I’m an atheist because I don’t need what religions are selling. It’s all about death, really. No one wants to die. Scientists are working on extending lifespans and religious people are working on eternal life, reincarnation, etc. Isn’t one life enough? Sure, it sounds great to live forever, but it would get boring I’m sure. Everyone loves the idea of heaven because no one really thinks about it. I see this life as heaven. Heaven shouldn’t last forever. I equate it with a trip to Disney World. Would you really like to stay at Disney World for a year? A month? All expenses paid? It sounds great! But even little kids would be crying to go home before too long. It would lose its charm.
Now that I’ve had kids I look forward to that day (hopefully far away) when I can rest and look back on my tiny contribution to this special world. A world that happened to settle into a spot that was conducive to it creating life. How fantastic! And it will be enough just to say I was here. That I got to be born. That I got to live when billions of others didn’t even make it out of the womb. And that my genes (through evolution) will eventually be in every human on earth, just like our genes contain bits of ancient Egyptians and other Africans. No one thinks about heaven, but at the same time it’s all they want. But only if their lives don’t feel like heaven. I have what I need in this life. And it’s enough. And now I get to experience things all over again through my children. What better gift? But I’ll have had enough when I’m old. If I spent my entire life wondering where I was going when I died, I’d forget to live.
In email, Libby Anne passed along a little jewel from her youth: some radio propaganda against that horrible demonic portal to evil, Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a radio show called Castles and Cauldrons, with a special introduction from James Dobson, warning you kiddies about the dangers of those role-playing games and their non-Christian magic and mysticism, which will lead them into contact with demons and satanism. It’s a two-parter, with summaries of Part 1 and Part 2. Warning: it’s laced with commercials for Focus on the Patriarchy.
They play a version of the games I’ve never encountered. These games give you actual magic powers that allow you to summon demons and control people and eradicate your enemies and read people’s minds. They sure seem a lot more powerful than Christianity.
Mary was rather disappointed at this news — it came too late for us, we have already booked our tickets, and we have to miss it all. But you don’t! If you’re coming to the Reason Rally, you can also sign up with the Secular Coalition to get training in lobbying. Learn how to take the reins of power into your hands and change America’s course!
Secular Coalition to Flood Capitol Hill with Godless Voters to Lobby Representatives
Lobby Day for Reason: March 23, 2012
WASHINGTON, DC— The Secular Coalition for America today announced the Lobby Day for Reason, a free lobbying day for secular Americans to take place on March 23, 2012, on Capitol Hill.
The Lobby Day for Reason will offer secular-minded individuals a morning of free lobbying training followed by the opportunity to meet with congressional staff to discuss issues related to the separation of church and state. Lunch, snacks, and materials are included.
The event will coincide with the Reason Rally, expected to be the largest secular gathering in American history, co-sponsored by the Secular Coalition for America. Lobby Day for Reason is free and will begin at 8:30 am on March 23, 2012, at the Hyatt Regency, located at 400 New Jersey Ave. NW, Washington, DC.
This event will encourage and support secular and nontheistic Americans to speak out to the elected officials who were put in office to serve all of their constituents regardless of religious beliefs. The Secular Coalition will support these taxpaying Americans as they put faces to the nontheist and secular communities and tell their federal representatives that they are voters and are paying attention to issues.
The lobbying training will be led by Amanda Knief, government relations manager for the Secular Coalition.
"We want to have a wave of godless voters flood the halls of every congressional building to show all of America that secular and nontheistic Americans are here, that we expect our elected officials to represent our issues, and that we care about our country just as much as any American," Knief said. Only by participating in the very system that is working against our communities right now can we hope to change things.
While studies show that up to 15 percent of the U.S. population—or roughly 50 million Americans—are secular, the visibility of our community is still low. Secular Americans often hide their nontheistic viewpoints and ideologies because they fear persecution. A 2006 study conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Sociology found that atheists are the least trusted minority group in America–many of the respondents associated atheism with immorality, including criminal behavior, extreme materialism and elitism. A 2011 study by the University of British Columbia found only rapists were distrusted to a comparable degree as atheists. The Secular Coalition is working to change this by making the voices of all secular Americans–atheists, agnostics, humanists and freethinkers–heard by the Administration and Congressional representatives.
2012 will mark the second consecutive year that the Secular Coalition will host a lobby day. The 2011 lobby day included more than 80 people making almost 50 lobbying visits in one afternoon. The Secular Coalition expects the 2012 event to draw even more secular Americans due to its timing the day before the Reason Rally.
To register or for more information, go to http://secular.org/reasonlobby. The Secular Coalition encourages early registration those who register early will more likely be able to have visits with their Senators’ and Representatives’ offices.
The Twin Cities Creation Science Fair was held last weekend. I was out of town, but flew back in on Sunday afternoon and actually thought about swinging north and dropping in to see what was going on, but decided against it: I was tired, and these things are sad and tawdry affairs, and they just make me depressed for the poor kids.
But Josh Engen was there. Apparently my name came up a few times while he toured the exhibits.
Finally, we came across a presentation entitled “Dinosaurs And The Ark.” The board had obviously been put together by a very young child, and the matriarch of creationism wanted desperately to protect it. This woman, whose nametag read “Julie Von Vett,” ungracefully positioned herself between the camera and the poster board and began staring at me in a way that reminded me of my grandmother.
“Are you planning to post these pictures on PZ Myers’ website?” she finally blurted out.
Me: “Excuse me?”
Julie: “You know PZ Myers, don’t you?”
I explained that I had no relationship with Mr. Myers and that my being there had nothing to do with him. But, it was obvious that Julie’s mind was made up. By then she was grilling me like a cartoon drill sergeant. Who was I working for? Why was I there? Etc. Etc.
After several passive-aggressive attempts to trick me into admitting that PZ Myers had sent me on a secret mission to disrupt her event, or perhaps that I actually was PZ dressed up in some kind of clever disguise, a small crowd of people slowly formed around us. Within a few minutes, I was surrounded by several aggressive creationists, and each one had a separate theory about my associations and purpose.
The most interesting accusation that was brought against me (and PZ Myers, and all of his readers by association) was that I was specifically there to make fun of children.
I’ve attended many creationist events. I never disrupt them or even recommend to others that they disrupt them: those visits are fact-finding missions. I also don’t encourage making fun of the kids — they are the victims. It’s good that some of them are trying to do basic science, but the fact that the organizers compel everyone to put bible verses on their posters is telling and deplorable.
But by gosh, next year, or perhaps the year after, I’m going to have to go to the Har-Mar Mall in February, just to freak these people out. Or maybe I can actually get by with commissioning a squad of undercover minions to go on a secret mission to infiltrate their science fair. Or perhaps openly — maybe we need a Twin Cities Creozerg?
Except for the sadness of dealing with deluded kids. That makes it so much less fun.
Wait…Greta Christina, my fierce sister-in-arms at FtB? Those bastards! They have pitted family against each other for their sick entertainment! You know what this means. Vote harder. Vote every day. I must conquer.
Unless I can cunningly maneuver her into some peculiar forfeit if she wins, in which case I’ll cheerfully throw the race. Atheist, you know.
She has a condition called Uterus Didelphys. Variations of this condition aren’t uncommon, occurring once in a few thousand births. The reproductive tract develops from paired tubes that fuse prenatally, and sometimes the fusion is incomplete, producing a range of arrangements illustrated below.
Would you believe a pornographer has asked Ms Jones to star in a movie? (Of course you would — that’s exactly what you’d expect.) In this case, it’s stupid as well as insulting and offensive. Women with these kinds of conditions often don’t even know it until puberty or later — there aren’t any obvious external differences, so when she takes off her pants she looks like any other woman, and no, she can’t have sex with two men at once. In didelphys, the vagina is divided in two by an internal septum, nothing more. Sex with a man just means he can bear a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right and penetrate one side or the other. And even there, it’s possible to get surgery to reduce or remove the septum.
The primary problems for the woman are a little confusion during menstruation, with awkwardness in using tampons; and it does constrain the birth canal somewhat, so caesarian deliveries are recommended.
So…no obvious external differences; no special kinky sex; some reproductive difficulties; if the condition is known, somewhat more likely unpleasant interactions with dumbasses, like the porn producer. That’s about it.
Here’s another video about the condition (contains closeups of female genitalia, in a clinical setting).
Last week, I gave a talk at UNLV titled “A counter-revolutionary history of evo devo”, and I’m afraid I was a little bit heretical. I criticized my favorite discipline. I felt guilty the whole time, but I think it’s a good idea to occasionally step back and think about where we’re going and where we should be going. It’s also part of some rethinking I’ve been doing lately about a more appropriate kind of research I could be doing at my institution, and what I want to be doing in the next ten years. And yes, I want to be doing evo devo, so even though I’m bringing up what I see as shortcomings I still see it as an important field.
I think of myself as primarily a developmental biologist, someone who focuses on processes in embryos and is most interested molecular mechanisms that generate form and physiology. But I’m also into evolution, obviously, and recently have been trying to educate myself on ecology. And this is where the conflicts arise. Historically, there has been a little disaffection between evolution and development, and we can trace it right back to Richard Goldschmidt and the neo-Darwinian synthesis.
There is minimal consideration of development in the synthesis. The big man in the interdisciplinary study of evolution and development at the time of the formulation of the synthesis was Goldschmidt, who actually raised some grand and important issues. He was interested in sex differences; the same genome can give rise to very different forms, male and female. He was interested in metamorphosis; the same genome produces both a caterpillar and an adult moth. And he was interested in phenocopies; the same genome can generate alternative forms under the influence of environmental factors. He had some very speculative ideas about global systemic mutations that haven’t really panned out, and his ideas were tarred with the label “hopeful monsters”, which didn’t help either. It was non-Darwinian! It argued for abrupt transitions! I’ll defer to Gould’s defense of Goldschmidt, though, and would say that those weren’t good reasons to reject some challenging ideas.
The charge that stung, though, was Ernst Mayr’s accusation that Goldschmidt believed that new species could arise by a single fortuitous macromutation in a single individual, that Goldschmidt had abandoned or failed to grasp one of the most essential principles of evolutionary thought: that evolution occurs in populations, not individuals. He did not understand the concept of population thinking. I don’t think he was entirely guilty of that, but I have to concede that there was a disjoint there: as a developmental biologist, Goldschmidt would wonder first and foremost about the kinds of genetic rearrangements that would generate an evolutionary novelty, and just assume that a superior morph would propagate through the population, a process of relatively little interest; while an evolutionary biologist would be less interested in the developmental details of the generation of the phenotype, and much more interested in the mechanics and probabilities of its spread through a population.
Evolutionary biologists and developmental biologists think differently, and that creates a conflict between the evo and the devo. I’m not unique in noting this: Rudy Raff included a table in his book, The Shape of Life, which I’ll reproduce here, with a few modifications of my own.
Quality
Evolutionary Biologists
Developmental Biologists
Causality
Selection
Proximate mechanisms
Genes
Source of variation
Directors of function
Target
Trans elements (coding sequence)
Cis elements (regulatory)
Variation
Diversity & change
Universality & constancy
History
Phylogeny
Cell lineage
Time Scale
101-109 years
10-1-10-7 years
Modified from Raff, 1996
Those different emphases can lead to biases in where we place the importance of various processes. I’ll focus on just two: causality and variation.
When we’re looking at the process of change within our domains, evolutionary biologists have already mastered the art of population thinking: everything is about propagation of patterns of variation within a population. There aren’t explicit mechanisms that generate subtypes to fit the range of roles available. Instead, a cloud of forms is created by chance variation and the unfit are selected out. Developmental biologists, on the other hand, see an organism with a constellation of necessary and dedicated functions — there must be a nervous system to regulate behavior, there must be a gut to process food — and specific molecular mechanisms to programmatically generate them. Embryos do not proliferate a mass of cells with random variants, and then use the ones that secrete digestive enzymes for the gut and the ones that generate electrical impulses for the brain. A lot of development papers really do talk about nothing but proximate sequences of causal interactions that lead to a specific function or fate.
To an evolutionary biologist, variation is the stuff of interest: populations with no variation are not evolving (it’s a good thing such populations don’t exist, or if they do, chance will swiftly change the situation). To your average developmental biologist, variation is noise. It clutters the interpretation of the data. We want to say, “Here is the mechanism that produces this tissue type,” not “Here is the mechanism that sometimes produces this tissue type, in some organisms, sometimes with other mechanisms X, Y, and Z.” We generally love model systems because they allow us to establish an archetype and see a reliable pattern. In the best case, it gives us a solid foundation to work from; in the worst case, we forget altogether that there is more complexity in the natural world than is found in our labs. I would be the first to admit that laboratory zebrafish, for instance, are tremendously weird, inbred, specialized creatures…but they’re still extraordinarily useful for getting clean results.
I will also be quick to admit that the above is a bit of a caricature. Of course many developmental biologists reach out beyond the simplistic reduction of everything to linear, proximate causes. Raff, in that book, goes on to discuss specifically all of the problems of model systems and how they distort our understanding of biology; I could cite researchers like David Kingsley who specifically study variation in natural populations; Ecological Developmental Biology, which describes the interactions between genes and environment; and of course there are all those scientists at marine stations who aren’t staring at tanks full of inbred specimens, but are going out and collecting diverse forms in the wild. I am admitting a bias, but the best of us work hard to overcome it.
And then…we sometimes slip. I highly recommend Sean B. Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo as an excellent introduction to evo devo, I even use it in my developmental biology course. In reducing the discipline to a popular science book, you can see what had to be jettisoned, though, and unfortunately, it’s that whole business of population thinking and environmental influences (clearly, Carroll knows all that stuff, but in distilling evo devo down to the basics, that developmental bias is what emerges most clearly). Here, for instance, is the admittedly sound-bitey one sentence summary of what evo devo is from the book:
The Evo Devo Revolution
“The comparison of developmental genes between species became a new discipline at the interface of embryology and evolutionary biology—evolutionary developmental biology, or ‘Evo Devo’ for short.”
Sean B. Carroll, 2005
Again, this is not a criticism of the book, which does what it does very well, that is, describe the mechanistic process of development and the regulatory logic behind it, but notice the missing words in that abbreviated description: populations and environments don’t really come into play. All we’ve got there (and this is a bit unfair to Carroll) is comparisons of genes between species, which is enough to show common descent and relationships between the phyla, but it doesn’t say how they got that way — which is an unfortunate deficiency for a discipline that is all about how things get that way!
That’s what I’m concerned about. Right now, evo devo is far more devo than evo; we really need to absorb some more lessons from our colleagues in evolutionary biology. A more balanced evo devo would weight variation far more heavily, would be far more interested in diversity within and between populations, and would prioritize plasticity and environmental influences far more. If we did all that, it wouldn’t be a revolution — because it would embrace everything that is already in evolution — but would be what Pigliucci calls the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. What we’d have is a better appreciation of this well-known aphorism:
“Evolution is the control of development by ecology…”
Van Valen, 1973
That’s the holy trinity of biology: evolution, ecology, development. Our goal ought to be to bring all three together in one beautiful balance.
(Yeah, I stole the triquetra. We’ll use it far more wisely than the religious.)
I suspect that the story of my turn to atheism is less interesting than many. I did not have the dramatic crisis of faith that is so often described in the turn away from theism. This must stem from the fact that I began down this road as a small child.
My early experience with the church was much like the experience of most of the people I know. Sundays were a day where I was forced to wear uncomfortable clothes and go to a big place that smelled funny. It was full of old people who got very bent out of shape if you did not sit absolutely quietly for a whole hour! Then this other old guy in funny clothes would stand up in the front and drone on and on about whatever was on his mind. It was torture. The big payoff, though, was that if you behaved, you got to go out to eat afterward.
Despite myself, I still managed to pick up the basics. There was this guy who was really really powerful up in the sky somewhere who really really cared what you spent your time doing. There were all these stories about him, or more usually, about people interacting with him, that were just like the fairy tales my dad would tell when I was going to sleep. Stories about animals on a big boat and guys riding around in whale stomachs. For some reason, though, people seemed very concerned that you take these stories seriously and not the fairy stories–even though, I confess, I liked the fairy stories better. I was also aware that there were other kinds of people who believed the exact same stories but were not to be associated with if possible. They were called Baptists. Somehow, they believed the stories TOO much.
The turn didn’t come until one day in about the second or third grade. I was at the library in my school looking for a nice little book to hold me for the weekend. Usually, I would be on the lookout for some nice Garfield comics or perhaps some Clifford the Big Red Dog. That day, however, I found a story of creation that the Indians told. Honestly, I don’t remember the story or from which tribe it originated. It had to do with the Sun and the Moon getting together and making the Earth as their child… or something like that. It was a long time ago. In any case, what I remember most of all was my reaction to it. I thought, “How could anybody possibly believe that?!” That thought made me pause. “Wait a moment,” I pondered, “if that story sounds ridiculous, then what rational can I give to the story in the Bible? Why does everyone take THAT story so seriously?” I should point out that I grew up in the deep south. I had never met anyone who did not take the Bible seriously.
From there, it was a slow spiral into inevitability. From Christians, I got my first taste of what a horrible argument sounded like. I was in high school then. I said to some of the kids in Sunday school, “But you can’t really KNOW that the stories in the Bible are true.” I don’t remember what this was in response to, but they seemed shocked. Their reply was, “Yes, you can. It says so in the Bible. You just have to have faith!” I was shocked that anyone could say something so inane.
I remember sitting in church again, later on. I was bored. So, I decided to actually take a look at what all of the fuss was about. So, I picked up the Bible. They were liberally sprinkled about, after all. I suspected that this was to encourage us to read them. I started at the beginning. Genesis started out okay. I knew this story, after all. Then I came across one I hadn’t heard. It was about these two brothers named Cain and Able. They were the sons of Adam and Eve. Somehow, they had managed to get wives from somewhere. It didn’t really go into where exactly these females came from. I suspected I wasn’t supposed to ask. Anyway, they got together to buy presents for God. Able got something really nice that God liked. Cain gave something kind of mediocre. God was a bad liar and hurt Cain’s feelings, so Cain got all jealous and killed Able! WHOA!!! WHAT THE… Who reacts like THAT?! Talk about Christmas from hell! Anyway, the rest of the people (what other people?) were upset and figured they ought to punish Cain, but God said not to and gave him a NoNo mark instead. I guess that was supposed to have been sufficient, or maybe there weren’t enough people back then to start offing people for transgressions. I had thought this was supposed to be a GOOD book. It’s really not. I guess you could argue that it has really good parts, but then you don’t say it is a good book. You say it is a book that has its moments. Doesn’t really have the same ring to it. “The It-Has-Its-Moments Book.”
My senior year in high school, I decided that the only rational position to take on the whole affair, considering the sheer number of available religious beliefs and the unknowabilities of their various faith claims, was one of “I don’t know what the truth is, so I’ll just have to find out when I get there.” I was prepared to wait for death to take me so that I might find out the truth. The truth, I decided, was more important than wishful thinking. I later found out that this was called agnosticism, so that’s what I called myself.
It wasn’t until graduate school that I discovered the atheist community on YouTube. I read the books. I listened to the arguments. I reasoned that I was being unfair in my beliefs. I wasn’t really agnostic on the issue of whether or not Zeus or Thor were real. I didn’t believe for a minute that the Cargo Cults were a representation of reality. It was just the religion of my childhood that I was holding up a candle for. So, I abandoned it.
I am an atheist, because I recognize the value of the truth over faith. I recognize that the truth is not something that is landed on one day and held to vigorously. There is great value in bringing it slowly into focus as the facts come in. What you BELIEVE is the truth on one day may not in fact BE the truth. Evidence is the key.
I am an atheist, because I can find no reason not to be.
Have you ever had relatives give religious books to your kids as Christmas or birthday presents? And then you start thinking about sending their kids science books to teach them a lesson? Here’s another way to do it: send them The Intelligent Design Coloring Book. Then time how long it takes them to figure out it’s satire, rather than an admission of your conversion.
The only worry is that they might not ever figure it out.
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February 22, 2012 at 11:00 am 
PZ Myers 
…and this is a 
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