Measles Don’t Matter Because Math

Posted by syntherzukal on February 14, 2015
Posted in: Evolution. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Not too long ago I wrote about the silliness of all the hysteria surrounding the smidgen of ebola cases entering the United States. Of course, ebola’s gone from the news cycle (though Africans are still dying by the thousands, concerned Americans), but now hysteria has raised its ugly head again with the measles outbreak in California. A few dozens have been infected, all a lovely gift from Disneyland and the anti-vaccination fad.

Of course, everybody is looking for somebody to blame. The majority (all?) of the people who got sick were unvaccinated, as is the case in every measles outbreak for obvious reasons. Therefore, it’s those goddamn antivaxxers making everybody sick, right? It’s irrational child abuse not to vaccinate your kids, so let’s force them all to get their measles shots. Or maybe it’s the goddamn Mexicans, bringing their filthy third world diseases illegally across the Rio Grande. Let’s close the borders.

Whoa, pardner. First of all, those dirty foreigners apparently have higher vaccination rates than Americans. Second of all, before we go railing about how irrational the antivaxxers are, maybe we should step back and take a second look at that question.

Vaccination is a classic case of a Public Goods game. Vaccination obviously greatly reduces the risk of getting sick, and it also provides “herd immunity” — the more people around you have been vaccinated, the more protected you are even if you haven’t been vaccinated. There’s obviously a cost associated with being sick (as in you could possibly die), so it’s good to not get sick. But, as the antivaxxers remind us, there is also a potential cost to getting a vaccine, in that you might suffer a side-effect, also possibly killing you. Because of herd immunity, the benefits of vaccination are shared by the community, including the unvaccinated people who don’t accept the costs of vaccination.

Why it interests me is that there’s a clear partitioning of the benefit of vaccination between a private component — the near-complete immunity of vaccinated people to the disease — and the public component, the lower risk of being infected in a population containing many vaccinated people. Public goods that have that partitioning are what we call Black Queen functions, and they have the interesting property that they allow co-existence between “helpers” (in this case, vaccinated people) and “cheaters” (antivaxxers). In other words, it makes rational sense for a certain number of people to remain unvaccinated in society.

We can use some math to figure out what that number is. Now, let me preface this by saying I’m neither a mathematician nor an epidemiologist, so if this is all over-simplified or algebraically wrong, I apologize. I’ve definitely made a lot of simplifying assumptions for mathematical tractability. But here goes. Let’s define a system as containing three groups of people: iMmune people (M) who have been vaccinated and can’t get sick, Anti-vaxxers (A) who haven’t been vaccinated and can get sick, and iNfected people (N) who are currently sick. The whole population of people is thus P = M+A+N.

The population as a whole grows and shrinks by normal birth and death, with death being a constant function d of the current population size for each group, and births occurring at a certain maximum rate b that drops to 0 at a rate controlled by a constant, k. M‘s and A‘s grow and die at the same rate and always reproduce their own type. Absent disease, we can describe the normal disease-free growth of the population as a differential equation:

dP

Now let’s add in the expectations of the Black Queen evolutionary system. First of all, there’s a cost to vaccination. Some number of M‘s will suffer severe consequences from vaccination, resulting either in death or an inability to reproduce. Let’s say this takes place at rate s; then we can describe the dynamics of M with:

dM

Importantly, M‘s never get sick. A‘s, on the other hand, get sick at a rate determined by an infection constant i and the number of infected people — N‘s — in the community. N‘s on the other hand, either get better at rate r (thus reverting to A’s) or they die at rate m. Now we can describe the dynamics of A‘s and N‘s:

dA

dN

Lots of things can happen inside a model like this, but we’re only going to concern ourselves with its equilibrium point — or where everything stabilizes and quits moving around. We do that by setting the “dX/dt” side of the equations — the differential, which describes movement — to 0 and solving for the three variables representing our population members. If we assume that all the N‘s get over their illness reasonably quickly (relative to the long-term birth/death process of the population), we can say that r+m=1. Thus, the total of antivaxxers and infected people in the population at equilibrium becomes:

Ahat

Okay, let’s break this down. This equation describes the number of antivaxxers we expect if everybody is acting rationally — it balances the costs of infection with the costs of immunization exactly. This number is largely controlled by the danger associated with the vaccine — s, which makes the number go up — and i, or how infectious the disease is, which makes the number go down. To put it in human terms, it makes sense not to get the vaccine if you see more people having side effects to the vaccine than you see people getting sick with measles.

(Note that this is a generic problem with preventive measures: if they work, it starts to seem like they’re useless, because the thing they prevent becomes so rare as to seem inconsequential. A very similar argument could be made about the value of individually-owned firearms to society: nobody in Somalia would argue about the value of owning a rifle, but in whitebread suburbia — suffused with armed cops lurking in the wings — guns seem superfluous.)

Let’s plug in some real numbers. As best I can tell, the probability of having a severe side effect from the measles vaccine is about 1 in a million, but let’s go crazy nuts and say it’s 100 times that high, and 1 in 10,000 people who get immunized are either killed or sterilized by the measles shot. Since you only need one shot in a whole lifetime (let’s call that 50 years), the rate constant s works out to 0.000002 per year. The death rate for people infected with measles is also quite low — roughly 2 in 1000 in the developed world — so m = 0.002. Finally, the infection rate is very high, so let’s set i = 0.95, representing a 95% chance of getting sick if you’re surrounded by sick people. With these values, the total number of antivaxxers and infected people supported by the system is: 1 per square mile. In fact, assuming s is very small, the abundance of antivaxxers reduces to 1/i, entirely dictated by the likelihood of being infected when you encounter a sick person.

Interestingly, this value doesn’t change if we raise or lower the total population size, although we can calculate how population size affects the proportion of the infection pool to the total population. The algebra is a little hairier but eventually you get:

Mhat

So, the proportion of cheaters goes down as k (i.e. population size) goes up — meaning it’s more likely you’ll see the use of vaccinations when you’re in a big city with lots of people than out in the country by yourself. Makes sense, no? If we plug some numbers into this equation — b = 0.003 per month, d = 0.0007 per month, and k= 1000 people per square mile — we arrive at an equilibrium proportion of cheaters of about 0.03%. In the United States, that would work out to about 90,000 people.

We’re clearly not at this equilibrium point now — there are way more antivaxxers than that. It’s possible that right now, the number of N‘s is so low and health care is so effective at isolating illness (lowering i) that it’s really hard to get sick. Presumably, if the antivaxxer fad continues, the prevalence of measles will increase until more and more A‘s get sick, eventually causing their numbers to start to drop towards a stable equilibrium.

I know people like to attribute “insanity” to movements like antivaccination. However, I suspect that antivaxxers (and other conspiracy theorists) are normally rational people with mistaken beliefs. When confronted with obvious evidence in the form of sick antivaxxers, they’ll change their tune. But regardless, the equations suggest that the risk even to them is low, and to those of us who are vaccinated, the risk is extremely, vanishingly low.

We COULD force the antivaxxers to get shots. This would save a very very small number of lives. It would also cost a fortune and would involve using force to shoot drugs into people, which seems exceedingly creepy to me. Before I’m willing to sign on to a policy like that, you’ll have to show me a disease with a much higher m than measles. Till then, there are more important things to spend our money fighting.

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ASD: Not a Very Nice Guy

Posted by syntherzukal on February 1, 2015
Posted in: Academia, Politics. Leave a comment

Apparently I’m good at making people angry. A few weeks ago, a person for whom I have tons of respect sent me an email warning me that some of my writings in this blog — posts about religion and politics — have really offended some people. This individual’s concerns were couched in terms of the effects the blog might have on my career: my views might alienate people, potentially keeping them from wanting to work with me. However, and maybe it’s just me being paranoid, there was also a subtext to the email that maybe my blog was giving off cooties that could harm people who are connected with me professionally, and make them need to distance themselves from me.

I realize that I say some pretty unalloyed things on here, but I wonder what in particular sets me beyond the pale? True, I have called Richard Dawkins an insufferable douche on multiple occassions, but that’s a pretty common opinion both in and out of academia. I’ve singled out a few others by name that I believe are “part of the problem” when it comes to the politicization of evolutionary theory. I’m generally ornery, and use a lot of curse words. But where’s the unacceptable over-the-topness that might make my colleagues want to wash their hands of me?

In re-reading my posts, perhaps the most aggressive word I use, and use often, is my referring to Christians as “Christers”. I use that word because about half of my posts could be read as apologies for Christian fundamentalism, and I want to be as clear as I can be that I’m not a Christian, nor do I actively support their wrong, discriminatory, and superstitious behaviors. I look at fundie Christians the way I look at ugly endangered species; they have a right to exist in the habitat where they’ve always been, and however obnoxious they may appear, our world is richer for their presence. That, and in the modern world, particularly in the circles I move in, they are weak, and much of what is said about them strikes me as cruel bullying unworthy of serious people. But while I’m skewering the antireligious leftists who abuse them, I have to also skewer the Christers with a little name-calling. Fair and balanced, mon ami.

So… I’m coarse, I curse a lot, I call people names and say things that aren’t polite. I thought I had been pretty good about keeping this blog in an obviously exaggerated persona. I think my angry backwoods metalhead shtick is pretty funny, but I guess I’m not as amusing as I thought.

I admit to being totally floored by this email from my colleague. I absolutely didn’t see it coming, and it frankly crushed me that this person might look askance on me for speaking my mind. I remember feeling the same way when, shortly after 9/11/01, my parents said some things that made me feel like a cold-blooded traitor for my view that the US provoked the attacks and our moronic foreign policy was as much to blame as the terrorists themselves. In both cases, I felt torn between unpopular (but correct) viewpoints and my desire to have the respect of the people closest to me.

I think the most likely source of tension that this blog generates is from my criticism of many members of my profession — academic scientists — for their outspoken left-wing partisanship and hatred of religion. The individual who wrote the email to me kindly pointed out that in real life I’m very personable. Like most people, I have the common decency not to talk lightly about politics and religion in public. In most workplace environments these topics don’t come up much because nobody wants a fight. Unfortunately, academia is so monolithically leftist that there’s no reason for partisans not to hawk up their diatribes on the job. Who’s gonna fight when everybody already agrees? People freely bring up politics and religion all the goddamn time at work. They talk about how awesome their leftist altruism is; they pat each other on the back about how progressive they are for rejecting the superstitions and prejudices of the old world.

An anecdote: I spent my (recent) 40th birthday at a scientific meeting. That night, we went out to eat as a group, and I found myself sitting next to an imminent scientist, with several other senior people nearby: I was by far the most junior person there. The man sitting next to me went into a diatribe about how people who disagree with President Obama are racists. Not because he murders American children, or steals my money and uses it to violate my civil liberties — I don’t like him because he’s black. Everybody within earshot vocally agreed with him, even when he piled on and got more and more extreme and insulting to whites and Republicans. Now, if anybody in any other profession had said such a thing at a business dinner, he would have had to deal with at least a handful of angry retorts. But in science? Everybody agrees, so you can be as extreme and brutal as you want and nothing happens. Poe’s law was made for this world.

Living like that — constantly biting your tongue when people are unknowingly mocking you right in front of your face, day in and day out — is exceedingly frustrating. I could engage them in debate, but a lifetime of experience arguing with leftists (and Christers, for that matter) suggests that they would just gang up on me and life would be even more uncomfortable for me afterwards. So I vent on the blog.

But beyond just venting, I believe it’s important to say the things I say on ASD, if for no other reason than to let other people like me know they aren’t alone. Increasingly we try to think about who we’re pushing away from science. For instance, we struggle to figure out why women and some racial minorities remain underrepresented in science despite decades of efforts to increase their numbers. One prevailing idea is that the culture of science causes many such people to feel uncomfortable, unwanted, or unhappy amongst us, such that they tend to stay away. Some people have the single-minded focus to say to hell with feeling bad, and these people often succeed in science. But most people have the sense to move away from environments that make them feel like crap.

Well honey, let me tell ya, science culture is openly hostile to people with even vaguely traditional worldviews. Conservatives, libertarians, the religious, one-earner families, people who aren’t convinced Europeans are the cancer of world history, and anyone else who disagrees with the leftist Weltanschauung are often going to feel alienated and isolated in this world. If we’re trying not to drive people away from science, how can we not take notice of this mistreatment of 42% of the US population?

The leftist authorities want to remind us how important diversity is — people from different backgrounds bring different viewpoints to a project. Can the same thing not be said about political temperaments? There’s as much evidence that politics are genetically hard-wired as there is that, say, sexual preference is hard-wired. When prominent evolutionary biologists fill there supposedly-about-science blogs with dipshit nonsense like marking out “God” on the backs of dollar bills, how can we even pretend we aren’t systematically excluding even the mildly religious from science? This sort of thing isn’t an intellectual debate about the merits of faith — it’s vile, unadulterated mockery, and it’s literally everywhere in my profession.

I can’t help but note that the individual who wrote me this email about how ASD is dangerously over the top doesn’t mind linking to the aforementioned “evolution” blog.

In deference to my career I’ve removed links to this blog from anything connected to my real world persona (not that it would be that hard to figure out who I am). I’ve also killed anything that links directly to people I’ve worked with over the years: I can’t expect others to choose to make this fight with me, and don’t want to force them to make a choice between working with me and disavowing my politics. But I’m not going to shut up, and if anything this email has solidified the nascent focus of this blog. Women and minorities have tons of advocates online. ASD will be the voice of the right-wing minority in academia, and the legions of traditionalist people driven away from our profession by rampant discrimination and mistreatment.

Plus music reviews.

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We Don’t Need No (More) Education

Posted by syntherzukal on January 25, 2015
Posted in: Economics, Evolution, Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

OMG, President Obama is gonna give free college to everybody! Poor kids everywhere, rejoice, a high-paying tech job is right around the corner! How could anybody be against this?!!? Bless his sweet Hawai’ian heart, let’s just forget about the murders and the civil rights violations and all the fascist spying bullshit and just hire him on for a 3rd term, Putin style!

… despite being a college educator himself, ASD is very skeptical about the utility of this plan.

Ask yourself this… Do we really need more education? Specifically, what do you get out of community college (CC) that you couldn’t get out of high school?

Some fields are very specialized and require long-term exposure to a vast body of knowledge and previous practice to master. Think engineering, law, medicine, academic research. Even if you could squeeze the basics of these fields into high school, you’d still need some years immersed in the field’s culture before you truly got it. It’s also probably good for the role models of our society — the doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, whatever — to have a broad liberal arts education underlying their specialized knowledge, since they help preserve, transmit, and define our culture.

CC doesn’t prepare anyone for this kind of job: it’s purely vocational. You get degrees in things like programming, network management, and accounting. While those are all laudable skills, do you really need 14 years of education to do them? I humbly submit that you do not.

A couple decades ago vocational training came on-the-job. You got hired knowing nothing but the basics (reading, writing, ‘rithmetic), and within a month or so you learned whatever the company wanted. However, at some point it changed so that to get that same job, you had to spend 2+ years of your life sitting in a CC classroom, probably while you worked at Wal-Mart, just to get in the door. There’s a large opportunity cost in spending two years in college. You’re not building career experience; you’re spending money, not making it; you’re making no useful business connections; you’re broke, so you’re probably not getting married and having kids, either.

The President says he wants to improve workforce preparedness in the US and cut education debt. He could push high schools to teach more useful skills, thus reducing the number of people who have to go to college at all. For instance, there’s a big movement (which I wholeheartedly endorse) to teach basic computer programming to middle and even grade school kids, thus lifting the myth that you need two semesters of calculus before you can understand a command prompt. Probably the best jobs you can get with CC are IT jobs, but if kids came out of high school knowing how to code… just that one simple policy, which would cost virtually nothing, would revolutionize the American workforce.

If CC isn’t needed to learn how to do a job, and the skills it teaches are more economically taught in high school, then what’s the point of going? As ASD is wont to do, let’s take a run at this question using evolutionary theory.

Think about the job market as a Malthusian system: more people want good jobs than there are good jobs, so competition is high. As we’ve already covered above, getting a job usually doesn’t require already knowing how to do that job. What determines whether you get it is: do you look more competent on paper and at the job interview than the other people applying for the job?

Thus, fitness in the job market — how well you compete — is about looking better to the hiring committee. Your resume — since they see it before they meet you — is probably the most important element of fitness. What you need to outcompete your conspecifics is more lines on your resume. The best lines are work experience, but when you’re a noob fresh out of high school, you can pay for lines by going to college.

In Granddad’s day, not everyone had a high school diploma, so if you had one you were competitive. Once 12 years of free education became a human right, you needed some college to get a job. These days some job markets are so glutted that you need grad school to be competitive. This is painfully obvious to anybody in science grad school: we compete like starving pit bulls to produce resumes solid enough to get us into good postdoc labs, with the hope that someday we might look good enough to get an entry-level academic job.

The longer resume competition continues, the more impressive the resume has to be to get the same job. In evolution, we call this a Red Queen race. The name comes from the Red Queen Hypothesis, originally proposed by Leigh Van Valen to explain the apparently constant probability of a species going extinct in a given time period. Briefly, the hypothesis says that a species’ environment is constantly deteriorating because of the evolutionary improvement of the species’ competitors. When your competitor adapts, you need to get an even better adaptation or risk going extinct, producing a never-ending evolutionary arms race — the Red Queen race. The analogy comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which the Red Queen from a chess set has to run faster and faster just to stay where she is.

Red Queen races are great for stimulating rapid evolution, and as such they can be good for a species in the long run. In the short term, though, the race is wasteful: the definition of competition is that both competitors lose, but one loses more than the other. Indeed, some Red Queen races don’t improve a species’ lot at all, and just elaborate pointless vanity characteristics. Consider the case of the peacock’s feathers, which are very useful for competing for mates against other peacocks but probably actually increase the likelihood of getting caught and eaten by predators. That’s a pretty good descriptor of resume competition, methinks, and one might argue that government intervention should be directed toward avoiding such useless frilleries. On the contrary, the President’s plan actually worsens the Red Queen race: now literally everybody will have a CC degree, which will make them completely useless for getting a good job.

The Red Queen race makes us addicts to higher education: we can’t jump off the merry-go-round without killing our competitiveness. Why would government support such a thing? I’m sure it has nothing to do with education being a big business, and subsidizing it lets the bigwig politicos sink their fangs into it and vampirize it to further enrich themselves. I’m also sure such a motive has nothing to do with government’s obsession with health insurance or real estate or oil — all markets that have been manipulated just enough by government to encourage addiction, and to allow the politically connected to take profits.

The President’s CC plan is thus useless for improving the workforce and reducing debt. In fact, it will probably do the opposite by reducing the number of years of work a person can do in their lifetime, and by forcing more people to get 4-year degrees to remain competitive. Worse, the President says he’s going to tax 529 college savings plans to pay for the program. I’m sure the good childless leftists think only the super-rich use 529’s, but that’s stupid — rich people pay for education out of pocket, but marginal middle-class families need investments to pay for the Red Queen-inflated tuition their kids need to get jobs. As usual, the upper-crust left pinches the middle class to enrich themselves, using poor people as an excuse.

The President’s plan really is a wonderful bit of left-wing politicking, though. It sounds really great and inspiring — let’s uplift the poor with the light of education! But at the same time it increases the share of the population that’s in debt, out of work, alone, and miserable, thus inflating the voter roles with Democrats. Gold, man!

Dear readers: if you’re enjoying reading my rants, consider sharing or re-tweeting! ASD needs more cultists.

God, Schmod: ASD‘s Obligate Charlie Hebdo Rant

Posted by syntherzukal on January 18, 2015
Posted in: Politics, Religion. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

So, crazy muslims are killing people again. Everywhere I see good modern atheists lamenting the barbarism of religion. “Remember that time that radical atheists killed all those people? Me neither,” they say. If people would just see the light of reason and give up these silly caveman superstitions, all of this violence would go away.

Point one: Radical atheists have killed WAY more people than radical muslims.

Here are a few examples:

  1. Communism is to its very core antireligious. “The opiate of the masses” and all that. Even disregarding the massive famines, plausibly caused by characteristic leftist innumeracy rather than genocidal malice, communists murdered 38 million people in the 20th century. If we want to compare apples to apples, let’s just think about all the Commie bombers and terrorists active in the 60’s and 70’s in Europe, like the Red Brigades.
  2. The French Revolution abolished Christianity and set about enacting the destruction of Catholicism in that country. In less than a year, the Reign of Terror enacted by the revolutionaries claimed 40,000 lives, including some 2,000 Catholic clergy.
  3. In a similar vein, the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century resulted in a regime that despised the Catholics. The non-religious Plutarco Calles was “president” of Mexico in the 20’s, during which time thousands of priests were executed and literal wars were fought between Calles’ regime and the overwhelmingly Catholic population of Mexico.

This isn’t meant to suggest that atheism prompts mass murder; it’s just to make the point that atheists aren’t exactly immune to radicalism and extreme violence.

Rather than blaming religion, perhaps we should blame ideology. The notion that any of our airy philosophies are worth more than actual human lives may be the only truly evil thing that exists.

Point two: Even if you eliminated religion from the picture entirely, Arabs in France would still be pissed off and violent.

Obviously it doesn’t fit with the proper multicultural worldview, but I’m convinced that the only way Arabs and French will really get along is if it becomes impossible to tell them apart. I would say the same thing about any other pairing of ethnic groups, in any other country, anywhere in this world or any other one.

I’m biased in this thinking by my training as an ecologist and an evolutionary biologist. It’s clear that if you put two populations in the same environment, competing over the same resources, you’re going to end up with only one population after not too long. Either the two will blend together, or one will outperform and supplant the other. There are ways around this, but those are the two most likely outcomes.

Not only is conflict guaranteed between two distinct populations in the same environment, but there are good reasons to suspect that the conflict will usually favor the resident population over the immigrant. This is especially true when you have organisms that extensively engineer their environments or depend on complicated social arrangements — both things that are important in human societies. Culture has an infrastructure — all the buildings and art and language and even modes of transportation that accumulate through the industry of a people acting in a place for many lifetimes. Every last bit of that infrastructure is designed by and for the resident group. Whatever the resident’s peculiar strengths are, you can bet those will be enhanced and emphasized by that cultural infrastructure. Moreover, you can pretty well guarantee that that infrastructure has been adapted specifically to give the residents an edge over their nearest neighbors, who incidentally are also the most likely to immigrate.

On a “level playing field” then, the residents will usually win out over the immigrants. We can try to make things more equitable by giving the immigrants a ‘leg up’ or by hamstringing the residents in various ways — but even then, all those policies will be designed by the residents, using the resident’s cultural infrastructure, and will still usually wind up screwing the immigrants. The only way those poor bastards can come out ahead is either to conquer the residents or to marry them and cease to exist as a distinct ethnicity.

Because we believe so strongly in multiculturalism, we are basically incapable of thinking about this UNTIL the situation gets so out of hand that heads are being lopped off. So we encourage immigration, and inevitably the immigrants figure out that the game is inherently stacked against them forever, no matter what anybody does. This results in very pissed off people, often in large numbers.

Pissed off immigrants might be forgiven for lashing out at the resident population, who is in fact the proximal cause of their problems. Even if the residents welcome the immigrants, their very existence restricts the success of the immigrant population.

And how do pissed off poor people fight the resident authority? Do they call up the reserves and field their tank armies? Do they whip up votes in the legislature and sink billions into lobbying for their interests?

No, they use terrorism. It’s the only weapon they have. Acting surprised when poor immigrants blow up soft targets is like acting surprised when a dog bites you after you poke him in the eye. What did you think he was gonna do, call the cops?

Terrorism is the curse of a globalized humanity, where people move around so much that every moderately successful country has large populations of failing immigrants growing progressively more radical and angry. There are no good solutions to this situation, but one might predict that ethnic nationalism in Europe and elsewhere will continue to grow in popularity, both as a defense mechanism for immigrants and a solidarity movement for residents.

Manmade Reefs and Other Biomechanical Fantasies

Posted by syntherzukal on January 14, 2015
Posted in: Economics, Evolution. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

I just read an editorial in PNAS asking whether or not decommissioned oil rigs should be converted to artificial reefs. A very intriguing study was recently published by Claisse and others showing that oil rigs were remarkably productive habitats, similar in many ways to natural reefs but in fact outperforming their natural counterparts in most metrics. This study impressed me because it completely contradicts my prejudices about oil rigs as sites of terrifying environmental decay. Indeed, some part of my brain finds it plausible that oil rigs might be capable of ripping holes in the spacetime continuum and releasing arcane beings best left forgotten.

I’ve thought about the value of artificial reefs several times in the past. When I took the Pearl Harbor tour in Honolulu, I was distracted from the history by the beautiful reef flora and fauna that had colonized the sunken ships.

No doubt, the Navy gets the best cemeteries.

Similarly, when they demolished the old Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, SC, I remember speculating about how its steel bones would be a wonderful substrate for oysters in an area that was increasingly too muddy for them to grow (alas, apparently the reef plans were ultimately scuttled for financial reasons). In both of these cases from some of my favorite places in the world, manmade structures provide critical habitat for benthic (seafloor-dwelling) organisms that often have trouble finding places that are solid enough for them to attach.

The editorial strikes a cautionary tone, and says that we shouldn’t necessarily jump the gun about using rigs as reefs. There are obviously many other variables to consider, some of them ecological, some of them financial, most involving both of those factors. Nevertheless, I find the notion of wedding technology with nature aesthetically delightful. Chalk this up with garden-topped skyscrapers, living hydrogen fuel cells, and food trucks that run on their own waste cooking oil. It’s irrational to think we can restrict human expansion to save the environment, but it’s not crazy to imagine a green future where nature adapts to and incorporates our technologies. Innovation, evolution, and the innate human love of beauty can provide as many solutions as dirigiste environmental policies to the conflicts between the technological and natural worlds.

Dear Alabama: Stop Making It Easy For Them!

Posted by syntherzukal on January 9, 2015
Posted in: Evolution, Religion. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

Apparently the wonderful state of Alabama is attempting to update its science education standards to meet 19th 21st century standards. Toward this end, the Alabama Department of Education has paid a panel of experts to draft a document outlining these standards, indicating what students at each level, K-12, are expected to understand, as well as strategies for teachers to move them towards these achievement goals.

Now, I realize I’m biased, but the first thing I looked for was whether or not these poobahs included evolution in their curriculum. So, I searched the document for the word, “evolution”. It turned up only 3 times — which, you might say, is 3 times more than one would expect in Alabama, so yay. Unfortunately, all 3 mentions were in a single paragraph on page 6 (of 80-something), and were part of a mealy-mouthed and weasely attempt to dodge responsibility for letting Christer extremists impoverish education for the whole state:

“The theory of evolution by natural selection, a theory included in this document, states that natural selection provides the basis for the modern scientific explanation for the diversity of living things. Since natural selection has been observed to play a role in influencing small changes in a population, it is assumed, based on the study of artifacts, that it produces large changes, even though this has not been directly observed. Because of its importance and implications, students should understand the nature of evolutionary theories. They should learn to make distinctions among the multiple meanings of evolution, to distinguish between observations and assumptions used to draw conclusions, and to wrestle with the unanswered questions and unresolved problems still faced by evolutionary theory.”

Now, you might think from reading this paragraph that the intention was to salve the wrath of the Christers against future mentions of evolution in the curriculum. However, they never bring it up again. To their credit, evolutionary principles are brought up in many places in the document, under the heading of “heredity” or maybe “unity and diversity”. They even talk about the role of mutations in producing long-term changes in populations. From the 7th-grade standards:

“Construct an explanation from evidence to describe how genetic mutations result in harmful, beneficial, or neutral effects to the structure and function of an organism.”

So that pretty much defines evolution, huh? SO CALL IT BY ITS NAME, YOU FUCKING COWARDS.

I understand what these people are doing. They’re trying to get as much good science into this document as they can without triggering a full-court press from the backwoods hellfire revivalists that could endanger much more than just evolution in the curriculum. But coddling those people is causing serious harm to Alabama’s students — two of whom happen to be my F1’s.

You see, evolution isn’t some abstract conjecture about the origin of life or human beings or whatever. It directly affects our health in the form of the ongoing evolution of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria. But more than that, evolutionary theory and the hard math that underlies it forms the basis for all sorts of practical, presumably religiously uncontroversial things. It’s used by computer scientists and mathematicians to solve intractable problems. Engineers use it to improve mechanical designs and think outside of the boxes that we’ve made for ourselves over the centuries. Doctors use it to figure out how to tailor medicine to different populations of people with different biologies.

Evolution permeates EVERY ASPECT of modern technology and science.

In the introduction to the document by Thomas Bice, the State Superintendent of Education, we are told:

“In addition, today’s workforce depends on graduates who are prepared with necessary scientific and technological skills to address these issues. Our newly developed science standards affirm the importance of science literacy for all students.”

You can’t achieve that goal if you don’t call evolution evolution, dude. Don’t even pretend you care about these things if you can’t stand up to the jerks that have been making this state a laughing stock for a hundred years.

My desire here is simple. I want this document revised to do what the page 6 preface says: to teach evolution politely, without suggesting you “have to believe it” or whatever. My readers know that I often support the rights of Christers to be Christers and here is no different. All I ask is the word “evolution” to appear throughout this document, wherever the writers are frakking talking about evolution.

The Standards document is still in public review. Feel free to add your two cents — but try to be civil about it; don’t give the Christers any more ammunition than they already have.

Dear readers: if you’re enjoying reading my rants, consider sharing or re-tweeting! ASD needs more cultists.

Let’s Do Our Best To Make Sure Only Democrats Believe In Evolution

Posted by syntherzukal on December 1, 2014
Posted in: Academia, Evolution, Politics, Religion. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

I’ve written before about why so many people don’t believe in evolution: basically, obscure scientific truths aren’t as important to most people’s lives as their social contacts and political groupings. In a society where the political divide largely pits the faithful against the profane, it would be insane for anyone not directly involved in the scientific process to value evolutionary theory over, you know, not getting screwed by a government controlled by your enemies.

So, simple self-interest strongly favors rejecting evolution when your political enemies use it as a battle standard. The actual facts don’t matter! When I saw the title of this blog post by popular evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne (“You can’t get Americans to accept evolution by giving them the facts”) I was excited that he might have come up with a similar notion. I mean, the evolution of disbelief in evolution, what an obvious thing, right?

Then I read Coyne’s post, and, masochistically, a few other posts on his blog. By the time I was done, I was almost persuaded to stop accepting evolution myself (good job, dude). Fortunately, I came to my senses, but I did realize that there might be another motivation, maybe even stronger than self-interest, for rejecting evolution.

You see, there’s a real, deep-down satisfaction that some of us get from mocking self-righteous twats and making them angry. There’s just something about the sanctimonious Good Guy club that makes me want to kick people in the balls and do anything I can do to spite them and make them miserable. And dear gods, the academic left has sanctimony to spare.

My favorite part of the post is the bit where we hear about how religion kills kids because of “faith-based medicine” and how, if we could just kill off religion, people would figure out how awesome abortions and homosexuality are. Seriously, an evolutionary biologist stated this. How do these guys not see the hilarity of this position? How do they not understand that they’re just as guilty of turning evolution into a political football as the nutballs that believe the earth is 10,000 years old?

Whatever, Coyne is a solid scientist, and nothing I say here about his positions on religion should be construed as disrespectful of his contributions to the field. Unlike Dawkins, he’s done actual science in the 21st century. He’d probably be able to do a lot more if he quit obsessing about religion. But, like Dawkins, he probably gets so much positive feedback from the choir of online left wing atheistic sycophants that he literally has no idea how much damage this passive aggressive, self-satisfied bullshit does to the acceptance of evolutionary biology by the American public.