Behaving like animals: The Bonobo and the Atheist
The Guardian
Is human nature a beast that needs to be tamed? Should we "throw out Darwinism in our social and political lives"? Or are we naturally altruistic, empathetic and moral? In Frans De Waal's new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, he takes on the thinkers ...

Ball State University has a crap course on their curriculum: they have a crank professor, Eric Hedin, who is pushing religion and creationism in the guise of an astronomy course. It’s bad science and bad teaching, and I think Coyne has adequately document the abysmal quality of the material. It’s all religious apologetics and intelligent design creationism. I’m not going to disagree with that at all, and Ball State ought to be acutely embarrassed.

Unfortunately, this part of Coyne’s disagreement is invalid.

This has to stop, for Hedin’s course, and the University’s defense of it, violate the separation of church and state mandated by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (“freedom of religion”) and which has been so interpreted by the courts. It’s religion taught as science in a public university, and it’s not only wrong but illegal.  I have tried approaching the University administration, and have been rebuffed.

This will now go to the lawyers.

No, sorry, not right — academic freedom is the issue here, and professors have to have the right to teach unpopular, controversial issues, even from an ignorant perspective. The first amendment does not apply; this is not a course students are required to take, and it’s at a university, which students are not required to attend. It’s completely different from a public primary or secondary school. A bad course is an ethical problem, not a legal one. It’s also an issue that the university has to handle internally.

This kind of thing happens. I’ve known of a couple of cases where faculty go ’round the bend and start flaking out in the classroom, and there’s not much you can do, except what Ball State seems to be doing. Put the person into low level service courses where they have to teach students something basic, like algebra, where their weird views can’t do much harm. Or give them some non-majors elective where they aren’t going to have much influence. I notice in Hedin’s courses that he’s only teaching low level courses and honors/interdisciplinary courses. It looks like maybe the department is doing their best to isolate a problem.

Another option is to take this history into consideration in tenure decisions. Hedin is an assistant professor, and so is probably untenured — the department may be avoiding confrontation until it gets dealt with decisively in Hedin’s tenure year.

If you’ve got a tenured professor who has gone weird on you, it’s a bigger problem…then you’ve got damage that needs to be routed around. Check out Michael Behe’s class schedule at Lehigh, for instance. It looks to me like they’ve carefully placed him only in courses where his ignorance about evolution won’t hurt too much. Are we going to sue Lehigh to get him fired? That won’t work, and is also an insult to a department that is doing their best with a bit of deadwood.

I think it’s very unwise for an atheist professor to pursue legal action against another professor for their religious views. That’s a two-edged sword, and if a university were to cave to public pressure to fire a professor for unpopular views, you know who’d be next.

Now it is possible that the whole physics department at Ball State is full of credulous nitwits who are trying to build a theological perspective into their curriculum. That will be corrected in two ways: they’re going to have a more difficult time hiring good faculty, and as the reputation of their department spreads, they’re going to have a more difficult time recruiting good students. Rot expands, you know. It’s not a good thing to encourage.

But it’s probably premature to threaten a department with legal action for having one dingbat assistant professor.

(via Larry Moran)

Atheist Professor Jerry Coyne Fiddles While the Darwinian Palace Burns
Algemeiner
Jerry Coyne, who teaches evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, long ago took upon himself the role of Grand Inquisitor of Modern Atheism. On his Why Evolution is True blog he routinely informs us of the latest heresies against Atheistic ...

But only to laugh at it. Some new pseudoscientific ‘documentary’ has been released this week, titled Sirius, which apparently has everything in it: conspiracy theories galore, ancient astronauts, zero point energy, pyramids, UFOs, antigravity, war, top secret government agencies, and aliens. One alien at least; the big feature proving the existence of aliens from outer space is dessicated, tiny little corpse of an “alien” found in the Atacama desert. I saw that and knew immediately what it was. It’s human. It’s simply a mummified fetus, in which the plates of the skull (still quite distinct) have collapsed on themselves as the flesh dried out. Here are a few shots of the obvious. Apparently, the UFOlogists are all surprised now because they had a lab run some simple tests, and they returned the information that it was human — and an indigenous Chilean native, at that. Whoop-te-doo. Anyone other than a deluded fanatic could see that by just looking at the sad little thing. I did find out one useful bit of information, though: a site with a skeptical summary of all the purported alien corpses that have turned up over the years, from shaved monkeys to deformed children to fake alien mannequins. I have to say that I rather liked the Siberian alien made out of bread crumbs and chicken skin. There’s some real artistic talent there.

Islington Gazette
Sunday Assembly pastor claims UK's first atheist congregation evicted from ...
Islington Gazette
The pastor of Britain's first atheist church has claimed his congregation has been “kicked out” of the church they were using to worship by “moralistic” Christians. Comments; Email; Print. To send a link to this page to a friend, you must be logged in ...
Godless... and now homelessChortle

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Tina Dupuy had a good op-ed published in the Sedalia, Missouri newspaper, titled “Teaching creationism hurts kids, undermines educational system“. Yeah, it does: it prompted some rebuttals that made her case even more strongly. John Nail has some complaints: Writer had it dead wrong on debate over teaching creationism In response to Tina Dupuy column in the April 15 paper entitled “Teaching creationism hurts kids, undermines education system,” I’d like to say, “Phooey!” From the article it sounds like she has some real issues with her mother. Read more
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Today we’re going to talk about snail sex. There was recently a hubbub about an National Science Foundation (NSF) funding a grant to study snail sex to Maurine Neiman, John Logsdon, and Jeffrey Boore. Because, y’know, snails are so slimy, and sex is gross, so that makes snail sex… icky, and what is it good for?!?... M. Wilson Sayres http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com

In case you’re wondering why I’m experimenting with video, there actually is an ulterior motive, and it’s the same one that got me into blogging in the first place: teaching. I’m teaching science at an undergraduate institution, and contrary to many people’s expectations, a bachelor’s degree does not confer a deep understanding of science, and it can’t. Students come out of high school with an ability to read and do basic math (at least the ones we admit to college!), and have wildly varying abilities in writing, analysis, and thinking. I think the undergraduate university’s role is more to deepen the student’s abilities in those general skills, and also to provide a broad knowledge base in a discipline of their choosing. We’re preparing students to go off and do science, if that’s what they want to do. I’ve done my job if my students go to graduate school competent and confident, ready to get to work and explore the natural world. Or if they choose not to follow a science career, they’re open to read and think about the world in a scientific way. So there are a couple of things I do in my upper level lab courses. I take a hands-off approach: I teach students how to use the tools in my lab, give them a general idea of what would be cool to do or see, and turn them loose. If I see a combination of frustration (“I can’t get it to work! How do I get it to work?”) and play (“What if we do this?”), it’s a success. I have them blogging because it’s a sneaky way to get them to think about the subject of the class outside of class, and also to get them to blend their interests — which usually aren’t identical to mine! — with what I’m teaching. And then there are presentations. Communicating your work is an important part of doing science, too. I try to get them to do that with the blogging, but also our university promotes a...
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Hackney Gazette
Sunday Assembly pastor claims UK's first atheist congregation evicted from ...
Hackney Gazette
The pastor of Britain's first atheist church, the Sunday Assembly, has claimed his congregation has been kicked out of the church they were using to worship by “moralistic” Christians. Comments; Email; Print. To send a link to this page to a friend ...
Comedians atheist church evicted from holy (owned) landSuch Small Portions
Godless... and now homelessChortle

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I haven’t had much use for The Lizard of K Street since he posted this sociopathic little gem in 2004:

Did the president really gut the Endangered Species Act yesterday while no one was paying attention? So I’ve heard, at any rate. If so, good riddance. You’ll all yell at me, I suppose, but really: Who cares? Species die, shit happens, get over it.

It is not exactly news that Matthew Yglesias is a tepid thinker. Poking holes in Yglesias’ vacuous, self-absorbed puffery has long been a popular pastime among bloggers from the progressive left to the hard right. He’s got himself a cushy gig these days, squirting out incontinent posts with no detectable logical or factual value, and as long as people give his outlets page views it’s all good. Eyeballs are eyeballs, and it doesn’t matter much if those eyeballs are rolling upward hard enough to burst blood vessels.

But this shit? This shit is inexcusable.

Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

The reason is that while having a safe job is good, money is also good. Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States that’s primarily fishing, logging, and trucking—pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. And in a free society it’s good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum.…

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States. Split the difference and you’ll get rules that are appropriate for nobody.

There are three main problems with Yglesias’ argument.

1. Yglesias’ argument is profoundly immoral. People are willing to take bigger risks to feed their families when they’re burdened by poverty, yes. But arguing that we should use that unfortunate fact as a basic design feature of global workplace safety regulations is vile.
2. Yglesias’ argument is profoundly ahistorical as well. Workplace safety regulations — and environmental laws, and education for women, and all of the thousands of other social goods we fight for — don’t magically appear when societies’ wealth passes a certain threshold as a result of the airy  fapping of the invisible hand. Those regulations come into being because people fight for them, often dying in the process, against the opposition of the entrenched powers that make the regulations necessary in the first place.  And here Yglesias is on the side of the entrenched powers, willing to wave away yet another workplace disaster so that he can continue to enjoy the cheap cotton shorts, running shoes, and tablet computers he sees as his birthright.
3. Yglesias’ argument is essentially plagiarized from a 1991 memo by Laurence Summers written when the latter was the chief economist at the World Bank. A salient sampling from that memo:

I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. … The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand.

An individual human life is worth fewer U.S. dollars in Bangladesh, and so betting that lower-value life against the possibility that you might actually survive your $432 per annum minimum wage job just makes better sense there than it does here, eh Matt? Hell, if the typical Bengali minimum wage worker survives his or her job for three or four years before they get crushed to death by an unsafe building, they may actually have come out well ahead of the game!

It’s a repugnant argument.

Matthew Yglesias should be ashamed of himself.

The Atlantic
The Atheist Who Strangled Me
The Atlantic
These “New Atheists”—Harris, Hitchens, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the zoologist Richard Dawkins—went on to devote a good chunk of time to forums in which they squared off against religious believers (though at last count, their efforts had ...

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This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. We read a paper about dunnarts today. Consensus: adorable. Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread

I’ve been told by a lot of people over the years that I need to start making youtube videos (some of them may have changed their minds once they learned of my low opinion of most youtube commenters), but the hurdle has always been the learning curve — I could just yell at my camera, but I’m used to investing a little prep time, and also I generally find those so, so boring. The only way to learn is to do, though, so I did. I clumsily assembled a little video discussing recent blog posts on Pharyngula, and here it is. I’m calling it the Pharyngula Fringe Report. Not giving up my day job, don’t worry. I think I’ll be trying to do this sort of thing sporadically over the summer, while I’m pinned down in Lovely Morris Minnesota, managing our summer research program. Maybe I’ll get a little better at it; I recognize that there are real skills involved in putting a good video together, and I don’t have them yet. Anyway, suggestions and criticisms are welcome.

I would love to visit China. I’d especially love to be invited to go there and have all my expenses covered. So when I got an official-looking invitation to a conference there a while back, I had a few milliseconds of enthusiasm, until I read a little deeper and my excitement got replaced with bafflement. I just turned away from it, but they keep begging me to attend. Here’s the latest letter from the China Medicinal Biotech Forum: Dear Dr. Paul Myers, This is redacted, the program coordinator ofthe 6th CMBF-2013. On behalf of the organizing committee of CMBF-2013, I sent you a formal Invitation Letter several weeks ago, which is regarding inviting you to participate in our forum as the Chair/Speaker of Session 7-2: Genetic and Cell Engineering Technologies for Biological Therapy. But we haven’t received any reply from you. In case of missing this grant event, I am writing again to extend to you our sincere invitation. Since we have learnt that you are making valuable contributions to Paul Myers…, your unique and inspirational message will definitely highlight the forum. The 6th CMBF will be held on September 25-27, 2013 in Shenzhen, China. And it is hosted by CMBA, which was established in 1993 and consisted by 200 enterprise members and over 2000 professional individuals. It is on attachment to Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China, which is an executive agency of the state that plays the role of providing information, raising health awareness and education, ensuring the accessibility of health services, and monitoring the quality of health services provided to citizens and visitors in the mainland of the People’s Republic of China. It also cooperates and keeps in touch with other health ministries and departments, including those of the special administrative regions and the World Health Organization (WHO). We have hosted CMBF for five times in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and Dalian respectively. Each...
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Atheist group looking into Hattiesburg Prayer Breakfast's legality
WLOX
HATTIESBURG, MS (WDAM) -. A national atheist activist group has made an open records request to determine if the City of Hattiesburg uses tax funds to support the upcoming Mayor's Prayer Breakfast. The Freedom From Religion Foundation claims the city ...

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Taslima points to celebrities who are actually getting cupping done. It makes me wonder if they’re also getting bled, and whether they prefer leeches or the lancet. It’s medieval nonsense and total quackery.

I was wondering if there were any good analyses of this stuff, though, and my search turned up an unsurprising fact: WebMD, that popular website for Americans who can’t afford to go to a real doctor, is embarrassingly uncritical of cupping. In fact, they’re generally very woo-ish — I am once again made conscious of my class privilege, because when I feel sick I walk down the street to see a real doctor at nominal cost, because I’ve got good health insurance. Which makes me wonder some more — maybe universal health care would be a more effective means of curbing quackery than trying to educate everyone to be good skeptics. Sometimes, being skeptical is only an option when you can afford to question.

In America, if you’re a wage lackey who experiences a major health problem, you’re just out of luck — the working poor get thoroughly screwed by the system. Stephen Andrew of The Zingularity is working two jobs, coming off a major heart attack, and is about to be evicted from his home. I guess his real problem is that he’s one of the moochers who didn’t vote for Romney.

He’s looking for donations to tide him over this rough spot. If you’re one of those people with a stable income and good health and a bit of a surplus…oh, hey, that’s me! I should go click on his paypal button.

He’s still dying of cancer, but it’s good to see a godless heathen like him still finding happiness in his life. Discovering the sheer extent and depth of the feelings people have expressed on the message board over the past two weeks has been truly astounding. I feel treasured, I feel loved, I feel I’ve done more than just pursue the craft I adore and make a living from it, and more than just fulfil the only real ambition I’ve ever had – of becoming a professional writer. I am deeply flattered and touched, and I can’t deny I’ve been made to feel very special indeed. At the same time, though, I’d like to think that it’s like this for every author, to a greater or lesser degree; we’ve each engendered more love out there than we think we have, and it’s only the fact that I’ve been able to pre-announce my own demise that has allowed me to realise my portion of that love in full while I’m still around to appreciate it. Now I’m thinking…I’ve never met him and I guess I never will now, but I should send him a note of appreciation. We’re all alone in this world except when we’re not, so making the effort to touch another human being is rarely wasted. (Also…cancer sucks.)

Atheist group looking into Hattiesburg Prayer Breakfast's legality
WDAM-TV
HATTIESBURG, MS (WDAM) -. A national atheist activist group has made an open records request to determine if the City of Hattiesburg uses tax funds to support the upcoming Mayor's Prayer Breakfast. The Freedom From Religion Foundation claims the city ...
Mayor Dupree says prayer breakfast will go on as plannedYall Politics

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