It’s been a pretty good day

I’ve just been tuned into the American Arachnology Society meeting all day, and boy is my brain tired. It’s a good tired, though.

Then Mary gave me a belated Father’s Day gift: a Laowa 60mm f/2.8 ultra-macro lens. She shouldn’t have. I’ve only had a few minutes free to play with it, but it’s sweet: amazingly clear and sharp, but definitely not your casual macro lens, since it has no autofocus, no electronic aperture control, no image stabilization, just a hunk of very nice glass.

Now I have a little time to go on a walk and try it out. It’s a hot day, the spiders have been gamboling in my office, there’s a good chance I’ll find my octo-friends outside. Also, AAS is running a bioblitz, so I’ll have to get some specimens for that.

Oh, and DEREK CHAUVIN WAS SENTENCED TO 22.5 YEARS IN PRISON. That’s a relief, now I don’t have to riot and set Morris on fire tonight.

Ugh. Can we just throw him in jail and forget about him now?

It’s still too much Trump. There’s a slow dribble of information about just how repulsive he was as president, and I only want to hear it in the context of court transcripts during his treason trial.

The top US general repeatedly pushed back on then-President Donald Trump’s argument that the military should intervene violently in order to quell the civil unrest that erupted around the country last year. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley often found he was the lone voice of opposition to those demands during heated Oval Office discussions, according to excerpts of a new book, obtained by CNN, from Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender.

Titled “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” the book reveals new details about how Trump’s language became increasingly violent during Oval Office meetings as protests in Seattle and Portland began to receive attention from cable new outlets. The President would highlight videos that showed law enforcement getting physical with protesters and tell his administration he wanted to see more of that behavior, the excerpts show.

That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people, Trump told his top law enforcement and military officials, according to Bender. Crack their skulls!
Trump also told his team that he wanted the military to go in and beat the f–k out of the civil rights protesters, Bender writes.

Just shoot them, Trump said on multiple occasions inside the Oval Office, according to the excerpts.
When Milley and then-Attorney General William Barr would push back, Trump toned it down, but only slightly, Bender adds.

The only time I want to hear about these assholes is when they’re getting punished, like Giuliani losing his right to practice law in New York. It is extremely frustrating to read about Trump using his power to push for murder on the streets, and yet nothing is ever done.

Proper decorum when spotting a spider during an arachnology meeting

There’s a major added benefit to attending a virtual conference. I’ll be spending the next 5 days ‘attending’ the American Arachnological Society meeting, which really means sitting in my home office listening to voices over my headphones with images of data about spiders on my computer screen, and the advantage is that I can be distracted without disrupting the event. Last night I was tuned into Maydianne Andrade’s excellent talk about widows and sex variation, and this critter was scampering over the windowsill.

[Sorry, you know the drill: the photo is on Instagram or Patreon]

So I got up, grabbed a collecting vial, scooped it up, and snapped a couple of photos right in the middle of her talk. There were about 180 arachnologists listening to it online; imagine if they each spotted a spider during a meeting, and felt no restraint about indulging their passion right then and there. Chaos! The entire audience would be on their hands & knees, or climbing the walls!

It would be great!

Maybe not as productive information-wise, though.

Also, there was a tiny theridiid spinning a web on my microphone stand. I got it, too, but it’s so small I think I’ll need to bring it into the lab to look at it with the microscope.

Catholicism is sick

Really sick. I’m surprised it’s not terminal already. Behold, the Church Militant, and its spokesperson, Michael Voris, all sucking up to … Milo Yiannopoulos? Are you kidding me?

I’m simultaneously revolted and impressed by the fact that Milo has found another niche full of gullible fools. I’m sure he’s having a grand time with his new act.

Meanwhile, as Milo is fêted by Catholic fanatics, hundreds of more graves have been found at the Catholic Marieval Indian Residential school in Saskatchewan. But hey, let’s praise the repentant homosexual!

Nicholas Wade is the Andrew Wakefield of molecular virology

For the past month or so, my inbox has been inundated with letters insisting that they have proof of the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Their insistent missives are full of jargon, like arginine codons and furin cleavage sites, and insistence that the particular sequence found in the virus could not possibly have arisen naturally. I am not an expert in viral genomics by any means, so my usually reply is a shrug that I don’t know the details, but I find their claim that the viral sequence could not have appeared by natural causes to be naive and unlikely, and that their probability argument is not a clincher. I’ve usually refrained from pointing out that they sound exactly like a few generations of creationists I’ve had to put up with.

A lot of that jargon and argument can be traced back to an article by Nicholas Wade in which he made those very same claims. I tend to veer away from anything by Wade — his embarrassingly bad book that advocated for “race realism” convinced me he’s not a trustworthy source — so I didn’t dig deeply into it. He seems to have persuaded some people, including David Baltimore(!), who has since retracted his endorsement of Wade’s “smoking gun”.

A science writer I trust far more, Thomas Levenson, explains what’s wrong with Wade’s claim.

Wade asserted that a particular arrangement of a specific sequence in the viral genome, called a codon, was unlikely to have gotten there naturally. There are actually six different codons for arginine, and the one found in a particular region of the SARS-CoV-2 genome called the furin cleavage site does occur less frequently in viruses than it does in the human genome. An even more telling detail to Wade is that this uncommon arginine codon shows up twice in that small segment of the virus’s genome. For that to occur naturally, Wade wrote, “a chain of events has to happen, each of which is quite unlikely.”

That’s what Baltimore assented to. But scientists say Wade misdescribed critical links in his chain. Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen led an early inquiry into the possible role of a lab escape in the origin of the virus, which concluded that it “is not a laboratory construct,” a finding that Wade termed “poor science” in his article. After Baltimore’s quote became public, Andersen re-entered the argument, and became one of a number of researchers to challenge many of the details Wade relied on. Andersen told Nature that Wade’s claim that steps in the emergence of the virus were too improbable to have occurred is not true. Rather, the pandemic virus uses that codon about 3 percent of the time that its genome calls for arginine—not common, but not impossibly scarce either—and, importantly, that other coronaviruses make use of it too, at similar or greater frequency.

Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello says the unusual pairing of a particular codon that Wade saw as decisive actually points away from laboratory manipulation. “We have some idea why this codon is rare in RNA viruses,” Racaniello says. Selection pressures have been identified that would discourage its use in viral genomes. But, he says, “We don’t know why it’s not zero. The fact that it is conserved in many viruses means that it’s beneficial in some way we don’t understand.” This is the kind of mystery that evolution throws at researchers all the time. Racaniello adds that if a lab researcher was trying to modify a virus to measure its effect, the researcher wouldn’t use the codon pairing identified by Wade because its effect would be too unpredictable.

I’d had an uncomfortable feeling with any argument that claims a low probability makes something impossible, because improbable things happen all the time. But 3%! That’s not low, especially not when you’ve got a virus with a population of trillions.

I’m calling it the Chris Rufo Theory from now on

Chris Rufo is a sad little man, and I almost feel sorry for him. He is the primary person responsible for triggering the nationwide moral panic over Critical Race Theory; he’s the one who handed the far right an egregious misinterpretation of the idea, shaping it into a meaningless punching bag for conservative resentment. Now he’s getting his moment in the sun, and we all get to see how feeble his idea is. He got eviscerated by Joy Reid. From the very first question she asks he is found wanting.

“Are you an expert in race or racial theory, are you a lawyer, a legal scholar, is that part of your background?”

Yeah, I’m a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, I’m running their initiative on Critical Race Theory.

Uh, what? The Manhattan Institute is a conservative think-tank dedicated to promoting capitalism and free market economics. Former members include George Gilder (who also co-founded the Discovery Institute) and Charles Murray. One of its big policy successes was pushing broken-windows policing, that terrible flop of an idea that only succeeded in increasing police power.

Rufo is, or was, a documentary film maker, and a research fellow at the Discovery Institute. There is absolutely nothing in his background that qualifies him in the slightest way to be an expert in race or the law. He should have said “No” in answer to that question.

But that’s OK, because Reid then exposes his ignorance repeatedly. She is amusingly vicious with a smile as she points out that nothing he claims is part of Critical Race Theory actually is, and wickedly uses his own words against him. His version of CRT is just a propaganda tool, a grab bag of lies and nonsense that he claims are all part of the theory; as he himself says, The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ I like that she also does not let him use this interview to vomit up nonstop lies without pushback, something I’ve missed from too many journalists in the last few decades. A good interviewer is not a stenographer who is providing a platform for the interviewee.

Watch the whole thing.

One lasting contribution is that I’ll never again think of the right-wing spin on CRT as Critical Race Theory. It’s all really Chris Rufo Theory.

AiG thinks incest is just fine, after all

At their Creation “Museum” and at the Ark Park, Answers in Genesis does have displays justifying all the incest in the Bible — everyone was less corrupted by the Fall back then, you know. So an editor publishing an article in a journal he edits, run by his employer, is perfectly fine, I guess.

The article below is from Dan Phelps, who happens to be a real geologist.

Today I received a press-release (provided below) for a paper published by Answers in Genesis’s geologist, Dr. Andrew Snelling. The paper claims, among many other things, that certain rocks in the Grand Canyon were folded before they were lithified (turned to rock) and this “proves” the rocks formed recently in Noah’s Flood of 2348 BC. This is total nonsense. I read the paper, which includes much extraneous material that appears to be present to impress AiG’s supporters rather than to convince geologists. The paper presents sundry creationist claims about radiometric decay as if they were widely-accepted when they are not considered such outside of Young Earth Creationist (YEC) circles. The paper concludes that the rocks in question formed during the “global Genesis Flood cataclysm about 4,350 years ago” This paper is, in reality, a parody of a scientific paper, designed to impress non-scientists.

Note that the paper is published in AiG’s own “journal” (Answers Research Journal) which Snelling, himself, is THE editor. The instructions for authors of this self-published journal (below) are rather revealing. Papers are judged for publication based on their “biblical stand” and other religious criteria. Specifically, the instructions for authors states “The editor-in-chief will not be afraid to reject a paper if it does not properly satisfy the above criteria or if it conflicts with the best interests of AiG as judged by its biblical stand and goals outlined in its statement of faith.” This is, quite obviously, not what a real science journal would do. The paper was not submitted, to my knowledge, to a peer-reviewed journal such as Geological Society of America Bulletin, Geology, or any of a number of journals devoted to structural geology. If Answers in Genesis really wishes to convince the scientific community as to the validity of their claims, why is this? Wouldn’t impressing the scientific community with convincing arguments be more important than convincing laypeople and potential donors if AiG’s goals were honorable?

The claims that these rocks were soft when deformed have been presented by young earth creationists for a number of years and geologists find them laughable because of evidence to the contrary and creationist’s apparent ignorance of the dynamics of how folded rocks form. See for example a chapter on this very subject in the book Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth. Available here: https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Canyon-Monument-Ancient-Earth/dp/0825444217

The press-release for the paper put out by AiG is found below.

Here are the instructions for authors of Answers Research Journal: https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/research-journal/instructions-to-authors.pdf

See especially page 13:

Answers Research Journal’s instructions for authors-

“VIII. Paper Review Process

Upon the reception of a paper, the editor-in-chief will follow the procedures below: A. Notify the author of the paper’s receipt
B. Review the paper for possible inclusion into the ARJ review process
The following criteria will be used in judging papers:
1. Is the paper’s topic important to the development of the Creation and Flood model?
2. Does the paper’s topic provide an original contribution to the Creation and Flood model?
3. Is this paper formulated within a young-earth, young-universe framework?
4. If the paper discusses claimed evidence for an old earth and/or universe, does this paper offer a very constructively positive criticism and provide a possible young-earth, young-universe alternative?
5. If the paper is polemical in nature, does it deal with a topic rarely discussed within the origins debate?
6. Does this paper provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammatical-historical/normative interpretation of Scripture? If necessary, refer to the following: R. E. Walsh, 1986. “Biblical Hermeneutics and Creation.” In Proceedings First International Conference on Creationism, vol. 1, 121–127. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship.
Remark:
The editor-in-chief will not be afraid to reject a paper if it does not properly satisfy the above criteria or if it conflicts with the best interests of AiG as judged by its biblical stand and goals outlined in its statement of faith. The editors play a very important initial role in preserving a high level of quality in the ARJ, as well as protecting AiG from unnecessary controversy and review of clearly inappropriate papers.”

Here is the press release AiG issued today.

Creation Scientist’s Ground-Breaking Research at Grand Canyon Published

4-Year Study Helps Confirm Rapid Formation of the Canyon’s Layers by Massive Flooding

Petersburg, Kentucky, June 23, 2021 – A bedrock belief of evolutionary geologists has been convincingly undermined today with the publication of ground-breaking Grand Canyon research conducted by geologist Dr. Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis (AiG).

A scientist with the highest credentials, Dr. Snelling spent more than four years studying layers in the walls of Grand Canyon in Arizona, especially where those rock layers are not lying flat but are folded. Dr. Snelling, a creationist, has just released his stunning findings in the peer-reviewed Answers Research Journal. His research helps confirm a rapid formation of those massive Canyon layers and contradicts the belief that they were formed over millions of years, as is commonly accepted by geologists. His in-depth paper can be found at https://answersingenesis.org/geology/rock-layers/petrology-tapeats-sandstone-tonto-group/.

Throughout Grand Canyon, thick rock layers appear which are smoothly bent (some close to being at a right angle—see photo). Dr. Snelling observes: “Normally, solid rock cannot bend without breaking, so this leaves only two options for bending: either the rock layer was bent while still soft, shortly after being deposited by water, or after the layer had fully hardened, it was bent by pressures which made the rock plastic, like playdough. Geologists who believe the layers were laid down over millions of years accept the latter option.”

Dr. Snelling points out that for hardened rock to bend without breaking, it must undergo metamorphic changes in its mineral content as well as its structure, including at the microscopic level. At the outset of his research, his question was: is there any evidence of the hard rock in the bent layers being metamorphosed?

Dr. Snelling examined samples from two prominent folds in Grand Canyon. His research concluded: “By comparing the Tapeats Sandstone samples from the folds with other Tapeats Sandstone samples located far from the folds, no metamorphism has occurred. Therefore, our four-year research project confirms that these rock layers were bent while they were still soft, after rapid deposition.” Dr. Snelling also concludes: “This is tremendous evidence that the Canyon’s rock layers were laid down during a massive flood and subsequently bent before any of the layers had hardened.” Dr. Snelling suggests this evidence is consistent with the effects of Noah’s flood and its aftermath.

The “uniformitarian” argument—namely, that the layers of rock (or “strata”) at huge canyons like Grand Canyon were laid down over millions of years—has been powerfully challenged by this seminal study of rocks Dr. Snelling personally collected inside the folds of the canyon.

The quandary now for those who argue for millions of years for the canyon’s layering is: how could these hard layers, which were bent supposedly 450 million years after they formed, not shatter during the bending process? Dr. Snelling declares: “Observational science tells us that rock layers must be soft when they fold. But over the supposed 450 million years, how could they possibly have remained soft until they were then bent?”

Ken Ham, CEO and founder of AiG, states: “Dr. Snelling’s monumental research confirms what should be obvious to all geologists: such folds must have been formed relatively quickly before the thick rock layers hardened. It’s a major blow to long-age geologic thinking.”

Dr. Snelling, with an earned doctorate in geology from one of the world’s leading institutions, the University of Sydney, had long recognized that more creationist research in geology was needed to explain the formation of the massive layers exposed in canyon systems around the world—and whether they could be explained catastrophically (e.g., massive flooding) as opposed to the dogma of uniformitarian long-age thinking. (The arguments for a global flood, including from Dr. Snelling’s decades of research, are presented at AiG’s attractions, the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum.)

The evolutionists’ story about the formation of Grand Canyon in Arizona is that the rock layers at the Canyon were laid down over very long ages. Then the Canyon was carved through them over millions of years by the slow erosive powers of the Colorado River. Because of their dogmatic thinking, officials and academics associated with Grand Canyon National Park tried to prevent Dr. Snelling from conducting this study, expressing disdain in emails about his religious and creationist beliefs. In 2017, international media reported that Dr. Snelling finally received the research permits he had first requested from the park in 2014 so that he could continue his field work inside the canyon. Presented with the clear-cut, documented evidence of an anti-Christian bias in the permits’ denial, the Departments of Justice and the Interior agreed; the Grand Canyon National Park changed course and issued Dr. Snelling’s research permits.

Ham hailed Dr. Snelling’s research: “This scientist with top credentials has offered powerful new evidence of the rapid formation of Grand Canyon’s layers during the global flood of Noah’s day followed by the canyon’s quick formation. His superb work exemplifies AiG’s ongoing original research, conducted by full-time PhD scientists from renowned institutions who have published in leading science journals. Our faculty also work in other fields such as genetics, paleontology, and astronomy to help confirm the Genesis account of origins as well as Noah’s flood.”
Research Background

Dr. Snelling collected rock samples on a research trip through the Grand Canyon in August 2017 in order to investigate the nature of the folding of strata in the Canyon. Dr. Snelling stated: “The Tapeats Sandstone is a formation 30-100 meters thick that prominently outcrops through the walls of Grand Canyon for about 500 kilometres. Erosion of the underlying Precambrian basement rocks produced what’s well-known in geological circles as the ‘The Great Unconformity,’ upon which the Tapeats Sandstone was deposited. The Great Unconformity, in fact, has been traced across several continents.”

Dr. Snelling added: “The mineralogical content, textural features, sedimentary structures, continental-scale deposition, paleocurrent directions matching continental patterns, and even the tracks and traces of transitory invertebrates, all indicate rapid burial and are consistent with the catastrophic erosion of the Great Unconformity near the initiation of the global Genesis flood cataclysm, only about 4,350 years ago.”

Dr. Snelling is a member of eight professional geology groups. One of his prior research projects included a study at the Koongarra uranium deposit in Australia. Dr. Snelling is also the author of the two-volume Earth’s Catastrophic Past and hundreds of articles on geology. Several more articles are to come on Dr. Snelling’s original research at Grand Canyon.

To read Dr. Snelling’s research paper, visit: https://answersingenesis.org/arj.

Answers in Genesis is an apologetics (i.e., Bible-affirming) ministry based in northern Kentucky. Its Ark Encounter opened in 2016 and features a 510-foot-long Noah’s ark. West of the Cincinnati Airport and next to the AiG headquarters, the Creation Museum has also become a major family attraction. Both venues are experiencing huge crowds this month, with some record-setting days.

Conservatives don’t understand the military

They dragged in a general to testify about critical race theory. They didn’t get the answer they expected.

I suspect that generals are better educated overall than senators (amused that they cut away briefly to Matt Gaetz, shaking his head in…hey, why is that corrupt Floridian still in office anyway?). The enlisted personnel are definitely more diverse than the Senate. It was a real eye-opener for me when I actually visited a couple of army bases, visiting my son, and noticing that the people working there are much more diverse than even at my liberal university.

If the right-wingers, which includes so many chickenhawks, think they can automatically get the support of the military, they better think again. This is not to say liberals do understand the military, or that the army will support the left wing, but that they’re a separate perspective that doesn’t neatly fit into our civilian categories. The best thing to do is leave them out of politics, and encourage them to continue to be independent of that role.