You all remember Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the court case that decided that no, teachers couldn’t smuggle creationism into the classroom by pretending they were teaching reasonable alternatives? This story about a West Virginia law even references it.

In 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that it was unconstitutional to present intelligent design as an alternative to evolution because it advanced a Christian viewpoint and is not legitimate science.

Well, it’s baaaack!

A bill that could permit teachers to discuss and answer questions from students about theories, including intelligent design, will head to the House of Delegates for a vote after a tweak Tuesday morning.

Senators already approved the bill, Senate Bill 280, early in the legislative session, saying it protected teachers who may face legal challenges when discussing theories outside of evolution.

A Democrat member of the House Committee on the Judiciary argued that the bill didn’t explicitly permit intelligent design in classroom teaching — despite what was discussed as a possible intent of the legislation in the Senate.

During debate, Republicans emphasized that the bill wouldn’t be a mandate of what to teach; rather, they said the legislation ensured that students could have wide-ranging discussions on theories.

“This bill doesn’t require a teacher to teach creationism,” said Del. Andy Shamblin, R-Kanawha, who is a public school teacher. “All this bill does is say if the subject is brought up, the teacher can discuss that subject.”

While voicing support of the legislation, Del. Scot Heckert, R-Wood, said that the bill could result in more students being interested in science or “simply [keep] them from getting involved in drugs, playing on the computer all the time or eating Tide Pods.”

Teachers have not been prohibited from having a conversation about a topic not in the curriculum (unless, of course, it’s mentioning that they’re happily gay-married, in which case fundamentalists will storm the school with pitchforks and torches.) They can say, “I believe in the book of Genesis” and then move on — what they can’t do is derail the whole curriculum by spending class time going over the begats or treating the bullshit peddled by the Discovery Institute as science. Public schools are supposed to have science standards, a set of things the teachers are obligated to teach, because they are supposed to be preparing them for college, or for life as an educated citizen. Teach those religious ‘alternatives’ in Sunday School, where you’re not constrained by the shackles of reality or practicality.

Naturally, the Bible thumpers make the same arguments they always have.

Del. Todd Kirby, R-Raleigh, said that he didn’t see how the legislation introduced religion to students in the sciences classes.

“Just because you believe we came from something greater than a mere chance or an instance when everything happened to come together in our universe and solar system … it doesn’t mean you’re pushing religion. It just means you have a different theory than what’s taught in school,” he said.

Another ignorant yahoo who thinks evolution equals chance, and that any old tall tale you can babble about is a “theory”. What he’s talking about is a peculiar religious myth that he wants taught alongside natural selection and the periodic table and Newton’s laws of motion. He just wants the schools to pretend that Adam & Eve have equal explanatory power to common descent.

No one is fooled. I know and he knows that he is pushing religion, he’s just the one lying about it.

Meanwhile, the state of Kentucky is likewise investing large amounts of money into promoting faith-based bologna, as the FFRF points out.

The Northern Kentucky Convention & Visitors Bureau’s new Kentucky Faith Trail program has received a $305,000 grant from the state. The Faith Trail is a self-guided tour through 11 sites of “faith, culture, and history,” as a Bureau press release states. Even though the trail “is designed to be inclusive, welcoming people of all faiths and backgrounds to embark on a shared journey of discovery and reflection,” all 11 sites are Christian. To belabor the obvious, this makes the trail the opposite of “inclusive” and welcoming to people of “all faiths and backgrounds.”

Two of the sites, the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, are well known for spreading misinformation and promoting anti-science worldviews, FFRF points out. The Ark Encounter purports to be an accurate replica of the mythical ark from the biblical story of Noah and claims that the Christian story of a worldwide flood actually happened. Similarly, the Creation Museum promotes scientifically disproven myths of how the universe came to be and promotes inaccurate information, such as teaching guests that humans and dinosaurs once co-existed on Earth. Both the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum are owned by Answers in Genesis, an extreme evangelical Christian organization that spreads misinformation and scientifically inaccurate teachings about our world.

The Bureau must cease using taxpayer money to promote a Faith Trail that includes the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, FFRF stresses.

Gullibility, unfortunately, does not disqualify one for running for high office.

I have no patience anymore. I was sent this video titled Evolutionists Have Been WRONG About Dinosaurs for Years from Answers in Genesis, and I was only able to watch the first 3 minutes.

It opens on two people, one claiming to be a paleoartist, the other a Ph.D. paleontologist. They have to be failures at those occupations because they also announce that they are employed by Answers in Genesis. At least, though, they are quick to state their objection. Is it reasonable to believe in feathered dinosaurs in a Biblical worldview? Their answer is no.

They’re easily refuted, of course, just by showing a dinosaur fossil with feathers. That’s pretty stupid, you’d think, to frame up a target so easily shot down. But they have cleverly created an excuse in advance!

They show some clips from one of the Jurassic Park movies, and telling us that those are fake. Did you know that? That Hollywood magnified the size of dinosaurs and made them look flashier? And that the Pyroraptor holotype was fragmentary and lacked any feather impressions. If only the scientists would stop relying on movies for their data. Of course, they were instead relying on data from other specimens of dromaeosaurids that do have feathers. Those don’t count, though, because then they said the thing that made me close the video.

Evolutionists have been changing the meaning of words…to better fit their evolutionary worldview.

They’re making a definitional argument. Birds have feathers, and dinosaurs don’t, therefore any fossil found with feathers is a bird, not a dinosaur. See? Those dastardly scientists changed the meaning of the word “dinosaur!” That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. The universe is fixed and unchanging, just like the Bible says, and whenever a scientist finds evidence of species in flux, they’re wrong. Because the Bible tells them so.

Poor man. Ken Ham is being left behind by other creationists, which is of course not his failing, but of all those other faithless Christians. So he’s going to tell us where they are going wrong.

If you’re like me, your jaw dropped at that claim that …no form of evolution, including theistic evolution, can explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman. This is Ray Comfort levels of ignorance; we don’t argue that men evolved before women, or that the sexes evolved independently, or that men evolved into women. Those are creationist arguments. We all evolved together, our ancestors had male and female forms, and the first humans were the product of a gradual shift in populations. Anyone who tries to claim that evolution argues that the sexes evolved sequentially is abysmally ignorant, and this question about how women evolved from men is an example of a truly stupid question.

But why does Ham say the same thing twice? The first bit is quoting Answers In Genesis’s statement; the second is quoting the Assemblies of God statement, which AiG plagiarized. What he’s whining about, as he goes on, is that the Assemblies of God no longer claims that evolution can’t explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman. Assemblies of God has abandoned a stupid claim, while AiG still holds to that idea, therefore, to Ken Ham, Assemblies of God has abandoned the truth of scripture! Worse, nowadays they’re arguing for more tolerance on scientific matters, and reject the dogmatism that is the foundation of Ken Ham’s beliefs.

“As a result, equally devout Christian believers have formed very different opinions about the age of the earth, the age of humankind, and the ways in which God went about the creative processes. Given the limited information available in Scripture, it does not seem wise to be overly dogmatic about any particular creation theory. We urge all sincere and conscientious believers to adhere to what the Bible plainly teaches and to avoid divisiveness over debatable theories of creation.”

Uh-oh. That is a direct attack on Answers in Genesis. Ham is going to forever insist on promoting deeply wrong and ignorant ideas, and he’s still clinging to Ray Comfort’s misconceptions.

One must occasionally take a dip into the creationist literature, although I must admit I’ve been examining it with less and less frequency as time goes by. The problem is that they’ve never got anything new or even interesting, and they keep rehashing the same old nonsense, straining to make it start making sense.

So…The Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism was recently posted, and it’s a good snapshot of the state of creationism nowadays. It has somewhere around 75 titles listed, and clearly there are a fair number of people wasting their time struggling to erect this facade of pseudoscience on the enterprise. I’m taking a step way back and asking what their current obsessions are — and nothing has changed in over 60 years.

An awful lot of the articles are about the age of the Earth. They are desperate to find a way to telescope all of history into 6,000 years, so an immense amount of effort is put into justifying a global flood about 4,000 years ago. Most of the articles are about re-interpreting geology or inventing novel physics to invalidate radiometric dating. I think they realize that their insistence on a young earth is absurd and unsupportable, but is also critical to their interpretation of the Bible, and they’re struggling to resolve their discomfort with reality by making lots of excuses.

Guys, it’s not working. There was no Genesis Flood. Give up. Try instead to remodel your interpretation of the Bible to fit geology and physics.

Probably the second-most popular topic is “baraminology,” their attempt to remake biological systematics in the Lord’s image. Their problem is that modern systematics is built on a solid foundation of statistics and mathematics and vast amounts of data, and they have to ignore almost all of it to make their case, and what little data they do use is ripped out of context and mangled unpleasantly to make weird examples of isolated cases.

I confess that I don’t get the point of baraminology. It’s all about grouping species into specially created “kinds”, but in a sense, we do that already with the real science of cladistics. The difference is that cladistics has a mechanism, descent with modification, while baraminology is presupposing a creator who built “kinds” on his personal and ineffable whim.

One topic that is notably absent from the program is Intelligent Design. This is a group that explicitly supports Young Earth Creationism, so it’s not surprising that the people who avoid publicly advocating for Biblical creationism (while supporting it privately) are excluded. There were a whole 4 articles that discussed capital-D Design, and they were all pathetic. For instance, one titled Testing the Cavefish Model: An Organism-focused Theory of Biological Design reported that cavefish would produce pigment when exposed to high-intensity light, and concludes These implications do not support the conventional view that beneficial adaptations arise through random mutation, unregulated genomic recombination, or accumulation of unguided genetic variation – regardless of time scales. Therefore, organisms are the agents in control of adaptations and diversification. Physiological adaptation does not refute evolution! When my students vanish off to more southern climes for Spring Break and come back with tans, should I treat that as evidence that evolution is false?

That paper had five authors, by the way, all from the ICR. What I conclude from that is that stupidity is additive.

I tried looking at the more novel papers. Apparently, creationists tolerate a high degree of flakiness in their contributors. For instance, John DeMassa claims to have found Messages in the Genetic Code: The DRAm Form through the magic of numerology.

Does the Genetic code contain non-structural information or even intelligible messages? The present work offers a mathematical investigation of the genetic code using a novel numeric procedure applied to both nucleobases and amino acids found in standard code tables. The numeric two step procedure amounts to an atom count of all the atoms in standard genetic code tables and shall be called Compound Numeric Triangulation. The first step called Compound Numeric Indexing (CNI) converts the DNA codon table (purines and pyrimidines),the RNA codon table (purines and pyrimidines) and the 20 standard amino acids into representative index numbers. In this step, cytosine (C4H5N3O), for example, presents 13 total atoms (4+5+3+1) and would be assigned the index number 13. The codon CCC is assigned the CNI value 39 (13+13+13). Similarly index numbers are collected for the other codons in the DNA and RNA tables and substituted in place of the letter codes. The same procedure is applied to the amino acids. Three tables result. The code tables are next examined for reoccurring CNI values. For example, in DNA, the CNI value 39 is found 1 time but 46 is found 12 times. The patterns are next collected and arranged in ascending table arrays (39, 40, 41, etc.) with their respective frequencies and product totals. Since 46 occurs with a frequency of 12 it is entered into the table as its product (46 x 12 = 552). This general method is repeated for the RNA codon table and the 20 standard Amino acid to give a total of three new product table arrays. In the second step, called Numeric Triangulation, the arrays are subjected to the method of finite differences. In this step, adjacent product numbers in an array table are subtracted and the result is placed above and between the adjacent numbers. The process is continued until a triangle is formed. Historically, difference triangles have been used to determine properties of polynomials but other attributes were studied in this examination. The difference triangle for the 10 base product numbers of DNA released 45 additional difference triangle values to give a completed triangle consisting of 55 elements. For the RNA code table 91 numeric elements are produced and the amino acid table 78 numeric elements. Inspection of the triangle tables show number matches at their perimeters which was interpreted as a design element and potentially an assembly motif. Surprisingly, a three triangle composite structure elegantly assembles to reveal a graphed object. This shall be called the DRAm (DNA, RNA, Amino Acid) form. Again, surprisingly the DRAm form is an intelligible pictogram consisting of 224 number pixels. The 2-D picture is next transformed, using suggestive internal number patterns, into a recognizable, printable 3-D object. An interpretative process is lastly applied to the 2-D DRAm form to reveal a startling communicative interactive tool. Theological implications with respect to the question of design and origins will be reviewed and potential applications of this discovery will also be discussed.

Did you get that? He’s manipulating the genetic code into an array of numbers, and then converting those numbers into pictures. It’s important to note that he’s not looking at genetic sequences, but the code itself — so the pictures are going to be the same for every organism.

I had to look elsewhere for examples of his pictures.

I guess that settles it.

In other fun times, an engineer at Liberty University has A Mathematical Description of the Christian God.

The Christian God is one trinitarian God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Omniscience is all-knowing. Omnipresent is being everywhere at once. Omnipotent is all-powerful. Because the Holy Spirit has been revealed in the bible as reflective of different energy forms, He can be abstractly represented as energy in mathematical terms. Since power is the time derivative of energy, we can then cast the energy representation as a time derivative to make it power. When one integrates this equation from zero to infinity over all space and time, then we can get the mathematical expression of God’s omnipotence. We can also integrate information from zero to infinity and garner the effect of omniscience. Finally, we can also integrate time and space from zero to infinity and garner the effect of omnipresence. We can then multiplicatively place these three integrals together to describe the fullness of the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The notion of infinity from Blaise Pascal and David Hilbert is a critical aspect of the mathematical description of the Godhead.

I see nothing specific in that description to justify claiming that generic math describes a particular god.

Enough of that bullshit. I thought I’d browse for some one article that touched on my interests or expertise…but there was nothing about spiders or evo-devo. I was trained as a fish guy, though, so this article, Unresolved Issues in Hypothetical Fish-to-Amphibian Evolution by David Prentice, should contain some common ground that I could dig into.

Unfortunately, Davide Prentice is an unqualified nobody.

B. S. Physics, M.Ed. Curriculum & Instruction, M.A. Science Teaching

LA lifetime secondary certification in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, General Science, Mathematics

Taught on Creation and Apologetics in 13 countries

He’s a retired schoolteacher, which counts for something, but his background is an undergrad degree in physics from what, 40 years ago?

This is a poster presentation bringing together multiple problems with the idea that some ancestral fish evolved into some ancestral amphibian.

The Lamarckian idea that “form follows function” has been thoroughly falsified. The only explanation for characteristics of an organism’s phenotype is the content of its genotype rather than its need for new features.

That’s a really odd way to introduce your subject. “Form follows function” is not a Lamarckian idea, it’s architectural. Here’s a nice summary of the biological uses of the concept.

“Form follows function”, a principle coined by the American architect Louis Sullivan and first introduced to the field of biology by Kosak and Groudine, is associated with modern architectural design, underscoring the idea that the shape of a building or object should be based primarily upon its intended function or purpose. In biology, this principle is reflected in the close relationship between a specific biological structure and its purpose. However, owing to the complex nature of biological phenomena, sometimes it is very challenging to reveal the precise relationship between form and function of an organelle.

Not dead, but complicated. The rest of Prentice’s opening is even more wrong: we don’t talk about need for new features, and any modern biologist will tell you that the phenotype is a product of genes and environment. This is not an auspicious beginning, and it’s all downhill from there.

The new creatures would have to undergo random mutations in their DNA to produce at least thirteen major changes. They would have to (1) leave the water and come onto land, (2) acquire two radically different types of vertebrae (rhachitomous and lepospondylous); (3) acquire segmented backbones in place of a continuous notochord; (4) develop legs instead of fine, (5) develop a pelvic girdle where none existed before; (5) acquire a mechanism to propel themselves with the legs instead of fins, (6) develop muscles strong enough to support their weight on land, (7) develop a breathing apparatus geared primarily to air, (8) develop necks which are not found in fish, (9) acquire a different number and arrangement of bones in the skull, (10) develop eardrums for the first time, (11) acquire eyelids to keep the eyes from drying out, (12) change the method of fertilization from internal as in the alleged ancestral fish to external as in all known amphibians, and (13) acquire a mechanism so as to undergo metamorphosis, which does not occur in the putative ancestral fish.

Only thirteen? That’s an easy problem then.

Except he’s simply following an old creationist stratagem of listing a bunch of stuff, claiming each one is insurmountable, while not bothering to address any of them in detail. Leave water and come onto land is a great big bucket for a whole lot of changes, and that he thinks any of them are difficult tells me he knows nothing about biology. Develop legs instead of fin[s]; yeah, we have a good handle on many of the genetic changes involved in transforming fins into limbs. As for change the method of fertilization from internal as in the alleged ancestral fish to external as in all known amphibians, I have to ask if he’s ever heard of salmon? Most fish use external fertilization!

He’s also ignorant of basic concepts in paleontology.

In addition to the biological problems, the evidence from paleontology indicates that such an evolutionary process did not happen. Tracks of four-limbed creatures have been found in at least four locations around the world. They are dated 395 MYA. The commonly accepted “transition” from water to land, Tiktaalik, is dated 383 MYA. Even if the time scale were correct, this is 12 million years too late.

You know, Tiktaalik is not a direct ancestor of modern tetrapods — it is representative of a clade of transitional forms from the Devonian. This is a non-problem for anyone who has a non-literal understanding of a fossil series and understands the concept of populations changing and diversifying over time. From such ignorance and misconceptions, this non-biologist/non-paleontologist concludes:

In short, the biological and paleontological evidence indicates that the evolution of fish to amphibians never happened.

There’s a reason I’ve been less attentive to the creationist literature over the years: it’s stupid.

If you’ve never heard of David Rives before, you’re fortunate: he’s a lesser creationist best known for the well-fed, smug, toothy smile of a prosperous real estate agent, and that he was formerly married to Jenna Ellis, former lawyer to Donald Trump who is now facing racketeering charges. It’s always sad when two hellbeasts get divorced.

Rives runs a creationist ministry with a YouTube channel in which he claims to be “changing the narrative.” He’s not. But I had to watch this video, title “Secrets of the Arachnids.” Before you jump in, though, I’ll warn you that the first 20 minutes is incredibly boring: he’s interviewing a dorky arachnologist named David Nelson, and aside from the vapid interjections of Rives, it’s mostly painless, and mostly the kind of stuff you might catch dorky me saying — he’s definitely enthusiastic about spiders. At about the 22 minute mark, though, I lose all sympathy for him.

We learn that David Nelson is a professor at Southern Adventist University in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Oh god. It’s one of those places.

The Biology and Allied Health Department fully supports a biblical six-day creation and developed the Origins Exhibit, a museum-quality display that showcases topics such as irreducible complexity of the cell, the geologic column, the flood, and dinosaurs.

It’s a temple of misinformation. While I enjoyed the early part of his interview, when he’s talking about survey protocols and cool spider facts, it then goes off the rails when he starts talking about teaching a course in venoms and claiming that all venoms are flawed, degenerate versions of physiologically adaptive molecules, and that they support the biblical claim of a Fall and a loss of ‘information’. No, they’re not. If you read anything about The Biology and Evolution of Spider Venoms, you’d know that the components of a venom are complex and diverse. It’s not just a collection of failed phospholipase molecules, but a set of numerous, specialized molecules produced by duplication and divergence. It’s absurd to claim that this is a sign of biological decay.

Spider venom can contain up to 3000 different molecules, suggesting that the prospecting of all extant spider species could yield ~10 million venom components. Spiders therefore comprise a hyperdiverse lineage of predators with venom that is far more complex than that of most other animals.

Here’s a taste of the detail in the analysis of the structure of venoms. They are beautifully unique and specialized, and the Nelson gomer throws all the information away to claim it’s all about a loss of information. Yeah, guy, when you ignore all the information, it looks like a loss.

ICKs are the most abundant cysteine-stabilized peptides in nature: they are found in the venoms of many spiders and other animals, and have also evolved diverse functions in plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses (Undheim, Mobli & King, 2016). A fundamental obstacle hindering the evolutionary analysis of ICKs is the pseudoknot motif and its disulfide bonds, which are largely responsible for defining the tertiary structure of these peptides. Amino acid substitutions can therefore accumulate with little impact on structure, leading to profound diversity (Olivera et al., 1995; Sollod et al., 2005; Kozminsky-Atias & Zilberberg, 2012; Sunagar et al., 2013; Sunagar & Moran, 2015; Undheim et al., 2016). This challenge has been addressed recently by the application of ‘structural venomics’ (a combination of venom transcriptomics, proteomics and structural biology) in Hadronyche infensa to shed light on ICK evolution (Pineda et al., 2020). This approach showed that most ICK peptides are descendants of a single weaponized ICK lineage that underwent duplication and structural diversification, giving rise to a variety of peptides with elaborate ICK folds following their recruitment as venom components (Pineda et al., 2020). The ancestral ICK toxin was proposed either to contain a fourth disulfide bond that stabilized its β-sheet (lost in some descendants) or the typical three disulfide bonds with the fourth evolving independently at least twice (Pineda et al., 2020). Domain duplication would then explain the dICK peptides (Pineda et al., 2020). Structural venomics thus provides evidence that gene duplication is an important process in the evolution of spider venom and other venomous lineages. Similarly, gene duplication was proposed as an explanation for the evolution of αLTX in Latrodectus spp. (Gendreau et al., 2017; Schwager et al., 2017). However, it is important to note that the confident reconstruction of gene evolution processes requires genomic data. Results based exclusively on venomic data sets need to be interpreted with caution as assembly artifacts and overinterpretation can easily blur the evolutionary signature and lead to false assumptions. At least one ancient whole-genome duplication event is also thought to have occurred in the lineage leading to spiders and scorpions, providing the foundation for extensive neofunctionalization (Schwager et al., 2017).

You can’t talk about the evolution of anything without talking about neofunctionalization — that is, the emergence of new capabilities in evolving molecules. The science of venoms involves deducing where each toxin component came from, and dissecting the functional effect of each one.

Horizontal gene transfer has contributed to the evolution of some venom components, including PLD in the family Sicariidae (Cordes & Binford, 2018). PLD was traced to a single proteobacterial ancestor, from which it appears to have radiated widely, at least partially facilitated by horizontal gene transfer (Cordes & Binford, 2018). Horizontal gene transfer has also been proposed to explain the origin of αLTX, based largely on the complete genome sequence of Parasteatoda tepidariorum (Gendreau et al., 2017; Schwager et al., 2017).

What exactly does David Nelson teach in his venoms course? I am mystified. He seems to be building everything on flawed premises and an utter ignorance of the scientific literature. Does he hide PubMed from his students? Because two minutes with that would show that their professor is lying to them.

I haven’t even mentioned venom delivery systems. Does David Nelson teach that these represent a loss of function from a prelapsarian ideal?

Southern Adventist University ought to be shuttered and burned to the ground. Those poor students.