The incredible self-annihilating creationist argument

This is an amazingly stupid argument.

This guy claims that he can disprove abiogenesis. He has two arguments:

  • Hydrolysis. All the molecules would be soaking in water, and water breaks down chemical reactions. He compares this to monkeys with typewriters, with the addition complication that they have to type in the rain.

  • Chirality. The typewriter has to be twice as big to accommodate both the left- and right-handed molecules, and if the monkey types the wrong handedness, the whole paragraph it’s typing is ruined.

I trust you can see the colossal flaw in his claim. If true, then no chemical reactions could occur in modern, living cells — all that water would be dissolving everything. If chirality was a problem, then no protein could be assembled without picking amino acids having the wrong handedness. The thing is, hydrolysis and condensation reactions are going on continually in the cell, and the whole system pivots on maintaining an equilibrium of disassembly and assembly. As for chirality, enzymes have extremely specific chirality requirements, and will only process molecules of one handedness — and only synthesize molecules of the necessary chirality.

To refute him, I only have to point out that he is mostly made of water, yet he isn’t dissolving in front of me, and that before he self-liquidates, his proteins are made up of only L-amino acids, and not a random mix of L- and R-enantiomers. This is basic biochemistry, and he doesn’t understand it.

Somebody may have confronted him with these facts, compelling him to slump into slimy racemic puddle years ago. H e hasn’t posted in over 3 years, and didn’t have more than 200 followers. Poor dumb creationist.

Infinite Thread XXXXI

Behold, the Ugly Palace (il Palazzaccio, aka The Palace of Justice in Rome).

It’s nice to know we aren’t the only country that throws away money on hideous, grandiose buildings with terrible cost overruns and rumors of corruption. Of course, if it were built here, it would be excessively gilded, and would be a deathtrap.

Talk among yourselves about construction projects. Or whatever.

Previous thread

Illinois has a real winner

The Republicans in Illinois must be desperate — they’re running a creationist, who runs a private school for creationists, against Governor JB Pritzker. This guy, Darren Bailey, is pathetic, and the Pritzker campaign keeps hammering him with dinosaurs.

Were you there? Straight from the mouth of Ken Ham.

Bailey won the Republican primary, which is no surprise, but the polls currently show Pritzker in a comfortable lead, 54-34.

The intellectual pick-pocket

Imagine I were invited to join a lab, and was given access to their data. I frequently talk with lab members, and I help them with writing up their results. Then, suddenly, I publish a grand paper summarizing their work, claiming that any novel insights were entirely my own, and didn’t give any credit to that generous lab.

Would you accept my claim to full credit?

That’s precisely what Anthropic has done!

When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used A.I. agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.

Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years.

Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s A.I. models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.

In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.

I don’t understand how they can claim that they didn’t suck evidence and arguments from a human science lab — that’s their whole business model! What’s not good for their business, though, is stealing credit, which has a natural consequence.

Dr. Mestre had become increasingly enthusiastic about using A.I. for his science. Just last month, he began using Claude Science, a new Anthropic A.I. tool tailored to researchers.

But after Anthropic’s announcement last week, he is winding down his projects with Claude and shifting to other models.

“I’m shutting down everything,” he said.

Why would anyone type their hard-earned evidence directly into a machine that will blithely steal it?

Building Better Men

I went through rush, the campaign to enlist new students into a fraternity/sorority, my first year at the University of Washington. They attempted to lure me in with alcohol, which I drank, and gambling, which I rejected as stupid, and with overly friendly women, which I was too addled by the aforementioned alcohol to have a coherent conversation with. I quickly concluded that fraternity life offered me absolutely nothing of interest, and would have just been a wasteful distraction. I’ve never liked the whole fraternity philosophy ever since — they are places for young men to gather and learn terrible lessons about the world.

I was not surprised by the news from Cornell. In short, a young underage woman was given alcohol at a bar. She drank it, and was probably not at all accustomed to it. She drunkenly staggered off to the Chi Phi fraternity, where “friends” gave her ketamine, and she stupidly consumed it. Then they took her to a back room, raped her repeatedly for 7 hours, and even got on snapchat and invited their fellow frat brothers to join in the gang rape. This was not something she chose, or could even choose, being zonked out of her mind on drugs and alcohol.

This was a crime, plain and simple. The 7 rapists should have been arrested and faced severe criminal sentences, greater than mere expulsion. They were not. When the reputable university of Cornell heard about this atrocious, outrageous criminal act, they held an internal investigation, and kicked two of the criminals out of the university, without passing them on to civil authorities. The others were told to write essays.

Essays. I had no idea that writing was such a dreadful punishment.

The university is not supposed to be a bubble where horrific crimes are diminished to the point where you can rape a woman and expiate your crime by writing words. Being a student shouldn’t be a state of privilege, but apparently in this time when being a student is associated with being a child of a rich family, it has become a mark of belonging to an elite who can be excused for criminal actions.

No. I reject that. They must face the consequences. The students should be arrested and tried for rape. The bar that willingly served alcohol to underage women should face severe criminal penalties, their liquor license should be at risk. The Chi Phi fraternity should be shuttered permanently. Or at least that’s what I thought until I read the national headquarters statement on the incident.

The sexual assault allegations involving parties at Cornell University are deeply concerning. Anyone who reports sexual violence deserves to be heard and treated with compassion, dignity, and respect.

Chi Phi unequivocally condemns sexual violence. Our founding principles of Truth, Honor, and Personal Integrity, and our mission of Building Better Men, call on every brother to demonstrate character through his actions and respect for the dignity and safety of others. Sexual violence is fundamentally incompatible with those expectations.

Oh god. Platitudes. How is the fraternity system at all about Truth, Honor, and Personal Integrity? How does drunkenness and notoriously wild partying Build Better Men? It’s all a lie. Burn every chapter to the ground.

And shame on Cornell. They’ve built a safe space for the rapist sons of wealthy donors. They (and many other universities) need to change the university culture, but they won’t. The system is built with layers of privilege maintained by fat cats on managing boards, and they don’t care.

Am I naive to believe a university should be a place of learning?

Don’t forget these names: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar. They’re the ones who drugged and raped a helpless woman. That should be on their CVs, at the very least. I also hope their mothers know what their boys have been accused of.

Revisiting Whalefall

I didn’t believe the hype nonsense about Whalefall, but I’m not a marine biologist. Maybe a marine biologist would see a way that a whale could swallow a man who would survive for an hour? I’m willing to be persuaded.

This sane, sober, well-informed video doesn’t do it for me.

I am interested in the tactics the defenders of the movie take. One event is improbable, unlikely but well, maybe possible; another event could only happen under rare circumstances; yet another event could happen if a confluence of different conditions occurs; add them all up, and presto, declare it could happen. That’s not how things work.

I learned something I hadn’t really thought through. Whales have a complex ruminant stomach that is muscular and crushes and tears food before passing it on to an acid-filled forestomach. I don’t care how many faint “maybes” you stack up, once you hit a single “impossible,” you’re done.

The dumbest man in congress

Tommy Tuberville gave a 20 minute speech in which he claimed that furries were sick psychos who were flying passenger planes, and that all transgender people should be locked up in mental institutions.

Many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community, Tuberville said sternly. Lord help us.

It’s terrifying when you think about this, he continued. When you walk on to a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.

I think all airlines have a dress code for their crews that involves wearing a uniform. He’s wrong and is lying.

I am not all concerned about someone, in their free time, choosing to wear clothing that makes them happy, even if it doesn’t conform to conventional social expectations. They are not insane.

I’m more concerned about the lunatics who drag their weird, unfalsifiable, untestable and authoritarian religious beliefs into the public square, where they try to use them to oppress other peoples’ freedoms.

Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama, and is doing well in the polls. I’m sorry, Alabamians, you are confirming all the offensive stereotypes about your state.