We didn’t “come from rocks,” Matt Powell’s brain is just an example of convergent evolution

It’s unfortunately true. He is now straining to defend creationist caricatures of evolutionary biology. He has a new video exercise in sophistry in which he claims to have scientific support for the claim that “we evolved from a rock”. He excerpts Aron Ra pointing out that evolution does not argue that we are descended from a rock, and tries to refute him by finding a paper in Science that says we did. Only it doesn’t. He’s relying on colloquial use of terms to confuse the issue.

The paper says this:

Thank goodness for granite. If not for the formation and subsequent erosion of large quantities of metal-rich granite on a supercontinent that formed billions of years ago, the evolution of multicellular life—including us—could have been stifled or delayed, according to a new study.

For much of its history, life on Earth existed as only single-celled organisms. Certain proteins critical for multicellular life, and presumed to have been equally critical for its evolution from single-celled ancestors, require heavy-metal elements, especially copper, zinc, and molybdenum, says John Parnell, a geoscientist at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. Previous studies suggest that multicellular life evolved sometime between 1.6 billion and 1.2 billion years ago. Researchers thought that before that innovation, these vital metals were locked away from environments where life thrived—either sequestered in the oxygen-poor depths of the ocean or held in ancient ore deposits in Earth’s crust, waiting to be eroded.

This is not saying we evolved from granite, or descended from granite, or even came from granite. It’s saying that some metal elements that living organisms use as catalysts in chemical reactions eroded out of granite, and further, it’s a paper specifically about the origin of multicellular life, not all life.

To explain it in Biblical terms, here’s Genesis 4:22.

As for Zillah, she also gave birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron; and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

Or Exodus 31:

Now the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “See, I have called by name Bezalel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship, to make artistic designs for work in gold, in silver, and in bronze, and in the cutting of stones for settings, and in the carving of wood, that he may work in all kinds of craftsmanship.

If I were to now claim that the Bible says we “came from” bronze, iron, wood, gold, and silver, that would be as deliberate a misreading as Powell’s claim that evolution says we “came from” rocks. Life arose from energy-rich molecules in solution in the ocean. That early life used essential metallic elements in promoting chemical reactions does not imply we “came from” rocks, any more than when the Bible proudly declares in Joshua 10:28 that Joshua captured Makkedah that very day, and attacked both it and its king with swords, utterly destroying it along with every person in it, leaving no survivors, it is implying that the Israelites were made of swords.

Clearly, though, followers of the Abrahamic religions can thank goodness for iron. If not for the presence of mineral deposits that allowed them to forge killing weapons, they might have gone the way of Makkedah and Jericho, and the Jewish and Christian religions might have been stifled or delayed.

Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers & spiders dwell in unity!

I guess Abe beat me to this one, but I’ll join the party a little late.

Rebecca is looking at a study that found…

“…low belief in human evolution was associated with higher levels of prejudice, racist attitudes, and support for discriminatory behaviors against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ), Blacks, and immigrants in the United States (Study 1), with higher ingroup biases, prejudicial attitudes toward outgroups, and less support for conflict resolution in samples collected from 19 Eastern European countries (Study 2), 25 Muslim countries (Study 3), and Israel (Study 4). Further, among Americans, lower belief in evolution was associated with greater prejudice and militaristic attitudes toward political outgroups (Study 5).”

That’s an observation that accords well with what I’ve seen, anecdotally. My most religious family members are also the most racist…or is it that my most racist relatives are the most religious? I don’t really know which direction the arrow of causality is facing.

But also, as someone who has associated more with atheists than theists, we all know that the atheist movement split over precisely this kind of issue. There are lots of self-declared evolutionists who also rail against immigration, who claim that there are differences in intelligence that split along racial lines, and who are confident that women are inferior to men. I’m looking at the study and thinking that maybe this result is an artifact of the godless being swamped out by the numbers of the godly.

But then, they controlled for religion.

“Finally, perceived similarity to animals (a construct distinct from belief in evolution, Study 6) partially mediated the link between belief in evolution and prejudice (Studies 7 and 8), even when controlling for religious beliefs, political views, and other demographic variables, and were also observed for nondominant groups (i.e., religious and racial minorities). ”

Now that’s more believable, and narrows the cause of the effect significantly. It’s not just religion, it’s having beliefs that encourage categorizing some living things as meaningless and subject to murder. That’s a metric that clearly suggests that the most egalitarian and benevolent people are those who even love spiders. (OK, respecting the right to life for fruit flies might be even better, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to that level of enlightenment yet.)

Now I want to see a comparison of NRA members to the general public. People who buy great big guns so they can slaughter large warmbloods might be the worst of them all.

“New” creationist arguments, same as the old creationist arguments

Last night, Aron Ra summoned a team of crack anti-creationists to deal with the chaotic incoherence of a demand/set of assertions he had received from a creationist. I sympathize. I looked this over and cringed deep down at the raging, arrogant absurdity of someone so ignorant thinking they had multiple gotchas to refute evolution.

I wanted to send you a quick message about a mistake that was mentioned in your recent ” donald johnson’s, lucy ” video. I’m the person that sent in the comment at the beginning of the livestream mentioning three things, one of which was how don said the leg was found more than a mile away from lucy in a letter, but dons response was that i was spouting nonsense. The issue is, I’ve literally read the letter before. Don flat out lied on your stream, so i wanted to make you aware of that. Here’s a video of a creationist mentioning that letter in one of his videos, and showing the letter as well, so the letter does indeed exist. Its not the best source, but that’s largely due to evolutionist’s trying to censer anything that can be used against evolution. Here’s the video. youtube.com/watch?v=6kf5JII6sIQ&t=294s

I’m a yec Christian that wanted to send you a quick message about some of the reasons why people are hesitant in believing stuff like the tree of life and a 4.5 billion year old earth, because like you’ve mentioned in your videos before, people deserve to know what’s true. The age of the earth boils down to 5 main issues. 1: there’s never been a rock of known age successfully dated via radiometric dating. If we date something like recent volcano reputations, like mount saint Helens, the rocks are dated to millions of years. If something like happened with any other subject, it would have been thrown out a very long time ago. 2: since we don’t use something of a Known age to calibrate it, then what do we use? The decay rates themselves? Nope, its evolution. 3: how can you ignore radiometric dating results, but other people can’t? For example, we have found diamonds that contained 6 billion years worth of argon decay before. Its claimed those received an extra 2 billion years worth argon contamination. How can you ignore like 2 billion years worth of decay but other people can’t? And even more importantly, how can you tell which dates are correct and which aren’t? The answer is evolution. There’s millions of other out of place fossils like the diamonds that were redated as well, like skull 1470, which is a 230 million year old human skull. 4: radiometric dating automatically dates young rocks to millions of years by default. That’s the excuse I’ve read before to discredit the old ages we found at saint Helens. My point is, your old ages don’t disprove a 6,000 year old earth because you’re dating methods can’t give numbers that low, so it defaults to being millions of years old. That still matters even if we were to ignore all of the yec stuff and even assume the earth is old as well, because that still leaves the question on what age the fossils are. We still wouldn’t be able to accurately date the fossils due to this issue. 5: I’m sorry but I forgot what 5 was, but I’m mention it later if i remember it. Anyways.

I don’t think the tree of life is true, because there isn’t much evidence for it, and something people don’t seem to realize it’s so contradictory that it couldn’t of happened. For example. Genetics doesn’t form the tree of life you think it does. its claimed we are 98% genetically similar to chimps, but mice and pigs have gene’s that are 98% similar to humans. Its claimed dolphins are 98% similar to humans as well. Chickens are 60% to humans while mallard ducks are 80% similar to humans. Cows, the platypus and mallard ducks are 80% similar to humans. A sea Turtles genome is claimed to be more closely related to birds than reptiles. There’s a 500 million year old worm that 70% similar to humans. How’s that work when stuff closer to us on the tree of life is less similar? For example, mice are either 60% or 70% ( I’m forgetting which). We’ve even found a virus with the letter z DNA basepair, which means it doesn’t fit on the tree of life. I’m typing this out on my phone, and this message is getting pretty long so I’ll wrap this up. There’s a lot of issues with the chromosome 2 fusion site, but I’ll ignore those and focus on the most important point. There’s 13+ other sites just like it In our genomes, which means we have 14 fusions in the past, which means humans had 74 chromosomes, while apes had 48. We literally can’t be apes. It doesn’t really matter if the fossil record is in a evolutionary order or is out of order because even if the evolutionary sequence did exist worldwide, then geology would still disprove it. The questions evolutionists ask are cherry picked because there’s like a thousand other questions that need to be asked before hand, but aren’t. A quick example of what I’m talking about is how fossil footprints could have stayed around for tens of millions of years without eroding away. Thanks for reading and take care!

We went over this jumble of poorly understood claims (seriously? He thinks zDNA is a base pair rather than an alternative configuration of the helix?) and tried to sort them out. You’ll have to judge whether we succeeded.

I shouldn’t have bothered, since the creationists are clearly in denial of the science and won’t listen, and also because that tore up my evening enough that now my lecture, that I have to give at 11:45 this morning, is incomplete and I have to stitch it together fast.

Torturing myself

Tonight, for funzies, I’ll be watching a short ID creationism video and commenting on it. The video is only about 10 minutes long, so using my rough rule of thumb, it’ll take about a hundred hours to correct all the falsehoods. It’ll only take 2 minutes for me to run out of patience.

Rebecca Watson takes on both Joe Rogan and Jon Stewart and clobbers them

It’s not just the racism, it’s the ignorance. Rebecca Watson pulls up a horrendous clip of Joe Rogan yammering on about cryptozoology — he’s claiming that a mysterious new giant primate had been discovered in Africa, called the Bondo ape. He’s quite insistent about it, to the point where when an actual primatologist calls in to say it’s not true, he screams at her, belittles her Ph.D., and scornfully references her vagina. It’s an amazing performance. He’s Gish Galloped against Phil Plait, claiming that the moon landings were faked.

And now, apparently, were supposed to accept that he’s just a guy who has interesting conversations with interesting people? Bullshit.

Pay attention, debaters

Eight years ago, Bill Nye and Ken Ham met to debate evolution vs. creationism. They engaged in the Creation Museum, which was a big mistake — never willingly give the home court advantage to your opponent. Nevertheless, if you ask any biologist how it went, they’ll mostly agree that Nye kicked Ham’s ass. The low point for the creationist was when he proudly declaimed that no amount of evidence could ever convince him he was wrong, because the Bible was absolute truth.

However, even now Ken Ham brags about the debate. He and his followers think he trounced Nye, and specifically think his testimony about the infallibility of the Bible was a clincher. Ham isn’t hiding in shame, he still trumpets the debate regularly.

He didn’t learn a thing, but neither did many people on the other side. I’m still seeing people lining up to debate Kent Hovind, or Standing For Truth (if you don’t know him, he’s a fraud on YouTube) or the “Great” Debate Community, or any of these yahoos whose ticket to traffic on social media is to host debates on “controversial” topics, which usually means putting up an idiot on equal standing with someone supporting conventional science. The more absurd their position, the more inane their response, the more conflict they generate and the more traffic they get.

The loser is always the person who gives respectability to the kook at the other lectern. Learn from this. It doesn’t matter how slick, professional, and clever you are in your side of the debate — at the end of the day, the winner is going to be the one who praises Jesus the most.

Debate as a tool for misinformation and propaganda

David Gorski rips on all those quacks and debate-me bros. It’s good stuff.

Challenges to “live debates” from science deniers are challenges that scientists should, with only the rarest of exceptions, generally decline. Nothing good comes of them, as they are theater, not science. Their purpose is not even really to persuade anyone. Rather, it is to represent pseudoscience as being worthy of being on the same stage (or Zoom meeting) as science, quacks as worthy of having their beliefs presented as being of similar credibility to science-based medicine presented by real doctors, pseudoscientists as worthy of being considered equally with scientists, and conspiracy theorists as worthy of being considered equally with real experts in a field. They are a tool of propaganda and almost never a tool to get at valid science. That’s exactly why cranks love “live public debate” so much, even when faced with criticism from an even crankier crank, and, even better for them, these forums allow them to puff up their egos by convincing themselves that they’ve bested a real expert.

If that doesn’t demonstrate why scientists should politely decline such requests, I don’t know what will. To paraphrase Scott Weitzenhoffer, such debates are like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory. Depriving them of that opportunity not only drives them up the wall, but it prevents them from using you, as a scientist, physician, or science communicator as a tool to foil to use to spread their misinformation.

Maybe we ought to have some kind of pledge where we all agree to not give those people oxygen. David has been more consistent than I have in spurning the debate-me bros, but I’d sign it, too.

I have to disagree with him mildly on one thing, though.

I can’t resist spoiling the answer to this question by saying right away that the answer is no. All truth does not come from “live public debate.” I won’t say that it’s always a bad idea for a science advocate to agree to a debate like the sort in the “challenges” by Dr. Oz and Steve Kirsch. After all, Steve Novella showed me how it’s done back in 2012 when he accepted a challenge of convenience to debate Dr. Julian Whitaker about vaccines at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in 2012. (The Amazing Meeting was being held the same weekend in Las Vegas; so he and I were there already.) However, it turns out that Dr. Whitaker was very bad at the deceptive debate techniques that cranks use, but also Dr. Novella was very, very good at anticipating and responding to common antivaccine arguments. Even though Dr. Novella basically mopped the floor with Dr. Whitaker, I still had misgivings, as I did when Bill Nye similarly wiped the floor with creationist Ken Ham in a debate of science versus pseudoscience with respect to evolution. Basically, I view these examples as the exceptions that prove the rule that scientists really shouldn’t debate cranks…

Floors were neither mopped nor wiped in those debates. They’re still filthy. I agree with Novella and Nye, so I agree that they did a fine job of presenting their position, but no, the “loser” of those debates did not see the error of their ways, and the majority of their fans did not change their minds. I don’t pay any attention to this Whitaker person, but I do check in on Ham now and then — and he brags about his debate. He believes he triumphed, and his followers slavishly agree with him. See also Kent Hovind, who claims to have been in 260 debates, and to have won every single one of them with half his brain tied behind his back. He even claims to have won a debate with me, which didn’t occur!

If those are our best examples of victories, I’m going to go ahead and say it: it’s always a bad idea for a science advocate to agree to a debate.

The bit about Matt Powell

Last night, I did a livestream on YouTube. YouTube tends to bury these things, so I’m doing an experiment: I yanked out a 20 minute segment (it’s shorter! That helps) and reposted it. That also meant I could go in and edit and add an endtitle that gives credit to my Patreon supporters.

This is a bit where I talked about Matt Powell’s latest clueless video. I guess he hates pop culture almost as much as he mangles science.

The complete livestream is here, about an hour long, if you want to hear my exasperation at Jordan Peterson, and a bit about a recent paper on bat evolution.

Oh, also, I guess you get to see my graying Zappa.

Dear god, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson are such pompous know-nothings

Behold, two idiots talking.

There is no such thing as climate. Climate and everything are the same word. That’s what bothers me about the climate change types. It’s like — this is something that bothers me about technically, it’s like climate is about everything. OK. But your models aren’t based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. That means you reduce the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well, how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation if it’s about everything? That’s not just a criticism, if it’s about everything, your models aren’t right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything.

  • Climate is not about “everything”. Let’s look it up on Wikipedia, since Peterson didn’t even do that much.

    Climate is the long-term pattern of weather in an area, typically averaged over a period of 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, which includes the ocean, land, and ice on Earth.

    So not “everything”.

  • Yes, climate is modeled. The relevant variables are assessed by knowledgeable experts, not muscle-bound blatherers or disgraced freaky Jungian psychologists.
  • Models are constantly assessed against ongoing observations and measurements. Predictions are made and tested. That’s what we use to measure their validity.
  • No model can include “everything”. That’s why it is a model. You can’t just make a blanket dismissal of all models solely because they’re models. That’s like throwing out psychology because it doesn’t account for every neuron and every variable in physiology.

Remember: Spotify paid Joe Rogan $100 fucking million dollars to broadcast on their network. Peterson was getting paid $200 fucking thousand per month for just his clinical practice, which I presume he gave up because he’s earning more from his speeches and books.

Fuck both of these guys.