Rewriting Genesis…accurately

The introductory schtick to my talk at the Seattle Skeptics meeting last night was to take a Bible and read a bit of Genesis, making the point that it was vague, wrong, and useless (I also ripped out the page and waved the pathetic thing around a bit, which had several people asking if they could have the bible defaced by PZ Myers afterwards). Then, of course, I summarized some small bits of the story of eye evolution to demonstrate that science has a much deeper and more powerful origins story than that little scrap of piss-poor poetry that half this country wants to make the backbone of our science curriculum.

Now here’s something cool: somebody has tried putting the actual creation story as revealed by modern physics into the same kind of portentous, simple language that even a Mesopotamian goat-herder could understand, the point being that if a god had chosen to tell primitive people how the universe came to be, he/she/it could have done so in just as awe-inspiring a way as the false myths we’ve got.

It’s rather neat that modern scientists know more than God.

Do you believe?

Now South Carolina is offering one of those inane “I BELIEVE” license plates to drivers in their state, and yay, we’ve got a stupid poll to crash! You can vote “Thumbs up” or “Thumbs down” on it, which was a bit of a dilemma for me — I kind of like the idea of the credulous being clearly labeled, and would approve of the idea of having “I BELIEVE” stamped on their foreheads if they wanted it. I resolved it by answering as if I were given the choice of getting this plate, to which I would say “NO WAY”.

Formal complaint

Dear Sir/Madam

I wish to complain about the fact that Katie Kish doesn’t like my kind. I am quite certain that the universe has a law that requires that everyone find me likable, and I am surprised that the internets allow disagreement. I would appreciate your attention on this matter as I consider this deeply offensive.

(OK, yeah, atheist meetings need much more diversity, and more spokespeople would be great so everyone doesn’t have to look at the same faces all the time. But we have to respect “spirituality”? Yuck. Bleh. Empty noise.)

Good on you, Oklahoma!

Under the malign influence of the wicked and silly Sally Kern, some Oklahomans were trying to pass an awful religious viewpoints anti-discrimination act, which would have simply given further privileges to majority religious views in the state.

Fortunately, Governor Brad Henry has vetoed the legislation, saying

Under current state and federal law, Oklahoma public school students are already allowed to express their faith through voluntary prayer and other activities. While well intended, this legislation is vaguely written and may trigger a number of unintended consequences that actually impede rather than enhance such expression. For example, under this legislation, schools could be forced to provide equal time to fringe organizations that masquerade as religions and advocate behaviors, such as drug use or hate speech, that are dangerous or offensive to students and the general public. Additionally, the bill would presumably require school officials to determine what constitutes legitimate religious expression, subjecting them to an explosion of costly and protracted litigation that would have to be defended at taxpayers expense.

It’s one small step back from the brink of theocratic inanity, hooray!

Local Boy Gets Obnoxious

Cool — I’ve been written up in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It’s a good story by a journalist, Tom Paulson, who I just met this week, and who seems to know what’s up in the area. I’ve already had a relative call up and say she’s glad I’m famous, so it’s all just in time for the family reunion tomorrow — everyone will be prepared to take me down a peg and make sure I’m not too cocky.

Since I did say a few things about the Discovery Institute, he called them up and got their side of the story. This part is the typical creationist sidestep.

Not so, said John West, associate director of the institute’s center for science and culture. Intelligent design allows for the possibility of some kind of ultimate intelligence behind everything, West said, but their research “doesn’t start from a religious premise.” He rejected Myers’ contention that they are “creationists.”

West noted that one of their scientists, Douglas Axe at the affiliated Biologic Institute in Redmond, just this week had an article describing his computer simulation of protein evolution published in the prestigious online science journal, the Public Library of Science.

“We’re not proposing the book of Genesis as a scientific textbook,” West said. “We just think science and religion are friends, not enemies.”

Where to start?

ID doesn’t just allow for the “possibility” of an ultimate intelligence, it is their fundamental premise. Read the very first sentence of the Wedge document: “The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.” It declares that their goal is the “overthrow of materialism” and that they want to re-open the “case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature.”

They are insulting our intelligence when they claim that they are not creationists. Of course they are. You have to be blind, stupid, or a dishonest scoundrel to say otherwise.

I never claimed that they were using the book of Genesis as a scientific textbook; however, their base, the people who are going rah-rah and trying to use ID as an angle to sneak their ideology in the public schools, would like nothing less. ID is a façade of pseudo-secularism erected to cloak the religious goals of their organization. If you followed the Dover trial exposed that plainly; there’s a reason we laugh and call these bozos “cdesign proponentsists“.

And of course West would bring up the recent PLoS paper — it’s an excellent example of their new attempts to patch up their secular cloak.

The paper is called Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints. It’s a description of a new software package written by the secret Biologic Institute, which they argue will have utility in modeling protein evolution. The paper says absolutely nothing about Intelligent Design, makes no arguments against evolution, and is utterly untroubling to evolutionary theory, and it’s clear that the way they got it published was by studiously avoiding the kinds of stupid statements that are the hallmark of the Discovery Institute. It’s useful cover for them: they will now be announcing at every opportunity that they do too do science, and they deserve a cookie … hoping that the luster of a publication that does not address their core assertions at all can be redirected to put a little shine on the tawdry crap they advance elsewhere.

It’s actually not a bad paper, with an interesting idea at its center. They have designed an evolution simulator built on an analogy, that protein shape can be compared to the shape of Chinese characters. The virtue of the plan is that they can associate a complex morphology with an unambiguous functional criterion, its similarity to a representation in the vector world of of a Han character. It’s a clever idea, but the paper really doesn’t do anything with it yet, except propose it and make arguments for some similarities with natural processes. OK. Now if only I could trust the authors not to twist it in bizarre directions in the future, knowing that few of their critics will have bothered to plumb the arcana of their software, or that they know that all they have to do is claim that they’ve got some observation that disproves some facet of evolution, which will require that some people be distracted from real biology to address it.

Wesley already has some criticisms. I haven’t read it carefully enough to offer my own (I’m on vacation, dangit!), but I do have some general doubts…and suspect that if it works well at emulating biology, it won’t be supporting the scientific claims of Intelligent Design creationists, anyway. But no matter its successes, it is already being used by the Discovery Institute as a political tool to prop up their sham operation.

A good question

Sometimes my email contains a few good and sincere questions — and here’s an example. This is probably the most common rock on which creationists founder: a profound misconception about what evolution says, and a natural human desire to see a guiding plan to the world.

I’m tormented.

I appreciate the struggle many creationists are having about evolutionary science. I find myself tormented as I observe the world around me.

What I seem to be focused on is how a plant or animal is self aware of it’s need to evolve? How does a tree know how to “evolve” it’s seed to fly on the wind? How would a lizard “know” that it needed to develop camouflage to survive?

I can’t imagine who any plant or animal other than human would have the ability to “know” and as well as pass it along via DNA to future hundreds of thousands of generations?

I’d appreciate your feedback…this is really starting to bother me.

The first part of the answer is that the organism doesn’t know that it must evolve. There is no plan, no guidance, no goal imposed ahead of time, the tree or lizard are not following a program that says they have a goal. The outcome emerges as a consequence of selection and chance.

The tree did not plan ahead. In a population of trees, there was chance variation in how far seeds fell from the parent; seeds that fell in the shade of the parent would not flourish, while seeds that were fortuitously caught by the wind and fell further away were more likely to thrive, and produce more offspring. Lizards that blended in with their environment were less likely to be eaten, and had more offspring that, inheriting their parents inconspicuousness, were also less likely to be eaten, and variation in their progeny was selected further approximations to camouflage.

There is no “know”, no awareness. Darwin’s insight was that life didn’t need it to produce a pattern of change — unguided random variation, filtered after the fact by natural selection, produces an appearance of design.

And yes, this is a fact that many people find troubling. We’re brought up thinking we’re cuddled in the swaddling hands of a god who has a grand plan for us all, and that every little up and down in our life is the product of some cosmic intent — it’s reassuring and makes us feel important. It’s an interpretation unsupported by any evidence, too, and often contradicted. We live in a world of chance, and we’re all on our own.

OK, readers, maybe you have a better explanation. Go ahead, chime in with a comment and explain how we’re going to wean the general public away from their imaginary sky father.

Do not be concerned

Several people have written to me expressing their concern over the recent publication of this paper:

Evidence for Intelligent Design in Gastrointestinal Endocrinology: Identification of Novel Cholecystokinin/Gastrin-Like Peptides in the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.
Greeley GH Jr, Endocrinology. 2008 Jun;149(6):3184-6.

Oh, no! Have the creationists scored a coup and snuck propaganda into a legitimate science journal? Have no fear. This is a short review paper by an editor describing some work on cholecystokinin phylogeny. Some of you old-school physiology types may recall that a colloquial term for this class of hormones is “brain-gut peptides” — molecules that are expressed in both the gut and the central nervous system (and many other places). CCK is produced in the endocrine cells of the upper small intestine and in neurons in the brain, apparently prompting a weak joke linking intelligence and gastrointestinal hormones. It is not pro-ID at all. It even says, “the work of Janssen and
co-workers elegantly defends the hypothesis that the mammalian CCK/gastrin-CCK1R/2R signaling system is an ancient signaling system with counterparts throughout the evolutionary tree.”

Turn off the sirens and return to your homes. All is well. It’s just another false positive in the literature for Intelligent Design.

Support El Tinklenberg!

Michele Bachmann is the Minnesota representative who embarrasses us all. She is, of course, a Republican, and one of the dumber ones — she’s our anti-gay, anti-science, anti-American, far-right-wing kook, and we need to get her out of office … she’s up for re-election this year.

My oldest son Alaric is an activist and organizer for the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party here in Minnesota, and he’s campaigning for the sensible opposition, El Tinklenberg. He’s asked me to promote an event going on TONIGHT, a fundraiser and rally for Tinklenberg in St Cloud. If you’re somewhere in the region, stop by. If maybe you aren’t a Minnesotan, but you’d like to help out financially (really — Bachmann is flaming insane, and the entire country ought to be interested in ousting her), call 320 217 5394 and chip in a few bucks (you might also find my boy on the other end of the phone line. Tell him hello from me.)

Here are the details on the big event.

Please Help Us
DEFEAT
Michele Bachmann

Cindy Harner, Rich Kelly
and
Rick Miller

Invite You to Come, Meet and Support

El Tinklenberg
Candidate for Congress in the 6th

Thursday, June 5
7:00 – 9:00 PM

Home of Rich Kelly:
524 7th Avenue South, St. Cloud
Co-hosts include:
Senator Tarryl Clark
Representative Larry Haws
Representative Larry Hosch
Candidate Joanne Dorsher
Candidate Rob Jacobs

Contribute What You Can!

ALL ARE WELCOME!

RSVP to Rick Miller 320-293-3935 [email protected]

Work fast. I just got this notice myself, since my connection to the internet is only intermittent while I’m out of town.