grounds. This includes both doctrines that are demonstrably false and those so framed that they cannot even in principle ever be shown wrong, such as the “heads I win, tails you lose” attitude in psi-research toward defending rather than meaningfully testing its hypotheses, in which even null results can be interpreted to show a psi effect. As for myself, it all sounds a wee bit like special pleading, but hey, what do I know?

• Logical fallacies, often quite elaborately framed, are used to support pseudoscientific doctrines, like the logical contortions used by those who deny well-supported scientific findings and some psi-researchers who like to try their hand at subverting the dominant paradigm, whatever that’s supposed to mean (*snark*). After all, you can only support bad data with bad logic, however carefully crafted it may be to seem compelling to the unwary.

• Pseudoscience denies, defies, ignores, and/or rejects outright a scientific consensus, any that disagrees with its claims, and a consensus in science is not an electoral vote or popularity poll, unlike politics. It is not an argument from authority to rely on and refer to the statements of qualified experts, since none of us are experts on everything despite what we may think. A scientific consensus, when it is reached, is a simple recognition of reality by those with the relevant expertise to so recognize. If every legitimate astronomer agrees that gravity is the principle large-scale binding force of the universe, then it would be wise to give them the benefit of the doubt unless and until they are convincingly shown wrong by peeps of similar qualifications who play by the same rules and use the same methods.

Here too are a few things that pseudoscience isn’t,

• Erroneous conclusions made in good faith: The process of science is messy, since those who do it are human and fallible just like the rest us. Also, the raw data in any study is just as messy, needing processing before firm conclusions can be drawn from it. Most initial research studies don’t pan out with further attempts at replication. Sometimes scientists make mistakes, honest ones, But pseudoscientific doctrines are often riddled with willfully false claims and faulty reasoning. One fringe author wrote his most popular books while in prison for fraud.

• Speculations with a basis in sound reasoning and data: Pseudoscientific doctrines are marked by a tendency toward speculation without any real grounding, any sound informational basis for it. Oftentimes, pseudoscientists, who tend to be self-isolated and incommunicado with the wider community of researchers, are frequently unaware of actual scientific developments, and just make sh*t up and pass it off as official doctrine, while claiming the very same for the scientific mainstream.

• Pseudoscience is not distinguished by personal disputes more among it’s proponents than of the scientific mainstream, and in some pseudosciences with a New Age or postmodern relativist bent, there is often a degree of cooperation among different camps of the same general claim, as though they are willing to put aside or ignore their differences in doctrinal points to better combat their mainstream opposition.

• Pseudoscientists do not generally differ from their mainstream counterparts in terms of personality, flaws, style or quirks: Just as some scientists have well-known human shortcomings and failings, some fringers can be well-mannered, urbane, and scholarly in demeanor, though the nature of their scholarship is at odds with that of science. Pseudoscientists can be just as cultured and outwardly gentlemanly, or ladylike, as any scientist. One does not have to seem cranky to be a crank.

Hopefully the above will be useful in helping to note something fishy going on when what may superficially look like science isn’t, and I’ll conclude this with a quote from a fictional character whom I created for my short stories:

“Bold and allegedly revolutionary claims alone to not make a science.”

~ Aloysius Hawthorne-McGrath, “Paleontologist Extraordinary”

Questioning the Questionable: The idea of missing links

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I recently came across an old and outmoded idea, dating back to early 20th century ideas on evolution, namely that of the so-called ‘missing link,’ which is still perpetuated by many creationists arguing against evolution.

This is an idea that involves questioning that ‘man evolved from apes‘ (or monkeys, take your pick…), a straw-person, since no reputable biologist argues this, and is based upon the ‘ladder of evolution’ or ‘great chain of being‘ fallacy, the idea that evolution is linear, like the rungs on a ladder from lower or more primitive species to higher, more advanced ones and the idea that evolution has a certain ‘direction’ or goal it must move toward.

This is unlike Darwin’s own actual concept of a sort of tree of life, or shrub, in which species can be compared to ever more branching limbs and twigs, that spread out and diversify over time, but without any goal or directional intent existing in the process.

This more accurate view is used today in biology and in which living things are simply different from one another, and in which humans are not descended from apes, but jointly descended along with other present-day primates from an earlier common primate ancestor that over time diversified into the modern species we see today.

We did not, of course, come from modern apes, or monkeys, or from any species currently extant, but from an earlier ancestral species that was simply different, not ‘lower’ than we on the rungs on a ladder or links in a chain, but which diverged in response to selective pressures and branched out into the current species over millions of years.

All current hominids descend from a common, earlier and presumably extinct form of apelike ancestor, itself branching off from its contemporaries from still earlier primates, those descending from a still earlier mammalian species, themselves deriving from proto-mammals and ultimately stretching all the way back some several billion years to the earliest self-replicating bacteria-like cells, and before them, earlier proto-cells following the origin of the molecular precursors of life on the early Earth.

There is no such thing as a ‘missing link’ and never was, for it assumes an argument that modern biology does not make, and I find it curious that anyone would take it seriously as a genuine weakness in evolutionary biology.

Then again, when one makes use of erroneous facts in support of an argument, the only way to do so consistently and effectively is with equally erroneous logic, something that in any sort of science denial is invariably committed by those so denying.

Go figure.

The Miller-Morris Debate

The 1981 debate at Brown University between biologist Kenneth Miller and creationist Henry Morris, in four parts, courtesy of the National Center for Science Education.

Why Common Design Common Designer = FAIL << cdk007

WTF?? The Love-Children of Birds & Lizards??

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This is kind of interesting–a sort of creationism I wasn’t previously aware of, a kind in which different species are all created, then successively expunged and replaced by further creations who are themselves expunged and replaced.

W.T. Freeman (who is NOT to be confused with W.T. Bridgman, of ‘Dealing With Creationism in Astronomy’ fame) was a 19th century naturalist who held to this variety of creationism, and who came up with a rather novel way to explain the existence of such transitional forms as Archaeopteryx in a manner that allowed him to (fallaciously) save his worldview from any conceivable (to him) disproof: Archaeopteryx was the result of canoodling between birds and reptiles, a sort of trans-order paraphilia.

WTF?? That’s right — because of kinky sex between a lizard and a bird…

Never mind the fact that it’s known to be genetically impossible, but it sounded compelling to him.

What’s interesting about this is that it clearly lays bare the reasons that creationists oppose evolution, and any other science even peripherally connected with it: If the Bible is not infallibly correct as a literal history of the world, then it cannot be trusted to be correct as a guide to morality or meaning as well.

In principle, it is literal fact to a creationist, all of it, and evolution, et al. contradicts this, and must therefore be false. Never mind that even self-professed biblical ‘literalists’ cherry-pick and interpret the Bible any way they please, but that’s neither here nor there…

Creationism isn’t about facts or science, it’s about a narrow view of morality, which creationists believe will go down the tube if scripture cannot be relied on as literally true, and this implication terrifies them, for they can admit the validity of no belief but their own.

That’s the reason that they so vigorously oppose science, especially evolution, because to them these things threaten the inerrancy of scripture, and thus the very underpinnings of faith and proper morals of civilization.

Related Articles

• Evolution Victory in Louisiana (theness.com)
• Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.: Creationists Destroy Creationism with Their Own Words (huffingtonpost.com)
• Creationists still can’t seem to evolve (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• Evolution texts survive in Louisiana (cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com)

Qreationist Goes Completely Off-Topic…

…in response to a question, with highly humerus results. No, I’m not going to use “that image” this time, since that would just be too mean, even if the stupid does burn…

WTF?!? Too Much Gas For Evolutionists? << Really??

More humerositude from the creationist camp with literally astronomical science gaffes that would make Carl Sagan spin in his grave with embarrassment that one of his own species would so debase himself by uttering them in all apparent seriousness. Yes, Jupiter ‘defies the explanations of Evolutionary Naturalism™’ *giggle*…this is a hunk’a burnin’ silly…

Geocentric…or Egocentric? — Likely Both Together

I think that there is a certain amount of self-questioning that comes with skeptical thinking. For myself, I’m always asking whether I’ve done things correctly, asking about a proposed action’s likely consequences, and most importantly how and if I truly know what I think I do when given reason for uncertainty on the matter in question.

No one is more critical of yours truly than me.

This self-doubt, healthy when done in moderation, appears to be linked in seeming paradox to confidence — in questioning our knowledge and alleged abilities, provided that these then pass this gauntlet of querying — this rigor thereby making said confidence more robust.

In small doses, this insecurity keeps us honest, lets us find out if we truly do know that which we think we do, and if not, gives us a reason to resolve the situation. It’s when, taken to an extreme that this otherwise useful self-doubt blossoms into a full-blown pathological insecurity that it becomes correlated with the extremes of conviction we call fanaticism.

Those harboring this hyperactive self-doubt are often driven to confirm their beliefs to themselves by attempting to convince others of them as well, often as vociferously and aggressively as they can manage in order to relieve the anxiety cause by their discomfort with uncertainty.

Human beings are psychologically ill-suited for easily accepting ambiguity. It’s when I saw this (Click me here) last night in checking Twitter that that fact became strikingly apparent.

“The First Catholic Conference on Geocentrism”…Who would’a thunk it?

Personally, I find this at once both amusing and saddening that those physically dwelling in this day and age would be so driven by zealotry and conceit that they would willingly and knowingly post their misgivings on a website for all the world to see, and thus subject themselves to much well-deserved derision.

Yes, Troythulu is an evil bastitch…

Please, fellas, as soon as you’re willing and able to join the rest of humanity in the twenty-first century and leave behind your long-demoted medieval need to literally be central to the universe, let us know. After all, my most excellent D00ds…the truth shall set you free — even if at first you don’t like it.

Eugenie Scott Explains Why Science Is Agnostic

Intelligent Design by Purple Space Squids