“Communication Is a Two-Way Street” is a trite metaphor that, although useful at times, is an incomplete description of the reality of the process of communications.  Yes, there are senders and receivers in communications.  The senders can only control how they present messages.  They can’t control how messages are received. Only receivers can control their reception.

In intro psychology courses, many of us spent weeks trying to get a solid grasp of the subtle differences between sensation and perception.  Just as two people can experience (perceive) a temperature of 55° F as either warm or cool depending on their preconceptions and other environmental factors, two people can also hear or read my message and either decide that I am “right on” or that I am “not helping.”

I sincerely intend to attend someday a conference where all the cool kids congregate. If I had been at TAM8 in Vegas last weekend, I would have caught this speech that Phil Plait gave on being a dick when it comes to skepticism.  Stephanie was there and wrote about it.

That’s the closest thing I have to a conversion story I have. It’s also why I was a touch disappointed in Phil’s speech, although I appreciated most of it. He asked how many of us used to believe in woo, and he asked how many of us had been converted by people being angry and mean to us. He didn’t ask how many of us had been converted by someone being angry and mean on our behalf or on behalf of the ideals of skepticism.

I’d have raised my hand. High.

I have been wondering what has been learned lately in the blogosphere regarding the best methods to communicate skepticism and interest in science to the general public.  It still seems to me that with the You’re Not Helping self-immolation, the lesson learned was that people don’t like sock-puppets (and for good reason).  Or perhaps that Chris Mooney had better do a better job of checking on someone before vouching for him.

In most of the discussions related to accommodation of religion and science, most of the effort at discovery and focus has been placed on the methods of the message senders.  Who is right?  Who is wrong? Is it okay to be a jerk?  Are jerks making it more difficult for the non-jerks?  Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas even has a post that suggests that we can use science to determine the best way to get people to like science.  He even proposes a (lame) experiment:

Someone grounded in that body of research could develop some testable hypotheses about how folks might respond to NAs. Then you could do lab work, bringing in a large and representative sample of folks with views across the c/e spectrum. Do a pretest, then have some of them read a selection from Dawkins’ The God Delusion, others read from Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, and a control reading something unrelated to creationism and evolution and theism. Then do a post-test. Follow up a month later, and see how their views on science generally, evolution specifically, and on the relationship between science and religion have changed. Follow up a year later. What sticks, and what doesn’t? What do people remember? What do they convey to their friends? Then follow up the study with treatments that vary the extent of contact with New Atheist writings, to see whether people who read all of TGD, or watch a 2 hour talk by Dawkins, react differently than those with more fleeting contact with NA ideas.

The reason that I think that this idea is “lame” is because the concept doesn’t take into account the individual prejudices, the environments and the presuppositions that people bring into a reading of a book that looks at religion to determine that belief in God is the result of a delusion.  It’s a loaded experiment that I think would yield little.  A reading of either Miller’s book or Dawkins’ book is unlikely to find an audience of readers who were initially unbiased towards the concepts of religion and science.  Such an experiment wouldn’t be able to isolate the independent variables enough to create a sufficiently testable hypothesis.

More importantly, though, Josh makes the mistake of assuming that there is a “best” way to do all of this science communicating.  I don’t see how there can be one “best way” to turn an “Unscientific America” into a scientific America when there isn’t any single “America.”  There are 300 million Americans, and each of them have their own looking-glass selves. Communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  A message is by necessity interpreted by the receiver.  Communication is colored by the recipient’s background, history and environment.  Perception is a function of perspective.

Suppose the experiment were to be set up using the two books that Josh suggests; Finding Darwin’s God, by Kenneth Miller and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  Suppose a sizable portion of the Miller readers were anti-Catholic and decided that his book is pure papist nonsense.  Would their non-acceptance be skewed by his catholicism?  How would the experimenter control for such an extraneous variable?  That is just one possible objection, and I am sure that social scientists can find more problems with the idea.

Humans are not psychic.  There is no direct communication available from my brain to yours.  We are limited in communications by the usage of symbols whether visual or audio.  We talk, we write, we listen, we read and use other means to indirectly communicate.  The indirect means we have to communicate are filtered through our perspectives.  We can’t control how other people filter.

Let’s try looking at it this way.  Is there an experiment that can show the “best” temperature to take a shower?  Would Josh be able to come up with a statistically valid sample to prove that 140°F is the “best” temperature and then expect that everyone take their showers at that temperature in order to get a consensus on clean?

Communication is not a two-way street.  It is an intersection.  Sometimes there are four corners and sometimes there are seven corners, and I think it unreasonable to expect that a left turn is always the correct course of action.  People who receive your directions and your communications have varying needs.  Stephanie needed someone to be angry at flim-flammers on her behalf, and Randi was there for her. Some people don’t need to hear that; some people just want discussion.  Some people just want the facts.  The trouble is the communicators don’t know what the receivers need. Most of the time we just know what we want to give. That’s just fine as long as we recognize that the message may vary and still have a desired effect.

So, be a dick or don’t be a dick.  Just don’t pretend to tell me that you know which size fits all.

Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth (or a close approximation thereof). Almost A.C. Doyle

I have a friend who has often told me that as an atheist I rest too much on my preconceptions that God doesn’t exist for me to be open to evidence that his God does, in fact, exist.  He has told me that because of the problem of induction,  there is no way that I can “know” that God doesn’t exist, and that nothing in the scientific method can be used to support atheism.  Since no one can be justified, apparently, in drawing absolute answers from repeated observations, then it is silly to say that there is no God just because I have never experienced “Him.”

It’s the problem of induction, again.  I hesitate to discuss such a philosophical quandary among those who read this blog regularly; those who will likely school me on where my lack of formal philosophical training has failed me, but I have been thinking about the differences between science and religion as “ways of knowing.”

In order to maintain confidence that a causal relationship between natural phenomena has been established, one scientific method that I learned was to disprove a null hypothesis using statistical tools to analyze my data.  If the null hypothesis is not disproved, that means that the proposed hypothesis probably establishes a causal relationship and my investigation has yielded a good answer within a specified confidence interval. In other words, by following a scientific process, an investigator has come up with a good explanation for why something is so, or how something works.

This is only one of the methods that scientists use to discover how things work, one of the ways that people discover “how the world goes.”

Religion promises knowledge based on non-verifiable acceptance of authority, resignation to “mystery,” and the record of inscripturation.  Apologists for religion promise to provide “other ways of knowing” that aren’t limited to verifiable, positivistic methods. Religion, in general, tells people that we can know for certain that the supernatural exists and interacts in measurable ways with the natural.  Religion explains, in its “way,” the creation, miracles, interventions in personal lives and through catastrophic natural events.  The explanations are authoritative but not testable nor replicable through any reliable means.

There is a difference between the process of science and the nature of religion.  Science provides the “probable” answers, while religion promise certainty as long as the seeker will accept Mystery. ¹ Cosmologists have teased out most of the probable answers as to what happened following the Big Bang to within Planck Time and are still trying to determine how this universe came into being.  They don’t know absolutely if the current understanding of the process of expansion has been accurately described, but they have reason to acknowledge that it has been described very accurately using the process of inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning, as I understand it, is the process of analyzing subsets of the whole to make rational judgments of the nature of the whole.  For a common example of how inductive reasoning works, I will use political polling.  A sample of the population of likely voters is queried as to how they plan to vote in an upcoming election.  The larger the sample polled, the more likely the pollster is to obtain an accurate prediction of the eventual outcome.  Once the sample size exceeds a certain level, the returns of accuracy and confidence change little and it would be foolish and expensive and time-consuming to sample more than necessary.  A poll of all the people who will vote would be the most accurate way to predict an election, it would yield an “absolutely true” result, provided that none of those polled were deceptive or changed their minds.

The ideal sample size can be determine through some quick calculations, for example:

Determining Sample Size

((The trick to stats is designing the proper formula.  Once that has been done it is a simple matter of algebra.))

Nate Silver didn’t need to sample all of the voters in the 2008 election to predict that Obama would carry the electoral vote.  He merely needed to analyze the polls that sampled populations within the whole of the electorate.  The results he predicted were accurate to a specified confidence level, the famous “margin of error” of ±3 per cent.  There was a 5% chance that he could have predicted incorrectly.  In experimental design, a scientist will determine what margin of error will allow for the most probable and acceptable description of the causality of a natural phenomenon. Shorter:  Is this what caused that?  The  possible answers are not “yes” or “no.”  They are “probably” or “probably not,” or “that’s funny.”

The “problem of induction” is related to absolute knowledge.  If all knowledge is tentative, then any solution is as good as any other.  There is no certainty and there can be none, so my answer is as good as yours even if I haven’t done any serious investigation.  If you can’t state with a 0% margin of error that something is so, then you really have no useful knowledge. I can’t predict that the sun will rise tomorrow with absolute certainty, because I can’t see into the future.  I can confidently state that it will because I have an understanding that the sun doesn’t really rise, instead the earth rotates and creates an effective illusion that the sun is rising. For the Earth to stop rotating sometime in the middle of the night, events would be a bit more jarring due to the forces of momentum than I would care to deal with.  I wouldn’t then be too concerned that my prediction was wrong.

The “problem of induction” has been misused to claim that since there is no way to “know” that there is no God then God is likely to exist even if there is no direct nor indirect evidence of such an entity.  Not by any professional philosophers has this been done, mind you, but by friends of mine who think that they have stumbled onto something that “no atheist can answer.”

When it comes to the differences between religion as a “way of knowing” versus science as a way of understanding, religion offers something that science doesn’t.  Religion offers the comfort of absolute knowledge.  It offers the absolute answers, the answers that people want:  there is a creator that is watching after us and providing a way for us to experience a blissful afterlife.

The conflict between science and religion is in the means of acquiring knowledge.  Religious authority is often derived from personal revelations of prophets who have experienced something that to them is “real” and “true,” as true as the feeling of a burned hand in a fire. I have “felt” the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I have also “felt” the presence of the pagan Goddess in a drawing down of the moon. Both experiences were very emotional, uplifting, exciting and convincing. God’s presence was revealed to me, as was the Goddess’s. I should also note that both experiences were accompanied by prophecies from the respective supernatural agents.

Through these experiences, I found out how religious people “know” what they know. There could be no doubt, because the words came directly to me while I was experiencing the ecstasy. There was no induction needed, because through those experiences I had the Truth.  As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

I could tell you the Truth of those prophecies, but you would have to take my word for it.

Religion and science are not compatible because of the illusory nature of “truth.”  We all have truths.  Religion claims to provide Truth.  Science is just a process that uses methods to get close to truth.  Religion provides other ways of knowing.  My question is in knowing what?  What does religion help us know, exactly?  And if induction can’t be used to prove an absolute, is that really a problem that religion can solve?

I don’t know.

1. Have you ever noticed that Catholic theologians pronounced the word “mystery” with the “M” capitalized? How do they do that?

I’ll describe these two worlds by informally looking at the example of fluoride in the diet of infants and children. Fluoride is added to drinking water in many American communities. Therefore, a baby that is fed on formula that is made with tap water gets a dose of Fluoride that is larger than otherwise likely. If the formula is mixed at home using special extra-fluoridated water (which is advertised as having a health benefit for the little ones) then an even larger amount of fluoride is added to the infant’s diet.

There is some evidence that too much fluoride cases a condition that affects primary teeth in a negative way. So some research has been done on this.

The conclusion of the scientific research is probably best described in a document provided by the American Dental Association, which indicates that you would not do harm to avoid giving fluoride to your infants prior to six months of age to avoid this condition, unless you are in an area where the water is not fluoridated. The current medical literature seems to indicate that other effects of fluoride are probably not anything to be concerned about.

But, there is another point of view. This other point of view claims that fluoridosis (the tooth condition of concern) is a very very bad thing to happen, that is occurs widely in children with fluoride in their diets, and, that fluoride in diets also causes brain damage, food intolerance, depression, other gut problems and autism. And more. In short, fluoride is a poison.

If you Google the right terms you will find mostly this second view. If you put the same search terms in Google Scholar, you get the other view, that fluoride may be a little bad in quantity for infants, but otherwise, it is not the end of the world and is mostly good.

The “fluoride is deadly” point of view emerges over time in a very straightforward process, which I’ll call the denialistic method. I call it that not because it necessarily leads to denailist conclusions, but because it is a method that was perfected by denialists (and conspiracy theorists).

Step 1: A winged monkey flies out of someone’s back side and screeches an idea. The idea may be plausible, it maybe insane. Doesn’t matter. It’s an unformed idea about something. So far, this is similar to (and sometimes identical to) the scientific methods, and in the scientific method it is called “observation.”

Step 2: Someone identifies a positive relationship that relates in some way to the winged-monkey idea. It does not have to be a valid or logical relationship. For instance, if the winged-monkey idea is that “Crohn’s disease causes autism,” then the positive relationship might simply be a study that finds that both Crohn’s disease and autism are increasing in incidence or reporting over recent decades. This would be instead of formulating and testing hypothesis, as in the scientific method.

Step 3: The winged-monkey idea is now formed into an accretive model, or glommed onto an existing accretive model, where it joins other winged-monkey ideas to be used as part of a Gish Gallop to convince anyone who is unsure of the the verity of the model, or to drown out and hopefully shut up anyone who has serious arguments against it.

It is interesting to see the same exact form of argument in denialist movements, race-based science, among creationists, and Kennedy conspiracy theorists. I used to get annoyed at the Kennedy conspiracy theorists. But they were all about 20 years older than me and are now mostly dead, so we don’t hear from them as much any more. But I now realize that if Kennedy conspiracies were still viable and vibrant, a lot of people who are otherwise involved in the modern white supremacist movements or antivax movements or other Bizarro World activities would instead be busy working on who shot the President in 1963, and maybe they would leave the rest of us alone.

Scientists, science communicators and skeptics need to understand where the Bizarro World ideas come from and how they develop. They really are not that different from science ideas. There are only a few real differences between the accumulation of information and development of theories in the rational world of science and in Bizarro World.

One difference is the accumulation of evidence. Both accumulate evidence, but in the real, scientific world, much of the evidence eventually gets thrown out, while in the Bizarro world it is never thrown out. Another difference is in what evidence is taken in to begin with. Another is in the placement of an immutable descriptive model or theory at the beginning of the process in Bizzaro World, as opposed to attempting to arrive at a descriptive theory at the end of a process as is done in science.

That there are races and that the “black” race is inferior, in a way that is genetic with virtually no environmental effects, is the immutable theory that starts the “research” process about race among the racist scientists in Bizarro World. That any given compound or chemical pushed on us by the government, such as fluoride placed in our water supply in order to contaminate our precious bodily fluids, causes any problem one may think of (or that may be suggested by the constant screeching of the winged monkeys) is part of the fluoride denialist theme song. Many of the science denialists put a literal interpretation of the Bible in front of any subsequent scientific investigation, such as related to evolution, or modern medicine.

These different Bizzaro World groups have historical links even if the modern practitioners do not necessarily always realize it. Race-based science and fluoride-panicked science deniers have common ancestry with each other, and with the Bible thumpers, and may even share some connections today. Look no further than the John Birch Society to find many of these links. I’ll bet there are white supremacists living in cabins in the Rockies (or for that matter, the Catskills) who refuse to drink municipal water when they roll into town for supplies. Which is okay. The problem is when they leave their cabins and get real, important jobs …

My roommate is a Christian.  His mother is a clergywoman, his stepdad a clergyman and his aunt a preacher as well.  He invariably interrupts me whenever I open a conversation on something cool I learned regarding evolution with the standard disclaimer that he is religious.  Yesterday, I told him that he should really think about how it is weird that if I were to explain to him that the sky is blue because of light ray refraction, or that the reason that lakes turn over just before freezing in winter because of the unusual crystalline properties of water ice and its density, that he wouldn’t interrupt me about his religion.

He equates evolution with atheism. No matter how many times we go through that whole thing about “This is what we find out through science, and this is how they do it, and religion really shouldn’t interfere with your interest in it,” the conversation gets stuck there. To me it seems as though his religious belief is blocking him from an area of understanding of nature that is really fucking cool.  It saddens me, and makes me think that the main purpose of religion is the preparation for death and making sure that one is going to the right place for eternity.  What else we can do in the meantime is meaningless in the long run when eternity is at stake.

This is the nihilism that is religion. (I find it extremely odd that there is so much ethical resistance to euthanasia.  The idea that the extremely sick should have their suffering prolonged indefinitely so that they can experience the “dignity of suffering” is an incredibly cruel interpretation of “God’s Will.” If you believe they will be in Heaven when they go, let them go.)  Death is inevitable, and we should spend our lives prepping for it and not offend God by questioning the world around us.  It is why we must deal with the idiocy of theodicy and let theologians justify the reasons that nature plays horrendously cruel tricks on us; “Suffering is God’s way of letting us know that he has a Plan that we can’t fathom.”  But, to find alternative explanations to the God hypothesis is ludicrous.  For every answer that scientists propose that coincides with the observations of the natural world and how it works, the response is “Silly Atheist, you are not as learned as Kierkegaard.”

Spreading enthusiasm for evolution, such as I experience, and the extreme wonder that the intellectually curious find in teasing out the details is not easy when faced by such resistance. I don’t think anyone who is also enthusiastic about science has the answer, either.  If they did, then we wouldn’t be seeing the acceptance of evolution stall and continually have to face resistance from so many quarters.  We  wouldn’t see so many polls that place a public acceptance of evolution below that of creationism.

The strategy of groups such as the NCSE will work with some people, I think. But I don’t know.  There seems to be this underlying assumption that they know how to do it, by being assuring and enlisting the help of theologians and by saying that many scientists believe in God and see no conflict.  It may work for some people, but for others it won’t matter.  They know that death can come at any time and that if they are not solid enough in their faith when it comes, then they go through the coal chute to Hell and eternal agony and fire.  It’s not likely when faced with that sort of fear they are going to accept such assurances, and certainly not from someone who doesn’t interpret the Bible the Right Way. Creationism is not an intellectual conclusion.  It is an emotional conclusion.  It backfills data to agree with their foregone conclusion (which is what makes it ridiculous).

No one really knows the strategies that will work to help break the barriers that place religion in front of intellectual curiosity about evolution.  What we do know is that there are many people who are making assumptions that it should only be done in calm, assuring and moderating tones and that the straightforward approach of the New Atheists is going to set everyone else back a hunnert years so that the Friendly Atheists have to start all over again. ¹

The insistence that atheists be quiet about what we think are the implications of evolution and cosmology are very religious in nature, in the sense that the accommodationists want to use “shaming” to influence the behavior of a subset of their own group.  They are also using a “sense” of what is the absolute right way to develop a strategy of what they seek to achieve.  To those of us who are serious about atheism, and especially for those of us who left religions that place a high value on using guilt as a means to modify behavior, it is a reminder of what we are trying to get away from when we finally declare our atheism publicly.

The conciliatory approach that has been tried for years has not done much to change the situation, and the New Atheists, no matter how gentle and careful we are to stick to the details on why we hold the positions that we do, seem to offend people just by our very existence.  And yes, we lash out angrily at this often and return the offense with ridicule and bile.  We have our reasons and we have human emotions, so no one should be too surprised.  We expect to be shamed by our religious friends and relatives, so it doesn’t bother us as much as it does from other atheists and agnostics.  They should know better.

It’s the assumption part that makes me angry. It is what made me so angry about the book Unscientific America, and it is what makes me so angry about the idea of “Framing Science” when it comes to the interplay between science and religion.  It is what makes me so angry about the comfortable atheism that Michael Ruse insists on, when he says that Dawkins makes him embarrassed to be an atheist.  I will tell you now that I am more interested in having a beer with a creationist than I am with someone who insists that he or she knows the “right approach” to build enthusiasm for evolution.  I get to the point where I can’t stand to be around people who know this answer, but can’t see the irony in the idea that they have come to this conclusion on how to increase the acceptance of science without using science to find out.

Sociology may be a young science, and like economics it is not a “hard science” in comparison to chemistry, physics, biology and the other fields.  But it does provide tools for understanding what can and should be done to help people see the excitement that discovery of the natural world and its workings brings to us no matter what their religion says about the natural world.

The sociologists should be the ones to help us figure out how to do this.  What needs to be done before people like Massimo Pigliucci, Matthew Nisbet, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Josh Rosenau, Chris Mooney and hundreds of others (who I admire greatly on so many fronts but with whom I disagree on this issue,) is to ask people clarifying questions before deciding whether or not there is a one-size-fits-all approach.

My bet is that there is not. However,  I don’t know for sure.  I am basing this on my impressions and a rational decision using incomplete data that have not been seriously analyzed.  I would like for the friends of science and religion to prove that they are really friends of science in order to find out how to help people see the wonder that is the natural world without continually placing philosophical roadblocks in place.

If the data conclusively show that in order for Johnny and Susie to grow up to be good scientists, I should shut up about atheism, then I will consider it. Until then, don’t shame the New Atheists.²  We get enough of it from the religious and self-righteous.

And I just want to share info about cnidarian opsins and the evolution of vision with my roommate without having to get sidetracked into this same discussion about atheism every single time.

1. I am a very friendly person.  I am also very honest about my atheism; the whys and wheres and hows are not something I hide when I try to explain myself to people who have a hard time comprehending.  I smile while not conceding, and it is the “not conceding” that makes me a New Atheist.  The smiling part keeps me connected as a person to a non-atheist.
2. It’s a silly term but we appear to be stuck with it.

My two favorite historical quotes are, “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants,” and, “I owe my greatness to the smallness of my contemporaries.” Taken separately, each quote has its charm. Together, they explain…well, academia at least.

“The Giant’s Shoulders” is a monthly science blogging event, in which authors are invited to submit posts on “classic” scientific papers. The blog carnival submission page, and more information about the carnival, is here. The previous carnival is here, at Entertaining Research.

And I just want to say, that of all the blog carnivals out there, this is the best one!!! I mean, seriously, check out these amazing posts….

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Reginald Scot and the Discoverie of Witchcraft reviewed and examined at Skulls in the Stars.

With Halloween approaching, it is worth thinking of one of the iconographic links made to that holiday…the witch. Witches can be fun: We can dress up as them for trick-or-treat, we can have childhood crushes on them (each generation has its hot TV witch, it seems), and of course, there are lots of people running around today who are pretty sure they are witches. The Harry Potter series is a highly successful exploitation of the concept that proves to be very entertaining to all by the most cynical.

But it would be inappropriate to ignore the fact that many tens of thousands (perhaps over 100,000) people were executed during the late Middle Ages through the “Renaissance” in Europe (and the colonies), charged as witches. People become angry at the use of the word “holocaust” in contexts they judge inappropriate. This might count as a holocaust. You judge.

The history of European witches and the persecution of people accused of being witches is very complex and has not been unraveled sufficiently to this day, but one of the more interesting moments in that history was the publication of the book The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) by Reginald Scot. Scot’s book “chronicles the supposed powers of witches and provides devastating arguments against them.” Arguments against the belief in powers of witches, not against the witches themselves. Blogger gg of Skulls in the Stars has read this tome and provides a fascinating analysis of it, placing it in historical context. It would seem that Discoverie is one of the earliest skeptical volumes written in Western history. This blog post is one of the most interesting that I’ve read in a long time.

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Brian Switek of Laelaps won’t sweep Robert Broom under the rug! (Robert Broom and the “End of Evolution”) and the closely related Bain’s “Bidental Reptile” From the Cape Colony.

These two posts were particularly interesting to, and meaningful for, me, as I’ve worked on one of Robert Broom’s paleontological sites and handled some off the original “bidental reptile” material, which incidentally is stored in a room called the “Broom Closet” in the Transvaal Museum. (Some days it does seem like everything is connected.)

Brian explores the “unique view” held by Broom on how evolution works, which, like many of these early ideas, we don’t talk about much today. “Broom rejected both natural selection and Lamarckism as potential factors for evolutionary change. Instead he believed that the evolution of life occurred through a sequence fore-ordained by a Creator…” Well, science marches on, but that does not mean that we should forget the ideas of our forbearer.

In Bain’s “Bidental Reptile” From the Cape Colony, Brian outlines a key chapter in the unraveling of the early history of mammals and the relationship between European science and the evidence coming out of what is now South Africa.

Both essays are excellent reads and can not be skipped by anyone interested in evolution or paleontology.

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The History and Introduction of Nuclear Chemistry and the Atomic Model at Phil for Humanity.

I’ve always been fascinated with the history of discovery of the atomic and subatomic level of matter. I find it absolutely fascinating that observation of regular scale, real live things, a pile of math, mixed with a few powerful insights could have lead to the construction of an atomic theory that was a correct as it was. If you look at the key papers of the day, you will see a series of exclamation points, each representing an insight or discovery as astounding as the last. I assume the reality was less “!-> !-> !-> !-> !-> !” and more “bla bla !-> bla bla bla !-> !-> bla bla !-> bla bla !-> bla !-> !->bla !->”

Whatever. Phil B.’s blog post is an excellent overview of the historical developments by a handful of giant-shoulder-guys around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.

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That’s for Jan Brueghel the Elder … A look at historical telescopes.

My first career was in Historical Archaeology, and during that time, I became an expert on 17th through 19th century Euro-American ceramics. Part of that process involved collecting old images…paintings and etchings and so on…that depicted (as part of the background, but sometimes as the focus, as in the case of still life paintings) such ceramics (as well as tobacco pipes and glassware). Dated (even if approximate) and provenanced (to country) images provide an excellent source of documentation of the material culture of a particular historical period.

Well, it turns out that this works with telescopes as well. How cool is that? Niall at We All are in the Gutter writes about early telescopes in art and covers a paper called, “The mystery of the telescopes in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s paintings.” I’ll let you read the post (and the original paper) to understand the mystery and its implications. You will not be disappointed.

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Petit canard, grand canard, a post on the 1918 Pandemic and the historical silliness of the homeopathic remedy Oscillococcinum.

The virus was discovered about 20 years before the 1918 pandemic, and in those days, ten science years were equal to about one science year of today, so that’s like saying that the virus was discovered just before the pandemic. One reaction to the 1918 flu was a lot of research on the flu. And since viruses were just discovered, it is not that surprising that the presence of bacteria at the scene caused some people to think that bacteria caused the flu.

Medical science, such as it was in those early days, showed this to be wrong, but it would seem that alternative medicine, in at least one of its forms, still thinks so. I’ve just given you the way too simple version of a must-read post by PalMD at The White Coat Underground.

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Skulls in the Stars examines The first paper on invisibility? (1902).

Invisibility is kind of a freaky concept. Air is invisible (to us, most of the time), of course, but most other stuff is not. Well, actually, how would we know….

Anyway, gg has us covered on this topic with a detailed examination of the concept and its early study. This is one to hand out in class.

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Scicurious: Friday Weird Science: the Bees and the Bees

This is about bee sex.

Sometimes the early “giants” had it right. Sometimes they had it wrong. Sometimes maybe they weren’t really even that giant about it. In this case,

[i]t’s a paper from 1777, and so old that half the ‘s’s are ‘f’s. This makes the paper even more amusing, because now, rather than reading “Discoveries on the Sex of Bees”, I got to read “Difcoverief of the Sex of Bees”

The sex of bees eventually became a critically important thing. The whole bee thing puzzled Darwin and inspired Hamilton and to this very day confuses the layperson and fascinates the behavioral biologist. This post by Sci is a must-read for anyone interesting in the history of evolutionary biology.

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Steel Cage Death Match: da Vinci vs. Galileo in The Renaissance Man Uniform Gravitational Acceleration SMACKDOWN.

What can I say. What goes up must come down. And either way, there are coriolis forces working. But do they work differently on objects falling towards a spinning planet vs. away from a spinning planet?

I recommend getting out your slide rule, a cup of coffee, and a piece of pie, and sitting down with this post for a fascinating flight of science.

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GetOddNews: What is Gravity.

This is a detailed historical description of gravity with reference to Newton, Einstein, and other historical figures. Suitable for use in an educational setting.

I checked. There are rules for this invertebrate-oriented blog carnival. One of the rules says that there are two kinds of posts: writing about spineless critters and photography of spineless critters. Obviously, that rule was written before it became apparent that the two so often come together that you can’t really tell them apart.

This month’s submissions to the Circus of the Spineless web carnival represent an astonishing array of organisms and the full range of the kinds of interests people take in those organisms, and each post is illustrated with at least one, often many, very pretty pictures. I’ve taken a detail (usually) of one image from each post and used it below as illustration. Click the picture to visit the post!

For those of you who are here to see the bugs and stuff but have not been to Quiche Moraine before, I welcome you to poke around. This is an eclectic web site with three regular authors and a string of special featured guest authors. We address Minnesota things, political things, science, the arts, writing, and so on and so forth. We like to think of Quiche Moraine as a slower moving than average higher quality than average web site, much like most nature blogs seem to be.

The Circus of the Spineless has a web site all its own. Click here to visit it. There you will learn that the most recent edition was at Wandering Weeta and the next edition will be at Marmorkrebs. You can find the email to submit your posts at this about page.

Please visit each of the sites referenced below. StumbleUpon them, Digg them, FARK them, enjoy them. Point to this carnival on your blog so everyone can find it, and in so doing, find the excellent entries. This is a carnival. The carnival is a shameless promotion of what a community of bloggers thinks is worth promoting. So, let’s do that!

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The ubiquitous tiger beetle at Beetles In The Bush

This ubiquitous species is restricted to nearly the entire North American continent and is found only in just about any habitat you can imagine.

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Weekend Bugs at 10,000 Birds

Click the ladybug to see some of the nicest “bug” photography you’ll get anywhere.

I spent my weekend in upstate New York with Daisy visiting my folks and we had a good old time eating far too much food, having far too much fun, and, somewhat unfortunately, considering some of them were of the biting variety, seeing far too many bugs.

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Flight of the remote-controlled cyborg beetle at Neurophilosophy

The miniaturized system developed by Sato and his colleagues is mounted onto the pronotum (the dorsal, or upper, plate of the exoskeleton), and consists of electrodes implanted into the brain and wing muscles.

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Moth Night: Zales at A DC Birding Blog

Moths were already flying at dusk when Patrick and I arrived, and more gathered at the lamp as the evening grew darker. … The two types of lures attracted different sets of species, so it was best to check both at least once to get the most out of the event. Patrick and I walked the trail at least twice and spent plenty of time at the sheet. In the course of the evening, I saw several moth types I had not seen (or at least identified) previously.

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It’s National Moth Night(s) at 10,000 Birds

…when you do take the time to look at moths they’re every bit as beautiful and variable as butterflies, and – usually – far better represented in terms of species in most gardens (or similarly easily-accessed piece of land).

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Crane Fly at A DC Birding Blog

This large insect was sitting near the top of a picnic table umbrella at my uncle’s house. It sat without budging for a long time allowing many pictures, which was good because it was perched well above my head. This is one of the largest insects I have seen…

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Jaspers! at The Magpie’s Hoard

I thought that only Sheffield folk called wasps “jaspers” but apparently the name is widely-used across the British Isles. Peter Marren believes that it is probably a corruption of the Old French word for wasp, guespe.

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A Walk in the Woods: 2 Insects and a Gastropod at Birder’s Lounge

As I put this post together, I am reminded of how much I don’t know. No matter how much time I spend learning about birds, insects, mammals, native plants, etc – it seems like the body of knowledge I am attempting to learn keeps growing. Since I delight in new discoveries, this is exactly how I like it.

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Thatching Ants at Dave Ingram’s Natural History Blog

While most people don’t like ants I find them quite fascinating. Thatching ants are entertaining to watch and are beneficial in controlling other insects. In addition, many species of birds visit the mound to use the ants for “anting” in an effort to rid themselves of skin parasites.

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Cave dwellers at Wanderin’ Weeta (With Waterfowl and Weeds)

The crevices serve as hiding places for small critters. Saturday, I found a few baby slugs, a miniature harvestman, a tiny red mite. A millipede took off running as I lifted the stone. And of course, there had to be a sowbug; there always is.

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The jelly hunters at The House and Other Arctic Musings

…As we caught it we began to see more and more jellies, and ended up with at least four different kinds. Collecting them in one of our blueberry picking containers.

That is all. Thank you for visiting.

When I am doing jigsaw puzzles, I’m using half my brain–the analytical half. The other half sends me into social thinking. I think of friends, social issues, social problems. For some reason, today my brain led me to remember graduate school. Specifically, the bad social parts of grad school. For anyone who thinks women & science is a dead issue, I offer my experience.

I walk into orientation for physics grad school and am faced with 25 fellow students. All male. The orientation teachers later told me they were doing everything they could to not scare me off.

First semester sucks. From A student to C student in one semester. I have a study group, but they’re not great. I discover I don’t really like advanced physics. But I’ve wanted to be a college physics professor since high school, and this is the path to that. I stick it out, but struggle, emotionally and in my classes.

I learn from more senior female grad students who NOT to work with. Professor X will steal the credit for your work; Professor Y is straight out sexist.

I encounter the second year grad students. The ones who earned their class the name “The Class From Hell”. They had a poster up in the TA office the previous year with a running total of how many female students came to see each TA. These amazing specimens move from dirty looks or come-on looks to comments: “You wear that just to show off your legs, don’t you?” “Not many skirts around this place.”

The thought that I would dress to show off my legs is so funny it takes my breath away. I’m in grad school, struggling and trying to stay sane, and I’m going to wake up and say “I think I’ll wear those tights that make my legs look good. Maybe that asshole second year will notice.” I didn’t even brush my hair every day. I washed it, braided it, and only rebraided after it got too messy by the third or fourth day. I had custom wrist braces which limited my hand mobility. (Keys on a carabiner clipped to my belt loop, since I couldn’t stick my hand in my pocket.) Obviously my only purpose for being there was to tempt him.

One skank doesn’t let my wedding ring deter him. He doesn’t take my hints. Even after outright refusals, he still hangs around. When he said “I don’t know how your office mate gets any work done. I’d be too distracted looking at you,” I shook with anger and fear. My office mate, a good friend and a sensitive new age guy, helped me cope with it.

Even well-meaning or honest remarks can make for an unwelcoming environment. I like long skirts, the kind where you have to hold them when you go upstairs, or you trip. As I was climbing the staircase one day, one of the profs I didn’t see much stopped and watched me. He commented that it wasn’t something you saw much of anymore. Yup. I was the only one in the whole building who wore skirts who wasn’t a secretary. He didn’t mean anything negative by his comment. But it sent a message all the same.

For a few years we had a female lab manager. She got the crap too. She would set up Monday’s labs on Friday or Saturday. Occasionally, when Monday class came around, there would be key pieces of equipment missing from the lab rooms. It got so bad that a few of the good folks in the department slept in the labs one night. Didn’t catch anyone.

Those who were supportive of the women in the department got together. A small group. Talked, discussed. Couldn’t do too much, though. But a lifeline, a support group. Managed to bring sexual harassment training to the department. It didn’t make a noticeable difference, but gave me a great piece of advice. When someone makes an inappropriate comment, you ask “what does that mean?” If the comment is legit, they won’t mind explaining it. If it isn’t legit, you’ve just brought everyone’s attention to it.

The department has changed a lot since I was there. More female grad students. Less overt discrimination and harassment. I don’t know how much covert crap is going on. Harder to find out. But the stuff I encountered did its job: I did not get a physics PhD. It wasn’t the primary reason, or even the secondary reason. But it was a part of why I left with a masters.

It got a little bit better after I switched programs. My office and my job were still in the physics building, though. I became sort of invisible. She failed, she is no longer worthy of my notice. The feeling that education was a lesser field was palpable. There were a handful of physics professors who encouraged me and worked with me. Two of them served on my dissertation committee. At least being invisible meant I got less crap. But it bugs me that in a way, they won.

P.S. I found out years later that my first year adviser once reached into his pants and “adjusted” himself in the middle of a class. A class with one female student in it. No one noticed but her.

However, I haven’t been inclined to take the book terribly seriously. I’ve mocked Sheril and Chris for applying certain double standards to their communications and those of scientists and atheists. I’ve pulled together some prior objections to their message that the book doesn’t address and new objections to some of the points in the book. But I haven’t spoken to the book directly myself, and not because I don’t appreciate Chris and Sheril’s prior work or think they shouldn’t be taken seriously themselves.

The reason I haven’t addressed the book is because there’s been something nagging at me about it that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. There was a connection I wasn’t making. Then, while planning for a project meant to promote general skepticism, I finally got it. It shouldn’t have taken me that long.

The scope of Unscientific America is too narrow. There are problems in our collective understanding and acceptance of science, yes. However, these are the same problems we experience in many parts of our public life. Politicians have the same difficulties in engaging the public in their work as scientists. History experiences the same denialism and conspiracy-theory mongering that’s found in debates that should be purely scientific (and long settled). Media coverage of crime is as badly slanted toward the sensational, or more, as any scientific reporting. Our poor understanding of advertising claims is hardly limited to the pseudoscience of “natural” remedies.

No, the problem is much wider than that described in Sheril and Chris’s book. These are problems stemming from a general lack of the fundamentals of skepticism: curiosity and critical thinking. Unfortunately, that means the solutions they propose aren’t likely to help as much as one might hope.

Scientists can talk forever. They can do it eloquently. They can express their passion and the wonder they find in discovery. They can be funny and clever and humble. But a listener who isn’t prepared to engage with the material will, at best, walk away with a slightly better view of scientists and about two and a half facts with which they can impress those of their friends who are impressed by that sort of thing.

This won’t prepare them to deal with the next scientist they come across, who might be a chemist working in an oil refinery who doesn’t “believe in” anthropogenic global warming, or maybe an astronomer entranced by the majesty of “the heavens” who tells them that evolution can’t result in new species. It won’t give them the tools to determine whether that scientist is someone to be trusted on that subject. It will just make them feel better about taking someone else’s word for things that make their life more comfortable. That doesn’t help us. It doesn’t help them.

So what can we do? Ah, that is the question, isn’t it?

The answers to this won’t be easy. Skepticism isn’t easy. It requires concentrated effort in a society designed around distractions. It requires time and effort that anyone living at a subsistence level doesn’t have to spare. It requires habits of thought that have negative social consequences. The person who upsets the standard order is generally not popular.

However, the situation is far from hopeless. One of the better ongoing conversations at SkepchickCon this year was about how we lead people to skepticism. Masala Skeptic had some great suggestions about being a safe (non-mocking) place to bring questions that need a skeptical viewing, not having all the answers (being willing to say, “I don’t know either. Let’s find out.”) and not pushing too hard for agreement. Others threw around ideas about keeping schools from suppressing the innate curiosity of children. We talked about the need to reclaim the word “skeptic” from the denialists.

All of us came away from the convention invigorated by the reception we received and determined to do more to promote skepticism generally. None of us, however, think that the strategies and tactics for this will fit within a slim book. This will take broad and diverse effective behavior.

So while we’re all out here following our chosen paths, what else do you think people can do to promote skeptical thinking? And maybe more importantly, what are you doing?

What is the meaning of life?  Where is our purpose?  Why are we here and what are we supposed to do?  Where did we come from and what will follow us when we are gone?  Why am I such a lowly worm and a sinner?

In my favorite episode of My Three Sons, Chip Douglas wants to join a club that his friends have started.  They cook up a series of tasks for him to complete for his initiation, and when he completes his tasks they will teach him the “dirty little secret.”  He is dying of curiosity, so no matter how absurd the tasks, his dogged determination carries him through so that he can reach the Holy Grail of the “dirty little secret.”

Chip finally completes the last task and goes to his friends and says “Okay, I’m in.  What’s the dirty little secret?”  They laugh and tell him that “The dirty little secret is that there is no dirty little secret.”

Giordano Bruno

And that, my friends, is the mystical meaning of life.  There is no dirty little secret, no hidden answer “42.”  It rains on the just and the unjust alike. I am not a sinner, nor a lowly worm.  The purpose of “purpose” is to puzzle us, to urge us to try to discern the secrets as a great pastime, inspiring wonder at the world around us.  A deep desire to understand the “why” of the cruelties of fate (or the blessings of good fortune) is born of a curiosity that drives us on through our tasks.  If we just keep on searching for answers to our questions, eventually our gods will give us the 411 on life.  Or something will.

I was out having a conversation with a guy who calls himself an “atheist, mostly” because he doesn’t accept the Christian/Jewish/Muslim concept of God.  Nor does he accept the gods of mythology.  He does, however, think that there is more out there that we don’t yet perceive through our physical senses.  He bases his belief on the shared experiences of humanity encountering ghosts and other unexplainable phenomena.  He has decided that if so many people have reported supernatural phenomena for centuries, there must be some basis in fact.   I didn’t laugh at him, but I did explain to him that I had experienced some weird things myself.  I explained to him that when I looked back at them, I could find a plausible and natural explanation for each.

That’s how it is with the appearance of design in nature, and it’s the appearance of design that leads to the illusion of purpose.  The biological cell is incredibly complex, with multitudes of cooperating organelles and structures.  The process of creating copies of DNA and from there, mapping out the structure of proteins (which then fold in the most efficient structure possible to carry out their tasks), well it’s all just too complex to develop without the guidance of a planner.

If the Planner is capable of such wondrous processes as meisosis and mitosis (and sex), then the Planner must be in control of Purpose and our lives thus have meaning beyond that which we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear.  Religion, in this context, makes a great deal of sense.  It provides answers to the question of purpose.  Follow a path and gain enlightenment and/or eternal life in the Planner’s Presence.

Unfortunately, the answers provided by religion aren’t all that satisfactory, because they don’t provide any means to verify or test the answers.  The answers are based on authoritative declarations from the writings and thoughts of learned people who have analyzed the works of other learned people. The answers are based on the pronouncements of a priestly class who lay claim to a source that we can’t access (unless we have a faith strong enough to believe them despite contrary evidence).

Science steps in and looks at the processes of nature and shows us how to tease apart the secrets of their workings, slowly and carefully and with missteps along the way.  The missteps are readily acknowledged and re-examined.  The successes are retested to make sure they closely approximate (within a high confidence interval) the truth.  Then they are once again examined as new questions arise that cast doubt on the answers.

The problem with science is that it doesn’t provide comforting authority.  It never promises the “truth” of anything, just progressively more useful descriptions.  The result of scientific methodology is often more uncertainty, and that is not comforting to those of us who believe in absolute answers.  This will never do, and from this uncertainty comes for some faith that we can still practice the ritual and pray and get the answer we have been promised.  Science and religion are in a pas de deux, but they are constantly stepping on each other’s toes.

If science can’t produce comforting authority then what is it good for?  It is good for disproving assumptions, is what it is good for.  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that race is a valid biological construct.  It has been good at disproving the the “certain knowledge” that complex structures such as avian vision can’t develop in stages (half an eye).  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that there was a global flood 4,500 years ago.  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that the universe and all of its contents can only have been produced by an intelligent actor.

If, then, religion depends on a creator in order to provide a purpose to life, what happens when that creator is no longer a necessary function in the life equation?  Religion steps back in and says it can still help find purpose because science is limited to a natural methodology, whereas through faith there are “other ways of knowing” and science can’t approach those other ways.

Of course, as an atheist, I can look at the pathetic claims to “other ways of knowing” and scoff.  I acknowledge that I have been using very general terms and examples, and in my examples I allow religion to be relatively harmless.  It is a concept that claims an authority it cannot have.  I could simply sit back and say “Well, if some people want to believe, then that’s their business” and I could leave it at that.  With that, I could be just as accommodating as Josh Rosenau or Chris Mooney or Chad Orzel, and then I could whistle on my way nonchalantly.

My problem is that I am not content to leave it at that.  I didn’t become an atheist because of science; it was a slow realization that I was not born a lowly worm.  I was not born dependent on the sacrifice of a man-god and his resurrection in order to gain “salvation.”  I realized that I had no overriding purpose to uncover; I was not born to any certain fate.

I learned that as religion lost its explanatory power on the workings of nature, it clung to its power of redemption and salvation, and these are problems that it created so that it could provide the solution.  I’ll drop the generality of religion and address my specific objection to Christianity.  I was taught that at birth I carried the sin of Adam and Eve and that I needed to practice certain rituals or pray certain prayers to be cleansed of the sin that I never committed.  I needed baptism, confession and contrition to access the creator. In another version of Christianity I needed to be “born again.”  I could never be good enough for the creator on my own, being human.  And being human, I was condemned to be separate from the creator unless I chose the right way to accept redemption.

I am not a sinner.  I have done bad things, but I am not a sinner.  The sin for which I am supposed to be supplicating forgiveness was a sin committed by someone else.  I just couldn’t buy into the idea that I was born evil and unable to become good on my own.

I dropped Christianity.  That was when I ran into the objection that I couldn’t explain origins without God, and therefore I am foolish to be an atheist.  What I find humorous is that when I explain that scientific methodology has disproven the notion of a necessary supernatural designer, or planner, then I am also told that God is “not an explanation for origins, God is inseparable from Creation.”  The goalposts are continually shifted.

And finally, I arrive at my point.  The organizations fighting (thanks to all of you!) to achieve acceptance of solid education in subjects scientific, are bowing first to the demands of religion to say, “But this shouldn’t harm your faith.”  They are granting privilege to religion that it doesn’t deserve, while the defenders of religion are demanding that science conform to faith.   By giving in to this demand, the defenders of science forget that the process of science is an interloper into the security blanket of cherished, certain knowledge.  Science is a dirty bastard, because it doesn’t confirm the answers we want.

In advancing science education, scientists should not accede to such demands to accommodate religious fear of becoming less and less relevant.  What they should instead do is explain the science and let religion and the religious deal with their own issues regarding the implications of the discovery of how nature works.

They’re grownups. they can handle it.

You didn’t hear about it? It was the much anticipated and sold out public event called the Origins Symposium. The media may not report it, because they don’t get science. But regular, everyday people do and are hungry for it. We came to hear the new, and what we know will be stunning, discoveries about how the world works. We filled up the concert hall on the campus at Arizona State with anticipation.

Monday morning began with an amazing line up of rock star status scientists who spoke for an hour, one after another. Does lecture style delivery at a podium with PowerPoint visuals on a large screen sound boring to you? Not a bit—it was mesmerizing for five hours straight. Steven Pinker, Don Johanson, Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, Craig Venter, and Lawrence Krauss presented their unique views on evolution, origins and their research with charismatic delivery. We laughed and cheered and bonded knowing we were witnessing an historic event. As the late afternoon panel of six, count ‘em, six noble laureates came on stage, we stayed right where we were. Ira Flatow, the nationally known science journalist and host of Science Friday, expertly juggled the egos and zingers that the physicists on either side of string theory tossed at each other.

Listening to these brilliant minds was like hearing a symphony performed by the original composer. The world of ideas and the appreciation of beauty is an aesthetic artists share with scientists. This trans-disciplinary approach is one that Michael Crow, President of ASU, and Lawrence Krauss, physicist and director of the “Origins Initiative” are developing. Along with college courses, the Initiative will also reach out to the public and journalists through workshops and future events.

Between presentations, I noticed how many in the audience were curious about the people around them. We found each other interesting and smart. We’re creating a trend, riding a wave of discovery, taking part in a cultural transition don’t ya know. Many people told me how relieved they were to see our intellectual lives respected after eight years of oppression.

So with spring and science in the air, I felt a little giddy heading back to Minneapolis. I’ll revisit my bookmarked pages at the Origins web site during the year, watching how the Initiative develops and hoping to catch next year’s big event.

Lynn Fellman is a Minneapolis artist and blogger, as well as an interviewer for Atheists Talk radio and one of science’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders.