Dear Assholes: an open letter in support of Rebecca Watson

Holy shit.

I can’t really believe we are doing this all over again. Last year it was “elevatorgate”, and this year it’s the “not going to TAM shitstorm”. Both of these huge blowups have been caused by people who self-identify as “critical thinkers” attacking (harassing, threatening, name-calling…) an outspoken leader in the skeptic movement for – *gasp * – expressing her opinion.

Like, fuck.

Last year, Rebecca suggested on one of her regular youtube videos that propositioning a woman in an enclosed space late at night was not a way to make a woman feel safe and comfortable, especially not after she had announced that she was tired and just wanted to go to sleep. This triggered a series of escalating responses from both men and women.  These responses ranged from the spurious (“others face more threat than you did, so why are you complaining”) to the absurd (“if we can’t proposition women in secluded elevators, how will we ever get a date”) to the thuggishly moronic (“fuck you, you should be raped”). And these, for the most part, from people who could rhyme off a dozen or so logical fallacies at the drop of a hat. Obviously they don’t actually understand the application of those logical fallacies in rational discourse.

This year, Rebecca stated that she didn’t want to attend TAM because JREF president D.J. Groethe chose to blame “…irresponsible messaging coming from a small number of prominent and well-meaning women skeptics…” for the decline in women registrants this year, rather acknowledging that the best way to attract more women might be to assure them that steps were being taken to make the event as safe and friendly to all participants as possible.

As with elavatorgate, Rebecca received a torrent of hate mail, threats of rape and accusations of all sorts. Again, this is the skeptical, supposedly critical thinking community. Apparently William Steig was right when he said “People are no damn good”.

So let me spell it out to those who feel it is okay to harass Rebecca Watson for stating her opinion, and I will try to use as few syllables in each word as possible:

If you scream that someone should be raped for saying that they don’t feel entirely safe attending a conference with you, I think you kind of make their point for them. Don’t you?

So to all those misguided, misogynistic, ignorant, threatening, willfully blind assholes out there, just grow up, will you?

 

Whatever Happened to Parsimony?

These two items cropped up recently:

• Nicolas Cage is a Vampire
• John Travolta is a Time Traveller

The people proposing these theories and putting the photos up for sale are either themselves loopy, or they think there are gullible loopy people out there with scads of cash to waste. Or both.

I mean really.

When you see a picture that sort of looks like someone, do you think to yourself “gee, that sort of looks like [person]”?  Or do you think “That looks like [person], so it must be [person], because nobody else could POSSIBLY look kinda like [person]”?

It frightens me that there are people who think that undead vampires and time travel are more probable than some people looking like other people. They need to spend more time on this site, so they can learn that George Carlin is actually Sigmund Freud…

Faith vs Trust

Creationists – the loud ones, like Ken Ham, Kirk Cameron, and Kent Hovind – often repeat that evolution, like religion, is a matter of faith, and therefore evolution and religion-based beliefs on creation stand on equal ground. But this is a rhetorical ruse. In order to uncover the man behind this curtain, we need to look at “faith” vs “Faith”.

Faith with a capital F refers to religious faith – complete, unwavering acceptance of the tenets of a religion. But faith with a small f means something different. We can say we have faith in a pilot, and in the aircraft he is flying. What this means is not a complete, unwavering acceptance of the miracle of flight, but that we trust the pilot’s training, and the engineers’ skill. But that trust is not unwavering – evidence to the contrary (missteps by the pilot, or mechanical issues with the aircraft) will shake that trust. In the case of religious Faith, many are taught and believe that evidence contradictory to their religious beliefs is there to test their Faith, and so they entrench themselves further rather than changing their worldview.

In a sense, science is a matter of faith – but it is most definitely not a matter of Faith. I would rather say that science is a matter of trust. We trust that the laws of nature will not suddenly change. We trust that the tools we have at our disposal will give us reliable information. We trust that a preponderance of converging data is on the right track to representing how a phenomenon actually works.

But wait, there’s more…

Creationists will say that you have to have faith in Science just as you have to have Faith in religion – but you don’t. The reason Science is so reliable is that it works whether you believe in it or not! You can disbelieve in gravity, rocket propulsion (aka Newton’s 3^rd Law), fluid dynamics, and evolution all you like. But that doesn’t make them not happen. So while most people do put some faith (trust) in Science, it is not required that they do so. And, in fact, a critical eye and healthy dose of skepticism (by which I mean real skepticism, not denialism) are necessary for Science to move forward – so scientists who trust the preponderance of existing knowledge do not automatically trust new discoveries.

So the next time you hear the argument that Science is just like religion, because it relies on faith, call that argument what it is: Bullshit.

Running the numbers on homeopathic dilution

Why do we keep saying that homeopathy is not medicine? Why do we keep saying that there is no medicine in it? Surely when you dilute something there is still some of it there. So why do skeptics insist that there is nothing?

Well, I’ll explain.

In a typical homeopathic dilution, a tiny sample of something is dissolved in water, and then 1 mL of solution is transferred to 99 mL of water (making an even 100 mL). It is mixed (well, “succussed”), and then 1 mL is transferred to another 99 mL container, and so on. This may be done 20 or 30 times.

Sure, that’s a lot of dilution, but even if you put a few drops of something in a swimming pool, there are so many atoms in a drop that any sample should contain traces of the substance, and the homeopathic dilution is, after all, only a few litres.

Well, no. Let’s do the math on this, and see what the concentration comes out to be at the end. Let’s choose something like Lithium, as it is light, and it is used as a medication (I have no idea if it is used in homeopathy, but let’s just use it as an example). Lithium has a molar mass of 6.94g, and a density of 0.53 g/mL. Let’s begin with a 1% solution (v/v), and dilute it 20 times:

1 mL of Lithium contains 4.6×10^22 atoms. That’s 4600000000000000000000 atoms. That’s a lot. When dissolved, 1 mL of that solution should contain 1/100 of that, though still 46000000000000000000 atoms. But each time we dilute it, we decrease it by a factor of 100, so with serial dilutions, we have

1. 460000000000000000 atoms
2. 4600000000000000 atoms
3. 46000000000000 atoms
4. 460000000000 atoms
5. 4600000000 atoms
6. 46000000 atoms
7. 460000 atoms
8. 4600 atoms
9. 46 atoms
10. 0.46 atoms
11. 0.0046 atoms
12. 0.000046 atoms
13. 0.00000046 atoms
14. 0.0000000046 atoms
15. 0.000000000046 atoms
16. 0.00000000000046 atoms
17. 0.0000000000000046 atoms
18. 0.000000000000000046 atoms
19. 0.00000000000000000046 atoms
20. 0.0000000000000000000046 atoms

What this means is that after only 10 dilutions there is a roughly 50:50 chance of a single atom being present, and after 20, there is a chance of 1 in 217 billion billion that there will even be one atom present. Or, put another way, it would be the same as taking one mL of a substance and dissolving it in a volume of water equivalent to a sphere over two and a half billion kilometres across, or roughly the size of the orbit of Saturn correction: with 20 dilutions the volume would be about the volume of a sphere the size of earth’s orbit. But if you add two more dilutions, that sphere expands to the orbit of Uranus. And if I’m doing my math correctly, 30 dilutions would be equivalent to dilution in a sphere 130 light years across!*

So we know that there is none of the active ingredient in homeopathic medicine, if it is in fact prepared properly. None at all. But then, homeopaths don’t claim the original substance is there – they claim the water is influenced, and retains a “memory” of the substance, and that this memory is what is amplified by the dilution. This, too, is of course utter bullshit.  This idea is born of magical wish-thinking, and is not even remotely related to reality. Water is water, and has the properties of water, not a “memory” of what was once in it.

So that’s why, when we say “there’s nothing in it”, we really mean it.

*check my math:

• there are 10^15 cm^3 in a cubic km
• 30 dilutions by 100 is 10^60 mL
• which is 10^45 km^3
• which is a sphere with radius 6.2×10^14 km, or 65 light years.

Oh yeah? So there!

Oh, what the hell. I really shouldn’t be doing this as I have actual work to do. CL Taylor (@cltaylor463) claimed to have disproven evolution several times. So I called him on it. He says

@BipedalTetrapod I just refuted your ignorant evolution-Athestic ideas in the past seven tweets

Okay then. Let’s have a look-see at the refutation, in reverse chronological order:

I have once again picked apart evolution!

Ya, ya, you said that. Butlet’s have a look

Adaptive radiation is a pipe dream develped by evolutions to justify a faulty assumption of evolution.

Um, no. Adaptive radiation is observable in the fossil record. Sorry, but “I say so” isn’t refutation.

All creatures are not perfect. Imperfections mean nothing evolution is flawed.

No. Evolution never EVER claimed creatures are perfect. Quite the opposite. Creationists do, however, so that’s a point for me.

Homology means that we have common traits with other animals but nothing more evolution is flawed

You share the same number of arms and legs and hands and feet with your siblings and cousins, yes? Are these genetic? Did you inherit those traits from a common grandparent? Or is it just chance that your whole family has the same number of fingers and toes? If these characteristics are genetic traits that are inherited from a common ancestor, then ALL organisms that share those traits inherited them from a common ancestor.

98% is not 100%.A chimp is not a human.Our DNA is so complex that we do not share a common ancestor.

Duh. If a chimp were human it wouldn’t be a chimp. DNA isn’t actually complex. It is very simple. Paired nucleotides strung together. It’s just that there are a shitload of pairs.

Life does not have a family tree evolutionist.We did not come from bacteria.

“because I say so” isn’t an argument. So, wrong.

It is impossible both mathematically&observingly for evolution to exist.

Whatever that means. Evolution is observable and has been observed (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html#observe, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html) and mathematics is used all the time in evolution.

Since radioactive dating is inaccurate,Evolution is based on unscientific&undocumented assumptions.

Radioactive dating is quite accurate. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html. Evolution is based on science, and always has been, whether you like it or not.

Evolutionist,still believe in the principle of superposition?

That recent strata are deposited on older strata? Duh.

Evolutionist-Calculations based on invalid assumptions always=invalid results

But calculations made repeatedly on assumptions that have been validated by umpteen different analyses from all walks of science tend to be valid. I would say, however, that Intelligent Design calculations, which are based on invalid assumptions, do lead to invalid results. So thanks for pointing that out.

There is no way for scientist to know the original amount of radioactivity in rocks when made.

Yes, there is, by looking at the quantity of the products of radioactive decay.

The earth’s rotation was stopped twice in Joshua10:13-14;II Kings20:9-11.

Gee, you got me there. Why, I must give up my atheistic evolutionist ways! No. Just kidding. Sorry, but it really wasn’t.

Only God could have designed cell differentiation so well. Random chance could not have done such.

Evolution is NOT about random chance. It is about iteration under selective pressure.

Evolution flaws-the uniqueness of DNA is so complex that it proves complex organism were made seperate&along side simple living things.

See the Chimp comment earlier. To which I will add that “It’s too complicated for me to understand so it must be false” is not a valid argument. I count 14, not 7 tweets. But anyway, let’s take a couple more:

@kaimatai It is not observable to believe in Evolution, b/c it denies the existance of God. God is the law and order in life.

So, what you are saying is, your faith is so shaky that it is threatened by actual observations of real events?

@kaimatai I find it very hypocritical that your lack of stable morality is lecturing me on your Postmodernism. Really? You are a fraud also

You want lack of stable morality? Research shows that the faithful have a wandering moral compass.

The Disingenuous “Thermodynamics” Argument

You know, I still keep seeing the second law of thermodynamics being used as an argument against evolution, despite multiple thorough rebuttals. So let me add a few words of my own in an effort to stem the flow of stupid.

The argument, loosely summarized, goes like this:

1. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy must increase in any closed system.
2. Since life from non-life requires complex molecules to form from simple molecules, life could not arise by chance, because this would violate the 2nd Law.
3. Since mammals and birds and fish are all more complex than single-cell organisms, they could not have evolved, as a system cannot become more complex over time.

The rebuttals for this are, quite simply:

1. The Earth is not a closed system. We receive about 1.3 kJ of solar energy per square metre per second, every second, always.  The second law of thermodynamics does not apply.
2. Life from non-life is abiogenesis, not evolution. But abiogenesis is thought to have been driven by heat and chemosynthesis, so again there is an input of energy.
3. Lastly, and most ironically, the very people who claim that single celled organisms couldn’t possibly become complex, multicellular organisms, themselves grew from a single cell. So it’s good enough for them, but not any other organism. And secondly, the argument using thermodynamics against evolution proposes, instead, the sudden appearance of all living things. Like that doesn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics. Sheesh.

But wait, there’s more. You see, the argument that evolution is impossible because of the second law was widely promoted by the likes of Drs. Henry Morris and Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research. Please note that these gentlemen, at the time they made these claims, had doctorates in Engineering and Biochemistry respectively. Which means they understood the laws of thermodynamics, and would have known that the argument was wrong. Which means they were blatantly lying.

The fact that this argument is still being presented as evidence against evolution is appalling, and shows just how ill-informed the anti-evolution movement really is.  Feel free to send anyone you find using this argument to this page, or for a more torough thrashing, to the Talk Origins Thermodynamics FAQ.

Economic argument against the woo

XKCD for the WIN:

Quality, not quantity, leads to speciation

In 1859, Charles Darwin published a book that changed how biologists understand the living world. Although his book was titled “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, it never actually explained the process of speciation. Although an elegant and thorough explanation of the mechanisms underlying evolution, he extrapolates this to say “species have changed, and are still slowly changing by the preservation and accumulation of successive slight favorable variations”. In other words, natural selection produces change, and the accumulation of enough changes produces a new species. A century and a half later, this is still accepted wisdom.

For most Biologists (and scientists in general), accepted wisdom is not enough. Ernst Mayr put forth the notion of allopatric speciation – that physical isolation can allow genetic change to occur separately in two populations, eventually leading to reproductive isolation and thus to speciation. Steven Gould and Niles Eldridge produced the idea of punctuated equilibrium – that the history of life consists of long periods of stasis (ie species remain relatively unchanged) punctuated by rapid bursts of species diversification.

Although many viewed speciation and macroevolution as the rapid accumulation of many individual variations, effectively speeding up the process, others (Goldschmidt, Gould) proposed that these events occurred through single (or a small number of) events that produced significant morphological or physiological change. The technical term for this is saltation (meaning a jump), though Goldschmidt’s term “hopeful monster” is also used – not always kindly.

In the early 80’s, Homeobox genes were discovered. These are genes that regulate body pattern, and it was discovered that the duplication, relocation, and modification of these genes is responsible for significant changes in body plan. Suddenly there were genes that could produce “hopeful monsters” without significant genetic change. And yet, the gradualistic model of speciation through accumulation of many small changes has persisted, primarily because there has been no evidence that a single or small number of changes can produce enough change to create a new species.

Recently, Dr. Mark Pagel at the University of Reading decided to put to the test. He reasoned that if speciation is dependent on the accumulation of a number of genetic changes, that would show up statistically as a normal distribution in a survey of the number of genetic differences between species in the family trees of different groups.

What he found was that the distribution did not follow a normal curve, but an exponential (poisson) distribution instead. This is the distribution one finds with truly random distributions, such as the frequency of lightning strikes. The differences between these two random distributions are subtle but significant. The most important difference is that a normal distribution has a mode – a peak value around which the values are distributed. A poisson (exponential) distribution does not – any value is equally likely.

The implication for evolution is that there is no typical, usual, or expected number of mutations required for a population to become a separate species from its parent population. In other words, We can’t say that a new species arises after about 20 (or 60 or 2000) mutations. It may take any number of mutations to form a new species – 50, 100, 1000. Or just one.

At first this seems to fly in the face of the “accepted wisdom” that there is some sort of threshold for speciation. But given that mutation is random, any number of mutations could occur that produce little or no effect, or that do produce an effect but in genes that are unimportant. For speciation to occur, a change must arise that leads to a reproductive barrier. What this study tells us is that a sufficiently significant change is as likely to occur from a single mutation as from 10, 30, or 100.

So while the accepted wisdom – or at least the default assumption – is that speciation arises as the result of an accumulation of minor changes, it now looks more like a single significant change is responsible for a speciation event. The implication being that the quality of mutation, not quantity, is the deciding factor for speciation.

Although in retrospect this makes perfect sense, it does provide additional context for models of evolutionary change – such as punctuated equilibrium and Goldschmidt’s “hopeful monsters” – that were ridiculed when first proposed. Which just goes to show that Hamlet was right: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/nature08630.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527511.400-accidental-origins-where-species-come-from.html?full=true

The Triceratops that Never Wasn’t

 

I recently returned from a holiday abroad to find headlines proclaiming that Triceratops Never Existed! My first thought was of course, WTF? And my second thought was, just how stupid are they? And then the little pessimistic third thought was that the way this story is being waved about, it will be used as “ammunition” by antievolutionists, one more little item with which to further wrap themselves in ignorance.

So here is the story.

Ceratopsian dinosaurs were (mostly) large, quadrupedal herbivoves with a frill behind the skull, and many bore horns from the nose and/or the top of the skull over the eyes. There is substantial diversity in the group in the shape and size of the frill and horns, leading to the definition of many different genera and species. But there is also variation within each species, blurring the boundaries between the different classifications. Because of this, the group as a whole has undergone taxonomic revision several times. The recent work by John Scanella and Jack Horner continues this trend by further clarifying the taxonomy of this intriguing group.

Scanella and Horner surveyed known specimens of the ceratopsian classified as Torosaurus, and concluded that the developmental and morphological evidence suggests they are not members of a separate genus, but in fact “fully grown” members of Triceratops. This is bolstered by the fact that there are no known juvenile Torosaurus remains – though the discovery of such remains would, of course, reverse this change in classification. Since the name Triceratops was coined first, it remains while Torosaurus becomes obsolete (pending further study and corroboration by other researchers). This sort of thing happens all the time, partly because defining “species” for organisms that have been dead for 70 million years with only a limited dataset is tricky business, and partly because we learn more. Science progresses.

So, in fact, the story headlines should have read “Torosaurus reclassified as adult Triceratops“. But a) that requires understanding what is being written, and b) wouldn’t sell papers. It really ticks me off just how wrong the statement “Triceratops never existed” really is. Animals classified as Triceratops and Torosaurus did exist, which is why we have their fossils. The classification of one of these groups may be in error, but it would be Torosaurus that ceases to be as a genus.

UFOs and the Argument from Ignorance

This is a great video clip of Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining the principle of argument from ignorance in the context of UFO sightings.