There are jobs in which death threats are expected as a matter of course, and sometimes as a bizarre honor. Highly visible and important government officials could expect to be targets of angry conspiracy theorists, the lawmakers of most developed countries can face a firestorm from those opposed to how they vote. The real, old fashioned investigative journalists researching corruption and criminal organizations overseas or in their own country could expect a visit from some thugs warning them to keep silent. By contrast, building a climate model or two and running some very big and complex applications on a supercomputer hardly seems like an incredibly controversial act which merits a flood of death threats, right? Well, think again…

The scientists revealed they have been told to “go gargle razor blades” and have been described as “Nazi climate murderers”. Some emails have been sent to them without any attempt by the sender to disguise their identity. Even though the scientists have received advice from the FBI, the police say they are not able to act due to the near-total tolerance of “freedom of speech” in the US.

Prompted by the shrieking of right wing pundits and a convoluted elaborate conspiracy theory according to which environmentalists are trying to create a totalitarian New World Order through legislation, some very angry people in the U.S. who are stretching their right of free speech to the extreme. Forgoing even the simple recitation of denialist counter-claims, they just let the fantasies of murder and mayhem fly, while raising plenty of questions about their mental stability along the way. When you hear a scientist who says that our planet is warming and it may be a good idea to review our energy policies, and your first reaction is to have a shrieking banshee’s howl of apoplectic rage followed by e-mailing your violent fantasies of shoving razor blades down his throat to the scientist in question, you have some very serious anger management issues to resolve. The difference between disagreeing and completely losing your mind is a pretty big one. Especially when, as was noted by the scientists themselves, the maniacal rage is completely misplaced.

“I suspect part of the reason people feel they have to attack climate scientists, is that politicians and environmentalists have a tendency to hide behind the science,” said [Dr. Miles Allen]. “In the run-up to Copenhagen, we often heard the phrase ‘the science dictates’ – that we need a 40% cut in rich-country emissions by 2020, for example – when in fact only a very specific, and politically loaded, interpretation of the science implied any such thing. If people who claim to be on the side of the science use scientists as human shields, it is hardly surprising that the scientists end up getting shot at.”

That’s right. Environmentalists who abuse science to fervently push for their own agendas have just as big of a share of the blame for these death threats as Hannity, O’Reilly and Beck. Yes, the green NWO conspiracy and those who pretend they’re fighting sinister forces about to enslave them and their nation are out there and they’ve even shown up in full force in the comments of my post explaining why it’s cold in winter in January of this year. The very fact that this conspiracy theory is fed by media outlets and that science bloggers actually need to be spending a blog post explaining why it snows during the winter in the Northern Hemisphere is very disturbing and frustrating. Even worse is the denialist fervor about Climategate, despite the media recanting their articles on the subject in light of numerous investigations. But the environmentalists who are so eager to engage in a war of words with denilaists in mid-conniption by throwing out unfounded and over-wrought doomsday scenarios, then declaring to have scientific support on their side aren’t helping. All they’re doing is just making sure that more and more climate scientists are in the crosshairs of radical right fringes who don’t just want to disagree, but whose behavior in this situation can only be described as utterly unhinged.

Laszlo’s piece is probably one of the most lackluster and clichéd defenses of theistic evolution I’ve seen in a very long time, managing to say absolutely nothing original and presenting virtually nothing but arguments by assertion. The universe is fine tuned, biologists don’t say that evolution is a product of chances and life is far too complex to have evolved in a few billion years. Why? Because Ervin Laszlo says so, that’s why! There’s not a link, a cite or a reference to be found besides a nod to such a worn out and tired old fallacy, it should’ve been left on the shelf where it was found. In fact, the whole thing reads as if it was written about thirty years ago and published without any changes or regard for modern scientific advancements and rebuttals to the arguments being presented. Take the following old chestnut for example…

Post-Darwinian biologists recognize that the evolution of species is far more than just the chance processes classical Darwinists say it is. It must be more, because the time that was available for evolution would not have been sufficient to generate the complex web of life on this planet merely by trial and error. Mathematical physicist Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probabilities and came to the conclusion that they are about the same as the probability that a hurricane blowing through a scrap-yard assembles a working airplane.

First off, all biologists who studied evolution after Darwin are post-Darwinian biologists. Just like Newton is at the heart of today’s cosmology, especially general relativity, Darwin’s work is still one of the foundations of our modern biological theories. As a philosopher and apparently, concert pianist, Laszlo is clearly unfamiliar with how scientific theories are built up over decades. Just like yanking Newton out of physics would render almost all modern astrophysics useless, neglecting Darwin’s work would be a huge step backward for biology. When you see a pundit talking about moving past some influential scientific figure, it’s generally a major hint that the pundit doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Unless natural selection is somehow definitively disproven while a new mechanism for explaining how certain genetic changes occur and compound in populations is shown to be a better explanation, scientists are not going to abandon Darwin’s work.

Another major tip off that Laszlo is just babbling out of his depth is the invocation of Hoyle’s Fallacy. You see, Hoyle was a very good astronomer but when he tried dabbling in other scientific disciplines, he was very often wrong in rather spectacular ways. When he tried to calculate the probability of life arising at random, he used the wrong methodology, started with the wrong premise, and used arbitrary values. Instead of calculating the odds of life arising and evolving by chance, he calculated the odds of spontaneous generation. So when it came to biology, Hoyle knew just as little about it as Laszlo. Who, by the way, found it far too difficult to spend a minute or two on the web to do just a little background research on the person he was going to quote, plowing ahead with a celebrity quip without checking what actual experts have to say about it. But then again, Laszlo is far more interested in pontificating than actually offering any evidence for sweeping assertions like this one…

Evolution of life presupposes intelligent design. But the design it presupposes isn’t the design of the products of evolution; it’s the design of its preconditions. Given the right preconditions, nature comes up with the products on her own.

And his proof for this is what exactly? How is this different from the old and tired Watchmaker argument? It’s nothing more than a religious declaration, followed by another assertion that since Laszlo has spoken, there is no longer any controversy between creationists and biologists in the public eye and everyone will agree that we live in a fine tuned universe. Maybe this kind of factual and intellectual laziness flies in systems philosophy, but it doesn’t work in real science. Even basic particle physics tell us that the universe isn’t fine tuned and that instead of precise arrangements, we have a few ranges of conditions which would produce a universe very much like the one we inhabit. And even basic logic should tell us that just asserting something doesn’t equal proving it, especially when every one of his hackneyed attempts at proving his point has been addressed over and over again by a library’s worth of books. I would say that maybe next time, before babbling about things he clearly doesn’t understand, Laszlo should do a little reading but we all know that’s just not going to happen.

While you might say that I’m probably being a bit harsh, check out his interview with Time Magazine where he opines on Darwin’s legacy and questions why the scientist is even in the history books at all, ascribing it to an intense public relations effort by biologists. The fact that we could pick out hundreds of scientists who’s ideas are celebrated today but have been used for nefarious means or corrupted to justify the ideas of groups which clearly lacked the ability or the desire to actually understand them, bothers him not at all. This issue got about two short paragraphs of lip service in his aforementioned promotional piece and it doesn’t stop him from the nonsensical declaration that school shooters and sociopaths trying to apply natural selection to those around them must be examples of how Darwin’s work promotes “disturbed thinking.” It’s as if Sewell never looked up what the term non sequitur means. But in this lurid display of witlessness, two quotes really stand out…

I think we have to decide what status we are going to give to the human race. Most of the world’s religions hold that human life is sacred in some way. In teaching common descent with animals, we also have to examine what is special about human beings, and why they deserve to be treated differently and granted certain rights.

Anyone care to guess why religions hold human life is special? Because they’re made by humans who want to survive and thrive, controlling the behavior of societies and ensuring that we stay at the top of the food chain so we can propagate our species. Does he think that biology classes are taught by PETA? Does he not know that natural selection would actually dictate that we’d have a vested interest in working with each other for our mutual benefit so we can survive and spread our genes? This is one of those collections of words which are supposed to mean something profound, but end up making vacuous, nonsensical statements.

What has the theory of evolution done for the practical benefit of humanity? It’s helped our [basic] understanding of ourselves, yet compared to, say, the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the World Wide Web, I wonder why Darwin occupies this position at the pinnacle of esteem. I can only imagine he has been put there by a vast public relations exercise.

Right, why do we need to know the theory of evolution? I mean it’s only the driving force behind most of today’s medicine and the fundamental framework for cutting edge inventions and discoveries in biology. In his book, Sewell lets fly with the painfully dimwitted assertion that Darwin’s work hardly holds as great of a place in the scientific hall of fame as the discovery of DNA. You know, the DNA which was found when scientists wanted to reconcile Mendel’s work on heredity and the theory of natural selection and has since been one of the biggest tools for evolutionary research? Did this idjit happen to forget his brain on a dark shelf somewhere before he set off to defile Darwin’s memory some more?

If Sewell tried to be intellectually honest, he could’ve found all that on the web, the invention he considers a lot more important than anything Darwin ever did. And speaking of the web, did you know you could find plenty of sociopaths, bigots, racists and even a homicidal maniac or two congregating on far flung websites? Should his next great expose be on Tim Bernes Lee and the dark legacy of the web he funds to be far more important than one of the seeds for modern biology? Nah. That’s not controversial enough to raise a ruckus and line his pockets so he’ll stick to Darwin. In an era when every airheaded loudmouth gets to publish a screed, it makes sense to go for the manufactroversy and force yourself into the spotlight.

[ illustration from a t-shirt and comic strip by Aaron Diatz ]

In his article, Sewell has the typical debate tactics of a creationist quote-bot down to a science, if you pardon the pun. His authoritative sources of the Darwin-is-evil tripe include Darrell Scott, who’s claims to fame are his woefully misinformed tirades about the evils of evolution which were brought to light by after his daughter was shot at Columbine and he found himself in front of a camera, and Ann Coulter who was the de facto definition of right wing insanity until we were introduced to Sarah Palin last year. What, was Ray Comfort not available to comment on this story? How about Dinesh “Couldn’t Think His Way Out of a Paper Bag” D’Souza with all his grand and inanely wordy insights? And what about Ben “Science Makes You Kill People” Stein? As long as we’re asking clueless demagogues, why not go down their celebrity roster? To make matters even worse, this insipidity was published in the science section as if it was in any way a legitimate scientific or historical piece as it casually links Darwin to every ignoramus to ever malign his theory.

On this blog, I’ve taken this issue up with Steve Newton, an expert on the subject at the NCSE and in the link included in the first paragraph, but I will mention again just how ridiculous this excuse for logic really is. If we decide that scientists and engineers are responsible for every objectionable use or misuse of their ideas, we should be blaming the Wright brothers for fighter planes and 9/11, John Dalton and all his work on the atomic theory of matter for nuclear weapons, Tim Bernes Lee and his prototype for the modern internet for spam and viruses, and Iron Age metallurgists for modern bullets. Last, and certainly not least, we should also blame the Bible writers for racism because so many of the texts it contains have been used to justify slavery, misogyny, genocide and ethnic cleansing. In fact, the Bible and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s anti-Semitic tracts were cited by Hitler as his inspiration for the Holocaust. A horrifying mangling of natural selection was tacked on by those he employed based on loyalty and ideology rather than genuine education or scientific knowledge. So, when are the creationist hordes going to start holding Chamberlain responsible? Or just plain old bigotry?

And to think that Darwin wrote about the notion that helping each other and those less fortunate must’ve been a product of natural selection, opposed slavery, and while being raised into the standard mentality of Victorian men, his views on women were almost liberal at the time. His cousin Galton and ideologue Herbert Spencer created a pseudoscientific monster by combining the bits and pieces of Darwin’s theory that interested them in justifying their bigotry and snobbishness as noble or prescribed by nature, and we’ve been stuck with whole generations of snobs, racists and bigots who decided their skin color or the size of their bank account makes them better humans than those with darker skin or lighter wallets. For them, the issues of biology and natural selection as it applies to social animals is irrelevant. They just feel free to skip that part without realizing that a population which tries to preserve the “purity” of its genes actually becomes inbred and more prone to certain propagating genetic defects. Why do you think populations of Orthodox Jews who insist that only pure-blooded Jews should marry in their communities have a disproportionate rate of Tay-Sachs? They’re ignoring a basic principle of evolution which works best when genes are spread around.

If anything, evolution is like the hippie of scientific theories. The more genetic variety you have, the more genes you try to mix, the more likely you are to develop resistance to more diseases and avoid carrier genes for any specific genetic condition, so this condition will be less likely to fully activate and more likely to go extinct. This is what those focused on “purity” refuse to understand. Pure humans don’t exist. They never have. They’re just a fanciful concept with no place in reality. Instead, we all have our flaws and defects, and with a larger pool of genetic material available to a population, we’re more likely to overcome them, incorporate each other’s good genes and either mute or minimize the troublesome ones. The aforementioned bigots will resist it because it makes them feel less special as humans. The creationists will ignore that this is what evolution tells us when we actually focus on the science because accepting this fact doesn’t give them the opportunity to drag Darwin through their verbal manure yet again. So much so, that at this point, the Discovery Institute, AiG, Ray Comfort and now Sewell, aren’t just beating a dead horse but violating its bleached, skeletal remains with a disturbing and terribly misplaced zeal.

[ story idea via Jerry Coyne. can't see the video? here's an alternate format ]

One of the best examples of this lackluster attitude to writing is Dinesh D’Souza who’s specialty is rehashing one side of whatever debate he hears in the media and pretending he’s come up with some sort of revelation that really seals the deal. This time, he tries to prove the existence of an afterlife. Oh this should be good…

The “evidence,” of necessity, is indirect: D’Souza doesn’t claim to have communicated with anyone who has died, and he doesn’t expect to. Instead, he looks to the human heart, and finds therein a universal moral code underlying acts of self-sacrifice and charity that appear to run counter to the Darwinian imperative to outcompete thy neighbor.

So this is the grand proof for the afterlife, huh? Instead of perusing truly bizarre and unique tales from medical professionals about the strange experiences their patients report during risky surgeries, D’Souza is going to trot out the finest arguments from the Ray Comfort school of theology? Ah, that’s right. Going about it the way I just offered would require actual hard work and research and Mr. D’Souza has a mortgage payment due and needs to pump out a book to keep himself relevant. Doesn’t matter that he doesn’t understand the basics of a scientific theory he criticizes in the most hackneyed way possible or that his thesis falls on its face if we would apply it to the real world. He just needs to sit in his den and wax poetic.

The idea that there’s “a Darwinian imperative to outcompete thy neighbor” is utter bunk for the simple reason that if this were the case, there would be no such thing as social mammals. Wolves, bats, chimps, dolphins, humans and other creatures living in communities have evolved to help each other so we can boost our rates of survival, increase in number and continue our species. Darwin even wrote about this very phenomenon in The Descent of Man so to link a phrase created by Herbert Spencer after the theory of natural selection buzzed over his head to Darwin is an act of an intellectually lazy dilettante who’s priorities are to hear himself talk first and make any sort of sense second.

D’Souza acknowledges that the prominent atheist Richard Dawkins has offered an evolutionary explanation for human goodness, but he doesn’t buy it.

But of course! How could an actual scientist with decades of education in the field possibly hold a candle to a demagogue with no interest in intellectual honesty or facts? Hear that academia? Dinesh D’Souza, who barely seems to understand what you’re talking about, doesn’t buy your argument. You can all pack up, go home and dismantle your institutions because clearly, the voices in his head are far more knowledgeable than you. Just in case you want to argue, keep in mind that according to Newsweek, he’s the second coming of Buckley…

In a Jesuitical display that does credit to his reputation as “an Indian William F. Buckley Jr.,” [he] turns to his advantage one of the atheists’ favorite arguments, God’s apparent tolerance for [our] suffering. Precisely because evil so often goes unpunished in this world, he asserts, the moral code must reflect another reality, in which souls are judged, punished, or rewarded after death.

You know what? I would absolutely agree with D’Souza being compared to Buckley. He’s also incredibly long- winded and obscures his self-serving agendas and lack of expertise on a subject in eloquent language. And as for his dabbling in theodicy, he seems to have failed a simple logical test. By declaring that because we’re suffering in the temporal world, we must be punished or rewarded in another, he sort of forgot to provide any actual proof of how this happens and wrote a giant non sequtur. Although let’s be realistic here. It’s not that he forgot. He simply has no proof and must build the same house of cards built by millennia of priests and their followers because he has literally nothing else at his disposal.

[ illustration by Neil Blevins ]

Considering that Bill is getting up there in age, getting so worked up is probably not good for his heart. In fact, prolonged stress can shave years off your life. But he’s still at it, taking every possible opportunity to make his paranoid fantasies and indignation heard. To give you an idea of what a Bill Donohue rant sounds like, try to imagine an apoplectic banshee howling into the wind. And just to make it more accurate, think of the banshee as a cross between Rush Limbaugh and a toddler having a temper tantrum. Or Glenn Beck. Either way, you’ll get a very similar result. But I digress a little here. What I really wanted to note was the way Bill truly outdid his own rabid demagoguery in the above mentioned column with the following quote…

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

Holy FSM on a pasta box! Did he perchance want to walk by a college campus and spit in someone’s face as well, just to put the icing on the cake? Or maybe crash a secularist meeting with his wife and have her praise his virility as lewdly as possible in public? Oh, wait a second… That’s right. Our paragon of morals and values is divorced, so ladies, if you’re in the market for a 61 year old with no control over his emotions and most likely to see you as nothing more than a method of boosting the population of people like him, he’s available. And at this point, it’s hard to know how to best mock his inane ramblings because he does a pretty good job of it with no help from me, or anyone else. That quote is just such a perfect combination of cheap, false piety, paranoia and vicious hatred, you want to slide it into a holster and use it like a bludgeon for future debates.

Look, it’s one thing to defend people who have to bear the brunt of real hate speech. But to offend people who you loathe simply because they’re not like you because you can, because you want to, and because you want to use your religion as an excuse to do that? That’s pathetically low and disgustingly exploitative of your faith in the kind of base, earthly way that pretty much every high brow message of the Bible warns you not to do. Then, just to top his already ridiculous antics, Bill wants to boil down the entire idea of how a civilization will proceed in its social development to breeding, in the most offensive method possible. So is that all it is? Pump out an extra couple of babies, the GOP needs all the votes it can get? Does he not realize that he’s using his fans as nothing more than human canon fodder in a bandwagon fallacy?

Maybe, one day, Bill will realize that when someone calls you hateful, offensive and exploitative, you don’t jump up and proceed to spew out the most hateful, offensive and exploitative thing you can. Frankly, it’s amazing to me why there are people who want to be defended by someone with the ability to make them look worse with pretty much every attempt to advance their interests in the press. It has to take an impressive level of denial or a total lack of self-awareness to use Bill Donohue as your face to the outside world.

[ illustration of a dark soul by Neil Blevins ]

Atheism worships (they hate that word) the Cosmos, Evolution, and Reason. The Big Bang and Darwinian Evolution are the creation myths, and the Big Crunch the prophecied [sic] cataclysm.

You know, I’ve never encountered an atheist who prays to a picture of Darwin or a poster from a physics class with a graphic of the Big Bang. I’ve never seen an incantation over The Origin of the Species or a homily after the reading of A Brief History of Time. There’s also no building where atheists gather once a week to recite or memorize passages from the latest papers on astrophysics and evolutionary biology. So where’s the worship and the ritual? Oh and the whole thing about the Big Crunch as the doomsday cataclysm? At the rate that our universe is expanding, it seems very, very unlikely that it would actually happen. The current mainstream idea of how the universe will end involves the observable cosmos running out of fuel over trillions of years. If you’re going to make comparisons, at lest try to get your cataclysms right. But his argument gets even stranger…

Oh, I know; these are scientific concepts and not simply faith-based stories.

So then what’s your point? If you know these aren’t just tall tales, what are you complaining about and why are you comparing them to myths written sometime during the bronze age? The evidence for all those scientific concepts are repeatable, observable facts. The evidence for the Bible is people demanding that we accept it as a true account and an accurate transcription of conversations with a supernatural entity. Sorry but when the facts are in front of me, I’m temped to go by the facts. But that’s just what Birdnow expects and counters with…

Of course, this means that the ultimate questions of where this random, mechanistic universe came from cannot be answered. God is as good of an answer as any, but most atheists simply insist there can be none and believe in a mechanical universe that generated spontaneously with physical laws balanced just right for the evolution of life and human consciousness.

If you believe you can’t answer the question of where the universe came from and decide to invoke a creature for which we have no evidence in any way, shape or form other than philosophical musings of your fans, you are intellectually lazy. God is not as good an answer as any because we have no proof for an all knowing and omnipotent creature creating the cosmos. Hell, if we need to use magic to make a theory work, that theory is just wishful thinking. And the whole idea that the laws of physics are balanced just right for evolution and for human consciousness? Nonsense according to physicists.

There are plenty of other things I could mention in Birdnow’s long, tedious, grossly uninformed rant which has so much hatred and passion emptied into it, one can imagine him foaming at the mouth and barking while he pounded this fiery mini-screed into his keyboard. But it’s probably best that I leave it at this. Just because you write in a way that makes readers imagine you leaping out of the screen and trying to beat them over the head with something heavy, doesn’t give your arguments a single shred of validity.

The basis of her article is an OSU study of 219 students which found a link between Facebook usage and GPA. Students who used the social networking site tended to have a GPA between 3.0 and 3.5 while those who didn’t, usually had between a 3.5 and a 4.0 on their report cards. Facebook users studied between one to five hours per week on average while non-users logged in between 11 and 15 hours of study time. While there’s definitely a strong correlation, the authors point out that it doesn’t equal causation. Rather, it’s more likely that Facebook users with lower grades would find other ways to avoid studying.

In her write-up, Hamilton glosses over this important point and goes on to say that this study is not the first one to “associate Facebook usage with diminished mental abilities.” Diminished mental abilities? Ouch! That’s actually pretty insulting and grossly erroneous considering that the study she’s using to make this insult has nothing to say about mental ability. If a group of Facebook users consistently scored lower on an IQ test than non-users, she might have some leg to stand on but a GPA is also measure of a student’s discipline and study skills. If a user is distracted with social networking, it doesn’t mean that he or she is feeble minded. He or she is probably just not doing a very good job of balancing academics and social life.

There could also be many other factors involved in why a student’s GPA is the way it is. Maybe the classes are tough. Maybe the professors grade harshly. Maybe there are other distractions unrelated to the web, like drama with a significant other or family troubles. A simple survey of users vs. non-users doesn’t control for these possibilities which is why there are experts who consider most studies on online usage inherently flawed. Hamilton makes a quick note of their opinions and briefly documents Facebook’s response before going on to rehash all the typical complaints about college students spending way too much time on the site and posting quick updates to their profiles instead of paying attention to lectures.

But some of the most controversial evidence used by Hamilton to support her idea of social networking users being distracted slackers are quotes from Susan Greenfield and Gary Small, a duo of neuroscientists known for making rather wild claims about how our brains interact with technology. Greenfield made a statement in the UK’s House of Lords that using social networking sites was “infantilizing the brain,” an assertion that was received with raised brows and criticism. In fact, one of England’s best known scientific skeptics, Dr. Ben Goldacre, called it a case of using one’s position “to give undue weight to opinion and conjecture.” And as for Small’s statement that prolonged online usage would leave “young people unable to understand the context of subtle gestures and the emotions behind them,” he’s trying to sell a book on how to survive in the digital world with your brain intact and this quote is part of his pitch.

Now interestingly enough, Hamilton tries to present these statements as actual studies rather than the opinions and assertions they actually are, once again misusing information to build a framework for what clearly seems to be her personal view of social networking sites and many of the people who use them. If this isn’t a textbook example of technophobia, I wouldn’t know what is. And the most irritating thing about it is the blatant misuse of anything that sounds somewhat scientific to present this technophobic opinion as fact.