Speech at March for Science Seattle

Here’s the 4-minute speech I gave at the March for Science in Seattle, Earth Day 2017, April 22. That’s Karen up on stage with me, wearing a coral reef on her head. It was an honor to speak and a joy to march.

My topic is how evidence can unite us all. My book, Grandmother Fish, gives children evidence for evolution when they wiggle like a fish and hoot like an ape. Kids love learning that humans are part of the great family of animals. Evidence also says that humans are all one family, as Charles Darwin concluded. Evidence can unite the human family because it allows people to share ideas across cultural boundaries.

“Can you wiggle?”

Karen and I are available for artist and author visits, either together or independently. Contact us here: http://www.grandmotherfish.com/contact/

For what it’s worth, here are the notes I used when giving the speech.

evidence together
grandmother fish
earliest fish with jaws
over 400 Mya
200 million greats
3 years
evidence
Grandmother Fish
evidence for little kids
wiggle like a fish—earliest fish
crawl & breathe early reptiles
squeak & cuddle early mammals
grab & hoot early apes
walk & talk early humans
kids love: animals, family, animal family
“I am a HUUMAN”
family of life
humanity one big family
Charles Darwin knew—evidence
evidence says: all related
evidence bring us together
Chinese translation of Grandmother Fish—language, culture, political system, economic system
Not like me: English, Seattle, Mary Oliver, Unitarian
everyone’s story
we are all related
a vision of who were are that we can all share

2017

Male robins fighting over territory

Robins and Evolution for Kids

[This post was posted in March of 2017, before John & Colleen Marzluff and I created Crow Scientist, the free app that teaches kids how to observe real-life crow behavior.]

Now that spring has come to the northern latitudes, here in Seattle the robins are back in the parks. Robins are easy to observe so they provide a good opportunity to talk to kids about how behavior and natural selection play out. Here are science notes for kids, worded simply and arranged roughly from the most basic for the younger kids to the more advanced for older kids. These notes teach a core evolutionary concept, that individuals within a species compete with each other to have healthier and more numerous offspring.

Brighter Robins Are Male, Plainer Robins Are Female

The robins you see easily are males. They have bright red feathers on their chests, and they spend a lot of time out in the wide open. You can sometimes spot females, too, but they have duller breast feathers, and they don’t put themselves on display the way males do. Males also tend to be somewhat larger than females. Male robins are like roosters, and female robins are like hens. 

Male Robins Fight for Land

Robins need to gather food for their children, so each male fights to have a bigger plot of land. You often see two male robins out on a field or big yard, each keeping his distance from the other. When two robins face off and neither one backs down, they fly at each other and turn around each other in a sort of whirlwind. It’s easy to spot male robins facing off against each other because they stand out in the open. If they notice that you’re watching them, however, they might stop fighting, so be sneaky.  

Female Robins Choose Males with Good Land, Good Feathers, and Good Songs

When a female chooses a male with brighter feathers and a stronger song, that male is probably healthier than average. When she picks a male with a larger area of land, she probably gets more food for her chicks. If her mate is healthier and her chicks have more food, then her chicks are more likely to be strong and to survive. 

Most Chicks Die

A robin mother might hatch a dozen hatchlings in one summer, and most of them die before winter.   

Robins Fight Because They Can’t Cooperate

Robins don’t have language, laws, money, or other tools that humans use to divide up resources. That’s why robins are stuck fighting. Fighting takes lots of time and energy, and it’s dangerous, but it’s the only way a male robin can claim enough land to get a mate. Male robins don’t help each other, work together, or make friends with each other. 

Robins Don’t Know What They’re Doing

Male robins don’t know why they’re fighting. When they see another male’s red chest, they just feel like fighting. Female robins don’t know why they choose males with lots of land, bright feathers, or strong voices. They just feel like making that choice. Humans are driven by feelings, too, but we can reflect on our own behavior and even make explicit agreements with others about what we will do or won’t.  

This lesson is a big one because it’s easy for humans to project human-like thinking onto animals, or even machines.  

Testosterone Drives Male Competition

Hormones are chemicals that animals’ bodies make that affect how they grow, feel, or act. Testosterone is a hormone that affects how robin chicks develop in the egg. One effect of testosterone is to organize the male chick’s brain for fighting. When the chick grows into an adult and the breeding season starts, the male chick’s body creates more testosterone, driving it to fight the other males. Testosterone is a type of hormone called a steroid.

“Testosterone for Amateurs”, the basics about this much-talked-about hormone.

Cock robins at peace, a 10-second video of newly returned male robins hanging out peacefully. 

Bonus Science Humor

Robins are a type of thrush, and the genus name for thrushes is Turdus (Latin for thrush).

Crows in the Park
Once you learn the call of a hungry juvenile crow, it’s easy to spot crows families. With any luck, you'll see the the juvenile beating its wings and the parents feeding it.

Games for Humanist Families

Clades, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, 
Cheeky Monkey, King of New York, Dixit

The games pictured here are the ones I took to the first meeting of the “humanist family game club” at my Unitarian church. The idea behind the game club is to give humanist families a fun way to hang out together. As a game designer and a father, I have spent years thinking about games that are great to play with kids and grownups together. Here are my descriptions of these games, which I recommend for humanist families.

Dixit by Jean-Louis Roubira

This charming game involves looking carefully at the detailed, dreamlike, full-color images on the game cards, so it has plenty of appeal from the start. One player gives a clue about a card they secretly chose from their hand. Then each other player secretly chooses a card from their own hands that more or less matches the clue. These cards get turned up, and only the clue-giver knows which one is the “real” card. Everyone tries to guess which card is the clue-giver’s, and players all score points based on how the guesses turned out. The real trick is that the clue-giver gets points only if at least one player successfully guesses the card and at least one player fails to guess their card. If the clue is too clear or too vague, the clue-giver loses the round. Kids have a hard time hitting the right balance between clarity and opacity, so they can struggle as the clue-giver. Little kids do well on a “team” with a grownup. Most of the game, however, is guessing others’ cards, and little kids can have fun doing that. Playing Dixit, whether giving a clue or trying to follow one, is a sophisticated use of our ability to communicate. For kids, it’s an enjoyable way to practice thinking “what did they mean by what they said that?” As for its humanist qualities, Dixit is all about understanding other people’s stories—and often misunderstanding them.

King of New York by Richard Garfield

This action-oriented game is the only violent game on this list, and it’s the most rules heavy. I recommend it because it handles battles in a way that is smart for play balance and good for avoiding hurt feelings. It’s true that the players control monsters that fight over who is the “king of New York”, but the system works such that you never choose which player you attack. Everyone attacks the monster that’s in Manhattan, except for the monster in Manhattan, who attacks everyone else. Play is straightforward: you roll a bunch of special dice, and reroll any dice whose results you don’t like. After up to two rerolls, you use the final results to determine how your monster fights other monsters, heals its wounds, smashes buildings, fights the military, gains energy for special powers, or gains fame. Kids who don’t really know the game can play by feel, and even if they don’t win their monsters will smash buildings, fight other monsters, and step on tanks like the big kids’ monsters do. Educational bit: The map shows the five boroughs of New York so you can show them to kids. One downside: A monster can sometimes get knocked out of the fight and the player out of the game. Usually, however, a player wins by amassing 20 fame points, not by defeating all the other monsters. 

Cheeky Monkey by Reiner Knizia

In this simple but engaging game, players pull animal tokens out of a bag. You can stop after taking a few tokens, or you can take more, but if you pull an animal that duplicates one you’ve already pulled this turn, all the animals you pulled this turn go back in the bag. A press-your-luck mechanic like this is great for kids because they can make real tactical decisions by feel, deciding whether to play it safe or to take risks and living with the consequences. If you have to put all those tokens back in the bag, it’s because you pulled one too many tokens, not because another player messed with you. A few additional rules involve stealing tokens, allowing for player interaction. In addition to being a fun game, Cheeky Monkey features hyenas, walruses, and other distinctive animals from around the world, with science notes about their habits and habitats. 

Chicken Cha Cha Cha by Klaus Zoch

In this German game, you move your chicken around a track, using concentration-style memory play to control movement. Kids are famously good at memory tasks, so it’s a great multigenerational game. The pictures are fun and colorful, mostly animals and eggs. The game includes an aggressive element in that you are trying to steal the tail feathers of all the other chickens, but the circular track prevents players from simply picking on whichever other player they like. Most of the action is memory play and moving around the track. 

Clades and Clades: Prehistoric by Yours Truly

In addition to teaching kids about evolution, Clades has a lot going for it as a game for kids and grownups. Physically, the game involves looking at lots of cute pictures of animals, something that even little kids enjoy. Everyone plays all the time, so kids never have to wait their turn. It’s easy to make the game simpler for beginners, and it’s easy to handicap. Plus, of course, it’s about evolution and science. A middle school science teacher I know says that the game elicits deep questions from students. Clades: Prehistoric is the same game, but with dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other extinct animals. Order here from Atlas Games or ask for it from you friendly local game store.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

Why Games for Humanist Families?

Games are great ways to let kids see humanism in action. For one thing, we humanists turn to other humans for our meaning in life, not to a spirit or an afterlife. Your experience playing a game results from a live interaction shared with other people and with no fore-ordained conclusion. That’s a genuine interaction in a way that seeing a movie together is not. Engaging with other humans for an evening also sends the implicit message that human relationships are worth investing in, a message that adults pick up as well as children. Second, playing games is good for social development. On one level, it teaches basics such as fairness and being a good sport. On a more fundamental level, games teach children to see human interaction as a social construct. Society is like a game, with rules, penalties, winners, and losers. We agree to interact with each other by the rules, but ultimately the rules are up to us, and we can change them to make things better. For example, if we play a game “fairly” and by the rules, some people have built-in advantages that give them an outsize chance of winning. Older kids, for example, do better at Dixit than younger ones. Is that fair? If not, can we change the rules to make the game more even? Whatever the answer, that’s good humanist thinking. 

Kids’ Games and Clades: earlier post on noncommercial games for kids 

2017

the presenter as a grade-school atheist

Outline of Jesus Presentation

Tuesday I’ll be presenting about the historical Jesus and Jesus mythicism at the Seattle Skeptics meeting here in Seattle. Here is the outline of my presentation, plus links to resources. 

Your Humble Presenter

Lifelong atheist. Raised liberal Christian. 

Atheist community organizer: “honest debates”, Darwin Day, Winter Solstice Potluck.

Author of Grandmother Fish: A Child’s First Book of Evolution.

Mainstream views on Jesus. The experts’ evidence convinces me.

Talk Format

There’s too much material to cover in one night, so I’ll review the whole thing briefly and then I can answer questions or expand on topics that folks find interesting. 

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt
says humans are “groupish”.

Human Cognitive Shortcuts

These biases make it difficult to hold a productive debate over the question of Jesus. 

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
—Programmer Alberto Brandolini.

Thinking Fast and Slow, emotions first and reason as your press agent.
I.e., You think you’re right when you feel you’re right.

Us versus them, emotionally motivated reasoning.
E.g., Am I a fake atheist? 

Binary thinking, all-or-nothing intuition, pattern matching.
E.g., “Are the gospels fact or fiction?” 

Confirmation bias, difficulty in recognizing one’s own error.
E.g., forgetting inconvenient facts. 

“May I?” thinking versus “Must I?” thinking, grasping at straws.
E.g., “There are no contemporary accounts.”

David Strauss said the gospels were
history plus mythology (1846)

Topic One: Historical Jesus

Who he was and how we know.

History of historical Jesus scholarship.

Who was Jesus, according to secular historians: The Jewish hillbilly exorcist.

The best evidence for Jesus: his disorganized cult. Lots of strong evidence about this leaderless cult. 

My favorite evidence for Jesus: his remarkable way with words.

Other evidence.

Jesus’ crazy life story.

How beliefs about Jesus changed from AD 30 to 100.

State of scholarship.

Occam’s razor.

If Richard Carrier can make his case, he will
revolutionize the scholarly study of Jesus

Topic Two: Jesus Mythicism

Historical evidence aside, skeptics can tell the mythicism is bogus by looking at it skeptically.

What is Jesus mythicism? Radical denial of evidence.

Mythicist arguments. They criticize historical evidence but offer little their own evidence.

Who are the mythicists? Atheist writers you’ve heard of only because they’re mythicists.

Is mythicism a conspiracy theory? Is “historical Jesus” the biggest con game in the history of secular scholarship?

Who’s right, the experts or you? What are the odds?

Conclusion

Links

Here are links for folks who want to see more.

History for atheists: examines evidence for and against Jesus, by and for atheists. http://bit.ly/atheistJesusTO

Christopher Hitchens lays out “impressive evidence” for a historical Jesus. http://bit.ly/hitchjesus

State of scholarship, this blog post addresses that issue: http://bit.ly/tweetjesus

Changes in belief about Jesus from AD 30 to 70, this blog post addresses that issue: http://bit.ly/TweetNTplotFixes

Other blog posts on Jesus: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Jesus

Encyclopedia Britannica, an article written by the world’s top historical Jesus expert: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jesus

A coherent mythicist account of Christian origins: No link. So far no one has been able to show me one of these, so if you find one, let me know. Update (August ’17): Dr Carrier gives a brief account of how Christianity originated in On the Historicity of Jesus. I’m happy to critically compare the mainstream account to Carrier’s account any time.

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day

A song about natural selection by
cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo

Happy Darwin Day! Today I’m running a bunch of activities at Seattle’s Darwin Day celebration, noon to 3 in Bellevue. To coordinate with the organizer, I made a list of evolution activities that I’m ready to run, and here it is. I’ve done most of these activities at school visits or other events, but a few are untried. 

Grandmother Fish

The book is a starting point for discussions about evolution and about the history of life on earth.

Wiggle-Along: A read-along of the book, with five kids in front demonstrating the sounds and motions of each Grandmother. Everyone follows along. Great for kids getting their wiggles out. If you’re not familiar with the book, you can see an early draft being read to kids for the first time in this video, which we originally did for the Kickstarter campaign in 2014. 

Timeline exercises: The five kid volunteers are part of a visual demonstration of how much time has passed since each of the Grandmothers, compared to each other, compared to Earth’s history, and compared to the existence of the universe. You can print full-size images for the five “grandmothers” to hold, available here. 

The story of my book: For kids who dream about being authors someday, the story of how I wrote Grandmother Fish is partly inspirational and partly a caution. It took me many years to figure out how to do the book, and I needed help from many friends to get it right. You can do great things, but it can take a long time, and you need to learn to accept help. 

Q&A: There’s a ton of science behind Grandmother Fish that is not obvious on the surface, so if kids have questions, I have answers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game
This is my animal-matching card game of evolutionary relationships. A “clade” is a complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. For example, “birds” composed a clade, and reptiles and birds together form a larger clade called Sauropsida. Up to 8 kids can play at once, but they’d have to all squeeze around a shared play area. This game is suited to an activity center, sort of like a craft session but for a game instead of a craft. People can drop into and out of games. The game is also a “conversation starter” for evolutionary history, as represented by the animals on the cards. Clades is illustrated by Karen Lewis, the same wonderful children’s artist who illustrated Grandmother Fish.

Kids’ Songs and Dances

We humans all evolved from people who sang and danced around the campfire all night. This stuff is fun for kids, and when kids dance, it’s an excuse for grownups to have fun, too. 

“Charles Darwin” dance: The hokey-pokey meets evolution, where kids evolve from fish into humans one body part at a time. Here a link to the lyrics. They start like this, and you get the idea. 

     “You put your right fin in, 

     You take your right fin out,

     You put your right fin in,

     And derive an arm right out…”

“If You’re Disgusted and You Know It”: A lot like “If You’re Happy and You Know It” but with universal facial expressions and sounds for key emotions: happy (smiling), sad (weeping), scared (scared face), disgusted (yuck face), and surprised (“oh” face).

“Five Violet Spiders”: A familiar tune gets original lyrics and a video by cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo. The song demonstrates natural selection, as the most visible spiders get eaten.

Link to video

Stand Up Interactive Activities

These activities require people to stand up and move around. 

Bloodlines: Roll giant dice to simulate the identification of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam in deep time. Little kids can do it, although it involves probably going extinct.

Mates: Mate-choosing simulations with cards. We simulate monogamy, mixed polygamy, and total polygamy. Kids can do it, but that might be weird. 

Life-on-Earth Timeline: This activity follows the Grandmother Fish reading. It could also be cut loose as its own activity. 

Walk-and-Talk

Stand and be counted with your people! Everyone stands in a group. The leader presents the group with either/or choices such as, “If your favorite dinosaur is a Triceratops or other herbivorer, move left. If your favorite dinosaur is a Tyrannosaur or other predator, move right.” Everybody moves and then gets to see how everyone else in the group answers each question. Opinionated people on either side can explain their choices. Periodically we stop and discuss, and then move on to new questions. The questions cover evolution questions that people can answer personally, such as favorite extinct animal, experience with evolution while growing up or in school, mammals versus birds, personal experiences (hunting, foraging, cooking, having children). It’s something of a mixer. 

Kahoot! Quizzes

These are two short online quizzes with my original questions and creative-commons images. They cover big ideas, not trivia. For each question, one option is a silly answer, so kids who can’t actually answer the questions can still play along by spotting the silly answers. I use each question as a way to put some aspect of evolution into a greater context, showing how this information fits into the larger picture. These quizzes are on the Kahoot! site, which allows people to answer questions on their phones and participate in the quiz all at once. The quizzes are free for the public to use. 

Wings Quiz: 12 questions on wings, which was the theme of Seattle’s Darwin Day this year. You can also listen to a 15-minute audio of my practicing running the quiz. You can see how I pull in evolutionary concepts and use the questions as starting points. 

Link to quiz    Link to audio

Evolution Quiz: 10 questions on evolution, Charles Darwin, and life on Earth. These are big ideas, like what Darwin thought of “savages”, not trivia, like what years Origin of Species was published. 

Link to quiz

Poetry Reading: “The Sea” by Mary Oliver

This poem is about a woman yearning to return to the fishy life of her ancestors. It’s so good I memorized it to recite at Burning Man one year. Evolution isn’t just about what happened in the past. It’s also about how we feel today, knowing that we are connected to all living things.

Link to poem    

There’s only time for me to do a fraction of these activities at Darwin Day today, but I hope to do the rest someday.

2017

Example of creationist conspiracy theorizing

Creationism is a Conspiracy Theory

You can’t be a young-earth creationist without being a conspiracy theorist. When people like Bill Nye take on creationism, they rely on facts and logic. Maybe we should add a conspiracy-theorist angle when we debate creationists. In the States, there are plenty of people who have heard a lot of disinformation about evolution and who don’t know where to stand, but most of them know that they don’t want to be part of any conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists are nut cases.

VP Mike Pence tries to portray creationism as  just another idea about where humans came from, but in reality it’s much more. Creationism rejects science, and with it the body of scientists across the globe who work to advance human knowledge. They say that scientists are not to be trusted to tell the truth about what is good science and what isn’t. According to a creationist, anybody with a middle school education can look at the evidence and know that the world’s scientists are wrong about the history of life on Earth. How could so many scientists be so wrong for so long all over the world? It has to be a conspiracy.

According to creationists, some scientists know that evolution is a lie but spread it anyway, while others are willfully ignorant. It’s not just biology teachers and textbook writers who are in on the conspiracy. It’s anthropologists, archeologists, astronomers, geneticists, geologists, psychologists, and zoologists. The conspiracy includes the whole science community, which should rise up in revolt but instead plays along. It includes everyone with a middle school education or better who looks at the facts and doesn’t see things the way creationists see them. In their book, we’re all dupes or conspirators.

If the science community, as they see it, is a vast conspiracy bent on propagating a devilish lie, what else might scientists be lying about? Climate change? Trump called it a hoax. Vaccines? He said it caused autism. Maybe fluoride in the drinking water? Chemtrails? Morgellon’s? If creationism is true, then the scientific community is a pack of liars, and any of these conspiracy theories could be legitimate. Creationists want to debate by confusing the issue with details, such as the laws of thermodynamics. Let’s look at the big picture: is there a massive, century-old, worldwide conspiracy to lie about science? If that’s the question we’re debating, maybe it will be easier for people to see creationism as the anti-intellectual movement it is.

Mother Love and Human Nature

The three of us in 2006

In college in the 80s, I studied psychology and sociology, and at that time everyone knew that the biological view of human nature was bunk—racist, sexist, reductionist bunk. Thirty years ago, that outlook seemed reasonable, but now it turns out that the biological view has a lot to tell us about ourselves. It’s embarrassing that I was so wrong about human nature, but I have come to embrace the biological view. The biological view says that each person is unique, that variety is built into the human genome, that the brain evolved for behavioral flexibility, and that we humans are the most behaviorally flexible of all animals. The biggest benefit of biological thinking is that it makes better sense of the human experience than the blank-slate view that I learned in college. As a personal example, I submit the love that my late wife had for our daughter. The biological view affirms that mother love is a core component of human nature, while the blank-slate view portrays it as more like victimhood. 

Nothing that a biologist says about human mothers represents anything essentially true about humans as a group or as individuals. Biology is too messy to be essentialist. Nor can biology tell any individual that they must be a mother or should be a mother. When conservatives say that women should stay home and be mothers because it’s natural, that’s not biology talking. Considering the biology of human motherhood doesn’t oppress anyone. It’s the blank-slate view that minimizes the lived experience of most mothers.    

My wife had a hard life, but being a mother to our child brought her joy and a sense of purpose. Her love for our child came from deep within her being. Our daughter, for her part, was more than a passive subject of conditioning. She responded to her mother’s love with complementary instinctive behaviors, completing a positive feedback loop of mother-child communication and bonding. In the 80s studying sociology and psychology, I learned that a mother’s love for her child was something that had been trained into her by the culture’s gender role system. It didn’t spring from deep within and in fact was a tool that the patriarchy used to keep women down. My wife’s love was a conditioned response, they’d say, like thinking of pink as a “girl” color. Love like my wife’s, I was taught, merely feels as though it springs from deep within. That’s what I learned, but biology knows better. In reality, humans make the best mothers on the planet, bar none. Our mammal lineage has been developing mother-and-child instincts for hundreds of millions of years. As mammals go, we apes are exceptionally good mothers, and as apes go we humans are tops. The love my wife felt for our daughter really did spring from deep within her.

The blank-slate view tells women that their deep maternal feelings are actually shallow. The biological view says that a mother’s love for her children is the real deal, a profound element of the human experience.