A reader who has been stymied by TypeKey (I wish I could fix that bug) informs me that mturner, one of the creationists at the ARN message board, thinks he has rebutted my post on whale limb evolution, claiming that Thewissen et al. have actually found evidence for Intelligent Design creationism. It’s fairly typical nonsense from the ARNies, but it’s so amusing I had to rebut his rebuttal.
ARN is a weird place. There are several patient, intelligent people working it to correct the babble that the flaming idiots who dominate the board put up. I am not that patient, so I can’t stomach the fools who frequent it, and mturner is one of the nastiest and dumbest of the lot. You can read his comments at ARN, or just go below the fold here—I’ve put the full text in this post.
As per your link, PZ says, ” The main players in limb formation, the genes Sonic hedgehog (Shh), the Fgfs, and the transcription factor Hand2, are all still present and fully functional in these animals. What has happened, though, is that there have been novel changes to their regulation. Even loss of structures is a consequence of changes and additions to regulatory pathways.” So, would you explain how changes in “regulatory pathways”, that is, changes in developmental direction without mutation of the regulatory gene, [cutely named “Sonic Hedgehog”–you irrepressible scamps, you!], is accomplished via RMNS and not ID, that is, by EAM?
mturner has his own pet name for Intelligent Design: Endogenous Adaptive Mutagenesis. As near as I can tell, the only difference is that he gets to string 3 big words together, which makes him sound clever. Or pompous. EAM is not documented anywhere, nor is there any evidence for it; if you read that ARN thread, you’ll notice people asking mturner to explain this EAM thingie, and his reply is that it’s all documented in the ARN archives. Never trust a theory whose sole provenance is the archived rantings of a web site full of kooks.
Oh, and RMNS is their weird jargon for “Random Mutation and Natural Selection”.
The way regulatory pathways are changed without modifying genes is by changes in cis regulatory regions—pieces of DNA associated with a particular gene that control the transcriptional machinery. Random changes to these regions can change their affinity for transcription factors and change the timing and position and degree of activation of the gene. See? That wasn’t hard.
PZ then says, “This retention of major genetic pathways should be obvious just looking at a whale. They evolved from four-limbed tetrapods, and lost their hindlimbs as more and more locomotor function was committed to the tail and flukes, yet they still retain forelimbs.” Buit golly, PZ, “use it or lose it is just plainLamarxckism, not RMNS!!
That is, it’s EAM! Have you come top join us on the Bright Side?
No, it isn’t Lamarckism (or even “plainLamarxckism,” whatever that is. In my few glances at ARN, it’s never quite clear what are typos and what are yet more peculiar neologisms bred in the hothouse atmosphere of the asylum.)
The swimming power stroke for cetaceans is given by the tail. The hindlimbs were not particularly useful for propulsion, but they were lumpy, protruding objects that interfered with hydrodynamics. Variations that reduced the drag of the hindlimbs would have a selective advantage in a swimming animal.
Next PZ says, “It is the same set of genes that operate in the hind- and fore-limbs, so of course you can’t just get rid of them–this is a case of selective limb loss.” Golly, who or what did the “selecting”?!? Your passing gamma ray, your genomic screw-up, or, as EAM maintains, the organism itself?!?
While the hindlimbs were useless in swimming, the forelimbs still retained significant utility as a steering mechanism. Mutations that knocked out both pairs of limbs would be disadvantageous, because having a nice torpedo shaped body but no way to steer it doesn’t lend itself well to survival. Mutations that reduced hind limb size while sparing the forelimb were most advantageous.
PZ then digs himself down a little deeper–“In addition, the genes have multiple functions making simple gene loss untenable. Shh, for instance, is a critical signaling molecule involved in the specification of midline structures in early development, and loss of the gene as a whole is lethal.” But hey, this time RMNS pulled it off, eh? One more little miracle to we can attribute to blind chance rather than smart management, hmmm? Oh. PZ, you’re such a mook!
I don’t think mturner quite got the point of the article. Shh is not a gene that we vertebrates can spare; there was no loss of the gene, but only a change in its pattern of regulation. This was made quite clear, I thought, in the title of the article.
Our mook continues–“What evolution did was to modify the domains of expression, selectively inactivating limb genes in the hindlimb region.” “What evolution did”!!!!? Here ol’ PZ pulls the standard Genomic Darwinist ploy of attributing causation to the effect caused. How dumb [not to mention illogical to the point of irrational] is that? How many times must we point out to you daydreamers that evolution, an effect, cannot cause itself. Nothing can! Something “modified the domains of expression”, alright, but it wasn’t “random genetic mutation”, it wasn’t “natural selection”, and it sure as hell wasn’t “evolution”, because the modification is the evolution. So, then, what did all this very selective modifying/redesigning? The organism, via Endogenous Adaptive Mutagenesis.
I dare not look too deeply into the logic of this paragraph, because clearly that is the way madness lies. Apparently, mturner believes that change occurred by the organism willing its hindlimbs to disappear.
My phrasing was intentional. We don’t know the precise details of the mechanism, but we can describe a change that occured over the course of evolutionary history: a gradual diminution of the hind limbs in early cetacean evolution, followed by a nearly complete shutoff of the hind limb 34 million years ago. We know how that shutoff is accomplished in the modern embryo: by a change in the domain of the Hand2 regulatory gene’s expression. We hypothesize that this is a consequence of changes in the cis regulatory regions of Hand2, or possibly a change further upstream in Hox gene regulation. These kinds of changes can be easily accomplished mechanistically by small changes in the genome. These are ideas that can be tested; the authors describe experiments in mice in which changes in Hand2 expression can lead to limb loss exactly like that seen in whales.
Later, after much detail that explains nothing, PZ says–“Looking at the evolutionary history of whales, the authors think they can pin down when this downregulation of Hand2 occurred. Shutting off that gene causes a complete loss of the limb, so older fossils that show a gradual diminution of the hind limbs must have retained an active Hand2/Shh combination; the complete loss occurred about 34 million years ago, so that would have been the ‘moment’ when this restriction would have caused the final disappearance of the whale’s posterior limbs.” Except that simply stating that “then this happened” is no explanation at all for how, why, when, and where it happened. Description of an event, although PZ and crew have never grasped that fact, is no explanation for that event.
We ask, what is different at the molecular/developmental genetics level between a whale and a mouse? We see that a key difference is the location of Hand2 expression. We therefore postulate that a key step in the generating a morphological difference between mouse and whale is actually a very tiny difference in how one gene is turned on, a difference that is easily caused by common genetic errors. We know when it happened. With a little more digging into the molecular biology, we’ll know exactly how it happened, right down to the single nucleotide changes. We know the chemistry of DNA quite well, and can say exactly what kinds of trivial, every day molecular events would have caused those changes. That’s a convincing case to me.
EAM, whatever it is, is a mechanism without evidence, without a supporting rationale, and which is so murky and undefined that its principal proponent can’t even explain it.
I think I know which side is making stuff up.
hen the Boy Wonder says–“A promising correlation in the fossil morphology is that there was a concurrent reorganization of the vertebral skeleton at the same time that the hind limbs were lost. The distinct identity of the sacral vertebrae was lost, and the caudal vertebrae became more homogeneous. This implies a change in the expression pattern of the Hox genes, which are responsible for anterior-posterior positional information. That suggests that we ought to look upstream of Hand2, and ask what’s going on with Hox gene expression in cetaceans–the changes that streamlined the vertebral column may have simultaneously induced the changes in Hand2.”
**
“A promising correlation” for whom or what? “that there was a concurrent reorganization of the vertebral skeleton at the same time that the hind limbs were lost” simply makes it even more impossible that this highly selective process was a mere ‘genetic accident’. But the PZ fans out there will just gloss over that Grand Canyon of a hole in their hypothetical explanation.
It is a promising correlation that can lead to a more precise explanation of the mechanism. We know that the Hox genes, in particular the hoxd series, regulates Hand2. We know there was a shift in Hox gene expression in cetaceans—we know that from vertebral identity. A known change in one regulator of Hand2 makes it easier to see how Hand2 expression could have undergone a concordant change.
Uhm, here’s a clue for you, PZ and pals. Your, “looking upstream of Hand2”, to “Hox gene expression in cetaceans” simply isn’t looking far enough “upstream”. You then have to look “upstream” of the Hox genes, and guess what you’ll find when you do that! Oh, come on now, stop crying! You’re big boys now, so act it.
Why, yes. We already know what processes induce changes in genes. We’ll have to look to known, documented mechanisms in genetics and molecular biology. This doesn’t make me cry—it means we’re on familiar ground and can be confident of our understanding.
Then yer man says something sensible–“How do you make a whale? Clearly, you don’t just “lose” the genes required to make hind limbs. You have to revise and add to the control information for existing banks of regulatory genes involved in limb formation.” But the last time I looked, “to revise and add to the control information ” was something ‘mind’ does; intelligence, not happenstance.
No, happenstance does modify the regulatory information in the genome. I’m not sure how anyone can argue otherwise; there is no known physical mechanism to protect regulatory DNA from the forces of “RM”, random mutation, and we can compare the same genes in different organisms or different individuals and see the variations. We see spontaneous mutations crop up all the time. Unfortunately for mturner’s thesis, however, we don’t see ‘mind’ modifying organisms in nature, have no evidence for any kind of directed intervention in the course of evolutionary history, and do see a lot of clumsiness and waste and randomness in development. It’s clear that modifying control information isn’t an exclusive property of mind.
And yet there are people who believe that P.Z. Myers talks sense. Sad, but true.
Cheer up! The good news is that very, very few people believe mturner talks sense.
There are a lot of messageboards that are the opposite, even on many Christian sites: most of the posters religious and non, are just fine with evolution… and it almost seems like they are hanging around to show off their chops defending it. When a creationist finally shows up, it’s a huge pile on. It’s just too fun, I guess, to poke holes in tragically silly arguments, and there’s often just not enough to go around some places. :)
And it’s puzzling, isn’t it, that their ‘intelligent’ designer seemed to feel that the logical way to make a whale was (1) to start with something with four limbs? And (2) to modify it very slowly, bit by bit, generation by generation… (3) not by removing the genes that make the limbs, but by modifying their expression?
It’s erally pretty sad to think that he’s got all that staring him right in the face, and still just ain’t got the ‘nads to face what it’s telling him.
Next time someone with cystic fibrosis gets sick instead of calling the doctor I’m going to get them to change their DNA through mindpower. Tonight I think I’ll get rid of this annoying pink skin that is just going to end up giving me skin cancer. How difficult could it be to will a genetic change so my skin produces more meletonin? But then I guess I could just will skin cancer away with my DNA changing mind power – or does a cancer have a mind of its own? I think I need some grant money to look into this.
“Molasses-thick” might have been generous, PZ.
Two things strike me about mturner’s comments.
One, he spends an inordinate amount of time objecting to PZ’s use of shorthand. He just ignores the simple fact that ‘evolution did X’ and ‘you do X to achieve Y’ are just figures of speech signifying a set of historical events whose timing, sequence, and causes can’t be known with arbitrary precision.
Two, it’s bizarre that someone could possibly accept that 34 million years ago the whale lineage underwent a change in gene regulation that resulted in the complete loss of their hind limbs – and still cling to the notion that such changes couldn’t occur naturally.
What is it with the thick miasma of condescension from someone who clearly doesn’t know his ass from his elbow on these issues? Directed mutation is such a feeble old idea- I wonder why, if mutations are directed towards present needs, our immune system makes do with random variation selection to produce antibodies?
See, the upside to this is that we got another discussion on Hox genes! Is it a bad sign that Hox genes get me a little hot and bothered? I mean, who *wouldn’t* think they’re really cool?!
In regards to the creationist “rebuttal” – there does seem to be a consistant error in logic throughout his post. Sometimes I have to wonder if they really don’t know any better, or if it’s intentional. AiG seems to suggest that you need to believe in literal creationism because otherwise you don’t know what parts of the bible are true and you open a window for people to reject Christianity (it was in a response to a Christian parent concerned that his son was an atheist and I’d link it but that’s always been the thing that gets my comments eaten). If your faith is so weak you have to hide your head in the ground you need to readjust your strategy, there.
It’s funny reading that board, since one commenter asks MT where he can find out more about ‘EAM’, and MT replies ‘the archives’, meaning the ARN archives. There really is something amusing about this whole monomanaical lifestyle of being some untrained anonymous nobody who is just certain that they’re going to set the scientific world on fire by posting their brilliant never-quite-finished ideas in crabby little internet chat room posts. It’s especially amazing when the, uh, amateur scholar isn’t even working within an established crackpot subfield, but instead is coining all their own terminology and new concepts. PT & ATBC get these people, too, all of them completely convinced of their scientific omnipotence, in the complete absence of ANY positive reinforcement. I really wonder how on earth they think their ideas will ever accomplish anything when all they do with with them is post them to blogs with irritable commentary about how dumb scientists all are. Just you wait, in 40 years the world will find my blog posts, be totally blown away, and THEN I’ll be vindicated!!
This always reminds me of ‘angry loner’ syndrome. You know, after a sudden tri-state crime spree (neighbors: “he seemed so quiet”!) the police examine the suspect’s apartment and discover that among his other ‘projects’, he (always a ‘he’) was writing a huge manifesto revolutionizing evolutionary science and posting it all over the internet, after getting fired from his security guard job. Sigh.
“plainLamarxckism” I suspect is a “joke-spelling” linking Marx and Lamark, which is pretty wacky.
PZ, in your explanation of the mice/whale article you simply did what everybody does out of convenience: Replacing “Due to the naturally occuring variations in the population of whales due to random mutations the selective pressure caused a shift in the frequency of alleles and thus the emergence of new control information…” with
“You have to revise and add to the control information…”, making it all easier to read.
And mturner thinks this undermines somehow the argument? His designer must have been low on brains on his birthday.
“And it’s puzzling, isn’t it, that their ‘intelligent’ designer seemed to feel that the logical way to make a whale was (1) to start with something with four limbs? And (2) to modify it very slowly, bit by bit, generation by generation… (3) not by removing the genes that make the limbs, but by modifying their expression?”
I don’t understand. It is a “logical” way for a whale to develop, is it not? Are you saying that an intelligent designer would of necessity use an illogical way?
Or maybe you’re saying that ID proponents believe that an intelligent designer would use the “poof” method instead of the logical method you describe? But that can’t be right as you certainly seem to be saying this ID person does accept that the three steps happened.
Or are you saying the whale as it exists today is somehow the one intended result of the process, so that it’s puzzling that God would have valued all the creatures in between (or, presumably, whatever comes next)?
No, I’m losing myself here. I’m not arguing, I’m just trying to get what you’re saying. It’s an interesting comment. Would you mind clarifying?
Whales evolved themselves by their flukestraps. I wonder what changes they’re working on now?
Well that was a waste of five minutes.
Shorter mturner: nuh-uh!
(The opposite of uh-huh – I don’t know if I’m getting the spelling right.)
Simple denial combined with lack of understanding, abuse, ego, name-calling, and a refusal to explain himself.
Ah, whales… the creationist’s nemesis. I think evo-devo goes over the heads of the likes of mturner, who think genetic information has to be either “lost” or “increased”.
Oh, and just a nitpick. Ronald Brak wrote:
“How difficult could it be to will a genetic change so my skin produces more meletonin[sic]?”
Melatonin is a hormone associated with sleep, I think you meant melanin.
mturner displays some typical pseudoscience behaviour. He doesn’t really distinguish between a mechanism and observations of what it does.
In the paragraph that PZ identifies as the road to madness, mturner drivels “”What evolution did”!!!!? … the standard Genomic Darwinist ploy of attributing causation to the effect caused. … evolution, an effect, cannot cause itself … the modification is the evolution.”
Here he disallows the basic idea of a description (a mechanism) of how a phenomena works behind the observations and conflates that with the observations themselves.
‘What gravitation did’ was to accelerate mturners brain to the floor when the back half of his skull opened, to make a squishy mess on the floor. Here gravitation is both the effect and the mechanism. It’s a theory.
His confusion becomes even more noticeable in his next comment since he discusses mechanisms anyway.
“Your only mechanism is random accident, which is no mechanism at all”
As usual, he conveniently forgets the other part of these mechanisms, the nonrandom part. In biological terms that must be an halfassed description.
Julia,
I think the argument is that an ID designer, that starts with a fourlegged creature, should immediately go to the final stage of gene regulation.
While IDiots may sometimes accept microevolution and sometimes macroevolution, their intelligent designer should use the final design without intermediate steps.
Or rather he should have constructed fourlegged animals with two independent leg systems, since he must have planned whales and primates from the start. A designer can do anything anytime anywhere, which is why it is an idea that explains nothing. But an intelligent designer should have some restrictions. :-)
Julia:
I’m sure you’re just overlooking it. It’s one of those blindingly obvious things. One of those things that pretty much should go without saying, so I guess you could miss it that way.
The other way, of course, is if you’ve already decided not to see it.
But (and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume for now I’m not just feeding a troll, and anyone wants to warn me off, please do so) I’m happy to expand.
Re the ‘poof method’: In fact, that’s just what the ID proponents do say, in cases when they think they can get away with it–or when they’ve dug themselves in so deep on it and invested so much into it that admitting it’s as absurd as it looks is too painful for them. See ‘clotting cascade’. Or ‘flagellum’. (Or ‘flagellum fatigue’, if you prefer.) That’s precisely the argument, there. It couldn’t have happened stepwise, is the (entirely unsupported) claim. Ergo: poof.
But here, in the case of the development of the whale’s body plan, this particular proponent doesn’t quite do that. Comically, he accepts those three critical things: (1) that whales are descended from species that had forelimbs, (2) that the change from those descendants to the whales was gradual, and even (3) that the method by which the limbs were removed wasn’t by modification of the genes that make them, but by modification of the genes controlling those genes’ regulation.
Three things which, once you’ve acknowledged them, are quite enough all by their little selves to make a designer redundant, since the process they describe can clearly happen by small, slow changes in the genome, and there’s no need for some invisible magic guy to come along and breathe on the base pairs over those many millions of years to nudge them into place. Three things which, once you’ve acknowledged them, do all by their very little selves, make a ‘design’ hypothesis look hilariously contrived, since this is a ‘designer’ which, curiously, gets to modern creatures just the way evolutionary biology suggests evolution and natural selection gets them there without him–a ‘designer’ which ‘designed’ a submarine by modifying a terrestrial creature by tiny, opportunistic, stepwise changes over tens of millions of years. And didn’t even bother to take out that gene that makes the legs… Just fiddled with the one that turns it on.
Three things which should even be enough to point you toward evolution and natural selection even if you’d been living on a desert island, and had never heard of them before, for that matter. Three things roughly parallel to the kinds of things people started putting together, oh, about 150 years ago, now, to work out what was really going on.
Three things you’d pretty much have to bury your head in the beach and scream ‘I can’t hear you; there’s sand in my ears’ continuously at the top of your lungs to avoid hearing not to grasp where they lead.
Strangely baroque way to make a whale, again, I say: (1) Make a terrestrial walking machine. (2) Chop the legs off.
And no, I’m certainly not saying “it’s puzzling that God would have valued all the creatures in between”… And now it’s my turn to be puzzled by your bringing it up…
‘God’, you say? I was under the impression we were talking about the origin of the modern ceteceans, arguing from evidence and inference. Suppositions as to the opinions of mythical bronze age figures who apparently love every sparrow and proto-whale that falls belong (if anywhere) in theology, down the hall.
Or are you suggesting the ID camp are (again) admitting this is really all about their belief that said mythical figure must be everywhere, breathing on the chromosomes?
Because actually, I suppose that, too. As all of the above shows, there’s really no other reason to bring in a ‘designer’ in this case.
What else has he got? It’s the sharpest tool in his kit because it’s the only tool in his kit.
More like molasses-quick wit.
Minor addendum: ‘that whales are descended from species that had forelimbs’ (in the latter post) should read ‘that whales are descended from species that had four limbs’ (as in the former). Though I suppose that should be obvious, too.
Whales evolved themselves by their flukestraps.
Thank you, BJN, for making my day with that one.
mturner wrote:
Is it just me, or has he just disproved God?
Here’s something OT for the post, but right up PZ’s alley:
Mice inherit trait without the gene
It’s about RNA carrying hereditary information independently of the DNA, through many generations.
One of the fundamental elements of the creationist worldview seems to be thinking of evolution as happening to individual creatures rather than over generations of descendents. They see it as happening like those cool animated films where a fish grows legs and stands up and then transforms into a dinosaur, and so forth. The “why are there still monkeys” canard is an outgrowth of this.
If an individual creature is transformed, then there’s some logic to believing that something must be deliberately transforming it. But the mystery remains how they can so aggressively resist seeing this distinction.
Isn’t he raving for exactly what Pinkoski’s raving against?
That man has multiple copies of the ass gene.
Lunartalks wrote:
“That man has multiple copies of the ass gene.”
Would that be the Horse’s ass or the Jackass gene?
I’d guess, because they are’t thinking nor seeing, they are rationalising. Normal people think like “how is that supposed to work, given that it is consistent with (some evidence)”. Someone suffrring from creationist delusion thinks like “How could I interpert(read distort) evilutionist’s words so, that I can claim all he says is blatant nonsense or lie”
“Three things which, once you’ve acknowledged them, are quite enough all by their little selves to make a designer redundant”
I see. That’s much clearer. I thought you might be using some form of the argument, “Assuming a designer/God exists, that isn’t how he/she/it would do it.”
Thanks.
Beats me. But this is aconsistent feature of the anti-science crowd.
“While IDiots may sometimes accept microevolution and sometimes macroevolution,”
Umm, actually I think this is wrong, I haven’t seen any creationist accept much macroevolution. mturner himself may be a Lamarckist in his EAM, it is a bit uncrlear. But my argument works anyway, both a creationist and a Lamarckian should use a single design change.
“Would that be the Horse’s ass or the Jackass gene?
Probably a Horse’s ass, since you can lead a creationist to truth, but not make him accept it.
Julia,
“I thought you might be using some form of the argument, “Assuming a designer/God exists, that isn’t how he/she/it would do it.””
I claim that, and AJ observes: “Strangely baroque way to make a whale, again, I say: (1) Make a terrestrial walking machine. (2) Chop the legs off.”
So there are some questions about the argument you mention. It is a pity that ID can’t come out and characterise its designer – maybe it is intelligent and so use simplest possible solutions.
If an idiot like mturner can get a PZ Myers to waste time on him, guess which side of this fracas is making more efficient use of its available brain power?
Huh? This is bizarre. If a person were to believe in this EAM idea for some silly reason, what exactly does the “intelligent designer” do?
I can understand why fundie creationists believe what they do – they are ignoring evidence because it conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible. I think it is stupid to ignore evidence, but the reason why they are doing what they are doing is clear. Even IDer’s – I understand that it is a duplicitous ploy to get creationism into school curricula. I’m not cool with what they do, but I understand it.
But WTF is this dude thinkin’? If “the organism itself” is responsible for selecting novel heritable phenotypes, it doesn’t seem that God (oops.. the intelligent designer) has a role. So why believe this EAM bs? Is it underpants gnomes type logic, perhaps as follows:
organisms did not arise through RMNS –> it was EAS –> ??? –> my pet religion is correct
oops, the (il)logical connections should have been:
organisms did not arise through RMNS –> it was EAM –> ??? –> my pet religion is correc
“It is a pity that ID can’t come out and characterise its designer – maybe it is intelligent and so use simplest possible solutions.”
Yes, it is a pity, but legally, I suppose, a very necessary attempted omission for them.
It seems to me that assuming the existence of a designer/God doesn’t in itself logically mean that there’s something incompatible about the evolutionary process unless one also assumes that the whale as it exists today is somehow the special, particular, exact form the designer was aiming for. Of course, many or most or all ID people do seem to be claiming that, or at least saying the original “kind” (whatever that may be) was especially planned.
Weak analogy:
My neighbor prefers the flowering stage of plants; it’s the form he aims for. So he plants lots of annuals, buying them when they are beginning to bloom, and pulling them out when they stop blooming. I enjoy everything about the plants. I like the seeds, and the early growth, and the development of leaves; and I enjoy the falling petals and gradual going to seed again. If the desigher were to be like my neighbor, then the evolutionary process would certainly be a strange way to produce the preferred form. But if the designer were more like me in preference, I don’t see what would be illogical in designing the whole process just as it exists, with, presumably, the modern whale not as an ending point but as just one more stage.
Now that I’ve thought about it, it seems to me that perhaps the only thing I was missing earlier is that both you and AJ were applying that second assumption (of the modern whale as the preferred, ending stage) in recognition of the fact that that assumption is so common with ID people. So then, yes, the evolutionary process would indeed be a “strangely baroque way to make a whale. . . .”
(By the way, I enjoy your posts, and find them most informative.)
Is it wrong of me to be scornful of creationist and ID proponents because they ignore animals like Odontogriphus omalus, Petalocrinus mirabilis, or Gomphocystites bownockeri?
“Melatonin is a hormone associated with sleep, I think you meant melanin.”
D’oh! What a stupid mistake! No wait, it’s not a mistake! If you check the archives at ARN you will see that I was right all along and those fools who think melatonin isn’t responsible for skin colour are all idiots. Someday those archives will show to the world what a genius I am.
As usual, there are two words that apply to this idiot, mturner …
LIAR
and
FOOL
Keep saying it!
“Is it wrong of me to be scornful of creationist and ID proponents because they ignore animals like Odontogriphus omalus,”
No! There’s an old saying: “The devil is in the details.” There’s another old saying: “God is in the details.” I keep trying to tell people at ARN that they have to get the biology rignt. Many don’t. The worst part is that they don’t seem to care that the biology isn’t right.
I seem to have been responsible for this post, as I linked to PZ’s article over at ARN. I stick around over there — sometimes gritting my teeth — for a couple of reasons:
1. They dig up interesting articles, though they usually misunderstand entirely.
2. There may be a few lurkers who are actually interested in the biology.
3. In trying to nail down just why much of what is said is wrong, I sharpen my own understanding of both the biology and the philosophy.
So I soldier on. Reminds me of a remark by the late humorist James Thurber: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Word, while the very Oedipus of reason crumbles about us.” He was talking about malapropisms, but it fits misused science about as well.
“We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Word, while the very Oedipus of reason crumbles about us.”
…
Isn’t that what happens when you shoot yourself in the foot by falling in love with your mother?
Why do these people not understand feedback loops? “the effect cannot be a cause” is a load of crap when you’re iterating over generations… the portion of the signal that propagates best becomes stronger over successive loops, self-modifying without anything “willing” it to happen.
Back when I had the stomach to lurk at ARN more than I do now, I had found at least two instances in which mturner actually came right out and saidf that he did not understand the primary literature.
Yet he still insists that he has the ability to provide authoritative commentary on its contents.
He is, frankly, an ass.
Of course, his arrogance is rivalled by that legendary egotist, Warren Bergerson (Life Engineer) at ARN, according to whom Genetic Drift is “intentionaly fraudulent”, genetics is a pseudoscience, RMNS was disproved 50 years ago, etc.
Amazing….
“Now that I’ve thought about it, it seems to me that perhaps the only thing I was missing earlier is that both you and AJ were applying that second assumption (of the modern whale as the preferred, ending stage) in recognition of the fact that that assumption is so common with ID people.”
I didn’t think too much about that but you are right about this being assumed. I think AJ does it, but not I.
How mturner thinks about this is unclear. If he is a pure Lamarckian he may be saying that if the animal does something to loose legs it should be one mechanism. Then my argument plays. He may however accept evolution constraints. Then it comes down to the gene behaviour that invalidate the usual Lamarckain theory.
If he is an ID Lamarckian he may believe that modern species are the ending stages. Then AJ arguments play. He may also believe that a designer puts the behavioural idea in the animals head for all eternity. Then it comes down to the usual problem with that a supernatural mechanism is no mechanism.
“(By the way, I enjoy your posts, and find them most informative.)”
As you can probably see this is mutual. There are a couple of individuals that not only writes so clearly they help me see new things, but also have a clear personal touch. I enjoy that.