Just Under the Surface

In the current political climate, where Christians consider Nazi racism to be one legitimate viewpoint even if they do not themselves embrace it, it is certainly possible to believe that the time is not far away when conservatives will institute an evil reign of terror. It seems unlikely that this will happen, but could Germans in 1933 have guess what Hitler would do? And he did it because they let him.

We are surrounded by nice people all day every day. But occasionally we get glimpses of the evil that hides in human nature and which can come out under the right circumstances. Here are some examples.

First example. I had a student a few years ago who was very smart and dedicated, and very nice. Strange topics sometimes come up in individual conversations during laboratory sessions. For some reason, some of us were talking about Vlad the Impaler and this student, with a straight face, made the case that he deserved to be the national hero of Romania. This student, so nice on the outside, harbored at least this bit of evil in her heart. If she should ever in a future dictatorship be in a position to make decisions about what to do with political dissidents, such as myself, what would she do? I doubt she would come up with the idea, but I also doubt she would resist it if a future dictator liked the idea of impaling his enemies.

Second example. In Durant, Oklahoma, a white man who identified himself as “Goofy” went on a verbal rampage against all Mexicans, and said that World War III is going to begin right here with whites against immigrants. Most white people do not feel the way he does, but there must be at least a couple of million people who do and who can cause an immense amount of terrorism once they get started. All they need is some event that will unleash their currently latent fury, like (in this case) hearing a woman speak Spanish on a cell phone. (The woman has been in America legally for 40 years.).

We all have evil in our hearts; evolution has made human nature both good and bad. While altruism is part of human nature, we must understand that we are altruistic only toward those people whom we consider to be inside of our group. Slowly through history we have expanded the boundaries of what we consider our group to be. To many people, altruism extends not only to all humans of every race, but to higher animals, to trees, etc. But there are millions of people who still consider other races to be outside the realm of altruism and therefore not deserving even the simple decency of being allowed to live.

Even a small terrorist minority can ignite the worst elements of human nature and cause a wave of terrorism. Let’s hope (stupidly, perhaps) that this does not happen. Conservative religion, whether Christian or Muslim, frequently unleashes the worst in human nature.

This essay appeared on my science blog, without the final sentence.

Goodbye Old Folks, Hello Guns

The nursing home down the street from me has closed. The first thing I noticed was that there was no longer any liquid garbage on the street outside. The nursing home staff always poured lots of uncontained liquid garbage into dumpsters, which would then leak out all over the street and cause a stench. (Isn’t this against the law? At least they did not pour uncontained shit into the dumpster, as far as I know). I noticed that the street was not an open sewer. It was only then that I noticed that the parking lot was usually empty, except when it had pickup trucks of the kind that handymen use.

This nursing home is run by the local fundamentalist church. Apparently, they spread themselves too thin by running this nursing home. They apparently need to focus their efforts. And I am pretty sure what those efforts are. They mainly want to focus on getting their members to buy guns and have them ready to use, perhaps in the near future. I do not know this, but I have evidence that suggests it. This was the church that sponsored what they called a freedom rally a few years ago. The door prize was an assault weapon. By shutting down the nursing home, which I suspect was plagued by health code violations, this church can afford more assault weapons.

Another thing they can focus on is to verbally attack evolutionary scientists like me. This is the church that put on their marquee, “Evolution: The science of calling God a liar.” They have guns; I am their enemy, they think; should I be scared? Maybe. I am certainly vigilant. I keep a low profile. I never put bumper stickers on my car, and seldom put campaign posters in my lawn. (I did once. It was a sign urging a no vote on state question 777, which gave almost unlimited power to agribusiness corporations. Amazingly enough, the question was defeated.) I still walk to work, right out in the open, sometimes wearing an evolution shirt, but I am ready to start driving, by an alternate route, if necessary.

Rural Oklahoma fundamentalists and racists have a pent-up anger that needs only a slight stimulus in order to erupt. Just a couple of days ago, a Durant, Oklahoma man went on a verbal rampage against a Mexican woman, cursing her for being an immigrant and speaking Spanish. (She was indeed an immigrant, but has resided in America legally for 40 years.) He threatened to start World War Three over immigration. The woman shot a video, which was aired on a local news channel.

Of course, that lone crazy man cannot start a war by himself, and most people just considered him batshit. But there is A LOT of pent-up anger and violence in millions of conservatives in America. All they need is the right stimulus, one big enough to begin a chain reaction of fury and religious zeal. We cannot know when that might occur. They could not start a war, but they could wreak a devastating amount of terrorism; this is something that just a few thousand of them could do—it would not require a mass uprising.

What might the stimulus be? Fundamentalist pastors claim that they speak the very words of God, and their “sheeple” follow them blindly, not even reading their Bibles. Some of these churches celebrate and encourage the hoarding of assault weapons. If a fundamentalist pastor wanted to start a terrorist uprising, there is not much that could stop him.

October update: They were just cleaning out the old folks home; the old folks are back.

The Evolution of Language...and Manipulation

What are the evolutionary purposes of language? Most people would, without further thought, assume that the principal purpose of language is communication of information. That is, indeed, one of its purposes; but, I believe, it is a secondary purpose. The primary purpose of language is social interaction: to influence others to do what you want them to do, to create a good (or bad) impression of yourself in the minds of others, to identify yourself as a member of their particular group.

This is the principal reason that there are languages, plural. Each “tribe” even today has its own language. These languages are much more complex than they have to be, and the main reason is that if you cannot master the complexities of the language and its pronunciation, you are probably an outsider.

But even within a society, language is primarily a tool of social interaction, and often of manipulation. We can see this in the current eruption of white supremacist and neo-Nazi sentiments in the United States. The use of these terms would prejudice a reader against them, and I would avoid them, except that the right-wing extremists are proud of them. Some of them carry Nazi flags, and the others allow them to.

1.      When a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 [http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/us/charlottesville-james-alex-fields-charges/index.html], President Trump vacillated between condemning neo-Nazi activities and considering them to be merely part of the spectrum of political opinion. At no point did he or any other member of his administration call this an act of terrorism. But it fits all definitions of terrorism. The terrorist was not targeting a particular individual with his car; he was attempting to create terror among the people who were protesting against the white supremacists. And he used deadly force. If he had been Muslim, he would have been instantly branded as a terrorist. The selective use of the word “terrorist” against Muslims but never using against white Christian extremists is a clear use of manipulative language.

2.      The white supremacists call their cause and their rallies “free speech rallies” rather than neo-Nazi or white supremacist rallies. By getting millions of people to use this term for their activities, they project the message that, “You can’t possibly be against free speech! So you have to allow us to shout out our hatred against our fellow citizens.”

Technically, they have the legal right to say whatever they want to, so long as they do not incite people to violent action. But they are evil. We cannot allow them to depict their actions as mere defenses of free speech. All of us who are not aspiring Nazis must keep calling these people, and all who sympathize with them or speak out in their defense, what they are: the modern defenders of Adolf Hitler.

Some conservatives have tried to excuse the terrorist by saying that he had suffered abuse as a child. I have no opinion about this. But a black man could not have used this excuse.

Hitler himself was a master of language manipulation. (He wasn’t a master of much else. His leadership was disastrously delusional and destructive for his own German people, for example.) Most of us think of the phrase “Deutschland über alles” (Germany over all) as being Hitler’s phrase for world domination. But it was originally used to unite the German kingdoms (such as Saxony and Bavaria) into a single country: Germany was more important than its constituent kingdoms. Hitler stole the phrase and all the sympathy that went with it. Also, if Hitler had publicly proclaimed that he planned to slaughter millions of Jews, if he had called it an attempt at extermination, he would have had much less support from the German people. But he called it a “solution,” and who wouldn’t be in favor of this? A person is as likely to support a “solution” as “free speech.”

Political conservatives hate, viscerally hate, our modern language practices in which we attempt to counteract the racism of the past. They call it “political correctness,” which implies that anyone who does not use racist terms is doing so only for political influence. Our use of “black” instead of “nigger” can only mean, to conservatives, that we want political power; they think it cannot possibly be because we want to show respect and love to people who people who have been oppressed and slaughtered in the recent past. Conservatives want to refer to what happened in Tulsa in 1921 as a race riot, implying that black people were doing the killing and burning. In reality, it was a white mob hunting down and shooting blacks. Prominent Tulsan and KKK member W. Tate Brady was pleased to see a black man being dragged behind a car with a noose around his neck. It is not “political correctness” that makes us refer to the 1921 incident as a massacre or as an act of terrorism rather than a riot. It is a desire for truth, and to try to make up for the white massacre of blacks in the recent past.

To test the hypothesis of “language exists largely for manipulation,” all we need to do is see the spectacular failure of invented languages. Esperanto was invented to create world peace under the misguided notion that a common language will prevent miscommunication. But liars can lie in Esperanto. Charles Bliss created a system of symbolic communication that, he believed, would prevent language from being manipulated. He printed up six thousand copies of his book and sent them to government and other leaders all over the world, and got no response whatever, until some nurses noticed that this system might help children with cerebral palsy, who cannot communicate what they are thinking, to connect with the world. Bliss’s system thereby escaped extinction. But soon it was being used, not in place of other languages, but as a way of learning them, leading right back to the manipulation that Bliss, an escapee from World War Two, hated so much.

So when humans have created new languages for the express purpose of avoiding social manipulation, the new languages become the venues of social manipulation. This is an experimental confirmation of the hypothesis that languages evolved for social interactions, one important component of which is manipulation.

And there is nothing we can do about it, other than to keep using language in such a way as to try to counteract evil people from using their words to oppress others in their attempt to revive Nazi sentiments and make them palatable.

I also posted this essay on my science blog.

After posting a video on this topic, I received a comment saying that the white supremacist in the car was merely trying to get out of the crowd, and that his car was being attacked by leftist protestors. Well, of course this is what happened, AFTER he drove his car at high speed into the crowd. Of course his car was attacked AFTER he committed his act of terrorism. This is obvious to anyone who has seen the videos, such as this one. The fact that there was someone even within my small circle of YouTube viewers who believes that it is okay for a white supremacist to ram his car into protestors, that killing someone is a form of free speech, is frightening. My video, so far, has had only 18 views, and this comment came from one of this small number of viewers. Extrapolating to the total adult population of America, this means that there are approximately a half million right-wingers in America who believe that such action is justified. There might be more, as my videos tend to be viewed by progressives.

Christians Worship Trump

In America today, Christianity consists entirely of the worship of Donald Trump. Christians believe that everything Trump says is correct and must be believed, is good and must be obeyed. The Bible, and Jesus, are totally irrelevant to modern American Christianity.

Of course, you will immediately say that there are millions of Christians regarding whom this statement is incorrect. And you would be right, of course. I happen to know a few and so do you. But there are many other millions of Christians who loudly proclaim the near-divinity of Donald Trump.

What I have chosen to do, for the sake of simplicity, is to assume that all Christians are worshipers of Trump. I will then make individual exceptions for those Christians who make a public denunciation of Trump in some way or other. If you are a Christian who does not worship Trump, your denunciation must be public, as on Facebook, or a blog. Something that is searchable on the internet. You cannot secretly worship Jesus while publicly worshiping Trump.

I realize that it is something of a risk to identify yourself as a Christian who denounces Trump. His followers have guns and love them. But the danger is not nearly as great now as it will be later, once Trump’s worshipers have more power. And your public denunciation is likely to have more of an effect now than later.

The German churches largely went along with Hitler. If they had stood up to him in 1933, history might have been different. But by 1939 it was no longer possible for the churches to change anything. By then, not just Germans but Vichy French and other sympathizers were committing acts of unspeakable cruelty—acts that they might sincerely have not wanted to commit—while claiming that they were just following orders.

Some possible places to post your opposition to Trump:

• The whitehouse.gov website (keep a copy)
• On Facebook
• Your blog

So if you identify yourself to me as a Christian, I will assume that you worship Trump and wish Him to be the great spiritual leader of America. But I will ask you if you have publicly denounced Trump, and where you posted your statement. If you can answer that question, then I will concede that you are a Christian. Otherwise I can only assume that you are a worshiper of Trump, with whom for my own personal safety I must communicate as little as possible.

So, You Want the Gospel?

So, you want the Gospel? I wouldn’t suggest going to church to find it. Just listento this song by Glen Campbell, who died yesterday.

Thoughtful Quotes from All the Light We Cannot See

One of the best books I have recently read is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which was a best-seller last year. It is so well-written and thoughtful that it was compelling despite an adventurously fragmented arrangement of short chapters. A blind French girl and a young Nazi radio operator were both very aware that the universe is full of photons that we must perceive with something other than our eyes.

“Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger?”

“...she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never see a photon sent from the sun.”

“But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking as the city is gradually pounded to dust.”

Dinosaur Trackways on the Blank Slate of the Mind

I have posted this essay on my science blog as well, but I include a final paragraph on this blog that was not on the science blog.

The last couple of days, I have had the privilege of working, again, with Glen Kuban down in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas (Dinosaur Valley State Park). Usually we work alone, or with a couple of other people, but this time there was a little crowd. A BBC film crew brought their cameras and even a photographic drone to get video footage of the dinosaur trackways, which I have written about numerous times previously in this blog, for example here). They also came to interview Glen, who has worked on these tracks (and knows each footprint by name) for 37 years, and he will not get some worldwide recognition for the work he has done. Congratulations, Glen! You deserve it.

Watch for the BBC video when it comes out. It will be called Rediscovering T Rex. The trackways in the park are not T. rex, but there are very few verified footprints of T. rex. But in the Paluxy river bed you can see long trackways of Acrocanthosaurus, which was similar to T. rex in many ways. The BBC does not yet have an American distributor for this video, so far only Canada and France, but I’ll bet that within a year or so you can find the video on Amazon or your local library.

I have posted a YouTube video of Glen and the film crew, if you want to experience what it was like to be there.

We were at the trackway site that was made infamous in the 1970s-era creationist movie Footprints in Stone, where creationists claimed that human footprints overlapped dinosaur footprints, thus proving, they claimed, that the entire evolutionary timetable of Earth history was wrong. The evidence of human footprints in 110-million-year-old mud (now limestone) was skimpy and some of it faked. Most creationists, even those who have not publicly disavowed the “manprints of the Paluxy,” pretty much ignore them. The son of the producer of the creationist movie, when he discovered that his father had misled his viewers about these footprints, destroyed all remaining copies of the movie. There was no discussion of this uniquely American controversy with the BBC crew, even though they knew about it, because it is such a dead issue even among creationists; certainly European viewers would wonder why anyone took so much as two breaths to talk about the supposed man-prints.

But there are still passionate creationists, mostly in the Glen Rose vicinity, who believe that the supposed man-tracks are real and that they prove that not only are all evolutionary scientists wrong, but even most creationists. They are a crazy little cult. They still have a museum right near the state park, although it appears to be on the skids and is now only open two days a week. I have posted essays in this blog about the Mantrack cult in the past (for example here). The state park personnel who were with Glen, me, and the BBC crew told me that this little cult has so effectively spread the hoax that lots of visitors still ask them how to find the man-tracks. It gets pretty intense sometimes, and rather than to create a confrontation, the park personnel sometimes have to simply walk away or busy themselves with some other park visitor.

We sort of expected that some members of this cult would come and try to disrupt the BBC filming. This did not happen, however, perhaps because there were a half dozen park employees on the scene. This track site is hard to find but the cult members, some of whom own adjacent land, can get there. They act as if they also own the river bed, and have in the past tried to keep Glen from studying the tracks. Actually, the river bed belongs to the state of Texas.

But one of the cult members came by, claiming that he was taking photographs for the City of Glen Rose. I very much doubt that the city government actually sent him, however. They might have posted some of his photos in the past, but he was acting in no official capacity. Of course, this man, whose name I forgot, and just as well, started going through his little speech about how belief in the man-tracks took less faith than belief in what he called “strict evolution.” Glen had told me beforehand almost verbatim what this little speech would be. It is as if the cult members are programmed to give their little speeches, and they will not respond to anything you say. They act as if they are brainwashed.

But that was not actually the precipitating event. The man started by saying that a cold front was coming through this weekend, and that it would only be about 92 degrees instead of the normal 97 degrees. This, he claimed, disproved the entire science of global warming. As I am one of the climate scientists that Donald Trump hates and Emmanuel Macron loves, I had to point out that this was an invalid conclusion. Global warming does not mean that temperatures never decrease; it means that they increase more, and more often, than they decrease. Well, this was all the cue he needed to self-identify as a right-wing extremist (or words to that effect; I did not yet so label him) and launch into his speech.

This man went on to comment on the fact that paleontologists have stopped using the genus name Paluxysaurus and started using Sauroposeidon instead. This shows, said the man, that scientists are wrong about this and, why not, everything else also. But changing names of organisms reflects the ongoing process of coming to better understand the evolutionary history of the organisms. And, of course, science advances because scientists make mistakes and then learn from them, something that religious cults almost by definition cannot do. Cults believe themselves to be directly inspired by God, and to admit one mistake totally undermines their reason for being.

I wish to make two points from this. First, the religious fundamentalists are now attacking all of science and education on two fronts. Formerly, they focused all their attention on evolution. Now, they also consider climate scientists to be servants of Satan. This is why scientific and educational organizations, all the way from national and international organizations such as the AAAS and NCSE to local ones such as the Oklahoma Academy of Science and Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, of both of which organizations I am a past president, disseminate as much information about climate science as about evolutionary science.

The second point explains the title of this essay. The lumpy limestone of Dinosaur Valley State Park has proven to be one of the most creative blank slates upon which a religious cult can write its own version of the history of the universe. The dinosaur footprints are real enough. The supposed man-tracks are incomplete dinosaur footprints. On some of these prints, the dinosaur toes have eroded away. On others, the creationists have deliberately ignored the dinosaur toe prints. Early creationists film footage and notes show clearly that they knew the dinosaur toe marks were present. In a few infamous instances, creationists have even carved human toes on the dinosaur prints, or carved entire fake human footprints in the limestone. Rather than getting insights from the evidence in the limestone, they have used the limestone as a blank notebook on which to write their own version of reality, a version not even shared by most creationists.

It is unclear whether these cult members are dangerous. Of the hundreds of videos I have posted on my Darwin Youtube channel, the only ones on which rabidly angry comments have been posted were those in which I showed Glen Kuban at work in the Paluxy riverbed. A couple of times I have wondered whether to report these creationists to the FBI, but their comments were just short of personal threat. Of course, there were atheist comments also, which insulted the creationists. The creationist comments did not threaten the atheist commentators, Glen, or myself with any violence; they merely hoped that God would rain down fire and brimstone from the sky to destroy us and our children, that’s all. The blank pages of limestone on which this cult writes its version of reality includes at least the hope that everyone who disagrees with them will be destroyed.

I must now add that I have had many of the same experiences as many of the readers of this blog. We have been driven away from doctrinal religions because of fundamentalists and the rabidly violent things that they believe. Is this fair? Should I reject Christianity because of fundamentalists who believe that God wants them to have their guns ready to use against the rest of us? Of course there are members of every religion who esteem the pathway of peace. There are lots of churches, and mosques, that proclaim peace and love. Should they be held guilty for what their bloodthirsty co-religionists do and say? No, but here is the problem. There is nothing within the structure of religion itself, particularly not the doctrinal ones such as Christianity or Islam, that prevents hatred and violence. I consider peaceful Christians and Muslims to be enablers of the violent ones because they believe that their scriptures are, in fact, the sword of the Lord. I have the greatest esteem for Jesus of Nazareth, even while I totally reject Christianity. Christianity is a system of violence and oppression that has falsely taken the name of Jesus as justification for its destructive evils.