A creation museum of your very own!

The creation museum in Social Circle, Georgia, complete with all of its contents, is for sale. Like me, I’m sure all of you are going “squeeee!!” right now.

You know, Father’s Day is just around the corner, and rather than getting me a $5 tie, maybe the kids should chip in and get me this. It shouldn’t cost much more. And as a special bonus, Georgia benefits when the trucks come in and haul all this trash away. There should be a picnic and a parade.

Maybe I’m being unfair. It might be worth more: that “museum” looks wonderfully kitschy. Everything is in flashy gilt frames, and just the Robot Giant Pandas have got to be worth something.

More creationist misconceptions about the eye

Jonathan Sarfati, a particularly silly creationist, is quite thrilled — he’s crowing about how he has caught Richard Dawkins in a fundamental error. The eye did not evolve, says Sarfati, because it is perfectly designed for its function, and Dawkins’ suggestion that there might be something imperfect about it is wrong, wrong, wrong. He quotes Dawkins on the eye.

But I haven’t mentioned the most glaring example of imperfection in the optics. The retina is back to front.

Imagine a latter-day Helmholtz presented by an engineer with a digital camera, with its screen of tiny photocells, set up to capture images projected directly on to the surface of the screen. That makes good sense, and obviously each photocell has a wire connecting it to a computing device of some kind where images are collated. Makes sense again. Helmholtz wouldn’t send it back.

But now, suppose I tell you that the eye’s ‘photocells’ are pointing backwards, away from the scene being looked at. The ‘wires’ connecting the photocells to the brain run over all the surface of the retina, so the light rays have to pass through a carpet of massed wires before they hit the photocells. That doesn’t make sense…

What Dawkins wrote is quite correct, and nowhere in his refutation does Sarfati show that he is wrong. Instead, Sarfati bumbles about to argue against an argument that no biologist makes, that the eye is a poor instrument for detecting patterns of light. The argument is never that eyes do their job poorly; it’s that they do their job well, by a peculiar pattern of kludgy patches to increase functionality that bear all the hallmarks of a long accumulation of refinements. Sarfati is actually supporting the evolutionary story by summarizing a long collection of compromises and odd fixes to improve the functionality of the eye.

There’s a fundamental question here: why does the vertebrate eye have its receptors facing backwards in the first place? It is not the best arrangement optically; Sarfati is stretching the facts to claim that God designed it that way because it was superior. It ain’t. The reason lies in the way our eye is formed, as an outpocketing of the cortex of the brain. It retains the layered structure of the cortex, even; it’s the way it is because of how it was assembled, not because its origins are rooted in optical optimality. You might argue that it’s based on a developmental optimum, that this was the easiest, simplest way to turn a light-sensitive patch into a cup-shaped retina.

Evolution has subsequently shaped this patch of tissue for better acuity and sensitivity in certain lineages. That, as I said, is a product of compromises, not pre-planned design. Sarfati brings up a series of odd tweaks that make my case for me.

  1. The vertebrate photoreceptors are nourished and protected by an opaque layer called the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE). Obviously, you couldn’t put the RPE in front of the visual receptors, so the retina had to be reversed to allow it to work. This is a beautiful example of compromise: physiology is improved at the expense of optical clarity. This is exactly what the biologists have been saying! Vertebrates have made a trade-off of better nutrient supplies to the retina for a slight loss of optical clarity.

  2. Sarfati makes the completely nonsensical claim that the presence of blood vessels, cells, etc. in the light path do not compromise vision at all because resolution is limited by diffraction at the pupil, so “improvements of the retina would make no difference to the eye’s performance”. This is clearly not true. The fovea of the vertebrate eye represents an optimization of a small spot on the retina for better optical properties vs. poorer circulation: blood vessels are excluded from the fovea, which also has a greater density of photoreceptors. Obviously, improvements to the retina do make a difference.

    It’s also not a condition that is universal in all vertebrates. Most birds, for instance, do not have a vascularized retina — there is no snaky pattern of blood vessels wending their way across the photoreceptors. Birds do have greater acuity than we do, as well. What birds have instead is a strange structure inside their eye called the pecten oculi, which looks kind of like an old steam radiator dangling into the vitreous humor, which seems to be a metabolic specialization to secrete oxygen and nutrients into the vitreous to supply by diffusion the retina.

  3. Sarfati also plays rhetorical games. This is a subtly dishonest argument:

    In fact, cephalopods don’t see as well as humans, e.g. no colour vision, and the octopus eye structure is totally different and much simpler. It’s more like ‘a compound eye with a single lens’.

    First, there’s a stereotype he’s playing to: he’s trying to set up a hierarchy of superior vision, and he wants our god-designed eyes at the top, so he tells us that most cephalopods have poorer vision than we do. He doesn’t bother to mention that humans don’t have particularly good vision ourselves; birds have better eyes. So, is God avian?

    That business about the cephalopod being like a compound eye is BS; if it’s got a single lens, it isn’t a compound eye, now is it? It’s also again pandering to a bias that our eyes must be better than mere compound eyes, since bugs and other lowly vermin have those. Cephalopods have rhabdomeric eyes, meaning that their photoreceptors have a particular structure and use a particular set of biomolecules in signal transduction, but that does not in any way imply that they are inferior. In fact, they have some superior properties: the cephalopod retina is tightly organized and patterned, with individual rhabdomeres ganged together into units called rhabdomes that work together to process light. Their ordered structure means that cephalopods can detect the polarity of light, something we can’t do at all. This is a different kind of complexity, not a lesser one. They can’t see color, which is true, but we can’t sense the plane of polarity of light in our environment.

    I must also note that the functions of acting as a light guide (more below) and using pigment to shield photoreceptors are also present in the cephalopod eye…only by shifting pigments in supporting cells that surround the rhabdome, rather than in a solid RPE. Same functions, different solutions, the cephalopod has merely stumbled across a solution that does not simultaneously impede the passage of light.

    Color vision, by the way, is a red herring here. Color is another compromise that has nothing to do with the optical properties of the arrangement of the retina, but is instead a consequence of biochemical properties of the photoreceptors and deeper processing in the brain. If anything, color vision reduces resolution (because individual photoreceptors are tuned to different wavelengths) and always reduces sensitivity (you don’t use color receptors at night, you may have noticed, relying instead on rods that are far less specific about wavelength). But if he insists, many teleosts have a greater diversity of photopigments and can see colors we can’t even imagine…so humans are once again also-rans in the color vision department.

  4. Sarfati is much taken with the discovery that some of the glial cells of the eye, the Müller cells, act as light guides to help pipe light through the tangle of retinal processing cells direct to the photoreceptors. This is a wonderful innovation, and it is entirely true that in principle this could improve the sensitivity of the photoreceptors. But again, this would not perturb any biologist at all — this is what we expect from evolution, the addition of new features to overcome shortcomings of original organization. If we had a camera that clumsily had the non-optical parts interposed between the lens and the light sensor, we might be impressed with the blind, clumsy intricacy of a solution that involved using an array of fiber optics to shunt light around the opaque junk, but it wouldn’t suggest that the original design was particularly good. It would indicate short-term, problem-by-problem debugging rather than clean long-term planning.

  5. Sarfati cannot comprehend why the blind spot would be a sign of poor design, either. He repeats himself: why, it’s because the eye needs a blood supply. Yes, it does, and the solution implemented in our eyes is one that compromises resolution. I will again point out that the cephalopod retina also needs a blood supply, and they have a much more elegant solution; the avian eye also needs a blood supply, but is not invested with blood vessels. He gets very circular here. The argument is not that the vertebrate eye lacks a solution to this problem, but that there are many different ways to solve the problem of organizing the retina with its multiple demands, and that the vertebrate eye was clearly not made by assembling the very best solutions.

Sarfati really needs to crawl out of his little sealed box of creationist dogma and discover what scientists actually say about these matters, and not impose his bizarre creationist interpretations on the words of people like Dawkins and Miller. What any comparative biologist can see by looking at eyes across multiple taxa is that they all work well enough for their particular functions, but they all also have clear signs of assembly by a historical process, like evolution and quite unlike creation, and that there is also evidence of shortcomings that have acquired workarounds, some of which are wonderfully and surprisingly useful. What we don’t see are signs that the best solutions from each clade have been extracted and placed together in one creature at the pinnacle of creation. And in particular — and this has to be particularly grating to the Genesis-worshipping creationists of Sarfati’s ilk, since he studiously avoids the issue — Homo sapiens is not standing alone at that pinnacle of visual excellence. We’re kinda straggling partway down the peak, trying to compensate for some relics of our ancestry, like the fact that we’re descended from nocturnal mammals that let the refinement of their vision slide for a hundred million years or thereabouts, while the birds kept on optimizing for daylight acuity and sensitivity.

Scientists making creationists cry

The Discovery Institute is getting so politely eviscerated by a couple of people right now — you ought to savor the destruction.

Richard Sternberg, the wanna-be martyr of the Smithsonian Institution, made a stupid mathematical mistake in explaining alternatively splicing, and then, after it was explained to him, did it a second time, revealing that it wasn’t just an unfortunate slip, but a complete failure to grasp the basic concept. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, except that Sternberg has been yammering away about how alternative splicing represents a serious problem for evolution.

Steve Matheson continues his deconstruction of the DI’s poor performance in a recent debate. The creationists are constantly cheesed off about the whole idea of junk DNA, that there are great stretches of sequence that have no specific functional role, and seize upon every little example of non-coding DNA shown to have an effect on the phenotype to claim that all of it does. They don’t understand junk DNA. Again, it’s embarrassing that they even strain at this topic when they are so clueless.

My objection to Meyer’s references to introns and “junk DNA” is more than just a quibble about the molecular biology of introns. I’ve explained before why I find the whole “junk DNA” mantra to be utterly duplicitous, and I referenced my previous writing in the critique of Meyer. The basic story told by DI propagandists and other creationists is that non-coding DNA was ignored for decades, during which it was thought to be completely functionless (due to “Darwinist” ideas), only to be dramatically revealed as centrally important to life. That story is false. The real story is more interesting and complex (of course) and has been explained in detail several times.

Really, T. Ryan Gregory’s short and sweet post on the history of the concept is essential reading. If only the ID creationists would read it…

And finally, Matheson has a far too charitable letter to Stephen Meyer. He assumes that Meyer is a smart guy, honestly interested in science, who has gotten sucked into the inbred and self-deluding folly of creationism, urging him to get out and talk to actual scientists, where he’d learn what they really think, rather than these fallacious myths creationists tell themselves. It’s a nice idea, but I think the premise is incorrect. Meyer is a creationist first, who has been trying to learn little bits of science that he can use to rationalize his preconceptions.

It’s still a very nice letter, though, and a scathing denunciation of the Discovery Institute. They’ll ignore it, I’m sure, except to move Matheson a few notches higher on their list of enemies.

The Discovery Institute is desperately patching Meyer’s mind-numbing magnum opus

As you’ve probably heard, Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute published a book last year calle Signature in the Cell. It stunk, it got virtually no reviews from the scientific community, although it was avidly sucked up by the fans of Intelligent Design creationism. One curious thing about the book is that it has sunk out of sight already, which is a bit peculiar and a bit disappointing for an explanation that was promised to revitalize ID.

Remember Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box? I’ll give Behe credit, that one was well-marketed and got the brief attention of many scientists, who read it bogglingly, recognizing quickly that it was poor fare written by someone with no idea of what was going on in evolutionary biology and genetics. But at least it was quick and punchy, and had some great PR slogans that still get thrown around — ‘irreducible complexity’, anyone?

Meyer’s book had none of that. It’s a bloated paperweight, full of self-indulgent preening by Meyer, and without a single novel idea in it — it’s simply the most unmemorable, uninteresting pile of schlock the DI has turned out yet.

And I think the DI knew it. As mentioned before, the marketing was awful — they worked hard to keep it out of the hands of scientists who might review it ahead of time, which was an awful mistake. Even if we were pretty much guaranteed to trash it, it would be publicity — look again at Darwin’s Black Box. If there was even a hint of controversy in the text, the best move would have been to fan it. But no…it is the most boringly tedious mess, and the only stories they got were scientists rolling their eyes in boredom.

Recently, reviews have trickled in…all negative. So what does the Discovery Institute do? Would you believe they have published a whole book titled Signature Of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell? It’s only 105 pages long, so it’s a more digestible read than Meyer’s book, and it’s also a free download.

It’s impressive. It’s a bad idea to spend too much time responding to criticisms, but the staff at the DI have been so peevish that they’ve written an entire book in an angry tone (hah! Tone!) in ineffectual reply. Here’s an example of their cranky wit, from an introduction in which they classify their critics as either “distinguished scientists who haven’t read the book” or “pygmies who populate the furious, often obscene Darwinist blogs”.

For example, Jerry Coyne is a University of Chicago biologist who lately seems to spend most of his time blogging. Yet he clearly belongs among the ranks of the more distinguished writers who bashed Meyer’s book without reading it or reading about it. On the other hand, such an individual as blogger Jeffrey Shallit, mathematician at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada–not to be confused with the University of Wallamaloo of Monty Python fame–may object to being classed as a pygmy. Oh well. Sorry.

That’s fairly typical of how they handle their critics: if they’re a big name in the field, claim that they’ve never read the book; if they’re less well known, point out that they aren’t associated with the big name universities like the University of Chicago or Harvard. I even get this treatment in their brief section on me, who gets both barrels of their dual strategy:

All the people who hate Meyer’s book appear not to have read it. So too we have the complaint of Darwinian-atheist agitator P. Z. Myers, a popular blogger and biologist. Myers explains that he was unable to read the book, which he slimes as a “stinker” and as “drivel,” due to his not having received a promised free review copy! But rest assured. The check is in the mail: “I suppose I’ll have to read that 600 page pile of slop sometime… maybe in January.”

Dr. Myers teaches at the Morris, Minnesota, satellite campus of the University of Minnesota, a college well known as the Harvard of Morris, Minnesota. So you know when he evaluates a book and calls it “slop,” a book on which he has not laid on eye, that’s a view that carries weight.

In all seriousness, what is this with people having any opinion at all of a book that, allow me to repeat, they haven’t read and of which, as with Jerry Coyne, they admit they haven’t so much as read a review?

It’s true that I hadn’t read the book when I wrote that, and it’s also true that they had pre-empted many of their potential critics by promising a review copy and never delivering. They still haven’t sent the promised copy, but I did buy one — used, for cheap — and actually did read it last January. I’d also seen the reviews and found the absence of any substantive content in the descriptions telling. Since reading it, which was a genuinely agonizing experience since Meyer is such a pretentious writer who goes on and on at painful length about nothing at all, I have to tell you that my summary was spot-on.

I haven’t posted a review because, honestly, it’s a book guaranteed to inspire nothing but ennui. There isn’t one solid nugget of substance or even sharply defined ideas, no matter how wrong, in the entire pile of sludge. I can, however, pull up a summary from near the end of the book, in Meyer’s own words. This is the logical edifice on which his story is based. See if you can spot the flaws.

  • Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

  • Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

  • Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for information in the cell.

You’ll notice the key phrase in there is “specified information”. I looked through the whole book for a definition. There is none. Well, that’s not quite true: I did find this sentence:

The term specified complexity is, therefore, a synonym for specified information or information content.

Whoa. One vague tautology is all he’s got to back that up. Notice how revealing that is about his first point above: his entire book peddles this idea that no one has demonstrated a natural mechanism for producing specified information. But of course, any one with any competence in this subject can tell you all kinds of ways a genome can produce increases in information, the kind that has a few mathematical definitions and is measurable, so Meyer tosses in that magic modifier, specified, to throw away a big chunk of the literature that troublingly contradicts him.

If it helps to grasp the rhetorical game he’s playing, just substitute the word “magic” for “specified”. It’s perfectly equivalent.

  • Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of magic information.

  • Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of magic information.

  • Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for information in the cell.

Better?

In those terms, his first point is correct but uninteresting. Material causes do not produce magic information, but so what? They do produce mundane information, and that’s all we need to describe a cell. Meyer also fails to demonstrate that cells contain any magic information in the first place.

Now, though, it also ruins his second point. I would cheerfully concede that intelligent processes can change the information content in a cell, and would have agreed with him on one third of his syllogism…but, unfortunately, I know of no way to produce magic information, since Meyer hasn’t bothered to define it.

And his final point is both nonsense and dishonest. Note that he has left the specified magic qualifier off the word information this time; it’s a cheap sleight of hand. Even so, though, to accept his conclusion requires accepting a false premise, that natural process have not been demonstrated to produce new information, and therefore we have to accept his claim that ID is the best explanation around.

Really, that’s all there is, that’s the core of that 600 page behemoth of noise. It is most unpersuasive. Perhaps that’s why they’ve had to produce a lengthy, carping criticism of their critics.

But don’t let me give you the wrong impression: they only mentioned me in a few paragraphs, and you’ve just seen everything they had to say about me. The bulk of the book is dedicated to a few people who have made some telling criticisms: Francisco Ayala, Darrel Falk, Jeffrey Shallit, and Steve Matheson (I must also mention AG Hunt, who also has some great critiques…but got ignored by the DI). In particular, I recommend Shallit as someone who actually knows information theory well and does a fine job describing how Meyer butchers it; I also have to recommend Matheson’s amazingly thorough chapter-by-chapter dissection of the book. If anything should be published, it’s those blog entries, which neatly expose the dishonesty and ignorance that permeates every page of Meyer’s hackwork. I don’t know how he did it, because Signature in the Cell was exasperatingly boring to me, and after reading it twice I never want anything more to do with it ever again. Maybe Matheson has discovered one virtue to religion (he’s a Calvinist biologist, by the way): it teaches one how to pore over meaningless, badly written texts without lapsing into a coma.

What is wrong with you, Queensland?

Look at this: they’ve explicitly added creationism to the public school curriculum in Queensland, Australia. That’s just nuts.

They’re even doing it in an entirely bogus way — they’re teaching it as a controversy in history classes.

In Queensland schools, creationism will be offered for discussion in the subject of ancient history, under the topic of “controversies”.

…

Queensland History Teachers’ Association head Kay Bishop said the curriculum asked students to develop their historical skills in an “investigation of a controversial issue” such as “human origins (eg, Darwin’s theory of evolution and its critics”).

This is confusing. It sounds like they’re going to be babbling about whether the earth is 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion years old, but that isn’t history — that’s just lunacy. There is some relevant history that could be taught, such as that from Ron Numbers’ book, The Creationists, which explains how ideas about creationism changed over the years, talks about the major figures in the creationist movement, and describes how creationism itself has changed historically…but I doubt that the people who are backing this want the subject addressed seriously as a series of events in the last 100 years.

It’s clear that they’re just trampling on history as a back door to get pseudoscience into the curriculum. I keep telling people, these creationists are cunning — the science side of the debate has gotten hardened by repeated attacks, and is usually better prepared to resist the foolishness, so they switch targets and catch history or philosophy off guard. Every academic discipline is subject to this corruption.

Give it a few years, and if they’re beaten back by the history professionals, just wait until they try to sneak in by claiming creationism is math, or health, or physical education (oh, wait, they’ve already gotten in there — in lots of schools, it’s the Christian athletes who are often the center of creationist activity).

The little man in the television set

Jeffrey Shallit has an excellent post on the conceptual failure of creationists to grasp even the possibility of an absence of intent. You probably know the feeling — you are trying to explain some process in biology or chemistry, and your student is struggling to fit the story into his mental picture of molecules or cells with purpose and plan, and he can’t move on to the next stage of understanding until he sheds the preconception of intelligent guidance to the reaction or interaction. Shallit compares it to a poor confused tourist to a computer lab who can’t quite figure out where the people doing the drawings on the graphic screens are.

And then he discusses an Intelligent Design blog, which makes the tourist look like a genius.

Northern Ireland culture is apparently cuckoo

The Culture Minister for Northern Ireland is a born-again Christian kook who has decided that the Ulster Museum is insufficiently respectful of the notion that a magic man in the sky poofed the universe into existence in 4004 BC — the farmers on the plains of Mehrgarh and the potters of Mesopotamia were probably greatly surprised to be conjured out of chaos so abruptly, their shock only exceeded by the later confused state of Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty, which was simultaneously exterminated by a great flood from that psychopath, Jehovah, and also continued unbroken with no notice of their extinction for another 150 years. Resilient folk, those Egyptians.

Anyway, the nutcase in question, Nelson McCausland, has demanded more attention be paid to his clueless creation myth. No, not the interesting myth with Fomorians and Fir Bolg and the Tuatha de Danaan, not even the one with frost giants and cows licking people into being, but some weird Hebrew fairy tale.

Nelson McCausland, who believes that Ulster Protestants are one of the lost tribes of Israel, has written to the museum’s board of trustees urging them to reflect creationist and intelligent design theories of the universe’s origins.

The Democratic Unionist minister said the inclusion of anti-Darwinian theories in the museum was “a human rights issue”.

McCausland defended a letter he wrote to the trustees calling for anti-evolution exhibitions at the museum. He claimed that around one third of Northern Ireland’s population believed either in intelligent design or the creationist view that the universe was created about 6,000 years ago.

Weird. I had no idea the Protestants of Northern Ireland and our Native Americans all belonged to the same peripatetic tribe. Or that preaching ignorance and lies was a human right that must be supported by the government.

At least the appeal to a majority ruling on science was familiar creationist nonsense. When will these loons learn that museums and schools should only teach the stories that are sensible, rational, and right and not simply every random every eruption of lunacy that some deluded clique finds compatible with their dogma?

You will not be surprised to learn that McCausland is a member of DUP, and is a Paisleyite, another crazy creationist Bible-walloper. He also uses the same justification of appeal to the mob to defend his views on homosexuality.

I would not be a supporter of Gay Pride, and I think that in spite of attempts to portray it as an event that’s going to boost the country and increase the number of major events in the city, I think the majority of people in Northern Ireland would have great reservations and in many cases strong opposition to it.

I believe it is the will of God that relationships should be heterosexual. I believe that’s what God intended and planned. But I would not treat anyone unfairly.

It’s fascinating how often bigotry and ignorance go together. One might almost speculate that there’s a causal relationship there.

(via Pagan Prattle)

First round of ill-informed objections to the first synthetic bacterium

I’ve been following the reaction to the synthesis of a new life form by the Venter lab with some interest and amusement. There have been a couple of common directions taken, and they’re generally all wrong. This is not to say that there couldn’t be valid concerns, but that the loudest complaining voices right now are the most ignorant.

Hysteria and fear-mongering

Pearl-clutching and fretting over the consequences is fairly common, with a representative example from The Daily Mail (Stridently stupid ‘journalistic’ outlet).

But there are fears that the research, detailed in the journal Science, could be abused to create the ultimate biological weapon, or that one mistake in a lab could lead to millions being wiped out by a plague, in scenes reminiscent of the Will Smith film I Am Legend.

The article refers to that awful movie a couple of times. It’s a little baffling; were they getting kickbacks from the movie producers or something?

The complaint is misplaced. What they’ve accomplished is to synthesize a copy of an existing organism, with a few non-adaptive markers added. It’s no threat at all. We do have the potential to now modify that genome more extensively; the interesting scientific work will be to pare away genes and reduce it to a truly minimalist version, just to see how much is really essential, and the useful industrial work will be to engineer organisms with additional genes that produce proteins useful for us, but not necessarily for the mycoplasma. That’s going to compromise the competitiveness of the organism in the natural environment. I’m not worried.

Maybe someday when organisms can be built in some psychopath’s garage, then we should worry. But for now, this is an experiment that takes a lot of teamwork and money and experience to pull off.

Playing GOD!

That same Daily Mail article goes on and on about that cliche.

Pat Mooney, of the ETC group, a technology watchdog with a special interest in synthetic biology, said: ‘This is a Pandora’s box moment – like the splitting of the atom or the cloning of Dolly the sheep, we will all have to deal with the fall-out from this alarming experiment.’

Dr David King, of the Human Genetics Alert watchdog, said: ‘What is really dangerous is these scientists’ ambitions for total and unrestrained control over nature, which many people describe as ‘playing God’.

‘Scientists’ understanding of biology falls far short of their technical capabilities. We have learned to our cost the risks that gap brings, for the environment, animal welfare and human health.’

Professor Julian Savulescu, an Oxford University ethicist, said: ‘Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into its destiny.

‘He is not merely copying life artificially or modifying it by genetic engineering. He is going towards the role of God: Creating artificial life that could never have existed.’

The Catholic church, perhaps unsurprisingly since they’ve been burned in the past by the conflict between science and religion, is taking a very cautious stance on the issues. They clearly don’t quite know what to make of it, but are prepared to offer their services if any ethical concerns arise.

Vatican and Italian church officials were mostly cautious in their first reaction to the announcement from the United States that researchers had produced a living cell containing manmade DNA. They warned scientists of the ethical responsibility of scientific progress and said that the manner in which the innovation is applied in the future will be crucial.

Since it will be a long, long time before we can synthesize lubricious altar boys, however, I don’t think there will be much call for Catholic advice on the ethics of synthetic biology. Just say no to irrelevant old perverts offering science advice. Besides, the church is also full of conservative fusspots who will spout tired stereotypes.

Another official with the Italian bishops’ conference, Bishop Domenico Mogavero, expressed concern that scientists might be tempted to play God.

“Pretending to be God and parroting his power of creation is an enormous risk that can plunge men into a barbarity,” Mogavero told newspaper La Stampa in an interview. Scientists “should never forget that there is only one creator: God.”

“In the wrong hands, today’s development can lead tomorrow to a devastating leap in the dark,” said Mogavero, who heads the conference’s legal affairs department.

There is no god. The only creators are chance and selection, and now Craig Venter.

The “playing God” noise is going to get even more tiresome, I’m sure. It’s nonsense. If what they’ve done is playing God, then god is biochemistry and molecular biology and the natural processes of physics. We’ve all been playing god every time we cook, or paint, or knit, or write, or create. It’s not a violation of the natural order, and it’s simply doing what humans always do. Apparently, being human is the same thing as being god.

Total confusion

I’m extremely disappointed by the reaction of Andrew Brown, sometimes smart guy, all too often weird apologist for religion. I have no idea what he’s trying to say, but he does try even harder than any atheist I know to tie this work to atheism. “Craig Venter’s production of an entirely artificial bacterium marks another triumph of the only major scientific programme driven from the beginning by explicit atheism”, he says, and “Atheists of the Dawkins type will take it as practical proof that there is no need to hypothesise God at all: we can make life without any miracles, and there’s no need to imagine a creator”. Say what? Venter’s program was driven by scientific curiousity, not atheism; but if Brown wants to equate science with atheism, that’s fine by me. We’ve also known all along that there is no need to hypothesize an intelligent creator, and this is only one more piece of evidence. It isn’t proof. We don’t deal with proof in science.

And then there’s this baffling statement.

But at this moment of complete victory for materialism something odd has happened: the chemical and material world turns out to be entirely shaped by something called “information”.

“Life is basically the result of an information process – a software process” says Venter, and “Starting with the information in a computer, we put it into a recipient cell, and convert it into a news species”. But though this information clearly exists in some sense, it’s impossible to say what kind of thing it is, because it isn’t a thing at all. Whatever this may be, it isn’t material, and it isn’t bound by physical laws. Information turns out to be as elusive and as omnipresent as God once was.

I don’t think so. We have tools to measure information, we can generate information, we can study information…we can’t measure, generate, or study gods. There’s nothing supernatural about information. Information is part of that chemical and material world, and we godless materialists aren’t at all distressed by its existence.

Denial

When you look at what the creationists are saying, it’s simple: they’re scrambling to find excuses to reject the significance of the experiment. Expect to see variations of these same arguments repeated endless by every creationist you ever talk to!

There’s the “it isn’t really a synthetic organism” of Billy Dembski (Intelligent Design wackaloon and fundamentalist Christian), which is what you’d expect of someone who doesn’t understand biology.

The rhetoric is interesting. What they’ve done is stuck a synthetic genome inside a nonsynthetic cell. Nonetheless, they’ve slipped into talking of a “synthetic bacterial cell.” Indeed, one headline reads “The First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell.” This is hype.

If something is going to be called “synthetic,” shouldn’t the whole of it be synthesized and not merely a minuscule portion of it? Also, does such a cell knowably signal design and, if so, why wouldn’t cells untouched by Synthetic Genomics do the same, i.e., implicate design?

The synthesized genome was inserted into an existing bacterial cell, with it’s extant suite of proteins and other molecules, this is entirely true. Venter and colleagues relied on the transcriptional enzymes and ribosomes and so forth already present in the cell to kick-start the activities of the DNA. However, this was only to bootstrap the genome into functionality; within 30 generations of this novel line, Venter estimates, every one of those proteins and every molecule of the cell will have been replaced with the products of the artificial genome.

So, if after a period of time, you’ve got a cell whose DNA was produced by a machine, and whose membranes, enzymes, structural proteins, and metabolic by-products were all produced by that machine-generated DNA or the protein products of that DNA, what makes it a non-synthetic cell?

The response from Answers in Genesis (Young Earth creationist clowns) is a variant of that objection. It’s the “it isn’t anything new” excuse.

Regardless of some hyped press reports, this research (brilliantly executed as it was) has nothing to do with evolution in the molecules-to-man sense. Dr. Georgia Purdom, a molecular geneticist on our Answers in Genesis (AiG) staff, notes that there has merely been an alteration within a kind (at the family, genus, or species level). Even the researchers have acknowledged that this first synthetic cell is more a re-creation of existing life — changing one simple type of bacterium into another. While Venter claimed, “We have passed through a critical psychological barrier. It has changed my own thinking, both scientifically and philosophically, about life, and how it works,” he was also quite clear that [his team] “didn’t create life from scratch.”

I can’t believe they actually weaseled in that nonsense about “kinds” again, as if their fantasyland boundaries are actually relevant.

No, it’s not something brand new, it’s a conservative starting point from which to start generating novelties. This is an argument that will not be able to survive for long, since as work proceeds and genes are removed and new genes added to the artificial genome, the results will not be something that can be called simply another mycoplasm any more. Well, rational people will realize that this is a dead argument, but the kind of people who still insist that there are no transitional fossils will continue to parrot it, looking dumber and dumber year by year.

The argument that this says nothing about evolution is wrong. The bacterium synthesized is not a version of the very first life form to exist, so it’s saying nothing about earlier forms (but that may change as we work towards reducing the synthetic bacterium to a bare-bones suite of genes), but it does say that bacteria are products of chemistry. If you honestly want to learn where the first cells come from, this work says you’d better look to biochemistry, not theology, or the pullitoutofmybuttology of AiG.

It defines a point in the middle of the evolutionary process, and says we arrived there by chemistry. Subsequent evolution, we already know, was by processes we understand (evolution!) but also denied by AiG.

Here’s another argument from Reasons to Believe (Old Earth Creationist goofballs): the “it’s too complicated to have evolved” chestnut that they’ve been chewing on for decades.

For example, Venter’s team must identify the minimal gene set required for life’s existence to re-engineer an artificial life-form from the top down. As they continue to hone in on life’s essential genes and biochemical systems, what’s most striking is the remarkable complexity of life even in its minimal form. And this basic complexity is the first clue that life requires a Creator.

This isn’t life in its most minimal form. It’s a copy of a modern prokaryotic bacterium. As I said above, this is representative of a midpoint in evolution, not its beginning. The complaint does not apply.

Furthermore, complexity does not imply design. Natural processes are quite good at generating complexity, even better than design, so pointing out that something is complex does not distinguish between the two hypotheses. If I had one magic wish and could wake up these idiots to one thing, it’s the simple fact that complexity and design are not equivalent states.

Finally, the one argument we’re probably going to hear the most from creationists in the coming years is the “the synthetic bacterium was built by design, therefore all life was designed”. (Notice that Dembski makes the same illogical claim in his quote above.)

Given the effort that went into the synthesis of the total M. genitalium genome, it’s hard to envision how unintelligent, undirected processes could have generated life from a prebiotic soup. Though not their intention, Venter’s team unwittingly provided empirical evidence that life’s components, and consequently, life itself must stem from the work of an Intelligent Designer.

Let’s play a game. I just grabbed a deck of cards and dealt myself this hand:

J♥ K♠ 2♦ 6♥ 6♠

Now you grab a deck of cards and replicate my hand precisely. You had to go through the deck, card by card, search for those 5 specific cards, and then order them and lay them out in front of you, didn’t you? I just dealt out the five top cards in a shuffled deck.

Which of us had to put the most effort into getting their five cards? Does this imply that in every game of poker, the dealer has to go through the deck and hand-pick which card is given to each person? The huge amount of effort that Venter’s team put into this project does not imply that a focused team built the first mycoplasma genome by the same processes; it says that making a copy by our current technology requires that much effort. The “it was hard to make” excuse simply doesn’t apply.

This does not imply that the original successful bacterium was generated by chance, as trivially as dealing a random array of nucleotides from a deck, however. Venter and his team cheated: they copied a known winner, a genome that had been honed by a few billion years of evolution into a successful organism. They sought out a winning hand like this one and copied it.

A♥ A♠ K♦ K♥ K♠

Again, you could give yourself that hand in a couple of different ways. You could go through the deck by design and pick out those cards. Or you could deal out hands repeatedly, throwing out any that don’t match the target — that would work, too, given that you’ve got billions of years to play the game. Or you could do it as evolution does, just play poker with your buddies and know that there are lots of different ways to generate winning and losing hands, and the process will result in a winner emerging with every deal.

All of the denialist arguments are basically errors based on their misunderstanding of Venter’s experiment and evolution in general. Be prepared, they will be recycled heavily.