Wheels within wheels

Ben Stein wins another honor. He has been declared the Rosa Parks of Darwin skeptics on the Rosa Parks of Rosa Parks Blogs, which points out amusing and offensive instances of rhetorical hyperbole. The amusing bit here, though, is that he got named this on the basis of an old post by creationist Kevin Wirth which does literally say Ben Stein is the Rosa Parks of Darwin Skeptics, right in the title. I’d seen this before, way back in the old days of the Expelled hoo-ha, but this time I noticed an interesting connection. At the bottom of the article, it has this brief biographical note:

Seattle area writer and Darwin skeptic Kevin Wirth is the publisher and editor of the new book “Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters” by Dr. Jerry Bergman. He has investigated and researched issues related to the persecution of Darwin Doubters since 1982.

Wait, what? Jerry Bergman? That Jerry Bergman, the carbon-is-irreducibly-complex and chemistry-is-a-religion-so-you’ll-get-fired-for-posting-the-periodic-table Jerry Bergman? The crazy Jerry Bergman I debated back in November?

Wow. Kevin Wirth really knows how to pick ’em.

It also reminds me…that debate was recorded by the local creationists, and they said a DVD would be made available; it would have been nice if they’d sent me a copy. They haven’t. The existence of any recording seems to have faded away from their site. I wonder why?

It can’t be embarrassment, because they actually host a pdf by Bergman arguing his bizarre version of irreducible complexity.

…the only way to refute the concept of irreducible complexity is to demonstrate that all objects can be reduced to a fundamental particle and still function properly. If a radio, a functional eye or ear, can be achieved, for example, by a single quark (the particle scientists now believe is irreducible)–or all, of the functions of an intelligent human, including the ability to reproduce with other humans, can be produced by a single quark, they are not irreducibly complex.

Yeah, he’s that nuts. He doesn’t demand that evolutionists produce a mere crocoduck to prove evolution, he wants us to produce a porn film starring talking quarks.

Poor science standard in Minnesota

Our state science standards are being patched up right now, and while they’re mostly just fine, one sneaky provision is still on the books.

“The student will be able to explain how scientific and technological innovations as well as new evidence can challenge portions of or entire accepted theories and models including but not limited to cell theory, atomic theory, theory of evolution, plate tectonic theory, germ theory of disease and big bang theory.”

It’s the old ‘teach the controversy’ argument. While it seems innocuous, and we actually should teach kids how to address established theories critically, it’s really just a backdoor for teachers who sympathize with creationism to smuggle in instruction in intelligent design creationism. It’s also more difficult than it sounds. Even this article, which is sympathetic to good science education, gets the idea wrong. Here’s an example given of a ‘challenge’ to evolutionary theory.

The National Geographic article reports that the fossil, called Ardi, challenges portions of the theory of evolution that say the missing link between humans and apes would look something like a chimpanzee. For example, Ardi is changing our way of thinking about how hominids moved about. Its big toe splays out from the foot to better to grasp tree limbs. However, its foot contains an extra bone that keeps the toe rigid to help the hominid walk bipedally on the ground. The extra bone is not found in the lineages of chimps and gorillas. Also, the upper pelvis is “positioned so that Ardi could walk on two legs without lurching from side to side like a chimp,” researchers say, while the lower pelvis was built like an ape’s to accommodate huge hind limb muscles used in climbing.

No, no, no, no, no. There is absolutely nothing in the discovery of Ardipithecus that challenges any portion of the theory of evolution. It’s an observation of a historical quirk, a detail of the pattern of changes in one lineage. It’s the equivalent of finding an apple tree, watching the fruit fall, and noticing that one apple bounced left, and another bounced to the right — if you’re really, really interested in the distribution of apple bounces (in the way we’re personally interested in human evolution), it may be interesting…but it does not in any way challenge Newton’s laws of gravity.

See the problem? A lot of people misunderstand the concept of a theory; we’re going to get a crop of teachers who don’t know what they’re talking about who will intentionally try to sow doubt in students’ minds by putting forward claims that miscellaneous facts challenge evolutionary theory when they do no such thing.

The only way this standard could be at all useful is if the teacher actually understands deeply that the theories listed can not be currently challenged, except by inventing weird science-fictional ideas that are unsupported by evidence…like intelligent design creationism. I can think of observations that would contradict evolution, easy, but guess what? There are no alternatives, and the creationists certainly have not provided any evidence against evolution.

Vanity Fair reviews the Creation Museum

A good take-down is a thing of beauty. A.A. Gill visited the “museum” in Kentucky, and gets right to the heart of the matter: it’s not a museum, it’s a national embarrassment.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do. This place doesn’t just take on evolution–it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.

It’s also ugly, cheesy, and stupid. People often try to excuse faith by claiming it inspired a lot of great art…but here is the evidence that god is dead. All his rotting corpse seems to inspire any more is cartoon kitsch. And Christian rock.

I spent a lot of time in the Eden picnic area, trying to wrest some sort of spiritual buzz, a sense of the majesty and the mystery, but it’s conspicuously absent. Literally beaten to death. This is Ripley’s Believe-It. It is irredeemably kitsch. In fact, it may be the biggest collection of kitsch in God’s entire world. This is the profound represented by the banal, a divine irony. (The penchant for kitsch is something that gay men and born-again Christians share.) This tacky, risible, and rational tableau defies belief, beggars faith. Compare it to the creation story in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Masaccio’s expulsion from Eden, or any of the thousands of flickering images, icons, and installations based on faith rather than literalist realism. It truly makes you wonder, Is all this righteous ire, all this money, all this Pentecostal flame-throwing the best they can come up with? This cheap county-fair sideshow–this is their best shot? It may be more replete with proof than a Soviet show trial, but this creation is bereft of any soul.

We’ve criticized Ham a lot for the inanities of his museum, but I wonder if the accusation that he’s a cheap, tasteless rube will sting a little more than harping on the fact that he’s ignorant and irrational (which he considers virtues). We’ll have to see if a response appears on his blog.

By the way, Ken Ham reads Pharyngula, even if he never links to us or mentions us by name. He has a blog post that quotes me and commenters here, to show how evil we are. You should check it out to see if he found you worthy of damnation.

There’s an app for that

If you ever argue with creationists, you know that the Index to Creationist Claims is an incredibly useful site, as is the book version, The Counter Creationism Handbook. Life just got a little sweeter: it is now available as a smartphone app for the blackberry and iPhone (just get into the App Store and search for ‘creationist’). Well, sweeter for us; creationists will find themselves a little more readily refuted now.

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.