As my regular gentle readers know, my father is Hubert P. Yockey, the nuclear physicist whose scientific papers and books have been seminal in the field of applying information theory and coding theory to molecular biology, the origin of life and evolution. The driving intention of my father’s work in this field has been to rid the field of any proposals that have their foundation in faith, whether religious or secular, so that the only theories that prevail in science are the ones founded on the application of the tools of science: “counting and measuring,” as he quotes Socrates.

(BTW, it is stilted to refer to him as “Hubert P. Yockey,” but his name is a Google key phrase in this subject so I am going to go with sounding stilted so that people searching for his work online can find this post.)

Hubert P. Yockey’s work on the origin of life and evolution sends science and religion to their respective corners: scientists must discard speculations and theories that are proved to be based on faith AND they are wrong to use science to make pronouncements about religious beliefs that are beyond the tools of science. For example, Copernicus and Galileo were right, while the Catholic Church was wrong. Likewise, people of faith are wrong to try to mask their religions as science, that is, factual so that their dogmas must be accepted by all. Hubert P. Yockey includes the secular faith of dialectical materialism, which is the foundation for scientific theories of the origin of life, as one of the faiths that scientists must reject.

Hubert P. Yockey points out that Darwin himself in his book, The Origin of Species, noted that he was not addressing the origin of life because the origin of life is an axiom of biology just as the origin of matter is an axiom of physics and chemistry. Hubert P. Yockey’s most important scientific contribution has been to apply information theory and coding theory to show WHY the origin of life is an axiom of biology and that THAT is what should be taught about the origin of life.

And, this morning, when I was talking over my recent post about him, Hubert P. Yockey said it really IS time to change the scientific nomenclature from “Darwin’s Theory of Evolution” to “Darwin’s Laws of Evolution.” He compared it to quantum theory — which is now also referred to as the laws of quantum mechanics. He also pointed out to me that lay people think that “speculation” and “theory” mean the same thing. They do not. In science, the word “theory” indicates the steps of how a phenomenon occurs. THEN scientists go to work to understand the mechanics of the theory. So, physicists went to work to discover WHY quantum theory was such an apt explanation of phenomena and discovered the LAWS of quantum mechanics.

So, Hubert P. Yockey points out, the discovery of DNA, the genetic code, the genome, the sequence hypothesis, information theory and coding theory, and the tools of gene sequencing have allowed scientists to elucidate WHY Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the Origin of Species is such an apt explanation for the phenomena of biology and therefore now deserves to be called Darwin’s LAWS of Evolution and the Origin of Species.

Religious people have wrongly appropriated Hubert P. Yockey’s work to re-brand Creationism as Intelligent Design — see Yockey’s amicus brief for the 2005 Dover “Panda” trial. (I have over 20 years of private correspondence to back this assertion, plus my own conversations with my father, at least one of which I have on video, but I am barred by copyright law from publishing anything except my father’s letters.) The intention of these religious people is to appropriate the apparatus of the state — in this case, the educational system — to brand their religious dogma as science in order to force people to accept it. This is wrong in every possible way.

One of the most cunning arguments that religious people make to deceive people into believing that their religious dogma should be accepted in the scientific marketplace of ideas is that Darwin’s theory of evolution is “only a theory” — in order to capitalize on lay people’s incorrect belief that “theory” and “speculation” are synonyms in science — and that therefore their “theory” of Creationism/Intelligent Design is equivalent and should be taught in schools along with Darwin’s theory of evolution because it’s “Darwin’s theory,” not “Darwin’s LAW.”

No. No. No. No. NO!

“Science has sufficiently elucidated the mechanics of Darwin’s theory of evolution that now the scientific nomenclature should be changed to Darwin’s LAWS of evolution and the origin of species,” says Hubert P. Yockey.

Cite this post when you quote him on that.

Because I am new to conservatism and blogging, when I first saw Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs attacking dear, brave Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, whom I met at CPAC and came this close to asking her to autograph my … arm — so much do I admire her courage — I did not know what to make of his accusations except that I cannot bring myself to believe evil of her. People who want me to believe evil of her are playing with fire and running with scissors at the same time. However, by the time Charles got to denouncing Stacy McCain of The Other McCain (see below for his recent replies); Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit; and Pajamas Media, the group blog he co-founded with Roger Simon; THEN I knew I was on solid ground in questioning his judgment, and possibly his sanity.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a thoughtful post on “The Descent of Little Green Footballs” today that includes his reactions to Charles Johnson turning on his fellow anti-radical-Islam bloggers, starting with Pamela Geller:

At first, I noticed that Charles Johnson was getting into feuds with the other anti-radical Islam websites. Early on, as far as I could tell, it was all Charles attacking websites like Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and Gates of Vienna over these European political parties that they supported because they were anti-radical Islam.

At the time, I didn’t know who was right and was wrong. In fact, I still don’t because Charles’ arguments were all very “Seven [Yo, John! It's six!] Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Some European political party I had never heard of was terrible because it had a high ranking member that I had never heard of who freely associated with some other people who were REALLY BAD that I never heard of and — all these bloggers were terrible, horrible, awful racists and fascists for liking these political parties.

I was sad when I saw Charles attacking Pamela and I didn’t know enough of the “who struck John” to spring to her defense. It appears I wasn’t alone. And maybe Charles was using the difficulty of checking his work as a cover so his mud would stick.

John continues:

Eventually, the bloggers Charles was picking fights with started firing back at him and I started to notice that Charles had a huge beef with Christians. At one point, I looked over at LGF and noticed that literally half the posts on his front page were edged pieces about creationism. This struck me as extremely odd given that creationism wasn’t a hot topic at the time. You could read through 30-40 blogs, not read one word about creationism, and get to LGF and there were 10 posts about it.

This, I found to be a very troubling sign. There are certainly plenty of atheists and agnostics who are good conservatives. However, inevitably in my experience, when you have someone who has a huge beef with Christians, they turn to the Left. That’s exactly how it happened with Andrew Sullivan and John Cole from Balloon Juice and it’s how it happened with Charles, too.

Now here I have to distinguish my position on Christianity, Creationism and Intelligent Design from Charles’s. First, I am spiritual but not religious. I do not have a problem with Christianity until it intrudes into government and education to appropriate the apparatus of the state to impose its dogmas as the law of the land — in the case of homosexual equality — or as facts — in the case of demanding that Creationism and/or Intelligent Design, which are religious dogmas, be taught in school.

My stake in the homosexual equality discussion is obvious — I support equality for homosexuals.

My stake in the Creationism/Intelligent Design argument is due to the work of my father, Hubert P. Yockey, because he has demonstrated that the orgin of life is unknowable, just as the origin of matter is, and that what should be taught about the origin of life in schools is WHY the origin of life unknowable. The sequence is: [unknowable origin of matter] > matter > [unknowable origin of life] > life. In addition, he has pointed out that objections to Darwin’s theory of evolution based on gaps in the fossil record became obsolete with the discovery of DNA because there are no gaps in the genome from the origin of life to the present and we can now look back through the genome and DNA, so that gaps in the fossil record are irrelevant.

I only want church and state, and church and science, to go to their respective corners.

Charles reports on the intrusions of religion into government in the form of people of various religions getting laws passed to require that Creationism and/or Intelligent Design be taught in schools. So I am keeping Little Green Footballs in my newsfeed. There is a delicious irony in this, though. My father’s work shows that ALL of the accepted theories on the origin of life are wrong since coding theory shows why it is unknowable, now and forever. So I consider Charles’s beliefs on the subject to be as faith-based as those of any Christian, even if the faith is based in dialectical materialism. The belief that it is possible to discover the origin of life in the laws of physics and chemistry — which do not contain sufficient information for the problem — is exactly like believing that if you study the physics and chemistry of ink, or pixels, you will be able to discover the origin of works of literature. Exercise-in-futility-wise, it is the modern-day version of trying to figure out how to turn base metals into gold.

Turning to Charles’s attacks on Stacy McCain, below I link the best of Stacy’s recent thoughts about Charles, who really, really should not have poked the bear:

“Andrew Jackson’s Mother Advises This Response to Charles Johnson:

Contrary to anything Mad King Charles may tell his dwindling pool of yet-to-be-banned readers in their “private” discussions, this engagement began when Johnson attacked my friend Pamela Geller for her attendance at the October 2007 Brussels conference. Though I was not involved in that dispute, as I told Pamela in a brief phone conversation this morning, I now regret that I did not immediately leap to her defense.

(snip)

Say what you will about Pamela Geller, she is not afraid of a fight. And what the conservative movement needs now — far more than we need ideological unity among intellectuals or would-be intellectuals — is people who are not afraid of a fight.

“LGF Boycott HQ” — too funny!:

We know you’re dying to know what’s going on in Lizard Land, so here are recent LGF headlines and summaries:

No Racism at the Tea Party?

Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:59:05 pm PDT

Photos of anti-Obama posters at DC 9/12 rally which proves “racism” because anybody who doesn’t like Obama is racist, just like anybody who hated Bill Clinton was anti-oral sex.

(snip)

In other words, you’re not missing anything at LGF you couldn’t get from Amanda Marcotte or Firedoglake.

“Charles Johnson exposes yet another scary neo-Nazi: CHARLES JOHNSON”

God told an angel I’ll call “Lydia” to send me an e-mail:

After reading about the dust-up, it occurred to me that Charles could be exposed as a hypocrite by using his own methods. CJ uses what I call a “Six Degrees of Extremism” (or Six Degrees of Racism/Euro Fascism, etc) political parlor game.

He condemns Robert Spencer [of Jihad Watch, linked above] for “associations” with “extremists”* and you for “connections” to white supremacists, yet he adds Daily Kos to his blogroll and approvingly links their posts, which contain the exact kind of material and links to people that CJ uses to excoriate his new targets.

Based on his own criteria, CJ himself is now a racist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi fascist. Here’s how: [click here].

My headline would be MUCH better if I could have created urgency to click on this post by leaving out the “(NOT!).” But I know better than to trust the Left, having so recently resided there. I do not want anyone to have an excuse to put my name to a phrase saying Stacy is a racist or a bigot because he is not. The reason I can call him a “lousy racist” and “a terrible bigot” is that he completely and totally sucks at both, again, in the sense that he is neither.

This morning I see that my blog pals Dan Collins and Dan Riehl are springing to the defense of my dear friend and fairy blogfather, Robert Stacy McCain, who goes by “Stacy” and blogs at The Other McCain. I must add my voice to theirs, but with more authority, because Stacy writes in opposition to homosexual equality and I am lesbian and I support the cause of homosexual equality — for example, federal protection from discrimination in access to jobs, housing and public accommodations (e.g., restaurants, stores, sporting events, concerts, parks); same-sex marriage; repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” so that gays and lesbians can be openly gay or lesbian while serving in the military; and adoption.

One of the things I have marveled at and loved about joining the conservative movement is that it embodies the ideal of embracing diversity. My experience of diversity on the Left was that, sure, there’s a rainbow of races and a sort-of rainbow of religions and homosexuals believe they are welcome (which is not the same as actually being welcome), but there was a strict uniformity of beliefs that were imposed top-down and woe betide the useful idiot — like me — who tried to cash in any of those checks, especially if they then went all activist on the asses of the Lefties breaking the promises — again, like me — for passing worthless promises in the belief that that neighborhood of the Left was just ignorant and only needed activism and education so that it would keep the promises it had made of equality, inclusion, yada-yada-yada.

Even after being run out of the lesbian and gay community in the pages of The Washington Blade in 1996 for my advocacy for the rights of people in wheelchairs, including my late life partner, it was not until the spring of 2008 when I found out about Barack Obama’s 20-year allegiance to Rev. Jeremiah Wright that I began to realize that the Left is where the most vicious racism and bigotry now resides in the U.S. Over the last year, with access to a fuller statement of facts from bloggers and online magazines than I ever got from the mainstream media, I have come to see the Left as the modern embodiment of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. My perception now is that the Left espouses ideals to gain followers, but only to gain power over them, seldom, if ever, to deliver on policies in line with their stated ideals. It’s all “say one thing, do another” over there.

In contrast, on the Right, there are a few common principles holding conservatives and Republicans — who are not the same — and libertarians together in common cause — mainly, that there is a tipping point of taxation beyond which people no longer have the means of true liberty; that capitalism is the highest and best economic system to allow individuals to make the most of their lives and create a better world; and that the ideals on which the United States of America was founded are worthy of defending and passing on intact to the next generation.

Beyond those few common principles, I find enormous diversity of belief and opinion in the Right, as well as a diversity of sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, race and what have you. Plus, I find women in positions of power and authority. People on the Right are able to have opposite and mutually exclusive opinions on various matters. Put together, that is real diversity.

So, yes, Stacy and I are at daggers drawn over homosexual equality, especially gay marriage equality. But he states his reasons — and his feelings. I state mine. And we remain staunch and loyal friends.

In addition, Stacy is NOT a racist — there’s just no way.

Stacy has his own pertinent remarks for Charles Johnson as folows:

• Point One — Charles Johnson doesn’t know me from Adam’s housecat

His attack on me at LGF is a classic “ransom note method” attack — the assembling of this, that and the other to create a collage, like a kidnapper glueing together words clipped from magazines.

• Point Two — Charles Johnson is prejudiced, and subscribes to stereotypes

No Southerner should ever think he will be allowed to defend his homeland and her people without being insulted for it. If you’re going to defend the South, you must be prepared to defend it down to the last boll weevil on the scraggliest cotton patch in front of the most decrepit tar-paper shack in Mississippi.

So widespread is anti-Southern prejudice, especially among the intellectual elite, that the man who presumes to defend the South might as well begin by foreswearing any further ambition in life. Assume at the outset that you will be denounced and castigated and exiled to outer darkness, and resolve that this daunting prospect will not deter you from your duty.

(Note: the last two paragraphs of this post are rated ROTFLOL.)

(I should mention at this point that I was born in the South and raised in Tennessee, California and Maryland. My mother’s side of the family are Southerners. I take a dim view of stereotyping Southerners.)

• Point Three: Charles Johnson will regret it but once, and that will be continuously

All this background on the issue was never reported by the New York Times, and the people who have condemned me as a “neo-Confederate” know nothing about how I gained that descriptor.

Did I write some things that were . . . intemperate? Hey, we’re talking about Stacy McCain here, OK? When I go to fight, I go to war, and it’s war to the knife, knife to the hilt.

I love Stacy McCain. He is my friend, a valued mentor, and he is in no way, shape or form a bigot or racist.

P.S.

I believe this is only the first or second time since I started my blog that I have used the word “bigot.” I do not find it helpful in discussions aimed at illuminating how society and groups within it should set boundaries.

The link to Charles Johnson’s blog, Little Green Footballs, is in my newsfeed so I can keep an eye on him. I support Charles in his fight against Creationism, and its re-branded version, Intelligent Design, which came into being using deliberately distorted points from my father’s work. (I have the correspondence!) I do this because my father is Hubert P. Yockey and he has published a number of papers and two books from Cambridge University Press on the origin of life and evolution. Both my father and I oppose Creationism and Intelligent Design. My father’s work demonstrates that what we should be teaching in schools about the origin of life is that it unknowable by any current or future method, and why. (Dad supports the theory of evolution, in case anyone is wondering.)

By the way, I do not necessarily agree with all the bloggers who are in my newsfeed. It is a selection of people whose blogs I read, except for Shakey Pete’s Shootin’ Shack — I can’t get Peter’s RSS feed to work with my newsfeed.

Update, 9/13/09: Stogie at Saberpoint also came to Stacy’s defense today — please go read his entire post because it has additional important information (emphasis mine):

Stacy and I were involved in online discussions (aka “the great listserv debates”) with a large group of interested people and, of course, the issue of race and race relations came up and was hotly debated. Should blacks, Jews and others be allowed into our fold? Stacy, I and others said, “absolutely!” There were some bigots in the group who wanted to add a racial component to our movement but Stacy (and I and others) strenuously opposed it. Stacy was an outspoken leader of the non-racist faction; he denounced racism as dishonorable and wrong. We fought the bigots together and took a lot of heat for our stand. Nevertheless, a New York Press reporter named Michaelangelo Signorile misattributed another’s comments on interracial marriage to McCain. These errors were subsequently picked up by other bloggers (as well as the SPLC) and spread. Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs is the most recent purveyor of these falsehoods.

In addition, Prof. William Jacobson picked up the cudgel on Stacy’s behalf today and also noted that how false accusations of racism are now used to damage enemies in the search engines:

Fourth, the LGF attack appeared to be payback for McCain’s defense of Pam Geller when LGF attacked her. Payback attacks always are suspicious.

… being tagged a racist is about as damaging a tag as exists because the damage is caused once the accusation is made.And that is the point. If you want to ruin someone’s reputation, just keep posting the words “racist” in close proximity to their name on the internet so that web search engines associate the person and the accusation. That is what some people tried to do to Glenn Beck recently by making accusations of past criminal conduct in the form of a question for the very purpose of influencing Google and other search engines.

The false accusation of racism is a despicable tactic. It damages the person against whom it is made and the victims of true racism.

And that is why I felt it necessary to speak up this time.

Carol of Carol’s Closet calls for “Truth in Labeling: Stacy McCain is NOT a Racist but Charles Johnson is an Asshole“:

Stacy McCain is not a racist. He is a proud son of the South and as an adopted southerner myself, I believe there is much to be proud of. Mr. Johnson dilutes the word “racist” by using it as a stick to swing at his latest intended target (apparently Johnson is one of those people who is always targeting someone).

Social conservatives and Republicans who support the propaganda that Intelligent Design is scientific are destroying the credibility of the G.O.P. as a supporter of the scientific method, just as Charles Johnson says today (and almost every day) at Little Green Footballs. This matters because fiscal conservatives must use science to defeat the specious science used to support the fear-mongering that is the campaign against global warming, now re-branded at climate change. Like changing isn’t what the climate DOES. The G.O.P. must drop its support of faith masquerading as science in order to be credible in its support of the real science regarding the climate and the environment.

However, I have to admit, legitimate scientists are not helping very much to burnish the reputation of science because their search for the origin of life is based on the complete failure to grasp simple principles of coding theory. The short version of the explanation is that you cannot look back from a 20-letter alphabet of amino acids to a 64-letter alphabet of codons. This means the origin of life is an axiom of biology just as much as the origin of matter is an axiom of physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. The origin of life is unknowable. That is what should be taught about the origin of life. All of the scientific scenarios for the origin of life that currrently exist and that may be proposed in the future are based on faith just as much as Intelligent Design and Creationism and must therefore be rejected as well.

(NOTE: It would be very helpful if some of y’all would click the “Donate” button to help me buy about $100 in materials I’d like to use to explain the coding theory you need to know to understand why the origin of life is an axiom of biology just as the origin of matter is an axiom of physics, chemistry and astronomy. Thanks.)

My father is Hubert P. Yockey and I edit his work, so I really am an authority on this topic. In fact, I’ve been thinking that since what I have to say on the origin of life and Darwin’s theory of evolution is unique, I should write a lot more on the topic while my father is still alive to consult and ensure that what I write is correct and leave mocking Obama to others for the nonce.

These thoughts have coincided with Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs getting denounced by Glenn Beck this week for calling the Tea Partiers extremists, which I agree is an assertion that has no foundation and is malicious.

I’ve only dropped in on Little Green Footballs on a handful of occasions and Johnson never answered when I asked to be registered as a commenter. I’ve only glanced through his coverage of the advocates of Creationism, and Intelligent Design, which is re-branded Creationism, trying to get their religious dogma written into science textbooks and taught in public schools at the expense of public tax dollars.

By the way, the origin of life and evolution are two completely separate considerations. As my father has pointed out (pp. 119-120, Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 2005), Darwin specifically said his theory of evolution had nothing to do with the origin of life:

But I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal [The first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, classically thought to have been due to Moses] term of creation, by which I really meant “appeared” by some wholly unknown process. It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter. (Darwin, 1898, HPY emphasis)

My father was among the first group of scientists to see the application of information theory to biology in the 1950′s — in particular, his paper on the application of Shannon’s Channel Capacity Theorem to molecular biology — and he organized the third-ever scientific conference about it in 1956 and edited the book of papers presented there, Symposium on Information Theory in Biology, edited by Hubert P. Yockey, Robert Platzman and Henry Quastler, Pergamon Press, 1958.

Dr. Quastler organized the first two conferences on information theory and biology and the field would be significantly farther along if he hadn’t committed suicide in 1963 the day after coming home and finding his wife dead in their home (from natural causes, as I recall). It also would be farther along if my mother had been sane and supportive of my father’s work instead of the chainsmoking, alcoholic borderline that she was. I am devoted to my father because he is the one who took care of the three of us children and protected us in an era where divorce was not an option because no matter how awful a mother was, she always got custody. My father resumed his work on information theory after my younger brother, Eric, was killed in a car accident on August 22, 1973.

Dad has been in the position of Mercutio in the debate on the origin of life — “a pox on both your houses” — because he has worked to demonstrate which scenarios must be rejected as scientific because they can only be asserted on the basis of faith. He trusted the courts to enforce the separation of church and state and keep creation scenarios based on religious dogmas out of the public schools and university science classes. However, as a scientist, he saw that the scientific scenarios of chance and self-organization also were based on the dogma of the secular religion of communism, dialectical materialism, and did not survive true scientific scrutiny and therefore could only be maintained on faith.

And what my father constantly has said about faith is that it has a place in religion but not in science, citing Socrates that the means of removing illusions is “counting and measuring.” (The full quote is in Dad’s book cited above and here, on page 5 of the reply to the FTE amicus brief he wrote for Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005. FTE is the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, which distorted my father’s work and attempted to appropriate his scientific reputation in the book at the center of the trial, Of Pandas and People. I will post about that tomorrow or Sunday. BTW, if you buy my father’s book, I would really appreciate your purchasing it through my Amazon Associates advertisement located on the right underneath the newsfeed column. I take care of my father and do not have any other job to support myself or pay my own expenses.)

Since science is about counting and measuring, not faith or dogma, this means religious people have no business dressing up their dogmas as science to force others to believe them and to appropriate public money to proselytize for them in public schools. Likewise, while science may be able to disprove certain dogmas, such as the earth being the center of the universe, scientists have no foundation for claiming science disproves the existence of God — I was about to continue by saying that science cannot address the existence of God because that is a matter of faith. Then I remembered that science is going to be able to address various aspects of the existence of God — or, perhaps, more accurately, the experience of God — when there is a larger pool of subjects in the higher states of consciousness called “enlightenment.” I will explain higher states of consciousness tomorrow. But even when sufficient subjects are available, scientists will not be able to address whether or not God exists, but rather, only the physiological correlates associated with a subjective experience of God.

Over the course of his work on the origin of life, my father is the one who has shown that it is unknowable, as Charles Darwin and Nils Bohr predicted. Something that is true, but which cannot be derived from anything else, is a starting point for reasoning called an axiom. The origin of life is an axiom of biologybecause it is unknowable. That is what should be taught about the origin of life. All the other scenarios for the origin of life rely on faith or miracles, which is why my headline says, “Pretty much everyone is some kind of creationist except my father.”

P.S.

Just about everything I know about LGF and Charles Johnson is in this story from the Christian Science Monitor, which I just read.

I’m reading Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism now and have been appalled at finding from his book, for the first time, that socially conservative Christians resist Darwin’s theory of evolution because they don’t want people to get the notion that ideas also can evolve, say, for example, interpretation of the Bible.

This is news to my father and me. And that is a big deal because that’s my father’s book I showcase in my Amazon widget on the right side of the page, entitled Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life by Hubert P. Yockey.

So I asked my father to keep me company this afternoon while I was preparing dinner and explaining this to him. A few minutes into our chat I was surprised when he laughed and said, “I am a cannibal to God.”

Our conversation had turned his mind to his childhood when one of his brothers came home from school and told their mother, “I am a cannibal to God.”

It turned out that the teacher had said, “I am accountable to God.”

Dad couldn’t remember whether his brother had heard the expression in public school or Sunday school. The Darwin conversation didn’t go much farther after that. But isn’t it funny how what we hear is really a combination of what we already know how to hear and what we want to hear?