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I think Wiley Miller, the artist who pens the web comic Non Sequitur, misspelled "creationist".
Also, he meant to say non-conceptual. Or is it aconceptual? Hmph. I guess being a web comic creator is harder than I thought.
Tip o’ the fish nets to Cindy.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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June 1st, 2009 at 8:14 pm
He meant what he wrote: “preconceived ideas” make a “pre-conceptual scientist” the way evidence makes an ordinary scientist…
June 1st, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Nowadays, I can’t tell whether a cartoon like this is (1) slamming creationism/antivaxxers/other pseudoscience, or (2) slamming real scientists for not believing in some woo-woo thing the artist thinks is real.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Nit: Non Sequitur is a syndicated comic strip, not a web comic.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Can prophylactics help prevent preconceptions?
June 1st, 2009 at 8:39 pm
He’s been tiptoeing around the Mars Hoax lately too.
I’m not sure if he just thinks the whole thing is funny or what. He’s dangerously close to perpetuating the hoax, though. It -IS- the funny paper, though…
June 1st, 2009 at 8:45 pm
If you follow Wiley, you know he’s slamming pseudoscience.
The word he’s playing on is “preconception”, and he’s making fun of folks who’d reject anything that doesn’t fit their preconceptions. The essence of nonscience.
Perhaps it’s the hyphen that throws you.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:54 pm
If you read the comments below the cartoon you’ll see that quite a number are from preconceptualists!
June 1st, 2009 at 9:07 pm
The genius of this kind of strip is that nobody can tell which side he’s slamming. Anti-science conservatives think he’s slamming Al Gore or the 99.9% of biologists who support evolutionary theory, while pro-science people think he’s slamming global-warming denialists or creationists. That way, the cartoonist doesn’t offend anybody in his potential audience.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:13 pm
The comments over there made me sad.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Frightening woo, no? I put the first “ID” comment and got to watch the IDiots present their “I’m stoopid and prowed of it!” responses.
J/P=?
June 1st, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Wow, as others have said, the comments over there made me sad!
June 1st, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Kevin S, I would venture that a cartoonist who tries to make philosophical points, while making it difficult for the reader to interpret, has failed. And in my mind, this is making fun of those who make up their minds first. It’s obvious from the tone if not the last panel.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:31 pm
The comments there made me sad too but I just ordered two Galileoscopes so the happy kind of balances that out. For now.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:46 pm
I’m nitpicking, but if the difference between a “webcomic” and just a “comic strip” is that a webcomic appears only on the web, and a regular comic appears in newspapers as well as on the web, then Non Sequitur is not a webcomic, it’s just as comic strip, as it appears in many fine newspapers.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:54 pm
When I grow up, I want to be a pre-conceptual skeptic. Pre-conceptual skepticism is being FOREVER skeptical on anything despite being presented with overwhelming evidence/facts as to a thing’s verity, even dismissing such powerful evidences as preconceived notions.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:49 pm
BJN said: “Perhaps it’s the hyphen that throws you.”
Actually, what’s throwing me is the increasing tendency of IDers/antivaxxers/conspiracy theorists/etc. to say that their critics have preconceived notions that are unaffected by evidence.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:42 am
Non-Sequitor is funny and I would bet that Wiley falls on the reality side of the fence. It is even funnier that the insane seem to think that ‘pre-conceptual scientists’ refers to those actually doing research and advancing the current inderstanding of science and not those relying on dogma and ‘received wisdom’.
June 2nd, 2009 at 2:40 am
Phil:
I read NonSeq daily (ever since it was in a local newspaper, and I moved to reading it on the Web), and Wiley is definitely on the side of Reality. Danae (the little girl) is the personification of all the ‘wooists’, politically sneaky people (I wonder if she’ll wind up with antivax?) who spend their time making life difficult for reasonable people. There’s also a fisherman/boat captain who comes up with great stories of ’sea serpents’ and such. Worth a read.
Speaking of cartoons, Brewster Rockit is ‘repairing’ the “Trubble Telescope” this week.
http://www.gocomics.com/brewsterrockit
Brewster is NOT an especially bright person, BTW.
J/P=?
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:01 am
The blockheads are projecting wildly. Yes, the comments made me sad, too. Is that comic becoming the saddest page on the ‘net?
Had to buy 5 ’scopes to cancel that out.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:10 am
I initially thought that the first panel ist the whole thing and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. “A preconceptual scientist. Uh… what’s that?”
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:31 am
“pre” sounds like the appropriate prefix since the belief is formed first, then information selected to support it. I would imagine “non-conceptual” would mean “doesn’t depend on ideas” while “aconceptual” would be “has no ideas”.
@Alan: I’ve read the strip over the years and I get the impression that the author is poking fun at the loons – however, you need to ask a cartoonist because the cartoons often do not reveal much about the cartoonists themselves. I would have thought this particular cartoon fell in the “obvious” category, but looking at the responses that may not be so. It’s yet another manifestation of Poe’s theory that a parody of fundamentalism is indistinguishable from the genuine claims of fundamentalism.
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:56 am
Wow.
I must either be a lot smarter than some people, or a lot dumber…
I ‘got’ the strip (or at least I think I did…) without much problem, it really seems obvious…
Right?
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:09 am
It seems pretty obvious that its about scientists (or anyone) starting with preconceived results. This could apply to creationists, anti-vaxxers, Al Gore or others (even cosmologists sometimes), but I think its a stretch to attribute the comic as targeting a specific group, unless someone knows the cartoonist.
But then the beauty of art is that it can be interpreted in so many ways. Often differently than what the artist intended. I wouldn’t be surprised if a creationist had this on their refrigerator somewhere.
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:43 am
A “scientist” with preconceived ideas… the beauty is that it describes both the creationists AND the fraudsters in mainstream science.
I liked it.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:28 am
I had this set of strips on my wall at work. They’re very good. Wiley originally wrote them in 2005.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:50 am
I read the comments. Oh god. I read them. Now I can’t unread them.
Nothing has shaken my faith in democracy and universal human rights more than the trend toward allowing comments on everything on the internet. It. Shows. Me. The. Stupid.
Fortunately, I’m in the process of becoming a high school biology teacher. So hopefully I can do my part to make people less stupid.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I’ve already seen someone with antivax sympathies post this, identifying the “pre-conceptual” scientists as those making vaccines. *sigh*
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
You are all shooting in the dark and at all the wrong targets. The whole strip explains quite clearly what the term “means,” and it even presents a demonstration. This is frankly a poor showing for purported skeptics. First check all the facts, then draw a conclusion.
See http://www.chron.com/apps/comics/showComic.mpl?date=2009/6/1&name=Non_Sequitur_pan.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
*sigh*
Pre-conceptions (religious):
* Humans Are Cool, so we must have been ‘built’ rather than just morphed over time
* God exists
* God is infallible
* God made us in his own image, thus see first bullet
* We can’t explain everything, thus Goddidit
* Scientists are all teh stoopid, cuz they try to refute the above!
Pre-conceptions (science):
* We can’t explain everything… yet (thus, science continues)
* We can certainly explain a pretty good mess of things, based on what we’ve learned through science.
* If we can observe it, explain it, and predict it, we can make some assumptions and theories about it (success from second bullet)
* Nothing is infallible, including everything we think we know — and that makes the previous bullet better and better.
* If there’s no evidence that it exists, it probably doesn’t.
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm
This is my Favorite comic and I’m surprised to see so many misinterpretations. You have to read the comic regularly and for some time before you understand the artist’s humor. And JohnParadox, Danae could not be farther from a “wooist”. She’s spot on the mark when it comes to bursting balloons.
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:37 am
There’s this though: http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2009/05/25/
“Well, as you know, Mars will be closer to Earth in August than in all of recorded history, so close that it will appear as large as the Moon! This may not occur again for another 60,000 years.”
Storyline, yeah… Guess which astronomer gets quoted in the comments.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:32 pm
30. Molly Says:
JohnParadox, Danae could not be farther from a “wooist”. She’s spot on the mark when it comes to bursting balloons.
Thinking back on Danae’s earlier stories, I think I should not have called her that, but she does use some of the techniques of ‘woo’ (which, BTW, I include many “political” techniques) to make her point(s). A recent storyline (see F.’s comment) demonstrates that. I was fascinated by a recent storyline where Danae learned that ‘being good’ made one ‘invisible’… until she realized (with help) that she would only be invisible as long as she behaved.
J/P=?