Another creationist list of lies

It’s always amusing to see creationists try to explain why Charles Darwin was wrong, especially when they make up lists of reasons “Darwin’s theory of evolution does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.” These are always people who wouldn’t know what scientific scrutiny was if it knocked them immobile with a carefully measured dose of Conus snail toxin, strapped them to an operating table, and pumped high-intensity Science directly into their brains with a laser. As I often wish I could do.

Anyway, some ignorant jebus-lover hacked together a list of 10 “mistakes” that Darwin made. Strangely, they completely miss his actual errors (probably because they’ve never read anything by Darwin and don’t have enough knowledge of biology to recognize where he has been superceded) and babble on about what are actually creationist errors.

1. “Warm little pond” theory: There is no solid evidence of life arising spontaneously from a chemical soup.

Actually, there is. We know that organic chemicals arise spontaneously all the time in nature — they’re even detectable floating about in space. We also know that biology is chemistry, and that every process driving biological phenomena is ultimately physical and chemical. We also know that life arose in a geologically brief period early in the history of the earth. It’s certainly a better explanation than that some invisible guy said some magic words and poof, life appeared spontaneously with all the complexity of extant forms.

By the way, the “warm little pond” wasn’t part of Darwin’s theory. It was a brief speculation made in an 1871 letter to Hooker.

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, – light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

That’s actually still an entirely reasonable hypothesis, and not a mistake at all, especially when you recognize that he was suitably cautious in his publications. Here’s what he said in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, for instance.

“As the first origin of life on this earth, as well as the continued life of each individual, is at present quite beyond the scope of science, I do not wish to lay much stress on the greater simplicity of the view of a few forms, or of only one form, having been originally created, instead of innumerable miraculous creations having been necessary at innumerable periods; though this more simple view accords well with Maupertuis’s philosophical axiom ‘of least action.'”

2. Simplicity of the cell theory: Scientists have discovered that cells are tremendously complex, not simple.

Total fiction, but an oft-repeated lie by creationists. Scientists in Darwin’s day had access to light microscopes with resolution as good as ours today; they were actively studying the structure of the cells, identifying and naming organelles, teasing apart the choreography of cell division. They were entirely aware of the mysteries and complexities of the cell’s contents.

And again, there was nothing in any of Darwin’s writings that presupposed that cells had to be simple.

3. Theory about the cell’s simple information: It turns out cells have a digital code more complex and lengthy than any computer language made by man.

Wait, isn’t this the same as #2? I’m seeing some padding going on already.

But no, the genome is not a computer program written in a complex computer language. The words “digital code” are not magic, nor do they imply any supernatural origin.

4. Theory of intermediate fossils: Where are the supposed billions of missing links in the evolutionary chain?

Oh, really? This is the most absurd creationist claim: we keep digging up transitional fossils and waving them in front of their noses, and they just close their eyes and chant “lalalalala”.

5. Theory of the variation of species: Genetic adaptation and mutation have proven to have fixed limits.

They do? Where is this “proof”? When I can see from the molecular evidence that a fruit fly, a squid, and a human all share a common core of related genes, I have to say that if there are such limits, they are very wide — wide enough to encompass the entirety of life on earth.

If he means that there are limits such that a mouse will not give birth to an orangutan or a cabbage, I’d agree…but no biologist proposes any such ridiculously saltational view of evolutionary change. It’s always the creationists who demand that a cat give birth to a monkey before they’ll believe in evolution.

6. Theory of the Cambrian Explosion: This sudden appearance of most major complex animal groups at the same low level of the fossil record is still an embarrassment to evolutionists.

They are so embarrassed about it that they keep writing about it and studying it!

Remember, though, “sudden appearance” means over tens of millions of years…and it’s a creationist who believes the whole of the earth’s history is about a thousandth of the length of just this one geological period who is claiming that 20 million years is untenably sudden. It’s also not true that that animals abruptly appeared: we have evidence of precursors, and even within the Cambrian we see patterns of change from beginning to end.

7. Theory of homology: Similarity of structures does not mean the evolution of structures.

This is the one case where this creationist has dimly caught a glimpse of a real argument within biology. We’ve been wrestling with the concept of homology for a long, long time — with problems of definition and implementation. These arguments, however, do not cast doubt on the evidence for evolution, so I’m not about to get into them here (this is where a philosopher of science would be much more useful!)

8. Theory of ape evolution : Chimpanzees have not evolved into anything else. Neither has man.

But a proto-chimp/human — our last common ancestor — evolved into both humans and chimps.

This is a very silly argument. It’s like claiming that because none of my children have yet reproduced, it is impossible that my wife and I produced them.

9. Theory of the tree of life: Rather than all life branching from a single organism, evidence has revealed a forest of life from the very beginning.

Goddamn you, New Scientist! Ever since they ran their stupid, misbegotten cover, the creationists have been crowing about Darwin being proven wrong. The tree model is still largely accurate for multicellular life, but we have to add a component of horizontal gene transfer, and we recognize that at the root of the tree of life, in all those single-celled organisms, the profligate exchange of genes across species is much, much more common.

But this is still evolution! It’s also an entirely natural mechanism; there aren’t angels or gods mediating bacterial conjugation or viral transduction.

10. Rejection of an intelligent designer: This opened the door for many to reject God, the Bible and Christianity.

That’s no mistake. You should reject gods, holy books, and various cults, because they’re all bullshit.

That was a pathetic effort, so typical of creationists. I’ve seen many such lists of Darwin’s errors, and there’s a lot of overlap…but there’s one thing I’ve never seen appear on any of them. Why don’t they ever mention Darwin’s biggest mistake, his theory of blending inheritance, pangenesis? It was completely wrong, it was even incompatible with natural selection, yet the creationists never seem to latch onto it as a tool for defaming Darwin. Is it because then they’d also have to understand that another natural mechanism, one that is intrinsically about chance and statistics, so thoroughly replaced Darwin’s mechanism? Is it because they neither understand the theories Darwin proposed, nor Mendelian genetics?

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – HidariMak

I had always considered myself to be lucky, as far as relatives go. All of my grandparents, aunts, and uncles would welcome my family when we visited, which was anywhere from 1 to 5 times per year. And we (and they) would visit, despite the days drive each way. All of them were happily married to their first spouse. All of them were people whose work ethic allowed them to get by in even the worst of times. With very few exceptions, all of them viewed the rest of the family tree with equal respect.

[Read more…]

Why I am an atheist – Sally

I went to Catholic school for the first ten years of my life. There are certain things that are second nature to me even now. When I hear an ambulance, I sometimes have to restrain myself from beginning the sign of the cross, and I’ve been looking for suitable nonreligious profanity for years. But I was surrounded by complacent and/or lazy Catholics. They were all so entrenched in the religion that they assumed that everyone else was, too. They never bothered to put forth the effort to indoctrinate me.

[Read more…]

Doesn’t Andrew Sullivan understand what we’d say in reply?

It’s appreciated that Sullivan expresses his outrage at the stupid claims of creationists.

What do you do when people use religion to perpetrate empirical untruth? In a free country not much. But on this kind of issue, it seems to me that Hitchens was right. These people need to be mocked mercilessly for ignorance and stupidity. This isn’t faith. It’s bullshit. And yet in this advanced country, it’s everywhere – and one political party panders to it.

But didn’t he stop to think that many of us will look at him, a Catholic, and say exactly the same thing about sacred crackers, the magical power of baby dunking, the doctrines of heaven and hell (and for that matter, an afterlife), and his atrocious nightmare of a sky-daddy?

Hitchens was also right about religion. He didn’t restrict his criticisms to just the creationist subsect.

Adding space dinosaurs can draw attention to your sins

That ridiculous paper that postulated alien dinosaurs has another flaw, to the detriment of an otherwise well regarded researcher: Ronald Breslow has been accused of self-plagiarism. It seems to be true, too; examples show that he has been recycling substantial chunks of text in multiple papers.

I guess that’s how the big names can generate those impressive publication lists: they just recycle each paper a few dozen times.

Why I am an atheist – Wayne Schroeder

I was raised as a Christian, but gained my free thought in my teenage years, in the late 1960s. My father was a minister in a moderate protestant church, the Evangelical United Brethren (which merged with the Methodist church in 1968), and I was a believer in my early life, like the rest of my family, friends, and all of society it seemed. But as I learned about evolution I began to question the need for God to explain much of the world. I was taught that evolution was the how but God was the why, but that didn’t seem very plausible. Over the course of a few years, a world without god started to seem more likely. My breakthrough though was finally discovering that there are people in the world who do not believe in any god, that it is possible to be an atheist, and realizing that, it fell into place that that was my world view too. John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” are wonderful.

I’m an atheist because there is overwhelming evidence that there are no gods. There are many lines of evidence but an important one for me is that when you rationally and dispassionately consider religious development, it is clear that people create gods, not vice versa. The more distant the cultures, the more different the religions but if people were actually perceiving reality, they would not. Religions battle each other and evolve, each striving to gain and retain believers. Dispassionate reasoning, not religious/emotionally thinking, is a better way separate truth from fiction.

The scientific method is clearly humanity’s most effective way to discover actual truth. To see how well it works, you only have to consider the the wonders of our technological society and compare life in it now to times and places where religion rules. Scientific understanding has been displacing religious beliefs over the last few centuries. It was once believed that a god or gods caused disease, rain, drought, the apparent movement of the sun, even life, death, a lots more. We certainly don’t know everything, but we know and understand a great deal more than the ancients did.

There is some comfort in religion, as most all of us would like to live beyond death, but believing something doesn’t make it so. Truth is more important than comforting falsehoods, and is better for us as individuals and for society as a whole. People have many ways of deluding themselves into believing what they want, so we need to avoid those tendencies, via skepticism and critical thinking.

At the same time, there is great beauty, wonder, and mystery in the real world; the fact that we, and all life, evolved here on Earth over billions of years, that there are billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each, that the atoms of our bodies were formed in stars (which flow through us like water in a stream), etc, etc, etc. It’s really sad that some people avoid seeing reality, in this one life we know we have, for a hope in a life after this.

Wayne Schroeder
United States

The Texas State Board of Education stars in a movie

If you’re wondering why Don McLeroy was on Colbert, here’s your answer: he’s one of the subjects of a new documentary, The Revisionaries. Note that the documentary isn’t his, he’s the king clown exposed in it…and somehow he thought that being targeted this way was a good thing, and that it was a smart move to appear on Colbert for it.

Hey, do you think that if McLeroy showed up at a theater showing the movie, he’d get expelled?

The NDE delusion

Salon has had a redesign, which is fine; they seem to do this periodically just to confuse us. I’ll adjust to that, but what I don’t like is that the first thing I saw highlighted was an article so full of woo that for a moment I thought I’d stumbled onto the Huffington Post. We are now supposed to believe that science has explained near-death experiences (NDEs), and the answer is proof of life after death. It’s all nonsense; some editor somewhere needs to learn some critical thinking, because this article is filed under “neuroscience” when it ought to be in a category called “bullshit”.

The first clue that this is going to be bad is the author, Mario Beauregard. Beauregard was co-author with Denyse O’Leary of one of the worst, that is most incompetently written and idiotically conceived, books I’ve ever read, The Spiritual Brain. It’s not just that he thought it sensible to team up with a well-known intelligent design crank, but that the content is unreadable and the “science” is gobbledy-gook — Beauregard is a well-established kook, and here he is, writing for Salon.

NDEs are evidence of nothing but the creative power of the human mind. NDE proponents are constantly trotting out the same tired old anecdotes and the same tired old bogus misinterpretations, and this article is just more of the same. If you’ve ever looked into the NDE literature, you’ll know that two cases that are repeatedly brought up are the 20-30 year old stories of Pam and Maria’s Shoe; they have become something close to legend. These stories are poorly documented — “Maria”, for instance, can’t even be found in any hospital records, despite a story that details many medical details. Beauregard blithely recounts this anecdotal story as evidence that NDEs are real.

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

The case is touted as a clear example of veridical perception. “Veridical” is one of the favorite words of the NDE/OBE crowd; it simply means an observation that aligns with reality, so they’re always babbling about people wafting about in a ghostly disembodied state and seeing things that no earth-bound human could possibly have seen, which are later confirmed. Unfortunately, all we get are second- and third-hand accounts full of embellishments, and tall tales whose highlights are depressingly mundane, such as seeing a shoe on a ledge. It’s always trivia that gets reported. It seems that all dead people want to do is hover.

And, of course, Maria’s story has been totally demolished. The little details are all inflated; for instance the claim that details of a shoe on a ledge could not possibly be discerned has been tested on that hospital building, and it turns out that a shoe on the ledge actually is really easy to see and jumps out to the eye of people passing beneath.

So, a few well-worn exaggerations are all these guys have to go on. I don’t think Beauregard can claim science has had any “shocking results” when this is the best he’s got.

Furthermore, Beauregard, who is supposed to be a neuroscientist, says some awesomely stupid things.

This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered. Nonetheless, studies conducted in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States have revealed that approximately 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time when they were clinically dead. These studies indicate that consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be experienced during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity.

This is another common claim. The subject, they say, was flat-lined during the incident — the heart was still and there was no brain activity, and yet, they claim, the subject was experiencing detailed perceptual events during this period of material inactivity. What they gloss over is the simple fact that, while there was definitely a period when their brain was functionally inert, they are describing these events afterwards, in a period when their brain is fully active. Beauregard is making the ignorant mistake of assuming that our consciousness is a continuous stream of recorded mental activity, and that a remembered event must necessarily have actually occurred.

That’s not how memories work. Our brains don’t tuck away a movie of our experiences somewhere in our temporal lobe; they store a few little details away, with a web of associations, and basically reconstruct the event when we try to recall it. This is why eyewitness testimony is unreliable — memory is dynamic and constantly being modified by later experience. When we lose conscious awareness and later recover it, the brain has absolutely no problem inventing a continuous narrative to fill in the blanks, and in fact, the way our minds work, we want that narrative. To consider that we didn’t exist for an interval of time is something we linear creatures tend to shy away from.

So when someone claims that a report of a recollection from a time when they were clinically dead is evidence of a mind functioning during that period when the brain was non-functional, you should know…they’re full of shit. It’s evidence of no such thing.

I also have to add that all of the accounts of NDEs and other such out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are peculiar in their attachment to ordinary patterns of perception. They claim to become a non-corporeal, immaterial, invisible entity that floats around, but somehow, they use the same mundane senses they do in the body. How do invisible eyes capture photons? How do immaterial minds detect physical vibrations in the air? Sensory transduction is a real problem for beings that lack hair cells and photoreceptors, I would think. It’s much more likely that they are using those fleshy sensory organs (or even more likely, the memory of using those organs), while experiencing an illusion of detachment from their body.

No reservations trouble Beauregard, though. He blindly charges on to claim revelation.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

As I’ve said, the recollection of vivid and complex thoughts while the heart is stopped is not only easily explained, it’s pretty much the default understanding by neuroscientists of how the brain works. The acquisition of veridical information would be more difficult to explain…if it had ever occurred. Trundling out the same hoary folk tales and anecdotes is not at all convincing that it has.

He is right that this idea of minds existing independently of brains is incompatible with materialist views. It’s also incompatible with the existing evidence, and he has presented no counter-evidence. His extremely badly argued article is yet another piece of evidence, though, that Beauregard is a crank.

P.S. It’s a shame that tripe got published in Salon, but don’t read the comments, or you’ll discover why it got published. There sure are a lot of mystically-inclined, quantum-woo-spouting diddledingles fulminating away in their readership.

Philosotroll covers a few other points.