More Quality Reporting at Uncommon Descent

Sneery O'Leary, the World's Worst Journalist™, spends most of her blog space attacking scientists and reporters more talented than she is.

But would a New York Times reporter be so foolish as to confuse Massimo Pigliucci with Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini?

Probably not. But Sneery is.

Screenshot, for when it gets dumped down the ever-growing Uncommon Descent memory hole:

Small Minds are Easily Amused

Over at Uncommon Descent we learn the most amazing things about mathematics:

Take the last two digits of the year in which you were born and the age you will be this year and the result will add up to 111.

It works for everyone this year.


Shshsh! Don't tell Denyse about people born in 2001. It might upset her world view.

I don't know which is more pathetic, the Toronto Star for printing this drivel, or Denyse O'Leary, for thinking it was interesting. Or maybe me, for thinking it is worth pointing out the mistake.

"Pathological Liar" Horowitz Reflects on His Own Mortality

Let's see: start with a guy who claims that left-wing intellectuals are responsible for the death of culture because they are intellectually dishonest.

Let him be the book reviewer for a book written by a fierce right-wing partisan described over and over again as a "pathological liar" (and with good reason).

Have the reviewer say not a single word about the well-documented dishonesty of the author of the book he is reviewing. And, for good measure, have the reviewer make ill-considered remarks about neuroscientists, claiming that their goal is to "empty life of its mystery".

Result: pompous drivel applauded by my favorite faux journalist.

But it is funny!

Creationists Get it Wrong Again

Since Uncommon Descent became, for all practical purposes, Sneery O'Leary's personal blog, it's become an amusing fountain of stupidity. The only question is, which particular bit of idiocy is worth remarking about?

Well, this one is. Sneery approvingly quotes the following excerpt from David P. Goldman's book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too):

Richard Dawkins and other self-styled New Atheists postulate that humankind evolved a genetic predisposition to altruism. This assertion is something of a flying spaghetti monster. Among all American ethnic groups, Jews share the most consistent gene pool – as studies have established beyond question – the result of two thousand years of marrying within the same community. Yet secular Jews show the least altruism – at least in the form of willingness to raise children – of any group of Americans, while religious Jews show one of the highest degrees of altruism by the same measure. A religious explanation of altruism, not a genetic one, fits the facts.

This one is just too funny! Goldman, whose education was in music theory and German (!), is so far out of his depth he's gasping for air. "Altruism" - as it is understood by biologists - is about individuals acting to increase the fitness of others at the cost of decreased fitness for themselves. It was developed by Hamilton and Maynard Smith, not Dawkins (although Dawkins has popularized it.) For closely related organisms, as in parents and their biological children, altruism is explained by the theory of kin selection, and has nothing to do with belonging to a "consistent gene pool". Whether you're Jewish or not, the chance that a particular allele is inherited from your father is 50%.

Relatedness is important in the biological theory of altruism not because two individuals might share many genes (Goldman's "consistent gene pools"); it is important because the degree of relatedness controls the probability that two such individuals share a specific gene with altruistic effects. Furthermore, once such a gene arises, it will be fixed in the populations with high probability, so that nearly members of the population will possess it. These misunderstandings of the theory are so pervasive that there are articles devoted to correcting them.

It's clear that Goldman has never read Alexander's Darwinism and Human Affairs -- one of the deepest and most important works in philosophy ever written. (Or, if he has read it, he's misunderstood it thoroughly.)

Furthermore, no one is saying that culture can't influence altruism as it is practiced in humans. I don't doubt that the cultural practices of religions can affect altruism, but the effects can be both positive and negative. Frequently this manifests itself as altruism to others who share your particular sect's beliefs, and hostility to those who don't (as this famous Emo Phillips joke illustrates). Teasing out the separate genetic and cultural effects of such a complex phenomenon in humans is likely to be difficult.

The biological theory of altruism has been tested (not "postulated"), and it even has been tested in artificial life settings. It has passed these tests. Pretending, as Goldman does, that it does not "fit the facts" is just a delusion.

But then what would you expect from Goldman, whose past is less than savory? And what else would you expect from Sneery O'Leary?

Those Creationists are Just so Darn Cute When They Try To Do Math, Part II

Here's your favorite ignoramus "reporter", Sneery O'Leary, trying to understand the mathematics of infinite sequences:


...Series terminate, according to their nature.

For example, the number 1 is the terminus of the natural numbers. It just is. There is no natural number below 1.* If you do not like that, you do not like reality.

Some series terminate because they depend on a higher or larger series at a certain point, one that governs them...

*0 is a placeholder, signifying: No number occupies this position.


Hopeless confusion in all measures here.

Sneery
- confuses sequences with series
- doesn't understand that the "natural numbers" often (but not always) are considered to contain the integer 0 (it's just a convention, and not one that is universally followed)
- thinks that 0 is not a number
- confuses the sequence of natural numbers with decimal representation of numbers
- thinks sequences always terminate
- etc.

But remember - her blog is the reliable source for news, destined to replace the New York Times!

Bethell the Buffoon Rides Again

I previously wrote about Tom Bethell, the blathering buffoon and faux journalist who never met an anti-evolutionary argument that was too stupid for him to parrot.

Now he's back again in the New Oxford Review. It's not surprising at all that the forum he chose is a self-described "orthodox Catholic magazine". What other magazine would publish this drivel? (Well, maybe National Review.) It takes a lot of chutzpah to call evolution "dogma" and then later publish in a rag that boasts its "unswerving loyalty to her Pope and Magisterium".

Bethell doesn't give any indication that he interviewed anyone except ID hacks for his screed. That's journalism? No. A real journalist interviews people who don't agree with his preconceptions. And the text shows it. How many misrepresentations, selective quotations, and misunderstandings can you find? No creationist chestnut is too stupid to repeat. He even drags out the corpse of the Colin Patterson quote! (It was debunked long ago.)

But the single funniest line is the claim that "Doug Axe and his assistants at the Biologic Institute may end up surpassing the Darwinists in pure research". Not bloody likely, especially if Axe continues to publish in an ID vanity journal where he is the Managing Editor.

Naturally, ID's other faux journalist, Denyse O'Leary is fully on board with Bethell. The funniest thing about O'Leary is that she calls herself the "UD News team", and suffers from recurring fantasies that her blog is going to replace the New York Times.

The Worst Science Books

Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O'Leary, the world's worst journalist™, gives us a list of her favorite science books --- in her usual barely literate style. (Note to Denyse: the plural of "coo" is not "coo's".)

No surprise, three of them aren't written by scientists: Darwin on Trial, Signature in the Cell, and Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution. Of the other two, one was written by a very mediocre scientist who made basic mistakes in previous books, and the other by a man whose bogus claims were repudiated by his own department. In Denyse's topsy-turvy world, actual scientists can be dismissed as "mooches and tax burdens", or "British aristocrats".

The late Martin Gardner studied this kind of crankery and knew how to recognize it. A scientific crank, Gardner said, "has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories." It is not possible to reason with this kind of idiocy -- ridicule is the best response.

Actually, Denyse's list would be a good start on a list of the Worst Science Books. Do you have any more nominations? I'll start with Judith Hooper's Of Moths and Men, Arthur Koestler's The Case of the Midwife Toad, and anything by Jeremy Rifkin.

Ignoramus of the Month: Denyse O'Leary

Not all intelligent design advocates are dishonest. Some of them are merely ignorant, abysmally ignorant, pig-stupefyingly-ignorant of the theory they criticize.

Example: here is Canadian "journalist" Denyse O'Leary describing her understanding of evolution:

So the claim is, "changed shape, changed size, changed metabolism and changed food source. How much more MACRO do you expect an organism to evolve?"

Hmmmm. Kittens do this all the time.

Change size? You bet. Goes from a couple of ounces to five lbs in half a year.

Confusing development of an individual with evolution in a population? That's a misconception about evolution that is usually ironed out in high school. Looks like Denyse was absent that day. I'd blame Pokemon, but I think Denyse is far too ancient for that.

Denyse O'Leary: our ignoramus of the month.


Update: O'Leary's posting was apparently too stupid even for her. It now seems to have disappeared from her website.

Further update: it's now back here.

Update on the Rom Houben Story

You may recall my previous discussion of the Rom Houben case. Houben is the Dutch man who has been in a coma for over 20 years, and was "discovered" to be conscious and capable of expressing his thoughts coherently through the bogus technique of "facilitated communication", or FC.

I and many other skeptics had doubts about the facilitated communication part of the story, while creationists such as Denyse O'Leary bought it unquestioningly. Creationist Kirk Durston joined the fray in the comments here, with Kirk claiming it was "doubtful that this team of scientists, headed by Laureys, is falling for fake messages typed out by a crackpot assistant" and assuring us that "We can infer from that, that what we are seeing in the video is a method that Laureys’ team has developed, or helped develop." Further, Durston accused another skeptic, the renowned bioethicist Arthur Caplan, of being "unethical" for pointing out that the bogus FC technique had been used.

Now Orac reports that O'Leary and Durston were wrong on all accounts. Further tests have shown that, indeed, Houben was not able to communicate through FC, and that Laureys and his team were, in fact, taken in by the bogus claims of an FC practitioner.

I also observe that FC has nothing to do with the other work of Laurey's team, namely developing a way to communicate with patients by asking them to associate "yes" with, e.g., thinking about playing tennis and "no" with thinking about being in his house. That's an interesting, though still controversial, idea that may be useful. It is a shame that Laureys' reputation will certainly suffer from his association with FC on Houben and his failure to use adequate controls when testing the FC claim. I also note that Laureys did not forthrightly respond to questions about his use of FC and never answered my query about it.

I feel very sorry for Rom Houben, who may be conscious but has had his voice stolen by FC crackpottery that Laureys helped publicize.

As for Denyse O'Leary and Kirk Durston, they were insufficiently skeptical and came to the wrong conclusion. Will we see them admit it? Will Durston apologize for his libel of Caplan?

More Mind-Boggling Stupidity from O'Leary

Denyse O'Leary, the World's Worst Journalist™, is at it again.

Here she fulminates against Richard Dawkins in her inimitable mangled syntax, quoted exactly as written:

[About time someone said the obvious. Darwinism does not work, Never has, never will. Kept alive by a taxpayer-funded, court-supported Darwin industry that is nearly a century old.[A shame and a scandal, and a waste of tax money. For the moment, I will set aside the completely ridiculous quasi-religious obsequies paid to Darwin. It got so bad that Darwin was compared to Lincoln. And while we are here, Dawkins claims he cannot produce an original statement of his big no-design theory - though professionals associated with the goals of this site reconstructed it - and it doesn't work.

Translation for those who don't speak Denysish:

"taxpayer-funded, court-supported Darwin industry" = evolutionary biologists who have forgotten more science than Denyse ever knew. Denyse's fulminations against academia remind me of this quote from Gordon Allport: "College professors are suspect because whenever emotion is in control, anti-intellectualism prevails."

"Dawkins claims he cannot produce an original statement of his big no-design theory" = intelligent design crackpots making a big deal out of the fact that Dawkins no longer has his original BASIC program for his famous "Methinks it is like a weasel" example of how natural selection can do hill-climbing. Never mind the fact that any idiot can produce a functionally equivalent program in a few minutes. Well, maybe not any idiot.

"professionals associated with the goals of this site reconstructed it - and it doesn't work" = pure hogwash. The idea works, and is used all the time in industry.

And she calls herself a journalist!

Note added January 19: O'Leary has now edited her page to remove one (but not all) of the syntax errors. The original version is preserved above for posterity.

The World's Worst Journalist Attacks!

So, it looks like Denyse O'Leary, the world's worst journalist™, didn't like my simple example showing that Stephen Meyer's claims about information are false.

Meyer claims information can only come from a mind. But this is clearly not true. For example, meteorologists collect information all the time about the environment: wind speed, wind direction, precipitation, etc. Based on this information, they make predictions about the weather. But this information did not come from a mind - it came from the environment.

O'Leary is unable to refute this argument, so all she can do is babble in response, as follows:

What mind indeed? If we experience either snow or dull, freezing rain here tomorrow, why should I be surprised? This is the season officially known as winter.

Well, that certainly showed me!

When confronted with my simple counterexample to Meyer's silly claim, it seems intelligent design advocates have three choices:

1. They can deny that things like wind speed, wind direction, etc. are actually information. Then they have to claim that weather forecasters make their predictions without any information as input at all. This hardly seems like it will convince anyone.

2. They can claim that the physical world's attributes are the products of a mind. But then everything is designed, so it is pointless to claim they have a novel argument for the designedness of biological organisms, since their claim is universal.

3. They can concede that wind speed, wind direction, etc. are information, but not the particular kind of information they had in mind. This is not likely to convince anyone either, since by Meyer's own definition these measures qualify as information. Nor is it likely to convince anyone who has examined the many critiques of Dembski's CSI.

So expect the intelligent design advocates to resort to more childish tactics. Already the commenters have taken to making fun of my name, and calling me stupid and dishonest. Yup, that's the way to answer the argument.