Atomic Nerds

The last time LabRat let bitey off the leash, it prompted Tam to ponder

This ties in nicely with one of my favorite questions I ponder while chewing pencils to splinters, which is “Why do fuckwits love conspiracy theories?”

Commenter MarkHB opined in reply

Glib answer: It saves them having to think.

Well, not quite so much, I suspect. Now, take all of the following with a large pillar of salt. LabRat is the bio-geek of the household, so calling anything I’m about to say an oversimplified generalization is a bit like saying a man struck by lightning is feeling a bit under the weather, but the problem as I see it is that they can’t help but think.

When your computer doesn’t have anything to do, the processor can throttle down. It doesn’t need to be grinding away very hard just to run a screen saver. The brain, however, is not like this. When the brain has unallocated processing capacity, it pretty much has to find something to do. It finds a book to read. It loads Halo and tosses sticky grenades onto Brutes. It writes a web browser plugin to make thumbnailing images easier. It writes a blog. It follows TV shows obsessively and creates fandoms. No matter what it is with that free time, it does something. Since you can’t just install seti@home on the wetware between your ears, that means it’s up to the individual to find some way to use those spare brain cycles. Some people try to just throttle down the processor, trying to achieve a perfectly empty mind through meditation, but about the point where the mind is good and empty, some stray thought pops in. Probably something along the lines of “Wow, that cow looks like I feel right now all the time. I bet there isn’t a stray thought in there messing up his day. That cow has it all figured out!” And then that leads to silliness like the notion that you had lived before and since you once ate a cow you were cosmically screwed until you atone for having lunch off the critter that’s got it all figured out, and then… sorry, kinda got off on a tangent there*.

There are plenty of great outlets for these spare cycles, too. Smart folks redefine physics, or write best-selling novels. Then there are not so great outlets, like gay incestuous male-pregnancy Harry Potter fanfic, or more to the current point, conspiracy theories.

Thanks to the advances humans have made over the last several thousand years, modern life does not require the same skillset it once did for a reasonable definition of success. In the dark ages, you might need to know how to till a field, how to mend a plow, animal husbandry, basic veterinary skills, a fair bit of what passed for modern medicine then for when the horse kicked you and broke your arm, cooking, brewing (since the water wasn’t drinkable), and any long laundry list of other things. This didn’t leave a lot of spare brain cycles for the average folk outside the day’s task. Roughly enough to come up with “It’s the witch’s fault!” when something really horrible went wrong. Nowdays, none of that is necessary for your average low-end cubicle dweller (who I’m fairly confident is the usual suspect in cooking up notions like some of the wilder ideas about what happened on 9/11 - I could be wrong though). If your cat gets sick, you take it to the vet. If your dishwasher breaks, you call someone else to fix it. If the sink backs up, you call the building super, or a plumber. Flat tire? Triple A. Computer problem? Geek Squad**. Dinner? Pizza or Chinese? There’s even water delivery available if the kitchen tap is too tricky. Over a large enough segment of, say, big city apartment dwellers who aren’t supposed to do most of their own maintenance without calling for help, and who do something nice and boring for a paycheck, that’s a pretty damn big pool of brain cycles looking for an outlet.

Also worth noting, humans are flat out wired for storytelling. In The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, Pratchett, Stewart, and Cohen lay out a pretty good case that storytelling (even stories as simple as “Ugg spear animal. Ugg’s tribe not hungry.”) is the primary reason we’re on top of the food chain, rather than equally clever critters such as chimps, bonobos, or dolphins. The urge to tell a story is right down at the very core of that wide-ranging species broadly marked “human.” In earlier days, the stories were different. “The volcano exploded because beings more powerful than us were angry.” Ok, maybe not so different from “The towers fell because politicians more powerful than us had an agenda,” but still. Those stories stuck then because that was operating off best available evidence, more or less. Now, when you say “fire had never before melted steel,” it’s fairly trivial for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with reality to say “Well, actually….”

So when you take all these conditions, bored people, people who aren’t very bright, and people who are wired to tell stories, things start to bubble up. When you combine that with the other portion of MarkHB’s comment,

Long answer: If there’s a big, hooscary Gubment conspiracy going on with Marlboro-smoking men giving FBI agents babies and space-cancer from back rooms before wiring up large buildings with demo charges knowing the terrists are going to attack…

….then it’s The Conspiracy’s fault that they’re living on welfare and keep getting fired for browsing conspiracy theory websites at work all day.

Then all of a sudden that story becomes much more important and real to the teller. And when the story becomes that important, preserving the story becomes necessarily important, leading to wonderfully creative dismissals of the science established by the spare brain cycles of the less-bored.

Seems to me that fuckwits love conspiracy theories simply because they gotta. But that doesn’t mean we should stop mocking them.

*Yes, I know that’s not the real version. But it’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
**Neatly servicing the non tech savvy and gullible groups at once.

Do we have ideas for stuff to post? For once, yes!

However, today has been… bad for me, worse for my other half. So once again, jam tomorrow, random small thingie for today.

Today’s link: Nostalgia Critic. I’m having a weird sense of deja vu about this one, like I’ve either linked him before or I merely thought about doing it and then linked something else instead, so if this is a rerun, well, he has new stuff up. Anyway, it’s yet another “Gen Yer rants on Youtube” thingie, but this guy is actually pretty good, especially if you grew up on the same pap I did. Particularly recommended rants/reviews: Family Double Dare, the Masters of the Universe movie, and Captain Planet.

Everybody’s talking about how cold it is this winter. Since I don’t want to be left out, I gotta join in. It’s frickin’ awful out there! LabRat and I spent the day outside splitting firewood, since that stuff is cheaper than gas for the furnace, and it was so cold…

I actually had to wear a shirt!

Can someone help me find the right load for wooly mammoths? What’s best in a fast rifle for rampaging sabre-tooth tiger attacks? I’m pretty sure they’re only minutes away!

“Remind me next time we’re at the hardware store that I need to pick up a new fire control group for the toilet. The valve on this one keeps going out of battery and running.”
“…A new what?”
“A new valve assembly. You know, the flushy-bit?”
“You called it a fire control group.”
“….Well it is!”
“*fits of snickering*”

Out on the theoretical frontiers of biology operate the game theorists, whose major occupation in science is constructing mathematical models to demonstrate that X or Y given scenario in sociobiology- that area of biology that covers how certain social behaviors increase or decrease fitness and therefore might be subject to natural selection in some fashion- is mathematically possible or impossible. Because they have to describe massively complex systems with ridiculous numbers of variables and lots of emergent behaviors, the models have to be pretty stripped down and simple- spherical race horses aren’t just accepted, they’re the rule. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium accurately represents no population of organisms that lives or has ever lived, but instead exists to prove mathematically that genetic polymorphisms are stable over time absent any other pressures on a given allele no matter how rare the allele. Like Hardy-Weinberg, the models of the biological game theorists exist to demonstrate that certain strategies have demonstrable effects and certain choices are objectively more fitness-enhancing depending upon the organism’s starting conditions. The models don’t have to be direct analogues of reality, they just have to prove that the strategic choices HAVE a significant effect. If someone later comes along and demonstrates that a variable not included in the spherical-horse assumptions destroys the model altogether, then so much the worse for the model, but it least provides a starting point for more detailed and useful research.

So, let’s consider a hypothetical* journal article by a pair of such theorists that, unlike 99.5% of what they do, somehow contained something that attracted attention as being newsworthy to the general public. Let’s further assume that this article was about mate choice, and that it constructed a model meant to apply to any species that reproduced sexually, featured female mate choice as the predominant determinator of what matings do and don’t happen, and didn’t have big “event” breeding where mate choice must be settled on within a very short period of time. Let us further assume that the model was then used to demonstrate mathematically that a female’s fitness interests were maximized if she waited a bit before mating to test the male, because if the male was “high-quality” his best interests were to mate with the best female he could find even if that meant waiting for awhile, but if he was “low-quality”, his best interests were to quickly break off before she figured out he wasn’t worth it and find a female that would allow mating sooner. Can you guess, after listening to the theorists explain their research, what a journalist might then turn around and report?

If you guessed that it would be headlined something like “Refusing to have sex on the first date increases the chance of finding a good man”, come on up and take your kewpie doll.

Journals have learned that it’s good practice for a number of reasons to relax their normal “subscriber only” access to online editions when an article in a particular issue gets wide attention, inside the community of that specific kind of research or out of it, and the Journal of Theoretical Biology proves to be no different. Since we have access to the original publication, we can actually clap a pair of eyeballs on it and see what the article ACTUALLY said.

We consider a male and a female in a courtship encounter over continuous time. Both parties pay participation costs per unit time. The game ends when either one or other of the parties quits or the female accepts the male as a mate.

Translation: Wasted time and energy matter, as both are finite for the male and female alike. Time and energy is what’s lost for both if either quits and what’s invested by the male if it ends in a mating and for the female if it ends in a mating that was worth the pregnancy.

We assume that there is a binary variable which determines whether the male is a “good” or “bad” type from the female’s point of view, according to either his condition or his willingness to care for the young after mating.

For ease of modeling and so that the model applies across many species we have assumed that goodness and badness are literally as simple as that.

This variable is not directly observable by the female, but has fitness consequences for her: she gets a positive fitness payoff from mating with a “good” male but a negative fitness payoff from mating with a “bad” male. We assume also that a “good” male has a higher ratio of fitness benefit from mating to fitness cost per unit time of courtship than a “bad” male.

The male gets a fitness payoff either way, but since the bad male has a lower chance of mating with any given female, his opportunity costs are greater if he waits around too long, so he’ll quit sooner.

There’s more in the abstract, but it essentially goes on to say “the math is sound within evolutionary guidelines and this is how this fits with other theories and research into mate choice”. So, to sum, the assumptions made are:

1. The male always wants to mate with the female. No other quality of hers is relevant.
2. The female’s stake in it is always her future fitness interests. (I.e. sex is never a desirable end in itself to the female, pregnancy always is.)
3. The goodness or badness of a male is a single binary trait that can be accurately evaluated solely by length of courtship.

Surely there could be no possible conditions here that aren’t thoroughly broken by the human dating experience! The journalist doesn’t think so, as his lede before he goes on to quote the two researchers (who are careful to keep it within the boundaries of what their model actually does and could do) demonstrates:

A new study shows that refusing to sleep with a partner on the first date could be one of the keys to making a successful match.

Researchers used a mathematical model to show that more reliable men were willing to wait longer before having sex for the first time.

By contrast, less suitable men were not as likely to continue dating.

Males turns into men, good turns into “reliable”, the period of courtship gets contracted to “first date”- the better to start working out which date exactly is the correct one to surrender the “prize” for his investment, presumably. “The model is a starting point for future research” turns into “it has now been scientifically proven that sleeping with someone on the first date is bad”.

Which, if a guy wouldn’t keep dating you if you didn’t put out at the earliest opportunity, then yeah, that’s probably a bit of a bad sign right there. And it’s not a good idea to try and make men more interested by sleeping with them. But if you really need to be told that, then you have far further to go along the learning curve of “making a successful match” than anything short of therapy can help with. Humans are the most advanced social species on the planet; we’ve radically diverse in temperament, ability, goals, culture- and perhaps most importantly, all the cheater/cooperator arms races that may have begun as early as colonies of single-celled organisms and continue all the way up to Survivor. If you try to sort out your love life with game theory, you’re almost certainly going to get gamed by someone whose tactics are sophisticated enough to be unmodelable. (Which only requires being more advanced than a moth.)

Also, journalists reporting on science are approximately as reliable as neolithic hunter-gatherers reporting on a space shuttle launch, so when and if you can, find the full text of the original article.

*Not really.

My chosen method for coping with being shorted a few hours of sleep and being far more in a state of mind for a nap than tackling the sprawling subject of the current state of theory and research into the transition from “lively chemistry” to “recognizable life” was drinking Pepsi Max until I felt more alert. Well, now I’m alert. I’m so alert I suddenly really, really identify with this kid:

Well, as anyone that I currently owe e-mail to knows (hi!) I haven’t been so good at keeping my promises this week, so you get a rant instead.

You know what I’m fed up to my tits with? Hearing people with every expectation of being taken seriously say that X or Y thing- this is usually science, but it can be any subject under the sun- is bullshit because why (extremely simple question) then, HUH? What about THAT, Mister Internet Smarty Person? If the question were something like “So how do you reconcile the results of this experiment published last week with current thinking in regards to optimal foraging theory?”, that would be one thing, but it NEVER FUCKING IS. It’s always something that the questioner could have answered for himself just by driving himself to the goddamn library, or even summoning the strength and determined willpower required to type something into motherfucking Ask Jeeves, like, and this is just choosing an example completely and utterly at random*, how do vaccinations work? But, no; God for-felching-bid that the brave crusader for truth against a world of evil scientists- who keep all their knowledge locked in their secret vault thousands of miles below the Earth’s crust and only appear once a year to report that the sun will rise again- ever interrupt his gormless glide through life to actually try and obtain any scrap of knowledge that might possibly violate his dearly beloved current beliefs, which he presumably acquired more or less by accident when he tripped and fell face-first on a book. It is the responsibility of YOU, agents of the highly exclusive Science Illuminati and keepers of all Earth’s knowledge, to answer his “challenge”, because the burden of proof obviously falls on the person making the claim that has been accepted basic knowledge in a field for the last two hundred years.

Why in the name of the holy hole of Freyja do people expect NOT to get bitch-slapped for this, and why are they so overwhelmed by shock and wounded pride when it happens? Do they really and sincerely believe that they have magically and without any effort or study whatsoever stumbled across the secret of the whole conspiracy against the Common Man? Is thinking so alien an experience to them that noticing a small inconsistency in their coloring-book mental image of the world such a massive and painful mental grind that they think they’ve done something momentous? CONGRATULATIONS CITIZEN, BY NOTING THAT IT IS MATHEMATICALLY NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR A COMPLETE BACTERIUM TO ASSEMBLE ITSELF BY PURE CHANCE OUT OF STERILE SALINE SOLUTION YOU HAVE SHATTERED THE FOUNDATIONS OF BIOLOGY! A WINNER IS YOU! I fucking knew awarding PhDs to the college students that could pick their nose the fastest was a bad long-term strategy for science, but thankfully good old American natural know-how has triumphed over the folly of academia. REAL smart people know that “books” and “journals” and “effort” are for chumps and intuit the foundations of reality and every nuance of the most arcane skill as easily as they breathe.

What really burns me to a blackened and acrylamide-filled crisp is how often these people are doing it to defend some point of theology, on which they base their entire morality. Don’t worry, I’m sure your God or Gods are totally fucking cool with you slandering huge numbers of other people as evil stupid liars because you can’t be arsed to read anything other than the one or ones you’ve determined to be absolutely and fully doctrinally consistent with the one you tripped and smashed your eyeballs on so long ago. (Or the Cliff’s notes. I’ve heard those go quicker and don’t overheat your brain cell quite so much.) I’m sure the fact that there’s nothing like that except a bunch of crap about dishonesty and spite being bad things- I bet the translator skipped a footnote. I bet he was an agent of those bastards with the knowledge vault! Those fuckers are everywhere!

Don’t worry, Brave Crusader of Extremely Light Reading. If there’s one thing you can ever be sure of, it’s that God will never, ever require you to leave your comfort zone. It’s all there in the book. Oh, all right. Page fifteen of the Cliff’s notes.

*Not really.

LabRat’s big bio post she promised is turning out to have way more meat to sort through than she expected, so after a shitty day at work she opted to punt to me for content for today. Rather than offer up Standard Internet Tech Rant #4 (“I hate my users so damn much”), I’ll just perform my own punt for a little of whatever grabs me that I can work through without the urge to stab and stab again until the stupid stops.

First, an “Only in Los Alamos” moment. Thanks to aforementioned shitty day, cooking was growing increasingly unlikely as dinnertime drew near. Since LR indulged me recently to scratch an itch I’d had for hot wings, it was my turn to indulge her, so we went to the local Greek place. Since Los Alamos restaurants live or die by the lunch crowd from the national labs, dinner services are… spotty at best. This particular place is normally a tomb after about 6:30, but tonight there were actually a few people in there. Sitting a few tables away from us was a pair of older gents. Not doddering old, but certainly not spring chickens either. Since the joint was still pretty empty, and LabRat and I aren’t the garrulous and noisy types when we eat out, bits of their conversation kept drifting over. A few of the more choice bits included “But that was back when you could actually find someone with a working understanding of rotational momentum,” “Right, but if you get 10^20 neutrons you still won’t be able to measure anything significant!” and “Well yeah, you can pulse it all you want, but until you get the proper wavelength the energy field is going to be trivial!” Betcha don’t hear that kind of side chatter at your local pub!

Next up, a quick reach into the history wagon. Way back when we were first starting this whole blog project up, I put up a review of the Sog Twitch XL. Since there were one or two things in there that have changed with time and use, and for some reason “sog twitch xl review” is still one of the more frequent terms cropping up in our sitemeter logs for some reason, I figured I should at some point throw some sort of update on it. Not really enough for a full post, but it’ll do to stretch this one out, by crackey! In the original review, I opined that the thumbstuds on the blade were next to useless. The spring assist on it was too tight to lever the blade open without the use of either both hands, or the thumb-spur on the back. The spring finally did loosen up some, to where it is possible to use the studs without it seeming more likely to open my thumb on a partially-opened blade than anything else, but I still think the thumbstuds are overall useless. The spring is still tight enough, even with more than a year of regular use, to make thumb slicing seem a little too probable, and really, the spur is just plain easier to manipulate. If they’d either moved the studs forward on the blade a little for more leverage, or left them off entirely, that would’ve done the trick. Also, the safety does tend to engage itself more often than I’d like just in the course of riding around in a pocket, but so far I’ve never had to deal with a charging cape buffalo with only my trusty pocketknife that suddenly wouldn’t open, so still not a huge deal. Otherwise, still a great knife.

Hey, speaking of sitemeter, let’s see if they’ve got something good to pad a bit. Mining those search terms works pretty well for other folks after all. Hmm…”roseholme cottage” Nope, sorry. Try one of these two lovely ladies. This is Nerd Ranch, Roseholme is a time zone or two over.

“view from the porch blog-=tam” Ok, what the hell. Did Tam haax0r my blog and take over or something? Sheesh.

“dealing with pushy men” I’m partial to 124gr at about 1100fps, but your mileage may vary. 230gr at 850ish is popular, and it’s damn hard to argue with 240gr at about 1200fps if you’ve got the wrists for it.

“new mexican californian texan drink same twice” A Texan, a Californian, and a New Mexican are sitting in a bar having some drinks. The Texan finishes his drink, smashes the glass, and says “In Texas, we’ve got so much money from oil we never drink from the same glass twice!” The Californian finishes his drink, and smashes the bottle of wine he poured it from. “In California, we’ve got so many grapes we never drink from the same bottle twice!” Finally the New Mexican finishes his drink, and shoots the Texan and Californian. “In New Mexico, we’ve got so damn many Texans and Californians we never drink with the same ones twice!”

“google crom problems” His definitions of just and mighty flames has been getting a little strict lately.

Finally, just to make sure there’s a little hate in here for everyone, please familiarize yourself with this sign. I could spew profanity over that increasingly popular little demonstration that folks weren’t paying attention in English class, but it won’t do any good. The dumbasses most frequently guilty tend to prefer digging themselves into deeper and deeper holes rather than say “Oh, I have made a mistake in proper use of the language. I will remedy this in the future,” and then call me a Nazi for getting worked up about grammar and spelling in a medium of communication entirely based on grammar and spelling. Fuckers.

G’night everybody!

About a year ago (give or take), I offered up my opinion on the changing reaction to tattoos in the U.S. Courtesy of Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man, an article has come to my attention about tattooing in Asia.

Ok, that’s kind of misleading. “Tattooing in Asia” could cover anything from the extremely meaning-specific Russian prison tattooing that borders on being a written language to the Yakuza tattooing of Japan to the Maori tribesmen to modern US style tattooing that happens to be taking place in Asian countries*. More specifically, this is focused around the Pacific Rim, and the expo under observation was in Singapore. The upshot is basically what I outlined in last year’s post: tattooing is becoming more socially acceptable as more young people get them and age with them. The interesting thing is that this is happening in cultures that have not traditionally been tattoo-friendly, at least not without some Serious Baggage attached to the process. The Maori are obviously fine with ink, for example, but their designs are so ritualized and cultural that you’re not going to see someone walking around with Tweety Bird on a shoulder in that neck of the woods. Even the Japanese are loosening up, though I understand it’s still fairly common to see “No Tattoos” signs at places like bath houses. Naturally, the big holdout is the world’s official stick-in-the-mud, hardcore Islam:

Tattoos are still frowned upon in more conservative parts of Asia, such as predominantly Muslim communities in northern Malaysia, said Eric Kueh, 27, a tattoo artist with 71st Skin Slavery in Kuching, Malaysia.

“Some of my older relatives give me a hard time,” said Kueh, whose right leg is covered in tattoos. “But for the younger generation, it’s not a big deal.”

Hmm. I may have to amend my triangle of suck. Maybe a pyramid of suck so I can bring booze in too. Anyway, back on topic. As with the muslim folks, there’s plenty of people still in this country that disapprove, rather heartily in some cases, but the numbers are dwindling. Even in such unlikely places as the National Labs here, there is very little stigma to walking around with ink. Hell, my doctor, who regularly works with old people just as part of being a doctor, is looking into acquiring some.

Also, since it is basically spinal reflex to observe that some folks are wishy-washy, there’s now on the market a type of tattoo ink that comes out entirely in just one lasering. Go for it, you commitment-phobes! Let your freak flags fly until the wind changes!

*We recently caught a fairly well done piece on the History Channel called Ancient Ink. The upshot is the host went around the world to check out various tattoo styles from the most ancient (such as thread coated with ash being sewn through the skin) to the modern machines and everything in between. When visiting Japan to learn about the hand-poke/hand-stick style, modern machine-artists in Japan did note that getting random English words and imagery is as popular there as getting random Japanese stuff is here. Well I thought it was funny.

My latest line of speculation has led into something that resembles more an impenetrable jungle with endless criss-crossing game trails than it has an organized information highway, so I don’t have much to write down at the moment except to take note of a few interesting things that have cropped up recently.

One of the ways in which you can tell a creationist mouthing someone else’s outdated and ill-informed attack line rather than a person genuinely interested in the earliest origins of life is if they lead off their discussion of abiogenesis- literally, life from nonlife, the murky zone in between chemistry and biology- with anything about DNA. While DNA may be the all-star self-replicating molecule and repository of information of pretty much all life on earth that we all agree IS life, with RNA a mere replicatory handmaiden, most everybody seriously working on the issue now believes that the earliest life was RNA-based rather than DNA-based. RNA isn’t as stable as DNA, but it solves a number of problems for a DNA origin because it’s also MUCH more flexible in the number of functions it can perform.

Well, in the department of “if you can’t do it in a test tube with a Bunsen burner, then it doesn’t count”, now it counts. (Naturally, trawling around, I haven’t seen this sway a single creationist except to declare it proof you need an intelligence to do it- can’t win for losing, can the lab-coats…) Suffice it to say that a group of scientists managed to set up a group of RNA… things… that were not only indefinitely self-replicating, but also began to, for lack of a better word, evolve. They developed new tricks, and some groups of replicators began to dominate others that had better tricks. You’ll note the article and the scientists are both quick to stress this isn’t life, and it’s… not… exactly? This is, in a major way, an artifact of the aforementioned grey area between chemistry and life inherent- like the grey area between variety and species, between colony and organism, or for that matter fetus or infant. The continuums of science are a stone bitch like that- they don’t yield readily to neat categorization.

Speaking of things that are difficult to categorize, and of the problems for the RNA-world model- specifically, how the RNA world became the DNA world- someone has proposed a scenario that solves a number of problems at once: virus-mediated evolution at the very beginning of life. One of the reasons the RNA world hypothesis was ever even entertained was viruses; they broke the “DNA dogma” of once upon a time that RNA only ever comes from DNA. Not in retroviruses, it doesn’t- they are RNA-based… um… organisms, creatures, packets of self-replicating pain… that quite happily synthesize DNA from RNA. (Viruses are regarded as not really alive because they need a host to replicate and don’t actually do ANYTHING other than that, although they do that one thing very well and are incredibly genetically diverse.) Forterre- the scientist putting forth the idea- noticed that DNA replication is accomplished with different enzymes in viruses, eukaryotic cells, bacterial cells, and archaebacterial cells- and given the tendency of viruses to cut and paste portions of genomes willy-nilly from and into their hosts, wondered if they weren’t the original vectors of the spread of DNA. While RNA replication is a better short-term edge for early life, DNA would provide not only stability, but far greater protection from viral attack- the double helix is much harder to crack open. Read the whole article for more- including more context.

Hey kids! It’s Fiskin’ time! Today’s victim: a British atheist who is apparently so wrapped up in making fun of Christian hostility to evolutionary theory that he forgot to study it at some point and winds up at the same or worse level of biological literacy than Michael Behe. He does have a handful of valid points- but it’s kind of hard to give him credit when he’s so intent on drowning us all in his own smug. Let’s follow along! Whee!

What creationists really hate is that we emerged by accident

1. Really? I thought what they really hated was that evolutionary theory doesn’t give them something concrete to point to and say with objective, irrefutable authority: “God did this and there’s absolutely no doubt about it. BOW IN AWE.”

2. Only by the loosest possible definition of “accident”.

But they’re lucky Darwin isn’t forced on us the way religion has been, otherwise the national anthem would start: “Our Gracious Queen will be saved or not according to a series of factors that are sod-all to do with God,” and once a week school assemblies would start with everyone singing:

“All things biological/ All matter sweet or frightening/ Are Godless, real and logical/ See — where’s the bleeding lightning?”

One gets the impression he thinks this is somewhat of a pity. Need I even point out that evolutionary theory has absolutely nothing to do with theology or metaphysics except that part of it that happens to contradict the precisely literal interpretations of religious creation accounts? (As do many, MANY other aspects of science, really.) Darwin died an atheist, but it wasn’t his understanding of the natural world that stripped him of his faith, it was the repeated pointless tragedies in his life- such as the deaths of three of his children of accident or illness before they hit puberty. Even if you accepted the premise that evolutionary theory invalidates all religion because they lose their “literal authority”, even I would say there’s a bit more to life than biology.

So they must have been created whole, as they are now, without changing. But this ignores the beauty of Darwin’s discovery, which is that species change not because they’re on a march towards perfection but by accident.

Excellent! You’ve managed to avoid a common misconception dating from Victorian misunderstanding of genetics that held evolution as an inevitable march toward wait what?

Survival of the fittest means those accidentally matching the requirements of a new situation, not the creatures most prone to winning a scrap.

ACCIDENTALLY? I recently burned nearly three thousand words on the subject of how the entire trick of life itself- evolution included- involves EXPLOITING chance, not stumbling through the eons with whatever feckless creatures of the moment that happen to luck into surviving. It’s true enough that fitness doesn’t mean the strongest- although it can certainly involve it- but fitness doesn’t mean being a lottery winner and nothing more, either. Fitness’s most literal definition is having the most children- or even just close kin, such as your brother or sister’s children- survive to reproduce themselves. That involves some small amount of luck in having to have the best alleles for a given situation or in not stumbling into a “rocks fall, everyone dies” event, but it has a lot MORE to do with being… strong, or smart, or fast, or just astoundingly good at scoring mates. Parental care- putting some kind of investment into young- is such a successful evolutionary strategy that massive numbers of species on this planet now depend on the hard work of their parents to have ANY chance of survival whatsoever, which is why rehabilitating an orphaned or tamed animal to the wild is such a massive pain in the ass. That’s not ACCIDENT. It’s a planet-wide self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing effort- and much of it is passing on (in very rudimentary cultural fashion) learned behavior- NOT the luck of the allele.

Otherwise by now the only hamsters to survive would be those ones who could pick up the wheel and smash it over their mate’s head, and the only surviving parrots would be the ones squawking: “Who wants some? Who wants some?”

Actually, the biggest evolutionary strength of the hamster is being able to reproduce like a little fuzzy machine (which is a lot of work), and the parrot’s is to be clever enough to exploit many different types of opportunity and food sources. There’s more than one way to have an edge- and the really ironic thing here is that the evolutionary edge that MANY different species have accumulated in various ways, from rats to coyotes to crows to cockroaches to our own beautiful selves, is to be extremely adaptable to changing situations, in the form of being an efficient generalist. To be nearly immune to accident in the form of a major environmental change, in other words.

And this dominance of the accidental is the most damning argument against intelligent design, because if all species were designed, it was hardly done by someone intelligent. If it was, how do you account for the parasitic wasp that lays eggs on its prey so they hatch and eat its victim while it’s still alive?

That’s quite an intelligent design from the perspective from the wasp, who has just secured a high-value food source for its babies- and there’s that parental care again, albeit in an early and rather impersonal form. What it isn’t is NICE. Neither biologists nor the religious say nature is nice, though some religions say it used to be.

What’s really sad here is that it’s NOT that hard to find examples of truly jury-rigged and generally bad design in nature that happens to be good enough to serve their owners into the next epoch.

More to the point, why are your most sensitive nerves at the end of your toe, where they’re most likely to get walloped?

So you watch where you’re fucking going so you don’t wallop them hard enough to break those relatively small and snappable bones.

Why are men’s testicles in such a vulnerable location, ay? Bloody vindictive design that is.

Because the body temperature optimal for keeping your mammalian self humming along so well aren’t optimal for spermatogenesis, where that much heat tends to damage the process. Cold-blooded animals get to keep theirs internally. If you’d asked why spermatogenesis works like that, on the other hand…

Why do dogs do the squashiest, most unpleasant turds that hide in the grass and spread themselves in the indentations on the bottom of your shoe, but don’t start smelling until you get indoors and then render the place uninhabitable until you’ve left every window open for a month? Why, why, why?

WHYYYYYYY OH WHYYYYY WOULD GOD EVER MAKE MY LIFE INCONVENIENT, DIFFICULT, OR UNCOMFORTABLE?! WHYYY?

Come on intelligent design people, the questions you have to answer have barely begun.

This is true. Why not step aside and let someone who has more than the most shallow possible knowledge of science or religion ask them?