Lee's Blog

Twenty P2 pages today. That’s a lot. But I did them all to the very best of my ability, including typing the whole page myself, going line by line from the bottom up in the spellchecker, running the page through three programs to pick up common punctuation errors, smooth-reading, and generally listening to Read Aloud’s rendition of the page. There were some pages that I didn’t give to Read Aloud because I didn’t think it could pronounce them (lengthy table of contents in “History of Greece” with many Greek person and place names).

I read that someone is reading the Origin of Species for the first time and will blog about the experience. Well, I read the Origin some time ago so that won’t work for me, but I may get Creation or evolution? and blog about that. The latest pages demonstrated the author’s inability to break away from “essentialist” thinking, a break-away that is essential (ho, ho, I made a funny) if you want to understand evolution.

One of the interesting features of PGDP is that you join “in medias res”. That is, you just get a page from the book — whatever page is next in line — which may be quite far from the previous page you edited in the book, if you had edited anything else in the book at all. So trying to follow an author’s train of thought can be an entertaining addition to the somewhat tedious process of proofreading.

Witness, for instance, page 337 of “Creation or evolution” by George Ticknor Curtis, which I have reproduced in toto here. This appears to be the middle of a discussion of political events in England and the United States. What does this have to do with creation or evolution?

I know what it would mean if I were writing it. I would contend that the choices available to every human being now alive — indeed the very lives of every human being now alive — are dependent on actions by people long ago and far away, so that existence for each person is shaped in large part not by his free will but by the results of past contingencies. A child might die in infancy because his ancestors chose — or were forced — to immigrate, or alternatively to remain, in an unhealthy environment, and thus that child would never get the opportunity to achieve anything or even to be “saved” as the Christians would wish.

If the Creator (or Intelligent Designer, or God) is okay with that, why would he not be okay with evolution, in which some lineages succeed and others fail, and some develop characteristics that enable them to spread widely while others are restricted to such tiny niches that they can go extinct when the niche is damaged?*

But I doubt that is Curtis’ argument. My guess is that he is making some contrast between the deliberate decisions of human beings as to how to form a government as opposed to the “random” results of evolution. Which would just show that this argument is based on a misunderstanding of where the randomness comes in, and where it doesn’t.

* Much as I love all mustelids, there is no denying that black-footed ferrets are not terribly successful. Even before human beings started destroying the prairie environment, black-footed ferrets were so rare that a quarter century elapsed between the first scientific description and the second. By the time the feds stepped in and did something useful for a change, capturing the entire species and starting a captive breeding program, there were just eighteen black-footed ferrets left in the entire world.

I did six pages today. That wasn’t actually intentional. There is a glitch in the interface such that if you hit the “back” or “forward” button, or refresh the page, you accidentally check out another page. I hit back, realized that I might have lost my changes, hit forward, and … well, that gave me two extra pages that I hadn’t meant to do. However, I don’t like to give back pages (it make me look like a quitter), and I don’t like to hang on to pages overnight (it makes me look like a slacker), so what could I do but proof the pages?

I have done thirty-two pages in “Creation and Evolution”. One of my problems in proofing it is that my mind wanders into replies to his arguments. It really is astonishing how the arguments for intelligent design haven’t progressed at all since 1887. Still, I will keep slogging away at it, and perhaps I will blog about it.

I also started — only started — a page in a French/English dictionary that has been hanging around in P2 for half a year. In the first pass, I struggled through over sixty errors on that single page, so I decided that I should finish the remaining passes tomorrow. Or possibly tomorrow and Sunday and maybe Monday too. It is really bad. In this case I do not think anyone would consider me a slacker for holding the page overnight or even longer.

You know, I’m not really plugged into this popular culture thing. I know about YouTube, but unless someone actually directs me there, it doesn’t occur to me to look for anything there. Which is why it took me a year to discover this.

I did not faithfully blog yesterday, but I did do my quota at PGDP. In fact, I did a total of four pages Wednesday after finishing up from Tuesday, and four more yesterday. So I am ahead of the game.

The book I have been proofreading is called “Creation or evolution”, so it ties in with my other interests. It is remarkable how the arguments for “intelligent design” today track exactly with the arguments for creation in 1887, all the way down to the circular arguments and failure to understand that the power of the creation “hypothesis” is precisely what makes it non-science. Since it can explain anything without any effort, it has no useful explanatory power. This passage, about the efforts of scientists to explain speciation and in particular embryological development, demonstrates this:

The believer in special creations has to answer no such questions as these. His hypothesis assumes the creation of a pair of animals of a certain distinct species; a law of procreation and gestation common to a vast multitude of organisms; and a law of embryologic growth peculiar to each species.

Well, yeah. If you simply assume that everything was created exactly the way it is, and that laws were established such that everything remains exactly the way it is, then you can “predict” that everything will be exactly the way it is.

But you can’t really predict anything — if asked whether it is possible that tomorrow someone will find a placental reptile somewhere in the tropics, a creationist, or an intelligent design believer, cannot truthfully say no. After all, the Creator, or the Intelligent Designer, might have decided that this specific area really needed a placental reptile even though no other area has one. A biologist, on the other hand, can say that, beyond a reasonable doubt, no placental reptile exists anywhere. The placenta is the result of a long series of contingent events that will not be duplicated in another line, such as a reptile. Something that works like a placenta could arise, but it will not be exactly the same thing.

I will probably have more to say about this book over the weekend.

Very quickly … PGDP was running quickly this morning, so I finished up from yesterday and did my quota today.

I have managed one and a half pages this morning. PGDP sometimes gets in a state where it takes several minutes to refresh a page, meaning several minutes to save what I’ve done so far, which makes me worry that I’m going to lose it (besides making me very impatient when I want to go to the next page.)

PGDP has been trying to do an intermediate save the entire time I’ve been typing this. I saved the text that I had corrected, so far, on disk in case the save fails completely. But I have certainly tried to perform my duty today.

Update: I let PGDP try to save for fifteen minutes, and finally gave up. Windows wanted to install updates and shut down so I let it which meant the usual struggle to get the monitors working again, which is why I didn’t finish the job the same day.

I have read that, if you want to develop a habit, the thing to do is to blog about it. That way, if you fall off the wagon, you feel morally constrained to publicly admit that you did so (well, as publicly as is possible on a blog that almost no one reads), and thus you will be less likely to fall of the wagon.

So I declare that I intend to do two P2 pages per week day and five P2 pages per day on the weekend. To get things started off right, Sunday I did eighteen P2 pages, and this morning I did three (I woke up unreasonably early).

I did come up with a new proofreading technique, which is so simple that I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Since I’m a touch-typist, and pretty fast and accurate, my first “pass” at proofreading is simply to type the whole page myself. Then I compare what I did with what the OCR did and what P1 did. I compare with both because it’s possible that I and P1 both unthinkingly corrected a misspelling that the OCR would have left alone. So far, any differences tend to be my own errors, but I’ve turned up a number of punctuation problems, and a couple of capitalization problems, that the OCR made and P1 missed. And retyping is quicker and more interesting than the first pass that I was making before. I continue to go through all the same steps after the first pass, of course.

I have a weather widget on my desktop (one of the few things about Vista that I like), which shows me the current weather all the time. When I got up this morning, at about five, the temperature was 44. About an hour ago I noticed that it was down to 40. It is now 38. Isn’t the temperature supposed to go up when the sun rises?

I note that it is 21 in Norman. A rare case when New York is warmer than Oklahoma. All summer long I noticed that the temperature in Oklahoma tended to be 15 to 20 degrees warmer than New York, even in the mornings, when the sun was up in New York but not in Oklahoma.

I used to have Pharyngula on the blogroll, and I used to visit it daily. I removed it some time ago and now only look in once a week or less.

Pharyngula used to be fun. PZ Myers would write about science; he would often write with some heat about creationism and its attacks on science and education; occasionally he would say something nasty about Christianity, and of course all his minions (as he himself calls them) would join in with profane and scatalogical abuse. This was often offensive, but I could read past it and enjoy the science and things like the horoscope predictions that he once did.

And then there was the cracker incident.

Some jerk received a communion wafer and, instead of consuming it as expected, took it away and, I guess, made some threat to it, and he was then reviled and even threatened by believers. I could not endure the vileness on Pharyngula long enough to get all the details. Anyway, PZ joined in and requested that someone steal a communion wafer and send it to him, and he would publicly abuse and defile it to prove that it was just a cracker. Someone did and he did, and the lunatic fringe responded with predictable fury, including death threats.

Now, I’m an atheist born and bred. My parents were not religious; although I never got the chance to ask my mother about her beliefs, I don’t recall anything about her that suggested that she was a believer, and certainly my father and stepmother were not. We attended church if we happened to be at my grandparents’ house on Sunday, since they were believers, but other than that I have never attended a church service except for weddings and funerals. I did go to an Episcopal school and we were required to attend chapel every morning, but they were well aware that many students were either non-believers or believers in other faiths, so “chapel” was basically “school assembly” with hymns (which I like for the music) and a dollop of light preaching, which I ignored.

On the other hand, I was brought up to be respectful of the beliefs of others. I do not pray, but I will bow my head and be respectfully silent when others do. And although I think religious belief is generally foolish, I don’t have the arrogance to say that people who live by their religion have wasted their lives; if they get joy from their lives without harming others, who am I do to criticize?

And more particularly, why should I interfere with them if they’re not interfering with me? Sure, I think a communion wafer is just a cracker and I would have no emotional response at all to seeing a cracker tossed in the trash, but that’s not how Catholics feel, so what possible reason could there be for me to deliberately cause them pain by defiling a communion wafer?

It’s kind of like this: there are things in my house that you would call junk, even trash, and pitch without a thought if they were yours, but to me they are treasures because of where I got them, who gave them to me, what was going on in my life when they came into my hands. It would hurt and diminish me if they were damaged, destroyed, or just ill-treated. You may have things like that too. I respect your feelings about such “junk” — even though it isn’t my junk and I don’t respect it in itself — and I hope that you would respect mine. Likewise, I respect a Catholic’s feelings about the communion wafer.

In short, despite being an atheist, I was offended by PZ’s offer to defile a communion wafer. I am also appalled at the lunatic fringe who threatened him; it is extremely sad that any controversial public figure today gets death threats like that. And they aren’t just threats, either; I don’t know if PZ needs bodyguards, but there are other public figures who do. So I am sympathetic and supportive of him just because of the death threats.

But since the cracker incident, Pharyngula has become nearly all Christian-bashing, to the point where I cannot bring myself to read it. Often I cannot even get past the titles of the posts. When I most recently dropped by, the first post was about “Death Cultists”. Dare I ask what a death cultist is? Is it someone who believes that their religion requires them to commit suicide? Is it someone who preaches, and practices, mass murder as the highest and best sacrament of their religion? Is it someone who holds public celebrations, dances in the street, and passes out candy, on learning of a successful act of mass murder? Is it someone who teaches children that it is their religious duty to clear minefields by rolling through them (rolling so as to maximize their chances of hitting a mine)?

No, of course not. On Pharyngula, death cultists are mainstream Christians, the sort of people that I deal with every day at work, people who in many cases are my friends, people who have never threatened me or done anything at all to harm me, people who go out of their way to help others after disasters even if the others don’t share their faith, people who express sorrow for the deaths of others and horror at their murder even if the others don’t share their faith, deeply caring people that I admire….

Snarl! I get too angry to even type coherently when I think of the misuse of the term “death cultist” on Pharyngula.

So that’s why I don’t list Pharyngula on the blogroll, and I seldom go there. In fact, it’ll probably be a month or more before I go back there. Maybe after a while the hopenchangey will induce PZ to dial down his hatred, though I doubt it.