Ken Ham, baffled

Crazy Ken Ham has learned about the Atheist Convention in Melbourne, and he has written his confused, garbled version of what it’s all about. He’s also done his typical cowardly routine of complaining about the convention and also, by the way, about me, but refusing to mention any of us by name, let alone linking to us. He can’t have his readers actually seeing what the other side has to say, after all; the world must be filtered through the benevolent and opaque lens of the Maximum Leader, you know.

At least it’s fascinating to watch a weak mind struggle to grasp something he doesn’t understand…mainly because what he accomplishes is to reveal his own ignorance and bias.

Imagine–listening to a meaningless talk at a meaningless conference held on a meaningless planet in a meaningless universe! Now, that would be an uplifting conference!

From their worldview, wouldn’t atheists see this meeting as a meaningless waste of time? Of course, they would claim they have some purpose and meaning–but it would be all constructed subjectively according to their own determinations! All because they shake their fist at God–but why?

Yes, it is a meaningless universe; the universe doesn’t care about us, doesn’t love us, and is mindless and indifferent. That’s simple reality. What we human beings do is wrest meaning for ourselves from a pitiless, uncaring background, and I think that’s wonderful, grand and glorious — it’s the process of finding purpose that is our accomplishment, not the imposition of an inhuman goal by a cosmic tyrant. This meeting will be a small part of everyone’s ongoing struggle to learn and grow — so yes, it will be uplifting. It will also be fun and constructive.

Shouldn’t it be obvious to Ham that his caricature of atheists is false? After all, we aren’t all just gloomily digging our graves, lying down in them, and waiting for death, so it should be clear that we aren’t a bunch of despondent nihilists. We’re living and active. What could possibly be driving us?

The Scripture tells us they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1). Basically it comes down to the fact that they don’t want to have to answer to anyone–they want to set their own rules. They generally want to abort babies if they want or make marriage whatever they want to make it to be (or reject it altogether). They want to do what is “right” in their own eyes! Thus, a Creator who owns them, to whom they owe their existence, and against whom they have rebelled, is anathema to them!

Ah, that must be it. Atheists are just out to murder babies and mate with anything that moves. Or stops moving. Or something.

Again, since most atheists are productive and cooperative citizens of their communities, it should be obvious that we aren’t self-indulgent anarchists, either. We do think there have to be rules, a social contract, that helps tie together the diverse people of our culture and permits civilized interactions between us. The difference is that we believe those rules should be developed by humane principles that recognize the equality and interdependence of all people, rather than being rules contrived by priests to perpetuate their power by inventing arbitrary ultimatums from imaginary superbeings.

We don’t believe in a creator god, so we reject the notion that we are ‘owned’ by one, but you can’t say that we find such a creator anathema — we don’t believe it exists! What’s repellent are self-styled prophets and priests (who are real) demanding that we follow their antiquated dogma.

It baffles the mind as to why these atheists even bother to try to aggressively convert people to their meaningless religion–after all, what’s the point? The only reason they would even bother is if they are engaged in a spiritual battle. Otherwise they wouldn’t care. They know in their hearts there is a God, and they are deliberately suppressing that, as the Scripture so clearly tells us.

Man, we can’t win an argument with a person that stupid. We don’t believe in gods, plain and simple. Ham says we do. How does he know? Because he has an old book that says we do. That’s the problem right there: that rather than actually paying attention to the evidence, talking to people and recognizing what they actually say, the devoted relidjit would rather trust a book written a few thousand years ago that claims to be able to read the minds of 21st century people.

Don’t worry. We’ll have a fabulous time in Australia. I know that some small part of the conference will be spent laughing at Ken Ham.

Oh, yeah, that part where he talks about me. Of course he doesn’t refer to me by name, or mention the blog, or include a link to the article he found objectionable, he just talks about that atheist professor in Minnesota who hates Christians and mocked Kent Hovind. Here’s what I wrote about Hovind’s recent online writings:

By the way, Kent Hovind is still putting up bizarre dialogs on his CSE blogs. He’s been having conversations with God, dead Egyptian priests, and Christian saints, who all reassure him about how clever and smart and good he is, despite being in prison for tax evasion. It’s pathetic and sad. There has to be a word for this: it’s a kind of mega-sockpuppetry, in which it isn’t just random strangers on the internet mysteriously popping up to back him up — it’s God and the saints and heroes of history who are all appearing as voices in his head to validate him.

Now brace yourselves and aim a fire extinguisher at your irony meters, because what Ham wants to argue is that I didn’t realize Hovind’s conversations with saints and deities was metaphorical.

Basically, Hovind created an imaginary dialogue with Potipherah (Genesis 41:45, 50) to point out that modern America has the same problem the Egyptians had when Joseph oversaw the years of plenty and famine. It’s pretty obvious this post is designed to be understood as metaphor. The same is so for the posting with the dialogue between God, Stephen (Christian saint), and Hovind. Any Christian reading Kent Hovind’s post would understand what he’s doing with these writings. The atheist blogger would also have to say that C.S. Lewis talked with the devil and his fellow demons in order for Lewis to write the Screwtape Letters, if he follows the same logic! Is this atheist that ignorant of literary techniques or just deliberating suppressing the truth?

Uh, what? So Ham is accusing me of believing that these phantasms of Hovind’s mind literally appeared to him in his jail cell? This is weird. I’m an atheist — I don’t believe in gods or long-dead people manifesting in living conversations. Of course I see Hovind as playing a game — he’s revealing nothing but his own sad perception of himself as a hero in these imaginary conversations, and that’s precisely what is so pathetic about it.

The funniest part of it all, though, is Ken Ham lecturing me on how I ought to recognize that a religious man writing down what he claims are the words of God is so clearly just a metaphor and a literary exercise…when he refuses to recognize the same status of the books of the Bible that he insists are literally and absolutely true and of divine origin.

It’s pretty obvious the book of Genesis is designed to be understood as metaphor. It’s Ken Ham who demands that it be regarded as the product of a conversation between ancient scribes and his god.

Kent Hovind: still in jail

Apparently, Kent Hovind filed for an appeal to the Supreme Court based on a claim that he really wasn’t trying to finagle his way past US tax laws by structuring all of his bank withdrawals to be under $10,000, therefore avoiding a trigger that would demand they be reported; it’s unfair to target withdrawals that way, and besides, they were all for his Christian ministry. Hovind also had another ace up his sleeve: he begged his readers to pray for him.

I guess God doesn’t like him: “Mr. Hovind’s appeal for a rehearing before the Supreme Court has been denied.”.

By the way, Kent Hovind is still putting up bizarre dialogs on his CSE blogs. He’s been having conversations with God, dead Egyptian priests, and Christian saints, who all reassure him about how clever and smart and good he is, despite being in prison for tax evasion. It’s pathetic and sad. There has to be a word for this: it’s a kind of mega-sockpuppetry, in which it isn’t just random strangers on the internet mysteriously popping up to back him up — it’s God and the saints and heroes of history who are all appearing as voices in his head to validate him.

Oh, I guess there is a word for that. It’s called “religion”.

(via Nathan Zamprogno)

Casey Luskin embarrasses himself again

Once again, the Discovery Institute stumbles all over itself to crow victory over evolution, led by the inspiring figure of that squeaking incompetent, Casey Luskin. This time, what has them declaring the bankruptcy of evolution is the discovery of tetrapod trackways in Poland dating back 395 million years. I know, it’s peculiar; every time a scientist finds something new and exciting about our evolutionary history, the bozos at the DI rush in to announce that it means the demise of Darwinism. Luskin has become the Baghdad Bob of creationism.

The grounds for this announcement is the bizarre idea that somehow, older footprints invalidate the status of Tiktaalik as a transitional form, making all the excitement about that fossil erroneous. As we’ve come to expect, though, all it really tells us is that Casey Luskin didn’t comprehend the original announcement about Tiktaalik, and still doesn’t understand what was discovered in Poland.

The fossil tetrapod footprints indicate Tiktaalik came over 10 million years after the existence of the first known true tetrapod. Tiktaalik, of course, is not a tetrapod but a fish, and these footprints make it very difficult to presently argue that Tiktaalik is a transitional link between fish and tetrapods. It’s not a “snapshot of fish evolving into land animals,” because if this transition ever took place it seems to have occurred millions of years before Tiktaalik.

Errm, no. Shubin and Daeschler are smart guys who understand what fossils tell us, and they never, ever argued that Tiktaalik‘s status as a transitional form depended on slotting it in precisely in a specific chronological time period as a ‘link’ between two stages in the evolution of a lineage. A fossil is representative of a range of individuals that existed over a window of time; a window that might be quite wide. They would never express the kind of simplistic, naive view of the relationship of a fossil that the DI clowns seem to have. For instance, here’s a picture of the relationship between various fossils, as published in Nature when Tiktaalik was announced.

i-317070f4db90df3b55f8534f268e8dad-tiktaalik_phylo.jpg
The lineage leading to modern tetrapods includes several fossil animals that form a morphological bridge between fishes and tetrapods. Five of the most completely known are the osteolepiform Eusthenopteron; the transitional forms Panderichthys and Tiktaalik; and the primitive tetrapods Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. The vertebral column of Panderichthys is poorly known and not shown. The skull roofs (left) show the loss of the gill cover (blue), reduction in size of the postparietal bones (green) and gradual reshaping of the skull. The transitional zone (red) bounded by Panderichthys and Tiktaalik can now be characterized in detail. These drawings are not to scale, but all animals are between 75 cm and 1.5 m in length. They are all Middle–Late Devonian in age, ranging from 385 million years (Panderichthys) to 365 million years (Acanthostega, Ichthyostega). The Devonian–Carboniferous boundary is dated to 359 million years ago.

Notice what you don’t see? They didn’t publish this as a direct, linear relationship that could be disrupted by a minor anachronism. It does not look like this:

Ichthyostega
↑
Acanthostega
↑
Tiktaalik
↑
Panderichthys
↑
Eusthenopteron
↑

These are all cousins branching off the main stem that led to modern tetrapods. Tiktaalik was almost certainly not our direct ancestor, but a distant cousin that was representative of a transitional state in the branching cloud of species that emerged out of the Devonian. And the authors of these papers knew that all along, weren’t shy about stating it, and if they made an error about anything, it would be in assuming that a gang of self-styled scholars who claim to be presenting a serious rebuttal to evolutionary ideas would actually already understand a basic concept in paleontology.

You would think Luskin would have also read the Niedzwiedzki paper that describes this new trackway, which rather clearly describes the implications of the discovery. It does not declare Tiktaalik to be uninteresting, irrelevant to understanding the transition between fish and tetrapods, or that Tiktaalik is no longer a transitional form. It clearly is.

No, here’s the new picture of tetrapod evolution that Niedzwiedzki and others have drawn. At the top is a diagram of the relationships as understood before the discovery, at the bottom is the new order.

i-1077993faea342c8477ca4d12095d8c4-clad1.jpegi-91c210e6965144049a9a049f28db61fb-clad2.jpeg
Phylogenetic implications of tracks. a, Phylogeny of selected elpistostegids and stem tetrapods fitted to Devonian stratigraphy. The grey bar indicates replacement of elpistostegids by tetrapods in body fossil record. b, Effect of adding the Zachełmie tracks to the phylogeny: the ghost ranges of tetrapods and elpistostegids are greatly extended and the ‘changeover’ is revealed to be an artefact. Pan, Panderichthys; Tik, Tiktaalik; Elp, Elpistostege; Liv, Livoniana; Elg, Elginerpeton; Ven, Ventastega; Met, Metaxygnathus; Aca, Acanthostega; Ich, Ichthyostega; Tul, Tulerpeton. ANSP 21350 is an unnamed humerus described in ref 17. The bars are approximate measures of the uncertainty of dating. These are not statistical error bars but an attempt to reflect ongoing debate.

Look closely.

Hey, the branches are the same! The relationships are unchanged! What has changed is that the branches of the tree go back deeper in time, and rather than a sharp changeover, there was a more prolonged period of history in which, clearly, fish, fishapods, and tetrapods coexisted, which isn’t surprising at all. Tetrapod evolution was spread out over a longer period of time than was previously thought, but this is simply a quantitative shift, not a qualitative change in our understanding of the relationships of these animals. It also says that there is the potential for many more fossils out there over a bigger spread of time than was expected, which is something we can look forward to in future research. Not research from the Discovery Institute, of course. Research from real scientists.

Now also, please look at the b phylogeny above, and tell me where the evidence for Intelligent Design creationism in this new figure lies. Perhaps you can see how a cladogram illustrating the evolutionary relationships between a number of fossils challenges our understanding of evolutionary history, because I don’t see it. If anything, it affirms the evolution, not the Sudden Appearance by Divine Fiat, of tetrapods.

For extra credit, explain where in diagram b of the Niedzwiedzki paper it shows that Tiktaalik has been “blown out of the water,” as Luskin puts it. Should they have scribbled in a frowny face or a skull and dagger next to the Tiktaalik bar, or perhaps have drawn a big red “X” over it? Because I can guarantee you that Niedzwiedzki and coauthors still consider Tiktaalik a transitional form that is part of the story of tetrapod evolution. All they’ve done is put it on the end of a longer branch. Nothing has changed; Tiktaalik is still a revealing fossil that shows how certain vertebrates switched from fins to limbs.

Finally, just for fun, maybe you can try to explain how the “Big Tent” of Intelligent Design creationism is going to explain how the Young Earth creationists in their camp — you know, the ones that think the planet is less than ten thousand years old — are going to find it heartening that a fossil discovery has pushed one stage in tetrapod evolution back farther by another 20 million years. That’s 2 x 103 times greater than the entire span of time they allow for the existence of the universe, all spent in shaping a fin into a foot. There ought to be some feeble expression of cognitive dissonance out of that crowd, but I suspect they won’t even notice; as Luskin shows, they aren’t particularly deep thinkers.

Ahlberg PE, Clack JA (2006) A firm step from water to land. Nature 440:747-749.

Daeschler EB, Shubin NH, Jenkins FA (2006) A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan. Nature 440:757-763.

Niedzwiedzki G, Szrek P, Narkiewicz K, Narkiewicz M, Ahlberg PE (2010) Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian period of Poland. Nature 463(7277): 43-48.

Shubin NH, Daeschler EB, Jenkins FA (2006) The pectoral fin of Tiktaalik roseae and the origin of the tetrapod limb. Nature 440:764-771.

I feel sorry for this kid

His class was going to go on a field trip to a museum; his parents denied the trip and scrawled their reasons why on the note.

i-595d3acb199cc4b5b4a58fec15e15e85-note.jpeg
Note: Just to let you it is not that we don’t believe in things like that, it is just misleading when you talk about it being billions of years old, when we all know that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So why would I pay so that you can misslead my children, your world is just a revolving(?), ours has a start and an end. God created the world. He created animals and man all in the same week. It was also Adam who named all the animals, they will do the essay ‘Rock and Minerals’ but it might not be 5 pages long, and about billions of years, it will be according to the Bible.

That’s just sad. And it happens fairly often; a few years ago, our university theater group put on a play about tolerance for local schools, and the notes from parents refusing to allow their kids to see it flooded in. It’s just not that often that one of those notes get scanned and put up on Failblog.

They’re coming for us, my fellow SF nerds

They’ve gone too far. It was bad enough that the creationists treat science with such contempt, but now…the fundy kooks hate science fiction, too!

Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!

Hey! Sagan was a physicist, and Asimov was a chemist; of the other evil science fiction authors listed, Heinlein, Clarke, Vonnegut, and Roddenberry, not one is a biologist! I think I’m offended.

TSTKTS

Carl Wieland, the creationist clown from Australia, wrote a bitter article denouncing atheists and scientists for refusing to give him a platform to yodel nonsense on, and one of the things he did was link to my my public refusal to debate him. Unfortunately, what that meant is that all of his Too-Stupid-To-Know-They’re-Stupid acolytes came charging over to declare that creationism was too scientific, evolutionism is a religion, scientists are afraid to debate their pet idiots, you’re all mean poopyheads who call us names, yadda yadda yadda. It’s turned into a regular storm of argument that has filled up the thread with over 1100 comments.

I’ve closed the thread and added an invitation to resume in this one, if they must.

One thing I’d like to see the creationists consider is a simple fact. When scientists make interpreting the totality of the evidence their priority, with even the believers among scientists regarding the natural world around them as part of their god’s message to human beings, they come to the conclusion that the book of Genesis is a myth or a non-literal parable of some sorts, because it does not line up at all with the physical evidence. The rocks speak out against the earth being less than ten thousand years old, and the molecules in our bodies all speak for billions of years of descent from a common ancestor. The only ‘evidence’ for a young earth is a very specific, and rather skewed, interpretation of one book written by a scattered conglomeration of non-scientific priests, accompanied by a lot of unfounded ‘revelations’ by seers, mystics, and obsessed numerologists (oh, and a related question to you creationists: how many of you are aware that many of the details of the creation myth that you regard as gospel truth have their source in the visions of the Seventh Day Adventist prophetess Ellen White and her agent, George MacReady Price?).

Now be honest. If you peel the Bible away from the argument, just pretend for a moment that it doesn’t exist, do you appreciate the fact that there is no independent evidence to support the story you draw from it? Think like a heathenish pagan who has no respect for biblical authority, and you’ll realize why your claims have no weight. What creationists are always trying to do is to cobble up some of that evidentiary support for their beliefs, while refusing to acknowledge that their entire claim rests on a presupposition that the bible is a valid source of prehistoric information.

If you did honestly try to separate your beliefs from your religion, you’re probably a bit dizzy and nauseous right now. Go ahead, go back to embracing your clumsy old book…but realize this. Here, you’re arguing with a group of people who not only disbelieve your crutch, but actively despise it as a source of lies. You can try to pretend that the source of your doubts about science are polonium halos and the Grand Canyon and missing transitional fossils, but we see right through you: we know the only thing propping up your absurd beliefs is the Bible.

And guess what? It’s just another cranky old book written by cranky old men who tried to replace their ignorance with a foolish certainty.

Be afraid

Perhaps you thought Texas’ malign influence was confined to corrupting science teaching in their own state. It’s far, far worse than that.

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Read the rest and tremble. It’s not just evolution, it’s all of science and history that they want to remake in the image of their vicious, petty god — and they’ve got a team of ideologues who will engage in all kinds of dirty tricks to get their way.

A sudden influx of Young Earth Creationists

I’ve been hearing a few complaints lately that there has been a shortage of creationist cretins around here — you all need an occasional fool to gnaw on to keep your fangs sniny and your pelts glossy, I know. Well, aren’t you lucky: Carl Wieland, head of the Australian contingent of global wackaloons, put up an irate reply to the atheist rejection of his offer to debate us. We’re getting a sudden surge because it included this summary of my dismissal:

PZ Myers’ “in your face, Christians” response

PZ Myers, however, while not giving the courtesy of a direct reply, did so firmly and unmistakably on his widely accessed blog. Not surprisingly, it, too, involved a rejection of the invitation to debate, with all the usual excuses trotted out. Readers who are not used to some of the anti-Christian vitriol on such sites need to be warned, but we think seeing the response may be useful for some of you who may have thought that this issue is primarily about science—it’s not. That much should be obvious just from the emotionalism of this response alone. There is a palpable disdain, even hatred, of Christianity and the Bible. Myers concludes his rejection with a “Here’s my answer to Carl Wieland … “, followed by an image which has a common depiction of the Lord Jesus, with the image of the hand manipulated so as to be giving a rude gesture. For the whole response by PZ Myers, bearing all the warnings in mind for younger members of the family in particular, you can see

scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/a_reply_to_carl_wieland.php

Curiously, although I’m not shy about expressing my contempt for all religions, that particular post doesn’t say anything rude about Christianity at all — it does plainly state that Young Earth creationists are not worth wasting time on.

Anyway, it has drawn in some fresh meat. Enjoy it while you can — the new kooks will turn tail and run away soon enough, if experience is any guide.

California crazy

Two distressing news stories out of that wealthy western state:

  • Berkeley High School has a serious problem: it’s a good, relatively well-funded school, but black and latino students aren’t doing as well as white students. Their solution: kill those expensive science labs and redirect the money to remedial classes. Science classes with no labs? Inconceivable! That’s what a body of earnest, well-meaning, and apparently scientifically illiterate parents and teachers have decided to do.

    You cannot learn about science without doing science. It’s like deciding to continue to teach theater and music, but without that troubling and time-consuming business of performing. Or like having a football program that never plays any games (I know, that one is pure fantasy…discontinuing a football team is much, much harder than simply shutting down teaching labs).

    I’m also surprised at the casual bigotry in the proposal. Demolishing their science program won’t hurt black and Latino students? Right. When I taught at Temple University, the biology labs were full of ambitious black students scrambling to pick up those essential, basic lab skills that they needed to be doctors and nurses someday…skills that were not taught in the impoverished urban schools of North Philadelphia. Is Berkeley training their minority students to be part of the cutting edge of science and technology and medicine, or are they more interested in turning out service workers for Taco Bell?

  • Here’s another tricky situation: the California Science Center is being sued for turning away the showing of an intelligent design creationism movie. It’s a tough case, because public institutions should be interested in presenting arguments for issues in science — even if it is a controversial story, the answer to abuses of free speech is more free speech.

    However, there are other parts of this story that mean I can’t just jerk the ol’ free speech knee. One key point is that what the movie was presenting was not a scientific controversy at all—seriously, any movie that tries to present the Cambrian as a serious problem that makes evolution impossible is celluloid trash. Because the venue can be leased should not imply that the CSC is open to anyone showing home movies, or to the latest porn impresario from the San Fernando Valley using it for the premiere of his latest flick. I would think a science center would have a vested interest in protecting its reputation for showing science.

    And of course, the creationists know about that reputation. That’s why they try to book prestigious places of science, like the Smithsonian, your local museum, or as we see all the time at the University of Minnesota, the physics auditorium, to show off their bogosity in the reflected luster of science. The reverse is also true: scientists don’t rush to unveil their latest discovery at the nearby church.

    The science center also had clear grounds for canceling the showing: the creationists tried to imply in promotions that the movie showing was a Smithsonian-endorsed event, which it was not — they were merely a gang of bozos who had the cash to lease the room. The center also had a clause in their agreement to prevent that kind of credibility-theft, requiring promotional materials to be screened before release.

    It’s all part of a growing problem: creationists know that their institutions have no scientific credibility at all, and they desperately want to borrow some authority for their lies from real science.