It’s a well-documented internet phenomenon that threads about female genital mutilation tend to be hijacked by discussion of circumcision. A while back, PZ brought attention to this fact, after just such a thread was hijacked on his blog. I think this betrays a loathsome societal tendency to ignore women’s issues in favor of more trivial male issues. We’ve seen this before elsewhere. A dominant social/economic group manages to puke up some twisted rhetoric that makes them seem like they’re the ones who are oppressed (Christians, “objectivists,” I’m looking at you). And, since they’re the dominant group, they get to hog the megaphone and drown out the voices of those who are actually disadvantaged. Really nothing new here.

However, I would like put forward a reason why I think the incessant comparison between FGM and MGM is understandable (not always warranted, but at least understandable): male genital mutilation is happening here.

The majority of infants in the US are still being circumcised, so drawing the comparison is at least useful in the sense that it illuminates how such a practice could arise and perpetuate itself. It’s difficult for an American to imagine how a parent could look lovingly into the eyes of their daughter, and then hand them over to someone who is going to razor off her labia. However, we have an innate cultural understanding of circumcision, so we can introspect on our own attitudes towards a similar tradition. Also, if you accept the premise that circumcision is morally wrong, then its defenders become proxy defenders FGM, and we gain great insight into the cognitive biases that drive these barbaric rituals forward through the generations.

Handicapping the discussion at the outset by prohibiting mention of circumcision seems to be an unnecessary, reactionary position on the part of those who would advocate it. Although I’m tempted to agree, because it’s utterly inexcusable that no discussion of FGM can get started without being totally derailed three comments in. Comparison is fine, but cooption is retarded.

Case in point: Neon Trees, and their new song “Animal.”

I don’t know what it is about people mispronouncing English /r/s that drives me up the wall, but this song is unbearable. Whenever the lead singer comes across an /r/, he either deletes it, or pronounces it as [ɰ], sometimes verging on [ɣ]

Here [hi:] we go again,
I kinda wanna be more than friends [fɰɛndz],
so take it easy on me,
I’m afraid [əfɰeɪd] you’re [jɯ] never [nɛvə] satisfied

Here [hi:] we go again,
we’re [wɪ] sick like animals, we play pretend [pɰitɛnd],
you’re [jɯ] just a cannibal,
I’m afraid [əfɰeɪd] I won’t get out alive.

Oh oh, I want some more [mɔɰ],
Oh oh, what are [a] you waiting for [fɔɰ],
Take a bite of my heart [haət] tonight.

*SHUDDERS*

In the second verse, the singer is required to say “I wanna run and hide,” and as far as I can tell, he pulls it off, but just as you think he’s redeemed himself, the next line is

I do it every [ɛvɣi] time

AHHHH!

The singer’s handicap is even more obvious in this quieter version:

Now, I’ll admit I’ve made exceptions to this pet peeve in the past, like for lead singer Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind. But that was only under special consideration of lyrical ability and musical talent.

I wish you would step back from [fɰʌm] that ledge my friend [fwɛnd]…
…The angry [æŋgwi] boy a bit too insane,
icing over a secret [sikwɪt] pain.

(and so on)

But no excuse can be made for you, Neon Trees. Pack up your shitty band and go to speech therapy.

I recently received another response to my piece “I am a Militant Atheist” over at Plasma Pool. The commenter – a Mr. John Pilkey – is much more level-headed in expressing his opinion than the previous commenter, which I appreciate.

I have to disagree that Biblical Christianity possesses great logical depth. In fact, it’s rife with contradictions that can only be explained with special pleading. For example, the fact that God is supposedly all knowing and all loving, but that he created man and placed him in the garden with the tree of knowledge. By definition an all-knowing being would know the outcome of these actions – namely that Adam and Eve would fall victim to temptation and eat of the tree. By definition, an all-loving being would seek to create a world without suffering. So why would God do this?

A suitable analogy would be someone releasing a priceless vase from the window of a ten story building. The perpetrator knows with exact certainty the trajectory the vase will follow, and can therefore be held responsible for the ensuing destruction. And while our vase-dropper is culpable, his knowledge of gravity is only based on a lifetime of feeling its effects (and perhaps a few physics classes). For all he knows, this time, there could be a lapse in Newton’s laws. Also for all he knows, a truck carrying a load of pillows could drive under the vase at the last moment, cushioning its fall. God, on the other hand, is omniscient: he would know with perfect certainty that man would bring sin into the world.

This simple contradiction is a crack in the foundation of all Christian theology, and as much as you try to buttress that which you build on top of it, this fundamental weakness remains.

Mr. Pilkey claims that he never expected to bear witness to a miracle, and that miracles of the past served as “authentication proper only to the times when they occurred.” He says that, because he is not an Old Testament prophet or an Apostle, he has no need of such miracles to establish or bolster his faith. Presumably, the faith of modern peoples should be grounded in tradition and upbringing. I think this contradicts yet another attribute of the Christian God: perfect justice.

How fair is it that members of generations past were permitted incontrovertible evidence of God’s existence – the sun standing still in the sky, the parting the Red Sea, any one of Jesus’ miracles– while I should be content with two thousand years of tradition and hearsay? Their salvation was virtually guaranteed because they benefited from direct evidence, while I have to struggle with ambiguous data, ultimately placing my bet on insufficient knowledge, and risking an eternity of suffering. This preferential treatment of generations past is not what I’d expect of a just God.

Mr. Pilkey also makes the point that for those such as himself, God’s existence is “presuppositional.” Now, I don’t intend what follows to be an insult, since he was so gracious in his response, but I feel it’s necessary to my rhetorical point: if that’s what he believes, Mr. Pilkey is not someone who’s looking for an answer that explains all his evidence, he’s looking for the evidence that explains his answer.

I object strongly to the accusation that scientists “hold fast to their fundamental convictions” as believers do. On the contrary, the entire endeavor of science starts with unshackling yourself from your presuppositions, or at least trying your best to. Just because you’re willing to disclose your prejudices outright does not excuse you from purging them. In science, nothing can be an “established fact beyond dispute,” because people’s reputations are made by challenging the paradigm. If someone could disprove Atomic Theory or the Theory of Evolution, they would be immortalized in scientific history overnight. The only reason scientists continue to believe that space is a “transparent vacuum,” for example, is that it’s evidenced by direct, laboratory observation, and it withstands experimental scrutiny. Neither of those things can be said of God.

A quick perusal of Teh Intarwebz shows there is a historian Dr. John Davis Pilkey, who seeks to reconstruct human history immediately after the waters of Noah’s flood receded, which he claims happened two thousand years ago. Our commenter did not provide a website, but a quick check of the source code of his comments shows his e-mail address as jpilkey@earthlink.net, which is the same for this site, so I suspect commenter Pilkey is in fact Dr. Pilkey.

Rebutting such a theory is far beyond the scope of my ability as a blogger and budding scientist, but I’d like to point you in the direction of at least one line of argument that’s compelling to me:

For example, the published count of alleles of ABO glycosyltransferase, the gene associated with the ABO blood types, is up to 29 so far. The three sons of Noah and their three wives only had a total of 12 copies of chromosome 9, where the gene is located, and even assuming maximum heterozygosity and no shared alleles between any of them, that still leaves 17 alleles that had to have arisen later.

There’s a lot more out there to be had. Talk Origins is a good site if you’re in the market for explanations.

Anyway, I’d like to thank Dr. Pilkey for sharing his opinion. I deeply enjoy discussing these matters, and appreciate the opportunity.

Seriously.

From their page on atheism:

Given that atheism appears to be significantly less appealing to women, atheists are a minority in the population and that people tend to marry people with similar values or who resemble their parents or themselves; this would suggest that male atheists may find it more difficult to find prospective female partners for marriage.

There are actually multiple subheadings about atheism and its attractiveness to women. I guess, their image in the eyes of women is of deep concern to the 11 year old boys writing this garbage. They’ve even written an entire page dedicated to the topic of

Atheism appears to be significantly less appealing to women

Jesus.

From the first paragraph of their page on Evolution.

Since World War II a majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the evolutionary position which employs methodological naturalism have been atheists.

Somebody poisoned the waterhole!

On their page about homosexuality, they draw a comparison between homosexuality and cannibalism:

In respect to the homosexuality and animals myth, there is currently interest on whether homosexual behavior is or is not zoologically “natural.” This is largely a sterile debate because behavior is not necessarily moral even if “natural;” because the nature of human beings is not necessarily the same as the nature of other species, and because it is not at all clear when an observed behavior can be counted as “sexual,” or as implying a sexual “orientation.” Also, Creation Ministries International wrote on this subject of whether or not there is homosexuality in the animal kingdom: “There is…documented proof of cannibalism and rape in the animal kingdom, but that doesn’t make it right for humans.”

Here’s the first paragraph of their page on feminism:

Feminism originally was an expression used by suffragettes - who were predominantly pro-life - to obtain the right for women to vote in the early 1900s in the United States and the United Kingdom. By the 1970s, however, liberals had changed the meaning to represent people who favored abortion and identical roles or quotas for women in the military and in society as a whole.

Apparently, feminism is about abortion and quotas. Who knew?

The entire site is full of this crap. My forehead is bruised from facepalming.

Just to give you an idea of the hot topics (read: objects of unhealthy obsession) on Conservapedia, here’s a screenshot of their google search result:

Yep. That’s what people are going to Conservapedia to learn about.

To be fair, here’s the same result for Wikipedia:

At first I laughed, but this is exactly what you’d expect if people were relying on a site to learn about things they were interested in, as opposed to playing wiki-circle-jerk around hot-button social and political issues.

Now that there’s been so much talk about the “Ground Zero” mosque, I figured it’s time I offer my two cents. Lots of good arguments have been made … entirely by those in support of the builders’ rights.

From the opponents’ side, I hear a lot of people asking “why does it have to be so close to Ground Zero?” That’s a question you’re free to ask yourself, or perhaps those who selected the site, but you cannot ground a serious objection in that question alone. Besides, what would you offer as a solution, to have a legally enforced radius around this hole in the ground where no Muslim edifice can be erected? Sounds constitutional to me …

I’ve also heard that it would be a “slap in the face” to the victims of 9/11. Well, I think that abandoning our nation’s principles is a greater affront to the memories of those killed in the attack than an “Islamic Cultural Center” ever could be. Not to mention the American Muslims who were in the towers when they were brought down; wouldn’t disallowing the construction of the Center be a slap in the face to them?

Which brings me to my next point: if there was ever any doubt in our minds that the Right is in the habit of systematically vilifying Islam and Arabs, that should by now be expunged. After all, these aren’t al-Qaeda operatives who want to build the Center, they’re Americans: that’s right the opponents are trying to deny Americans their right to worship wherever they want. Well, let them be reminded that the first line of the First Amendment reads

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

Yes, let them be reminded that their bellyaching can never beget any legal instantiation, because it would violate one of the first rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution.

In the end, I think that the anti-”mosque” people’s idiocy speaks for itself. But I should say that, while I think their entire rhetoric is vile, I would happily die for their right to voice it, as should any American for the free speech of their brothers and sisters.

For your viewing pleasure:

(Via)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(Via)

For a while, I’ve been interested in a subset of English nouns that are formed by suffixing /-th/* to an adjective. What’s peculiar about them is the alternation of vowel sounds between the lexical categories: the nominal form has one vowel, and the adjectival has another. Here are two common examples:

long - length
strong - strength

In both cases, the stem vowel shifts from /ɑ/→/ε/^†. This process is called “I-mutation”^[1],[2] because it involves pulling the vowel closer to the sound /i/ (”ee” as in feet).

The chart below visually demonstrates the process. It’s essentially a diagram of your tongue’s location in your mouth during the execution of vowels. For the /ɑ/ in long and strong and your tongue is low and retracted, and for /i/ of feet its pushed forward and up. A quick test on your own will confirm this.

Figure 1: /ɑ/→/ε/

During I-Mutation, the sound /ɑ/ is pulled upward and forward, and settles at an intermediate between /ɑ/ and /i/, namely /ε/.

This process doesn’t happen spontaneously: it’s environmentally conditioned, meaning there must have been an /i/ nearby to trigger the change. Historically, the /-th/ suffix was more like /-ith/ or /-ithu/, so it actually contained the sound /i/ (”ee”). So, in anticipation of the vowel in the suffix, speakers would move the stem vowel incrementally closer to /i/, and they stopped off somewhere in between. Later the /i/ was deleted in a process called syncope.

Some linguists have attributed I-Mutation and similar processes to human laziness, claiming that speakers try to expend minimal effort to pronounce the vowels of a word. However I think it’s more likely a constraint on articulation: the tongue is physical object, and must actually move from one position to another. Over time, this transition becomes audible, and begins to color the vowels. Eventually, the “slide” between sounds becomes part of the accent of that language and becomes established (think of a Spanish speaker trying to say home, they have much trouble mastering the slide from “oh” to “oo” packed into that vowel). But I digress.

For the other words in this class, an original I-Mutation has been obscured by other processes. For example, in the following words, the adjective was derived from the noun and was preserved. Later, the Great Vowel Shift changed the sound of the noun, but left the adjective intact:

fūl → filth ^{[3] ‡}

Figure 2: /u:/→/ɪ/

Later, fūl (pronounced “fool”) became foul by means of the Great Vowel shift: /u:/→/au/

hāl → health /ɑ/→/ε/ (See Fig. 1) ^[4]

Here, the Great Vowel Shift covered I-Mutation’s tracks by changing hāl (pronounced “hall”) to whole and a less commonly used word hale. The likely explanation for the two results is that there were two competing pronunciations of hāl, and each went a different way with the Great Vowel Shift (and it probably has to do with the influence of /l/ on the preceding vowel … don’t ask).

In other instances, it’s more complicated. The Old English word slaw had the same vowel of modern (cole)slaw, but the /w/ was actually pronounced /slɑw/. I-Mutation pulled the /ɑ/ forward:

Figure 3: /ɑ/→/æ/

… and we were left with slæwth (rhymes with mouth, which stuck around for quite a while in Old English. However, in Middle English, slaw changed roughly to the modern pronunciation slow, and speakers – conscious of the relationship between slow and slæwth – futzed the vowels. ^[5] The important thing is that the /th/ stuck around.

One final example is young - youth, although the story of /ng/ is a bit convoluted.

All of the derivations we’ve examined thus far were formed in Old English and were fossilized. Since then, the /-ith(u)/ suffix ceased being a preferred way of forming nouns, and has been abandoned in favor of suffixes like /-ness/. Linguists say suffixes like /-ith/ are no longer “productive,” because they aren’t actively used in the generation of new words, despite remaining as vestiges in certain words and phrases.

Although /-ith/ suffixation fell into disfavor, some words have nevertheless been formed to superficially resemble the fossilized forms through the process of analogy. For example, wealth was formed from well under analogy to health ^[6]. Here, both forms have the same vowel. This is probably evidence that analogy was afoot, because speakers don’t have conscious access to the rules of phonological rules like I-Mutation: they just added /th/ and called it a day.

On the other hand, some analogized words do exhibit change in the stem vowel, just not in the manner we know to be consistent with I-Mutation. Depth was formed under analogy with length ^[7], but this vowel alternation is inconsistent with I-Mutation. Similarly, analogy to length is also the provenance of width (from wide).^[8]

One final example is the word breadth, derived from broad under analogy with length. ^[9] This example does obey the rules of I-Mutation, but we can tell from its first attestation (1520) that I-Mutation had already swept through the Old English lexicon by the time it was coined. If it wasn’t one of the originally I-Mutated forms, it’s probably just a faithful imitation of the long – length alternation.

Most interesting is the emergent tendency to analogize to length for words relating to dimensions. It’s as if speakers wanted wide, deep, and broad to behave like long so that they could all be one neat set. This “ironing out” the kinks in the language is still happening today (although there’s some out there who would fight it). The noun height is traditionally formed from the adjective high, but you can often hear people saying heighth! It’s not hard to imagine a day when heighth has become accepted, and all the words for dimensions end in /th/.

* This sound is usually transcribed with a theta /θ/, but here I use /th/ for typographical simplicity.
† Technically, it was probably /ɔ/→/œ/ which was subsequently unrounded to /ε/. That’s why we have “o” in spelling today, but you get the idea.
‡ This almost certainly involved an intermediate /ʏ:/ which was later unrounded to /ɪ/.

Additional sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut

Mitchell & Robinson. A Guide to Old English. Blackwell Publishing, 2001.

The US Military has a $660 million contract with the Michigan company Trijicon, which manufactures rifle sights destined for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As it turns out, the company has been surreptitiously placing references to Bible verses on their sights. So much for this not being a holy war.

From the company’s mission statement on their website.

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

John 8:12 "Prepare to eat lead, raghead."

Dear God. These people make me shudder.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

That’s precisely how this looks to Muslims.

When imperial powers engage in this kind of religious warfare, things can get very nasty. The Sepoy Rebellion was instigated by the same kind of tactics in colonial India, when the British were accused of greasing their bullets with beef tallow and pig fat, which are ritually unclean to the native Hindus and Muslims respectively.

In order to load their rifles, the soldiers had to bite the cartridges. For Hindus, this meant they would lose their caste. For Muslims, it meant that if they were shot by such a ‘tainted’ bullet, they would die unclean and be excluded from paradise.

So they revolted. And much fun ensued.

(h/t Pharyngula)

If you haven’t heard of Pascal’s Wager, it’s a rather silly way of arguing to someone that they should believe in God. The argument goes something like this: in deciding whether or not you believe in God, you should approach the problem the way you approach a wagering situation. Ask yourself what you could possibly gain, and what you could possibly lose.

Given that you have two choices (believe in God, or don’t) and that there are two possible results (God exists, or he doesn’t), there are four possible outcomes. Traditionally, these are arranged in this decision chart to help you conceptualize.

Clearly, the most sensible solution for a soul-wagerer would be the first row: believing in God. The payoff is potentially high, and the risk is low.

Nevermind that this kind of wagering goes against the very faith-in-the-absence-of-evidence that the Christian God asks of us. Such a disingenuous attempt to feign belief in the deity probably wouldn’t go far to impress Him.

But that isn’t my main problem with the Wager. My beef arises from the fact that it only assumes one possible god. To be a real wager, you’d need to consider all possible outcomes, and that means other gods. Which is why I devised Elliott’s Wager, and the corresponding decision chart.

Unfortunately, it won’t fit in this blog format, so you can find it (here).

-

So where’s your money?

For those out there that believe the Noah’s Ark story was a literal worldwide flood, you might want to check this out:

Unreasonable Faith recaps some of the points they make in the video:

1. Even if Noah took out all the “variations” and only stuck with “kinds,” that would still have been over 2 billion animals.

2. For a year in the ark, two elephants alone would require 365,000 lbs of food and 65,000 gal of water;
two giraffes would require 54,740 lbs of food
two lions would require 16,000 lbs of fresh meat.

3. If Noah took all baby animals, how would all the babies get there from around the world at the same time? Or how would all the animals have babies at the exact same time?

…

5. Not even most of the sea life could survive due to the changes in temperature, pressure, sunlight, filtration, salt.

The video makes the point that at an elevation of 29,055 feet, all the animals would freeze to death, or suffocate to death because the air is too thin.

I don’t think that’s right, because you’d displace the air upwards as well. 29,000 feet would be the new sea level, and the pressure would be the same as current sea level (or just a tiny bit less, since the air is occupying a larger volume).

But that’s just a nitpicky detail.

It’s also worth considering that the rainiest place on earth gets 39 feet of rain a year, or 1.28 inches a day. In order to cover Mount Everest in 40 days, it would have to rain 8,716.5 inches per day (726 feet). That’s so much rain that you’d drown standing in it. The sheer downward pressure of that much water would probably sink the boat.

Nothing could have survived (unless it was magic).

Each of the four horsemen of New Atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) has his favorite argument he likes to trot out in his talks and debates. Having listened to these guys talk over and over again, I have become pretty familiar with their lines of reasoning and preferred modes of attack.

But there’s one I never get tired of hearing, and unsurprisingly it’s from Christopher Hitchens — in my opinion, the most eloquent of the four.

Unfortunately, I’ve hitherto been unable to find a transcript of this argument, so I took the liberty to transcribe it.

I asked Sir Francis Collins, the leading Christian who did the genome project (as you probably know), how long he thought humanity had been on earth, and I asked professor Richard Dawkins how long he thought fully evolved humans had been present. Dawkins thinks it could have been as many as 250k years, Collins thinks certainly not less than 100k — 100k is all I need. 100k years since we definitely separated ourselves from the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals…

…Now, that’s to say — if you believe in a divine intervention in our lives — that, give it just 100k years, for the first 94-95k, people are born, they die mainly of their teeth or in childbirth or of microorganisms they don’t know exist. Their life expectancy is for the first 50 or 60k years, perhaps 25 years. They’re killed by animals. They’re killed by each other in pointless turf wars. They’re killed in typhoons, floods, mudslides, and so forth. But gradually they make slow exponential progress, they get to the point (suffering all the time and heaven watches it with folded arms, like this). And then four or 5k years ago heaven decides “we can’t let them go on like this, we need an intervention. Probably the best place for it would be in Bronze Age Palestine or Egypt. Probably the best form it could take would be a human sacrifice. That might cheer them up a bit.”

Now, if you don’t believe this, you do not believe in any of the three monotheistic revelations, [because] that’s what you have to believe. That’s the minimum you have to believe in order to believe in any of those foresaid. And of course, it’s not believeable, or should I put it like this: it only re-places the argument as before. It replaces the argument as it was before we knew about Cro-Magnons, or dinosours, or Neanderthals. It argues from design. And if everything was designed, what are we to make of the designer, who sentenced so many generations to barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death?

In the first place, isn’t that a rather incompetent rather tinkering designer, to say the very least of it? In the second place, isn’t it a rather cruel, or at the very best, a highly indifferent one? And we still can’t be sure whether this same incompetent, and indifferent and cruel person cares whether we go to bed with members of our own gender or not, because there’s no way to derive verdicts like this from evidence like that. So the religious still haven’t scored the ghost of a point.

To me, that’s the most compelling argument that God is either non-existent, or an incompetent designer. Either way, the Christian God is a farce.

You can find this argument in most debates Hitchens participates in, but the transcription above is taken from a debate between him and Jay Richards.