Ablett couldn’t even translate the claim from peanut butter to vegemite!

I hope I didn’t catch something in the Antipodes. There seems to be something awful going around down there: Ken Ham, Ray Comfort, and now…Gary Ablett, Sr. He’s an Australian rules footballer with a few seedy drug-related incidents in his past — he’s also a world-class moron. He’s just written a long and mostly incoherent complaint about atheists for the Herald Sun, a cheesy tabloid in Australia.

Maybe it’s the football — they play without the heavy armor American footballers wear, so maybe he’s got brain damage. After all, Jason Ball wrote a nice rebuttal, and he’s Australian, too, so it’s obviously not a Southern Hemisphere epidemic.

Given that Jason has addressed most of the silly claims of this poor pious twit, I’ll just mention one thing that caught my eye: the recycled fatuity so common to creationists. Ablett makes an old argument against evolution.

Let’s take another example. Evolution teaches that matter plus energy (light or heat) plus time equals biogenesis, the cause of new life.

Yet our entire food industry relies on the fact that the evolutionary formula doesn’t work. For example, if you take a jar of peanut butter (matter), expose it to light and heat (energy) and add time you will never get new life (biogenesis) in that jar. And are we grateful about that! Why is new life impossible in a sealed jar? Because we are missing the most important aspect: information.

The very reason food is sealed is to keep information out, it’s only if and when the seal is broken that a contamination can occur because information has got inside the jar! We need to take this fact very seriously because in the food industry this experiment is conducted over a billion times a year collectively, and has been doing so for more than a hundred years, which proves that the absence of information renders life impossible.

Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s practically verbatim from this quaint exhibition of stupidity by Chuck Missler (also, not from Australia or New Zealand — he’s an Idahoan).

No scientist gives much credibility to the ancient Peanut Butter Earth hypothesis. We suspect that life arose in a chemically active watery environment, not a big brown glop of concentrated fats and proteins in a jar in the Archaean. We’re also not surprised that life doesn’t spontaneously arise everywhere anymore: conditions on Earth are very different from those in the abiotic/early biotic period, and what’s more, any new life that arose now, improbable as that is, would face a world populated by bacteria with 4 billion years of evolutionary refinement behind them. So it’s a very, very stupid argument.

The rest of Ablett’s arguments are just as inane, and are similarly ripped off almost literally from common creationist canards. There’s nothing original and nothing intelligent anywhere in it — it’s just sad how feeble these guys are getting.


Interestingly and entirely unsurprisingly, big chunks of Ablett’s article were plagiarized. It seems like most of their stuff can be traced back to a small population of ur-creationists in the 1960s, and there brains have been locked up solid ever since.

Hannity and Carlson dislike science

As yet another examples of the derangement of conservative thought, Sean Hannity has been pushing a list of 102 examples of ‘wasteful’ stimulus spending. I don’t quite get it; this is money the government is disbursing to encourage jobs for the sake of jobs, and if they were hiring people to dig holes and fill them in again, it would accomplish their task. However, the money is being spent sensibly on projects that also improve the nation’s infrastructure in small ways and increase knowledge.

One of the targets of their scorn are science projects, including this one, improving the facilities at an insect collection in Michigan. You might not want to watch this if Hannity and Tucker Carlson make you gag, but the scientist in charge, Anthony Cognato, does a good job of making his case.

The bad guys are really reaching here. Carlson tries to imply that they didn’t need the money, that all they had to do was stick the ‘bugs’ in a refrigerator, but that doesn’t work — this is a working collection, you can’t just archive them away in a deep freeze, and storing a million-specimen collection in a bank of -80° freezers would be rather substantially more expensive than putting in more effective shelving. Cognato addressed this (that link is behind a paywall, sorry):

The interview began and Carlson transformed into an effective pundit for the Right; the questioning was quick, the topics a little disconnected, and at times he seemed to fish for a particular sound bite that would support the opinion that funding the collection was a waste of money. For example, he asked me a couple times if I could have controlled collection pests by just continually freezing the drawers that contain the specimens, thus making our purchase of new storage cabinets unnecessary. I answered repeatedly that freezing our thousands of drawers was not optimal for long-term preservation, that it drained time and resources, and kept researchers from using the collection for scientific studies.

Then they try to suggest that all the $200,000 did was to hire a few students at $8/hour, which is not true: those students weren’t in charge of building shelves. That was a professional job from a company called BioQuip. One of the workers at that company wrote in:

My job is one of the many that were affected by this grant. I work for BioQuip, the California company that manufactures the drawers that MSU bought. Our company employs 27 people whose jobs were all affected by this grant as well as the lumber company, glass company & trucking companies we use along the way. This grant has benefited the US economy, created & maintained US jobs on a level far greater than 4 jobs at a single university. Hannity & Carlson need to do their homework.

Of course, the Right doesn’t see this. Read the comments on Hannity’s site about this subject: it’s insane. Most of the people are ranting about Pelosi and Obama with no connection at all to the topic of the video…except for the weird Cyrillic comments (Russian spam of some sort?).

We’ve got to keep these nuts out of power.

Tim Tebow gets a lesson

Tebow is an obnoxious hyper-religious football player. He recently had to take some kind of test with a group of other players, and this is what happened:

At the Scouting Combine, the Wonderlic exam is administered to players in groups.  The 12-minute test is preceded by some brief instructions and comments from the person administering the test.

Per a league source, after the person administering the test to Tebow’s group had finished, Tebow made a request that the players bow their heads in prayer before taking the 50-question exam.

Said one of the other players in response:  “Shut the f–k up.”  Others players in the room then laughed.

I think a lot of people are getting fed up with the excessive piety, and I’m glad some are speaking out. Tebow wants to pray, fine; Tebow wants to drag others into his delusion, fire back.

By the way, Tebow got a 22 out of 50 on the test. I had to look up this Wonderlic test — it seems to be a remarkably trivial ‘intelligence’ test of the sort you might see in a grade school, I would think. “When rope is selling at $.10 a foot, how many feet can you buy for sixty cents?” and “A boy is 16 years old and his sister is twice as old. When the boy is 22 years old, what will be the age of his sister?”, that sort of thing, nothing that requires any reasoning beyond elementary algebra.

I’m shocked that a grown man could get below 50% on this thing.

And the Templeton Prize goes to…

…a politically brilliant choice, Francisco Ayala. He’s a former priest who has argued for respect for religion while not going quite as far as some of the other possibilities in endorsing it, he’s been fairly circumspect about not presenting ridiculous rationales for religion, but he’s also an excellent and reputable scientist.

It’s definitely an astute decision. The foundation went for someone whose primary claim to renown is as a scientist, not as an apologist. They are a canny bunch, those rascals — they avoided the obvious targets and picked someone who isn’t quite as easily mocked.

How much support is the NAS willing to give to religion?

Imagine that a well-funded astrology organization were to establish a prize awarding a good chunk of money to a scientist who best affirmed the validity of astrology, all as part of a campaign to bestow a whiff of credibility to the belief that the position of the stars at the time you were born influenced your fate. Astrologers certainly want to pretend that they are scientific, so it’s exactly the kind of thing many of them would love to do; their only problem is that real scientists would laugh them away, and they certainly wouldn’t get the support of any of the major scientific institutions.

So why is the National Academy of Sciences supporting an organization claiming to reconcile science and superstition, and why is the president of the NAS nominating scientists for such an award? It’s exactly analogous; religion has no more validity than astrology, is openly unscientific, and I would argue is anti-scientific, so no legitimate scientific institution ought to be endorsing it. I know that some of their members may be church-goers, but some of them will also be following their horoscope in the newspapers, so that’s still no reason to pander to folly.

Here’s something else that’s odd: we’ve got the Templeton Foundation desperately looking for respect by marrying ancient superstitions to modern science, but we’ve got nothing on the other side. You don’t see American Atheists or the American Humanist Association funding research that would promote the idea that godlessness and science are compatible; they don’t have as much money, for one thing, but also we take it for granted that not invoking supernatural forces is a pretty reasonable thing to do in science. The godless don’t have to strain to wedge their ideas into a domain that excludes them.

We also don’t have an organization awarding a prize to the scientist who “has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s [natural, material] dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works” (that’s the description of the Templeton Prize, with one little change). It would be redundant, since that’s what science does. We also don’t have a major atheist organization giving out awards specifically to the scientist of the year who has made the greatest contribution to actively promoting secularism, even though they could: Dawkins, Harris, Kroto, Atkins and many others would be on the shortlist, easily. Maybe they should, but most atheists aren’t so insecure that they need to make a special effort to show that their ideas are compatible with science.

One reason they should, though, is just to see what would happen when they asked a major scientific institution to host the award ceremony. I predict a very rapid back-pedal from an organization that wouldn’t want to get into a political tangle…a consideration they apparently don’t worry about when what is being promoted is religion, despite the fact that religion is a fraud.

James Cameron:one of us?

James Cameron was caught in an interview saying what he really thinks about Glenn Beck, Fox News, global warming denialists, and let’s just say he uses a few terms that would send the Colgate Twins to their fainting couches. He also happens to be a vocal celebrity atheist.

I’ve sworn off agnosticism, which I now call cowardly atheism. I’ve come to the position that in the complete absence of any supporting data whatsover for the persistence of the individual in some spiritual form, it is necessary to operate under the provisional conclusion that there is no afterlife and then be ready to amend that if I find out otherwise.

I guess I shouldn’t have bothered with the question mark in the title.

Greece leads the way

Greece is rapidly heading towards economic collapse, and this has finally motivated tho do something that should have been done long ago:

The Greek government has announced it will start taxing churches as part of its efforts to get out of its financial crisis. A new draft bill to be tabled in parliament next week imposes a 20 per cent tax on the Orthodox church’s real estate income, reportedly worth over 10 million Euros (US $14.8 million) a year, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The Greek Orthodox church is squealing like a stuck pig, of course.

However, the Greek government has a debt of €216 billion; belatedly taxing €10 million isn’t going to make much of a dent. Let’s hope Greece isn’t leading the way into catastrophic economic failure.