This is why the Republicans want to ban NOAA

The mayor of Colleyville, Texas, Bobby Lindamood, made a perfectly reasonable suggestion that we should nuke Milton, after removing the radiation from the bomb, of course.

In a since-deleted Facebook post, Bobby Lindamood, the mayor of Colleyville (a Fort Worth suburb) wrote: For the amount of destruction this next hurricane is brining, it’s time to throw a simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation) at this dude and see if we can stop the rotation. It may save more than it can hurt.

He added, Just casting thoughts and ideas. This is gonna be bad.

Spoilsport NOAA has thrown a wet blanket on that idea.

During each hurricane season, someone always asks “why don’t we destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them” or “can we use nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane?” There always appear suggestions that one should simply nuke hurricanes to destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

I ask you, who do you want to listen to, some nerd in a lab coat or a proud MAGAt in a cowboy hat?

The big hat must cover a big brain.

Jonathan Wells is dead

Wells was one of the worst liars at the Discovery Institute, which is saying a lot. His pals out there in Seattle are writing his praises, of course; you won’t be surprised that they don’t understand why Wells’ books were loathed. Here’s Casey Luskin, who inevitably gets everything wrong.

A lot of people hated Jonathan, not because he was a hateworthy person, but because of the bad news he delivered about their scientific arguments. His ideas threatened their paradigm, and he wasn’t afraid to say so. But he didn’t hate back. He was a kind and caring person who used his gifts to make an immense impact, helping to reform junk science that had bloated evolution education worldwide. For all these reasons, Dr. Jonathan Wells will not be forgotten anytime soon. By his many friends, readers, and others who have benefited from his research, and of course by his loving family, he will be greatly missed.

He did not deliver bad news about scientific arguments; he didn’t understand, or pretended not to understand, the science he was criticizing. Everything he wrote was a misrepresentation. He didn’t reform junk science, he vomited up books that were nothing but junk science. I am confident that he wasn’t just ignorant, but that he intentionally, willfully, and maliciously lied about the science.

He was an intelligent man who got a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale, and then got a second Ph.D. in cellular and developmental biology from the University of California Berkeley. There’s rarely ever a good reason to get a second Ph.D., and Wells had the worst reason ever: he had become a Moonie, and he got the second degree at the behest of his church so that he would be better equipped to destroy Darwinism.

Father’s [Rev. Moon’s] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.

Yeah, he was one of those misguided people who went through a research program not to learn anything, but to get a few letters after his name so he could pretend to be an authority. He also dishonored Berkeley with a badge of shame; it is appalling that someone so dishonest and so committed to distorting the science could fool the research scientists at that prestigious university.

He distorted every idea he touched. Larry Moran thoroughly debunked his treatment of junk DNA, for my part, I wrote about how he constantly botched and misinformed people about developmental biology. Here’s an example of one of my posts in which I wasted my time dissecting the glurge of garbage pouring out of his Moonie brain.

The next person–apparently a professor of developmental biology–objected that the film ignored facts showing the unity of life, especially the universality of the genetic code, the remarkable similarity of about 500 housekeeping genes in all living things, the role of HOX genes in building animal body plans, and the similarity of HOX genes in all animal phyla, including sponges. 1Steve began by pointing out that the genetic code is not universal, but the questioner loudly complained that 2he was not answering her questions. I stepped up and pointed out that housekeeping genes are similar in all living things because without them life is not possible. I acknowledged that HOX gene mutations can be quite dramatic (causing a fly to sprout legs from its head in place of antennae, for example), but 3HOX genes become active midway through development, 4long after the body plan is already established. 5They are also remarkably non-specific; for example, if a fly lacks a particular HOX gene and a comparable mouse HOX gene is inserted in its place, the fly develops normal fly parts, not mouse parts. Furthermore, 6the similarity of HOX genes in so many animal phyla is actually a problem for neo-Darwinism: 7If evolutionary changes in body plans are due to changes in genes, and flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse? Finally, 8the presence of HOX genes in sponges (which, everyone agrees, appeared in the pre-Cambrian) still leaves unanswered the question of how such complex specified genes evolved in the first place.

The questioner became agitated and shouted out something to the effect that HOX gene duplication explained the increase in information needed for the diversification of animal body plans. 9I replied that duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content. She obviously wanted to continue the argument, but the moderator took the microphone to someone else.

It blows my mind, man, it blows my freakin’ mind. How can this guy really be this stupid? He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in developmental biology, and he either really doesn’t understand basic ideas in the field, or he’s maliciously misrepresenting them…he’s lying to the audience. He’s describing how he so adroitly fielded questions from the audience, including this one from a professor of developmental biology, who was no doubt agitated by the fact that Wells was feeding the audience steaming balls of rancid horseshit. I can’t blame her. That was an awesomely dishonest/ignorant performance, and Wells is proud of himself. People should be angry at that fraud.

I’ve just pulled out this small, two-paragraph fragment from his longer post, because it’s about all I can bear. I’ve flagged a few things that I’ll explain — the Meyer/Wells tag team really is a pair of smug incompetents.

1The genetic code is universal, and is one of the pieces of evidence for common descent. There are a few variants in the natural world, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule: they are slightly modified versions of the original code that are derived by evolutionary processes. For instance, we can find examples of stop codons in mitochondria that have acquired an amino acid translation. You can read more about natural variation in the genetic code here.

2That’s right, he wasn’t answering her questions. Meyer was apparently bidding for time until the big fat liar next to him could get up a good head of steam.

3This implication that Hox gene expression is irrelevant because it is “late” was a staple of Wells’ book, Icons of Evolution and the Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It’s a sham. The phylotypic stage, when the Hox genes are exhibiting their standard patterns of expression, of humans is at 4-5 weeks (out of 40 weeks), and in zebrafish it’s at 18-24 hours. These are relatively early events. The major landmarks before this period are gastrulation, when major tissue layers are established, and neurulation, when the neural tube forms. Embryos are like elongate slugs with the beginnings of a few tissues before this time.

4What? Patterned Hox gene expression is associated with the establishment of the body plan. Prior to this time, all the embryonic chordate has of a body plan is a couple of specified axes, a notochord, and a dorsal nerve tube. The pharyngula stage/phylotypic stage is the time when Hox gene expression is ordered and active, when organogenesis is ongoing, and when the hallmarks of chordate embryology, like segmental myotomes, a tailbud, and branchial arches are forming.

5Hox genes are not non-specific. They have very specific patterning roles; you can’t substitute abdominal-B for labial, for instance. They can be artificially swapped between individuals of different phyla and still function, which ought, to a rational person, be regarded as evidence of common origin, but they definitely do instigate the assembly of different structures in different species, which is not at all surprising. When you put a mouse gene in a fly, you are transplanting one gene out of the many hundreds of developmental genes needed to build an eye; the eye that is assembled is built of 99% fly genes and 1% (and a very early, general 1%) mouse genes. If it did build a mouse eye in a fly, we’d have to throw out a lot of our understanding of molecular genetics and become Intelligent Design creationists.

Hox genes are initiators or selectors; they are not the embryonic structure itself. Think of it this way: the Hox genes just mark a region of the embryo and tell other genes to get to work. It’s as if you are contracting out the building of a house, and you stand before your subcontractors and tell them to build a wall at some particular place. If you’ve got a team of carpenters, they’ll build one kind of wall; masons will build a different kind.

6No, the similarity of Hox genes is not a problem. It’s an indicator of common descent. It’s evidence for evolution.

7Good god.

Why is a fly not a horse? Because Hox genes are not the blueprint, they are not the totality of developmental events that lead to the development of an organism. You might as well complain that the people building a tarpaper shack down by the railroad tracks are using hammers and nails, while the people building a MacMansion on the lakefront are also using hammers and nails, so shouldn’t their buildings come out the same? Somebody who said that would be universally regarded as a clueless moron. Ditto for a supposed developmental biologist who thinks horses and flies should come out the same because they both have Hox genes.

8You can find homeobox-containing genes in plants. All that sequence is is a common motif that has the property of binding DNA at particular nucleotide sequences. What makes for a Hox gene, specifically, is its organization into a regulated cluster. How such genes and gene clusters could arise is simply trivial in principle, although working out the specific historical details of how it happened is more complex and interesting.

The case of sponges is enlightening, because they show us an early step in the formation of the Hox cluster. Current thinking is that sponges don’t actually have a Hox cluster (the first true Hox genes evolved in cnidarians), they have a Hox-like cluster of what are called NK genes. Apparently, grouping a set of transcription factors into a complex isn’t that uncommon in evolution.

9If you photocopy a paper, the paper doesn’t acquire more information. But if you’ve got two identical twins, A who is holding one copy of the paper, and B who is holding two copies of the same paper, B has somewhat more information. Wells’ analogy is a patent red herring.

The ancestral cnidarian proto-Hox cluster is thought to have contained four Hox genes. Humans have 39 Hox genes organized into four clusters. Which taxon contains more information in its Hox clusters? This is a trick question for Wells; people with normal intelligence, like most of you readers, would have no problem recognizing that 39 is a bigger number than 4. Jonathan Wells seems to have missed that day in his first grade arithmetic class.

It still infuriates me that a guy with a Ph.D. in developmental biology from Berkely would ask, if flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse? Because the Hox genes only trigger the deployment of downstream genes of the animal, ya idjit.

Casey Luskin is wrong. I didn’t hate Wells personally — I never met him — but I did hate his lies, of which there were many, whole books worth of ’em. Good riddance to lying scum.

Finally, a cause to unite the Right and Left

Who knew we could find unity in the cause of killing children? Right-wing loonies and left-wing moonbats have been working together to erode food safety and loosening milk pasteurization laws and allowing ideological weirdness to be poured down the throats of innocent children. But at least it’s bipartisan!

The contentious belief that raw milk may be healthier than pasteurized is a bipartisan one, however, it has captured the imagination of, as the Atlantic put it in a 2014 story, “urbanite foodies (read: progressives).” That same year, Joel Salatin, which the publication referred to as a “food and farm freedom celebrity,” told Politico that it was nice to have some liberals join the fight for the mainstreaming of raw milk.

“When I give speeches now,” he said. “The room is half full of libertarians and half full of very liberal Democrats. The bridge is food.”

You know, we actually have data. We know that childhood mortality was greatly reduced when we required that milk be pasteurized. It’s a simple and relatively easy parameter to measure: when you require pasteurization vs. allow raw milk to be sold, how many dead kids do you stack up in each category? We know the numbers.

The CDC would want us to remind you here that, yes, you are allowed to take risks in private, but raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurized milk.

When we were raising kids, we made the decision to exclude Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria from their diet as much as possible. It wasn’t just the cost and trouble of paying for funerals, but the nuisance of infants with diarrhea. Trust me, it’s no fun for anyone.

If you’d like to see an entertaining discussion of the thrills of raw milk, Talia Lavin has you covered.

Pasteurization changed the dairy game. By 1911, Chicago and New York had mandated milk pasteurization in commercial operations, with other major cities quickly following suit; by 1936, 98% of milk in the United States was pasteurized. This coincided with lots of other medical discoveries and improvements in public hygiene, but the milk-pasteurization push had particularly drastic effects: between 1890 and 1915, infant mortality dropped by more than half. By midcentury, babies drinking swill milk and dying of diarrhea was largely a thing of the past. Most people would agree that this is, generally, a good thing. I personally drink milk daily with my coffee; I am glad it doesn’t come with a side of typhoid.

I said that this movement was bipartisan, but now it’s fueled by a lot of right-wing “own the libs” influencers and nutcases.

It’s just that the contemporary opponents of pasteurization—the “raw milk” movement, as they call themselves—are so fucking dumb, and so knee-jerk about it. The movement is endorsed by such disparate grifters as Gwyneth Paltrow; RFK Jr.’s erstwhile running mate, Nicole Shanahan; Christian TikTokers; the existentially stifled Mormon tradwife that is the wanly smiling face of Ballerina Farm. The overwhelming number of recent raw-milk converts—and its loudest current evangelists—are on the far right: over in the raw milk aisle you’ll find an assortment of right-wing Fitness Guys with steroidal vasculation filming themselves chugging raw milk, alongside Alex Jones, QAnon influencers, the CEO of racist Twitter clone Gab, and a motley assortment of also-ran far-right Congressional candidates, plus organizations like the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance.

Now normally I might be willing to shrug off this suicidal insanity — let the kooks voluntarily weed themselves out of the population by swilling contaminated food — except that the primary victims of this lunatic movement are kids who have no idea of the risks, and who are simply expressing a natural trust in what Mommy and Daddy tell them. The problems arise when Mommy and Daddy are named Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones. That’s who the food safety laws are aimed at.

The end is imminenter, maybe

Nature reviews Ray Kurzweil’s latest tome of foolishness, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. They came up with the perfect illustration for the review.

Ray Kurzweil’s future is bad haircuts and silly gadgets stuck to your head.

The text is no less scathing. If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you know I despise everything Kurzweil publishes. I appreciate this pithy summary of Kurzweil’s bullshit.

Kurzweil repeatedly muddles computation with intelligence and consciousness. He flirts with materialism, dualism and panpsychism, contending that consciousness is “much like a fundamental force of the Universe”. Kurzweil then states that “it is the kind of information-processing complexity found in the brain that ‘awakens’ that force into the kind of subjective experience we recognize”. The words ‘complexity’ and ‘emergence’ are too often used in contexts in which ‘abracadabra’ might do as well.

That’s all muddled up with quasi-religious eschatological crap about the end of the world as we know it in the very near future. The singularity is imminent!

Kurzweil’s hyperbolic technological fetishism does not stop in ‘the cloud’. Apparently, the soul is digital and the body is mechanical. And so, the litany of fiction science, as I call it, goes on: the hype is squared as AI meets nanoengineering, in a revolution that “will enable us to redesign and rebuild — molecule by molecule — our bodies and brains and the worlds with which we interact”. He also argues that diligent people will achieve “longevity escape velocity”, living for much longer than we do now, by 2030. I can only hope that we would have reached bullshit escape velocity by then, too.

OK, you heard him. 2030. The eschaton will be here in 6 years. Maybe we’ll all live to see the prophecy go kablooiee, so we can all laugh at goofy ol’ Ray.

Intelligent Design 3.0?

What? I’ve been so neglectful of the ID gang that I completely missed an announcement five years ago that they were establishing something called Intelligent Design 3.0. Seriously, you can’t rely on me for news about the Discovery Institute because I fucking don’t care anymore. They shot their wad 20 years ago, and right now they’re a limp, exhausted pseudo-movement that thinks raising a number on their label makes them innovative.

Here’s what they announced in 2019.

After the Discovery Institute staff Christmas lunch last week, Stephen Meyer sat down with me for a quick video discussion of an extensive research project that, until now, has been deliberately kept from public. It’s Intelligent Design 3.0, an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly but, instead, to use design insights to open up avenues for new scientific discoveries. It is being supported by the Center for Science & Culture, thanks to the generosity of our donors:

That’s it. That’s all they had then. They declare that they are making an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly, so that’s the non-news…but the really important news is that they have generous donors. So it was a gimmick to raise money.

In 2024, they are now claiming major advances. The first is that they made their annotated bibliography longer.

It’s a talking point for evolutionists that in the past two decades, intelligent design has stalled. Hardly! On the contrary, I’m delighted today to share with you two very impressive measures of how much ID has advanced in that time. One is the latest update of our “Bibliography of Peer-Reviewed and Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design.” Go to the link to download the full bibliography, with annotations, which is the length of a book — 186 pages in total. That’s not bad for such a young field.

It’s pretty bad when you take into account that a lot of the articles are from their in-house fake journal, BIO-Complexity. I also notice that they still have a huge number of articles by the prolific David L. Abel, head of the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.. It’s easy to pad a bibliography if you have no standards and no quality control.

Their second major accomplishment is…they’ve created an Intelligent Design 3.0 website! If you’re wondering what’s on it, they’re bragging about publishing more garbage papers. They don’t have any real revelations, but just list a lot of legitimate fields that they claim to have contributed to.

The third and current phase of ID research extends ID 2.0 to new systems and fields, showing the heuristic value of intelligent design to guide scientific research. This research includes not only testing the origin of new systems, but also using ID to answer questions and make novel contributions in burgeoning fields, such as epigenetics, synthetic biology, systems biology, genomics (e.g., investigating function for junk DNA), systematics and phylogenetics, information theory, population genetics, biological fine-tuning, molecular machines, ontogenetic information, paleontology, quantum cosmology, cosmic fine-tuning, astrobiology, local fine-tuning, and many others.

I looked deeper to see what they claim to have innovated in one topic, junk DNA, and this is it: one paragraph, plus two citations to papers by Richard Sternberg and James Shapiro, published in 2002 and 2005.

Evolutionary scientists have long-claimed that the vast majority of our DNA which does not code for proteins is useless genetic “junk.” Intelligent design theorists, on the other hand, have long-predicted that much of this non-protein-coding DNA likely has important biological functions. This prediction flows naturally out of the fact that intelligent agents typically design things with function and for a purpose. Because of this ID prediction, quite a few ID proponents have been involved in research investigating function for non-protein-coding DNA—what was previously considered “junk.” Many of these scientists are part of our Junk DNA Workgroup, a collaboration of scientists who are seeking function for “junk DNA.” Many of these researchers are in sensitive positions so we do not list their names or publications.

They’re doing this research, but they can’t tell you who’s doing it! Yeah, I am filled with confidence.

I can at least praise their synergy: one goal is to pad their bibliography, and their second goal is to name a bunch of fields and buzzwords that they can use to pad their bibliography. Empty filler for the win!

They do have a long list of contributors to ID3.0, but it’s almost entirely the same old tired faces that have long been associated with the Discovery Institute. There’s a lot of rehashing of the same moribund nonsense.

I was amused to see Paul Nelson’s name listed again. One of his projects is “waiting time” and I will concede that he’s an expert on making people wait, but he’s not doing any research at all.

When genetics teaching goes very, very bad

Sometimes, when you’re teaching simple Mendelian genetics you have to make up fictitious scenarios, because real genetics is significantly more complicated than introductory students can handle. It’s an approach with pitfalls, though, because you don’t want students to think they can use your toy examples to model reality. There’s also a history of bad genetics misapplied to imply that genetics is reducible to pairs of alleles with only dominant and recessive relationships. I’ve invented simple Mendelian models for my classes, but I usually do something like make a story problem with Martians to avoid any confusion with reality.

But then, some genetics teachers, like Alex Nguyen of Luther Burbank High School invent story problems with a) imaginary human traits, b) traits that correspond to racist stereotypes, and c) assign them to specific, named students in the school. That’s not only misleading, it’s unethical. It’s shamefully bad pedagogy.

Here are some sample questions he actually used in a genetics test. These questions were so bad that a student quickly reported it to the school administration, and within ten minutes the principal showed up to confiscate the exam. And Nguyen tried to continue the test by projecting the questions on an overhead projector! I guess he didn’t get the message.

In high school, there are individuals who are cross-eyed like (the name of a student) and (another name of a student), which is a dominant trait. We call those individuals ‘weirdoes.’ So, if you crossed two weirdoes (the two students named again), that are heterozygous for being cross-eyed, what is the offspring that would result?

Crossed eyes are not a strongly heritable trait, and calling students “weirdos”?

For some reason, the African American culture has influenced most of the student body. How? In African Americans, they have a gene for the pimp walk, which is dominant. What is the result if you cross (student name) homozygous dominant Latina with a homozygous recessive Hmong like (student name)?

“Pimp walk” is not a heritable trait, the Hmong don’t have an unusual walk, and why is he tying this to a Latina student?

Here at the wonderful school of LBHS, we have certain students who love to sleep in class,” the question said. “I even see students fall asleep during exams! Can you believe that?! I don’t like it when students sleep in class… it’s rude! So, WAKE THE #$%K UP! Well, through much study, I have concluded that the gene for falling asleep is dominant. Not only that some students sleep, they snore in class. This too is a dominant trait. What are the possible offspring if you cross a homozygous sleeping, heterozygous snoring student (student name) with a homozygous attentive, non-snoring (student name) student?

Oh god. Do I need to say it? These are not heritable traits.

Human heredity can be very complicated when dealing with SO many traits. Luckily for you, the most that we have dealt with are two trait combinations. Every person on earth has certain body and shapes and this includes their facial structure. Some people have an oval facial structure like (student name) and other people can have a round face like (student name) while others may exhibit a square facial structure like (student name). That is why we make so many different shapes and sizes of glasses. While focusing on facial struct, we also have to consider people’s heights. There are tall people like (student name), mediaum and short people. Determine all possible offspring when (student name) RrTt person is crossed with an (student name) rrTT person.

Well, good for him for introducing dihybrid traits, but things like the shape of the face are polygenic, and not reducible to a simple Mendelian allele, and height has a huge environmental component.

Alex Nguyen was swiftly placed on administrative leave, and replaced with a substitute the next day. The “investigation” continues, but I don’t see why — they’ve caught him red-handed, they’ve got the exam he distributed, they should just fire him for racism and incompetence. And he’s been teaching for over a decade? That tells me there is something deeply wrong about the teaching of genetics in public schools.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

I woke up this morning with terrible sharp pains in my knee — I guess I’d been sleeping too hard. Naturally, an article titled Assessment of the efficacy of alkaline water in conjunction with conventional medication for the treatment of chronic gouty arthritis: A randomized controlled study caught my eye. Maybe it wasn’t about sleeping in an awkward position at all, but rather, I hadn’t been drinking sufficiently alkalized water! That would be easily fixed. I waded through all the statistics to get to the final summary diagram.

Mechanism diagram of alkaline water treatment for chronic gouty arthritis.

I am reassured that my tibia and fibula, and that unexpected third lower limb bone, have not yet begun to regress and break up into little tarsal bones. I don’t know about whether I’m full of pink and purple crystals, but who knows? Maybe my knee crystals were triggered into deaghtin citcliaell geucis.

This paper was the work of the Guangdong Provincial Hydroelectric Hospital & Paper Mill. How can you not trust it?

I’ve read a few romance novels, some fantasy, and a lot of bad science fiction

I prefer all of them to loony flat earth trash.

Candace Owens tries so hard to make women who read silly romance novels sound stupid, while she pretends to be an intellectual.

Can you guys imagine being married to me? My my poor husband, he rolls over, he’s like, what are you reading? And I feel like a regular wife says something, I don’t know, maybe a love series. Nora Roberts sweeping her away. Me, on the other hand — he rolled over, he asked me and I said, oh, I’m reading a flat earth theory. And it dawned into an entire conversation. He’s like, why are you reading a flat earth theory? And I’m like, because somebody messaged me on Monect about it, and they included some links, and I’m just reading them. I don’t know. I’m just an interested person no matter what. If there’s a bunch of people that believe something, I now want to know what it is that they believe. And, of course, he pushed me on this, and he was talking about the earth curvature and science. And I said to him, listen. I’m not a flat earther. I’m not a round earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science. I have left the megachurch of science because what I have now realized is that science, what it is actually, if you think about it, is a pagan faith.

Sorry, lady, you were never a member of that “megachurch”. Witness the fact that you are bragging about taking flat earth theory seriously.

Who remembers when lots of conservatives were reliable supporters of science and engineering, and called liberals “moonbats” for their crazy hippie ideas? What happened to them, anyway? Are they all dead?