Ken Ham claims to have been reading the science news
. Oh, really?
Sometimes when I read the science news I just have to laugh. It seems that secular scientists are willing to believe anything, no matter how ridiculous, rather than admit the truth that they know in their hearts. There is a Creator (Romans 1:20–21). Well, in the news recently there was a story about scientists from the UK who reportedly found a “tiny metal circular object” in Earth’s stratosphere, and they are now “suggesting it might be a micro-organism deliberately sent by extraterrestrials to create life on Earth.”
Just that description makes me skeptical that this is coming from scientists. So I followed his sources.
He got it from the Huffington Post. Already you’re dubious. The HuffPo is a hive of scabrous stupidity; it’s where left-wingers go to prove they’re no more intelligent than right-wingers, out of a sense of egalitarian niceness, no doubt.
The HuffPo article repeats the nonsense about a particle from aliens. Here’s an electron micrograph of it.
They’ve got to be joking. Electron microscopists know you can find all kinds of funny-looking, uninterpretable objects at those scales — that looks nothing like a micro-organism, and they’re overinterpreting junk in the field of view. Who is the source for this nonsense?
It’s the University of Buckingham. I have mixed feelings about that: yes, it’s a real university. But it’s a university that employs raving crank Chandra Wickramasinghe as the head of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology. And sure enough, this comes from Milton Wainwright and Wickramasinghe.
The last I’d heard of Wainwright, he’d been publishing in the Journal of Cosmology a set of micrographs of random dust particles and calling them “alien life”. You all remember the Journal of Cosmology? His paper was a ludicrous example of seeing shapes in clouds and getting it published.
But this silly photo and claim made the news at the University of Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology. It must have been published somewhere, right? Yep. The news article cites a source, one source: the Daily Express.
Call me gobsmacked and slap me with a mackerel. This is university PR, and they cite publication in the Daily fucking Express? This is something of a new low for university public relations departments. Imagine if an American university were to trumpet a scientific discovery for getting published, and published only, in the National Enquirer. This is not something to be proud of. This should be a source for considerable embarrassment. In fact, the only thing more embarrassing is bragging about publishing in the Journal of Cosmology, as other news articles do.
Here’s the Daily Express article. It also features a video about the “top ten facts about UFOs”, and on the sidebar, touts articles about a three-breasted woman, a stained-blass window that shows that Jesus was a ginger, and a grandmother towing a car with her teeth.
I did learn one useful thing from the Buckingham site. There’s another astrobiology journal: The Journal of Astrobiology & Outreach, and Wickramasinghe and Wainwright are publishing lots there. I checked out the current issue. It’s got six articles. Three of them are authored by Wickramasinghe. Who is the editor-in-chief? Chandra Wickramasinghe. You know, even without knowing what a shameless hack Wickramasinghe is, that fact alone should light up ethics alerts all over the place.
But back to Ken Ham: No, Kenny-boy, you weren’t reading “science news”. You were reading tabloid schlock on a disreputable website.
I know, you don’t know the difference.
Wait. He can read? By himself? And he can figure out big words not found in the Bible? And here, all this time, I thought he was at the level that even the Republicans dumb down to.
It is notable that Ham can’t tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience.
(Or pretends not to know the difference)
Not surprising, of course.
If any metal objects are found in Earth’s stratosphere, then Occam’s Razor says they are likely to be bits of human created space junk.
And it is not as if there aren’t natural means by which metal spheres can be produced. Metal dodecahedrons I’d raise an eyebrow to, but spheroids are, like, they most common shape that the laws of nature can produce….
I’m enjoying cosmology.com’s new landing page, wherein you can learn that asking price has gone up $50,000 from 2011 and that the site was apparently under contract with Deepak Chopra at one point.
Don’t forget about journalofcosmology.com, where they brag about getting one million hits per month.
They don’t mention that a significant fraction of that comes from me, and the rest is mostly people looking at the trainwreck.
In the world of low hanging fruits, any statement of “science” from Ken Ham and his organization have to be amongst the lowest.
Some of us remember Wickramasinghe from Evolution from space in which he is the co-author with Fred Hoyle. Fred Hoyle who was a brilliant scientist who ‘went off the rails.’
More ridiculous than believing a 2,000 year old book written by ignorant desert tribesmen, who obsessed over monumental issues like clothing materials and what sorts of images one engraved into stone, is the inerrant word of the supreme creator of the universe?
That object looks like an Austrialian football. I’m surprised Ken didn’t notice that.
Or, it could be an iron droplet ablated off a metallic meteor.
The Daily Express is a bit of a national joke in the UK. Last Saturday its front page headline warned of a ‘freeze’ from Siberia (like in March 2013). But daytime temperatures still reached 6 Celsius or more. I think they hype up the weather deliberately (quoting amateur forecasters with a track record of being wrong, and in consequence are wrong 90 % of the time) simply to try and attract potential Daily Mail readers (and more serious and substantial tabloid). Either that or their stupidity about the weather – or new miracle cures (sometimes) – apparently knows no bounds.
I’m disappointed that you refuse to accept that our Lord and Saviour had ginger pubes.
Message I’ve sent to Answers in Genesis via their website:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/03/18/down-the-rabbit-hole-with-ken-ham/comment-page-1/#comment-923475
Harsh but true.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/554074/Alien-seed-sent-Earth-aliens-Scientists-baffled
“Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham in England, said it is further proof of alien life.” Not sure whether they mean the plasmid or the mystery metal globe, but I think NOT.
The Daily Express nowadays is a trashy tabloid UK newspaper which loves pseudo-science and loves scaremongering. Note the use of the word ‘KILLER’ here: http://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/564873/Toxic-smog-UK-health-warning-alert-asthma-attacks-heart-problems-sore-throats-itchy-eyes
And the article in the Huffington Post is headed by a contextual title ‘Weird News’.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/03/aliens-send-space-seed-to-earth_n_6608582.html
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2015/03/18/scientists-say-life-came-from-alien-intelligent-design/
“… when they say things like this they call it science!” Scientists are not calling this University of Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology story ‘science’. They have not discovered alien life in our atmosphere. And – just like Answers in Genesis publications – the Journal of Astrobiology and Outreach does not appear to be a genuinely peer reviewed science journal.
Obviously God inspired SF people to write a ton about aliens so that cranks would be enabled to spread their psuedoscience, and thereby Ken Ham could make scientists look bad.
ashley @ 14
Watch, if he pays attention to it at all, Ham will spin that response into “See! Those godless scientists disagree about everything, while God’s holy word is unchanging and absolute!”
Ken Ham seems to have forgotten that Chandra Wickramasinghe appeared as a friend of the creationists in a court case in 1981. His statement ended with these words:
In the present state of our knowledge about life and about the Universe, an emphatic denial of some form of creation as an explanation for the origin of life implies a blindness to fact and an arrogance that cannot be condoned.
http://www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm
The NT can hardly be attributed to tribesmen in the usual sense. And the OT is more likely written by the elite at a much later date than traditionally assigned, but even I think it’s BCE.
Besides, anybody writing anything thousands of years ago was ignorant about many of the relevant facts here. If we were talking about what fucking Augustus scribbled down, that’s still true, and there wouldn’t be an implication that we ought to shit on “tribesmen” in the “desert,” as if they’re inferior in some way.
I have been reading Slacktivist’s reviews of the Left Behind books, and clicking other articles that look good. Slacktivist is a Christian who really dislikes Ken Ham.
The University of Buckingham was founded as Britain’s first private research university, and has had strong links with the libertatrian and neo-liberal movements in British Conservatism since its inception as the Un iversity College of Buckingham in the 1970s. When it became a university, Mrs Thatcher laid the foundation stone. Students at other universities used to describe Buckingham students as “Daddy bought me a degree”. How quaint. In those days students at every other university had their fees paid by the state and a means-tested maintenance grant. Nowadays they all graduate with enormous debts thanks to a succession of idiot politicians who believe in Business with a capital B and think neo-liberal economics is a hard science rather than rich people wanking.
I don’t see any criticism of the intellectual acuity of ancient desert tribesmen here. What I do see is criticism of modern thought that says that the limited knowledge available to those tribesmen, and their superstitions, beats everything we know today hands down.
Wickramasinghe is an embarrassment to Britain.
Buckingham University likewise
And the Daily Express.
They would all fit much better in the USA
Any offers?
Are you looking? I don’t understand what it is about my comment that you find disagreeable.
As I said, the words “desert tribesman” are superfluous. Similarly, your words “those tribesmen, and their superstitions” are needlessly specific. They are suggestive of a certain kind of person, unlike Augustus (to use him as an example again) who was not a desert tribesman with those superstitions (but had others). The correct and clear and unambiguous thing to say is that any person thousands of years ago was ignorant about the topic in question, and their ignorant writings on it should definitely not be taken on faith as inerrant. If that’s your basic idea, because you’re not saying something more specific about desert tribesmen (for instance), what you want to say is something like this:
“More ridiculous than believing a 2,000 year old book written by ignorant people […]”
Of course we can still make corrections (for an ignorant/careless person saying such things) about how old different parts of the book actually are and so on, but at least then it’s not an issue that the ridicule seems to be focused on the type of geographical region the people lived in, the type of social structures they had there (e.g., “tribes”), or their relationships in such structures (as “elites” or whatever). Because that kind of shit doesn’t actually matter, when it comes what is ridiculous about it. They could be very different kinds of people in very different social and environmental situations, writing their ignorant books, and it would still be a ridiculous approach to take about them. So, if it’s really not supposed to be about that, it’s only confusing things to bring that up. A reasonable person at this point would just say “fine, duly noted — that’s an improved version of what I meant to say, so I accept it as a friendly amendment” and move on with their lives, because that’s basically what they think.
If you’re disagreeing with me on that, then you’re saying it does matter, that desert tribesmen should be ridiculed as such. That of course is wrong.
However, if you’re actually trying to claim that you just don’t “see,” even after it’s presented to you as such, the difference between the general claim about people and one that’s highly specific (as well as very obviously charged with ideas about race, class, etc., which of course many people do want to ridicule), then I don’t believe you’re being sincere about what you can and can’t see.
Journal of Astrobiology and Outreach, published by OMICS, how lovely. I’ll leave the full URL here as a TLDR to the wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMICS_Publishing_Group#Criticism_of_publishing_practices
As a student I was friends with people who had Milton Wainwright as a tutor, lecturer, etc. I might even have met him in the boozer once. Odd is certainly a word you could use.
I’ve got a 3oz piece of pure shiny metal that fell out of the skies onto south america many years ago (16thC I think). It was sent by god to kill Ken Ham but his timing was a bit off.
Nae in Scotland, laddie! We’ve so far managed to preserve the position of tuition fees (for those ordinarily resident in Scotland, and for EU citizens other than those from the rest of the UK) being paid by the government. Grants, admittedly, have almost disappeared (students from low-income houseolds can get a bursary which covers a small part of their living expenses). Some in the rest of the UK complain that the current position is unfair, but after all, it was them who changed the status quo, not us. If rest-of-UK students had their fees paid, Scottish universities would mostly be attended by English students.
“three-breasted woman”
But that’s true!! I’ve read published reports about her, her name is Eccentrica Galumbits
It is a problem that most people get their science news from sources like the Daily Express and either mistake this bullshit for science or think that scientists are talking out of their asses.
Possibly from a volcano as well, maybe? <– not a geologist, just curious.
I wonder how Ham thinks this is evidence of scientists disbelieving in a deity. They could still believe in a god, it just would have created the extraterrestrials who then created us. Or is his god the only one that matters?
Oh… never mind…
“…willing to believe anything, no matter how ridiculous, rather than admit the truth that they know in their hearts…”
Ham seems blithely unaware of the irony here.
No, they weren’t. They were meant to note that, aside from being ancient (on which point re current knowledge we are in agreement), they were also people for whom we have no reason to think they had much in the way of intellectual acumen on the relevant subjects, even for their time. Contrast this with something written by Galen or Tacitus, about which I would not have said the same thing. I might ridicule something Philip Johnson said about evolution as something utterred by “an ignorant attorney”, but that says little about what I think of attorneys, aside from not trusting their opinions on biological matters.
Nick Gotts @ 27. I live on Tyneside, about 200 metres north of the line of Hadrian’s Wall. The stupider southern papers often refer to the Wall as if it were still the border. If only :)
Just how many pictures does “The Science News” have? Is it enough for Ken?
scienceavenger:
So, in contrast to desert tribesmen, you think Galen is somebody of the respectable sort, by virtue of being in a relatively larger society which wasn’t in a desert. So, if he made any claims about having “the inerrant word of the supreme creator of the universe,” then in that it case it wouldn’t be utterly ridiculous to believe him?
What can I say? I tried to be charitable, but that’s just fucked up.
The word “ignorant” does a lot of this work, by the way:
But you seem to think words like “desert” do that too. Fucking bizarre.
scienceavenger #32:
Your brush is far too wide. ‘Desert tribesmen’ gave us much of our early knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, to name but the two most obvious. You may want to consider going with the usual ‘bronze/iron-age goatherders,’ as there’s a at least a good case to be made that they wouldn’t have been of the more educated class.
(You may also want to consider the difference between ‘acumen’ and ‘education.’)
@Roderick Joyce #21:
The first time I heard of the University of Buckingham was about 17 or 18 years ago. Someone asked me about it (I work in a UK university) and after a bit of investigation I got suspicious and wondered how it qualified for a domain name in the .ac.uk UK HE domain. I was able to trace its web server’s IP address back to a building under a freeway in Los Angeles. This was at a time when UK universities were proud to have their own ICT expertise (we still are!) and were rapidly expanding their web presence, certainly not outsourcing or offshoring any of it. To me it initially looked like a diploma mill.