Bad Grandpa

There is a town in Washington state which has built almost 30 dinosaur statues and installed them in parks. It’s called Granger, WA, and I have probably passed through it in the past — it’s near Yakima and the Tri-Cities, but they only started celebrating dinosaurs after 1994, after my time. As you might predict, some people don’t like it.

Here’s one old man complaining about it in the Tri-City Herald.

During my grandson’s dinosaur obsession, he brought home an elementary school library book that taught dinosaurs came into existence by means of evolution. He told me that he asked the school librarian if there were any books that taught that God created them, and he was told no.

I wish our public schools would present creationism (Intelligent Design) as a possible alternative. I shared my story with a local school board member to bring awareness and, hopefully, to include a few books that promote a viable option to evolution.

We are frequent visitors to different branches of the Mid-Columbia Library and at the time, we couldn’t find any physical books on dinosaurs that didn’t teach the theory of evolution. We requested they purchase “Dinosaurs for Kids” by Ken Ham, who is noted for building the full size replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, named Ark Encounter. This particular book offers a view based on creationism. They were kind enough to purchase the book, and it is now a welcome addition to the library for our grandson and others to enjoy.

Or laugh at, as the case may be.

He does obliviously fail to notice one thing, though: the libraries aren’t afraid to include a wacky book from a religious source, but you won’t find any science books at the Ark Park. He does not, in fact, have any factual basis for presenting the narrow, sectarian cult beliefs of Answers in Genesis as comparable to the books the library did stock. Oh, he does have the usual argument from personal incredulity.

Both creationists and evolutionists easily acknowledge that the modern day inventions of a F-22 fighter jet, the Freedom Tower, or Mount Rushmore couldn’t have happened by accident or chance, but had to have a designer. I believe a much more complex structure, a living breathing human being, had a creator.

To me, it seems to be a blind leap of faith that the universe popped into existence as if by magic; in that matter created itself out of nothing by sheer random accident.

This seems to defy all science and mathematical probability, in my opinion. Others can consider another perspective, but I’ll stick with the idea that God, who wants a personal relationship with us, created this beautiful world by design.

So…he misrepresents evolution, which does not argue that complex organisms arose entirely by chance; he conflates evolution and the origin of the universe; he has an opinion that evolution defies science, rather than being part of it; he claims to have knowledge of the personal choices of an invisible intangible supreme being that created a universe of many trillions of stars so that he could be friends with a few mammals on one planet. I pity his grandson.

He ends his silly little opinion piece with what he probably considers a clever remark.

Dinosaurs may be extinct, but my beliefs don’t have to be.

I don’t think he understands that words like “extinct” can have multiple meanings, or that his beliefs aren’t persecuted — witness the Mid-Columbia Library’s response to his request.

You might be wondering how this random old guy has such authority in science that he can be advising the local school board. Here are his qualifications:

Lee Walter is Sunday School superintendent at Columbia Bible Church in Kennewick and vice chairman of the Tri-Cities Child Evangelism Fellowship.

No qualifications at all, no understanding of science, but his opinions are regularly featured in the Tri-City Herald — and he’s distressed that he can’t find his religious myths sufficiently represented in the public library.

Does anybody else find the concept of a Child Evangelism Fellowship distinctly creepy? What kind of person signs up for that?

Where have all the creationists gone?

Remember when we used to have creationists pop up in the comments here to spew stupid arguments and everyone would be wrangling over their inanities? They haven’t been coming by in recent years. I’d like to fantasize that we educated them all and they all learned the errors of their ways, but we know that’s not true. More likely, we have a reputation as an intensely hostile environment, and they migrated to occupy a more suitable niche.

But where?

I think I found them. Their new habitat is…Instagram.

Here’s a delightful little video, a guy doing a parody of Rage Against the Machine, changing they lyrics of “Killing in the Name” to explain how species change over time (sorry, I can’t imbed Instagram videos here, you’ll have to click on the link to see it). It’s short, it’s amusing. But it’s the comments that are amazing. I snipped out a small collection of the garbage posted there.

It’s funny how the upper echelons of biology, genetics, and evolutionists have disproved this. But the regular people and educational institutions haven’t caught on yet.

The fossil record doesn’t support the theory of evolution

Darwin has been debunked

But if all mammals came from fish, why are there still fish?

The laws of thermodynamics disprove evolution. Especially the second law.

But wait. Why are there still horses?

Interesting mix of micro evolution, a proven fact, with macro evolution, a long debunked theory

Evolution is a fun fantasy

Requires faith to believe we came from nothing, just like it requires faith to believe in God creating us. Fascinating the study abiogenesis, in the beginning, how it all could have started. I don’t have enough faith to believe we are one big accident, but that’s just me. 😉

we don’t evenadapt…we die if there is a 1 degree celsius difference from a country to another and u say we evolve? get outta here.

It’s an effen THEORY …

Christ is Lord

Brings up a good question about the ethics of fertility treatments and surrogacy. Some genes aren’t meant to be passed but we decided we’re going to force them down the line

Then explain this, why do monkeys and primates still exist if we EVOLVED from them.. would they have not died out? That sure is what the lyrics here imply, as well as the THEORY of evolution. Just admit, you dont have an answer for EVERYTHING.. Sorry.

Now do a song about how the fossil record is littered with evolutionary dead ends. Oh, wait…

The funniest part is there is no evidence of macro-evolution(monkeys to humans) but extensive evidence of micro-evolution(Darwins birds). God created all. Ecosystem factors created adaptations post creation.

Some of it might be sarcasm, like the “Why are there still…” comments. I didn’t include the sensible comments, like, “Imagine being a country that still has to explain evolutionism. I live 1km from the Vatican and NO ONE questions Darwin. Only ‘mmmurricah 😂” But it’s impressive how creationists have adapted by migrating to more favorable environments where they can double down on their folly.

I’m afraid to look at TikTok now.

I guess Ken Ham won’t be voting for Kamala Harris

I do appreciate it when people catch Ken Ham in those moments when he thinks he’s preaching to the faithful. He abandons all political caution and lets his freakish creepy views hang out. Here’s an Instagram video of Ken Ham preaching against that wicked Kamala Harris. He starts like this:

Like to see Kamala Harris’ latest embarrassment? Excuse me, it’s with a group of drag queens, and that’s why everything is in pink as well.

He then shows a brief (very brief, like a second or two) clip of Harris smiling and clapping. Where’s the embarrassment? We’re supposed to see this as a horror, I guess.

That tells you something about the state of this nation. You should judge that against scripture.

I mean, so evil.

Oooh, so evil. So embarrassing. Then we get another blip of Harris saying,

We trust women to make decisions about their own body!

Oh, she needs to learn some science, because a fertilized egg is not part of a woman’s body. It’s totally separate, and it’s a unique individual made in the image of god, and so she’s calling for the murder of many humans as she can in the mother’s womb.

My brain blacked out momentarily, hearing Ham declare that someone else needs to learn some science.

Uh, no, a zygote is genetically distinct from the woman’s cells, but it is part of a woman’s body. It divides to generate a trophectoderm, literally a feeding structure, that develops into a placenta that infiltrates and interdigitates with the woman’s uterine lining, intimately sharing her blood and nutrients for 9 months, inseparable from her tissues. I should think a woman ought to be able to make decisions about her health, her metabolism, her body, all these things that are profoundly affected by a pregnancy.

But Ken Ham is a creepy lying twerp. He then shows this bizarre image.

What is it with far-right cartoonists and their desperate need to slap labels on their metaphors? Do they lack the confidence in their art, and fear that it might be misinterpreted? This is Ben Garrison levels of a lack of faith in the intelligence of their readers.

I expect him to consider “evolution” as one of the storm of evils besetting the nice, “normal” family out rafting on their Bible, but “gender” is bad now? And “male and female restrooms”? I guess the last one sort of makes sense if you’re sufficiently regressive — after all, it was businesses providing women toilet facilities, rather than just for men, that allowed 19th century women the freedom to enter the market place. I wonder if Republicans are considering a ban on women’s restrooms?

I do think that having the presumably Christian characters in the cartoon clinging to an anchor in a storm is a good metaphor. I notice they didn’t feel the need to label that one.

Built on trillions of refutations of their mythology

I’ve noted this before, that Ken Ham’s Ark Park is built on a deep, rich bed of Ordovician fossils. Every time a creationist asks where all the fossils we’re supposed to have are, just tell them to use a shovel and rock hammer around the Answers in Genesis cult compound and you’ll find billions and billions of brachiopods and nautiloids and various shelly marine creatures right there.

Dr Joel Duff makes the same point — the fake Ark is built on an immense marine graveyard that is hundreds of millions of years old, yet the creationists mostly ignore it. I wonder why?

Dembski’s Delusion and Dishonesty Detector

Last night, I saw this video where a trio of Evilutionists romped through a memelist written by a teenager raised on Tumblr quizzes and mocking it.

Oops, no. It’s a 40 question questionnaire written by un-esteemed old crank, William Dembski, which purports to reveal your degree of devotion to the dogma of Darwin. It’s far more revealing of the ignorance of the twit who composed it than anything else. You don’t have to watch the video to deal with this childish test: take it here. It’s bad.

Each item consists of two statements, one being what a creationist imagines an evolutionary biologist believes, and one being what the creationist imagines is actually true. For instance,

1.
•Evolution in the sense that all present-day organisms arose from one or a few ancestors (common descent) is now a proven fact.#
•Evolution in that sense is still an unproven hypothesis.

The one with the # symbol is always the evilutionist position, in Dembski’s mind. In this case, he gets it right, except that I don’t like the word “proven”. It is a fact, though, supported by the molecular evidence.

Other statements get it thoroughly wrong.

2.
•The theory of natural selection (i.e., retention of chance variations) adequately explains common descent.#
•Even assuming full-blown evolution to be a fact, the theory of natural selection does not adequately explain it.

Nope, selection is not sufficient. What about mutation, drift, recombination, and most trivially, that cell division is a binary process? We are all children of our parents.

Others expose creationist misconceptions.

19.
•The concept of “junk DNA” was a major scientific blunder directly attributable to Darwinian thinking.
•Darwinian thinking advanced science by correctly characterizing non-coding DNA regions as “junk DNA.”#

No biologist ever thought non-coding was synonymous with junk. That’s the false idea promoted by creationists.

Others are just plain weird.

30.
•The motivations of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice cannot be understood at the deepest level without a knowledge of evolutionary theory.#
•Jane Austen had no need of evolutionary theory to understand human motivations at the deepest level relevant to literature.

Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, when Charles Darwin was 4 years old.

It’s just badly designed, too. Each question has the “incorrect” choice marked with that # symbol, so a creationist can march through, selecting the answer without the # and get a perfect creationist score; if you’re a biologist, you’re often going to be stumped because both options are wrong. Would you believe this “test” was designed for an educational website?

James Barham and I developed this questionnaire some years back for an educational website. To appease the search engines, the website eventually dropped it. Lightly dusted off, it is presented here. The questionnaire provides a useful mirror for understanding the influence of Darwinian ideas on our lives and culture.

It’s more of a mirror for letting creationists see what they want to see. Evolutionary biologists (not “Darwinists”) are invisible in it.

Continuing shake-up at AiG

Ken Ham is getting old. He’s been planning his successor, and I commented on the likely guys being brought to the top. The front runner, once upon a time, was his son-in-law, Bodie Hodge, who I called “a blithering goober”, and I couldn’t imagine him being put in charge of a multi-million dollar corporate entity, which is what Answers in Genesis is. We could probably map all the clawing to the top at AiG directly onto that TV show, Succession, except that I haven’t watched it.

Then Ken Ham announced who would get the keys to the Creation “Museum” and the Ark Park, and it wasn’t Bodie. He instead imported an outsider from Australia, Martyn Iles, a slick, polished blithering goober. I wondered at the time how that would go over with the whole gang at AiG, but they weren’t talking. I think Ken maintains an iron fist over his empire.

Now we have a hint to the power struggles within AiG. Bodie Hodge is out! He has set up his own little fiefdom, Biblical Authority Ministries.

Biblical Authority Ministries is solely an outreach of B. Hodge and is not associated with AiG in any way. Though obviously many articles and resources are linked to AiG’s website and materials. Mr. Hodge’s hope is that you will help support AiG and its outreaches by donations, resource sales, and visiting the attractions and also support Biblical Authority Ministries as well as both content for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

For a moment, I felt a little pity. Bodie dedicated decades of his life to promoting AiG, and now he has been passed over by his own father-in-law. Yikes. But then I read this bit of his autobiography:

He is a reconstructionist and a known presuppositionalist. This shows in his response style. He grew up being taught dispensational pre-millennialism and historic pre-millennialism but after extensive study has become a post-millennialist (partial pret). He has a heart to answer questions and promote the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Oh. He’s a pretentious blithering goober who talks about himself in the third person and believes in many silly, stupid things. May his ministry crash and burn.

My opinion of astronauts has declined precipitously

A new, partially reusable spacecraft, the Boeing Starliner, was launched earlier this week. That’s great. I’m not enthusiastic about manned space exploration, but I see it as a tool to help science learn new things, so go for it.

It’s Boeing, which isn’t such a great brand anymore, and it’s unsurprising that the capsule had leakage problems, but I expect those will be corrected. I have a bigger problem with the mission, though.

The commander, Barry Wilmore, is a fucking pig-ignorant creationist.

And it’s off! After several delays, Boeing’s Starliner capsule officially launched its first-ever manned flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and is on its way to the International Space Station. Among the crew on board is a friend of ours—Captain Barry “Butch” Wilmore, a Christian and a biblical creationist! And Captain Wilmore isn’t just on board—he is commanding this historic flight!

Wilmore used the time just before launch to promote Ken Ham’s creation crap.

And as they prepared to leave, Captain Wilmore was telling everyone about Answers in Genesis, the Ark Encounter, and the Creation Museum and how everyone needs to come and visit!

He’s going to use the ISS as a backdrop to plug Answers in Genesis merch.

Many months ago at his request, we sent him a variety of AiG, Ark Encounter, and Creation Museum apparel, which were then sent to the ISS and are waiting for him. He plans to put on the apparel and take some photos. Wow, AiG, the Ark, and the museum will be represented in outer space (I never would have dreamed of that 49 years ago when I gave my first creation talk)! Hopefully, we will have photos to share in the coming days.

This is inappropriate. A NASA astronaut is using a scientific platform to preach anti-science nonsense.

I will make a mental note, reminding myself that astronauts are nothing but glorified space truck drivers, and that clearly any idiot can fly one with enough training. That this dope has this prestigious job demeans the work and sacrifices of all the other astronauts.

Evolution destroyed in 5 minutes!

I can’t believe how embarrassed I am for Eric Hovind and John Harris. Eric is, of course, the son of Kent Hovind, which is humiliation enough, and John is the director of Living Waters Europe, so you’d think being shackled to that doofus Ray Comfort would make you reluctant to appear in public, but no, they now appear together in a video that has them capering ludicrously and giggling like maniacs because, oh boy, they’ve got those evolutionists now. They have a knock-’em-dead argument against evolution (it’s always against evolution, because they lack a defensible alternative) that will finally finish off evolution, and it’s so simple they can present it in 5 minutes. Except they don’t. This is a 40 minute video.

Discover “How to Destroy Evolution in 5 Minutes.” Using the lens of mathematics to critically examine the evolutionary timelines from chimp DNA to human DNA renders Evolution, once again, IMPOSSIBLE!

This compelling argument has left evolutionists speechless as they watch their evolutionary science foundation implode.

Join Eric Hovind and John Harris, Director of Living Waters Europe, for an insightful look at one of the most compelling arguments against evolution you will ever hear!

I’m sure they do leave many people speechless. I know I was stunned when I heard it, because it was so appallingly stupid and grossly overhyped. You can skip the first 30 minutes of the video, because it’s just John and Eric patting each other on the back, bragging about how sciencey they are, and rehashing bits of biology 101 (“this is what DNA looks like…”) that are completely irrelevant to their argument, and boasting about how they’ve left people completely convinced that they’ve destroyed science and are now going to church. It’s extremely obnoxious, especially when you get to their actual argument, which is abysmally unimpressive.

It’s Haldane’s Dilemma. It goes in cycles, where very few years some creationist rediscovers this idea, and goes raving looney claiming that they’ve disproven evolution, and then slowly goes quiet as evolutionary biologists look at them funny and then ignore them. It was first brought up by JBS Haldane in 1957. Haldane was a great scientist, not a creationist, and he brought it up as a potential problem in population genetics that needs to be resolved. It was the problem of substitutional load, that for a mutation to go to fixation involved a cost to the population, since replacement of one allele by another involved the virtual death of members of that population over time. So how could we possibly get enough mutations to transform a chimp-like animal into a person, since surely there are a vast number of genetic changes between the two? Haldane didn’t know how many, but must be lots, right?

Very smart people — much smarter than John & Eric, who know nothing about biology or evolution — wrestled with this problem, but the real question was not whether evolution could occur, but where was the error in Haldane’s assumptions or calculations. As molecular biology proceeded onward, undaunted by a theoretical problem, it was discovered that populations were hugely polymorphic, that is, contained a huge reservoir of widespread variation, that was incompatible with Haldane’s Dilemma. Either the premises for the math was wrong, or plants and animals existed in defiance of the natural laws of the universe.

Evolutionary biologists quickly figured out the flaw. Most of that variation is neutral and can accumulate with little cost. Gosh, empirical reality overcomes the theory, especially the relatively primitive theory of the 1950s. Creationists did not get the memo, though, and every few years they bring up Haldane’s calculations as if they were an evolution-stopper, rather than an early step in figuring out the dynamics of population genetics.

You can skip the whole video, though. It’s only appeal is the spectacle of watching two bozos engaged in a 40-minute pratfall. Here’s their ultimate evolution-killing calculation, presented at about the 30 minute mark.

Note that they are bending over backwards to use numbers that will favor evolution, which is why so much of this calculation is nonsense. Humans and chimps differ by 1% of their genome (it’s more like 3%, but OK), which means there are about 30 million base pairs that differ (they neglect the fact that these are two independently evolving lineages so each needs 15 million changes…let’s forget that, since their numbers throughout are so silly.) That means that in 10 million years at the rate of 1 beneficial mutation (an absurd number) every 20 years, the population can accumulate at most 500,000 beneficial mutations. But we need 30 million! Oh noes!

Every lay person will be baffled by the numbers and will be confused. Every evolutionary biologist will look at it in shock and wonder why this idiot is roaming the streets unsupervised.

You won’t be taken aback. You’ll note that the assumption of 30 million (or 100 million, or whatever) beneficial mutations is false, since most of the differences are neutral or nearly so, so we can just throw away the whole estimate. You might also comment on the fact that their formula is very linear, assuming that evolution is a long march forward, steadily adding beneficial mutations progressively to produce us humans, rather than a process of constantly branching diversification. You’ll also acknowledge that sexual recombination allows genes to evolve in parallel and be reshuffled into novel arrangements. Their little demo disproves creationist evolution, which is an entirely different process than biological evolution.

There’s little point in engaging with anyone presenting this level of ignorance and misinformation. Just pat them on the head, give them a lollipop, and encourage them to stay in school.