North Korea and Fundie Christians

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Michael

Since the death of bin Laden, North Korea has been attempting to suppress spread of the news:

North Korea has started a drive to confiscate mobile phones smuggled from China in an attempt to suppress news from the outside world, a group of defectors from the communist state said.

North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said in its latest newsletter police in North Hamkyong and Yangkang provinces bordering Russia and China have started urging residents to voluntarily surrender mobile phones or face punishment.

This is to be expected from North Korea. It is a place led by cowards who know accurate information, knowledge, and considered thought will undermine their worldview.

So that got me thinking. Who else does that? Who else refuses to make people aware of what the opposition is saying? Who else avoids facts like the plague? Why, fundie Christians, of course. It happens to PZ all the time with the Creation ‘Museum’ people. One creationist even did it to me. And I’ve seen it in countless other places. (Punching Bag Neil loves to do it, the coward.)

So can someone remind me where Jesus said that cowardice was a virtue?

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Sam Harris and William Lane Craig

Posted on April 9, 2011 by Michael

I’m just beginning this debate, but I thought I’d throw it up here now for anyone who wants to watch.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Creationism | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Punching bags

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Michael

Once again Neil has proved a great resource for punching bags. Following the link to one of his commenter’s blogs, I found this link to Cornelius Hunter. The guy has written an anti-science book or two and works for – you guessed it – the anti-science Discovery Institute. He has a post about convergent evolution, something he doesn’t appear to understand.

Imagine a future space explorer who travels to a distant galaxy and discovers an inhabited planet with an advanced civilization. In his visit he tours a great art museum. The halls are adorned with many beautiful paintings, but as the traveler walks through the museum an eerie feeling of deja vu overtakes him. The various exhibits he observes show different styles and movements that are uncannily similar to what he is familiar with from his home planet. Even particular paintings are incredibly similar to what he remembers.

Ergo, God.

But despite making his entire argument, and roughly half of the arguments from the Discovery Institute, Hunter continues.

This would be eerie because this high similarity has occurred for no apparent reason.

Well, gosh, he surely can’t be implying that convergent evolution happens for no apparent reason, can he? Because we do know that similar environments are a major cause. When two distantly related species which do not share a (recent) common ancestor are each in a similar environment with a similar niche to fill, they may both well fill it. Hunter may as well be saying that evolution itself happens for no apparent reason. We either know or can infer the reasons behind why many traits evolve. That they sometimes evolve independently and then converge does not throw the world of evolution on its head.

A million different paintings are possible, the traveler would never expect to see such similarity in independent masterpieces.

Except Earth doesn’t have a million different environments, broadly-speaking. And life has been around for 4 billion years. And not every option is equally viable. The odds, it turns out, really aren’t so bad. At least, ya know, when we feel like using facts and junk.

The level of convergence in biology has been found to be amazing in recent decades. Strikingly similar designs run all through the biological world. Such similarities do not bode well for evolution because (i) they are supposed to be independently created by chance events,

Chance? Nope. Wrong. They are created via nonrandom natural selection acting on populations that usually exist in similar environments and therefore have similar needs and/or possible outcomes.

(ii) often they must have arisen in different initial conditions,

The foundation of biology isn’t turned on its head because organisms use a different starting point. In fact, we ought to expect many different starting conditions; we see different biochemical pathways, different genes, and even different (sometimes subtle) morphology which all indicate differing evolutionary histories. That these pathways converge is indicative of patterns in the way life operates, not of the Jesus answer Hunter wants. Indeed, instead of Hunter’s anti-science response of “Nuh-uh, couldn’ta happen’d!”, we have some very interesting questions raised through ever-increasing discovery.

(iii) often they are found in different environments

So? Similar environment is the big cause, but that doesn’t make it the only cause.

(iv) the design space is large

This is just a repeat of his analogy. It’s still wrong.

How can we understand these strikingly similar masterpieces?

Well it really isn’t so difficult after all. You see, if our eye evolved once, then why not twice? Evolution is a story of serendipity, so why not add a bit more? Accepting the evolution of life requires a credulous mind. Once evolution is accepted as fact, all kind of events can be accommodated.

In other words, convergent evolution proves Jesus because it’s really hard to understand. If that’s the case, then I think Jesus is proven to Hunter all the time. Also, convergent evolution is false because, um, uh, ’cause things can’t convergently evolve.

Consider how evolutionist Simon Conway Morris explains convergence at the Map of Life website that documents convergences. Incredibly, for Morris, not only is convergence not a problem for evolution, it actually is yet another proof text. The message from biology’s massive convergence is “First, that evolution is true.”

First, Hunter doesn’t link to any explanation of convergence. He links to the page that describes the aims of Morris’ website. Second, it is the message of the website that evolution is true, not of convergent evolution. Call me crazy, but if a theory can be said to have a message, I would say convergent evolution’s message is that, in evolution, convergence happens. But maybe I’m just being wacky.

And how do these convergences help support such an amazing conclusion? Morris explains that biology’s very complex structures, such as the bacterial flagellar motor, “evolved independently at least twice.”

In other words, if you think complexity argues against evolution, just look—convergence reveals independent versions, which of course must have evolved. Such independent evolution proves such structures can’t be too complex.

…what? Convergent evolution doesn’t mean that something is therefore simple (though a strong case has been made for Hunter’s simplicity). Very complex structures or characteristics or traits can come about through evolution while landing on a similar spot or the same spot. Hunter’s conclusion has no relation to anything any real biologist has ever said.

Next please.

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Dear creationists,

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Michael

We ought to have a rule: if you can’t read the research and comprehend it, you shouldn’t be writing about it.

~PZ

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: | 6 Comments »

Ken Ham is a real piece of shit

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Michael

Ken Ham, that dishonest creationist D-bag with a ‘museum’, recently held a “Date Night” where he spouted off about “love” and his own, personal ideas concerning marriage. People were allowed to buy tickets for the Christian price of about $72. And, as you do with events about “love”, Ham had security goons posted all over the place. That led to some problems.

Three of us (myself, my girlfriend and our friend Brandon) passed the security checkpoint despite minor scrutiny. We arrived right at 6:00 p.m.; Ken Ham was just beginning his talk of love in the museum’s special effects room, and we were eager to hear it. Brandon’s “date,” Joe of Barefoot & Progressive, was late, and so the solo Brandon was the focus of much interest for the two guards, who carried the air of actual police.

“What kind of car will she be driving?” asked one of the guards. They wanted to know so they could keep strict tabs on who came into the museum.

“Oh,” I said. “His partner’s name is Joe. I think he drives one of those hybrids…”

You can guess how things went from there. The gay couple was denied entry for not being very Christian and Ham continued on about “love”. It’s weird, isn’t it? There is no way to resolve what makes one person more or less Christian than the next when both stake a claim to that awful title, yet people still seem to think otherwise. It’s a wonderful exercise is pure subjectivity.

Of course, none of this may have happened if the state was different. Kentucky has no law granting equality to its gay citizens. Maine and about 20-25 others states do (depending on the exact extent of equality being discussed). So as it stands, Ham’s immorality is perfectly legal right now, even if ultimately unconstitutional. That’s terrible, but at least it will be easier for future generations to see his sort of bigotry for how absurd it really is; I predict in 35-40 years that the actions of Ham and his goons will be widely viewed much as we would view them if they did this to a black couple today.

Filed under: Creationism, News | Tagged: , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Expected distortions

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Michael

Michael Behe recently had a paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology, a non-creationist journal. Here is Jerry Coyne’s conclusion:

Behe has provided a useful survey of mutations that cause adaptation in short-term lab experiments on microbes (note that at least one of these—Rich Lenski’s study— extends over several decades). But his conclusions may be misleading when you extend them to bacterial or viral evolution in nature, and are certainly misleading if you extend them to eukaryotes (organisms with complex cells), for several reasons:

Go to Professor Coyne’s site for the whole review.

It’s all fair enough and no one is really up in arms about Behe’s paper itself. But isn’t it interesting how quickly the creationist intelligent design crowd started distorting the facts?

Over at the intelligent-design site Uncommon Descent, the ever befuddled Denyse O’Leary has already glommed onto the review I wrote yesterday of Michael Behe’s new paper. And, exactly as I predicted, she distorts Behe’s conclusions:

So, not only must the long, slow process of Darwinian evolution create every exotic form of life in the blink of a geological eye, but it must do so by losing or modifying what a life form already has.

In other words, she’s extended Behe’s conclusions, based on viral and bacterial evolution in the lab, to evolution of “every exotic form of life” on the planet. This is exactly what one cannot do with Behe’s conclusions.

It really isn’t a surprise that this happened; Creationists are always distorting scientific papers – and specifically so they can prop up their religious beliefs. I’m just impressed with the utter accuracy of Professor Coyne’s prediction.

This distortion is hardly news, of course—I’m completely confident that Behe not only expected it, but approves of it—but I feel compelled to highlight it once again. Luskin’s three distortions, which correspond to the three caveats attached to Behe’s results:

1. Luskin doesn’t mention that Behe’s analysis concentrated only on short-term laboratory studies of adaptation in bacteria and viruses.

2. Luskin also doesn’t mention that these experiments deliberately excluded an important way that bacteria and viruses gain new genetic elements in nature: through horizontal uptake of DNA from other organisms. This kind of uptake was prohibited by the design of the experiments.

3. Luskin implies that Behe’s conclusions extend to all species, including eukaryotes, even though we know that members of this group (and even some bacteria) can gain new genetic elements and information via gene duplication and divergence. And we know that this has happened repeatedly and pervasively in the course of evolution.

About an hour ago I finished up my last assignment for this semester, and man, it’s always a relief when that special moment arrives. But after reading this creationist intelligent design proponent garbage, I’m already getting antsy to go back and continue with my legitimate education.

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Re: Dembski-Hitchens debate

Posted on November 24, 2010 by Michael

I’m currently watching the Dembski-Hitchens debate now that it’s back up. I’m embarrassed. And in two ways. First, you know that feeling you get when you watch someone doing something incredibly awkward and you actually feel embarrassed for that person? That’s how I feel about Dembski right now. He keeps repeating the same creationist canards. They have all been addressed. He needs to find something new (and maybe something factually true? I’m not sure if that touches on any of his personal interests, though). And second, I’m embarrassed that I had some initial surprise when he started going over all this garbage. I should have known better.

Update: Holy crap. I can’t believe he just implied that for something to be vestigial that it must be useless.

Update: Most of Dembski’s end is just a series of personal attacks on Hitchens.

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Dembski-Hitchens debate

Posted on November 21, 2010 by Michael

I have yet to watch this, but I thought I’d throw out a link to the Dembski-Hitchens debate anyway.

via Why Evolution Is True

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Cowardice

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Michael

We all know Jack Hudson. He’s an intellectual coward who hates gays because he’s personally insecure with his own (immature) sexuality. He once texted my cousin several dozen times from several different track phones because of a Facebook tiff. His writing leaves a lot to be desired. He willingly lies about evolution and Hitler (you know, Hitler – the guy who was a Christian creationist). One has to wonder why he doesn’t argue that the theory of gravity leads to V2 rockets. (I’m kidding. It’s obvious that such an argument doesn’t fuel his fundamentally dishonest agenda.) He is confused about his own ideas on what morality is. He will constantly quote from either FTSOS, status updates on the FTSOS Facebook page, or even from random people on that Facebook page. He doesn’t get really simple things. He even believes that Judith Jarvis Thompson’s analysis of the Trolley Problem is an issue of logistics, showing his utter ignorance of philosophy and thought experiments. (This is one of the most risible things he has ever said.) A high percentage of his posts are just responses to FTSOS posts – except, since he is literally the most dishonest person with which I have ever personally interacted, he refuses to cite me as his reference. When (for the nth time) he was called on his aversion to honesty, he continued with his lies and claimed he doesn’t get his cues from me. However, once I listed out at least five posts going back only a month and a half which showed his responses to original posts I was making, he was finally caught by the evidence, causing him to feebly fess up. He is laughably ignorant of biology, refusing to read papers he is dishonestly citing in his posts; this is understandable since he only has a few basic biology courses under his belt from over 20 years ago, not any substantial education in the field. And, best of all, he makes physical threats based upon jokes. I find this one the most entertaining because it reminds me of something a psychology graduate student friend of mine told me. He told me of a counseling session he had with some troubled youths. They asked him, ‘Hey, man, wouldn’t you be offended if someone said somethin’ about yo’ momma?”, referring to “Your Momma” jokes. My friend, being intelligent, of course said he wouldn’t be offended. The jokes are insignificant and without any real meaning. The troubled youths were amazed by this. Apparently vague, unimportant, mild, trivial jokes are really good at offending poorly educated people. And that was the case with Jack when I made a quip about his excessive weight.

You know Michael, I almost never feel compelled to deal with anyone physically, but you are very lucky your puny little bank teller body is in Maine, because i would kick your butt from one side of the room to the other if you said that to my face. Of course you wouldn’t because you are a coward.

For someone who pretends to be morally superior because of his false beliefs, Jack is awfully violent.

I’ve waited to bring up this quote last in all my links because I have linked to it in the past on Jack’s blog. He quickly deleted it. It’s obvious he’s embarrassed by what he said. He ought to be. But the correct, adult response is to just apologize in that case. I did. It isn’t that hard. Being wrong once in awhile or making a mistake here or there is part of being human. But maybe Jack is just trying to emulate the temper tantrums of Jesus, I don’t know.

The reason I’m making this post is simply because of Jack’s penchant for censorship. He’s as linguistically immature as he is sexually immature. He has a habit of deleting any naughty word that shows up where he has editing control. I disagree with him on that because he’s bastardizing not only language but also the intent of other writers. He’s in the wrong. But now he has taken everything up a notch. Not content with deleting individual words he finds offensive, he has taken to deleting absolutely any post I make on his blog. Part of the reason stems from his childishness. Part of the reason stems from the fact that he has never won a single debate in his entire life and it upsets him to get intellectually destroyed so often. Part of the reason stems from the fact that I’m sure he wanted to enjoy me typing out my responses only to find I had wasted my time; he could have just blocked my IP. (Perhaps I should have realized I was wasting my time when I first encountered the guy’s terrible – and fundamentally dishonest – arguments. Or, as he would say, arguements.)

What really makes me sad about all this, though, is that Jack is from Minnesota. I’m not going to hate an entire state because of one foolish liar, but man. It’s the home of PZ Myers and – far, far more importantly – the birthplace of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s a shame he has to be such a black mark on an otherwise fine location.

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

Butchering science

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Michael

Creationists hate science. They hate its conclusions, they hate its methods, they hate that it doesn’t support their silly beliefs. It’s that hatred that motivates them to butcher scientific articles and papers.

One recent butchering comes from Jack Hudson. I’m sure regulars here remember him. If not, it isn’t important. He’s a creationist with a background in introductory biology courses from 20 years ago. It’s doubtful he has much experience reading scientific papers, but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

In his post he butchers two articles. I’m going to focus on the first one, but I’ll briefly mention the second one. In that one researchers found that some negative mutations don’t change the protein sequence yet they are still negative. This one is simple. The entire sequence of a gene is not devoted to just the protein sequence. A mutation can therefore change one aspect of a gene without changing another – but it can still change another process that is important in forming proteins. Alter shape in one place and you have a good chance of seeing change somewhere else as a result. Biology is still all about shape.

The second paper, though. Woo. What a doozy of a butchering. First let me summarize the paper.

In asexual populations alleles can become fixed rather quickly. Their evolution is more straight forward because they aren’t mixing and matching genes. They produce offspring with the exact same genome, less there be a mutation. If there is a mutation, it can become fixed because things are generally less complicated with asexual populations and thus more black and white. Is this mutation good or bad? As the paper says and as Jack repeats upon hearing the term for the first time, alleles sweep through a population.

But when it comes to sexually reproducing populations, things become more complicated. And this is what the paper is about. The question is, do alleles sweep through populations in sexually reproducing populations like they do in asexual populations? The answer is no.

Now, if we’re to believe Jack, this means that evolution has failed because, why, evolution predicts an advantageous allele to reach 100% fixation, of course. Except it isn’t so black and white with sexually reproducing populations. (Nor does evolution predict that anyway.)

What the researchers did was study over 600 generations of fruit flies. They let them breed naturally, but then selected out the eggs which were produced the most quickly. This led to significantly faster reproducing populations. They then tracked specific alleles to see if they would become fixed. What they found was that they don’t.

Signatures of selection are qualitatively different than what has been observed in asexual species; in our sexual populations, adaptation is not associated with ‘classic’ sweeps whereby newly arising, unconditionally advantageous mutations become fixed. More parsimonious explanations include ‘incomplete’ sweep models, in which mutations have not had enough time to fix, and ‘soft’ sweep models, in which selection acts on pre-existing, common genetic variants. We conclude that, at least for life history characters such as development time, unconditionally advantageous alleles rarely arise, are associated with small net fitness gains or cannot fix because selection coefficients change over time.

The conclusion here is that selection for a particular trait in sexually reproducing populations acts upon many different aspects and genetic variants within the genome, not merely a single gene or SNP.

This suggests that selection does not readily expunge genetic variation in sexual populations, a finding which in turn should motivate efforts to discover why this is seemingly the case.

This is the actual conclusion of the paper. To put it another way (and to repeat myself), advantageous variants do not wipe out other genetic variants in a sexually reproducing population, instead acting on variation in a more subtle and complicated way. The big conclusion here is that there is a difference in how genes become fixed (or not fixed) in asexual populations versus sexually reproducing populations.

And Jack’s conclusion?

In short, if the activity failed to occur in the lab under optimal conditions, it is unlikely that traits are going to be transmitted this way in nature.

The traits are still being transmitted through natural selection working on variation. Jack’s conclusion has little to no connection to anything from the paper. In fact, it is abundantly clear that he read an article somewhere, figured out how to butcher it, and then went and read a few lines from the original paper.

I’ve said in the past that what takes a creationist 30 seconds to say takes an educated person 3 hours to correct. This post and the research required for it didn’t take that long, but the sentiment remains true – it’s a real hassle to untangle the carelessly mushed writings of a creationist.

Filed under: Creationism, Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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