Can you bear a little more Ben Carson? Some yahoo going by the name @CARSON4POTUS has been yammering at me on Twitter: he insists that I’m completely wrong, that Carson is not a young earth creationist, and as evidence he dredges up some godawful talk on creationism that Carson gave in 2011. It convinces me that Carson is even stupider than I thought.
Here are a few quotes from it. The numbers in brackets refer to times in this video, which I have not watched, because listening to Carson talk makes me want to sit him down at the kids’ table with a coloring book and tell him to leave the grownups alone.
[19:41] “You know, I am not a hard and fast person that says the earth is only six thousand years old, but I do believe in a six day creation. And, because, you know, it says in the beginning that God created the heaven and the earth. [19:56] It doesn’t say when he created them except for ‘in the beginning’, so the earth could have been here for along time before he started creating things on it. But when he did start doing that he made it very specifically clear to us, the evening and the morning were the next day, because he knew that people would come along [20:15] and try to say that ‘oh it was millions and millions of years.’ And then what else did he say in the very first chapter: ‘that each thing brought forth after its own kind’, because he knew that people would come along and say you know that this thing changed into that [20:34] and this changed to that and this changed to that. So at the very beginning of the Bible he puts that to rest.”
That first bit is a waffly reference to the gap theory of creation, which is the idea that god created the world in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, and then in space after the period and before the second sentence, millions or billions of years of geology occurred without comment. THen he picked up again some thousands of years ago with all the begats and the days and the “it was goods” and all that.
It’s kind of a goofy workaround the problem with radioisotope dating saying the earth is old and all that astronomy demonstrating Deep Time, and even at that, Carson can’t commit to plainly stating the age of the earth…for all you can tell from that quote, he could believe the earth is 6 days, 6 years, 6 million years, or 6 billion years old. He’s talking to Seventh Day Adventists who firmly claim that the earth is only 6 thousand years old, so he’s trying to maintain deniability here. Not only is he ignorant, he’s chickenshit.
He does commit to the claim that all life, from crawly things to trees to people, was created in a six day span, and that nothing evolved. So our Carson fan is basically declaring that he’s not so stupid to believe in a specific date for creation, but he does openly believe in a whole lot of stupid nonsense.
He also believes this:
[20:56] “… there is abundant evidence, geological evidence, that there was a worldwide flood. Go up into the Andes Mountains and see all those fossils on the top of those mountains. I mean, these things, when you talk to the evolutionists about them, they always say the same thing … ‘well, we don’t understand everything.’ [21:17] And I just say, ‘I’m not sure you understand anything.’ You know, they look at all those layers, and then they find some fossils in one of the layers, and they says this fossil is this many years old because it’s in this layer. [21:38] So, that means this fossil is like a million years old. And then later on they say, ‘well, this layer is a million years old because this fossil which is a million years old is in it.’ You know, that’s like saying, you know, ‘the sky can be red or blue’. And you say, well, the sky is blue. And you say why is it blue? ‘Because it is not red.’ Well why is it not red? ‘Because its blue.’ Yeh, you know that’s known as circular reasoning. That’s how they explain the age of all these things, its very circular reasoning, and really it has no real scientific validity.” [22:22]
No, there is no evidence for a world wide flood. None at all. If you point to fossils high up in the mountains, geologists will not say they don’t understand how they got there — we have a very good idea exactly how those mountains buckled and raised marine strata up to high altitude. It’s clear that Carson is the one who doesn’t understand anything.
He also regurgitates that old creationist nonsense about circular methods for dating fossils and rock. It’s simply not true. We have independent radiometric methods for dating igneous rock, which then allow us to estimate the age of fossils in sedimentary layers (in case it isn’t obvious, you don’t get fossils from lava flows) between dated strata. He’s reciting a lie that has been thoroughly debunked.
OK, so he doesn’t understand physics, geology, or evolution. These are fields well outside his area of expertise, so except for the fact that he’s touting counterfactual bullshit as truth, you could argue that he shouldn’t be embarrassed by his errors. That doesn’t excuse this statement, though:
[28:07] “… it [the human brain] remembers every single thing you have ever seen, every single thing you have ever heard.” … “Do you know, your brain, and this is a conservative estimate, could take in one new fact every second for over three million years before you begin to challenge its capacity.” [This is 9.4 x 10E13 facts. Wikipedia gives the following estimates: the number of cells in the human body = 7 x 10E13; the number of neurons in the human brain = 10E11]
Oh, nonsense. He’s supposed to be an expert on the brain, but it’s simply false that we record every detail of our lives. We can’t. How do you even quantify the number of “facts” you encounter in your lifetime? He’s just making crap up here.
There’s more at the link, including Carson saying that Satan invented the theory of evolution, but there’s only so much I can take. I am now going on a no-Carson diet until I’ve purged this noise from my brain.
Once again, Radiolab has an enthralling episode on the subject of forgetting. (with bonus Oliver Sacks!)
Which of the R candidates would do better than this?
I’m suffering a near-fatal eyeroll here. No, that doesn’t put jack shit to rest. If that placeholder* of yours was really all that, then perhaps it could have been arsed at some point to actually communicate.
* I’m on strike with the whole generic placeholder god – if people don’t have a name for their god, I’m just going to call it a placeholder.
joel @2
Even if none of the Republican candidates can do better, at least they might have the excuse of never having a proper biology class. Carson should have learned the basics of evolution. He definitely should have learned how the brain works, since he’s had to use that for many years.
Yet does he get proper credit? I’ve never seen any of his publications referenced in any peer-reviewed biology journal. It’s a scandal, I tell you, an absolute disgrace!
peridolia. Ask him to explain _the_cause_of_peridolia, not the word iself, nor examples thereof. But explain the brain mechanisms that give rise to mistaking random swirls for predator faces (man-in-the-moon included).
The we I understand it is that the brain “interpolates”, that what gets stored is incomplete, and when asked, it will just interpolate from other experiences to fill-in the gaps.
To claim the brain stores every bit of information exposed to it throughout every milli-second of exposure is misunderstanding how the brain works completely, settling on the olde model of “tape-recorder” of how memory works. I am surprised (not) that a neurosurgeon would characterize the brain mechanism so inaccurately.
I blame the Rethuglican hierarchy, who drafted a scientist of color, to be a shill [token] to sell their Koch agenda.
ugh. *my*brain*hurts*
Oh, I would love to see some post-publication peer review of Genesis appear on Pubpeer, eventually followed by a notice on Retractionwatch of the corresponding author’s request to withdraw the publication on grounds of fabricated data, failure to replicate, and extensive plagiarism (there’d been a very nasty letter from Enkidu’s legal counsel)!
“Not only is he ignorant, he’s chickenshit.”
Yet he’s only in second place – he needs to add loud & obnoxious to his qualifiers if he wants to move on up.
What’s up with that claim that the devil invented evolution? Is he saying that darwin or his contemporaries were literally possessed by the devil?
It’s actually a pretty slimy underhanded tactic to claim that anyone who says anything that you don’t like is evil or possessed. You’re literally demonizing people who disagree with you.
I also find it odd how he seems to appeal to the brain so much, in spite of other creationists rightly noticing that the brain taking care of all of the functions normally attributed to the soul makes dualism hard to maintain. How does a fundamentalist christian neurosurgeon reconcile what he’s learned about the brain with his beliefs of a soul and an afterlife?
The republican candidates are reciting what the people who bankroll them wish to hear. It’s a strategy, and since the same group of people who bankroll Republicans happen to own major media corporations, there is a lot of media coverage being given to complete idiocy. I think it’s all a ploy so that eventually the actual favored candidate will seem like a safe and prudent choice in comparison to ignorant doctors and racist and misogynistic millionaire narcissists.
In general this is true, but there are instances of lava flows with the right consistency, location, and temperature covering and preserving as fossils some life forms that are very resilient. There are many places in the Hawaiian islands where reefs, coral, and shells can be found weathering out of lava flows about ten feet above current sea level. Trees leave cavities in lava that become infilled with silica to produce replacement fossil branches cast in agate or chalcedony. Its fairly common in parts of the central and southwest US, and Canada.
I have seen numerous instances of medical professionals denying the existence of evolution. Seems like the creationist crowd must have been operating in the medical schools for decades. I should start asking doctors if they believe evolution underpins all of our understanding of biology. If they answer no, time to find a new doctor.
Remember “Baby Fay”, who had a baboon heart transplanted into her in 1984? It didn’t end well. The doctor who headed the operation, at a Seventh Day Adventist hospital, was asked by reporters afterward if he thought part of the problem was the evolutionary distance between humans and baboons, and he replied that that was a difficult question for him to know how to answer because he didn’t believe in evolution.
BTW, I tried looking for the exact quote and news story on that a few years back but was unable to find it online since it happened quite some time before people started putting news stories online. I do remember reading the story at the time.
Ooh, chalk one up for memory! I just looked at the Wikipedia article on the operation and found it had the referenced quote, virtually word for word as I remembered it from 36 years ago!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Fae
OTOH, don’t ask me about how I remembered the ending of an anthro short story, “The Golden Marshalltown”, which upon rereading after several years I saw I’d remembered it with my alternate much better ending. :)
Broken Things @11
Yep. Doctors and engineers are often remarkably ignorant of science even though science is the foundation for pretty much everything important in their professions. Many of them have passed through YEARS of education resolutely closing their minds to fundamental knowledge and concentrating only on specific techniques and procedures for performing medical and engineering tasks.
Innocent outsiders think their well-honed and well-compensated technical skills indicate scientific knowledge. They don’t.
When my cohort of archaeologists first read “The Golden Marshalltown”, we spent a large amount of
beertime trying to decide which real-life archaeologists corresponded to the characters in the story.So, If I measure my own height with a reliable measuring device to be 6 feet, 0 inches, and then a week later I go to the lumber yard and take a board advertised to be 6 feet long, stand it on end and find out it is 3 inches shorter than me, Ben Carson thinks I have no valid reason to complain to the store for selling short lumber?
A remember for the old timers; my old friend, Barb, was a huge fan of Ben Carson.
nutella @14
Doctors and engineers have more in common than that. Many doctors, particularly surgeons, are body mechanics, fixing specific problems. Carson was a brain mechanic.
as an engineer myself, it is easy to see how one can arrogantly think “EVERYTHING is engineered, so a cosmic engineer must be responsible.” Science being just a method to be used to design stuff or fix stuff; with no significant implications of accounting for everything that must be designed.
IOW, “The Ultimate Engineer designed everything, using Science”
.
I say this because I too have struggled with that arrogant viewpoint and continually fall back on looking at parsimony fully. Looking at some who claim “parsimony” fallaciously. as in: “the simplest explanation is God did it. Evolution is extremely complicated. The simplest explanation is goddidit. QED Goddidit is more parsimonious”.
The old timers might remember that my good friend, Barb, was a huge fan of Ben Carson.
Old timer might remember that my good friend was a huge fan of the good doctor.
Hi, Janine.
Sorry about all the comments saying the same thing. PZ’s trap got wonky and he set them all free.
Satan really invented everything good, didn’t he?
@rietpluim
And I believe he has all the good tunes!!
Lucky Devil!!!!!
So Genesis was written by God himself? Then why does he refer to himself in the third person? And even more peculiar, the third person plural?
re 26:
et al
me thinks Carson is telling us the Bible was scibbed by mere humans who used metaphors to describe swaths of bigtime as “days”. That the Bible is simply metaphor but absolutely true and accurate except where it aint. like the exact sequence of creating creature “kinds”. We think A-B-C-D-E where bibble says A-C-E-D-B.
So bibble is correct, cuz it says so right there in the bibble, in some other metaphor area. But Carson can see through the metaphors to see the TRUTH within the metaphors. so QED (Qouthe Error Dumble)
I concluded long ago that it’s quite possible to become a physician or surgeon without ever gaining an understanding, or even a respect for science. For the last year or so at the end of my time in grad school, I supported myself by tutoring medical students in biochemistry and genetics. I was surprised to learn that many of them couldn’t see why even the facts of biochemistry, let alone any account of how those facts were uncovered, should be part of their medical education.
To do the tutoring I had to use offices in the medical teaching facility, a separate building from that used by those of us in basic science degree programs. Even the graffiti in the rest rooms contained running conversations complaining about how science was such a waste of effort in their med school experience. It was a very disturbing peek into the anti-intellectual mindset of some (I can only hope not all) med students.
[blockquote]it [the human brain] remembers every single thing you have ever seen, every single thing you have ever heard[/blockquote]
My keys would beg to differ.
His analogies are as piss-poor as his other arguments. We know why the sky appears blue during the day and redder at sunrise and sunset. Setting that aside, he doesn’t even realise that his analogy isn’t one of circular reasoning: he sets up a false dichotomy and fails to provide an explanation for the answer he does suggest.
But still, I suppose it kept his audience happy. That’s what they’re paying for: entertainment and self-confirmation. The problem is that if too many people want that from the same person then everyone else ends up having to pay for the results.
I think there was always a faulty logic in the idea that brain surgeons are really smart. Carson is good with his hands and he worked on brains. That doesn’t mean he is good with his brain.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread:
Ben Carson couldn’t find evidence of “overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused” when it comes to climate change.
Governor Jerry Brown of California decided to help Ben Carson out. He sent Carson overwhelming evidence.
Link
You can lead Ben Carson to evidence, but you can’t make him read it.