The Creationist State of the Nation

See? I told you that in addition to being a creationist, Ken Ham is also one of those far right culture warriors.

During the conference, I spoke on the state of the nation and said that we are observing Romans chapter 1 playing out in the USA right now. I have heard many people say that if America keeps murdering children in their mother’s wombs (over 50 million babies since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973) and eliminating God from the culture (as by and large has been done in public schools and in the culture as a whole with the removal of crosses, nativity scenes and Ten Commandment displays from public places), then God will judge this nation. Well, I suggest that America is already under judgment, and a sign of this judgment is the increasing homosexual behavior (and the “gay” marriage issue) in the nation, reflecting that God is turning the culture over (as Romans 1:24 and Romans 1:26 describe).

I also declared at last week’s conference that the state of the nation actually reflects the state of the church. Frankly, I believe it is largely the church’s fault that the culture, from a Christian perspective, is collapsing and is coming under judgment. For example, there is so much rampant compromise in the church with its increasing acceptance of millions of years and evolution. This has led to generations of children in our church doubting and subsequently disbelieving the Bible. Today, two-thirds of them are walking away from the church by the time they reach college age. It only takes one generation to lose a culture, and we are seeing this happen before our very eyes.

The church is not influencing the culture in America as it once did. That is mostly due to the fact that the culture has invaded much of the church. Much of the church’s “salt” has become contaminated. And we know what God’s Word says about such contamination: it destroys.

But it’s not just happening in America! Our Western nations—once dominated by Christian thinking—are embracing sinful acts, such as abortion and homosexual behavior, and is now calling these evils “good.”

If you want to know where America will be in the not-too-distant future, look at the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. The churches there are largely spiritually dead (though I rejoice in the small pockets of Christian life there). All across Europe, countless church buildings have been turned into stores, nightclubs, temples, etc. Sadly, America is on the same path.

Happily, America is on the same path. But right now he and Pastor Phelps and every tinpot preacher with a load of hate to deliver sound a lot alike, don’t they?

You can understand why they cling to something as gallingly stupid as young earth creationism: they see it as all of a piece, that the eternal salvation of their children and grandchildren is dependent on not just accepting the liberal Christian view that belief in the divinity of an ancient Jewish carpenter is necessary to appease an omnipotent and rather wrathful cosmic father. Think about it: that’s a rather petty and trivial thing to hang such an essential gift upon, so there must be more. And the more that they’ve accepted is the costly sacrifice of giving up science, hating gay people, forcing their women into domestic servitude, and demanding non-stop official public piety.

Of course, I can’t help but notice that most of the people forced to make the sacrifices are not the family patriarchs.

But this is also why it is not enough to just educate people about evolution. For most people, science is just this hard, boring thing that they take for granted that someone else will do; they aren’t going to be at all impressed with accusations that they’ve abandoned science or even common human decency. They are serving an almighty LORD. They believe they have the biggest, baddest, strongest, most demanding boss of them all.

The teaching of evolution in the schools is just one tiny symptom of the real problem, and that’s why I argue that to defeat this one aspect that annoys me personally and directly, we need to confront and diminish the nasty head of the beast: religion. Tear it down, and then we’ll be able to pursue real knowledge unfettered.

And as a wonderful glorious additional bonus, we also get greater equality and a reduction of prejudice. I have no illusions that eliminating religion will lead to paradise, though — more like, eliminating religion will knock down one more major barrier to progress.

Apparently, I need to clarify myself

Melissa McEwan has written two more posts on misogyny in atheism. They’re both good and highly recommended, but I have to clarify something.

McEwan takes exception to something I wrote.

And then there were the atheist men, in most cases ostensibly sympathetic to my position, who piped up to let me know that I wasn’t talking about them, that they were one of the Good Ones. Even Myers linked to my list with the curious line: “Melissa McEwan has some Advice to Atheist Men. The long list sounds very good, but I do have one reservation: none of it is exclusive to atheists or men. I think it’s more Advice for Decent Human Beings.”

I’m not sure why my “long list” (of 18 suggestions) would engender reservations simply because it is not “exclusive to atheists or men,” unless one is keen to deflect accountability for being part of the group being urged to decency.

And one commenter interpreted that to a remarkably vicious degree.

Where the HELL does Meyers get off asking for advice and then saying “oh, well that doesn’t apply to me.” Uh yeah. It does.

So let me clarify. I was not saying I disagreed with the list in any way. I was not saying that McEwan was not talking about us ‘good atheists’. I was not trying to deflect accountability away from atheists. Most importantly, I was not saying it doesn’t apply to me — a bizarre charge, since I most certainly aspire to belong to the category of decent human beings, and I would hope that being decent human beings would be one of the goals of all atheists.

It was a reservation that wasn’t really a reservation — it was an appreciation of the universality of the suggestions, and a comment that the title of McEwan’s post was not adequate to describe the usefulness of the content.

I would definitely hope that more atheists would pay attention to her work.

Why I am a happy atheist

One reason is that we’re winning. Christian web sites are full of articles complaining about how young people are leaving the church; Ken Ham even wrote a whole book about it. Here’s an example of the genre from someone called Marc5Solas.

The statistics are jaw-droppingly horrific: 70% of youth stop attending church when they graduate from High School. Nearly a decade later, about half return to church.

Half.

Let that sink in.

There’s no easy way to say this: The American Evangelical church has lost, is losing, and will almost certainly continue to lose OUR YOUTH.

I let it sink in, and for some reason I just can’t stop grinning — a nice wicked devilish grin. Yes, yes, yes, the church is increasingly archaic, and it even helps when people make lists of everything that is wrong with the church, because they aren’t seeing beyond the problems. It’s lovely. Just keep hemmoraging, godly institutions, I’m happy to stand back and watch you bleed out…although I wish you’d stop thrashing about, you’re doing some damage in your death throes.

10. The Church is “Relevant”:

He’s actually complaining that the church tries hard to adapt to modern culture — it’s a typical conservative view that the old ways were better. It ignores the fact that religion always changes: the 19th century Catholic and Baptist religions were different than the 20th. But that wouldn’t fit with their pretense of holding eternal truths.

But hey, churchies, please do insist on locking yourselves into antique dogmas. I’m all for it!

9. They never attended church to begin with:

This one is related to #10. All them newfangled singalongs and pizza parties and hep cat stuff are distracting — make the kids sit and listen to a sermon for two hours, that’ll root ’em in the church.

8. They get smart:

My favorite! It’s those atheists who treat kids as intelligent questioning people that suck them in. Yay us! I mean, damn us. How dare we.

7. You sent them out unarmed:

To counter those atheists, the church has to get back to theological basics. Yeah, right. One problem there: that’s exactly what drove me away from the church, was learning what kind of bullshit I was expected to believe.

6. You gave them hand-me-downs

We’re back to the old-time religion whine. Kids are told to express their feelings, but those are lousy evangelical tools. Teach them the traditional stuff.

Please. Please do.

5. Community

Another complaint about the fuzzy wuzzy touchy feely modern church. Jeez, this guy really hates anything that deviates from his specific version of the faith.

4. They found better feelings:

More complaints about subjective faith over the virtues of dogma. I think he’s really padding his list of 10…so far it’s really about 2.

3. They got tired of pretending:

Christ, I’m so bored. It’s more of the same.

2. They know the truth:

More. Of. The. Same. Jebus. Now he’s complaining that kids taught this “god is love” stuff don’t have a proper appreciation of the fact that ‘god is law.’

1. They don’t need it:

Has he ever considered that maybe kids leave the church because the yahoos running it are boring as fuck? Yet again he’s complaining that an alternative liberal church let’s people find their way out of the rigid trap he thinks they ought to build.

Now you see why we atheists should be happy. Not only are young people abandoning that stupid mess of nonsense called church, but the priests are crankily sawing off the branch they’re standing on. May the whole rotten mess collapse soon.

You can all call me Mahout Myers now

Oh, no. Not again. It’s another arrogant wanker insisting that atheism is a religion, too, and of course, making dumbass arguments to do it. And here they are:

Atheists are, in fact, some of the most religious people.

First, they have a functioning God under whom they are subservient (normally it’s science or rationality, but mainly themselves), and that idea of God informs the way they live and interpret their lives. It informs their biases and determines their values, and governs any sense of morality or ethics they adhere too, or ignore.

So, if you believe in yourself or trust empirically determined facts about the universe, why, that’s exactly the same as believing in gods, therefore we’re all religious. Having any sense of morality is exactly the same as religion, even if it is a secular morality.

We’re not dealing with the most discerning intellect here, are we? Everything in the world is the same gray porridge to him; bicycles and elephants are all just objects, you know, so when people try to tell me they’re different, I’m going to say NO, and I will keep one in my garage and I will attach my pump to its toenails to inflate it and I will find a place to attach this spoke wrench.

The second argument is hilarious: keep in mind that this is a commentator on Fox News.

Once that’s all settled all that’s left is the preaching.

And they preach all the time.

This new breed of atheists is obsessed with the idea of God. They write books, deliver speeches, comment-bomb the evangelical blogosphere and generally rant on ad nauseam about the ills of believing in God.

So when anyone goes on a rant about the ills of liberalism on Fox, it means they really are a liberal themselves? I’ve tuned out that channel for so many years, but I guess I’ve been missing out on some great progressive discussions then.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re obsessed with how religion poisons our culture with endemic stupidity. I’m planning to cite Johnnie Moore, the author of the rant about atheism (oh, hey…I guess that makes him an atheist, too!) as a perfect case study in the future.

Another point he makes is that Richard Dawkins was defeated in a debate with Rowan Williams. It’s true, I looked it up: the audience voted 2:1 in favor of the Anglican priest.

Welp, I guess I gotta give up this atheism thing since a majority of people in England believe in god. Oh, wait…they don’t. It’s kind of evenly split right now.

So I guess I should adopt a faith because Dawkins had an off day?

If you read the summary of the debate, it was about whether religion had a place in modern society, and I thought this young person made a telling point about Dawkins’ performance:

One second year student told TCS: "He did not address the motion. His points focused only on debating whether religion is true, and ignored the question of whether it has a place in modern society."

Heh. Yes. I guess that’s quite perceptive. To some people, it’s completely irrelevant whether a claim is true or false, and they are quite happy to build a society around a lie.

I’m not one of those people. I guess I need to stay an atheist.

(via The Zingularity.)

Adam Merberg on grazing and Allan Savory and TED

I wish I’d seen Adam Merberg’s excellent takedown of Allan Savory’s TED talk on “greening the deserts” before I wrote my own. Merberg provides a history of Savory’s career that’s remarkably detailed for its relative brevity, with a couple of damning quotes by Savory, including this one:

You’ll find the scientific method never discovers anything. Observant, creative people make discoveries. But the scientific method protects us from cranks like me.

Merberg offers perhaps the best summation of both Savory’s attitude and the pseudoscientific impulse I’ve seen:

Savory argued at TED that Holistic Management “offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity.” What Savory does not tell us is that there is the distinct possibility that if we try to implement those ideas, we will fail. In this case, he will tell us that we misunderstood his ideas. How comforting it will be to know that his ideas were correct, as they always have been!

Also of interest, Merberg offers a sampling of credulous responses from people who pride themselves on being skeptical, including this one:

In Shermer’s defense, it may be that suspension of credulity isn’t really a guy thing.

One of the more interesting parts of Merberg’s piece is his conclusion, where he directs certain uncomfortable questions at TED:

In December, TED responded to concerns that independent TEDx authorized events were “dragging the TED name through the mud” by sending a letter to “the TEDx community” warning that bad science could lead to revocation of the TEDx license. The letter also included some advice for identifying bad science. I can’t help but think that Savory’s work should have raised concerns for anybody familiar with that list. At the least, Savory’s work “has failed to convince many mainstream scientists of its truth,” much of it “is not based on experiments that can be reproduced by others,” it comes from an “overconfident fringe expert,” and it uses imprecise vocabulary to form untested theories.

Of course, TED has no contractual incentive to apply the standards it sets for TEDx organizers to its own talks. However, the letter emphasizes that “your audience’s trust is your top priority,” and I think it’s fair to ask what TED did to respect that trust in this case. Did they research the science behind Allan Savory’s ideas? Are they satisfied that his talk amounts to “good science”? If Savory’s talk had run at a TEDx event, would that event’s license have been revoked? Now that TED has reined in TEDx, perhaps its next move should be to look in the mirror.

Go check it out.

Hamza Tzortzis is playing gotcha with Lawrence Krauss now

After that debate between Tzortzis and Lawrence Krauss that was overshadowed by the disgraceful anti-egalitarian exhibition of Muslim misogyny, iERA is now trying a new tactic: they’re releasing tiny snippets of the debate that they believe they can spin into anti-Krauss sentiment. Here’s a perfect example, Krauss’s reply to a question about the morality of incest.

The audience gasped when Krauss said it’s not clear to him that incest is wrong, and then he went on to argue that there are biological and societal reasons why incest is not a good idea, but that he’d be willing to listen to rational arguments for sexual and emotional interactions between siblings, for instance…not that he’d encourage such behavior. It’s a nuanced and complicated reply in too short a time, but otherwise, he’s not wrong.

But you know what Tzortzis is thinking: this is a perfect clip to play to the dogmatic mob, his people, who don’t do complicated and nuanced, and don’t care about rational arguments, only absolute dictates.

I’d add two other arguments that might sink in.

One is that religions also rationalize incest. Here’s the Protestant Christian example:

Since Eve was made from one of Adam’s ribs [Genesis 2:21-22], she would have been a clone of Adam and, had there been any genetic mutation in Adam, this would have been reproduced in Eve and expressed in their offspring. However, we may reasonably conclude that there were no mutations, and the very first commandment given to them was “to be fruitful and multiply” [Genesis 1:28]. However, the business at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil took place long before there were any children.

The account then continues where God confronted the guilty pair at the tree, but they did not confess their guilt or plead for forgiveness [Genesis 3:1-13]. God then cursed the serpent, imposed reproductive difficulties upon Eve and “cursed the ground for [Adam’s] sake” [Genesis 3:17]. From that moment, everything that Adam – and mankind since – ate had grown in the cursed ground. Cell by living cell, Adam began to very slowly change from his initial state of eternal perfection to mortal imperfection, and he finally died at the age of 930 years [Genesis 5:5]. Nevertheless, Adam and Eve’s immediate offspring would have been very close to physical perfection while brother-sister marriages were the only unions possible! Further, according to the genealogies given in Scripture, pre-flood longevity was about the same as that for Adam, so families were very large compared to those of today. Brother-sister unions were not only unavoidable, but they undoubtedly became traditional and expected.

Catholics make a similar argument.

Incest was not a problem for the immediate descendants of Adam and Eve. It became a problem when the deterioration of the gene pool meant that there was an increased likelihood that the offspring of the unions of near relatives would inherit physical or mental problems. Adam’s immediate descendants inherited perfect or nearly perfect genes, so the unions of near relatives were not a problem. Besides, near relatives were the only people who existed.

Muslims, too.

it is a known fact that legislation differs from one Shari’ah to another, while the principles and beliefs remain the same in all of them. So, making of portraits was allowed in the Shari’ah of Sulayman (peace be upon him) but is prohibited in our Shari’ah. Similarly, making prostration of salutation was permitted in the Shari’ah of Yusuf (peace be upon him) but is illegal in ours. Also, war booty was prohibited for nations before us but it is completely legal for us. The Qiblah of people before us used to be towards Bayt Al-Maqdis, but for us it is towards Ka’bah. In a similar way, marriage between brothers and sisters was permitted in the Shari’ah of Adam (peace be upon him) as opposed to those that came afterwards. The following is a clarification on the issue by Haafidh Ibn Katheer, who said:

Allaah allowed Adam (peace be upon him) to marry his daughters to his sons for necessity. Every couple used to have a boy and a girl. Hence, he married the girl of one couple to the boy of another. This is said by Suddi regarding what has been narrated by Abu Maalik and Abu Salih, from Ibn ‘Abbas, by Murrah from Ibn Mas‘ood and by other companions of the Prophet (peace be upon him) that Adam did not have (in his grandchildren) a baby boy unless it was accompanied by a girl, so he married the male of a couple to the female of another, and the female of a couple to the male of another

So apparently their absolute moral prohibition against incest isn’t quite so absolute after all. A good Muslim can fuck his sister if Allah tells him to.

But the other example I’d give is current, and it’s done all the time. Ever looked at a purebred Arabian horse’s pedigree? It’s an incestuous nightmare, and it’s encouraged — it’s even regarded as a good thing to reinforce good stock with a moderate amount of inbreeding.

Here’s an example of a horse pedigree. Notice what’s going on?

horsepedigree

Look at Pie’s Joseph, for instance. He is the product of a breeding between Wood’s Jay and Wood’s Jay’s granddaughter, Wood’s Chili.

Pie’s Joseph was then bred with his own niece, Pie’s Lady I, and they had a daughter, Pie’s Lady II. Pie’s Joseph was than bred to his own daughter to produce a son, Blue Joe, who is also his grandson.

Let’s not even get into cows and pigeons. Here’s a quick glimpse at the sordid sex life of Favorite:

cowpedigree

Are you squicked out yet? You shouldn’t be. This stuff is going on on farms all over the world. The biological prohibition isn’t quite as strong as you might think — if you want extremes of a phenotype, as you might in agriculture, trying to achieve selective homozygosity for specific traits might actually give you an advantage.

We tend to not want that kind of result in human crosses…although, if you think about it, an unscrupulous nation could embark on a breeding program for athletic ability that would benefit from a multi-generation pattern of incest…

But this all highlights a common problem: get into a debate with fanatics and ideologues like the iERA mob, and they will actually hold it against you if you actually consider the complexities of reality. We like both complexity and reality; how can you argue with someone who comes in with a bias that what you regard as virtues are sinful, and demands that the universe fit itself to their false simplicities?

The Genetic Code is not a synonym for the Bible Code

Oh, boy. The Intelligent Design creationists are all excited about a new paper that purports to have identified an intelligent signal in the genetic code.

Here’s a new paper that can be added to the growing stack of intelligent-design articles in peer-reviewed journals. Even though the authors do not use the phrase “intelligent design,” their reasoning centers on the detection of an intelligent signal embedded in the genetic code — a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by a natural cause, “be it Darwinian, Lamarckian,” chemical affinities or energetics, or any other.

I’ve read the paper by ShCherbak and Makukov, and by golly, the Discovery Institute flack really has accurately summarized the paper: it does explicitly and clearly claim to have identified evidence of design in the genetic code! That’s newsworthy in itself, that the creationists can accurately summarize a scientific paper…as long as the results conform to their ideological expectations.

Unfortunately, what they’ve so honestly described is good old honest garbage.

Here’s the short summary of what they do: they jigger the identities of the amino acids coded for by each codon into a number, a nucleon sum. What is that, you might ask? It’s determined by adding up the number of protons and neutrons in the amino acid, which is simply the mass number of the compound. Further, you can distinguish the amino acid into it’s R group, and the atoms that make up the peptide chain proper, which he calls the B group, for standard block. The mass number of the B group is always 74, except for proline, so he transfers a hydrogen from the R group to the proline B group to bring it up to 74, and by the way, did you notice that 74 is two times 37, which is a prime number? Now if you take all the three-digit decimals with identical digits (111, 222, 333…999), and sum their digits (111=3, 222=6, 333=9, etc.) you get the quotient of the number divided by…37!!!1!!

Are you impressed yet? This is simply numerology, juggling highly derived quantities that have little to do with functional properties of the molecules to come up with arbitrary numerical relationships, and then claiming that they’re somehow significant. They also play games with the sums of the mass numbers of just the R groups for certain codons, adding or subtracting the B number, finagling things until they get numbers that are evenly divisible by their magic prime number of 37, etc. It’s pure nonsense through and through.

But every once in a while, something sensible emerges out of the murk. Here’s the logic of their argument:

To be considered unambiguously as an intelligent signal, any patterns in the code must satisfy the following two criteria: (1) they must be highly significant statistically and (2) not only must they possess intelligent-like features, but they should be inconsistent in principle with any natural process, be it Darwinian or Lamarckian evolution, driven by amino acid biosynthesis, genomic changes, affinities between (anti)codons and amino acids, selection for the increased diversity of proteins, energetics of codon-anticodon interactions, or various pre-translational mechanisms.

(1) is simply saying that there must be a pattern of some sort — if the code were purely random assignment of arbitrary nucleotides to each amino acid, it wouldn’t be much of a sign — it would suggest that the sequence is noise, not signal. (2) is the really hard part, the one where you’d have to do a lot of work: you’d have to show that natural processes did not contribute to the pattern. They do not do that. They can’t do that. They take a different and curious tack.

They literally argue that because organizing the code by their nucleon sums makes no sense and has no reasonable functional consequences…therefore it must be an artificial and intentional feature. I’ve heard this argument before. It’s called the Chewbacca defense. Ladies and gentlemen, think about it: that does not make sense! If nucleon numbers show a mathematical pattern of any kind in their relationship to codons, you must accept the existence of a designer.

However, if we can show a natural property that leads to the organization of the genetic code, then I’m afraid their argument evaporates. Even more so than building an argument on the Chewbacca defense, that is.

There’s a very good discussion of the genetic code in Nick Lane’s book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, and I’ll briefly summarize it.

First, there is a pattern to the genetic code! No one has ever denied that; it’s obviously not the case that amino acids are randomly assigned to trios of nucleotides. Here’s the code:

geneticcode

Let’s look at one amino acid, glycine (Gly), down in the bottom right corner. The genetic code is degenerate: that means that most amino acids have multiple combinations of nucleotides that can specify them. Glycine’s codes are GGU, GGC, GGA, and GGG. Do you see a pattern? The code is actually GG_, where the third position has a lot of slack or wobble, and any nucleotide will do. We see similar cases where just the first two nucleotides are sufficient to specify leucine, valine, serine, proline, threonine, alanine, and arginine. Even with the other amino acids, there are some constraints; CA_ can identify histidine or glutamine, but if the third letter is a pyrimidine (U or C), you get histidine, while if it’s a purine (A or G), you get glutamine. There are patterns all over the place here! So of course ShCherbak and Makukov could find evidence of significant organization.

But there’s more. There are other rules associated with this pattern.

In the synthesis of these amino acids, biochemistry typically modifies a raw starting material. The first letter of the codon says something about the biosynthesis of the associated amino acid.

If the first letter is:
• C, then the amino acid is derived from alpha-ketoglutarate.
• A, then the amino acid is derived from oxaloacetate.
• T, then the amino acid is derived from pyruvate.
• G, then the amino acid is derived in a single step from simple precursors.

The second letter of the codon is correlated with chemical properties of the amino acid.

If the second letter is:
• A, then the amino acid is hydrophilic.
• T, then the amino acid is hydrophobic.
• G or C, the amino acid has an intermediate hydrophobicity.

Wait…so there’s a pattern to the genetic code, and that pattern is associated with the physical properties of the amino acids? Why, that makes sense. Chewbacca is routed! The most likely origin of the code lies in likely catalytic properties of dinucleotides; pairs of nucleotides in ancient organisms were initially functioning as proto-enzymes before they were incorporated into strings of coding information. At least that provides a historical physico-chemical route to the particular code we now have that does not require weird numerological masturbation.

It’s rather pathetic that the Discovery Institute thinks this is a beautiful piece of science. It’s not. It’s nonsense. But look how the DI spins this story:

How will evolutionists respond to this paper? It’s hard to see how they could dismiss it. Maybe they will try to mock it as old Arabian numerology, or religiously inspired (since Kazakhstan, which funded the study, is 70% Muslim). Those would be unfair criticisms. The authors have Russian names, certified doctorates, and wrote in collaboration with leading lights in the West. Or perhaps critics could argue that the authors hail from a foreign country whose name has too many adjacent consonants in it to take them seriously.

No, it appears the only way out for Darwinists would be the “Dawkins Dodge.” You may remember that one from the documentary Expelled, where Dawkins admits the possibility of panspermia for Earth, so long as the designers themselves evolved by a Darwinian process.

What’s most notable about this paper is the similarity in design reasoning between the authors and the more familiar advocates of intelligent design theory. No appeals to religion or religious texts; no identifying the designer; just logical reasoning from effect to sufficient cause. The authors even applied the “design filter” by considering chance and natural law, including natural selection, before inferring design.

If Darwinists want to go on equating intelligent design with creationism, they will now have to take on the very secular journal Icarus.

I didn’t even consider the religious or ethnic basis of this study; it didn’t come to mind at all. It is clearly simple stupid numerology, though. Look at the rationale given for all of the conclusions, which consist entirely of mathematical manipulations of arbitrary derived properties of the molecules, to arrive at a claim of prime number significance.

We certainly don’t need to invoke panspermia. Nothing in the genetic code requires design. and the authors haven’t demonstrated otherwise.

I am most amused by the cute parallelism of claiming surprise that the authors of this paper use “design reasoning” similar to that used by American Intelligent Design creationists. They’ve been slinging this slop for decades; why be impressed that another set of Intelligent Design creationists in Kazakhstan are using the same tired tropes?

I’m also not impressed with the failure of implementation of their logic. OK, they have a ‘design filter’ that they apply, but so what? Their methods failed to recognize a well-known functional association in the genetic code; they did not rule out the operation of natural law before rushing to falsely infer design.

And that last bit…I don’t care what journal it was published in. The prestige of a journal does not confer infallibility, and even the best of journals will occasionally publish crap. They will be especially likely to publish garbage when they stretch beyond the expertise of their reviewers. Icarus is a journal of planetary science that publishes primarily on astronomy and geology. This particular paper conveniently falls between the cracks — it’s a weird paper full of trivial arithmetical manipulations for arcane purposes with no scientific justification for any of its procedures. I don’t know how it got accepted for publication, other than by boring the reviewers with its incomprehensible digit fiddling.

One last thing: don’t rush to claim a secular purpose behind this work. It’s already been appropriated by freaky strange religious fanatics and lovers of the bible codes. You can’t blame shCherbak directly for this weirdo’s interpretations, but certainly he isn’t far from his temperament.

The facts presented on this site, when combined with those now revealed to us by shCherbak, constitute invincible evidence of the truth of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, and of the Being and Sovereignty of their Divine Author.

Yeah, numerology. Nothing but wanking over tables.

Larry Moran has more — it turns out that Uncommon Descent and Cornelius Hunter also liked this paper. Flies are drawn to shit, I guess.

TED Talk: spreading bullshit about the desert

What? TED vectoring pseudoscience? Unpossible! In one recent particular instance, though, a TED talk firmly grounded in bullshit — literal and figurative — is gaining a mortifying amount of traction with people who really should know better.

The lecturer is Allan Savory, who for the last couple decades has been pushing his own brand of Maverick Science despite hidebound opposition from “scientists” with their “peer review” and their “evidence” and their “reproducible results.”

Savory’s thesis: every desert in the world is caused by insufficient grazing. We know this because of reasons. All those desertified former grasslands in Africa and the Middle East that have been turned to dusty parking lots by cattle and sheep and goats just didn’t have enough livestock on them to churn up the soil, shit everywhere, and then move on to the next patch of land in a rotational grazing approach.

Savory’s approach can work in theory, on marginal grassland with very close monitoring and if your management goals do not include protecting species that are intolerant of cattle. Can work.  Doesn’t necessarily. And that’s irrelevant to actual deserts, yet Savory wants to push his approach onto ancient desert landscapes anyway.

The biggest problem for me, as I point out this morning at KCET, is that Savory doesn’t distinguish between actual deserts — stable, diverse yet fragile habitats — and ruined grasslands. He conflates “desertification” — a term that needs to be abandoned — with actual deserts, then misrepresents the basic science  of desert ecology, for instance calling cryptobiotic crusts a “cancer.”

None of this is a surprise to anyone who has followed Savory over the last few decades. Same shit, different day. But TED has helped him go viral, and there are people who are taking him at his word to an embarrassing degree. Even though he says stuff in the talk like “There is no other option” but to follow his program, a phrase that should cause any sane person to back away slowly with her hand firmly protecting her wallet.

But environmentally concerned people, even here in California, show a disturbing willingness to believe any negative shit they hear about the desert. The TED audience laps Savory’s crap up to a disheartening degree.

Anyway, I debunk what I can of Savory’s crap here at KCET. What I can given time and space, that is. It’s only a 13-minute video and one could write a book about the wrongness.