The mysterious origins of a creationist myth

Ken Ham was doing an interview, and he was asked a difficult question: “How did men get the dinosaurs to not buck them off of their saddles when people rode then? Were the dinosaurs more domesticated and well behaved because there wasn’t as much sin back then?” Good one. The creationists do tend to smuggle in a lot of rather unbiblical stuff into their mythology while simultaneously claiming to be strict literalists, so I’d like to see how they came up with that story, too.

Ham’s answer: Gosh, I don’t know. Where did you ever get that weird idea?

I don’t know where people get the idea that people rode dinosaurs. I mean, there’s no evidence in the Bible that that is so. When Job was looking at Behemoth, the description there… there’s nothing to do with people riding dinosaurs. We don’t know how people interacted with dinosaurs.

Go read the post, it’s hilarious. Where did people get that idea? From Ken Ham. He publishes books with illustrations of people riding dinosaurs, and he’s got a fiberglass dinosaur with a saddle on it in his “museum”.

He also distributes powerpoint slides for educators, loosely defined, to use in the classroom. Like these:

dinocart

dinoriding

It’s rather disingenuous of him to declare that he doesn’t know where these wacky ideas come from, isn’t it?

More trivial excuses for the anti-choicers

Oh gob, the stupidity. The latest wave of anti-choice legislation is based on one trivial premise: it’s got a heartbeat! You can’t kill it if its heart is beating! So stupid bills have been flitting about in the Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Arkansas, and North Dakota legislatures trying to redefine human life as beginning at the instant that a heartbeat can be detected. Here’s Wyoming’s story, for instance:

About two weeks ago, state Rep. Kendell Kroeker (R) introduced a measure to supersede the medical definition of viability. Current state law says abortions are prohibited after a fetus has “reached viability,” and Kroeker sought to replace those words with “a detectable fetal heartbeat.” The Republican lawmaker said the idea for his heartbeat bill just came to him one day because “it became clear that if a baby had a heartbeat, that seemed simple to me that it’s wrong to kill it.” On Monday, a House panel struck down Kroeker’s bill because it was too medically vague. But if Ohio and Mississippi are any indication, this likely won’t be the last time that fetal heartbeat legislation shows up in Wyoming.

It’s a step back from the inanity of declaring that life begins at conception — you can’t detect the heartbeat until 5-6 weeks of gestation — but still, it’s an arbitrary and ridiculous definition that relies entirely on folk knowledge about living things. If we’re going to do that, though, I propose that we go to the One True Source of knowledge and accept the Biblical definition of living creatures: they have breath in their nostrils. Therefore, abortion is legal right up to the instant that the baby draws its first breath.

Don’t argue with me! It’s in the Bible! Do you want to go to hell?

But the heart thing? Nonsense. Here’s what I routinely see:

Zebrafish embryos have a heartbeat one day after fertilization. That one above is a two-day embryo, and it’s even more special and sacred because it carries a heart-specific GFP, so it’s heart glows green. We don’t suddenly think of the organism as complete and inviolate because cardiac cells are twitching.

Or even better, you can dissociate the heart tissue of just about any animal, including humans, and culture single cells in a dish…and look! They beat!

If that were a human cell, does that means we could never throw that petri dish away? Speaking of human, let’s jack up the consequences. Here’s a clump of induced pluripotent stem cells, adult cells forced into an embryonic state by transfection with a few genes that reprogrammed this population into a cardiac cell state. It’s the religious right’s nightmare, transformed by the hand of scientists into living embryonic tissues, growing in a lab under a microscope…and it’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!

Is anyone seriously going to decide that that is human and deserving of all of the rights and protections we accord to adult people?

I suppose it depends on whether those cells are derived from a female or not.

I agree with this article

Islamic extremists have been destroying ancient manuscripts in an important library in Timbuktu. You know what that means? It’s time to chastise Richard Dawkins!

The latest furore comes after Islamist extremists burned down a sacred library in Timbuktu, Mali, during the ongoing conflict there. Prof Dawkins tweeted "Like Alexandria, like Bamiyan, Timbuktu’s priceless manuscript heritage destroyed by Islamic barbarians."

Cue much clutching of pearls and fainting. "He’s been mean about a religion!"

The article makes a very good point: “if you burn down a library, ‘barbarian’ is probably the right term.” I’d also add that if libraries are burnt down, your priority ought not to be to wag a finger at the people protesting the vandalism, but to at least wag that finger in the right direction…at the vandals.

A reply to Steven Novella

Steven Novella has written a post taking exception to some things I’ve said, specifically on the issue of the overlap of science, skepticism, and religion. I have to say, though, that what his post actually does is confirm my claim: that a lot of skeptics strain to delimit the scope of skepticism in ways that are not rational, but are entirely political and emotional.

But there’s also a lot I agree with. He has a lengthy introduction in which he lists many of the core elements of skepticism, including for example, promoting science and critical thinking, opposing pseudoscience, etc. (he also includes “methodological naturalism”, a claim I’ve grown disenchanted with…but that’s something for another day. Here’s something from Larry Moran for a contrary view.)

[Read more…]

Witch-Doctors on display

There is an organization in the UK called the Christian Medical Fellowship. OK, no problem, you might think — nothing wrong with Christian fellowship, nothing wrong with doctors who go to church or pray together. But you’d be wrong. Religion poisons everything. This is what the 4000 members of that organization talk about: demons.

The New Testament tells us that Jesus has commissioned us to ‘drive out demons’ (Mk 16:17), and we must be ready to respond to this commission if and when we are called to do so.

Psychiatry, then, is not the only domain within which we need to be aware of demonic influence, and perhaps it is not even the most important such domain. Furthermore, we cannot expect to make a simple differential diagnosis according to certain signs or symptoms of demonisation. However, this does not exclude the need to consider other possible links between demonic activity and mental illness.

Demon possession and mental illness, then, are not simply alternative diagnoses to be offered when a person presents with deliberate self harm or violent behaviour, although they may need to be distinguished in such circumstances, whether by spiritual discernment or the application of basic psychiatric knowledge. It would seem reasonable to argue that demon possession may be an aetiological factor in some cases of mental illness, but it may also be an aetiological factor in some non-psychiatric conditions, and in other cases it may be encountered in the absence of psychiatric or medical disorder.

How about some truth in advertising: I suggest they change their name to Christian Witch-Doctor Fellowship. I would not want to go to a doctor to discover that he would diagnose depression as possession, or that an ulcer was demonic.

Unfortunately, the US has its own national quack, Dr Oz. The New Yorker has an excellent exposé of Oz.

“I want to stress that Mehmet is a fine surgeon,” Rose said, as he did more than once during our conversation. “He is intellectually unbelievably gifted. But I think if there is any criticism you can apply to some of the stuff he talks about it is that there is no hierarchy of evidence. There rarely is with the alternatives. They have acquired a market, and that drives so much. At times, I think Mehmet does feed into that.”

At times? The man uses his bully pulpit to endorse destructive quacks, and peddles snake oil himself. I don’t care if he is a fine cardiac surgeon; he operates, presumably with high competence, on one patient a week, and then misleads millions.

There are many legitimate and articulate opponents of genetically modified products and, for that matter, of conventional medicine itself. But Oz has consistently chosen guests with dubious authority to argue those positions. Joseph Mercola, an osteopath, runs mercola.com, one of the most popular alternative-health Web sites in the country. Oz has described Mercola as a “pioneer in holistic treatments,” and as a man “your doctor doesn’t want you to listen to.” This is undoubtedly true, since Mercola has promoted such alleged experts as Tullio Simoncini, who claims that cancer is a fungus that can be cured with baking soda. Mercola has long argued that vaccines are dangerous and that they even cause AIDS. When Oz says that Mercola is “challenging everything you think you know about traditional medicine and prescription drugs,” it’s hard to argue. “I’m usually earnestly honest and modest about what I think we’ve accomplished,” Oz told me when we discussed his choice of guests. “If I don’t have Mercola on my show, I have thrown away the biggest opportunity that I have been given.”

It’s bizarre. He thinks his position within the bona fide medical profession means he now has a responsibility to open the door to frauds. It makes no sense…until you discover that the man doesn’t have the slightest understanding of science.

I was still puzzled. “Either data works or it doesn’t,” I said. “Science is supposed to answer, or at least address, those questions. Surely you don’t think that all information is created equal?”

Oz sighed. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” he said. “I have my religion and you have yours. It becomes difficult for us to agree on what we think works, since so much of it is in the eye of the beholder. Data is rarely clean.” All facts come with a point of view. But his spin on it—that one can simply choose those which make sense, rather than data that happen to be true—was chilling. “You find the arguments that support your data,” he said, “and it’s my fact versus your fact.”

Millions worship this guy, and watch his show religiously for medical advice. But his story is to simply throw away evidence-based reasoning.

I told Oz that I was aware of no evidence showing that Reiki works. He cut in: “Neither am I, if you are talking purely about data. But this is one of the fundamental disconnects between Western medicine and what people often refer to as complementary medicine. Not everything adds up. It’s about making people more comfortable. I offer things like massage therapy, and offered Reiki if people wanted it. I did not recommend it, but I let people know it was their choice.”

Please. Give me medical treatments that are backed up by data, rather than ones that make Dr Oz feel good.

Revisionaries now!

I’m watching this documentary right now, and I have to tell you…every time Don McLeroy or Terri Leo or Cynthia Dunbar come on, I’m snarling obscenities at the screen. What wretched ignorant people.

If you can’t watch it yourself, the creators are doing an IAmA on Reddit right now. And, oh, boy — McLeroy has shown up to make an ass of himself. Go chew him out.

The video is temporarily available for streaming on the PBS website.

She’s baaaack

Remember Republican legislator Cathrynn Brown’s bill that would have criminalized abortion on the claim that it would destroy evidence? She scurried to retract it after nationwide public shaming, but now she’s revised the bill and is trying to promote it again.

Good news! It no longer threatens women who get an abortion after a rape with a felony charge for tampering with evidence! Yay!

Now it only charges the doctor with a felony for facilitating the destruction of evidence. Progress! Oh, wait…it still criminalizes a legal procedure, and still specifically oppresses the victims of violent assault.

I guess that counts as practically no progress at all. How about the next iteration being a bill that criminalizes lawmakers who attempt to make an end-run around women’s rights to bodily autonomy?