It couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy

Would you buy a cancer cure from this man?

It’s been a while since I mentioned Joseph Mercola, the alternative medicine cancer quack with a vast empire of snake oil supplements.

If anti-vaccine influencers had a king, it would be Dr. Joseph Mercola, the osteopathic physician whose supplement empire has netted him a tidy fortune of $100 million. Mercola has been a power broker in alternative medicine circles for years—as my colleague David Corn has reported, he received a publicity boost more than a decade ago from celebrity doctor and erstwhile US Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, who called him a “pioneer in holistic treatments.”

You’d think he’d be riding high right now, given that the quacks have been been put in charge health, science, and medicine in this country. But it seems his fake drug companies are getting a bit of a shakeup.

This week, the supplement industry trade publication Natural Products Insider reported that last week, Mercola suddenly fired four members of his executive team. He also announced that his company would be going in a new direction, reportedly informing his staff in a video that “my new goal is to reach billions, literally billions, around the world with a new paradigm of how to increase joy in their life.”

He doesn’t have a grand plan. What he’s got are delusions of grandeur, fueled by a psychic. The con man has been thoroughly conned!

The details of Mercola’s “new goal” and “new paradigm” are scant, but according to the article, he made the changes in management after extensive consultations with a psychic named Kai Clay, who sometimes goes by the name of Bahlon.

Janet Selvig, Mercola’s sister, was one of the executives who was fired. In an interview with Natural Products Insider, she expressed concern about Bahlon’s influence on her brother:

Selvig said she confronted her brother about the odd behavior on Jan. 31 after seeing hours of videos of his trance channeling sessions with Bahlon. “I just felt immediately that he was being taken advantage of,” Selvig said.

The confrontation did not go well. Selvig said her brother was very dismissive of her concerns and defended his work with Clay. “He thinks the book is going to save the world,” Selvig said. “He believes that he’s [Mercola] a god and he’s been reincarnated. And he even referred to himself as the new Jesus.”

On Feb. 2, Selvig was shown an email sent to a coworker from Mercola’s address announcing the doctor’s intention to fire Selvig, Rye, Boland and a fourth executive. The email offered the CEO spot to a different Mercola team member who later turned down the position. The email went on to explain “reasons for the mutiny,” describing the Catholic church as a “global cabal” that controls “50% of the world’s worth” and “created all the pain that most people experience.”

Who is Kai Clay? Who is Bahlon? Just ask him.

Ever hear of channeling? Or Light Language?

Meet BAHLON an ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the Causal Plane channeled by Master Trance Channel Kai Clay.

The messages and healing energy shared during their packed group events are always uplifting, are often staggeringly predictive—filled with the Divine healing energy of Universal love, hope and healing.

And now sometimes when available, his 10 year-old daughter Sera joins with Bahlon to share full conversations in Light Language (and interpret these in English for all) followed by Light Language meditations so powerful many say they can “feel it in the bones of every past life, present and future life.”

It’s nice that Mercola has been taken in by a New Age crackpot, but…Bahlon has also roped in his 10 year old daughter Sera. A ten year old! That is child abuse. I found a video of Bahlon and his daughter babbling (and that’s all it is, babble) at each other, if you’re curious about what “light language” is. It’s horrible and gross, and I only listened to a few minutes of it before I had to close it. Maybe you’re made of sterner stuff? I hope not, because no one should want to listen to this creep lying to a child.

It always turns into a grift with these people

Bryan Johnson — you know, the Bryan Johnson who wants to achieve eternal youth by turning himself into a plasticine android — has taken the next inevitable step. It’s not a bold new medical innovation. It’s turning his lifestyle and his weird recipes and behavior into commodities that he can sell to gullible people, especially now that RFK jr has conveniently tagged all the dupes with the MAHA label. Johnson set up a conference that you can attend for the low, low price of $249 ($1799 for the premium package), and he and his associates will lecture you on how to don’t die by buying a subscription to his $15-$20 per plate food delivery service. You could live forever on this kind of meal:

I knew this was going to happen. Bizarre schemes by Trump-lovin’ rich people are a natural consequence of the world we live in now. Maya Vinokour attended the first event in New York, and blesses us with a lengthy breakdown of all the nonsense and banality that went down. Really, it’s long — but all you need is the conclusion.

I overhear a young woman telling her friends, her voice hesitant: “I guess this was ever so slightly overpriced?”—laughable from my perspective, as a severe understatement. Even at the Premium tier, the summit’s health “insights” were either overly familiar or extravagant and outlandish. The most daring proposal I heard all day was that we can save our messy human selves from technological obsolescence by capitulating to algorithms in advance. Is that a good idea? In keeping with this authoritarian moment in American history, what Johnson’s Blueprint and its commercial ecosystem does, ultimately, is invite us to understand our own dehumanization as a form of empowerment.

If that has whet your appetite, Bryan Johnson is taking his medicine show on the road, and is going to be bringing it to Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Get your tickets now.

I’ve done multi-city traveling lecture tours on the past, and they’re grueling, even when all I did was talk for an hour and then go to a restaurant and spend a night in another hotel room. They’re bad for your health. Somebody should tell Johnson that he’s going to reduce his lifespan by doing this.

Don’t listen to RFK jr

You don’t need a medical degree if you can do this

The latest “health” craze is all about condemning “seed oils”. I’m a guy with a family history of heart disease, so I pay attention to doctors’ dietary recommendations, and I never heard anything about “seed oils” until recently, and the complaints were always coming out of the mouths of fools.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new health secretary, has said Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils and has called for fast-food restaurants to return to using beef tallow, or rendered animal fat, in their fryers instead.

Recommendations from RFK jr tend to make me run in the opposite direction, but apparently there are a lot of gullible Americans who readily adopt any claim made by an anti-scientist. And then every corporation stampedes to follow the money.

In response to consumer concerns, some food-makers have stripped seed oils from their products. Restaurants like the salad chain Sweetgreen have removed them from their menus. Many Americans say they now avoid seed oils, according to a recent survey from the International Food Information Council, an industry trade group.

The seed oil discussion has exasperated nutrition scientists, who say decades of research confirms the health benefits of consuming such oils, especially in place of alternatives such as butter or lard.

“I don’t know where it came from that seed oils are bad,” said Martha Belury, an Ohio State University food science professor.

I know! I know! It comes from wellness influencers. All you need is a tiktok channel and a lot of unfounded confidence, and you too can promote weird random ideas under the guise of making people “well”. You don’t need a medical degree! You don’t even need to be a college graduate! Wellness isn’t a real scientific/medical discipline — it’s just a buzzword that has no regulatory oversight or any basis in empirical data. We all want to be well, but to have any authority in medicine requires years of training and constant updating from real sources.

I found something called Your Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Successful Health and Wellness Influencer. It’s revealing. The way to become a wellness influencer is a) find something you’re passionate about, b) connect with a community of wellness influencers, and c) land a brand deal. That last one is obviously the most important. Nowhere does it say you should study medicine or nutrition, or read scientific studies, or even be capable of understanding scientific studies. Just promote whatever random bias is floating around in your head!

It also helps to be young and slender and capable of doing yoga poses. Here’s a whole page of wellness photos you can use to build a page promoting your brand. Take a look and let me know if there’s anything illustrating knowledge or expertise; there is a common theme, and that’s not it.

In that article dismissing the seed oil obsession, you instead find studies and numbers.

Belury, who has studied fatty acids for three decades, says that claim is based on an oversimplification and misunderstanding of the science. Studies have shown that increased intake of linoleic acid, the most common omega-6, does not significantly affect concentrations of inflammatory markers in the blood, she said.

“Scientists who study omega-6 and omega-3 think we need both,” Belury said. “Seed oils do not increase acute or chronic inflammation markers.”

In addition, research from the American Heart Association and others has consistently shown that plant-based oils reduce so-called bad cholesterol, lowering the risk of heart disease and stroke, especially compared with sources high in saturated fat.

That’s found in new research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital scientists as well. A study of more than 200,000 adults over more than 30 years released Thursday found that people who ate the highest amounts of butter had a 15% higher risk of dying than those who ate the least. People who ate the most plant-based oils — including seed oils — had a 16% lower risk than those who ate the least.

Dr. Daniel Wang, who led the research, said new modeling data suggests that swapping less than a tablespoon a day of butter for equal calories of plant-based oils could lower premature deaths from cancer and overall mortality by 17%. Such a small daily change could result in “a substantial benefit,” Wang said.

Gosh. Belury and Wang are never going to be rich, famous, and popular at that rate. Americans don’t want to be told about data, they want to see a glossy image of sexy people sipping a drink with an umbrella in it while sitting on a beach in Costa Rica. That’s wellness, not a bunch of studies showing what’s actually effective in reducing mortality.

I think I’ll just listen to boring doctors in Minnesota who tell me to eat less red meat and consume more olive oil and salmon. It seems to be working; most of my ancestors seem to have died in their 50s, and I’ve made it to almost 70, and I haven’t made any major sacrifices in my lifestyle. A Mediterranean diet is delicious and good for you.

Unfortunately, I don’t look like a 20-something model and I don’t have a wellness supplement to sell.

Furious overconfidence does not counter the evidence

Here’s another wild creationist claim that just popped up from the YouTube algorithm. It’s a shouting match between a Muslim creationist (Subboor Ahmad) and an individual from the crowd, who is challenged to define evolution. He says “natural selection plus mutation,” which prompts this furious response from Ahmad.

If it’s natural selection plus random mutations, it becomes epigenetics.

What? No it’s not. That’s absurd. It just tells me that Subboor Ahmad knows nothing about evolution.

It also includes a clip of an encounter between Ahmad and Aron Ra, in which Aron correctly points out that drift is the major driver of evolutionary change, and Ahmad blows up in fury and accuses him of being drunk.

A creationist denies molecular evolution

Last night, Aron Ra got into a discussion about a claim that protein evolution is impossible, specifically, that different protein families could not have evolved. Here is the provocative and baseless claim.

There is no research that says protein evolution is possible, unless you appeal to evolution. That’s circular.
There is no research published that explains how a new protein family, with stable novel folds, can evolve in the rugged evolutionary landscape. Only conjecture and always with an appeal to the theory. That’s called theory laden evidence.

I have issues with the premise that evolution is fact (bad science). That demands a better definition of evolution so I’ll clarify, I have problem with the premise that random mutation, gene duplication, gene transfer, gene shift, and anything I may have missed, under the influence of natural selection is sufficient to produce biodiversity.

Perhaps a new mechanism will be discovered, but at present there is no evidence that evolution is possible beyond an appeal to evolution.

There is a barrier to protein evolution. Gradual change doesn’t provide a path from one protein family to another because the landscape is rugged. Point mutations will lead proteins off the functional cliff. Duplication doesn’t fit the bill either, not enough variety. Fact is, without some sort of bridge protein evolution is inconceivable. No bridge has been found.

I’m not claiming that there isn’t one or that it will never be found, I’m saying there is no evidence for one. It’s a leap of faith to say it happened.

I know you’re not a fan of that word, faith, but there is no alternative. The only justification for that faith is ontology. It’s your belief in naturalism which cannot be proven one way or the other. in fact, the very problem I’m discussing here is a thorn in the side of naturalism.

You’ve waged a lifelong war against theism and always appeal to intellectual honesty. Well, I’m being intellectually honest. There in no evidence that evolution is possible because protein evolution has no known solution.

Proteins exist on peaks separated by valleys where function drops off completely. The “rugged landscape”. The peaks play home to a variety of related proteins with limited variety of amino acid sequences called families. A peak is more like a plateau. Small changes can produce variety of function and fitness. Large changes cause function to collapse into a valley where the protein gets deselected.

The amount of change required to find a new stable fold with novel function, a.k.a. a new family on its own plateau, far exceeds what proteins can tolerate by incremental change without losing all function. This is not controversial.

Proteins need to leap or require a bridge. Leaps in sequence change are irrational because the search space is too large and the target too small.

The presumption is that there is an unknown “bridge” that allows proteins to make the transition from one peak to another. That bridge has yet to be found (or even adequately hypothesised), and without it proteins are trapped on local peaks. Meaning evolution is limited to variety of what is, with no access to cool new stuff. Micro but not macro.

The premise that evolution is a fact allows for the presumption that “we don’t know yet” is a valid placeholder for the bridge. A glaring “god of the gaps”. My “dilemma” is how can evolution be called a fact, when the facts exist to challenge it? It can only be reckoned that belief is the “Jesus nut” that keeps it from flying apart.

Anyone who is a materialist will naturally, and justifiably, search for that bridge. Dualists can as well, but it’s discovery isn’t an imperative. For the theist, that bridge may well be agency. In any case, agency is no worse than “we don’t know yet” as a filler.

My question is, on what basis do you declare the materialist ontology correct and the dualist ontology false? The inability to test is a feature, not a test in itself.

What does it matter if the problem was before Eukaryotes? Evolution covers the first cell to everything. From what I’ve read, the Cambrian Explosion is where the problem is most evident with many new protein families that have no observed precursors. All within a tiny fraction of evolutionary time.

“A protein family is a group of proteins that share a common evolutionary origin, typically reflected in their similar amino acid sequences, structural features, and often their biological functions. These proteins are usually derived from a single ancestral gene that has undergone duplication and divergence over time, leading to variations within the family. Members of a protein family may differ in their specific roles or expression patterns but retain enough similarity to be classified together.” -Grok (I trust AI is allowed for definitions?)

I understand the standard hypothesis. Gene duplication allows one to remain stable while the other continues on down the evolutionary trail. I also understand there is a vast leap required for a protein to diverge into a new family. Recombination is most commonly considered for large leaps, though no evidence exists it can be done.

I understand the standard hypothesis. Gene duplication allows one to remain stable while the other continues on down the evolutionary trail. I also understand there is a vast leap required for a protein to diverge into a new family. Recombination is most commonly considered for large leaps, though no evidence exists it can be done.

I also understand that proteins are intolerant of big change. That paper by Axe estimated that only 1 in 10^63 random sequences fold right. Leaps mean a big change which hits that small target.

On the other hand, incremental changes enjoy a similar problem of losing functionality (which can kill all progress), while also facing time constraints. There isn’t enough time for evolution to search out functional sequences. Even a nice new protein with a stable fold must break the barrier of epistasis.

Finally, I’m talking about entirely new families. Think Superfamily. Like a transporter to the first protease. The information hurdle is massive, and the serendipity required makes Powerball look like a sure bet.

Evolution is not really varying allele frequencies. That works for HS kids but it falls short. Evolutionary theory is the explanation for those varying frequencies. Theories explain HOW, not what.

So we talked for a while about this silly claim. As Aron points out this is just the old show me a cat giving birth to a dog creationist claim translated to show me a transport protein evolving into a protease. It’s the same thing and the same answer. We can trace the ancestry of cats and dogs and see that they converge on a common ancestor in the distant past; we can trace the ancestry of various proteins and follow them back to a distant duplication event to the modern diverse pattern. The creationist wants to argue that the process is simply impossible by throwing around various sciencey terms. He uses the old creationist claim that the probability of a particular functional sequence is only 1 in 1063, a calculation built on faulty premises. He invokes the barrier of epistasis…what barrier is that? I don’t think he knows what epistasis is, let alone the nature of his imagined barrier. He throws around the term rugged fitness landscapes without recognizing that landscapes are an explanatory metaphor, not an actual physical entity.

If you don’t want to listen to us babble, I sent Aron a link to a paper by Tomoko Ohta that summarizes it all.

In eukaryote genomes, there are many kinds of gene families. Gene duplication and conversion are sources of the evolution of gene families, including those with uniform members and those with diverse functions. Population genetics theory on identity coefficients among gene members of a gene family shows that the balance between diversification by mutation, and homogenization by unequal crossing over and gene conversion, is important. Also, evolution of new functions is due to gene duplication followed by differentiation. Positive selection is necessary for the evolution of novel functions. However, many examples of current gene families suggest that both drift and selection are at work on their evolution.

The creationist says that all of that is inconceivable, of course. Never mind that we have evidence of each incremental step and can see intermediates in the process preserved in the genome.

Then he falls back on free will and morality as obstacles to evolution, somehow.

A guilty pleasure

Sometimes, I’ll tune in to these atheist phone line shows on YouTube. It’s unfair, but it’s always the worst, dumbest, most ignorant Christians who call in to air their idiotic views publicly — maybe there are intelligent Christians out there, but they don’t call in to get skewered by atheists who know the Bible better than they do. Also, I enjoy hearing Matt shout, “SHUT THE FUCK UP” to some babbling ninny who can’t answer a simple question and chooses to instead try and overwhelm everyone with frenzied bullshit.

For example, this video titled “From Biblical Slavery to Alien DNA – Nebraska Steve Takes Us on Another Trip” is a good example of the genre. First the guy tries to say the Bible doesn’t endorse slavery, only to be trounced by the hosts reciting Bible verses at him. Then he segues to claiming there is evidence for God, although he can’t say what it was, in spite of repeated requests from the hosts to explain what that evidence was.

He did finally gasp out that “the WOW signal” is evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In case you don’t know, here’s is the WOW signal.

In 1977, an astronomer named Jerry Ehrman was recording radio transmissions from space, and got a brief, strong signal that he didn’t understand, so he scribbled “Wow!” on the printout. I’ve seen this cited so often by so many people as a sign that aliens are out there.

It’s not. The observation has been repeated. It’s noise from a passing comet.

The explanation started to come into focus last year when a team at the CPS suggested that the signal might have come from a hydrogen cloud accompanying a comet—additionally, the movement of the comet would explain why the signal was not seen again. The team noted that two comets had been in the same part of the sky that the Big Ear was monitoring on the fateful day. Those comets, P/2008 Y2(Gibbs) and 266/P Christensen had not yet been discovered. The team then got a chance to test their idea as the two comets appeared once again in the night sky from November 2016 through February of 2017.

The team reports that radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal 40 years ago. To verify their results, they tested readings from three other comets, as well, and found similar results. The researchers acknowledge that they cannot say with certainty that the Wow! signal was generated by 266/P Christensen, but they can say with relative assurance that it was generated by a comet.

Somehow, I don’t think Nebraska Steve would care.

I’m not banal enough to be a NYT columnist

I have no idea what he’s trying to say with this illustration on the column. God has a whip? He’s a bastard to make you behave?

But I could try, if the New York Times would give me a sinecure as their atheist columnist, and if I were willing to discard any self-respect I might have. After all, they do employ the most insipid theist they could find, Ross Douthat. He tried something slightly creative this week, trying to steel-man an atheist argument, badly. He presents his idea of The Best Argument Against Having Faith in God. It’s the problem of evil.

One interesting point about this argument is that while it’s often folded into the briefs for atheism that claim to rely primarily on hard evidence and science, it isn’t properly speaking an argument that some creating power does not exist. Rather it’s an argument about the nature of that power, a claim that the particular kind of God envisioned by many believers and philosophers — all powerful and all good — would not have made the world in which we find ourselves, and therefore that this kind of God does not exist.

That is correct. No one uses the problem of evil to disprove a god, but only the idea of a benevolent god, or more specifically, the perfectly good being most Christians promote. When I see it deployed in an argument, it’s usually to make the narrower point that I don’t believe in your god.

Douthat follows the usual out — refusing to deal with a direct criticism of his version of god to ask, “what about this other god?”, a weaker god than his magical being. And then falls back on general apologetics.

You can’t fully counter the argument from evil with evidence of God’s existence because the argument doesn’t fully try to establish God’s nonexistence. And you can’t fully counter it with an argument for why God might allow suffering — as a necessary corollary of free will, for instance — because the claim isn’t about the existence of suffering but its scale and scope and excess.

What you can offer, instead, is a set of challenges rather than straightforward rebuttals. The first challenge emphasizes the limits of what the argument from evil establishes even if you fully accept it: not that God doesn’t exist, not that the universe lacks a supernatural order, but just that the traditional Christian or classical-theist conception of God’s perfect goodness is somehow erroneous or overdrawn. This still leaves you with the converging lines of evidence for some kind of cosmic order, some kind of crucial human role within that drama. And it still leaves you with various theological alternatives to make sense of that evidence: You could be a pantheist or a polytheist, a gnostic or a dualist, a deist or a process theologian, and more. The argument from evil might be a reason to choose one of those schools over traditional Christianity, without being a good reason to choose atheism.

He really just doesn’t like atheism. Anything else but atheism. He doesn’t bother to say what those the converging lines of evidence for some kind of cosmic order are, though. But OK, sure, the problem of evil says you should be anything but a traditional Christian, I’ll take it.

Douthat is a traditional Catholic.

Does he even read what he writes?

The straw he grasps at is that any good exists, and you can’t explain that, therefore God.

But it makes the problem of good — real good, deep good, the Good, not just fleeting spasms and sensations — at least as notable a difficulty for the believer in a totally indifferent universe as the problem of evil is supposed to be for the religious believer.

Which suggests that even if that evil makes it hard for you to believe in a God of perfect power, you still shouldn’t give up hope that something very good indeed has a role in the order of the world.

Except that we don’t need an all-powerful supernatural being to explain how the world works.

The ball is in your court, New York Times: I’m available. I don’t know if I could write anything as stupid as Douthat’s scribblings, though. If I read enough Douthat will that make me ignorant enough to take his place?

Discovery Institute ♥ Joe Rogan & Bret Weinstein

The Discovery Institute is thrilled by Rogan and Weinstein, entirely because these conspiracy theorists criticize “Darwinism”. It’s laughable. Rogan is an ignorant meathead, and Weinstein is a weird outsider who profits from babbling nonsense about science. It’s no surprise that the garbage out crowd is in alignment with religious propagandists.

Here’s the bit the DI adores:

Weinstein says he is “sympathetic” to ID but rejects it, which we knew. He says the current version of Darwinism, however, is “broken” and the evolutionary mainstream “lies” to itself, and to us. He alludes to another Darwinian mechanism operating on top of the standard one of random mutation and natural selection:

I believe there’s a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form, that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer. [I believe] that what we did was, we took the random mutation model and we recognized that it was Darwinian, which it is, and we therefore assumed that it would explain anything that we could see that was clearly the product of Darwinian forces, on the basis of those random mutations. And we skipped the layer in between, in which selection has a different kind of information stored in the genome that is not triplet-codon in nature. [Emphasis added.]

In another words, I think he’s saying, the other information is in a “meta” relationship to the familiar material genome, the genetic information instantiated in DNA and other known physical epigenetic features in the cell.

Dr. Weinstein is a deep thinker, and I hope I’m not misrepresenting him. But this other information, in his view, is also material in nature, not spiritual — which might be the difference between Weinstein’s thinking and, say, that of Platonist ID scientists like Richard Sternberg and Günter Bechly who posit an “immaterial genome,” occupying that meta role.

Weinstein is not a deep thinker. He’s a disgraced ex-biologist and intellectual charlatan who now pals around with Douglas Murray and Andy Ngo and various other far right wing creeps, promoting ridiculous ideas about vaccines, race, and is an AIDS denialist, while promoting ivermectin during the COVID epidemic. He’s a fringe kook, but the DI is so stupid they can’t tell.

I have no idea what this “kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form” that he is referring to is, and I don’t think he knows either. He’s making up strings of words. The DI is right about one thing: it is on a par with “immaterial genome”. It’s all nonspecific nonsense that dumb ol’ Joe Rogan will nod along to.

Weinstein has another tell that exposes his irrelevance.

[In my opinion,] the mainstream Darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood. So by reporting that yes, Darwinism is true, and we know how it works, and people who aren’t compelled by the story are illiterate or ignorant or whatever, they are pretending to know more than they do. So all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it.
…
There are several different things that are wrong with [Darwinism]. The key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell, about how it is that mutation results in morphological change, is incorrect.
…
I am sympathetic to the intelligent design folks, though I do not believe they’re on the right track. I’m open to a universe with intelligence behind it, but I’ve seen no evidence of that universe myself. I’m open to it. If it happens, I will look at it.

Darwinism. Darwinism, Darwinism, Darwinism. Yes, there are things wrong with Darwinism: it’s a 19th century hypothesis composed by a guy who knew nothing about DNA, genes, molecules, or mutation. Show me anyone who proudly announces that he has discovered problems with Darwinism, and I’ll show you a popinjay whose understanding of science ended in 1900.

What is the story we tell about how mutation results in morphological change? I would love to hear it.

And then…

You’ve had Stephen Meyer on. He’s a scientist who’s quite good, and he’s spotted that the mechanism in question [the standard Darwinian one] isn’t powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains. And so he’s catching up, but that’s really on the Darwinists for not admitting what they can’t yet explain and pursuing it, which is what they should be doing.

Holy crap. Stephen Meyer is not a scientist. He got an undergrad degree in physics and earth science, decided he knew everything there is to know about biology, and went on to get a master’s and Ph.D. in philosophy. He held jobs in a couple of private Christian colleges before becoming a professional propagandist at the Discovery Institute. And now Weinstein thinks he’s a “quite good” scientist? That tells you all you need to know about Weinstein.

Well, that and vague, handwavey glop about mysterious sources of genetic information, vaccine quackery, racist apologetics, and ill-informed complaints about “Darwinism”. This is a guy whose whole career now is bent on getting on the Joe Rogan show to foment non-controversies.

If logic were a horserace, this guy would have lapped himself multiple times

A horse living as God intended it to

I suspect most of you don’t read the Answers Research Journal, the hack pseudoscientific journal published by Answers in Genesis to create the illusion that they do actual research. They don’t. And I don’t normally read it myself, but Daniel Phelps sent me a link to a recent article there titled Were Horses Designed to Be Ridden? If you know Betteridge’s law of headlines, then you know the answer is supposed to be “NO!”, but AiG can’t even get that right.

Horses have served as one of man’s closest companions for thousands of years. Humans have ridden them into battles, attached them to the plow, galloped them across great plains, and shown them in countless competitions. Found anywhere from ranches, to back yards, to racing tracks, to beaches, these magnificent animals have been used as instruments which brought great change into the world. One might even wonder how easily man would have managed to advance without them. With such close ties to man’s history, it seems natural that one should ask if horses were designed for riding. Such is the topic of this article and the research thereof. In considering different subjects such as History, Anatomy, and Scripture, it is this author’s belief that horses were designed to be ridden.

A bold claim. Does Caleb Harrier back it up? I shall follow Betteridge’s law, and the answer is…NO!

He’s supposed to provide evidence that horses were designed to be ridden, so he looks up the answer in a few sources, which is good. The sources are all consistent in their answer, which is also good.

Unfortunately, authors who have spoken to the topic of whether horses were designed to be ridden are usually dismissive to the idea. For example, the authors of Equine Science, simply state: “The horse is not designed to carry a rider’s weight on top of its back” (Pilliner and Davies 2004, 23). However, no explanation is provided in the text as to why the authors dismiss the idea.

Another example can be found in the popular book, How to Think Like a Horse by equine author Cherry Hill. In this work, she states that “A horse’s body isn’t really designed to carry extra weight, but it can by virtue of its suspension-bridge features” (Hill 2006, 50). Soon after, she adds: “Even though a horse is not designed to carry weight, because of the cooperative interaction between major topline ligaments and the circle of muscles, with careful consideration, we can ride” (Hill 2006, 52). The implication, then, from the author is that horses were not designed to be ridden. According to the text, horses at least have the capacity to be ridden but were not designed for such a role.

Numerous blog articles have been written on this topic of discussion as well. Sadly, these authors’ views also tend to be quite dismissive. In her article, “The Horse’s Body is not Designed to Carry a Person,” Didier (2019) states: “when we objectively assess what really holds a riding horse back we have to admit something quite awkward, and that is—from a design, strength, and balance point of view—the horse’s body is simply not designed to carry a person.” In this article, she at least provides reasoning for why she believes horses were not designed to be ridden, and it is due to their back structure in relation to where a rider sits.

In the article, “Were Horses Meant to be Ridden by Humans?”, Stone (2022) flatly opens with “Horses were never meant to be human slaves and carry them on their backs.” His explanation is the recurring theme about a horse’s anatomy, in addition to back pain caused by riding.

So all his sources say no, horses were not designed to be ridden, but he’s going to ignore that and decide that yes, they were designed to be ridden. So much for scholarship! His argument is that well, horses are ridden, and have been ridden throughout history, therefore they must be designed to be ridden. He also points out that they have strong back muscles, so therefore the only reason they don’t suffer catastrophic back failure is because they were designed to carry a human.

Then he unlimbers the big gun. The reason that we know horses were designed to be ridden is because the Bible, specifically the book of Revelation, says so.

It is this author’s position that, because Christ and His heavenly armies will one day be riding horses— as part of biblical prophecy—then horses were indeed designed to be ridden. It is not a horse’s historical record nor its anatomy that ultimately decides what it was designed for. As always, Scripture is our final authority. The King and His armies will return to the earth, riding on white horses. The horse kind—like other kinds—has always been a part of God’s plan. Horses have made a historical impact in our past; they will certainly have an impact in our future.

If that’s not enough evidence for you, there’s also the argument that Jesus would not use a horse for a purpose for which it was not designed.

Revelation 19 demonstrates that horses were designed by God to be ridden just as powerfully within a symbolic or metaphorical interpretation. For example, if horses were not designed to be ridden, then the Holy Spirit would not inspire John to write a passage that shows the Creator Jesus misusing His own creation. Also, if it were animal abuse to ride horses, Scripture—even metaphorically!—would not depict Jesus abusing His own creation.

I don’t know why he bothered to research horses, since he already knew his conclusion, and since the only source he needed was the Bible.