As anyone in the atheist/skeptical/feminist blogosphere has heard, there is a massive kerfuffle going on about Rebecca Watson’s response to being creepily propositioned in an elevator¹. I really don’t have much to say about it because far better writers than I have covered all the bases I can think of. What hasn’t been addressed is the fundamental fuck-upedness of one of the underlying assumptions of Rebecca’s critics: there is such a thing as an appropriate forum.

The idea of an appropriate forum is basically that a dialogue should be confined to a single rhetorical space. We see this a lot in “manners” guides, where it’s considered rude to publicly criticize someone for what is considered a private wrong. This seems to be the primary motivation in condemning gossip, which is, after all, merely warning one’s friends that another person is inconsiderate, an idiot, or outright dangerous.

It also comes up in other, sometimes weirder contexts. For example, when Rosie Redfield and others pointed out on their blogs that no, Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s paper on arsenic-eating bacteria doesn’t show what it claims to show, the first response of Science magazine (which published the paper) and Wolfe-Simon was that the bloggers were inappropriately publicly airing science’s dirty laundry and should have instead submitted official responses to Science.

This whole idea is absurd. Rhetoric (and any dialogue, from political speeches to Hieronymous Bosch paintings, is rhetoric) has exactly one rule: achieve your goal. If the most effective means of achieving your goal is by publicly calling someone out, you should do it. If the most effective means of achieving your goal is by humiliating someone, you should do it. If the most effective means of achieving your goal is to point out their marital infidelities and imply that they molest goats, you should do it.

Now, if your goal is to have a single person change their behavior, it’s probably not effective to publicly call them out. But that clearly wasn’t Rebecca’s goal in criticizing either the douchenugget who cornered her or the idiot who thought that the douchenugget was just being a man. Her goal was to get the community to recognize that such douchenuggetry is present, if not common, in the atheist/skeptical community, and that non-douchenuggets need to stop providing cover for the douchenuggets.

Now, was that goal a bad one? I don’t see anyone saying that. Was she ineffective? I don’t see anyone saying that. Did she, in being rhetorically effective, cause some harm that outweighed her goal? I don’t see anyone saying that either².

So, what it comes down to is bashing Rebecca for violating a non-rule of rhetoric.

As Amanda pointed out, creating non-rules—the political strategy of Calvinball—is a long cherished means for those with privilege to shame, shut up, and shut out those without. The particular non-rule of the appropriate forum is particularly harmful because it is both accepted by many people and very effective at preventing change. For example, when Science and Wolfe-Simon said that their detractors should submit formal rebuttals to be published in Science, what they were asking was for:

1. Several months where they would be the only “experts” who got covered by the media, thus ensuring that the public would never hear about Wolfe-Simon’s crap science and Science‘s crap review system.
2. Only people with academic careers, regardless of expertise, to participate in the debate. (Only those with academic careers have the time to usher a paper through the process of peer-review and the institutional funding to pay for page charges.) This would ensure that science remains an ivory tower where a misplaced sense of collegiality prevents harsh criticism.
3. The very important debate about whether Glamour Mags’ review criteria (novelty over quality) improperly distorts peer-review to the detriment of science to be held in backrooms, if at all.

In other words, they were asking for a complete subversion of the spirit of peer review, where the opinion of Stephen Hawking and the opinion of Stephanie the Physics Undergraduate are equally valid if they are backed by data. Similarly, people like Hemant Mehta are asking Rebecca and other feminists in the skeptical movement to abandon the powerful tools of awareness raising, shame, and personal story telling in order to spare the feelings of douches and douche-supporters.

Fuck. That.

Back to post
1. Long story short, at 4 am during a conference she said she was tired and going to bed. A guy followed her to the elevator and asked her to her room for coffee. Or, quite obviously, “coffee.” Rebecca pointed out in a vlog post that this is a douchy thing to do. Stef McGraw posted a response basically saying “hey, he wasn’t  a douche, Rebecca’s being a reverse sexist!” (conveniently leaving out the whole 4 am, tired and going to bed, part). In her keynote address, Rebecca used the response as an example of the fact that sexism is present in the atheism community. Several people then called Rebecca out for this.

Back to post
2. Yes, Rebecca was not nice to the douchenugget and his defenders. Good is not nice. Yes, Rebecca probably embarrassed Stef McGraw. That is a good thing—embarrassment is the emotion that keeps us from doing stupid shit more than once. I am embarrassed at my frankly creeptastic methods of asking girls out in high school and my first year of college, so I try to no longer be a creep.

I note this because of a discussion I found in Greta Christina’s archives about why atheism doesn’t make sense. Someone asked why Greta didn’t mention the cosmological argument for a creator god. (The cosmological argument basically states that everything in existence has a cause; the universe exists; therefore the universe has a cause; therefore god.) She mentioned the obvious complaint, that positing a god only shifts the question one step back: if everything has a cause, what caused god?

Aside: I’m mildly upset that until this week I’d never read anything by Greta Christina. The woman is a skeptical goddess. </hero worship>

Ahem.

But I think that there’s a more sound response to be made against the cosmological argument. Greta’s response punctures the argument for god, but doesn’t address the hole that the cosmological argument seems to put in naturalistic explanations of the universe: what made everything exist in the first place?

First, lets be clear about what causality is. It is a hypothesis. The statement “everything has a cause” can be falsified. In fact, it has been falsified. If you suck all of the matter out of some space, particles of matter and anti-matter will pop into and out of existence. These particles appear at random intervals with nothing intervening to cause them to exist. As another example, consider the classic Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. When the cat is observed, its wave-function collapses to either alive or dead. Which one is completely random, independent of any external or internal variables. Which way the wave-function collapses has no cause.

Even if you don’t grant that “everything has a cause” has been falsified—repeatedly—the statement “the universe has a cause” is logically meaningless.

One of the fundamental aspects of causality is that it requires time in order to function. David Hume listed 8 conditions for causality. The first three are:

1. The cause and effect must be contiguous in space and time.
2. The cause must be prior to the effect.
3. There must be a constant union betwixt the cause and effect.

So, if time does not exist, we can not talk about a “cause” and “effect.”

It should be agreed on by everyone that space and time are really that single confusing concept space-time. Most people also seem to get that there was no space before the Big Bang. But since space-time is one thing, the same equations that predict the Big Bang also show that time came into existence at the Big Bang. As Stephen Hawking said, asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole. “Before the Big Bang” is logically meaningless. Time is not a line, stretching infinitely backwards and forwards. It is a ray, with a definite beginning and (at least at the moment) no end in sight.

The Big Bang is, at least arguably, the “cause” of the universe. However, since “before the Big Bang” is meaningless it is meaningless to ask what caused the Big Bang.

So, in any case, the cosmological argument is utterly devoid of merit. The fact that it was not abandoned immediately once the Big Bang was proposed does not reflect well on apologists. The fact that it took until 19-fucking-94 for a philosopher to grasp this does not reflect well on philosophers.

The other tool, and I think the better, is IBM’s Many Eyes. For one thing, you can upload your own data. For another, you can get image files of your visualizations. This is nice for people like me, who can’t edit their blog’s html, but still want to show you a map of “bigfoot” “sightings” since 1870.

Why am I playing with these tools when I could be getting drunk on Southern Comfort, cinnamon whiskey, and Kahlua? Well, for one I like data better than hangovers. But I’m also working on a post about secession and the many cultural and political divides in the US. Data is necessary for any argument, but to convince anyone it must be presented clearly, accurately, and in an interesting manner.

I’ve switched career goals twice since I started college. As I started my freshman year, I was dead set on international law. I declared my double major in biology and rhetoric early on, joking that I would be the first prosecutor at the Hague to call a dolphin as a witness. Two of my high school friends and mock trial teammates half-seriously planned the law firm of Tan, Wertz, and Collins.

Somehow during my first year I changed my mind to medicine. I honestly don’t remember why. I think I might have just burnt out on rhetoric and needed a change. That didn’t last long, though. I had two major back surgeries in nine months. I had to withdraw from one class, and take a leave of absence for an entire semester. I came back too early, and nearly drowned in the course work. The idea of 48-hour shifts as a resident made me vomit. I couldn’t possibly be a doctor, and that made me hate myself.

Thankfully, at the same time I was struggling so hard, I took my first research class. My group’s project was, in retrospect, ill-conceived, unfounded, uninteresting, and likely violated university rules on human experimentation. It still got me hooked. I also went to my first science conference that year, an evolutionary biology meeting in Washington, and that gave me a glimpse of the excitement academia offered me*.

Since then, my goals have never waivered. It’s been over two years and I’ve never considered any options other than getting my Ph.D. and eventually a professorial appointment. Of course, this lack of a plan B has screwed me over. Again.

This semester has sucked. Between fibromyalgia, being on Vicodin, and some weird neuropathic pain that no one’s been able to figure out, I’ve barely been able to attend class, I’ve needed to withdraw from at least one class and take incompletes in others. I’m taking at least a year off before applying to graduate school, and I’m faced with the terrifying prospect of spending more than a few months doing something that doesn’t involve research for the first time in two years.

And of course I’m totally unprepared for it. I haven’t had a “real job” since May. I don’t know how I’ll manage not having a major project on my plate. And if I never end up going to grad school? I have no clue what I’ll do with my life.

*That’s not to say I didn’t, or don’t, have regrets. Even though I love research, and could never imagine abandoning it for practicing medicine, I still have the subconscious resentment at being forcibly shunted away from medicine.

In many species, males and females do not have the same interests when they reproduce. In polyandrous (females mate with more than one male) species, the offspring in a litter don’t always have the same father. Mothers therefore want multiple equal (smaller) offspring, while fathers want their offspring to be big and outcompete other males’ offspring in the womb.

This is all accomplished by genomic imprinting. In all mammals, some genes are switched off by methylation. Most of the time, all the genes are “re-set” after fertilization, but in about 1% of genes the parental pattern is inherited. This is handy for sexual conflict. Males pass on genes for growth that are turned on, and females pass on ones that are turned off.

This is actually why ligers (yes, the lion-tiger hybrid that Napoleon Dynamite ruined) are so enormous. Lions are polyandrous, so their sperm contains genes imprinted for enormous growth, and their eggs contain genes imprinted to counteract that. Tigers are monogamous, so they don’t have the sex-specific imprinting. So when a male lion fertilizes a female tiger, the paternal genes run wild, causing the offspring to be enormous.

Scientists have been able to create bimaternal (BM) mice by fusing the nuclei of two ova.  This results in baby mice (mouslings?) that have only maternally imprinted genes. As expected, they are much smaller than normal. In addition, according to a new study in Human Reproduction, they live longer. This is interesting, but not  terribly surprising. Small mice usually live longer.

Of course the researchers and science reporters (especially the reporters) overstate their case. They claim that this might shed some light on the difference between male and female lifespans. Bullshit. We know why males don’t live very long, and it’s because of what hangs between our legs. Testosterone wrecks the heart and other organs. In fact, if they’re so inclined, men can remove the offending organs and extend their lifespan a decade or so. Besides, normally-conceived males and females have identical patterns of imprinting, so there’s no imprinting would explain the difference in lifespan.

First, there’s the Tinkerer. The Tinkerer is interested in finding out what makes things tick, but mostly in figuring out how to put things together. The three chemistry student researchers fit into this. They’re playing around with some funky cyclic molecules, trying to synthesize them more efficiently and in a more environmentally friendly way. Dr. Frankenstein was a Tinkerer, as are the chemists that design drugs and agronomists that breed or genetically engineer crops.

Then you’ve got the Puzzle Solver. Puzzle Solvers look at the universe as a giant sudoku puzzle: they start off with a curious observation, and try to find the variables that make the data work. These are the people for whom “the scientific method” was made. Science is a series of hypotheses and tests, but the puzzle solvers treat it as an end in itself; the journey is the thrill, the endpoint an afterthought. It seems like Puzzle Solvers occur in all disciplines. Watson and Crick were certainly puzzle solvers, as were, I think, Marie Curie and Elizabeth Blackburn and her collaborators.

Finally, there’s the Story Teller. Storytellers are interesting because neither the result nor the test is particularly interesting on its own. A fact or even a truth can only illuminate a historical pattern which is itself of interest. We might call these people natural historians. Darwin is an excellent example: his theory of natural selection was the common thread in all the smaller stories of how the multitudes of organisms came to be in their current forms, habits, and locations. Jack Horner is another of my favorite scientific Story Tellers. Each fossil is a bit of a story about how dinosaurs lived.

Of course , most scientists have aspects of some combination of the three. I am predominantly a Puzzle Solver, but I’ve got aspects of a Tinkerer and Story Teller as well.

This happened last night. I was insomniating, which happens far too often, and I decided I might as well make the skeleton of my research proposal for my molecular ecology class. I kinda hate doing field work in November, so I’m doing some modeling to try to explain the time-dependency of molecular clocks. (If you can’t understand the linked article, don’t worry; it’s not important.) I was looking over the manuals for the programs I’ll be using and papers of previous attempts (failures all) to explain it. As I read and wrote out a tentative procedure, I had this conversation with myself*:

Me 1: This is gonna be so much fun!

Me 2: Dude. We’re going to be staring at a computer for six hours a day.

Me 1: Yeah, but look at this. No one has figured this out, and the math adds up perfectly!

Me 2: A quarter of the day.

Me 1: And maybe we could find a way to correct previous calibrations! It would solve so many evolutionary mysteries.

Me 2: For the next nine weeks.

Me 1: This is real science! Not that crappy cookbook chemistry stuff. Jack Horner, Rosalind Franklin, A. R. Wallace science!

Me 2: Six. Fucking. Hours.

Me 1: Ooh! Bayesian inference! This is so cool!

Me 2: What a loon.

I think I’ll be fine.

I’m literally addicted to information. Oh yeah, it’s possible. I go into withdrawal if I don’t have my laptop or iPhone for more than a day, and I regularly refresh Slate just to see if anything’s been posted in the last five minutes. It’s even worse for really interesting stuff. I’ve used The Sibley Guide to Birds as bedtime reading even when there was perfectly good, unread Asimov sitting on the shelf.

I think this is the sign of a geek. Wikipedia currently has four definitions of “geek” in its article; all but one (which restricts the term to computer wizzes) fit this description. To single-mindedly pursue knowledge is far outside the norm. In grade school it’ll get you called nerd, dweeb, or geek, and in college it’ll get you into grad school.

*In my head, of course. I’m not Gollum.

You are an asshat. When the professor says to ask any questions you have, she did not mean leading questions. Your knowledge of economics is not sufficient to perform the Socratic method on a lima bean, let alone a professor. Having read The Communist Manifesto and being, like, so into socialism does not make you qualified to comment on the interaction of supply and demand. Especially if you have your history so ass-backwards that you think that the USSR surpassed the US in military production.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey

Anyway, I wanted to say a bit about Labor Day, which has mutated into a sad shadow of what it once was. Labor Day is not meant to, as the U.S. DoL says and so many people think, “pay tribute … to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.” Labor Day started as a massive — and illegal — strike in Hamilton and Toronto that forced the Canadian government to pass the Trade Union Act. An American labor leader named Peter McGuire saw one of the celebrations that marked the anniversary of the Canadian strike, and managed to convince Grover Cleveland to rush Labor Day through congress.

Of course, the only reason that it was passed is that they were scared shitless. Industry’s bosses’ practice of simply murdering union leaders was working about as well as our whack-a-mole strategy for terrorism, unionists were getting upset about being mudered, and the philosophy of the Molly Maguires was becoming more and more attractive to more and more people.

So as you drink your cold Coors Light (*gag*) today, remember that the reason you have a day off is the same reason that you don’t work 14 hours a day in miserable conditions (unless you’re a medical intern, of course). Unionists fought and died, and are still fighting and dying, for the rights of workers. And also remember that Coors has an atrocious record of union busting.