Relax and Have Fun

Sunday morning we enjoyed the final two presentations, prior to heading back to sunny Mexico.   Jonathan Kirsch gave a very interesting, very scary presentation on the Long Shadow of the Inquisition.  He defined the Inquisitorial Toolbox as set of techniques, thoughts and methods that had been defined during the original Inquisition and that are still in use by the Church and by governments around the world today.   He pointed out that the Inquisition caused suffering due to habit of mind (i.e., the Cathars were persecuted because they did not believe in transubstantiation) and that only Christians were persecuted (although once a Jew or Muslim converted to Christianity for any reason……..they were fair game too).  Kirsch, too, was on an book tour.  Although in the Q&A session he recommended his God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism as his best book overall, he told us he’d prefer it if we’d all buy a copy of his newest book (from which the material for the presentation was taken), The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God.  Kirsch gave several example of tools from the Inquisitorial Toolbox being used today and pointed out that the power of being able to persecute someone based solely on the fact that they had different ideas or thoughts still came in quite handy for Authorities of all types.   He ended his presentation with a powerful story about watching Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Broadway right after 9/11.

Richard Dawkins introduced the final speaker, Eugenie Scott, as a hero in the fight for teaching science in the science classroom and as someone he admired greatly.  This was very interesting to me, given the amount of discussion in the blogosphere of late re the accommodationist stance of the Scott’s National Center for Science Education.  Scott made no reference to this in her presentation: Creationism:  Still Crazy After All These Years.    She gave a brief review of the history of creationism and intelligent design attacks on evolution in the classroom, then focused on current tactics including “teach the controversy” and the  “either/or” approach.  She pointed out that attacking evolution is just the tip of the iceberg.  Attacking evolution is attacking materialistic science.  Attacking materialistic science is attacking materialism (non-dualism).  Kind of a scary thought, given the subject matter of Kirsch’s presentation right before this.  She closed her presentation with some pretty sobering stories about what’s going on in Texas right now with their science textbooks.   Currently, the creationists are abusing the meaning of the phrase “academic freedom” as one means to try to teach religion in the science classroom.  Since Texas purchases so many textbooks, what they choose to purchase is usually what all the other states have to purchase.  So the content of the science textbooks chosen by Texas has a huge effect on science education all over the US.

Conference Summary:   This was a great conference.  The speaker list was incredible.  Everything else about the conference was fine, but it was the caliber of the speakers that really set this conference apart from the last few TAM’s (for instance).  For me, it was fun to see many of my favorite thinkers and authors in the flesh and it was very stimulating to listen to them in the  context of this conference.  Very refreshing.  I’ll close with some random links (of variable value) to other bloggers’ thoughts on the convention:  Linda  Ward Selbie,  Jerry Coyne, Russell Blackford, PZ Myers, Humanist Network News, Kate Lovelady and Jim Lippard.

Saturday morning started off with the previously-mentioned surreal experience of eating breakfast a few feet away from the Cigarette Smoking Man.  I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t really in character.

The first lecture we attended was on Cosmology: A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.   What a great speaker.   Ramona and I both want to go back and read some of his books now.  He covered many subjects (including a cool explanation of how we know the universe is expanding), but the one that I found most memorable (and that was tied to a theme in Dan Dennett’s presentation later) was about how the expanding nature of the universe will one day lead to a world in which the scientists will no longer be able to observe the rest of the universe….because it will be too far away.  At that point in time, falsifiable, scientifically accurate observations will no longer support the theory of an expanding universe.   I have no idea what motivated Krauss to include this thought experiment in his lecture, but the attitude behind even thinking of things like that is what makes rational thought and the scientific method great.

Next up was Carolyn Porco.  After a brief comparison of science and religion in terms of ways of knowing, she talked a lot about using stories (movies, shows, novels….) to communicate the advantages of science.   All of this was done with no visuals.  Then she switched gears and used images from the Cassini Mission (she is the leader of the imaging team) to describe the amazing discoveries around Saturn.  Listening to her and looking at those images was incredibly moving.   All the images from Cassini are available at www.ciclops.org.

Martin Pera gave a presentation on Embryonic Stem Cell Research.   He reviewed the short history of stem cell research, covered current scientific and political issues, and emphasized the need for flexible legislation instead of restrictive legislation given the early stage of the science (first embryonic stem cell was discovered in 1998).  He closed his lecture with a survey of emerging areas in stem cell research.

Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, gave a great presentation on……why evolution is true.  He was introduced by Richard Dawkins as the scientist to whom Dawkins now turns  for expert information on evolutionary biology.   As I told Professor Coyne when I met him later (although this probably didn’t mean as much to him as Dawkins’ comment), his blog posts at WEIT are the ones I always read, no matter how many others get culled out when the RSS reader is full.  Coyne’s presentation covered the five components of the theory of evolution,  predictions which could be made if the components were true, scientific evidence from various fields of study which supported the predictions, and for kicks, what would need to be discovered to disprove evolution.  He closed with a discussion of the apparent correlation between success and lack of belief in a god at the country level, summarizing that we need to make the world a better place so people won’t need a Sky Father.

Next, Daniel Dennett gave a presentation on The Evolution of Confusion.  Dennett is probably my favorite living philosopher.  I first heard him speak at TAM4 several years ago and have been a huge fan of his since then.  He talked about his efforts to reverse engineer religion, to try to understand it better.  Those efforts include studying active preachers who are actually atheists and defining the functional role of theologians (spinmeisters for religion).  He also covered the pernicious effects of the use-mention error (UME) as he segued into criticisms of Robert Wright’s and Karen Armstrong’s recent books (or, all her books in Armstrong’s case).   He closed his presentation with an overview of his thoughts on the evolution of the god meme, and stated that to extinguish religion or to mutate it into something harmless, we have to understand it.  [Note:  particularly in the case of this speaker, my brief notes in no way do justice to the depth and breadth of his thoughts.  Please see his books Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Breaking the Spell for full explanations of his thoughts on consciousness, evolution and religion respectively.]

John and Dan (as he asked me to call him)

I’ve been juggling several of Dennett’s books/writings on consciousness over the last few months, and was happy to have a chance to ask him about the order in which a layman should read them.  I caught him in the hallway after he’d come out of an interview with a journalist, so I imagine he was happy to field a fanboy question.  He suggested I read Elbow Room to understand the place-holders he was building for his future writings, Consciousness Explained to see the full picture of his thinking on the multiple-draft theory (and he warned me that this book was written for laymen but contained pointed arguments targeted at professionals), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea to see his take on the power of evolution  and then Freedom Evolves for the synthesis of evolution and consciousness thoughts.   Now I know, read them in the order he wrote them.

The final speaker on Saturday was Richard Dawkins, who started off his presentation by admitting that he was on a book tour, then read to us from the last chapter of The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, with editorial comments.   Sounds like a very interesting book.

…..on to Day Three.

Ramona and I went to a great conference in Burbank, CA in early October.  Darwin’s Legacy was co-hosted by the Atheist Alliance International and the Richard Dawkins Foundation.  We arrived mid-day on Friday and jumped right in by attending a live recording of the Dogma Free America podcast with panelists P.Z. Myers, Sunsara Taylor and William B. Davis.  The following sessions that afternoon were running in three simultaneous tracks.  First, I listened to a self-identified Arab-American (who asked us to maintain his anonymity) describe the Arab Atheist Network.  His talk ended up being a disjointed primer on the negative cultural aspects of Islam, specifically the absence of women’s rights, the absence of freedom of expression and the patriarchal biases.  He closed his presentation with a list of ways to not help Arab Atheists, which included continuing superficial critiques of Islam and  triggering in-group solidarity reactions.  His list of ways to help Arab Atheists was short and the main way was to translate or to contribute to the translation and distribution of critical thinking literature.

Next I attended Russell Blackford’s presentation on Defamation of Religion.  I enjoy many of the posts on Blackford’s Metamagician and the Hellfire Club blog and it was nice to get to hear him speak.  He had a quirky, irreverent  presentation which drew a lot of laughs from the audience.  The scariest part of the presentation came after his discussion of the proposed UN Defamation of Religion resolution.  Turns out Articles 19 and 20 of the The United Nations INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS (ICCPR) adopted in 1976 contain clauses which could be precursors to what some Muslim countries are trying to do with the Defamation of Religion proposal.

Met up with Ramona to attend William B. Davis’ presentation.  Davis played the Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-files.  He gave a very pleasant presentation which included several vignettes from his upcoming memoir (odd that he didn’t reference the X-files episode where his character was a thwarted writer…..) and then talked about whether The X-files hurt or helped critical thinking.  Evidently, Richard Dawkins had at some point in the past criticized the show for supporting pseudo-science.  His short answer to Dawkins was that there was no evidence for his claim.  Davis credited the popularity of the show with the observation that it (like Shakespeare’s works) described a scenario on the cusp between two worlds with great tension between the two worlds.  Then Davis drifted off-topic with some odd comments about capitalism and global warming.   Davis was in attendance throughout the conference, and I have to say that it was somewhat surreal to have the Cigarette Smoking Man lurking around in his cashmere sweater all weekend, bumping into him at breakfast, seeing him mill through the lobby of the expo.  I kept wanting to say “honey, watch out!”  even though we was a very nice guy.

While Ramona listened to a great talk by Sean Faircloth of the Secular Coalition for America, I went to Kate Lovelady’s talk on Building Thriving Non-theist Communities.  Kate is the leader of the Ethical Society of St. Louis.  I enjoyed this as much for the insights into Ethical Societies as I did for its content on the life cycle of communities/groups/projects.  Unrelated to Darwin, evolution, critical thinking or woo, Kate quoted a mentor of hers regarding how to approach things when you join a new group which I paraphrased in my notes as “If you join an organization and you see some good things going on and you see some bad things going on, don’t spend any of your energy on trying to stop the bad things.  Spend your energy working on making the good stuff even better.”   This advice may well have more effect on me than most of the rest of the content of the conference.

Next up, the ubiquitous and loquacious P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula fame.  Myers drew a standing room only crowd for his presentation on Design vs. Chance. He started off with a caricature of the standard Intelligent Design (ID) argument, then spent the next thirty minutes giving logical example after logical example to refute it.  Much better and much more on-target than his presentation at TAM6 last year.

From Richard's mouth to Bill's ear.....

As the sun set, we rolled into a happy hour (fun group with which to relax) followed by a viewing of a streaming of Real Time with Bill Maher on the big screen.  Richard Dawkins was his guest, although he didn’t get to say much thanks to the panel and Maher.  Next the full cast from Mr. Deity entertained us for an hour while Maher and Dawkins made the long trip from the studio to the conference.    Brian Keith Dalton gave a (thankfully) abbreviated version of the presentation I heard at Shermer’s convention last fall, then he and the cast performed a few episodes live and showed us a few episodes on the big screen.   There was much laughter.  Then Dawkins and Maher and their entourage arrived.  Dawkins presented the Richard Dawkins Foundation Award to Maher (after making a very pointed commentary that he did not agree with Maher’s view on alternative medicine) and then Maher took the stage and delivered a great stand-up comedy act based on readings from The Purpose-Driven Life .  I think the RDF award was given mainly based on Maher’s movie Religulous, which is really funny and really sad.  The last thing on the agenda Friday night was a Comedy Night in a smaller venue (the main conference room was filled approximately five hundred attendees) with several younger comics followed by Jimmy Dore as the headliner.

….on to Day Two

After having attending several of James Randi’s The Amaz!ing Meetings (TAM’s) over the past few years and having listened to some fascinating people (Murray Gell-Mann, Nadine Strossen, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Gillespie, Phil Plait, Richard Wiseman and Neil DeGrasse Tyson off the top of my head), I wanted to see what a Cal Tech-based, one-day Skeptics Society conference was like, in comparison to the JREF’s multi-day, Vegas-based get togethers.  One of the things about TAM is that there is a lot of fun filler.  Debunking stuff, magicians performing “psychic” experiments, people really passionate about ending psychic fraud and “amateur” presentations on various one-off topics (which were sometimes some of my favorite people/thoughts) fill in between the heavy hitters and usually have little to nothing to do with the theme of the conference.  So at this year’s TAM (at which the Skeptics Society always plays a big role), I was very interested to learn about the topic of this year’s Skeptic Society conference: Origins – the Big Questions.

The conference was fascinating.  We met on Friday night for a banquette at Burger Continental in Pasadena.  I recognized a few faces from TAM, but mostly met old white guys from California.  The demographics were skewed more towards them (us?) partly because of the on-going, monthly Skeptics Society lecture series at Cal Tech, I think.  I did end up meeting a guy from Las Cruces, NM (just up the road) who later gave me a great lead on one of the best speaker’s material.  After dinner, Dr. Michael Shermer took the band stand, welcomed us all to the dinner/conference, briefly reviewed the next day’s schedule changes and then introduced a great Los Angeles magician named John Carney.  This was a nice lagniappe for me.  I’ve heard about Carney for years, but have never seen him perform.  He was incredible.  He did a short stage set, then did walk-around to pick up the people in various dining rooms.  Amazing.  I can see why he is so well-respected in the magic community.  Plus, he was a funny guy and had a great stage presence.

I walked back to the “conference hotel” and called it an early night, to get rested for the big day of lectures.    Before I get to the lectures, I scare-quoted conference hotel because the entire conference took place at Cal Tech.  The hotel was very nice, and ran a shuttle (barely) to Cal Tech, but other than some ad hoc bar conversations there was really no conference-specific reason to stay there.   If I make it out there again, I’ll consider staying somewhere either closer to CalTech and/or less expensive.

The morning lectures were great!  These rock stars of science (Susskind, Prothero, Davies, Carroll and Koch) talked about string theory, evolution, cosmology, the origins of time and consciousness.  I enjoyed all the lectures, but Sean Carroll‘s was my favorite.  Unfortunately, his only published book is a graduate-level text book (pass); fortunately, he does have a Teaching Company lecture series available (check).

The afternoon lectures were less great.  Two out of the three religious speakers who were invited to debate the scientists did not present themselves very well at all.  To the point that a lot of the afternoon was a personal waste of time, contrasted against the morning lectures.  Here’s a link from another attendee and here’s one from Sean Carroll himself.  Both of these pages have more comprehensive links to the speakers and both criticize the afternoon sessions.  Between the two, you may see more of what I’m talking about.  I will be keeping an eye on Shermer’s responses to this criticism of the conference.

After the painful afternoon, we had dinner (all Burger Continental, all conference long) and then reconvened for a funny session with the cast from Mr. Diety.  Brian Dalton told us about the creation of the show, showed some of the earlier episodes and talked about their background, then he and the rest of the cast did some live performances of a few of the episodes, showed the obligatory blooper reel and took questions from the audience.  It was nice to end the conference belly-laughing instead of eye-rolling.

In his closing remarks, Michael Shermer mentioned that the next “annual” conference in a few years (a running joke of his) would probably be on war and terrorism.  Not sure if I’ll be able to make it back out to Pasadena in a few years (who knows where we’ll live then), but I’ll definitely keep my eye out for the speaker list.  Overall, the conference was well-run, most of the speakers were incredible (OK, they were all incredible in one sense or another) and it was very stimulating to socialize with that many other people interested in learning more about the Origins and the Big Questions.