What is Coming

Congratulations, America. You elected a racist, sexist, admitted sexual assaulter, and a petty, vindictive, con man and pathological liar to the highest office in the land. You elected a man who claims to be a Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third to the 2nd highest office (an American didn't even figure in the list). I think we have seen enough of D***** T**** and Mike Pence to know what is coming.

It is not pretty.

Here are my predictions. After eight or (hopefully) four years from now, you can see how many I got right. I hope to be wrong on all of them, but I don't think so.

1. Attacks on minorities of all kinds will go through the roof compared to previous years. I expect the rise of the Klan, neo-Nazis, and similar vigilante organizations. Jews, Muslims, black people, gay people, Latinos: all will be targets. Non-white and non-Christian students will be harassed in schools. Muslims will be attacked in the streets. At first it will be minor, like hijabs being pulled off, and orthodox Jews being beaten up. But the Justice Department will respond only tepidly to such attacks. There will be no effort at all to monitor the far Right. This stuff has been bubbling just below the surface for years (remember Alan Berg?) and now it will achieve legitimacy, or at least not outright disapproval, under the new president.

2. The full force of the federal government will be brought against critics. At first this will be in minor ways: direct criticism from the president via twitter, or reporters being shut out of press conferences. However, it will quickly escalate once Kim Jong T**** takes office. Reporters will be harassed and attacked. We will see the IRS used as a routine tool to harass and investigate individual critics and larger organizations, such as the ACLU and the FFRF. Existing tax exemptions will be removed for these groups. We will see passports of critics being denied renewal, or being confiscated at the border. We will see US citizens and (particularly) permanent residents denied re-entry into the country on bogus grounds. US citizens living abroad will be easy targets because they have little or no representation; the tax treaties with other countries can be abrogated and such citizens will end up paying double taxes. Kim Jong T**** has shown to be petty and vindictive and to hold a grudge for decades (remember Rosie O'Donnell)? Now he has the power to get revenge.

3. Intellectuals -- always a target of authoritarians -- will come under attack. At first it will be minor things, like withholding federal funds from institutions who employ intellectuals disliked by the administration. Later, it will progress to outright harassment through tax law changes and immigration. Permanent residents will have their right to stay revoked. Perhaps some people will be jailed under bogus terrorism charges for their controversial opinions. The Department of Education will be destroyed. There will be a renewed push for creationism, intelligent design, denial of human-caused global warming, and other crackpot theories in the public school curriculum. Educational institutions will suffer because excellent people from other countries will not want to come to the US where they might be targets. Graduate study will suffer. Pure research will suffer. NSF priorities will be shifted to things like exploration and exploitation of fossil fuels. Federal funding for research into alternative energy sources will dry up.

4. The Federal government will be turned into a money machine for Trump and his cronies. Once a grifter, always a grifter. Kim Jong T*** and his millionaire and billionaire friends will get huge tax cuts, while taxes for the poor and lower middle class will go up. The deficit will skyrocket. Friends of Kim Jong T**** will amass huge fortunes because of tax law changes and biased infrastructure allocation, while all critics will be shut out of participation. Cities traditionally run by Democrats will get shut out of funding for infrastructure projects.

5. Extremists will be appointed to the Supreme Court. They will make rulings that will significantly reduce access to abortion. Religion will be allowed as an excuse to disobey almost any law (as long as you are white). Advocating creationism will be allowed and even encouraged in public schools. Textbooks will be altered to remove discussion of evolution. Voting rights will be under attack, with bogus allegations of fraud as the justification. Redistricting will occur and strongly favor Republicans.

6. Blacks, Jews, Muslims, and gays will not sit by silently as these changes occur. I predict the rise of radical groups, much like the Black Panthers of the 1960's, that will retaliate in increasingly violent ways. There will be more street protests and violence. If you thought Black Lives Matter protests were violent (they were not, as a rule), you ain't seen nothing yet. Probably there will be bombings by groups like these. The need for crackdowns on these groups will be used by Kim Jong T**** as excuses to violate civil liberties. New intrusive laws allowing surveillance will be passed.

7. Finally, and this is the least likely (but the warning signs are all there), the US will degenerate into a fascist dictatorship, perhaps after some sort of Reichstag incident, with Kim Jong T**** as supreme leader. He will start by having the Republican-controlled Congress vote him some emergency powers. In an ironic reversal, the only country in Europe (after Marine Le Pen is elected) that will stand against Kim Jong T**** and stand for freedom and democracy will be Germany. They remember the last fascist dictator to take power and what happened.

I don't want any of these things to happen, but I predict many of them will.

For the moment, Canada is safe. Probably there will be an exodus of intellectuals and minorities from the US to Canada rivalling the Vietnam war days. But with the world's most powerful country becoming the fascist dictatorship next door, I don't know how long that safety can last.

Steve Goodman Sings About the Cubs

When I lived in Chicago, I often went to folk clubs on the North Side (now mostly gone) -- Holstein's, for example. There I got to hear some of my favorite folksingers, including Steve Goodman and Michael Peter Smith. Once I even got to sit next to Steve at the bar and have a chat with him.

Here are Steve's two famous songs about the Cubs. He tried to get "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" accepted as the Cubs official song, but for obvious reasons, it was not taken. So then he wrote "Go Cubs Go", which eventually became the unofficial Cubs anthem, played after every win.

Steve Goodman died of cancer in 1984. We miss you, Steve.

Psychology Experiment: How Does the Human Brain Unscramble Words?

Oddly enough, many neuroscientists and psychologists don't appreciate that insights from the study of algorithms and the theory of computation are very relevant to understanding the brain and how it accomplishes what it does.

Here's an example. Consider the humble jumble, a game involving scrambled words that's been around for over 60 years. Players get words of length 5 or 6 and have to unscramble them. How, exactly, does the brain do that? And why are some words harder than others to unscramble?

Computer scientists will instantly think of two different algorithms. The obvious algorithm, given a word of length n, takes about n! log D time, where D is the size of the dictionary. To accomplish this, try all n! permutations and look each up using binary search in the dictionary, which we have presorted in alphabetical order.

A less obvious but much faster algorithm is the following: first, sort each word in the dictionary, putting the letters in each word in alphabetical order. Then sort these words relative to each other in alphabetical order, together with the original unscrambled version. Once this preprocessing is done, to unscramble a word, rewrite its letters in alphabetical order and look up this reordered word in our reordered dictionary, using binary search. This takes about (n log n) + log D time, which is enormously faster.

With other techniques, such as hashing, we could even be faster.

I doubt very much the brain could be using this second algorithm. That's because we probably don't have access to all the words that we know in any kind of sorted list. So probably some variant of the first algorithm is being used. Our brains probably speed things up a bit by focusing on word combinations, such as digrams and trigrams (two- and three-letter word combinations), that are common, instead of uncommon ones. Thus, I would expect that unscrambling length-n words with distinct letters would, on average, require time that grows something like (n/c)! for some constant c.

We could actually test this with a psychology experiment. I searched the psychological literature using a database, but found no experiments testing this idea. Are there any takers?

Update: to address the issue of whether the brain could have "random access" to a dictionary of words, we could ask subjects to produce what they think the first English word that lexicographically follows a given word is. This is likely to be difficult for people, but it is very easy for computers. For example, what do you think the first word after "enzymology" is?

Psychology Experiment: How Does the Human Brain Unscramble Words?

Oddly enough, many neuroscientists and psychologists don't appreciate that insights from the study of algorithms and the theory of computation are very relevant to understanding the brain and how it accomplishes what it does.

Here's an example. Consider the humble jumble, a game involving scrambled words that's been around for over 60 years. Players get words of length 5 or 6 and have to unscramble them. How, exactly, does the brain do that? And why are some words harder than others to unscramble?

Computer scientists will instantly think of two different algorithms. The obvious algorithm, given a word of length n, takes about n! log D time, where D is the size of the dictionary. To accomplish this, try all n! permutations and look each up using binary search in the dictionary, which we have presorted in alphabetical order.

A less obvious but much faster algorithm is the following: first, sort each word in the dictionary, putting the letters in each word in alphabetical order. Then sort these words relative to each other in alphabetical order, together with the original unscrambled version. Once this preprocessing is done, to unscramble a word, rewrite its letters in alphabetical order and look up this reordered word in our reordered dictionary, using binary search. This takes about (n log n) + log D time, which is enormously faster.

With other techniques, such as hashing, we could even be faster.

I doubt very much the brain could be using this second algorithm. That's because we probably don't have access to all the words that we know in any kind of sorted list. So probably some variant of the first algorithm is being used. Our brains probably speed things up a bit by focusing on word combinations, such as digrams and trigrams (two- and three-letter word combinations), that are common, instead of uncommon ones. Thus, I would expect that unscrambling length-n words with distinct letters would, on average, require time that grows something like (n/c)! for some constant c.

We could actually test this with a psychology experiment. I searched the psychological literature using a database, but found no experiments testing this idea. Are there any takers?

Local Pastor Wants More Internet Censorship

When you hear that a local parent wants more Internet censorship in schools, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that somewhere there's fundamentalist religion lurking behind as a driving force.

Take a look at this website, which claims it wants to "keep Waterloo region schools safe". Click on "who we are", and you get "We are parents who would like WRDSB to use Internet technology more responsibly." But who's behind it?

You probably wouldn't know unless you read the local paper, because there doesn't seem to be any information on the group's own website. But in the Record you learn that the group is really Jacob Reaume, a "pastor and father". That's this guy, pastor at the "Harvest Bible Chapel" and educated (big surprise!) at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

The good pastor wants to censor Youtube in schools. But what's missing is any actual evidence that Youtube poses any threat to the safety of Waterloo Region students.

It's a shame that fundamentalists are not content with controlling the education of their own children. They want to control the way everyone else's children are educated, too.

For Good People to Do Evil, that Requires....

Steven Weinberg famously said, "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil---that takes religion."

Keep Weinberg's quote in mind when you read this appalling story of how a British Columbia man was forced to endure agony rather than get a physician-assisted death as he requested.

Why was he forced to do this? Because his hospital was a religious hospital.

Look, clearly most of the people who work in such a facility are humanitarians. But when the hospital's ideology prevents a dying man to be helped out of his pain at his own request, that's pretty sad.

A Visit to Nari

Readers of this blog know that I like to travel. I've been to about 30 countries and every continent except Antarctica. However, like most people in the West, I had never been to the tiny island nation of Nari. Recently I had a chance to visit this little-known country.

Because of its unusual customs, Nari is closed to most foreigners, but I had a professional contact, Ila, who agreed to sponsor my visit and be my guide. After a connection in Delhi, I arrived by plane, and upon stepping off the jetway I immediately felt very out of place. It was not jet lag. The reason why will be clear in a moment.

Religion is one reason that Nari is the way it is. 99% of the people on Nari adhere to the religion of Malsi, a poorly-understood sect (some would say a cult). The word "malsi" is difficult to translate, but a rough equivalent in English is "lack of inhibitions". (There are a few people on Nari who do not follow Malsi, but rather the Iahab faith, but they are unfortunately mistreated and generally persecuted.)

Malsi is hard for outsiders to understand. Adherents must engage in prayer rituals, which take place five times a day, where they face South and silently reflect on their inhibitions and work to overcome them. They must make a pilgrimage to a neighboring island, called Accem, at least once in their life. During one month each year (Nadamar), devotees eat constantly throughout the day, gorging themselves on the local fruits, which include nolem and etad. I was not there during Nadamar, but I still found the nolem and etad delicious, and much better than most fruit we could get here in North America.

But the most outstanding aspect of Malsi -- the one that everybody wants to know about -- is that believers largely reject Western notions of clothing. It's hard to be delicate about this, so I'll just say it: on Nari everybody walks around naked nearly all the time. Well, almost naked -- the belly button is always covered with a small round adhesive patch. Now you understand why I felt out of place. Old and a bit overweight, I didn't really want to follow the local custom. Any my navel is probably my best feature.

Since Nari is a tropical island, the weather makes the lack of clothing feasible. In Nari it is almost always 25 degrees C (77 degrees Fahrenheit), and the sun shines many hours during the day. Narians have a beautiful golden-bronze skin from their constant exposure to the sun, and most of them look extremely healthy. Needless to say, there are no tan lines.

When my guide Ila met me at the airport, I observed, as I stepped off the plane, that nearly everyone produced a small, colorful bag. Sitting on the benches throughout the airport, the Narians took off their clothes with athletic grace, and placed them in the bag, as I gaped in astonishment. Most were now barefoot, although some still wore their native sandals.

In my Western clothes (a t-shirt and shorts), I felt very much out of place. Indeed, as Ila (totally naked except for his belly-button patch) and I walked through the airport, I felt stares and disapproving glances from all sides. Ila laughed at my discomfort. "It's alright," he said. "We're just not used to many Westerners here. People look at you ... they know you do not follow Masli, and they are offended. But no one will hurt you." I felt reassured, but as we entered the parking lot, a man spit at my feet and then tried to pull my t-shirt off. Ila intervened and exchanged a few words with the man, and he went away, cursing. Ila apologized profusely.

Ila explained that one of the tenets of Malsi is that all people have malevolent inhibitions that must be overcome to achieve enlightenment. Their prophet, Dammahum, discovered this in the 6th century, and ever since, the Narians have followed his teachings. At an early age, children are taught to be outgoing and not shy. They are encouraged to take pride in their bodies. As part of this, clothes are regarded as useful only in the rare bouts of very cold weather, or for doing tasks that might be dangerous if uncovered, such as construction.

The navel is the exception. Narians regard the belly button as the seat of the soul, and hence it is only bared in the presence of extremely close friends and lovers. "It is the most intimate thing," Ila explained. "I can still remember the first time I saw my wife's navel. It was the most beautiful and tender moment of my life."

I was curious about how Narians dealt with some obvious problems. For example, did people really want to sit directly on chairs where other people had recently been sitting, naked? Wouldn't it be unhygienic? I quickly learned that Narians had developed solutions to almost every objection I had. For example, in Narian movie theaters and other public auditoriums, there are always dispensers on the wall that provide a small soft cloth that one places on the seat before sitting down. At the end of the event, these cloths were placed in a bin for wash and reuse. No one seemed to find this the slightest bit unusual.

We took a taxi to Ila's house, where I met his wife Mayram and his children. I have to admit feeling embarrassed when Ila's wife hugged me and unclothed parts of her jiggled against me. Seeing me blush, Mayram laughed. "You take off clothes, and go native!" she said. I apologized and said I was used to my own customs.

As part of my visit, I had agreed to visit a Narian university, where I would answer questions about the West. Very few Narian students have ever been to a Western country and they were puzzled about various aspects of life there. Perhaps not surprisingly, most questions focused on clothing. But it was not our custom of wearing clothes in public that had them interested; it was the way the West treated women and men differently.

"Why," I was asked, "do Westerners subjugate their women by forcing them to wear items of clothing that conceal their breasts?" I explained that breasts are erogenous zones, and in the West we feel it is best that these be covered in public. "Then why do you not insist that the chests of men also be covered? Do not your men have nipples, too?"

I struggled for an answer. "Nakedness of women's breasts is ... uhh... distracting," I said. "Men would focus on sex and not get any work done. If women wear tops, then we can focus on them as people, without the distraction of sex."

"So you are saying that Western men are unable to control their sexual impulses?" Everyone giggled. "Not exactly," I replied, although I had to concede that sexual harassment was indeed a problem in many countries.

"Tell us, is it actually illegal for women to go topless in North America? You would put your women in jail for such a normal thing?" I was asked. I had to concede that, although it is now technically legal in Ontario for women to go topless, this was still not the case for most jurisdictions in Canada and the US.

"And even in Ontario, what would happen to a woman who walked around without a top?" I was asked. I was forced to admit that they would often not be treated respectfully and that much social pressure would be brought to bear on them to cover up. Some women might even be attacked and beaten up. I heard a murmur of disapproval go through the room. Many students were shaking their heads at the backwardness of my society.

Despite my best efforts, I was unable to convince the Narian students that Western clothing was not a tool designed to subjugate women.

At the end of the event, I asked some Narian students about their navel patch. They seemed astonished that Western women would brazenly display their belly button in public (and indeed, Ila explained that there was a thriving trade in underground pornography in Nari, where Western women are shown in bikinis). "But aren't you afraid of someone seeing your soul?" they asked. I had to explain that many Westerners think the soul is an immaterial thing that one cannot see. They all laughed at that. "How could you possibly be so sure that an immaterial thing exists?" they asked. I could see their logic.

As I left Nari, I felt like my ideas about social behavior had been turned upside-down. Although I didn't agree that Western clothing was just a tool to subjugate women, I had to admit that our apparel is probably nothing more than a social convention, not a code ordained by a god or by nature. Perhaps our clothing rules are rooted in custom and tradition, and not on any actual rational or moral basis.

The Narian navel patch is as incomprehensible and foreign to us as Western clothing is to them.

I don't think I will visit Nari again, but it did make me think.

Was the Moose Hurt?

From New Brunswick comes the sad story of a moose that was hit by two cars.

Inexplicably, the newspaper story does not explain the fate of the moose.

World's Dumbest Journal Name

I think I have found the world's dumbest journal name. It is the International Refereed Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering.

The barely-literate web page tells you that it is a "reputed journal", and has a block of moving text that announces proudly that "IRJSRE is International Peer Reviewed Journal".

It also informs you that IRJSRE "provides new information, knowledge, analysis and developments in the Engineering and Science fields to cater the requirements of academic and practitioners". I never saw a journal announce that it was a caterer before.

The web page features a button that says "Call for Paper". Just one? Or maybe their photocopier ran out.

Another helpful button offers a "modal paper". I wonder if that means it's made of rayon.

And I wonder who would submit their paper to this journal.

Berlinski Exposed

Well, it looks like I was right when I guessed that David Berlinski was behind the scenes of the very strange online thing calling itself a "an independent quarterly review of the sciences", Inference Review.

For a long time they hid their editorial board. To what end, I don't know. Maybe they were embarrassed that Berlinski was involved. (I certainly would be.) But now they have come out and admitted that Berlinski is a "Contributing Editor". The other people involved are

Steven Wheeler
Executive Editor

Maud Kozodoy
Senior Editor

Hortense Marcelin
Managing Editor

Hélène Cambour
Marketing Director

Jean-Michel Gruet
Caricaturist

Well, at least we know now who is responsible for the appalling and grotesque caricatures.

The editors claim "We have no ideological, political, or religious agendas whatsoever." If you believe that, I've got some intelligently designed real estate to sell you. For god's sake, their latest "issue" has an article by James Tour.

What a joke.

Hat tip: GB.

The Brain and Computation

Further to my previous posts about the brain being a computer, take a look at this special semester at the Simons Institute at Berkeley: The Brain and Computation. Note the very high quality of the people involved, and the unashamed analogy between brains and computers.

Beating the Dead Horse of Intelligent Design

The funniest thing about this new interview of Bill Dembski is not that it's conducted by Sean McDowell, who has a "Ph.D. in Apologetics and Worldview Studies from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary" and is the son of the well-known evangelist Josh McDowell.

It's not that McDowell doesn't ask him a single probing question.

It's not that Dembski reveals he has a new book on intelligent design coming out, co-authored with the illustrious Robert J. Marks II; the table of contents can be found here.

It's not that Dembski still doesn't understand that the source of information in biology is well-understood biological processes such as mutations, recombination, gene duplication, and gene transfer.

No, the single funniest thing is that Dembski points to his nearly-dead, on-its-last-legs vanity journal Bio-Complexity as one of the ID movement's greatest scientific successes.

As I've pointed out before, Bio-Complexity is a great example of the utter intellectual vacuity of intelligent design. Despite having an editorial board of 31 people, in 2014 the journal managed to publish exactly 1 research article and a total of 4 papers. In 2015 they published a total of 2 papers. In 2016 so far they've published exactly 1 paper. (At that rate, in 2017 they'll publish half a paper.)

Wow! That is a research record to be very proud of! It really shows that intelligent design is fruitful, and inspiring top-quality research from scientists all over the world! The only downside is all the hard editorial work that needs to be done by those 31 members of the editorial board. Why, if they didn't have to spend all their time reviewing papers, they might be publishing some intelligent design research of their own. Truly, it's a scientific success.

Robert Marks: Two Years Later, Still No Answer

One characteristic of creationists is their unwillingness to follow the usual academic norms. To name just a few things:

1. While a tiny fraction of them publish papers in legitimate peer-reviewed academic journals, they typically do not publish their creationist views or evidence for creationism and intelligent design in such journals. Instead, they invent their own bogus journals, which then struggle to stay afloat for lack of acceptable submissions. Do any of you remember Origins and Design? I think it died around 2000. Do you remember Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design? It died around 2005. Now the intelligent design crowd has Bio-Complexity, but it has published only one paper so far in all of 2016. It, too, is headed for death.
2. They typically do not present their creationist views at legitimate peer-reviewed conferences. The few exceptions seem to be closed, invitation-only conferences devoted only to creationism or intelligent design. You do not see, for example, William Dembski (the supposed "Isaac Newton of information theory") presenting his work at the top information theory conferences, such as the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory.
3. They inflate their credentials.
4. They hold meetings at universities by renting space and then suggest or imply that the university somehow sponsored their meeting. The 2011 "biological information" meeting at Cornell is an obvious example.
5. They are prone to making public claims that they are not willing to justify.

The illustrious Robert J. Marks II, professor at Baylor University, is an example of this last characteristic. Back in 2014, he made the following claim: "we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji". I wanted to see the details of the calculation justifying this claim, so I asked Professor Marks to supply it. He did not reply.

Nor did he reply when I asked three months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked six months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked a year later.

It's now been two years. Academics are busy people, but this is pretty silly. Who thinks the illustrious Professor Marks will ever show me a calculation justifying his claim?

The Grammatical Rule that Isn't

A lot of my friends and acquaintances have been Facebook-sharing the following excerpt from a book by Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence:

Forsyth gives a good general rule for English, but like most grammatical rules, it's easy to find exceptions. For example, the American poet Benjamin Ivry wrote, in his poem "Ici Mourut Racine", of a "square little cottage".

So a challenge to readers: come up with the best natural-sounding exception to Forsyth's rule of English. You get bonus points if you violate Forsyth's order in multiple ways, and even more bonus points if you can find it in the published work of a native English-speaking author. No prizes for citing non-native speakers clearly lacking English skills.

Anonymous Theist Coward Tries to Get Me Fired

Last month, an anonymous theist coward with e-mail address "DrIntellectual@hotmail.com" sent e-mail to at least 35 members of my department, informing them that I am an atheist (gasp!), and trying to get me fired.

This isn't the first time this happened. About twenty years ago, some local evangelicals were actually picketing outside the gates of my university with the same goal. They failed, but everybody had a good time laughing.

I am happy to say that DrIntellectual's plan also backfired. Nearly everybody ignored DrIntellectual's message, except the Dean, who wrote me to offer his support. I guess DrIntellectual has never heard of "academic freedom" and what it entails.

The two things that drove DrIntellectual to inchoate rage seem to be my review of Stephen Meyer's book, Signature in the Cell, and my review of Patrick Glynn's book, God: The Evidence. But DrIntellectual offers nothing against the views I presented there, except some variations on "Wow! Oxygen! Hence, God!". This is literally an 18th century view: it was Dartmouth's founder, Eleazar Wheelock, who reportedly once offered the prayer, "O Lord! We thank Thee for the Oxygen gas; we thank Thee for the Hydrogen gas; and for all the gases." But it's the 21st century now. We don't burn witches any more, either.

Why is DrIntellectual driven to act like this? I don't know, but it's typical behavior for a certain species of theist. This kind of person is so steeped in Jeebus that it's literally inconceivable that anyone could believe differently. Furthermore, anyone who disbelieves must be evil, and therefore no tactic against them is too slimy. (It's the same method used by Scientologists on what they call "suppressive people".) Luckily, these dirty tricksters are usually too impotent to do much harm.

What DrIntellectual is really saying by his actions is that my book reviews are powerful. They represent such a threat to his insecure world view that he has to resort to this kind of poison-pen attack. He can't simply leave a comment on my blog or write his own rebuttal. No, the rest of the world has to coddle DrIntellectual's weak faith by removing all obstacles to it. He even resorts to implicit threats, writing "in the end, there will be a test, a very important test. Don't fail it." Threats like these are the theist's weapon of choice.

The Internet is the most powerful weapon against this kind of theism ever devised. When people of good will see the kinds of tactics some theists have to resort to, they know very well who is winning the argument. We are.

Friday Moose Blogging: Colorado Moose!

Moose in Mineral Creek, near Silverton, Colorado. We saw a bunch of people stopped along the highway, and we stopped, too. Glad we did!

Egnor Doubles Down

Creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doubles down in his latest at the misnamed evolutionnews.org site. He's still claiming that animals don't have language.

He really has nothing new to say. He provides no evidence for his claims, just a series of assertions:

"Language in animals has never been demonstrated": actually, it has. I gave several citations, but Egnor didn't address any of them. There is a whole subfield of ethology that deals with this. Egnor didn't even seem to know the name of the field.

"because animals are incapable of language.": pure assertion.

"Claims of animal language have been made by some ethologists, but those claims are mistaken": Egnor suddenly starts using the word "ethologist", which he didn't before. I am glad to have informed him of the name for the practitioners of the field he is criticizing. Again, pure assertion. He doesn't actually address any of the cited studies.

"We should begin with an examination of what we mean by language.": Egnor is not a linguist, either.

"The confusion between signals and designators is at the root of ethologists' misunderstanding about animal "language.": Yeah, all those ethologists who actually study animal language are wrong, but Egnor (who didn't seem to even know the word "ethologist" until two days ago) is right, despite not working in the field. Remember the word "egnorance" and why it was coined?

"Natural animal signals have no grammar": Probably not true. For example, see here and here and here. Now one could certainly take issue with any or all of these, but the point is that there is a large literature that needs to be assessed carefully, and which cannot be addressed by categorical denials of the kind Egnor makes. Egnor does not do this. He just knows he is correct, because ... Aristotle.

"Animals do not signal abstract concepts": pure assertion.

(Quoting de Waal): "We honestly have no evidence for symbolic communication, equally rich and multifunctional as ours, outside our species": A red herring. Nobody said animal language was as "rich and multifunctional" as human language, just that it exists, contrary to Egnor's claims. This is the traditional creationist technique known as "moving the goalposts".

Finally, Egnor insinuates that I haven't read de Waal's books, when I was the one who introduced them to him. He urges me to read de Waal's books. I have. My records show that I read Good Natured in 1996, as well as Chimpanzee Politics and Peacemaking Among Primates.

Yet More Egnorance

We haven't heard from creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor lately. (If I had to guess, I'd wager he's writing a book, in order to cash in on the unlimited religionist thirst to have someone with credentials confirm their world view.) That's too bad, because Egnor was a neverending source of amusement. He is, after all, the man for which the word "egnorance" was coined: "the egotistical combination of ignorance and arrogance".

That's why it's such a delight to see Egnor make a fool of himself yet again, with this Discovery Institute column about animal intelligence and language.

Egnor claims that "cats can't do logic, mathematical or otherwise, and they never will". Here is one of his arguments in support of this claim: "they don't do logic. Because they're cats." Well, that was certainly convincing.

Showing that Egnor knows even less about logic than he does about evolution, Egnor goes on to claim that "A logical statement is true inherently, independently of the particulars that occupy the place-holders". Really? This will certainly be news to actual logicians, who labor under the delusion that a statement like "for all x, there exists a y such that x = 2*y" is a false statement in the logical theory known as "Presburger arithmetic".

Like most religionists, Egnor seems to have a real need to believe that people are somehow fundamentally different from the rest of the animal world. He claims that "What distinguishes men from animals is this: men, but not animals, can contemplate universals, independently of particulars. Animals cannot contemplate universals. Animal thought is always tied to particular things." He goes on to claim, "Animal thought lacks abstraction" and "In fact, an animal cannot think about universals, for the simple reason that animals have no language."

How does Egnor know these things? He offers no empirical evidence in support of his claims. Empirical evidence is absolutely necessary, since there is nothing logically impossible about animals thinking abstractly. After all, Egnor's own holy book, the bible, depicts talking snakes and talking donkeys. While I am amused to see Egnor undermine the claims of his own religion, animal language and thought are questions that have to be resolved scientifically.

And there is an area of science that is actively interested in testing these kinds of claims, although you'd never know it from reading Egnor. It is a branch of ethology, which is the science of animal behavior. (I am not an ethologist by any means, but I can recommend the eye-opening books of primatologist Frans de Waal.) Contrary to Egnor's claims, the evidence for animal language is quite strong, although of course there are doubters. Animal language exists in many different animals, including bees, elephants, dolphins, baboons, and whales.

So how does Egnor back up his claims? By citing Aristotle. That's it. He writes, "This rudimentary fact about animal and human minds was noted by Aristotle, and was common knowledge for a couple thousand years. Moderns have forgotten it, and it has led to a morass of confusion about animal minds and the differences between human and animal thought."

I suppose if one's worldview depends on a 2000-year-old book written by people lacking scientific knowledge of the universe, then it's not a stretch to get your understanding of animal language and thought from a philosopher who lived 2300 years ago, and who simply asserted his claims without doing any experiments at all.

There is also evidence for abstract thought in animals other than people. Evidence exists for dogs, baboons, and crows, to name just three examples. Of course, all these examples are debatable (although I find these and others pretty convincing), and will likely continue to be debated until we know more about how abstract concepts are represented and processed in brains. Nevertheless it is pretty obvious that this is a question that, at least in principle, is capable of being resolved empirically.

I'll conclude with the words of David Hume: "no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow'd with thought and reason as well as man. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant." Or maybe that should be "egnorant".

typewriter

I've been watching a bit of the British TV show QI lately, and they mentioned the fact that the word "typewriter" can be written using the top row of keys on a QWERTY keyboard.

This got me wondering about what commonly-used words are the longest for each row. In addition to "typewriter", other 10-letter words you can type exclusively on the top row include "perpetuity" and "repertoire". Claims for "teeter-totter" seem to be cheating, as it is almost always written with a hyphen. The OED lists a few more such words, but none that are common ("pepperwort"?).

For the middle row, the longest seems to be "alfalfa".

The poor sad bottom row seems to have no examples at all, unless you include "zzz", which is sometimes used to indicate the sound of sleep.

On a French AZERTY keyboard, one can type the English words "appropriate", "perpetrator", "preparatory", "proprietary", as well as the winner, "reappropriate". The longest French words on their national keyboard seem to be "approprieriez" and "pirouetterait".

Happy Birthday, Jonathan Richman!

Somehow I missed this: May 16 was the 65th birthday of singer Jonathan Richman.

Jonathan Richman is really hard to describe, but he's sort of a weird blend of children's singer Raffi and the Ramones. When I lived on Ellsworth Street in Berkeley from 1979 to 1983, he lived quite nearby, and we often saw him performing in Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus (where the photo above was taken, in 1981), or the club Berkeley Square on University Avenue. Once I saw him walking down the street, ran up to my apartment, and got one of his albums out for him to autograph, which he gladly did. I even have a picture of Jonathan and me together, but I only show it to close friends.

Here are a few of my favorite Jonathan Richman songs:

• Roadrunner, one of his famous early songs, about Boston
• Egyptian Reggae
• Ice Cream Man
• Back in Your Life
• Abominable Snowman in the Market
• New England

Happy 65th birthday, Jonathan!