It’s like a nonsensical fantasy novel

I have sad news, everyone. Ken Ham has finally blocked me on Twitter, so now I’m getting all the humorous Answers in Genesis news second hand…like this glorious announcement. The Ark Park has a new exhibit! It’s a diorama showing the wicked antediluvian humans putting on gladiatorial games, with dinosaurs.

AiGArena

That is so damned Biblical that I think I shat out a prophet while I was laughing so hard.

Although, I have to admit that it is amazingly cinematic. Imagine how much better the gladiator scenes in HBO’s Rome or that Spartacus series would have been if they’d occasionally brought a T. rex into the arena.

It also reminds me of the fabulous (in all meanings of the word) Jim Pinkoski, he of pygmies and dwarfs fame, who invented this spectacular scene for the end of his Noah’s Ark comic book in which fallen angels mounted on dinosaurs attacked the Ark to prevent it from sailing.

destroytheark

Religion just means that you get to make everything up.

They got rocks in their hoo-ha

Yoni-eggs

Gwyneth Paltrow…oh, hey, I can just stop right there. You’re already cracking up at the joke. We’re done. I’m just going to unwind from classes with a cup of tea, you go on with whatever you were doing.

Oh, OK — Gwyneth is selling “jade eggs”, smooth stones, that you’re supposed to stuff up your ladybits and then walk around, doing your business or whatever, while they do magic things for you. She interviews the person who makes these things, named Shiva Rose, and we are enlightened on a number of strangely twisted ‘facts’.

I learned about the jade egg through the yoga community that I was in, and I sort of went down the rabbit hole of researching the practice—there was not as much information about it then as there is now. But it made intuitive sense to me: The word for our womb, yoni, translates as “sacred place”, and it is a sacred place—it’s where many women access their intuition, their power, and their wisdom. It’s this inner sanctum that we can access when it’s not in use creating life. Sadly most people use it as a psychic trash bin, storing old or negative energy. I see it as a place to celebrate ourselves as sexual, powerful beings, or as mothers, not a place to carry negative or un-dealt-with emotions. I’ve always been into crystals, so learning about jade eggs (which are gems) has been a natural progression for me—this particular jade, nephrite jade, has incredible clearing, cleansing powers. It’s a dark, deep green and very heavy—it’s a great stone for taking away negativity.

This sounds exactly like something the MRAs would agree with: a woman’s power and intelligence isn’t in her mind, but in her vagina. It isn’t. Also, whenever you hear the phrase “cleansing powers”, and it isn’t talking about detergents, you know you’re going to get a load of bullshit. Ditto for “clearing” and “negativity”.

I also find this phrase telling: there was not as much information about it then as there is now. That’s only because frauds like her have been busily making shit up and stuffing it onto the internet. There is not more information now, there is more garbage — she just can’t tell the difference.

If you really want one, Gwyneth is selling them for only $66. Here’s an even better deal, though: a gynecologist is offering free advice. You should take it.

As for the recommendation that women sleep with a jade egg in their vaginas I would like to point out that jade is porous which could allow bacteria to get inside and so the egg could act like a fomite. This is not good, in case you were wondering. It could be a risk factor for bacterial vaginosis or even the potentially deadly toxic shock syndrome.

Regarding the suggestion to wear the jade egg while walking around, well, I would like to point out that your pelvic floor muscles are not meant to contract continuously. In fact, it is quite difficult to isolate your pelvic floor while walking so many women could actually clench other muscles to keep the egg inside. It is possible the pained expression of clenching your butt all day could be what is leading people to stare, not some energy glow.

Gwyneth Paltrow seems like a nice, well-meaning but incredibly privileged person who is affably promoting ignorance and exploiting the gullible for personal profit. She may have a pretty smile and better manners, but she is almost as bad for society as the loud-mouthed trumpkins. She happily enables stupidity and makes it seem like a desirable state.

Evidence that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth…together!

The Ark Park and the yokels who visit it are made for each other. An article Louisville Magazine describes the awe and wonder the fake ark inspires in attendees.

Golly, someone said when the Ark came into view. Oh my goodness.

Four guys built that, another man said. Unbelievable, isn’t it?

Yep, sure is unbelievable. Here’s a photo of an early phase in the construction.

ark_crew

One, two, three, many. Yes sir, four people made it.

Then there’s the point where visitors explain that gravity doesn’t exist.

Gravity has never been proven, because gravity is a large object attracted to a smaller object, and it’s never been seen. If gravity existed, a BB and a bowling ball should bump into each other. So you see how guys like Newton get caught in their own lies.

So, if I held a BB near, say, a big rock with a diameter of about 13,000 km, they would just hang there and not bump into each other? ‘k.

The reporter asked Georgia Purdom a rather fundamental question: why?

“So why an Ark?” I said. “Why build it at all?”

We want people to see that the Bible is true, Purdom said. Just as there was a judgement in Noah’s day, there’s another judgment coming, and those who don’t know Jesus Christ as their personal savior will spend eternity in hell.

Such nice people.

But really, my favorite part is where he asked Andrew Snelling for evidence that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time. Easy, he claims.

Purdom introduced me to geologist Andrew Snelling, who followed Ken Ham to the U.S. from Australia and for the last nine years has been the director of research for Answers in Genesis. I said,
“There were dinosaurs on the Ark, right?” Snelling nodded. Right.
“Then why aren’t there dinosaurs today?”

Dinosaurs went extinct after they left the Ark. After the Flood, we had the Ice Age. We had a radically different world. Some creatures weren’t able to adapt. But most cultures in the world have some legend about dragons, and these dragons are actually a good description of dinosaurs. The Chinese, for example — their dragons are depicted on scrolls pulling the chariots of emperors. And there was a story called Beowulf in which the king slays a dragon, and this happened in Norway.
“So you take Beowulf to be evidence of dinosaurs existing?”
Yes, Snelling said. It was an eyewitness account.

Huh. I just happen to have the Heaney translation of Beowulf right here, and this is the description of the dragon.

Unyielding, the lord of his people loomed
by his tall shield, sure of his ground,
while the serpent looped and unleashed itself.
Swaddled in flames, it came gliding and flexing
and racing towards its fate.

So it’s kind of a writhing, scaly, giant, worm-like creature. That breathes fire. That’s definite; it repeatedly talks about flames and smoke and burning. Are we then to believe that dinosaurs could breathe fire?

Here’s a Chinese dragon dinosaur for you. It doesn’t look much like any dinosaur species I know of, but apparently we are supposed to take “eyewitness accounts” as the gold standard.

Beijing_Nine_Dragon_Wall

Incredible. Literally incredible.

Dogma comes in many flavors

Ask an atheist, and they will tell you that religion poisons everything. There is an understanding that human nature is not fixed, but is susceptible to all kinds of influences — people make decisions based not simply on what they are, but on how they were brought up and shaped by their environment. They are likely to note that an American is most probably a Christian, not because they thought it through and worked out the logic and evidence, but simply because they were brought up in a predominantly Christian culture; if they’d been born in India they’d most likely be Hindu, in Italy Catholic, in Iran Muslim, in Sweden Lutheran, etc.

Where this awareness fizzles out, though, is in domains where we’ve absorbed and accepted the dominant worldview — suddenly, the conventions become not a plastic response to history and contingency and idiosyncratic circumstance, but “human nature” and the arguments become all about the necessity of maintaining the status quo: “that’s the way it is”, “are you some kind of freak?”, “we wouldn’t be this way if it weren’t adaptive.” There is a pressure to conform, because everyone is expected to behave the way everyone else is.

We wouldn’t hesitate to be iconoclastic if the issue is one of faith. Break it down, we’d say, shatter those chains and think for yourself. Other topics, though, are suddenly taboo. Try to go to most atheist meetings and question, for instance, conventional notions of masculinity. A significant number of those radical superstition-breakers will be appalled and start whispering about you, and divisions will form and some will cast you out. There will be references to such distinguished defenders of the fixity of gender norms as Steven Pinker and Christina Hoff Sommers when they want to appear highbrow, and mutterings about cucks and SJWs when they don’t care. They are willing to be infidels only on narrow matters of religion, but on anything else, they are as hidebound and inflexible as the most dogmatic Catholic.

But they are wrong. Masculinity is not one simple thing. There is no rulebook that says “You must have short hair; you must enjoy football; you must sneer at queers; you must eat steak and work out on weekends.” Having a penis does not imply that there is a suite of behaviors you must accept, while not having one means you cannot engage in them. There is a link between biology and behavior, but it’s weaker than you think and requires constant reinforcement from culture in order to sustain itself. We know this is true because different cultures have different notions of masculinity. There is no one true male nature.

Cartomancer has a long and thorough post on the nature of masculinity in ancient Greek culture. It’s amazing. Right there at the root of contemporary Western culture, they can’t even get this fundamental biological essentialism right — different cities had different perspectives on what it means to be a man, almost as if the Y chromosome does not dictate every aspect of your identity.

I have spent some time outlining the Homeric models of manly behaviour, because they show us threads that continued to be important in the culture of the Classical city-states of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, widely regarded as the high water mark of Greek culture. But to talk of one Greek culture is clearly a mistake. The different city states each took their shared Homeric inheritance and distorted it in different directions, placing emphasis on different aspects of their shared culture and in so doing creating different and competing conceptions of masculinity.

Spartan culture, for instance, was radically authoritarian, militaristic, anti-intellectual and anti-capitalist. Full Spartiate citizens were expected to be full-time warriors, living in communal barracks with their fellow men and spurning the trappings of wealth, comfort and sophistication. To them courage was everything, the model of Achilles their ultimate goal. The Spartan approach to courage comes across well in the saying, recorded by Plutarch, that Spartan mothers expect their sons to come back carrying their shields or on dead on top of them (that is, having won the battle or having died trying – throwing away your heavy metal hoplon shield to better escape a pursuing enemy was an unforgivable crime in Sparta). The Greek word we usually translate as “courage” is andreia – literally “manliness”, and the two were pretty much synonymous in Sparta (compare the Latin virtus, from vir, man, which is the root of our “virtue”).

They don’t say much about femininity — there’s another lengthy essay that needs to be written — but it’s too often implicit that the feminine is the mirror image of the masculine. If courage and virtue are manly traits, then women must be timid and weak, or they are violating norms. If men of other cities are less diligent in pursuing glorious death in battle, they must be “pussies”, or that universal put-down, “women”. If a woman expresses courage like a man, she must be “butch”, a “dyke”, and must therefore be ugly and less desirable as a woman.

We are soaking in these attitudes. Fire up an online video game and do poorly, and watch the reaction: you must be a “pussy” or a “fag”. It’s gotten so bad that if you merely defend the equality of women, you are a damnable SJW who is betraying men.

But we can fix that! We tried to bring up our kids to be tolerant and open and willing to explore their identities beyond blindly accepting gender-defined paths, and I think they turned out pretty good. There are sub-communities within atheism that are conscious of other ways of thinking than the default patriarchal set, just as there are better ways of thinking about the universe than the indoctrinated godly explanations. We can learn to be better and recognize the artificiality of so many conventions in our society, so we can break them. This ought to be understood as the default position of atheist organizations everywhere. No gods, no masters, no dogmas about human nature.

There’s a flip side to human plasticity, though. If we’re flexible enough that we can be made better, then we must also recognize the possibility that culture can make us worse. If atheism is liberating, it’s also true that Catholicism is persuasive, and we could be living in a society that constantly tells us we need to be more Christian (hey, we do!). If the truth is that gender roles are more complicated and less rigidly dictated by biology than many people believe, there can also be a culture that promotes the lie that there is only one true way to be a man, and we have that, too, and it harms people as badly as the most demented religion out there. It’s called the alt-right, or the manosphere, or machismo, or any of a thousand names that some will automatically accept as virtuous (it’s built into the language that man equals virtue, after all.) Abi Wilkinson reports on her experiences with toxic masculinity.

In modern parlance, this is part of the phenomenon known as the “alt-right”. More sympathetic commentators portray it as “a backlash to PC culture” and critics call it out as neofascism. Over the past year, it has been strange to see the disturbing internet subculture I’ve followed for so long enter the mainstream. The executive chairman of one of its most popular media outlets, Breitbart, has just been appointed Donald Trump’s chief of strategy, and their UK bureau chief was among the first Brits to have a meeting with the president-elect. Their figurehead – Milo Yiannopoulos – toured the country stumping for him during the campaign on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour. These people are now part of the political landscape.

On their forums I’ve read long, furious manifestos claiming that women are all sluts who “ride the cock carousel” and sleep with a series of “alpha males” until they reach the end of their sexual prime, at which point they seek out a “beta cuck” to settle down with for financial security. I’ve lurked silently on blogs dedicated to “pick-up artistry” as men argue that uppity, opinionated, feminist women – women like myself – need to be put in their place through “corrective rape”.

I know about the “men going their own way” movement, which is based around the idea that men should avoid any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with women. I’m aware of “traditional marriage” advocates, who often argue that you should aim to marry a very young woman as she’s likely to be easier to control. I also learned the difference between an “incel” who is involuntarily celibate, and a “volcel” who makes a deliberate choice to avoid sexual activity, and sometimes also masturbation, often in the belief that ejaculation depletes their testosterone and saps them of masculine power.

I’ve read their diatribes, too, and what I find dismaying is how often they cite science as somehow backing up their views, but to their minds, “science” means rationalizing their rigid and deterministic gender essentialism. Good science says no such thing. Neither does history or philosophy or sociology or anthropology or psychology. We have a responsibility to stop these lies. They are as damaging to human psychological development as dogmatic Christianity or Islam, and if you are concerned about removing obstacles to our species’ potential, as most atheists will say they are, then you have an obligation to combat the propaganda of these pseudo-scientific Y chromosome worshippers as you do the propaganda of religion.

We growed a little more

Quietly, in the dead of night and in disguise, we stealthily slipped in some new people on the FtB roster. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.

You can go visit them yourselves, but keep it on the down low. If it ever got out what a hive of rapscallions and scallywags we were nursing at the SJW teat, they might call us rude names or something.

I can’t claim to be a prophet…yet

A reader has warned me that I might be guilty of the sin of prophecy. Back in 2014 I wrote this:

I will make a prediction, right here and now. The number of people identifying as “nones” will grow in this country in coming years, because we’re on the right side of history, and because organized religion is happily in the process of destroying itself with regressive social attitudes, scandals, and their bizarre focus on other-worldly issues that don’t help people. The number of people identifying as atheists will stagnate or even shrink, because organized atheism is happily in the process of destroying itself with regressive social attitudes, scandals, and their bizarre focus on irrelevant metaphysical differences that don’t help people.

And then they pointed out the results of this Gallup poll from the summer:

beliefingod

Nope. Not going to claim I’ve been sadly vindicated yet. As the article from Gallup points out, there’s a lot of wobbliness due to the precise wording of the question. I’d also suggest that the previous year’s abrupt downswing in religiosity looks more like noise, so this year’s upswing is nothing but regression to the mean. There are still signs of a slow trend away from belief in gods, but it’s nothing dramatic, and we’re not seeing widespread acceptance of overt atheism. As the article explains, the variations may not be meaningful of any kind of shift in ideas.

The exact meaning of these shifts is unclear. Although the results can be taken at face value in showing that fewer Americans believe in God than did so in the past, it is also possible that basic beliefs have not changed — but rather Americans’ willingness to express nonreligious sentiments to an interviewer has. Whatever the explanation for these changes over time, the most recent findings show that the substantial majority of Americans continue to give a positive response when asked about their belief in God.

I’m still going to argue that atheism needs something more than a denial of the existence of gods if it is going to achieve wider popularity. We’re riding on a slow swell of anti-clericism, but we need to get into the curl of a more active social relevancy.

We also can’t deny that we hold a minority view. But the “good” news is that the resurgence of Republican theocratic meddling might yet inspire more anti-religious views!

I get email

This is from א ב.

i have 2 interesting thoughts about evolution

according to evolution- a feces (a group of bacteria) can evolve into a supermodel (human)

according to evolution if we will find a watch with a dna and a self replicating system- we will need to think that this watch just evolved. because its have a living traits

have a nice day

I’m sorry, you’re entirely wrong. You do not have any interesting thoughts about evolution.

“Feces” is plural (singular is Latin “faex”, but English did not adopt the singular form). It is not a group of bacteria; it is waste material from digested food with additional bacteria. Evolution does not predict that it will evolve into a human. Quite the contrary: the bacteria in our guts are already specialized far beyond the state of the ancestral microorganisms that evolved into eukaryotes, they are quite unlikely to evolve multicellularity (which is another derived condition), and they’ve got better things to do.

Essentially all the organisms you can find in the natural world contain DNA, reproductive processes, and clock-like mechanisms — circadian rhythms are ubiquitous. Think about circadian rhythms, monthly and yearly cycles, and internal regulatory mechanisms, like the cell division cycle. Creationists are people who, if they found a squirrel in the woods, are more likely to strap it to their wrists and call it a Rolex.

The celebrity death toll is a matter of perception

abevigoda

We hear a lot about how awful the year 2016 has been…but have the obituaries actually been that frequent? Greg Laden compares the number of celebrity deaths this year vs. other years, and the answer is no. Which is actually what I expected — there is no causal mechanism and no selective agent making a particular year more lethal than other years.

deadcelebsaccordingtotvguide

Now if we’d had a global war, a civil war, a plague, and a collapse of society (wait until 2017 for those!), then we’d have a reason to expect a surfeit of deaths. I wonder how Syrian celebrities are faring this year?

Otherwise, though, I think this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. All it takes is the death of a few celebrities, a little nudge of superstition, like the rule of threes, and soon enough people are doing all the work for you, gleaning every mention of a death and throwing them into the tidy category of “2016!”, and that reinforces the story. You can’t remember every celebrity who died, but you can remember “a lot of celebrities died in 2016”, and that becomes the memorable link.

Alternatively, all the people who sold their soul for fame and fortune are being recalled this year because the stony-faced guardian of the portal to Hollywood Hell, Abe Vigoda, died in January 2016, unleashing a swarm of vengeful demons.

Now be honest: Who remembered that Vigoda died early this year? How many of you are now adding his name to the tally of 2016 deaths, reaffirming the myth?

The Discovery Institute is full of weird little people

The Intelligent Design creationist hit their peak sometime before 2005, and then plummeted rock-like into the depths of negligibility with the Kitzmiller decision, that made it clear they were just another gang of ignorant creationists with no scientific credibility. They still try to seem relevant, though, and go through the motions. One of their soft spots now is those other creationists — they try a little too hard to distance themselves from the more common breed of science denier.

An example: I relayed that creationist petition from Joe Hannon, something certainly fit for mockery. I did not mention the Discovery Institute, but David Klinghoffer is now castigating everyone who said anything about it, calling it “fake news” and a “phony petition”, and saying we “embraced a whopper”, because he couldn’t find anything about a Joe Hannon anywhere.

Uh, it’s a real petition. You can sign it and everything. It’s also a real (and very bad) argument of the kind made all the time and all over the place. It’s fairly typical of the popular and profitable kind of creationism sponsored by groups like Answers in Genesis — perhaps Klinghoffer would like to pretend the $100 million plus Ark boondoggle in Kentucky doesn’t exist? These are very silly arguments, but people do make them — and Mike Pence made them on the floor of Congress — so it’s weird to berate people for refuting them.

As for “Joe Hannon”: real person, fake name. We (the recipients of his email) had a brief conversation about it, and are convinced that it’s a fairly well known crank, atheistoclast AKA Joseph Bozorgmehr, on the basis of the style and nature, and also because he sometimes posts as Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr.

It’s actually pretty easy to figure out who “Joe Hannon” is — he’s notorious for his bad arguments, and for his frequent fake identities. I’ve banned him multiple times, and Larry Moran, as well as everyone at the Panda’s Thumb, knows exactly who he is.

Atheistoclast is Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr from Manchester, United Kingdom. He infected other postings on Sandwalk under the name “Reza” [Darwinism and Junk DNA].

He’s been banned from Pharyngula and was banned from RichardDawkins.net except that he created 95 new identities in order to get around the ban.

He is a holocaust denier. He used to run a business “selling components – just nuts and bolts – to the Iranian nuclear and missile industries” but it was shut down because of sanctions. Now he rants against British conspiracies.

Bozorgmehr has even been cited by…Evolution News & Views, the online propaganda organ of the Discovery Institute, claiming that he had disproven the efficacy of gene duplication in evolution (he hasn’t; it’s a very bad paper). Will EN&V admit that they “embraced a whopper”?

Klinghoffer’s only argument is that Hannon’s email and petition reads like a parody to me. That’s not a good argument against rebuttals, though, since everything the Discovery Institute publishes, including Klinghoffer’s ridiculous opinion pieces, sounds like a parody to me.

I get email

Isn’t this fun…I got email from a creationist today; it was also sent to a lot of other people. Joe Hannon wants Mike Pence to outlaw the teaching of evolution.

Dear All,

Howdie. I thought you might be interested to read a fresh online petition which is directed at VP-elect Mike Pence calling on the incoming Trump Adminstration to impose an immediate,unconditional and indefinite nationwide moratorium on the teaching of evolution in public schools, including the threat of crippling financial sanctions on those schools that do not fully comply with this proposed executive action: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/moratorium-teaching-evolution

However, the real business will begin when Congress reconvenes on Jan 3rd. We will be speaking with Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) who heads the House Education Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education. We will be asking for his subcommittee to approve a similar measure as an amendment to a House bill on education in 2017. Hopefully, the incoming Trump-Pence Administration will let high school students learn actual biology without the flawed narrative of evolutionism forced down their throats.

Merry Christmas to y’all,

Joe Hannon
Republicans Abroad (Make America Great Again)

He has a petition! It has two signatories so far: Joe Hannon and Uriah Wanker. That’s how serious this is. He has the backing of Wankers.

Well, let’s take a look at this petition. He has three primary arguments that he believes invalidate evolutionary theory.

1. The demise of the genetic blueprint: The majority of high school textbooks, along with the popular media, refer to DNA as a “blueprint” for building a living organism. This is taught because the Neo-Darwinian paradigm insists that the diversity of form in the biosphere is due to variations in DNA among species. However, this assumption has been shown in recent years to be essentially false, and that there is no blueprint in the genome governing the shape and complexity of the organism. Two researchers, Monteiro and Podlaha, admit that,“the genetic origin of new and complex traits is probably still one of the most pertinent and fundamental unanswered questions in evolution today.” Harvard professor, Peter Park, goes even further to proclaim that,“it’s become very clear that DNA sequences are just a building block. They don’t explain higher-order complexity.” Obviously, if organisms are more than just the epiphenomena of their genes, then the gene-centric Neo-Darwinian paradigm cannot at all explain the diversity of form and so fails utterly.

The “genetic blueprint” is a metaphor. The metaphor doesn’t work. The failure of a metaphor is not the failure of the fact of evolution.

Monteiro and Podlaha will be surprised to learn that their work is being cited as evidence of the collapse of Darwinism (actually, I think all scientists would be surprised to be told that the existence of unanswered questions means science has failed.) I don’t think Hannon understood the paper, if he read it all. The authors were setting up a specific question:

This work is difficult and time consuming, but the question at its core—the genetic origin of new and complex traits—is probably still one of the most pertinent and fundamental unanswered questions in evolution today. At stake is the possibility of testing whether novel complex traits arise from a gradual building of novel developmental networks, gene by gene, or whether pre-existent modules of interacting genes are recruited together to play novel roles in novel parts of the organism.

Hannon left out the part where they explain that they are asking whether novel traits evolve by incremental construction of new gene networks, or whether they evolve by cooption of an existing network for a new purpose. Whether a god magicked them into existence isn’t one of the choices.

2. The demise of cumulative selectionism: The core premise of Darwin’s theory of evolution is that biological features have been produced by the cumulative selection of innumerable slight successive modifications. But as renown biologist Dr. Michael Denton has noted, the theory of evolution has been in crisis for the past 30 years because of the abject failure to show that there is a functional continuum in biology that allows for a gradual change leading to complex new features. In his view,“Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth.”

Quite wrong. Critics have been predicting the imminent death of Darwinism since the day Darwin published it. Like their biblical prophecies, it never seems to come true.

As for the absence of a functional continuum — look to transitional fossils. There are plenty of examples.

3. The demise of the LUCA: The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is the hypothetical organism, that lived 4 billion years ago, for which there is no actual physical evidence of at all. It is only inferred because all life shares essentially the same genetic code. Recent scientific research indicates there is no reason to believe that it ever existed. As Professor Ford Doolittle states, “We do doubt that there ever was a single universal common ancestor.” Indeed, the idea that all living organisms are descended from a single ancestor is as preposterous as the discredited hypothesis that all human languages are descended from a prototypical tongue.

Correct. There was no single universal common ancestor. Again, all you have to do is read the original source to see that Joe is selectively editing and lying about the context of the quote.

We (some of us) do doubt that there ever was a single universal common ancestor (a last universal common ancestor or LUCA), if by that is meant a single cell whose genome harboured predecessors of all the genes to be found in all the genomes of all cells alive today. But this does not mean that life lacks ‘universal common ancestry’—no more than the fact that mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome phylogenies do not trace back to a single conjugal couple named Eve and Adam whose loins bore all the genes we humans share today means that members of Homo sapiens lack common ancestry.

So, bottom line: his case is a concatenation of lies, ignorance, and quote-mining. Standard creationist crap, in other words. Mike Pence will eat it up. Uriah Wanker will also find it copacetic.