I almost forgot — in 1658, Archbishop Ussher determined that the world was created precisely at 9am, 23 October, 4004 BC, making today the official creation day, and the earth 6012 years old.
Stop laughing, people. There are some who still seriously believe that: I just got spam from Whirled Nut Daily pushing this very silly book, The Annals of the World, buy James Ussher. They call it a masterpiece. I call it a quaint old oddity.
Whoa. Richard Dawkins appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show. Hewitt, in case you didn’t know, is one of those far right radio wingnuts, a lawyer with a blog who defended George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and always sides with religious conservatives in the culture wars.
It’s a fairly long interview, and you can see Hewitt trying to make lawyerly probes to lead Dawkins away from the book, and he’s also good at making lawyerly innuendo for his already anti-Dawkins audience — he’s constantly trying to cast doubt on the evidence for evolution, for instance — and you can tell that Richard is getting increasingly exasperated with the silly line of interrogation…until he finally snaps.
RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?
HH: Yes./p>
RD: You seriously do?
HH: Yes.
RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: My God.
HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…
RD: I’ve realized the kind of person I’m dealing with now.
I’m sure he’s overwhelmed right now with his book tour, but somebody needs to warn him about exactly what he’s walking into before he gets in front of a microphone. Hewitt is a ridiculous puffed-up blowhard of very little brain, and a remarkably calm, polite discussion while he ducks and dodges and blows a dog-whistle for his crazy listeners doesn’t work very well.
If Dawkins is going on the Glenn Beck show, though, I want to know about it.
(via Instaputz)
Americans have to own up to a little bit of an inferiority complex in one thing: our accents. If you watch TV at all, you know that whenever a documentary wants its viewers to be impressed with the erudition of the narrator, it’s got to have a British accent — it sounds so posh and educated and aristocratic, you know.
I have a cure.
Watch the videos below. These are direct recordings from the exhibits in a creation museum in the UK, and you get to hear those lovely British voices reciting the most godawful drivel, the most cliched creationist nonsense, the most ridiculous lies, and I guarantee you that after 20 minutes of that, those round vowels and gentle ‘r’s will sound to your ears like the braying nasalities of an episode of Hee Haw.
Oh, and you will realize that English creationists are just as stupid, if not more so, than their American counterparts.
I shouldn’t pick on Hee Haw, though. The most beautiful accents in America are from the South — just listen to Shelby Foote sometime. There are good things that come out of Mississippi, even.
Ah, this is going to be painfully dreary. Why do I let myself get dragged into these podium battles with kooks? I’m committed, anyway. Come on out to the UMTC next month for a game of kick-the-puppy. I’m going to be coming down off a real high that weekend, the IGERT symposium on evo-devo, where I’m actually going to learn something, and the next day I have to stand up with these clowns. Do me a favor and show up to ask some leading questions about science in the Q&A so I can talk about some interesting stuff.
This is the ad copy from the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. They’re very happy. Their young-earth crackpot is going to share the stage with me.
Monday, November 16, 2009, 7:30 – 9:00 pm
Debate: Dr. P.Z. Myers vs. Dr. Jerry Bergman
“Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?”
University of Minnesota, St Paul Campus
North Star Ballroom, St. Paul Student Center
(Buford Ave. near Cleveland Ave. St Paul Campus)
For a More information and a map, Go To www.tccsa.tcTwo Heavyweights Battle on Huge Topic
P.Z. Meyers has stated that teachers who accept intelligent design are pseudo-scientists who should be fired and publicly humiliated. Jerry Bergman was denied tenure and subjected to a hostile work environment at Bowling Green University for his beliefs, despite being the most productive member of his department and most popular teacher.
Dr. Myers website, www.scienceblogs.com/pharyngula, is a focal point for those who oppose intelligent design theory. Dr. Bergman has written Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing The Careers Of Darwin Doubters, detailing the way Dr. Myers’ vision is actually
being carried out.Is it logical to do so? Is it science? Is it education? Is it right? Come and hear. Then decide for yourselves.
Dr. Myers is an evolutionist and teaches at University of Minnesota Morris
Dr. Bergman is an intelligent design advocate who teaches at Northwest State College in Ohio.
The event is co-sponsored by Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists (CASH) http://cashumn.org
and Christian Student Fellowship (CSF) www.csf.net
at the University of Minnesota.
If we’re heavyweights, how come they still can’t spell my name consistently correctly?
I will be amused to learn how my agents have been carrying out my vision of slaughter and killing. They’ve been a little thin on details in their reports, so maybe Bergman will have some photos or something. Blood spatter? Broken machetes?
I also will be interested in meeting this academic paragon — did you know he has nine degrees? I’d feel outclassed numerically, except that his reliance on how many degree programs he shuffled through, the strangely unrelated fields they are in, the rather shady status of the institution that granted him a Ph.D., as well as the peculiar fact that he always leaves one little word out of his affiliation at Northwest State Community College (come on, there’s absolutely no shame in that — smart people go to and work at community colleges all over the country. Be proud. The Trophy Wife has an AA degree from a fine community college herself, and it’s eminently respectable) makes me think he’s really trying to compensate for something.
Wow, a whole month to go and I’ve already got my game face on and am sharpening up the knives. It might be fun, after all, as long as I go into it with the right attitude.
One of my favorite examples of the step-by-step evolution of molecules has been the work coming out of Joe Thornton’s lab on glucocorticoid receptors. It’s marvelous stuff that nails down the changes, nucleotide by nucleotide.
It’s also work that Michael Behe called “piddling”, despite the fact that it directly addresses the claims of irreducible complexity. Have you ever noticed how the creationists will make grand demands (show me how a duck evolved from a crocodile!) and then reject every piece of fossil evidence you might show them because there are still “gaps”? This is the converse of that argument: when you’ve got a system where you can show each tiny molecular/genetic change, they dismiss that as trivial. You really can’t win.
Well, Thornton has been working hard and coming up with more and more details, while Behe is still sitting there, eyes clamped shut and ears stoppered, insisting that IT CAN’T HAPPEN LALALALAALALALALAAAA. Behe threw together some dreck claiming that not only didn’t Thornton’s work demonstrate evolution, but it actually supported Intelligent Design creationism!
Boy, did he make a mistake.
Remember how when the creationists started playing games with his work, it roused Richard Lenski to slap down Conservapædia hard? We’ve got a similar situation here.
Joe Thornton has written a beautiful response to Michael Behe.
Read it. Really. It’s a whole lesson in important principles in evolutionary theory all by itself. It exposes the ignorance of Behe through and through, and demolishes the premises of Behe’s latest foolish book. And it made me feel soooo gooooood.
I was just catching up on a few blogs, and noticed all this stuff I missed about Jonathan Wells’ visit to Oklahoma. And then I read Wells’ version of the event, and just about choked on my sweet mint tea.
The next person–apparently a professor of developmental biology–objected that the film ignored facts showing the unity of life, especially the universality of the genetic code, the remarkable similarity of about 500 housekeeping genes in all living things, the role of HOX genes in building animal body plans, and the similarity of HOX genes in all animal phyla, including sponges. 1Steve began by pointing out that the genetic code is not universal, but the questioner loudly complained that 2he was not answering her questions. I stepped up and pointed out that housekeeping genes are similar in all living things because without them life is not possible. I acknowledged that HOX gene mutations can be quite dramatic (causing a fly to sprout legs from its head in place of antennae, for example), but 3HOX genes become active midway through development, 4long after the body plan is already established. 5They are also remarkably non-specific; for example, if a fly lacks a particular HOX gene and a comparable mouse HOX gene is inserted in its place, the fly develops normal fly parts, not mouse parts. Furthermore, 6the similarity of HOX genes in so many animal phyla is actually a problem for neo-Darwinism: 7If evolutionary changes in body plans are due to changes in genes, and flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse? Finally, 8the presence of HOX genes in sponges (which, everyone agrees, appeared in the pre-Cambrian) still leaves unanswered the question of how such complex specified genes evolved in the first place.
The questioner became agitated and shouted out something to the effect that HOX gene duplication explained the increase in information needed for the diversification of animal body plans. 9I replied that duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content. She obviously wanted to continue the argument, but the moderator took the microphone to someone else.
It blows my mind, man, it blows my freakin’ mind. How can this guy really be this stupid? He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in developmental biology, and he either really doesn’t understand basic ideas in the field, or he’s maliciously misrepresenting them…he’s lying to the audience. He’s describing how he so adroitly fielded questions from the audience, including this one from a professor of developmental biology, who was no doubt agitated by the fact that Wells was feeding the audience steaming balls of rancid horseshit. I can’t blame her. That was an awesomely dishonest/ignorant performance, and Wells is proud of himself. People should be angry at that fraud.
I’ve just pulled out this small, two-paragraph fragment from his longer post, because it’s about all I can bear. I’ve flagged a few things that I’ll explain — the Meyer/Wells tag team really is a pair of smug incompetents.
1The genetic code is universal, and is one of the pieces of evidence for common descent. There are a few variants in the natural world, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule: they are slightly modified versions of the original code that are derived by evolutionary processes. For instance, we can find examples of stop codons in mitochondria that have acquired an amino acid translation. You can read more about natural variation in the genetic code here.
2That’s right, he wasn’t answering her questions. Meyer was apparently bidding for time until the big fat liar next to him could get up a good head of steam.
3This implication that Hox gene expression is irrelevant because it is “late” was a staple of Wells’ book, Icons of Evolution and the Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It’s a sham. The phylotypic stage, when the Hox genes are exhibiting their standard patterns of expression, of humans is at 4-5 weeks (out of 40 weeks), and in zebrafish it’s at 18-24 hours. These are relatively early events. The major landmarks before this period are gastrulation, when major tissue layers are established, and neurulation, when the neural tube forms. Embryos are like elongate slugs with the beginnings of a few tissues before this time.
4What? Patterned Hox gene expression is associated with the establishment of the body plan. Prior to this time, all the embryonic chordate has of a body plan is a couple of specified axes, a notochord, and a dorsal nerve tube. The pharyngula stage/phylotypic stage is the time when Hox gene expression is ordered and active, when organogenesis is ongoing, and when the hallmarks of chordate embryology, like segmental myotomes, a tailbud, and branchial arches are forming.
5Hox genes are not non-specific. They have very specific patterning roles; you can’t substitute abdominal-B for labial, for instance. They can be artificially swapped between individuals of different phyla and still function, which ought, to a rational person, be regarded as evidence of common origin, but they definitely do instigate the assembly of different structures in different species, which is not at all surprising. When you put a mouse gene in a fly, you are transplanting one gene out of the many hundreds of developmental genes needed to build an eye; the eye that is assembled is built of 99% fly genes and 1% (and a very early, general 1%) mouse genes. If it did build a mouse eye in a fly, we’d have to throw out a lot of our understanding of molecular genetics and become Intelligent Design creationists.
Hox genes are initiators or selectors; they are not the embryonic structure itself. Think of it this way: the Hox genes just mark a region of the embryo and tell other genes to get to work. It’s as if you are contracting out the building of a house, and you stand before your subcontractors and tell them to build a wall at some particular place. If you’ve got a team of carpenters, they’ll build one kind of wall; masons will build a different kind.
6No, the similarity of Hox genes is not a problem. It’s an indicator of common descent. It’s evidence for evolution.
7Good god.
Why is a fly not a horse? Because Hox genes are not the blueprint, they are not the totality of developmental events that lead to the development of an organism. You might as well complain that the people building a tarpaper shack down by the railroad tracks are using hammers and nails, while the people building a MacMansion on the lakefront are also using hammers and nails, so shouldn’t their buildings come out the same? Somebody who said that would be universally regarded as a clueless moron. Ditto for a supposed developmental biologist who thinks horses and flies should come out the same because they both have Hox genes.
8You can find homeobox-containing genes in plants. All that sequence is is a common motif that has the property of binding DNA at particular nucleotide sequences. What makes for a Hox gene, specifically, is its organization into a regulated cluster. How such genes and gene clusters could arise is simply trivial in principle, although working out the specific historical details of how it happened is more complex and interesting.
The case of sponges is enlightening, because they show us an early step in the formation of the Hox cluster. Current thinking is that sponges don’t actually have a Hox cluster (the first true Hox genes evolved in cnidarians), they have a Hox-like cluster of what are called NK genes. Apparently, grouping a set of transcription factors into a complex isn’t that uncommon in evolution.
9If you photocopy a paper, the paper doesn’t acquire more information. But if you’ve got two identical twins, A who is holding one copy of the paper, and B who is holding two copies of the same paper, B has somewhat more information. Wells’ analogy is a patent red herring.
The ancestral cnidarian proto-Hox cluster is thought to have contained four Hox genes. Humans have 39 Hox genes organized into four clusters. Which taxon contains more information in its Hox clusters? This is a trick question for Wells; people with normal intelligence, like most of you readers, would have no problem recognizing that 39 is a bigger number than 4. Jonathan Wells seems to have missed that day in his first grade arithmetic class.
It’s appalling, but this is the Discovery Institute’s style: to trot out a couple of crackpots with nice degrees, who then proceed to make crap up while pretending to be all sincere and informed and authoritative. It’s an annoying trick, and I can understand entirely why a few intelligent people with actual knowledge in the audience might find the performance infuriating. I do, too.
Way back in July, I proposed that an appropriate response to the inane creationist ads that were appearing on scienceblogs was for people to take advantage of one, an offer of a free booklet on creationism, and then we’d all tear it apart mercilessly. I ordered mine, a lot of you did likewise, and some of you have even written critical posts already.
I forgot.
It wasn’t my fault, though. They didn’t send me my booklet! I jumped through their hoops, I filled out their form, I did everything they asked, and I set the issue aside, anticipating that the arrival of tripe in the mail would be my wake-up alarm to get going. It never happened.
Anyway, we’ll salvage something. If you already wrote a dissection, leave a link in the comments here. I’ll try to pull off a web copy of their garbage, and use that instead. Let’s set a date — a week from today — on which I’ll post my criticisms and link to everyone else’s.
Cheesy cheap creationist frauds, <grumble, grumble, grumble>
Atheists are familiar with the Grandma Gambit — it’s a common tactic used to shut us up. We’re told to keep quiet because our dear sweet devout Grandma couldn’t possibly deal with the news; it would break her heart and you wouldn’t want to do that, would you? What kind of callous rat would hurt a gentle little old lady!
It’s a rather patronizing suggestion that belittles Grandmas everywhere. Both of my grandmothers were feisty types who would have relished a good argument (and one of my grandmothers, who died when I was 12, would probably have just said, “good for you”). Go ahead, break the news to Grandma — it’s much more respectful than treating her like a delicate flower that would wilt at the thought of you not going to church.
Here’s a more realistic reaction from a Christian grandmother who hears that you’ve left the faith: an argument, in the form of a 33 page handwritten letter which is almost entirely a creationist screed. It’s interesting, too, because I see this a lot, that nowadays the response to apostasy is often built around arguments against evolution. There is an expectation that faith is not enough, and that calling the faithful back to the fold is a matter of reasoned argument with ‘science’ on their side. Unfortunately for them, they don’t have any science at all, and Grandma’s letter is a series of creationist canards, from the “just a theory” error to the absence of transitional fossils, all wrapped up with bible verses.
So Grandma wants to talk; what does the grandson do? He writes back with a 17 page letter, neatly typed, with charts and figures! Bravo! This is how loving families should deal with faith, by simply caring enough to wrestle with the ideas between them.
I am astounded. Usually AiG simply refers to me as “the Professor” or “the atheist”, but in their latest screed they actually mention me by name…and they even spell it correctly! Of course, they get everything else wrong.
A well-known University of Minnesota-Morris professor who has a history of hate speech against creationists—especially Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum1—inadvertently admitted recently that we were not wrong. This was kind of a blessing in disguise and also reveals much about his character. Professor Paul (P.Z.) Myers said:
First, there is no moral law: the universe is a nasty, heartless place where most things wouldn’t mind killing you if you let them. No one is compelled to be nice; you or anyone could go on a murder spree, and all that is stopping you is your self-interest (it is very destructive to your personal bliss to knock down your social support system) and the self-interest of others, who would try to stop you. There is nothing ‘out there’ that imposes morality on you, other than local, temporary conditions, a lot of social enculturation, and probably a bit of genetic hardwiring that you’ve inherited from ancestors who lived under similar conditions.
Myers admits there is no morality or anying that imposes it either (i.e., God) in his worldview. This means that from his own worldview, there is no such thing as right and wrong. Accordingly, this means that there must be nothing wrong with teaching the truth of creation as revealed in the Bible. Ironically, perhaps, it also means that there is nothing wrong in showing the problems with false religions like humanism and evolution.
They still couldn’t bear to actually link to the article in question; here it is.
Their article still goes awry at the very first sentence. I am definitely not saying that they were not wrong, and there was nothing inadvertent about my post. Seriously, I don’t sneeze and a grammatically correct blog entry pops out accidentally, or something. I actually have to invest a microsecond or three in thinking.
It gets worse in the sentence right after they quote me. There is morality in my ‘worldview’; don’t confuse the fact that I state baldly that there is no external non-human intelligent agent that imposes morality on me with an absence of moral thought. I derive my sense of what is right and wrong from intrinsic properties such as empathy and other social impulses, and from acculturation in a stable, successful society that has expectations of parents to introduce their children to what constitutes reasonable behavior. I also derive it rationally from what I can see as a robust strategy for long term security and happiness within my culture — that is, robbing banks has a very poor long term return on the effort.
So, I do believe in right and wrong. It’s just not handed down from a magical sky-lawyer.
Oh, but wait…I just noticed. This isn’t a serious article from AiG, it’s a comedy routine. That phrase, “the truth of creation as revealed in the Bible”, should have tipped me off. There is no truth in the Bible!
Never mind, just laugh. Well, laugh weakly. It’s still not a very good routine, but at least the clowns at AiG are trying out some new material.
