Lee's Blog

I discovered Little Green Footballs in the 2004 election, with the fake-but-accurate memos. I drop by sometimes just to see what’s up. Usually I read the creationism threads (LGF strongly opposes creationism), but I read other threads sometimes too.

So yesterday I was reading about a Catholic bishop who had been excommunicated and whose excommunication was recently lifted. He is, moreover, a Holocaust denier and exceedingly, openly, anti-Semitic. He was apparently ordered to apologize, and gave a not-pology indicating that he was sorry people were hurt by his Holocaust-denying statements. (I don’t think he addressed his anti-Semitic comments). He is now threatened with arrest in Germany because Holocaust-denying statements are illegal there.

I do not think that such statements should be illegal; I think it is much better that people who hold those beliefs should state them so they can be appropriately mocked, despised, and shunned. But I was troubled by this comment on LGF (bowdlerized because I don’t like that kind of language):

See- he’s sorry he’s said this publicly, not for the thoughts and opinions that he has. Like the crypto-fascists, he’s learned that in his society it [is] the speech not the ideology that’s the issue and he must hide, all while ignoring the root source which is his very thinking. At least- that’s what the fascists think is the issue. Hate speech laws help give rise to this. They try to gag the bigoted speech but it only helps bigots conceal their ugly nature. Because I [really don't care] about what this man says- it’s what he thinks that’s really offensive.

I don’t agree that we should care not about what someone says, only about what they think. After all, if they don’t say anything — if they don’t act out in a way that we can identify — how do we know what they think? Agents provocateurs: that’s the only way I can think of. Entrapment. Make them think that you agree with what you think they privately think, so that they will speak out and you can nab them.

That way lie thought police.

Moreover, in many ways I do not think people are to blame for what they think. I have mentioned before a book that I read as a child which had a profound influence on my thinking, and which I have never forgotten. It was A Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov, and the part that I vividly remember was a discussion in which a telepath points out to one of the main characters that in fact he is prejudiced against the others, including his girlfriend. He responds that he grew up in an atmosphere of bigotry in his formative years “so I can’t help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious.”

What I took away from that was “One is not responsible for the prejudices he learned at his mother’s knee.” People are not responsible for discomfort that they might feel with certain people or certain situations; they are responsible for actions that they take in accordance with their prejudices — and then only when they have had the opportunity to learn better.

So if someone thinks the wrong things — if he was brought up to think that Jews are evil deicides who secretly rule the world — well, that’s very sad and unfortunate. But if he has gone out into the big world and learned how preposterous, foolish, and frankly evil that belief is, so that he keeps his thoughts to himself and tries not to act on them, what basis is there for condemning him? Yes, he thinks bad thoughts, but he knows they’re bad thoughts and presumably makes an effort not to pass them on. Leaving him alone; letting him go along and raise children to whom he will not teach the evil thoughts that were taught to him; what better way to rid the world of those thoughts without the use of thought police?

Seriously: think of the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, when people like H. P. Lovecraft were writing appallingly racist stories and no one thought twice about it — the people who lived then and read those stories without a qualm are the ancestors of many of the people who voted for The One. The Jim Crow laws were repealed by their descendants; in some cases, by those people their very own selves. There are still people who grow up in families where racism and anti-Semitism are accepted but, until recently, such beliefs were despised and people who held them tended to be embarrassed by them. Those beliefs were, therefore, dying out. (Today, of course, racism is still despised but anti-Semitism is becoming a policy of the new Administration, but I’m hoping that will be reversed.)

Now, this bishop is quite another matter. Whether he learned this vile nonsense at his mother’s knee or picked it up later, he most certainly does speak out and act on it, so he is rightly condemned — but not for his thinking.

Orac has posted again about cancer woo. He is a researcher studying breast cancer and a surgeon treating it, so he understandably feels very strongly about it. As do I, of course. It is horrifying to think of some charlatan convincing a patient with cancer not to get treatment — not because the treatment actually is worse than death — but because the charlatan compares the treatment with something minor, like a magic diet or special pills. Any reasonable person would choose diet and pills over surgery, chemo, and radiation if the outcomes were the same. But they’re not, and who knows how many people have died horrible deaths that might have been prevented, or at least made less excruciating, with proper treatment.

Anyway, when Orac discusses cancer woo, he always points out the various testimonials that never have enough information to prove that the patient really had cancer. In that vein, here is my woo testimonial:

A couple of years ago, as I was applying my morning deodorant, I found a lump under my arm. It was quite large, considering that it wasn’t supposed to be there at all, and it also hurt. In fact, when I thought back, it had been hurting for a while when I moved incautiously or coughed. This was especially alarming since a family member had developed breast cancer at the same age. But, convinced by my Google education that cancer treatment was just cutting, poisoning, and burning, I relied on meditation, herbal tea, and magic crystals. In a couple of months it was completely gone, and it has never recurred!

Well, that’s almost true. It’s entirely true except for the sentence that starts with “But”. Actually, within four hours of finding the lump I was in the office of a breast cancer specialist getting it biopsied. The biopsy was followed up with an MRI. The conclusion was that I have an abnormal muscle bundle (a “developmental defect”, quoth the doctor) which had gotten injured and was massively inflamed (I suppose it’s easily injured because it’s in the wrong place). The doctor told me to be careful not to put any strain on it, and I followed directions. No other treatment was necessary, and within a week it had begun to shrink, and within a couple of months it was entirely gone.

But you can see how easy it would be for someone to become convinced that a lump like that was truly cancer and that it had been cured by some quack treatment, if the patient didn’t trust doctors and went to a charlatan instead. Meditation and herbal teas really would have kept me from doing anything strenuous with my arms, and that was all that was really needed to let the injury heal.

So I can entirely understand how an honest person could pen one of those testimonials. But the charlatans who use them really do cause death and suffering.

This is an interesting question that I came across in Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax”. The author, Phil Plait, points out that most people will answer, “yellow”, but the correct answer is, “white”, and he gives some reasons for why this can be seen to be true (such as that clouds are white, but they are seen by reflected light, and if they were reflecting yellow light, they would be yellow).

So why would we think the Sun is yellow? Plait answers that we really don’t know why we would think that.

Right after reading this, I happened to be driving home in the evening, and I came to the conclusion that there are several reasons that all work together to make us think it’s yellow.

We all know, of course, that we can’t look directly at the Sun when it’s high in the sky; if we do, we are immediately dazzled. So we can’t check the color directly. However, in a quick glance we can tell that it is definitely not red (or green or blue, as a friend pointed out when I proposed this, but red is the important one here). Now suppose it’s evening and you look over at the Sun. If it’s very near the horizon, then it looks red, but we know that must be an illusion as the Sun is definitely not red. However, if it’s somewhat up from the horizon, as it was the evening I was thinking about this … it can be quite clearly and unmistakably yellow, but still dim enough to look at briefly. Is the yellow color an illusion? We (or at least our less technologically advanced ancestors) can’t say positively that it is.

As a second point, the Sun is warm and it produces light. This is well known. The only other thing in common experience that is warm and produces light is fire. Flames are normally yellow, though as the fire burns down they may sink down into red coals and then disappear. This has a certain similarity to a yellow Sun sinking down into a red Sun on the horizon, and then disappearing. This lends plausibility to the notion that the true color of the Sun is yellow, even when it is too bright to look at.

Finally, imagine that you are an artist of antiquity, trying to produce images of celestial bodies that do them the honor that they deserve, being deities of a sort. We can look at the Moon without difficulty and we can see its color. We can represent it with a precious metal that does it justice: the Moon is clearly silver. But what is the Sun? Surely it can’t just be silver again. It must be a more precious metal, and since we already have reason to think it’s probably yellow, the logical metal to use is gold.

Thus, since the Sun looks yellow near but not at the horizon, is like fire which is usually yellow, and is depicted in art as being golden, and since we can’t look directly at it to check its color anyway, we accept that it is in fact yellow or golden. At least, that’s my theory.

I was lurking around some more websites with discussions of intelligent design creationism, and it occurred to me that there is a judo move to be used against it. That is, intelligent design “theory” is blasphemous.

I’m serious.

Or at least, I would be serious if I believed in blasphemy. Remember, the idea of intelligent design “theory” is that we can examine certain, shall we say, artifacts and perceive that they are designed rather than undesigned. So, for instance, we can look at an old campsite and say, this is a broken clay pot, whereas that is a broken rock; the first bears marks of design and the second does not: the second just happened.

Scaling this up, the intelligent design “theorists” point out that we can examine living things and identify them as being products of design, as opposed to other parts, which “just happened” or are the product of random chance. Well, okay, but the difficulty is that, under their assumption of God an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient power that personally created the heavens and the earth universe and the life therein, no part of the universe or the life therein could have “just happened”; every single thing, from the largest galaxy to the smallest mote of dust, is the product of design.

To suggest that some part of the universe is detectably designed, but other parts “just happened” is to suggest that the God the eternal, omnipotent, omniscient power that personally created the heavens and the earth universe and the life therein didn’t create all of it. I believe this would be blasphemy.

I was going to do my duty on PGDP tonight, but it was offline. After several tries, I got the message that they were doing unscheduled maintenance, and a link to this. I sincerely hope they have really good back-ups …

Update (Friday morning): still down. Doesn’t even respond to pings. I’m starting to worry about this. Getting withdrawal symptoms …

To be fair to Pharyngula, one of his recent posts is a thing of beauty. As they say, read the whole thing. The nicest compliment I ever got as a lawyer was, “You write like a piranha.”

Dr. Gotelli writes like a piranha.

Your invitation is quite surprising, given the sneering coverage of my recent newspaper editorial that you yourself posted on the Discovery Institute’s website…

In closing, I do want to thank you sincerely for this invitation and for your posting on the Discovery Institute Website. As an evolutionary biologist, I can’t tell you what a badge of honor this is. My colleagues will be envious.

Thwack!

Sixteen of my P2 pages have gone through P3. Fifteen went through without a hitch. But one contained this passage:

In the Kirikkot muri of the Karikkod proverty there is
a temple dedicated to Siva or Unnamalanathar, with a
large amount of property attached to it.

That’s exactly what it says in the text. There is no error in reading it. The P3′er marked “proverty” as possibly a typo for “property”. Well, maybe. But how am I to recognize proverty as a typo? Other than, I guess, Indian names don’t normally seem to be transliterated with a “y”, but then one might suppose that the typo is in calling it proverty instead of proverti, or something.

I don’t actually have a clue what a proverty would be, but then I don’t have a clue what a muri would be either (judging by Google, if lower case it seems to be a kind of food, and if capitalized it seems to be the name of a specific town, and neither meaning makes sense here). How would I know if a muri should or should not be found in a proverty?

Anyway, I hope that this will not imperil my proposed future in P3….

Update: almost immediately … if you google for muri and proverty and India together (and skip all the “poverty” that Google helpfully throws in), you can find this. Either two people made the same mistake, or else muries really are found in Proverties.

Another ferret picture.

Update: And another one!

This is a very foolish article.

Now that the Neanderthal genome has been reconstructed, my colleague Nicholas Wade reports, a leading genome researcher at Harvard says that a Neanderthal could be brought to life with present technology for about $30 million.

So why not do it? Why not give Harvard’s George Church the money he says could be used to resurrect a Neanderthal from DNA?

The author says, “I’m afraid I can’t see the problem.” Well, I can. I can see several possible outcomes, all bad.

You’d most likely get a severely damaged organism that can’t even survive. Considering how low the success rate is for just cloning extant mammals, when we have an unlimited supply of intact cells, I don’t think building a genome from scratch to use in cloning is going to be too successful. But even if it were …

You might get a being with intelligence in the human range. But if so, what conceivable right would you have to treat him as an experimental animal? Unless you take the religious approach of, “we have souls and he doesn’t, so we can do anything we want to him because God gave us dominion,” you’d have to say he’s a citizen of whatever country he’s born into, with the same rights of self-determination as everyone else. But, of course, he’d be regarded as a laboratory freak and monster and everyone including him would know that. What kind of life is that to inflict on him?

Or you might get a being with subhuman intelligence — still closer to us than to the existing great apes, though. Are you comfortable with treating him as an experimental animal? I’m not comfortable treating great apes as experimental animals. And what are you going to do with him when you’re through? “Sacrifice” him so you can check out how well you constructed his organs? Stick him in a zoo? His lifespan may well be as long as ours; are you going to provide for perpetual care? I noticed in the comments that others besides me thought of Isaac Asimov’s “Ugly Little Boy”, but at least Timmy could be sent home. This poor creature would never have a home.

But still, even with all that, would we gain anything by creating a Neanderthal? The author makes a really stupid comment on that point:

Granted, it would be disorienting and lonely for the first few Neanderthals, but it would be pretty interesting for them as well as us. (What would a Neanderthal make of Disneyland, or of World of Warcraft?)

A Neanderthal would think exactly the same thing as any other human being raised in our society. I — and you, and everyone else alive — have the same genetic makeup as pre-agricultural hunters and gatherers and nomadic herdsmen. They would be utterly overwhelmed and bewildered by concepts like Disneyland and World of Warcraft. Those of us brought up in technological societies are not. A Neanderthal raised in our society would be like us. He would not have a “Neanderthal culture” to compare our culture to. He would have exactly and only the culture that we taught to him.

The error in the author’s thinking is here:

Should we try to resurrect a Neanderthal?

Whether we want to or not, we cannot “resurrect” a Neanderthal. We can, perhaps, one day, construct a genetic replica of a Neanderthal, but it would not be any Neanderthal that ever lived, and it would tell us nothing about how they lived, except in the most mechanical sense (what food they could digest or not, what diseases they were vulnerable to). Their culture is forever lost, unless we can construct a time machine.

No, I don’t think we should construct a genetic replica of a Neanderthal. However the experiment turned out, it would be a cruel, cruel thing to do, and useless.

How fascinating. I dropped my headphones on the keyboard, and up popped “Windows Mail”. How clever of my headphones.