Jesus Haploid Christ

Do I need to cover this in my genetics course? Years ago, Ron Wyatt, the infamous pseudoarchaeologist, claimed to have made a remarkable discovery: he found the site of Jesus’ crucifixion! There was a hole, where the cross had been erected, and beneath that was a small chamber, and in that chamber was the Ark of the Covenant! Furthermore, Jesus’ blood had dripped down through the hole, and had splattered on the Ark, allowing him to collect a dried blood sample.

You don’t believe it? It’s on video, sort of. There’s a hole in the ground, and Wyatt squats in it and says there’s a chamber 60 feet down, and a door, and the Ark had been stuffed in there and packed in animal hides and boards and rocks. He doesn’t actually show that, but would he lie to you?

Ron Wyatt found this site by a combination of reading the Bible really hard, and by having visions, so it must be true.

One day in Jerusalem, after the swelling in Ron’s legs and feet went down a bit, he decided to go sightseeing in the immediate area around his hotel near the Damascus Gate. Walking along an ancient stone quarry, known to some as “the Calvary Escarpment,” he began conversing with a local authority about Roman antiquities. At one point, they stopped walking, and Ron’s left hand pointed to a site being used as a trash dump and he stated, “That’s Jeremiah’s Grotto and the Ark of the Covenant is in there.” Even though these words had come from his own mouth and his own hand had pointed, he had not consciously done or said these things. In fact, it was the first time he had ever thought about excavating for the Ark.

It was a very special trash heap.

Then he spent years digging down into the trash heap, and finally found something deep in a crack.

With adrenalin flowing through his veins and great anticipation, he looked around to see what else he could see, which wasn’t much. He shined his flashlight around the open area and then up to the ceiling. There, he saw something that caught his eye – it was a crack in the ceiling with a black substance within the crack.

Crawling slowly and painfully over the rocks to the rear of the chamber, he saw a stone case extending through the rocks. It had a flat stone top which was cracked completely in two and the smaller section was moved aside, creating an opening into the stone case. But the top was too near the ceiling for him to look inside. Yet he knew what was inside – the crack in the ceiling was directly above the cracked part of the lid, where it was open, and the black substance had fallen from the crack into the case because some of it had splashed onto the lid.

It was at this time, as Ron recalls, as the instant realization of what had happened here dawned on him, that he passed out. When he realized that the crack in the ceiling was the end of the crack he had found in the elevated cross-hole many feet above him, and the black substance was blood which had fallen through the crack and into the stone case, he KNEW the Ark was in the stone case. But the most overwhelming realization was that Christ’s Blood had actually fallen onto the Mercy Seat.

If he says it was Christ’s blood, I guess that must be what it is. Who can argue with such meticulous logic?

Now comes the fun part for a biologist. He collected a sample of the black goop, and rehydrated it. It was blood! Red blood cells, white blood cells, the works, and it was still alive. He says he was able to culture the cells, squash some white blood cells, and examine their chromosomes.

Suddenly, I have qualms. If Jesus’ blood was immortal, and could survive 2000 years of dessication and bacterial invasion, how could he squash a cell? And if he did, did the chromosomes and cellular debris on the slide continue to live? Are these tissues still living and growing in a slide box somewhere?

That’s a prompt for a horror story somewhere, but right now we’re talking about SCiEnCE, so let’s get back to that karyotype. We have discovered how many chromosomes Jesus had.

Under normal circumstances all human beings have 46 chromosomes…. 23 from their mother and 23 from their father. There are 22 pairs of autosomes which determine things such as our height, hair and eye color, etc. The 23rd pair is the sex determinant pair. They consist of either “X” or “Y” chromosomes. The mother only has “X” chromosomes. The father has both “X” and “Y” chromosomes.

If the sex-determinant pair is matched “X-X”, the child is a female. If “X-Y”, the child is a male. Thus we see that the single chromosome provided by the father in this chromosome pair determines the gender of the child. When the blood sample Ron Wyatt took from the crack in the rock ceiling above the Mercy Seat was tested, it contained 24 chromosomes…. 23 from the mother and one “Y” chromosome from the father, 24 chromosomes.

As Dr. Eugene Dunkley states in his article on the genetics of the blood of Christ, 24 chromosomes is exactly what would be expected if a man was born of a virgin. There are 23 chromosomes from the mother and a “Y” chromosome from a father. But that father cannot be a human father because the other 22 chromosomes on the father’s side are missing. Therefore the existence of a “Y” chromosome is at the very least a mystery, if not a miracle.

Not only was Jesus haploid, he was aneuploid! I’m glad that mystery has been cleared up.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any photographs of the karyogram, no samples available, and you can’t get a piece of Jesus’ immortalized haploid cell line, which would be interesting for biological research, and would probably be worse than HeLa at taking over cell cultures. All we have is “Ron Wyatt said so.”

Oh, also, possibly relevant to my genetics course: that last link talks about somatids, which are immortal blobs found in everyone’s cells, which can only be seen using a special microscope called a somatoscope, invented by a guy named Gaston Naessens. I tried following an explanation of what they are, how they work, and how they disprove the germ theory of disease, but the dense layers of bullshit and bogosity proved too much for me. Cut me a break, I’d just read a bunch of Ron Wyatt nonsense, I was already saturated.

Maybe I’ll dig deeper into that trash heap, but at least I’ve concluded it’s not suitable for any science class.

For this day of social media glitches, we thank you, O Lord

Twitter is back up, which gives me mixed feelings. At least I am grateful that Elon Musk is once again exposed as an incompetent manager. How many more times must that happen before his legion of worshipful fans realize it?

Another blessed event: YouTube has banned Kent Hovind! His KentHovindOfficial channel has been shut down, all of his videos erased. Hallelujah! To add insult to injury, he briefly appeared to complain about his deletion, and then urged everyone to go to his second channel, Dinosaur Adventure Land…then that was wiped out and deleted! Ah, such sweet schadenfreude.

There is still work to be done. Matt Powell, his mini-me, still has his MattPowellOfficial channel, which he can use to trumpet hate. Amusingly, Powell just recently left Dinosaur Adventure Land to return to his ‘ministry’ in Michigan. Hovind had a little farewell party in which he suggested Powell could return in a few years to take over DAL, clearly offering to make him his heir…and in the video, Powell flatly said no. Poor Kent. Abandoned. Denied. In public.

I guess it was Whack-a-Creationist Day.

I think Twitter might be done

Today, Twitter rolled out a new feature for subscribed users: they can post 4,000 character long tweets now.

But what if I don’t want to read long blog posts on a micro-blogging site? What if I’d rather not deal with long-winded assholes clogging up the feed? I guess I don’t have a choice, except, of course, that I’ll instantly block anyone who posts a treatise.

Worse still, though, I just got this message:

Oh no! I must have been chattering up a storm today. Got carried away. I just couldn’t shut up. Supposedly, the limit is 2400 tweets/day. But I’ve been tied up in lab and classes all day! How could I have done that?

So I looked to see how much ol’ blabbermouth PZ had babbled today.

6.

It was 6 tweets, and that broke Twitter’s capacity.

OK, that’s fine, I can switch to my Mastodon account and go crazy. Maybe I’ll post 8 times today. 10 times if I feel like flooring the accelerator.

It takes multiple mechanisms to drive evolution

I went through high school thinking that evolution was pretty neat. I read all the popular treatments — those Time/Life books, National Geographic, science magazines, etc. — and they made it sound like Darwin had got everything right in 1859. I could go along with that.

But then, in 1975, I went off to college and had access to a university library and started reading the real hardcore stuff. I was just mainlining PNAS & Science & Nature & Evolution & the Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology and soaking in all this exciting stuff, and that’s when I discovered the concept of genetic drift (specifically, thanks to Lewontin). My mind was blown. Suddenly, questions I had never even thought to ask were answered with clarity. Certainly nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, but likewise nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of neutral genetic drift.

I guess Holly Dunsworth had the same revelation, and also noticed the sad gap in public education.

In the USA, K-12 evolution education standards are missing GENETIC DRIFT as well as the word NEUTRAL.

(see here: https://www.nextgenscience.org/topic-arrangement/hsnatural-selection-and-evolution)

I don’t know how to understand life’s perpetual change without those fundamentals.

If students know about meiosis (which *is* in the standards), then they know about genetic drift. It’s just a matter of linking meiosis to evolution.

Genetic drift is a very simple concept and makes natural selection make a whole lot more sense!

I shout about this on Twitter and I get “just be happy anyone teaches evolution in K-12 at all” and “teachers don’t know about drift” in response. But evolution without genetic drift is not evolution, and if teachers knew about drift, then they’d be more comfortable teaching evolution. I guarantee it!

Without drift, it’s too easy to just replace God with natural selection. And that habit of narrating evolution by giving agency to natural selection is super-duper weird for non-believers let alone for believers! (This a no hatred of religion, faith, or creationism zone.)

Genetic drift paves the way for thinking about and then narrating evolution as the constant change that life/nature/biology is. Everyone gets that time is just constant change and they will get that nature/biology/life is too. They embody it themselves, being different from their parents.

Plus, continuing to teach evolution as only being natural selection (which is what the standards are doing), is also dangerous. That selection-obsessed mindset is tied to racism, sexism, essentialism… all the stuff that we have to remove from our species’ shared origin story. Darwin only had selection (not drift, etc) to work with and look what his imagination did with evolution: racism, sexism, essentialism

Oh wow, yes. I’ve got to stand up and cheer at that. Also specifically the bit about meiosis, because I’m teaching genetics right now and am constantly emphasizing the role of chance in inheritance. We’re built on a platform of coin flips and die rolls and long shots in heredity, yet somehow in our public education, that all vanishes and is replaced with something close to fixed destiny (in higher ed, that isn’t true, fortunately. Usually.)

Also, drift nicely bridges all those gaps in comprehension the creationists love to inflict on us.

I listened to an “evil” song and survived

I heard a little buzz about the Grammy awards last weekend — there was one song performed that infuriated the culture war conservatives. It got Ted Cruz mad.

“This… is… evil,” Cruz wrote on Twitter, the ellipses perhaps representing the breaks he took to consume more pornography. His post was a re-tweet from conservative commenter and former OANN presenter Liz Wheeler, famed for having the kind of brain you normally find in an aquarium. “Demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan,” she wrote. “I could throw up.”

Well, then. As an atheist in good standing, I had to look this performance up. Here you go, everyone can watch the Sam Smith and Kim Petras song, “Unholy.”

They lied to me. Oh, sure, Sam Smith wears a top hat with devil horns, but the song isn’t about Satan worship, it’s all about people of ambiguous and not-so-ambiguous gender gyrating on the dance floor at a hot club, with lots of lascivious behavior. Anyone interrupting the proceedings with a sermon about Satanism would be a killjoy, and would probably be thrown out. It wasn’t about God or Satan at all, it was about sex.

That’s what make the conservatives uncomfortable — it’s simply their current obsession with changing mores about sex, and the fact that a singer wears a hat with horns allows them to claim it’s all about their religion. It’s not. Christians have sex, too. Some of them are gay or trans even. All that’s going on is that they’ve got an excuse to exercise their authoritarian purity culture.

Let’s see what notorious libertine and Catholic League president Bill Donohue has to say about it all.

Kim Petras is a man who thinks he’s a woman, or what is today called a “transgender person” (they really don’t exist, but that’s for another day). He said he “personally grew up wondering about religion and wanting to be a part of it, but then slowly realizing it doesn’t want me to be a part of it.”

He did not say who told him he could not be a part of whatever religion he was talking about, or why. But he did admit that “as a trans person, I’m kind of already not wanted in religion.” He did not explain why that might be.

Wow. Donohue has always been an ugly little man, but he really embraces the hatefulness. Also obliviousness.

Petras says she (a person who really exists) was sympathetic to and curious about religion, but was rejected by religion. Donohue then stupidly complains that she didn’t say who or why she was told this religion would not accept her, or why she might not be wanted by that religion. I mean, read what you wrote, Bill. You are a shining example of the problem.

Man, I haven’t read anything by Bill since those long ago days when he was happily hating me. I think he’s gotten worse.

By the way, about the song: I didn’t much care for it, and it won’t be getting much play around my house, and that’s OK! It’s not evil, it just wasn’t to my taste. If you liked it, that’s OK, too! This shouldn’t be about the song, but about authoritarians who want to dictate your personal preferences.

No atheist groups have stooped this low, have they?

We’re always getting accused of being steeped in sex and godless hedonism, but then…have you seen the New Glow Baptist Church?

The New Glow Baptist Church has taken a bold step in advertising their services in a way that is unique and controversial. Their Instagram page is filled with images of women dressed in revealing outfits, with captions that invite newcomers to “Come As You Are” and “There Are No Dress Codes Here.” The bio section of their page also makes it clear that there is no dress code at the church.

You don’t need to check out their instagram page, I can summarize it with a safe-for-work image.

I strongly suspect this is not a real church and lacks any formal affiliation with any Baptist denomination, but is instead a scam. They want you to join their patreon account for $11.99 a month. Also I definitely believe this: the women they use are AI-generated.

According to information obtained by MandyNewsm.com, some the photos that have been circulating on social media are not real but are in fact generated by an AI.

I wonder if the combination of fetish porn and religion can really be that profitable?

Could we come up with a more boring title?

This weekend, it’s time for another Podish-Sortacast, and this one is called “Organizations”.

OK, I’m falling asleep already. It’s all a ruse, though, to lure everyone into a false sense of security: the plan is to talk about all those organizations that have failed us, discussing things like the Andrew Torrez case.

Uh-oh, I just realized…Freethoughtblogs is an organization, of sorts. A very loose organization, with me as the nominal head. This could take an ominous turn, becoming a revolution and a coup, all in real time during the broadcast. Maybe it’ll be painfully exciting after all!

Science fiction isn’t gendered anymore

I like reading space opera when I have the free time, but did not realize how many space operas were written by Cisgender Women, Non-Binary, and Trans People. That link will take you to a spreadsheet listing 750 authors meeting those criteria.

I’ve got a lot of reading to do.

Maybe I should have been aware, because looking over the list I’ve read a lot of Cherryh, Wells, Jemisin, Martine, Leckie, Okorafor, Bujold, and Hurley, and my taste runs to a lot of non-cis-male writers. And now I have more to read!

I remember a time when most of the popular SF writers were men (with notable exceptions). I think the tide has changed.

Uteruses are scary, so protect them!

I did not sleep well last night. I made the mistake of reading this story of a traumatic birth just before bed, and all I could think of was how my wife had three children, and how much could have gone wrong, and how lost I’d be if she hadn’t survived, and how much our kids would have missed, and it gave me unpleasant, morbid dreams. It’s well written, but don’t read it if you like being complacent. I need Mary around, and it smacked me right in the what-could-have-been anxiety center!

If you choose to avoid the tale of emergency surgery and blood and exposed organs, you should at least get the main message.

When Senator Lindsey Graham showed his hand and proposed a national abortion ban, he condemned an entire population to medical trauma. When he and his GOP cohort grandstand about “preserving the sanctity of life,” they do not seem to include the onslaught of death from placental abruption, placenta previa, uterine rupture, ectopic pregnancy, chorioamnionitis, stroke, preeclampsia, amniotic fluid embolism, cardiomyopathy, suicide from PTSD or postpartum depression, and various other freak shit shows that happen to those of us in stirrups.

The “culture of life” is a cult of maternal death. To claim otherwise is to turn away from medical fact, which, of course, has been the right wing’s entire modus ever since Trump decided face masks were itchy. To entrust reproductive healthcare legislation to the same politicians whose criminally negligent pandemic response killed over a million people is to sign the death warrants of untold Americans.

Those vile right-wingers who claim to be pro-life are wrecking medical education, shackling doctors’ hands, and condemning women to death. Don’t let them get away with it.