Good news about Daniel Hauser

The boy who was in the news recently for his Hodgkin lymphoma that his family wanted to treat with ineffectual homeopathy and herbs is actually getting better — now that the courts have ordered him to continue the medically functional chemotherapy treatments.

He doesn’t like chemotherapy, though (and who would?), and there are these interesting rationalizations going on.

Daniel Hauser was not at the court hearing but later told The Associated Press he had hoped he would be able to stop chemotherapy, which he said makes him ill.
“I get really sick when I do it,” the teen said during an interview at his family’s farm at Sleepy Eye. “You get so dizzy and I get a headache right away.”

Daniel said he believes his tumor’s improvement comes from alternative treatments he’s doing such as supplemental drinks and pills.

His parents also remain concerned about the risks of chemotherapy, which they initially rejected for religious reasons, saying it harms the body. But they told Brown County Judge John Rodenberg during the today’s hearing that they would take their son to a Wednesday chemo appointment.

Colleen Hauser told the AP at her home that doctors said it would take six months to treat her son’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma when he was first diagnosed, but they’ve now seen improvement in the past few weeks.

“Wow,” she said. “Something’s working.”

But when asked if she credits the chemotherapy, she said, “I’m not going to say it’s not, but I just want to make it clear that I would like a better plan, a better treatment plan, for Danny.”

You just know that if Daniel is cured, and we all hope he is, he and his mother will blindly give full credit to whatever magic water she has him drinking…anything other than the icky chemotherapy that actually does the job.

Don’t you appreciate it when a politician seeks the will of the people?

Even if he does try to clumsily word his polls to drive answers towards the one he wants — we’re smart enough to see through that and boldly click where we want. Let’s surprise Congressman Duncan Hunter with the vigor of our response.

Do you support a government imposed healthcare policy?

Yes, even if it requires tax increases.
54.2%
No, we can reform healthcare without a government-run plan that limits choice.
44.4%
Unsure
1.4%

I’m getting under Ken Ham’s skin

He seems a bit peevish. He now has a blog post up complaining about me and my “inaccuracies”. His complaints are amusingly petty.

I object to the lies at the very heart of his “museum”, and he thinks he is rebutting me by whining over petty details.

For instance, he quotes me as regarding the idea of “Noah’s ark being built to carry off members of every species on earth”, and then he primly informs his readers that that isn’t true: it only carried every kind of “land-dwelling, air-breathing animal”. Oh, well, that fixes the logistical problems of the ark right up, doesn’t it? Here we have a great big flood that turns the globe into Waterworld, and he doesn’t have to worry about the effects of salinity changes on aquatic organisms, doesn’t have to think about the plants, and the birds can just stay airborne for a year until the flood recedes. I don’t care what fraction of life on earth the poop-shovelin’, travelin’ family of Noah squeezed onto their big imaginary boat — the whole story is ludicrous and unsupported by the evidence or by sense.

Then he complains that I mentioned his “dinosaurs with saddles”. He’s only got one, he says, and it’s out for repairs, and it wasn’t out in the exhibits anyway. But again, this is his whole schtick behind the museum: that like the Flintstones, humans and dinosaurs coexisted! He’s got exhibits with kids playing with carnivorous dinosaurs, and he specifically claims that dinosaurs existed within the last 10,000 years. The point is that the founding premise of his scammy little “museum” is false.

He also complains that he doesn’t make any direct accusations of “malice and dishonesty” against biologists in general, but again, that’s the implication he makes by calling evolution a lie and the work of Satan. He says he doesn’t blame Darwin for the world’s problems — that’s caused by sin, of course — but again, it’s pretending that a major focus of his “museum” is on how godless Darwinism leads people away from the true faith and into depravity.

He thinks the numbers I cited are wrong. Well, take it up with the source I cited, which tracks charitable organizations to give potential donors information on what the institution is doing. Mr Ham can always provide them with up-to-date information, and I’m sure they’ll make the numbers more current.

Finally, the most pathetic whimper of all: I called it “Ken Ham’s ‘museum'”. It’s not his museum, he says, it’s the Lord’s. Yeah, right.

Since Mr Ham is so concerned about my accuracy or lack thereof, and is obviously stressed at the poor publicity I’m giving his little monument to ignorance, I’ll make him an offer. I’ll give him a whole day of my time if he’ll fly me in and give me a personal tour, during which he can point out all the things I’ve gotten wrong about Creation, and I will dutifully write them down and post a complete report of his various rebuttals. Thorough coverage for the price of a plane ticket. How can he possibly turn down such an offer?

If he was really confident of the legitimacy of his museum, I could probably even gather a small group of mouthy, obnoxious, and culturally prominent godless scientists who’d also take advantage of such an offer, and he could shepherd us all through at once, evangelizing as much as he wanted. It would be great! Come on, Mr Ham, put a little bit of your money where your mouth is.

Advice to new commenters

This must be an example of those emergent properties people talk about. In one of the comment threads, some simple suggestions for new commenters have been formulated. They’re pretty good — pay them some heed.

  1. When you post, even if you intend to reply only to PZ or to one other comment on the
    thread, up to 200 people (or more) will read, and possibly respond to you. Keep this in mind.

  2. As this is a science blog, a greater proportion of the readers and commenters here well-
    educated, and, if not scientists, are reasonably well-versed in logic, observation, empiricism,
    debate, and rationality. As such, their responses will likely be pointed, eloquent, articulate,
    and highly opinionated.

  3. Any comments you make will be judged, and often judged harshly for grammar, intellectual
    consistency, knowledge of the subject addressed, and openness of tone. Get used it; this is
    the deep end, not a wading pool.

  4. Commenters who wish to make religious, spiritual, or other arguments are welcome to do
    so, provided they are willing to respond to the observations and criticisms of other posters,
    many of whom are experts in their fields. Commenters who argue without insulting other
    commenters personally or in whole, and who actually respond to counter-arguments will have
    a stimulating time.

  5. Commenters who begin their interaction on this blog with insults (you’re a bunch of jerks),
    threats (you’re all going to hell) or other poltroonery (atheists have no morals) will be
    responded to in kind by persons who generally have far more experience and education, and
    certainly a greater vocabulary in both insult and invective.

  6. People often say stuff on the Internets that they would never say to your face. You are
    strongly urged to get over it.

People do get banned here, although it takes some effort. You can also read my list of grievances. In addition to the vociferous commenters already here who will skewer offenders, keep in mind that I rule this place as a casual dictatorship — if I get annoyed, I bring out the axe. All that’s saving some people is that I’m also a lazy tyrant.

One other thing I have to add for the regulars: I have a Three Comment Rule that I don’t really enforce very consistently, but would make for a somewhat less hair-trigger environment. Basically, if someone brand new to you shows up and says something annoying, don’t jump down their throat right away. Give them a couple of chances to clarify first, and then if they’re still painfully stupid, open fire with both barrels.

Ray Comfort needs some help

In more ways than one. You know I mocked his weird decision to sell an edited version of Darwin’s Origin with a long-winded creationist introduction just this morning…and he’s already edited the ad to include a quote from me.

“It’s like a book with multiple personality disorder — two parts that absolutely hate each other; an intro that is the inane product of one of the most stupid minds of our century, and a science text that is the product of one of the greatest minds of the author’s century.” PZ Myers, biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris

Now he has put out a call for someone to write a foreword for his very bad anti-atheist book. It seems to me that if he thinks it is appropriate for an idiot creationist to write an introduction to one of the most influential books in science, he needs a similar mismatch for his brain-dead little book…which means he needs a smart atheist to write that foreword.

I nominate ERV.

Another creationist gomer in a local paper

Even here in Minnesota, we get creationists ranting in the newspapers. This one is in the Brainerd Dispatch.

In response to a previous writer’s statement ” … modern neo-Darwinian synthesis of organic evolution is supported by more compelling and intellectually satisfying empirical evidence that any other idea ever advanced by the world’s scientific community … “

The retort to this statement is simple: hogwash! Remember, the neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is not “change over time” or “modifications through natural selection within an existing species”, nor dynamics of cellular metamorphosis. These kinds of actions are simply workings of the natural order and have been observed and recorded for centuries.

I could tell exactly what the writer is about to do at this point. Note that he is responding to a statement of fact, that there is a great deal of empirical evidence in support of evolution. He has announced that that is “hogwash”, but is he going to rebut any of the evidence? No, he’s going to do a little dance over the word “evolution” and tell us what it isn’t. And he’s going to get it wrong. Neo-Darwinian theory includes all of the things he just listed (well, except for “dynamics of cellular metamorphosis” — I don’t even know what that means, and the writer certainly doesn’t, either).

It’s nice of him to coopt elements of the theory and claim that we’ve known it all along, though. It’s one small step forward.

So, science is not synonymous with neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism is in reality a very recent construct. In fact, it was and is being continually cobbled together long after Darwin himself died. Neo-Darwinism in effect says – since there is no pre-planned design behind it – every thing is random and undirected-nothing is planned. There is no purposeful form of life. So human beings, like everything else, is in effect just one of the many possible resulting accidents of an unconscious blind cosmic dice shake. Everything that is came into being as an accident and will disappear someday the same way. Consequently, there is no reason for being, nor any purpose for the natural world, or behavioral norms, and surely there is no rational for a future hope in anything.

No one claims that science is synonymous with neo-Darwinian theory — the physicists and chemists and geologists would be very surprised to learn that they needed to be biologists to be called scientists.

The neo-Darwinian synthesis is less than a hundred years old. No one has been arguing otherwise about that, either. It’s also an active theory which is being continually tested, revised, and re-assessed. This is a good thing: we like to modify our ideas to fit the facts, not vice versa.

So far, nothing he’s said contradicts the claim that evolution is a well-supported theory.

But now we get to the nub of his objections: evolution is unplanned and lacks a long-term purpose. This is both a premise and an inference from the science. We always assume chance is behind variation; that is the null hypothesis. One could charge in, I suppose, and hypothesize that a particular pattern of change is the result of directed meddling, but the best way to test that would be to directly address the mechanism of the intervention. It’s not a very productive approach, we’ve found. We’d have to deduce some of the properties of the agent behind the change, you see, and if we try that, advocates of teleology always back away quickly from any testable proposals. It’s been a much more promising approach to postulate an absence of design, make predictions from that, and test them.

And voila, it almost always seems to work out well. Predictions that leave out angels, demigods, demons, and magic spells seem to work out quite nicely, so we are left with a powerful theory sans deities, which implies that deities are at least superfluous. That’s all the ateleology of biology means.

Ah, but notice again: none of his railings have any relevance to the claim of empirical evidence for evolution, that which he calls “hogwash”. This isn’t an argument, it’s an emotional appeal. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of an absence of guidance, so he’s announcing that evolution doesn’t include a god, and gee everyone, shouldn’t that make you dislike it? But whether we dislike an idea or not has no bearing on its truth.

Especially not when our Minnesotan critic then goes on to demonstrate his ignorance.

Neo-Darwinism’s top proponents-Dawkins, Huxley, Weiner, Gould and Dobzhansky are all convinced atheists. For the person who is interested in the subject, but does not want to wade through pages of polemic, or get into deep esoteric scientific reading, might simply go to the video store and ask for Ben Stein’s “Expelled” or get a hold of the book “Icons of Evolution” by molecular biologist Jonathan Wells. It might stun you on just how neo-Darwinism is pure fraud.

Ron Lindner

East Gull Lake

OK, let’s see. The top proponents are:

  • Dawkins: Definitely a top proponent, definitely an atheist. Good start!
  • Huxley: Well, he was a top proponent, but he’s dead now. Long dead. He also wasn’t an atheist. He was the fellow who coined the word “agnostic”!
  • Weiner: Who? It took me a moment to figure out who he’s talking about, but it must be Jonathan Weiner, the excellent writer behind Beak of the Finch and other science books. He’s more of a science journalist though, a good one. If he’s an atheist, he doesn’t write about it, and it doesn’t come through at all in his books.
  • Gould: Another top proponent, also an atheist, but also dead.
  • Dobzhansky: Dobzhansky? One of the most important architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, sure, but an atheist? He was Russian Orthodox, and by all accounts, rather devout! He was author of the essay, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”, which phrase irks many creationists, but if you actually read the essay, one of its central assertions is that science is not in conflict with his own sincerely held Christianity! This is the guy our writer wants to argue was a nefarious atheist?

I do have to give Mr Lindner points for unintentional irony. If you don’t like polemics, go watch Expelled? Right. Don’t want to read that science stuff? Then go read Wells. At least I can agree with that last point, since there isn’t so much as a scrap of science in that book.

I’m feeling dissatisfied, though. His starting premise was that the body of empirical evidence for evolution was “hogwash”, and he seems to have forgotten to actually address the point. Typical.

The kids are getting smarter

The news from a small UK survey is heartening: teenagers are abandoning or never had much belief in religion. Two thirds don’t believe in gods at all, and

It also emerged six out of ten 10 children (59 per cent) believe that religion “has a negative influence on the world”.
 

The survey also shows that half of teenagers have never prayed and 16 per cent have never been to church.

I came to the enlightenment late, so I’ve been in church. Really, they aren’t missing a single thing. Not one thing. Funny, isn’t it; the religious insist that we need the fellowship and ritual and sermonizing, but it’s all the most dreary crap and superficial ‘community’. We won’t miss it when it is all gone.

Visiting village dogs

I am horribly envious. I am speaking of the Village Dog Project, some current research going on that looks very cool.

Understanding the evolution and domestication in dogs requires genetic analysis of a global and diverse panel of non-breed-affiliated village dogs. With a network of worldwide and Cornell-affiliated collaborators, we plan to gather dog samples from remote villages, establish a genetic archive containing DNA and phenotypic information from these dogs, carry out genetic analyses on these samples, and develop computational methods for analyzing this dataset. In particular, we are interested in understanding the location, timing, and demographic conditions underlying domestication; the genetic changes involved in the transition of wolf to dog; the relationship between these village dogs and the breed dogs; and the effect that historical forces have shaped village dog diversity.

That looks informative and useful, and I’ll be looking forward to the publication of the research. That’s not what’s got me envious, though: for that, you have to look at their field work. The researchers are spending the summer traveling to exotic, remote locations (admittedly, to the kinds of places rife with scavenging village dogs, but still…) to collect blood samples. They have a travel blog that will be recounting their adventures, and also explains the science a little more.

After initial domestication, dogs probably lived “breed-less” lives as human commensals (hanging around humans, not really helping or harming them but living off their trash) for many thousands of years. During this time, dog populations quickly expanded and spread across the globe. In the last few hundreds of years, several hundred dog breeds were formed from local dogs in many parts of the world; these breed dogs have entirely replaced the non-breed “indigenous” dogs in some parts of the world, notably in Western Europe and the USA. However, most dogs throughout the world still live their lives as non-breed, indigenous, commensal dogs. We refer to these dogs as “pariah” or “village” dogs. They tend to be smallish (25-40 pounds), often tan, short-haired dogs, though the type varies a bit according to the region you’re in. The important point is that these dogs have not undergone the intense genetic bottleneck associated with breed formation. Thus, while breed dogs have only a small subset of the total genetic diversity of all dogs, it is likely that village dogs have a much greater range of the total diversity. Thus, they are very useful for looking at the original domestication event. They are informative of the original genetic bottleneck that led to the formation of domestic dogs many thousands of years ago.

Hmmm. We don’t seem to have many dogs running loose around exotic, remote Morris, Minnesota, but there are a few feral cats living off the dumpsters near the grocery store.

I probably wouldn’t try to read about visiting small midwestern towns to collect cats, though.