Oh, great. Ken Ham offered a basic course in genetics, which I found irresistible, since I’ve only been teaching genetics for something over 20 years. Maybe? I’ll learn something new. Unfortunately, all I learned is that Ken Ham has an irrational contempt for poodles.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Understandable. Yesterday, it was raining cats and dogs. I went outside and stepped in a poodle.
I’ll be here all night, so hearing protection is advised.
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Cross posted from youtube:
I’d argue that 1398 kinds* is too many to fit on the ark. That’s why Ham is disputing his own “scientists” to lower that number even more.
*Side note. The graphic on the display says “1398 kinds / 6744 animals”. How does that math work? I guess it has something to do with 7 of some and 2 of others.
Also to add: I bet Ham kicks poodle puppies.
I remember him going on and on about poodles in one article from the classic No Answers in Genesis website where there is an article about Dumb Idiot Ham going on and on about poodles for some reason. The link is here.
https://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/ham_and_poodles.htm
Likely he must have an unpleasant experience with poodles when he was a young boy or he just doesn’t like them due to their fluffy appearance.
Train attack poodles to saturate Ken Ham in a hill of yapping fur before he can kick them away!
It will be like “The Cats of Ulthar”, but cuter.
(soak them in surströmming juce before unleashing them)
I am learning so much these days!
Just yesterday, I got a basic course in astronomy from Marjorie Taylor Greene. Apparently, our planet is spinning. Stuff is spinning and rotating around other stuff, and that’s why the climate has changed. It’s totally natural.
I actually found that very entertaining, PZ. Mostly your facial expressions being the entertaining part. I got a great screen capture of that facepalm.
One thing–it sounded like he was saying there’s a loss of information with every succeeding generation. Did I hear that wrong? I guess in a few more generations we’ll degenerate into a bunch of undifferentiated goo, or something.
Oh, and I suspect his problem with poodles, the haircuts and all that, is he thinks they’ve been feminized. And that’s bad, right? Just a thought.
He also missed a golden opportunity to close with “toodles, poodles!” I’m sure the audience would have howled with laughter.
Dumb Idiot Ham ranting about poodles is entirely no different than Stupid Idiot Trump ranting about mash potatoes, like the ones his dad dumped on his head at dinnertime when he was 5 years old.
Back on the tundra or savannah not tolerating domesticated canids would have been a negative survival trait. But he is too dense to see the irony.
Despite being Australian he is a product of urban civilisation. Good luck being on your own in the outback.
Back on the tundra or savannah not tolerating domesticated canids would have been a negative survival trait. But he is too dense to see the irony.
Despite being Australian he is a product of urban civilisation. Good luck being on your own in the outback.
Doublet posting. Delete. Eeexterminate.
I learned from a senator that we men don’t have any x chromosomes.
If Ken Ham thinks poodles are degenerate, flawed examples of dog kind then I am justified in thinking that Ken Ham is a degenerate, flawed example of humankind. I can certainly be sure that he personally is significantly lacking in information.
@6 “a loss of information with every succeeding generation.”
I think with Ken Ham teaching genetics we can ensure this, yes.
Like the #1 evil master Ken Ham wishes he could be. Sauron, we can answer this post’s question with Frodo’s reply to Gollum: “What does he NOT hate?”
@12 poodles are an active healthy highly intelligent breed originally used for hunting/retrieving in water environments. A poor choice for “degenerate”!
@8 Dingoes were a very late (approx 3000 years BP) arrival in Australia, so people were “surviving” for some 47,000 years without dogs in Australia. Also They seem not to have been used for hunting although they did live in human campsites.
Not following Ken Ham very closely, I was almost ready give him a point for realizing that genetic drift leads to reduced diversity in a small populations… until this somehow turned out to be a consequence of original sin.
Still, interesting that he seems to have some kind of mechanistic or materialist understanding of genetic drift. No real need for a supernatural explanation. Someone should teach him about mutation-selection balance though.
Minor point, but Ham doesn’t even get the Vulgate Bible right — the word for “kind” (appearing in Gen 7:14) is “genus”, not “species”. The latter word is of much later origin.
Seems like he would have made quite a point of that fact, if he’d not been too lazy to look it up.
This is very good!
Patriarchy, seriously.
Also, it’s wild that he’s presenting “purebred” dogs as degenerate, which is the opposite of the eugenicist ideology of dog breeding.
It’s been a long time since I read Genesis (and it’s even sillier than I recall; I still find the resting part very funny), but I noted this from the slide:
I think his slide has “livestock” as the translation rather than “cattle,” but this is supposed to be on day 5, prior to humans, who are later given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So “cattle” or “livestock” are created before humans in some sort of anticipation of future domination or something. Doesn’t really hold up conceptually.
#17.
Just like he never gets the meaning of certain Hebrew words right, either.
#18.
Just comes to show that Ham, who always insists that the Bible is 100% true and accurate, never really gets the Bible right no matter how hard or often he claims to be an “expert” on it.
Poodles are highly intelligent dogs. A fave of the philosopoher Schoperhauer if memory serves.
One of them probly saw through and rebutted his nonsense and he never forgot it?
Also a breed or set thereof french and seen as effiminate and fancy.. Because humans make silly cultural associations.
My grandparents had several toy poodles – lovely, sweet dogs.
PS. Also walked a poodle or two orf the large non-toy breed as well and again, found them (at least the one’s I’ve known) to be absolutely delightful, beautiful, happy animals. Much nicer than toxic human fools like the non-astronaut Ham.
Thinking poodles, philosophers, symbols & (semiotic/`ological?) associations; I imagine Roland (?) Barthes (?) would have a few things to note here on what poodles represent in terms of sophistication, arty-ness, intellectual-ness and frenchness and wealth which, is on us and our cultural perceptions. Certainly not the dogs fault although, of course, any pure-bed dog is going to have its own set of issues due to inbreeding.
.* Right word /name / author? Very long time since I did any philosophy – did read atleats oenof his books adecade or tywo ago – linked with /offshoot of structuralism maybe?
Huh. Those italcis aren’t wher eI thought they were or meant to be.
Fix : I did read at least one of Barthe’s (?) books a decade or two or three ago..
Owosso Harpist @ #20, he has the verse right. The verse is what’s weird.
StevoR,
“Poodles are highly intelligent dogs.”
vs
“Ashkenazi are highly intelligent humans.”
or
“Ethiopians are the best runners.”
PZ too, so perhaps you’re right.
Me, I can’t see too much distinction between the concept of dog breeds and that of human races other than in degree. And, obs, when cruelly artificially selected eugenics are applied (can anyone think otherwise of it?) it’s convenient that dogs have a much shorter generative interval than humans.
(Or, shorter: saying a breed of dog is particularly good implies other breeds are not particularly good)
@17 It’s worse than that. The original word in Genesis is “baramin”, which can’t be translated into a Linnean classification, because Linnean classification didn’t exist back then.
There’s a whole branch of “science” called baraminology which tries to figure out which animals belong to which baramin. Are lions and tigers from different baramin, or are they both members of a “big cat’ baramin? Or is there simply a “cat” baramin that includes housecats, lions, and tigers?
Of course the answer is that they’re both members of the “cat” baramin, and only one pair of cats was on the ark. This is proven at https://answersingenesis.org/noahs-ark/reimagining-ark-animals/ (well, as well as any aspect of baraminology can be proven.)
@22. Chalk it up! I recalled right :
It was indeed Roland Barthes : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes
Plus semiotics : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
Plus Schopenhauer was indeed a buig poodles fan see :
https://www.clappisonvet.com/the-pleasures-of-poodles-to-a-pessimist-2/
@25. John Morales : Hmm.. maybe but there is quite a difference between human cultural and ethnic groups and dogs that are specifically bred & thus artifically selected to have certain traits here I think. I wouldn’t say allpoodles are identical though because dogs like people do have their own individual characters and attritributes and strengths and weaknesses so yes, still a generalisation. Of cours ein both humans and canines, environment and expectations and thus treatment shapes things.
StevoR, “I wouldn’t say all poodles are identical”.
Well, no.
What you actually wrote was, as I directly quoted, “Poodles are highly intelligent dogs.”
In short, both you and Ken Ham think poodles are special in some way; you think they’re highly intelligent, he thinks they’re degenerate, is the difference.
If the hamster dislikes domesticated canids, I want to introduce him to a pack of hungry non-domesticated ones just för laughs.
@ 28. John Morales :
Which is pretty much the consensus on the general nature of poodles. Wikipedia :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poodle
Source : https://thesmartcanine.com/are-poodles-smart/
Source : https://www.oodlelife.com/are-poodles-smart/
Basically, (acidly even?) the experts agree that high intelligence is a trait found in the Poodle breed. Of course, there might be individual Poodles that aren’t so smart but those are exceptions and the high intelligence is a matter of observed and quantified fact not merely my personal opinion. Not sure why you’re making such a big deal of this..
There’s a big difference between not-the-astronaut Ham basically having a prejudiced negative opinion of poodles that is seemingly unbased on any real logic or reason versus me saying what basically anyone who knows anything about the breed says.
Source :
At about 30 min, where he pulls up that Aa Bb Cc stuff he says that from two parents with that genome, offspring with AA BB CC would look different from their parents. Now it’s been five decades since I had even basic genetics, so forgive me if I’ve forgotten the terminology, etc., but if those are the only genes in play, since all three have at least one dominant allele, wouldn’t they look just like the parents?
Well, John, there’s quite a lot of things you can’t see that are nonetheless real. This is one of them. Dog breeds have been deliberately created for specific purposes, by systematic inbreeding and selection for the desired phenotype. Human races have not. Clear now?
#26.
I think “baraminology” is pure pseudoscience invented by creationists who have no basis on all their idiotic claims about how animals (living and extinct) are related.
Ridana @ # 31: … since all three have at least one dominant allele, wouldn’t they look just like the parents?
Nope – even clones can look completely different (within species limits) from their parent/ancestor/rootstock/whatever-you-want-to-call-’em.
@34) But that’s because in real life the entire genome is in play, consisting of lots and lots of genes with possible mutations and environmental factors affecting the resulting phenotype. If Aa is the sole governor of fur color (A=black, a=white), Bb is the sole governor of fur type (B=curly, b=straight) and Cc is the only gene that determines fur length (C=short, c=long), then would not the AABBCC offspring and their AaBbCc parents all have black, curly, short fur, baring mutations which would be neither ABC nor abc?
What I’m getting at is that it seems to me that his Mendelian example is too simple to conclude that the hypothetical offspring would look different, when they have a full complement of dominant genes as do the parents. He seems to be implying that the very presence of the recessive genes are what makes the offspring automatically look different.
KG:
I was always clear about the concepts at hand; you, however, have issues.
I noted that there is a distinction, which you summarise as humans haven’t being deliberately bred for specific purposes by systematic inbreeding and selection for the desired phenotype — instead, those effects arose due to reproductive isolation and natural selection for adaptive traits within that subpopulation.
Yes, there’s a difference between natural and artificial selection, but selection nonetheless it is, purposeful or not, directed or not. Humans are not exempt.
Standard Poodles are highly intelligent, but toy varieties are better known for being neurotic yapping mops with matted gunk around their eyes.
@ ^ Tethys : As I noted in #21, my grandparents had several toy poodles and whilst I guess its anecdata and mayeb they were just lucky – or good dog owners – that seems a tad unfair a characterisation to me. As noted before, their ones were very lovely, happy dogs & not that yappy or neurotic. They did get gunk in their eyes at times but not that bad given they were well looked after.
@36. John Morales : Maybe not “exempt” but there’s a lot more difference and diversity in different breeds of dog than there are in humans.
A Great Dane and a Chihuaha are extremely different, an African-American and a European American or Chinese person etc .. differe vastly less eg skeletal structure indistinguishable.
StevoR, “other than in degree”.