…but there it is, hosting a major young-earth creationism advocacy site. How humiliating! David A. Plaisted is a computer science professor who has accumulated piles of raving nonsense to support his creationism, and I would think the university would find it a bit of an embarrassment to see one of their faculty flaunting their stupidity in such an awful way, especially now that the Chronicle has picked up on it, and a Duke grad student has rubbed their noses in it.
For example, take a look at his argument that humanity is only 6000 years old. It begins with a partial quote from a paper by Francis Collins, in which he is discussing strategies for cataloging human sequence variation and briefly mentions that one approach would involve “[c]omparing the DNA sequences on two chromosomes in the vicinity of a variant that is 1000 to 10,000 generations old, which is roughly the age of the human population”. Plaisted goes off on this — why, that seems to say that the human race is very young (it actually says that the founding population for our existing sequence variation existed a few hundred thousand years ago). But then he ignores that datum to go looking for other examples, from mitochondria and ducks and flies, where he can claim with “simple math” (and bogus math) that, because some genetic variant arose a few thousand years ago, the whole species poofed into existence at that time. It’s all amazing nonsense in which he selectively picks examples that will support his desired conclusion of a 6000 year old creation.
He’s very fond of pulling out numbers from papers and performing semi-random and inappropriate permutations on them to justify his young earth bias and his rejection of common descent. He even stoops to the “apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, humans have 23” argument, as if variation in chromosome number is a significant difficulty. As the Primate Diaries show, he’s also not above making some genuinely inane claims.
But why would God create a creature that is so close to a human, but not quite? To answer this, we have to reason from what we know or can infer about God’s motives in the creation. This may lead us to considerations that seem far removed from those that are expected in this context. The original creation was intended to contribute to the happiness of man and animal. We can assume that in many cases the Lord created animals that would be a delight to man, and created man to be a blessing to the animals. Even today, both children and adults enjoy seeing gorillas and chimpanzees in zoos. It is reasonable to assume that these creatures were partly made for just this reason, to be a joy and entertainment to us.
Gorillas are children’s playtoys? Their purpose is to be displayed in zoos? This is where religious apologetics leads us … to madness and stupidity.
You know, David Plaisted has every right to his opinions, and I even think it’s OK for him to be trumpeting this nonsense on his university’s web servers. But I also have the right to regard David Plaisted, on the basis of his dumb-as-soiled-socks ideas, to be a demented, babbling crackpot, and to think a little less of UNC Chapel Hill’s computer science department. The other good faculty don’t deserve it, I know, but geez … what a loon.
My personal opinion is that professors at universities should only put up stuff related to their research/teaching on the university servers. The rest should be put up on their personal websites elsewhere.
Much like I wouldn’t put up my blog at my company’s website.
Even today, both children and adults enjoy seeing gorillas and chimpanzees in zoos. It is reasonable to assume that these creatures were partly made for just this reason, to be a joy and entertainment to us.
Holy crap, what a moron.
I wonder if he is channeling Ken Hovind. What loons.
Let’s put this guy in a gorillla habitat in a zoo and then cut the gorillas to half rations. After a week goes by he will find out just how “amusing” they are.
This reminds me of Arthur Butz at Northwestern University, at least as far as a University being forced to tolerate a tenured crackpot. Butz is a professor of electrical engineering there. Two years after attaining tenure, Butz published a book denying the Holocaust called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century and has been a regular on the Holocaust denial circuit ever since, even going so far as to stir up trouble by supporting the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran last year.
The point is that Butz used the personal webpage that NU allowed all faculty and students to have to publish his Holocaust denial, and the University couldn’t really do anything about it because Butz was smart enough never to bring up his views regarding the Holocaust in any of the classes that he taught. If I recall correctly, eventually the University solved the embarrassing problem of Butz’s website by revoking the privilege for all its faculty and students–a very blunt and unfortunate reaction. Personally, I tend to agree that faculty can hold whatever wingnut views they want as long as the views don’t affect their academic performance, although I’m a little conflicted on whether a university should allow such wingnuts on their faculty to use university resources (i.e., personal webpages on university servers) to spread their idiocy.
Yeah, and god put C. difficile in hospitals and nursing homes to help our sick and/or elderly to meet him in the afterlife.
Wait, is he saying that there are around 1,000 – 10,000 human generations, and still concludes that the Earth is only 6,000 years old?
I feel for the conflictedness of it all. Rather than retracting the rights of all faculty to host their ideas on u webservers, though, I favor opening the doors wide. The answer to hate speech is more speech. There must be some UNC faculty who find Plaisted to be an obnoxious ignoramus — let the criticisms bloom.
Yes
Aren’t these the same people that claim that evolution can only *remove* information? So shouldn’t chimps having less more chromosomes than us be a point *for* common decent? (Using twisted logic, of course.)
Idly, why *do* chimps have more chromosomes? Did they pick one up, or did we lose one?
We can assume that in many cases the Lord created animals that would be a delight to man, and created man to be a blessing to the animals.
This sounds disturbingly like an argument for bestiality with other primates.
Aquinas was right: get ’em as kids and you got ’em for life…
Sounds that way, doesn’t it? And didn’t the biblical characters become really old?
What is it with creationists and web design? Sigh…
Directly after the “Gorillas were made to be put in zoos” bit, Plaisted writes:
No comment needed, or possible.
Given that gorillas are vegetarians, I’m not quite sure how to interpret this….
I just wasted 10 minutes of my life looking through his ‘flood’ powerpoint. Too bad…I was hoping it was going to be an attempt to present all that ‘evidence’ there is out there for said deluge. Strangely, it spent a good amount of time discussing Atlantis.
Not really, given the fact that Chimpanzees have more genes that have undergone positive selection than humans.
Hmmm…. good question that I hope someone more knowledgeable than me will answer.
This chump’s comments about animals are not only wrong and solipsistic, but they’re profoundly unethical. If anyone wonders how the Christian right shrugs off global climate change, this might be a clue. Their view is that everything in this world was meant for us, and therefore [like a 1 year old child] we have no responsibility to take care of it. Just as the belief that god can take our lives away on a whim, so can we take the life of any other living thing away from them on a whim. This is disgusting.
Ah, but these (largely meritless in their own right) people (RWAs) are precisely the ones most impressed by and wanting to impress with the bogus authority that having a university web/mail address gives them; and are thus the very ones most likely to commit that abuse-of-position “crime”. They are probably quite unable to see the inappropriateness of it (status in a hierarchy and other highly visible attributes, such as public prayer, being core to their sense of identity and self-worth). All they see is how it serves their self-aggrandisement aims. They just can’t achieve that on personal merit.
NB They may even be deluded enough to believe that they really are adding value to the institution’s website with their online drivel. But I think the main driver for their behaviour lies in what they believe the association with that institution does for their own credibility.
On behalf of computer scientists everywhere, I would like to apologize for this guy.
Sometimes I think there should be tenure re-review every decade. If you’ve lost it… Time to move on…
So true. I was going to say, all the idiotic creationist content aside, the site itself makes my eyes bleed. Geocities anyone?
I looked at his web site, design circa 1992, and I though I was usin the Nuntius browser again. Then I thought.. Holy crap, this guy is a Computer Science teacher and he put up that web site?
…
then I realized, yea, he’s a CS teacher. He probably still teaches intro to programming in Pascal and makes the students run their code in the Mainframe interpreter.
ffakr.
Computer Science Professor huh?
I guess he won’t be teaching genetic programming.
About the 24 vs. 23 chromosome thing, gotta mention SciGirl’s famous chromosome challenge:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=2199739
Not that it’s anyhing new to the crowd around here, I’m sure.
It’s an interesting topic, which is mostly far over my head. But I can point to the research:
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html
There’s also some discussion of other related species (that is, related to each other, not necessarily to humans) with different chromosome numbers.
As a alumnus(BIOS 77): the shame, the shame.
Fortunately, my contributions are earmarked for the Public Health School.
A great explanation of the human chimp gene relation is
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=2199739#post2199739
Cheers.
I refuse to apologize on behalf of an American computer scientist – they can hardly be considered qualified… [just joking, one of my best professors was Neil Jones].
Nor logic, formal semantics, or any other subject requiring an analytical brain.
Neither. Humans are the derived ape-mutants with 2 of the previous chromosomes fused – the sort of thing which still happens from time to time with other chromosomes to cause some genetic disease conditions.
(I’ve been trying to post this with a link, in various ways, for quite a while and ScienceBlogs just won’t let me!)
On behalf of UNC grads everywhere, I’d like to second that apology.
Sure that works if the average age of reproduction of humans is 6 years old. 6 years/generation X 1000 generations is 6,000 years. Fits perfectly!
Of course 6 years is a little young to get married and get pregnant and so on. But he is a fundie from North Carolina. Twelve years old might be doable there, at least in some places. So he is off by a factor of 2. Good enough for a computer geek at UNC, I guess.
Why not tape his mouth shut, dress him in a gorilla suit, and THEN put him into the gorilla habitat?
Ah, Clarence Beeks…LOL
Delightful animals like HIV, smallpox, TB, malaria, rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, river blindness worms, guinea worms, tapeworms, cobras, scorpions, sharks, box jellies, blue ringed ocopuses, lions, tigers, and on and on.
“created man to be a blessing to the animals.” I bet the animals are just jumping for joy about humans. Who knows how many thousands of species humans have driven to extinction while overrunning the planet. Many of the rest have served as dinner fairly often.
What a stupid moron. He doesn’t need his web page taken away. He needs some extra strength Zyprexa.
Hey, why doesn’t he mention the good Christian entertainment provided by bonobos?
Re: Raven #33,
He explained that away by waving his hands and saying “I don’t believe it!”
No, really, his article that claims 6000 years does so by claiming that the rate of mutation for Mitochondrial genomes is many times faster than presumed, and thus humans have only been around for ~300 generations.
Looking through his site: Ugh. Bad math abounds (so bad, even I can spot it), only outdone by even more atrocious logic! And of course, the prerequisite complete misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection.
I can’t cite anything specific, but as I recall two chimp chromosomes actually combined into a single chromosome in humans, causing the discrepancy.
I especially like his point that “we have to reason from what we know or can infer about God’s motives.” Trying to guess an omniscient, omnibeneficent deity’s motives seems a bit tricky to me. Darwin said it best: A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Why do so many theists proclaim that God surpasseth all understanding, and then proceed to tell you all about his motivation?
This jesus freak has a section on “miracles”. I wonder how many miracles he has seen in computer science.
A YEC site with no provision for feedback or discussion? I am shocked! Shocked!
More evidence these idiots never bother to read their own blessed book.
I dropped into a church fund-raising luncheon yesterday. Two couples got into a discussion about whether the Bermuda Triangle is really a black hole. At least they laughed when I said the closest black hole to the Bermuda Triangle is Jesse Helms. But I was accused of not being open-minded.
What would Jefferson do?
Wow, does he know anything about how strong chimps are, or how many humans they kill a year? Childrens’ playthings indeed!
Given that gorillas are vegetarians, I’m not quite sure how to interpret this….
Anyone who assumes all vegetarians are inherently pacifist has never met a bull, a hippo, or a gorilla cut to half rations and dealing with a smelly human in a cheap suit acting thoroughly inappropriately.
As for the 23 vs. 24 chromosomes thing, there’s a nice parallel situation in guppies (Poecilia reticulata) and their close relatives the swordtails (Xiphophorus helleri and other species).
Guppies have 23 pairs, swordtails 24. I did some work on their chromosomes for my master’s. Besides the difference in number, I was able to detect an inversion on one chromosome, though I cannot tell you which one since I worked with “linkage groups” not chromosomes (they’re not exactly the same thing, and it requires more research and money to make the connection). Anyway, I wouldn’t be able to tell you whether their common ancestor had 24 and guppies had a fusion or ancestor had 23 and swordtails had a fission, without looking at another, related species. Preferably a nice big collection of other species, forming a gradient of relatedness to both guppies and swordtails. And even then my guess would be a very rough estimate only, given how much we DON’T know about chromosome-level evolution.
Give me a budget of, say, one million dollars, a modestly-equiped research lab, and three to four years, and I’ll find the answer for you, though. For the little fishies, not humans. Humans cost too much, take too long, and the ethics committees never let you set up mapping backcrosses.
Thank you to everyone for the quick answers. I love this place (and I’m almost regretting never having paid more attention to biology).
You cannot blame the college. Remember John Mack the Alien abductionist who had tenure at Harvard?
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/115975.htm
An impressive display of a strange kind of (written) glossolalia. The last sentence of the first paragraph does all the work– once we’re into ‘God did it’ explanations, there are no barriers at all, and the details don’t matter (except to specify the particular points where one says, ‘poof’)!
Ken Miller explains the 24 vs. 23 chromosome pairs issue here:
Letting them taunt the gorillas for weeks and weeks and then letting the big male escape works better!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6670723.stm or hunt youtube for ‘bokito’
Re Wager et al
Human chromosome 2 is the result of fusion of ape chromosomes 12 and 13. See the Ken Miller presentation referred to by AdamK.
And the HTML on his site is also full of amateur mistakes. It basically sucks.
I’d expect more from a computer science professor.
“Personally, I tend to agree that faculty can hold whatever wingnut views they want as long as the views don’t affect their academic performance, although I’m a little conflicted on whether a university should allow such wingnuts on their faculty to use university resources (i.e., personal webpages on university servers) to spread their idiocy.”
In my opinion, if a University allows its faculty to use University resources to host personal Web pages that are not directly related to their research or teaching, then that University should absolutely not be in the business of discriminating between non-idiotic and idiotic content on those pages. Obviously, they should ban illegal and patently immoral or disruptive material–and I know there are grey areas–but stupid fantasy gibberish like creationism clearly doesn’t cross that line.
It’s nit picking I know but.. Koala’s aren’t bears!!
Now since he thinks that God put Koala’s here for our enjoyment, when people get pee’d on when they are holding a Koala does he think that it’s God’s way of saying you need a shower?
*snort* What a moron.
Oh, wait, where have I heard this sort of logic before?
Candide, by Voltaire
Well yes, but a bull, hippo, and gorilla aren’t substantially more likely to attack an annoying human just because they’re very hungry. Why the half-rations bit?
just for the record, more people die in Africa every year from hippo attacks than from lion attacks (by a good margin IIRC).
they’re extremely aggressive. so remarkably so, in fact, that there are several ongoing studies attempting to figure out why exactly that is.
last I heard, the currently popular theory is that they were once much smaller, and overly aggressive behavior was a defense mechanism that simply was never selected against once they grew much larger.
and no, I don’t recall the level of hunger having much to do with the level of aggression in hippos, or the likelihood of an attack on a human, though i rather doubt it’s been studied beyond the anecdotal.
OTOH, lions too will attack humans for reasons other than hunger.
so will snakes, jellyfish, stingrays…
But I also have the right to regard David Plaisted, on the basis of his dumb-as-soiled-socks ideas, to be a demented, babbling crackpot…
oops. expect another slander suit.
:p
Why the half rations? Most likely because the commenter assumed they were omnivores or carnivores.
Humans do that a lot, assuming scary things are out to eat us. Or our livestock. Then we get out our guns and show how brave we are.
Any rations for the crackpot?
Well I suppose I will have to focus on the humor next time I encounter Toxicodendron radicans.
Hi all! First comment! Two actually.
1) The chromosome differences between humans and chimps are nicely described in the chimp genome paper in Nature, which is a freebie. Here’s the basic story:
2) On behalf of Christians everywhere, I would like to apologize for this guy.
And hey, PZ, do you remember me? Need a hint? :-)
The few times I run across creationists I like to tell them that I went to Baylor University. Then I tell them that my Old Testament History professor told us the stories in Genesis are based on even older myths from other cultures, and should not be taken literally. He even went as far as to say to the class that the Baylor biology dept rightly taught evolution as a fact. And the guy was an interim minister for area churches who were temporarily without pastors.
It has been quite a few years since I was a student at Baylor but I hope they are still upholding good science down there.
Well, I know I’d be pretty darned aggressive if I was put on half rations for a few days and then some idiot got in my face.
I would think especially if I were used to being fed by someone in that same species, if one got near I’d be wanting to know where my food was RIGHT NOW.
I didn’t realize my “half rations” comment would generate such a response. I was just supposing thaf if Plsisted thinks gorillas in zoos were so amusing he might try living for a couple of weeks in a zoo habitat where the gorillas got half their usual food. I didn’t mean to say the gorillas would eat Plaisted, just that he might have a hard time competing for food in such a situation.
Where do you dig this stuff up? Honestly, I’m starting to think this whole internet thing was a bad idea. I was happy when I didn’t know that the world was just an unending sea of mental illness.
I should point out, as a University Student and an IT staff member at two large Universities, the guy isn’t realy doing anything uncommon with University resources.
He’s got a person page up on a machine. Notice his user name is in the path.
He’s a CS guy, It should be incredibly trivial for him to dedicate a machine to this page (and if it isn’t he should be fired).
If you banned personal web sites from University domains you’d pull about 9/10s of the content down. Seriously.
How many undergrads post purely [or any] University related content on their webpages?
Gahh what a bunch of b.s.
As a proud NCSU alum, it makes me extremely delighted to see this kind of crap from those perrier drinking polo shirt wearing coiffured elitists across the haw river.
Here’s a picture of the fusion point in a synteny viewer. Human C2 is in the middle, chimp 12 on the left, and chimp 13 on the right.
I hope that the professor’s rather odd ideas extra his domain of expertise are not indicative of some failure to instruct. If he can still walk students through the evolution of GNU-Linux from its base in MINIX and UNIX, define and explain the differences in object-oriented programming and structured programming, who cares that he has some wild ideas. The university is that: a universe of mind. The over-all Puritanical bully-boy attitudes expressed here are disheartening.
*Sigh.*
This hits too close to home. :(
I’d like to see how this guy comes out in a face-off with a big “silverback” male gorilla. “Cute, cuddly and amusing” – riiight. It’s so adorable when they tear your face off! And Jane Goodall was just charmed out of her socks when she observed chimpanzees going on the warpath, killing other chimps, and even resorting to cannabalism. And we all know what the Bible, the ultimate authority (snark), says about the cute little lambykins and how much the big, purring lions just want to lie down with them.
You say that as it’s a bad thing.
I can see an argument for allowing teachers and students to put up their personal websites on the Universities domains (no, not really, but I can accept that it might be considered a benefit of studying/working there). I just believe that websites/-pages using the university’s domain should relate to the activities going on there.
In my eyes, it’s pretty similar to thinking that letters written under the university’s letterhead should somehow relate to the university and its activities.
I have a friend who was the chief flouridation engineer for the CDC in Atlanta. He was the guy that basically wrote the book for other engineers the world over to implement water flouridation systems for their people to improve oral health, thus improving overall health. I remember talking to him and how he spent so much of his time fighting the anti-flouridationists, who much like creationists, used quote mining and F.U.D. to scare communities from adopting good flouridation practices. Well, the interesting thing was there was one person in the EPA or CDC, I forget, who was a closet anti-flouridation crackpot. So what he does is publish his anti-flouridation views using his official email address. The antis go crazy and rejoice that they have a higher-up in the government who supports their viewpoint. When the govt. tried to suppress him, he files for whistle-blower status, and is granted that somehow. Now he sits and spends his time writing anti-flouridation propoganda on the tax payer’s dime, but the govt. can’t touch him. So this creationist cook seems sort of like that at UNC.
The over-all Puritanical bully-boy attitudes expressed here are disheartening.
yes, Stan, we should always encourage complete idiocy, in all its many forms, especially at the University level, right?
phht.
Re gorilla habitat: I doubt you’d have to wait a week. I bet this guy would not know how to act around the big guy and get pounded flat within the first five minutes.
Re being a CS professor: I heard this one about engineering in general a long time ago. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” ;)
Don
1. It would be difficult to enforce any rule limiting content on personal pages to activities significantly related to the university’s mission (or whatever). Attempts to do so would likely clash with guidelines on academic freedom. The only answer, if you want to control content, is to refuse to allow people to put up “personal” pages on university servers. (Historically speaking, the reason they were allowed–when anyone was paying attention–was that webhosting resources were scarce when cycles and bytes were counted in Ms, not Gs.)
2. Since the reputation of the institution is at stake in the public utterances of its members (especially its faculty), it would be reasonable for a university that allows personal pages to require everyone who has one to post a prominent disclaimer.To do so doesn’t control content other then the disclaimer itself. The reputation of the university may still suffer if it harbors too many nut cases, but at least the implication of approval suggested by the web page’s location on its server can be negated.
And this is a guy whose field is logical programming :-) Some people have very weirdly structured minds.
The oddest thing I found was this from his CV:
“His hobbies include hiking, playing musical instruments, cooking, foreign languages, bird watching, promoting democracy, and listening to the short-wave radio.”
Is it just possible he’d deliberately omitting some rather significant aspects of his freetime actvitiy? :-)
I actually audited a Prolog and Logic programming graduate class from him back in the 1990s. (I was in the philosophy dept graduate program at the time.) Sadly, the creation page does not entirely surprise me. As I recall, in the first class there was some whining about how he (and his team and students) did great work but was neglected blah blah. I found it bizarre :)
The rest of the class was OK, but rather mechanical. I remember him talking about using the Prolog command loop as a little calculator, e.g., N is 2*5! This felt very very dated to me then (it was a bit of a characteristic trope of presentation of read-evaluate-print-loops through the 1980s at least, but with things like Excel and software calcualtors and mathmatica felt more and more silly). We did do the Warren Abstract Machine, but again, it was a very mechanical working through of “Warren’s Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction” in class. There was very little discussion of alternative tech, compliation challenges, type systems, Datalog and secondary storage, OOP in LP, Functional/Logic programming hybrids, FOL theorem proving (a reasearch area of his), etc. etc. etc.
So, not a graduate class leading people to do research in the area, by and large. I guessed at the time that he was a bit of a relic in the dept. as often accumulates. The philosophy dept, for example, was quite good but had a number of “assistent profs with tenure” (something I had never heard of before!) who had gotten tenure at a time when the dept was quite marginal. Oh well. As far as I know, UNC isn’t a big logic programming, knowledge representation, or theorem proving school and Plaisted is basically the guy who does all of that (which a good school should cover to some degree even if it’s not a strength). He is reasonably competant if uninspiring at that.
Not that we shouldn’t mock him! I don’t know why this would change my opinion of the CS dept or the school as a whole. The undergraduate student body is fairly religious, which, let me tell you, if you’re teaching secular ethics can be a real issue. There’s sexism, racism, and a good deal of homophobia (and plenty of resistence to these). While I was there, an English professor had his tenure revoked for sleeping with his graduate student, which I find to be *far* worses than Plaisted’s nuttery. Even though I work in the relevant subfield and sorta hate NC, I would be happy to have a job in that CS dept. Not as happy as if there were better KR colleagues, but I think reasoanbly happy.
Yeah, ran across Plaisted’s pages a long time ago. He’s got lots of stuff arguing that a big chunk of physics is wrong and radiometric dating doesn’t work, stratigraphy is wrong and/or can be explained by the Flood, etc., etc.
At least his very thoroughness provides a rather pathetic demonstration of just how many different scientific disciplines must have their logic pretzeled in order to try to deny the fact of evolution.
This guy should go sit in on some of the religious studies courses at UNC. He probably doesn’t even know who Bart Ehrman is though.
As a graduate of N.C. State all I can say is, HA! I can’t wait to tell my UNC graduated brother about this.
Good gravy! I looked at the website and it was bad. Bad design, bad theories, bad argument and bad data. Yet another example of prostituting some data to fit a 6,000 year myth, and ignoring all the other bits that don’t fit.
Even so I cannot argue for supressing the site. It would be useful though if private pages could be separated from the universities ‘official’ pages – this is easy to do by playing with IP addresses and/or server names, e.g.:
http://www.cs.unc.edu/not_official/~plaisted/ce/index.html
Think how much grief this would have saved Baylor…
Of course you could select some other phrase (‘raving_nutter’?) but you would have to be careful not to put off other sensible private web pages.