This post will probably make the infestation worse

A couple of us faculty at UMM are shopping for microscopes — we need to replace a dozen of the tired old student stereoscopes with snazzier models. I’ve sent out several inquiries by email to various vendors, but I left out an important requirement: now I want a car microscope, to keep up with all the YUSsies.

I’ve got a couple of quotes, but you know what else I’ve got? A flood of ads for microscopes. Every web page I visit that has ads is now a parade of microscopes marching down the page. I’m not complaining, it’s better than the “one weird trick” ads and the ads for useless supplements.

I have to roll my eyes when a creationist says information!

You can tell when you’ve encountered some gullible twit of a creationist who has swallowed the Discovery Institute line whole. Whenever they recite Stephen Meyer’s favorite line, that only intelligence can create information, you know you’re debating a fool.

It’s simply not true. Anyone who has studied genetics knows there are many natural processes that generate information, making the claim obviously false. It’s good to have Dr Dan present a short sweet refutation.

I’ve confronted people with this kind of explanation many times in the past. Just search PubMed for “random nucleotide sequences” (or amino acid sequences) and it’ll come back with page after page of articles on the subject — they’re fairly common tools for exploring the functional space. Notice that the first one on this list is from 1983.

The standard response I’ve gotten from creationists is that’s not complex information, and if you ask them to define “complex” they will waffle around, and eventually declare something about complex specified information, which just means information that was defined by a prior source, by which they mean “God”, because they sure as heck don’t have a primordial volume that dictates the modern sequences.

It’s really just a rabbit hole that they can lead you into. They don’t even have a grasp on the meaning of “information” — it just sounds sciencey to their ears.