Jerry Coyne seems to have just discovered World Net Daily — at least, he’s surprised that a conservative publication would go after evolution. Think again; WND is notoriously demented. It’s full of birthers and other crazies, and they insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and fully accept the argument from Ussher’s chronology.
So he finds an article by a creationist apologist, Carl Gallups, and now I’m surprised: he discovers an original argument for creationism. In addition to insisting that no transitional fossils have other been found, he has a “creative” explanation for molecular similarities between species: it’s so they can eat each other.
When we ingest other living things, the DNA of those living things (fruits, vegetables, nuts, meats, etc.) just happens to be compatible with our DNA so that cellular respiration can take place. If it were not for the fact that our DNA is so akin to all other living things, we could not eat. If we could not eat, we would die.
Is the process of eating and cellular respiration the result of a mere fluke of evolution? Alternatively, could it be that a common Designer made certain that the process of eating and cellular respiration would function in such a precise and perfect manner? Which answer appears to be the most probable to you?
If the supposed cosmic and random happenstance of evolution was the real reason that all living things exist, why, when, and how did this happenstance mechanism decide that living things needed to eat anything in the first place? Would it not be odd that evolution should come up with the idea of food and energy creation through cellular respiration?
Cellular respiration is an astoundingly complex, energy-expending system. Yet in order for life to be sustained, living things must have other living things to ingest. What an odd thing for a mere cosmic coincidence to develop, by random generation. Is it not a strange convenience for evolution that all living things have such unimaginable DNA similarity that cellular respiration is possible?
It’s an impressive example of the difference between certainty and knowledge. Gallups is absolutely certain that he’s correct, but what he reveals in his writings is an absolute absence of knowledge about the subject he’s talking about.
Digestion does not require DNA template matching. DNA is a tiny fraction of the content of our food; we’re mostly after proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. When I eat a banana, I don’t rely on sequence matching at all: the masticated banana gets dumped into an acid bath with enzymes (my stomach) that breaks it down chemically, and then moves on to my small intestine where further enzymes demolish the structure of the polymers in the banana. For instance, nucleases dismantle the DNA strands, breaking them down into individual nucleotides, and those are then absorbed into my intestinal walls and used as an energy source and recycled into building my DNA and RNA.
I’m always dismayed at the way these bozos can rant on about metabolism and use fancy words like “cellular respiration”, declaring that they disprove evolution, yet they don’t understand one single thing, not even the most basic concepts, about the process. It’s rather dishonest.
No one with any understanding of eating disorders, food allergies, ulcer formation, stomach and intestinal cancers, obesity or any of the other myriad problems associated with the act of ingesting, digesting, metabolising and eliminating food would be fool enough to suggest that any aspect of the process was ‘perfect’.
In order to argue that this, or any other aspect of our physiology, was ‘designed’ one would have to accept that the notional designer in question was utterly incompetant, monstrously sadistic, or both.
That such systems evolved through the thoroughly imperfect evolutionary process of ‘survival of the barely adequate’ is vastly more parsimonious.
I tend to think that the DNA content of the pasta I ate for lunch (and the butter and the salt that go with it, and the water I drank) isn’t much more than infinitesimal traces. But, hey, who knows, there might be some kind of homeopathic effect?
It all makes so much sense, evolution is a random piece of crap and could never come up with a process like eating, where living things were dependent on continuing their survival by requiring a constant stream of resources.
Only God in his infinite wisdom could have thought about it…um..because…? Well we all know he likes suffering, and you can’t make kids starve to death if they don’t require food. Besides, it’s not like God could have made people not need food…um, because the fall…or something, I guess he’s not all that all powerful.
…Soo, what does this Gallups dude think plants eat?
It looks to me like someone ran across the chirality issue and decided to take it a step further. After all, if life on Earth is based on levorotary amino acids (therefore requiring God to intervene to choose the handedness of life’s chemistry), then surely DNA must have similar compatibility issues. Hence God, again. It’s a brilliant creationist breakthrough!
We get the same thing in Physics – use a bunch of sciencey words about quantum mechanics, and explain all sorts of froo – homeopathy, telekinesis, ESP, magic bracelets ….
I was just reading about the bracelets – the seller’s website claimed that certain things have high frequency, others low – like it was a component of the material. “Low frequency” doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of it.
Oh my! I ate a banana for breakfast this morning and my cellular respiration mixed up my genetic code with that of a banana! It’s my worst nightmare!
Is it really dishonest, or stupid, or ignorant…
OR
Can I really be arsed to differentiate? It is creationism, it is all of that and many more things. Who really cares?
There is a basic problem with the idea that to disagree with something, there is no obligation to have any idea about what that something is. Making stuff up is sufficient and a lot easier than learning something. Our society in general seems to think that this is reasonable.
Well, props for a new argument.
It’s one of their worst, but at least it’s new.
heh, yeah, I just saw this. PZ hits the nail on the head; it’s a case of not knowing even a little bit about what one is talking about. Dr. Coyne seems a little naive in that post, and he struggles mightily to figure out what the daily-world-nutter meant by his cell-sciency word-salad. What I said:
Plants?
Eat?
Plants don’t eat, you silly!
Ever see a plant place a drive-through order?
HA! Q!E!D!
Plants, as every good God-fearing decent person knows, live solely through the Grace of God. Especially lilies.
Wow. The confidence it must take to make up crazy-ass stuff about a subject you know absolutely nothing about and then sign your name to it is astouding. Of course, credo quia absurdum est is the starting point for these guys…
Great! That is the best argument for cannibalism I’ve ever heard.
So where does salt figure into this DNA matching digestion theory?
ding ding ding
He’s on the right track, but being anthropocentric, he misses the key point. God based everything on DNA so that the viruses would have a hospitable environment to live and play in. Clearly it’s the viruses that are god’s special creation.
That leaves the “God loves beetles” line in the dust.
“… if life on Earth is based on levorotary amino acids … ”
Surely this must imply that The Right is just wrong.
And bananas. Bananas! Triploid!! Evidence that threesomes are approved by The Designer.
What is the nucleic acid content of total parenteral nutrition formulations?
I wonder how the anti-vax gang view this. Some of them go quite apoplectic about contaminating precious bodily fluids with alien DNA or RNA, and here is someone saying it is necessary.
“Hey, you got Dunning in my Kruger!”
“YOU got Kruger in my Dunning!”
“It’s delicious!”
Ok, I have to apologize for what I’m sure will seem to many here as an elementary observation (I’m just an electrician, with only a high school education- 1976, in Gulfport, MS, at that), but… this doesn’t, at bottom, sound like anything but an extension of the “fine-tuning” idea, that the universe was “designed” to accommodate us, rather than the other way around. It’s an inference of design from what is actually only necessity, or contingency. Doesn’t sound like anything new to me at all- even the certainty from ignorance is old.
I see Gallups isn’t overestimating the intelligence of his target audience.
Does this doofus even realize that the shared DNA of all organisms is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence for universal common descent, ie evolution, there is?
And the need for organisms to eat other organisms is the source of almost all the pain and suffering in the natural world, and is one of the most compelling arguments against design by anything that could remotely be described as benevolent?
thisisaturingtest @ 21;
You are right on the money – it is just a slighty new and novel wrapping for a core idea that is as old as creationist blather itself.
“Is it not a strange convenience for evolution that all living things have such unimaginable DNA similarity…”
Even if the respiration thing were true, the rest of the argument doesn’t make any sense. All living things have DNA similarity because we descended from a common ancestor.
Plants eat dirt and air.
Of course, humans were created out of dirt and given the breath of life.
So, plants eat people.
Logic!
Many people seem like latter-day vitalists about DNA, thinking that it’s some sort of magic molecule. That may explain a lot of that creationist’s talking about DNA.
The fact is, DNA and its relative RNA are not much of the organisms and organism parts that we usually eat. We aren’t even well-adapted for eating a lot of nucleic acid — it can give us gout. That’s why it’s necessary to destroy the nucleic acid to make the likes of Spirulina safe for us to eat.
Maybe the evidence that sex serves largely as a defense against parasites would convince the sciencey-justifying types to drop the toxic gender-essentialism…? Nah, didn’t think so.
puh shaw
You’re obviously not a Breatharian.
That… what… arg!
Sorry, reading that made my brain crash.
Please excuse me while I go and reboot it.
mmmmmmm….banaaaanas….
Yes, this is a variation of the Fine-Tuning Argument, and remarkably similar to the folk apologetic of “Isn’t it amazing that we live on a planet that’s capable of sustaining life? What are the odds?!”
Like suzysalaksartok at #3, I also wonder why God is given credit for hitting a small target when God presumably doesn’t have to hit any target: He’s not working within a system — He’s creating whatever He wants. Whatever happens, however things are, regardless of the set-up, all processes would then be said to be functioning “in a precise and perfect manner.”
If existing as a person had nothing whatsoever to do with being “alive” and we existed only as spiritual forms wafting through a cosmic area devoid of oxygen, wouldn’t everything also be set up in a “precise and perfect manner?” If people didn’t need to eat to live, but only needed to bang rocks together every two hours, wouldn’t we be marveling that rocks have been so uniquely placed on the ground for our benefit? They might have been floating in the upper atmosphere or the earth might so easily have been made of cheese. What are the odds?
We marvel at the accuracy of a sharpshooter because he or she has done something difficult — hit a target that has been set up so it’s hard to hit. God could just throw something anywhere at all and, given that we exist, we draw a circle around it. Ooh, look — right in the center!!11!111!!!
Good toss!
@ Amphiox
Seconded.
Occam would like to give this Gallups a shave.
Hey, how about the fact that you can splice a human gene into the DNA of E. coli and the baterial ribosomes will churn out functional human insulin? “unimaginable DNA similarity” FTW! Checkmate, evolutionists!
Zeno,
Not exactly. Life on Earth is based on L-amino acids, but they aren’t all levorotatory (L-alanine, for example, is actually dextrorotatory if I’m not misremembering). The D/L nomenclature is based on whether the structure of the molecule is analogous to that of the dextrorotatory or the levorotatory form of glyceraldehyde. The dextrorotatory/levorotatory nomenclature is based on how the molecule rotates polarized light. And these two are not equivalent, they don’t always coincide.
Sastra @#32:
It seems to me like the same mistake they make in their “watchmaker” analogy- a failure of context. The inference they draw from the “watchmaker” analogy fails because the analogy, between a watch lying in a desert proving design through implication of a designer, and all of “creation,” depends on disregarding the different contexts of the two scenarios. The watch lying in the desert is obviously an artifact, and therefore has a maker, only because of the contrast between artificial watch and natural desert. In the case of “creation” (or, as I like to call it, “the universe”), there is no such contrast- the universe is all there is, so there is nothing to contrast it with. With a sample size of one, no extrapolation is possible as to others (or “Other”). They simply don’t understand (or deliberately misuse) context.
So this fuckwit thinks we are what we eat therefore god?
Looks like he’s been eating morons then.
Louis
I sometimes see a similar phenomenon on O-chem exams. Students will presumably be unable to answer a question (or too lazy or intimidated to think about it) but instead of leaving it blank they will write a sequence of meaningless sentences wherein they regurgitate as much vocabulary from the lecture as possible. A colleague of mine calls this approach “spray and pray”.
@36 but isn’t the desert designed as well? Why can’t we find the design elements – the irreducible complexity if you will – of the desert itself should be evidence of a designer. Yet it isn’t.
I like it even better when they use Mount Rushmore. The mountain with the faces is clearly designed. But, I say, you claim that all the mountains are designed…
So, if you took the dna out…you could not eat the banana? Is that what he is claiming?
Once in a while GRADERS go by whether answers mentioned the right words, too (live or computer-based) so sometimes this actually works. Blech.
So I guess the fact that the internal combustion engine requires a power source that does not share its chemical makeup is evidence that cars evolved, right?
Hurinomyces bruxellensis #38 wrote:
I like that. It describes most pseudoscience.
Woo-ists of all stripes generally like to avoid experts in the field. No matter how much you pray or spray, they know when you’re winging it. Instead, it’s populist appeals like
Yup. Folks puttin’ all that high-falutin’ fancy-pants technical science stuff through their common sense filter. You can trust that every time.
I like to change the context of “the watchmaker” analogy a bit:
“Suppose you were crossing a heath and you come across what looks like a dead rabbit. So you examine it carefully and note that it is made of cloth, is stitched together, and has a “Beanie Baby” tag sticking out the butt. What do you infer?”
@Gregory Greenwood
Even more basic than that, we eat with the same passage we breathe with. It’s bad enough that we both breathe in and out of the same passage, but whoever designed choking really needs a bit more omniscience.
I should raise the starting bid for my collection on eBay?
So far, it seems everyone is missing an important point. Not about science, but about theology.
If we have this tremedous DNA similarity specificially for this reason, the Creator created have created us this way.
The creationists also argue that before the Fall, we did not eat meat. There was no death, there was no consumption of other living things. (Simplified paraphrasing, but accurate.)
Therefore, the Creator could not possibly have created us this way, as that would have required us to eat living flesh prior to the Fall.
Hence, Gallops has theologically disproved a major creationist point. Are you sure he isn’t a Poe?
Sooo. Doesn’t understand evolution (it’s random). Doesn’t understand digestion. Doesn’t understand that some things are poisonous. Doesn’t understand that his argument makes his god look like a monster.
I’ve spotted a pattern!
It’s only a vaguely novel argument because it has nothing to do with reality and no one else in their right mind would suggest it.
I can write a treatise on why spoons keep the world spinning. It will be a most novel treatise… but it’s not going to redefine physics as we know it.
These arguments always make me think of Douglas Adams’ sentient puddle analogy.
Cellular respiration, and all the stupid free radicals it leaks like a poorly plumbed faucet, is the main reason organisms senesce and die.
Yeah, real precise and perfect.
And, of course, cellular respiration is an energy producing system.
I mean, that’s the whole point of it.
WTF is “cellular respiration”, anyway? Word salad, or an actual term that Gallups has misappropriated and misunderstood so badly that it might as well be word salad?
Someone mentioned eating as the big natural cause of suffering and it reminded me of the book series Animorphs I read as a child where they had visited an alien planet that seemed to be like the mirror opposite of Earth ecology wise. Most of the life were autotrophic via solar or chemo or thermo synthesis or symbiotic an the sentient life was telepathic so they lacked social strife. It was basically an ecosystem seemingly designed to be utopic (which considering the whole conflict of the book series was a war by proxy between Cthulhu and Space Jesus probably was the case)
The later. It’s the process of making ATP, the organic universal energy currency. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_respiration
Minor quibble: I wouldn’t say it’s the process of making ATP, but a process of making it. Fermentation is also used to produce ATP but it’s different from cellular respiration.
But yeah, actual term so badly misappropriated and misunderstood it is now apparently an “energy-expending” process. *headdesk*
Agreement.
@#46, dragon:
That’s a little too easy for the type of thinking that, basically, can just make shit up to keep up the narrative (i.e., theology)-
“The creator, obviously, being omniscient, knew beforehand that we would need that capability (after the Fall that he set us up to take), and so built it in as a failsafe. Before the Fall, we were breatharians, sort of. Just more evidence of Gawwwd’s infinite infinity!”
@#39, kantalope:
I’m pretty sure you’re asking that snarkily, but, if a creationist were to seriously ask me, “…isn’t the desert designed as well?”, I’d say- by the beliefs of your religion, sure. But, by the necessity for contrast to make the point in this particular defense-of-religion-by-analogy, no. Otherwise, there would be no way to see a difference between the watch (designed) and the desert (non-designed).
To me, the words “design” (the way creationists use it), “obvious,”- hell, the word “creation” itself- are descriptions of a quality, not something, like the universe, that can be quantified. It’s the function of science to quantify the “obvious,” and the result of religion is to insist on “quality” as a metric that it can’t, in nature, be for everyone. If someone wants to live their life by that make-believe metric, by a mythology based on a shared and organized perception of quality, that’s fine with me- as long as they don’t insist on me sharing that metric. That would be like the Nickleback Fan Club insisting that their opinion, that Nickleback is the bestest, most meaningful and fulfilling music of all time, is incumbent on everyone, by its own weight (do I really need to say what I think of that opinion?)
Stupid question, maybe. But does anyone know what Carl Gallups academic experience is? Which university is he affiliated to, and what papers on evolution/biology has he published.
Or am I reaching to far?
Except for in Soviet Union, where Food Eat You!
Next on Whirled Nut Daily :
“On maintaining the purity of our precious bodily fluids” by Gen. J. Ripper, president emeritus, John Birch Society.
Wait. I thought the great struggle of “eat or be eaten” was the bleak and hopeless atheist view, now it is the wonder of God?
People always bang on about reconciling science with religion, but if all that religion really brings to the table is making shit up as you go along, then what’s the point?
Those were my thoughts exactly. And failing that, it would seem that God wants us to eat primates, especially chimps and bonobos.
How does this “argument” not create a huge THEOLOGICAL problem? The creator, who obviously had recourse to photo- and chemosynthesis, instead made pitiless, bloody, terrifying predator-prey relationships? He COULD have made a “peaceable kingdom,” but instead made a realm of tooth and claw, consumption and decomposition? Fine, keep your god. He’s a complete douche if he exists. I’ll muddle through without it.
Shudder.
@Gregpeterson
The Fall. it explains everything.
Well really it doesn’t, but it is what I call the “Glass World Problem”. basically it’s when there’s a world setting that is neither clearly well designed, nor malevolently designed…just poorly designed to the point of kafkaesq hilarity. It first clicked for me in a web comic where the safety of the world depends on 4 easily moved, fragile, elemental orbs and one character laments how it makes no sense because no benevolent deity would make such a crappy fragile world, and an evil one would just make the atmosphere out of acid.
Well, this explanation sounds all sciency, and this guy has the courage to stand up against mainstream science. I guess then that this argument makes perfect sense to antigodless.
I always thought that if I had turned out the type with an unscratchable itch to reject everyone else’s explanations for everything and replace each individually with my own, I would like to also be a super-genius and create a world that scared the shit out of everyone. And then scared the shit out of them a little worse about 5 minutes later when they the whole other level of disturbing kicked in and they had to reject it before they bought into it, like Into The Wild.
This I would put under their pillow so they would find it right before bed.
I think my life would be complete then.
I always get a little tingle of anticipation that one of these guys is doing to just bust out the walls. But they always seem to just take a sciency term and slap in on a bit of poster board. They just don’t make them interesting like they used to I guess.
@56: thisisaturingtest:
That was my my point, though I did not expand upon it sufficiently.
Basically, the sum of both creationist arguments are internally inconsistent, and require making more stuff up. But they are so used to bad logic they don’t notice the inconsistency until it is pointed out.
So yes, we agree with each other.
Wow. Just wow!
I’m finishing up grading my 10th grade Biology class right now. I have a few kids who have failed the class, but even though they failed my course, they would laugh at this description of ‘needing DNA for respiration.’
Careful. If you say “banana” three times in a creation discussion, Ray Comfort appears.
Was it really so hard for Gallups to google “digestion” and save himself and others from this rank nonsense?
I’ve been actively carpet-bombing this WND thread, but I’m way outnumbered. There are some real whackos in the conversation, including one loon who USES ALL CAPS for his entire demented message, and mentions “evil lying atheists” on every other line.
Balstrome asked “Stupid question, maybe. But does anyone know what Carl Gallups academic experience is?”
Check out http://carlgallups.com/ – “Carl Gallups Ministries, LLC– Advancing the Kingdom of Christ and Restoring America’s Heart for God.”
“Carl Gallups is the long-time Senior Pastor of Hickory Hammock Baptist Church in Milton, Florida (Since 1987.) He is a conference leader, evangelist, youth evangelist, talk radio host, (Freedom Friday With Carl Gallups) talk radio and television special guest commentator, newspaper columnist, video and voice-over specialist, radio program producer, documentary video producer and member of the Board of Regents for the University of Mobile in Mobile, Alabama. … Carl is a popular Tea Party Speaker and was the lead-off speaker at the Daytona Beach Florida State Tea Party Convention in November 2011.”
“University of Mobile is affiliated with the Alabama Baptist State Convention… – ’nuff said.
Well, some forms of cellular respiration do expend a little bit of energy during the initial steps, to get the exothermic catalytic process rolling.
But it should be noted that cellular respiration is analogous to breathing and not eating.
True. And they’re not strictly catabolic either, as some of the pathways involved (like the Krebs cycle) can serve biosynthetic purposes too.
As I understand it, the Krebs cycle can be run wholly backwards, making it anabolic, if you force a continuous supply of ATP into it, because every step is an equilibrium reaction that can go either way depending on the concentrations of reagents/products.
And of course the forward Krebs spins of byproducts that can be used in other biosynthetic pathways.
That’s what I was referring to, but sure, the Krebs cycle can and does run backwards (reductive Krebs cycle). Some anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria fix carbon dioxide that way instead of using the Calvin cycle.
And glycolysis can also feed directly into biosynthetic pathways such as the nonoxidative branch of the pentose phosphate pathway. To make, say, ribose. Which is then used in the synthesis of nucleic acids like DNA, which other organisms will eventually eat but only because their DNA is compatible with their food’s DNA thanks to, uh, god.
Aaaaaand I just got back on topic. ;)
Word salad is word salad.
Funny–he wants to latch onto DNA and cellular respiration as if it will help explain his deluded idiocy, but his genocidal scumbag manual makes no reference to either of them. Science found that, just like it did evolution.
But of course this little dust bunny is the typical christer scumbag hypocrite who cherry picks science like he does his genocidal scumbag manual.
*hands Nightjar a tankard of five-day-old grog*
Analogous to the Krebs cycle itself, as it were.
Sounds like the guy read Stephenson’s Anathem; one of the plot points involve humans from slightly different universes. Their body chemistry is incompatible because of this; they cannot digest one another’s food.
The first thing I thought about were autotrophs, but after that I thought of a much clearer example: sugars. We only use 6 carbon sugars in our body, and some smaller intermediates that sit right in our main metabolic pathway, while plants, rude little hellions that they are, sometimes insist on storing their sugars in seven carbon rings and such.
Unwilling to let them hide so much energy away in waste molecules, we animals came up with a solution where we open the ring and cleave off the carbons in pairs until we reach something we are familiar with.
I think this really goes to show that we’ll figure out ways to eat each other, though if you want to talk to creationists make sure you’ve got a handful of examples ranging between this and purple sulfur bacteria so they can’t squeeze in the easy and predictable dodges that might actually seem to make sense to any neutral onlookers.
… what is that i don’t even … what … why … *cries*
Interesting!
I’m pretty sure that Brooks person is consciously trying to feed off the gullibility of Breatharians.
So you’re saying, Mr. Gallups, that God deliberately set things up so the parasitic wasp’s larvae could consume its living host? So that botflies could survive under the skin of a child in Africa? So guinea worms could wrap themselves around inside a person’s body cavity causing substantial pain and damage to their host?
Your argument doesn’t make me more inclined to worship your god. It just confirms, yet again, that I was right to turn my back on Christianity.