Will Knowland knows nothing

Will Knowland was a teacher at Eton who was dismissed for making a video claiming that patriarchy was good after being told not to — I’m not keen on the idea of firing someone for expressing an opinion, but I do think it’s reasonable to fire teachers for ignorance and incompetence. Knowland has gone on to make more videos to demonstrate just how stupid he is. He has chosen to claim that evolution is false. Big mistake. Especially since his arguments are pathetic.

I have the transcript. Let’s see how big a dumbass Will Knowland is.

here are eight things about Evolution that I wasn’t taught in school

Correct. He wasn’t taught the following things in school because they are wrong.

0:05 number one because Free Will is real and humans are rational any materialistic account of our Origins is certainly false this means darwinian materialistic evolution is and that’s why people who hold that worldview end up denying human rationality and Free Will including their own the two stand or fall together

I think free will arguments are all bad, no matter what side you take, so I’m not going to touch that one. The argument about rationaility, though, I think, is already refuted, because his claims are all irrational. Humans aren’t particularly rational — we’re all creatures of emotion and bias, and I note that Knowland fails to provide any supporting evidence or arguments otherwise. It’s an assertion with no rational support.

It’s also false to claim that science and evolution, specifically, require the rejection of rationality.

0:32 number two the oldest rocks on Earth date from 3.8 to 3.98 billion years ago but life was present 3.81 billion years ago so life had only 100 to 170 million years to evolve that is an instant a blink of the eye in evolutionary time

Remember that: 100 to 170 million is a blink of the eye. I’m inclined to think that 100 million years is an incredibly long time — lots can happen in a million years or a thousand. The origin of life was a process of chemical evolution. How many chemical reactions can occur in that span of time?

0:58 number three there’s no evidence for concentrated organic pools on early Earth no empirical evidence whatsoever and without a blueprint to direct it and convert it raw energy isn’t usable anyway but since these are only produced by life this is the Catch-22 and don’t say life came from space that just pushes the problem one step back where did it begin if it came from space

How concentrated is concentrated? Is he claiming to be a quantitative organic chemist now?

The best models for the origin of life now suggest it arose in deep-sea volcanic vents, which are rich in the precursors for organic molecules, and also provide the energy necessary for the reactions to produce them. Right now, electrons are being shuffled across inorganic substrates, reducing compounds and creating the building blocks of life without “blueprints.” It’s all chemistry. All of life is chemistry.

OK, I won’t say life came from space. That’s just bullshit anyway. Why does Knowland feel the need to put bogus arguments into his critics’ mouths?

1:33 number four there are millions of transitional forms organisms observable across successive Generations appear fully formed they have no ancestors or Bridges and they don’t change and don’t say punctuated equilibrium that is empirically equivalent to creationism

At least he admits that there are many transitional forms, but it’s weird that he then claims they can have no ancestors. All organisms are functional, or they wouldn’t exist. Evolution is all about changes from one fully functional organism to a different fully functional organism by small successive variations. We’d be very surprised to discover a species that arose from a non-viable population of incomplete organisms.

Again, he puts a bogus argument in our mouths. Punctuated equilibrium is about rates of change in subsets of a population. It’s not a version of creationism. Eldredge and Gould would be very surprised to be told that they have invented a creationist theory.

1:57 number five some structures require the whole structure to be in place to be functional imagine having one tenth of an eye or one one hundredth of a heart or one one thousandth of a penis

Most birds, to name one counter-example. Most birds (excepting ducks, obviously) lack a penis and mate by cloacal kissing. Clearly you don’t need a whole massive 3mm long penis to successfully reproduce, as he should know since he has 7 children.

Similarly, we evolved from organisms that have little more than a muscular tube for a heart and an open circulatory system, or that have only an eyespot that can only sense light and dark. We have a plethora of examples of simpler hearts, eyes, and reproductive organs that are entirely functional.

2:19 number six there are built-in limits to genetic material Darwin thought natural selection worked a bit like dog breeding but humans can’t make a dog the size of an ant or a whale and we definitely can’t create a new species out of dogs and that’s despite centuries of intelligent intervention speciation has never been observed

What are the mechanisms that impose these limits? He doesn’t say. Creationists never do. Besides, speciation has been observed.

Refer back to his objection number two, where he says 100 to 170 million is an eyeblink, yet now he argues that the limitations of a few centuries refutes evolution.

2:49 number seven DNA is literally not figuratively a code it embodies meaningful information it’s like the typewriter not the message there’s currently a 10 million dollar prize for anyone who can demonstrate a naturally encoding and decoding system nobody can

Man, that metaphor went kablooieeee. So DNA is literally a code, like a typewriter? What? None of that makes sense.

The existence of loons who want to offer a prize for demonstrating something that silly is not a point in its favor, especially since they’re going to automatically reject the existence of the “encoding and decoding system” embodied in cells. This $10 million prize does sort of exist, at least as a PR stunt and hype engine for Perry Marshall, a guy with a degree in electrical engineering and no understanding of biology at all. He doesn’t have $10 million to give away, so the entire “prize” is contrived to make sure no one can possibly win. That is not a point in its favor.

3:12 number eight cells edit their own DNA in real time in response to threats this isn’t random and there is variation and adaptation before natural selection can occur talking about selfish genes also assumes the very teleology and purpose that Darwin explicitly denied

I don’t think he’s talking about gene editing here — that’s a completely different phenomenon. Since it’s “in response to threats” I suspect he’s mangling the idea of modifying gene expression in response to the environment. There’s nothing in that counter to the idea of evolution whatsoever. It’s a natural and well-understood biochemical and physiological process.

The selfish gene concept does not assume teleology. Some gene sequences can use cellular machinery to amplify their representation in the genome. That’s all.

3:37 and then we’ve got metaphysical problems life didn’t come from non-life animal life didn’t come from plant life man the rational animal didn’t come from non-rational animals these are all differences in kind not degree go into your garden pick up a stone and look at it and think of it one day evolving into being able to compose a symphony solve a theorem write a novel you can’t evolve a thin line into a thick one by simply extending it that’s what it’s like trying to get life from non-life animal life from plant life rational life man from non-rational Life The Brute animals

Those look like metaphysical assumptions, not problems. Animals evolved independently from the lineage that gave rise to plants, for one thing. Life had to have come from non-life, unless you think life has existed eternally. Stones don’t evolve, since they don’t reproduce. This all sounds like incoherent word vomit from a guy who doesn’t understand anything he’s babbling about.

Now for his grand conclusion…

4:24 so what do I think about Evolution now the church fathers are clear that God could have worked through evolutionary processes in creating man’s body but certainly not in creating his intellect and at least some creatures were created fully formed and many stemmed evolution of the others was involved

I don’t give a flying fuck what the “church fathers” said. They aren’t authorities on evolution by any stretch of the imagination.

Well, that’s all he’s got. Once again, a creationist demonstrates the paucity of intellect behind their reasoning, and their whole position goes down in flames. Maybe he needs to stop assuming that he is a rational being and try to earn that adjective.

Deja vu — it used to be called “teach the controversy”

Classic foot-in-the-door technique, just picture them wearing ragged dirty clodhoppers

You all remember Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the court case that decided that no, teachers couldn’t smuggle creationism into the classroom by pretending they were teaching reasonable alternatives? This story about a West Virginia law even references it.

In 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that it was unconstitutional to present intelligent design as an alternative to evolution because it advanced a Christian viewpoint and is not legitimate science.

Well, it’s baaaack!

A bill that could permit teachers to discuss and answer questions from students about theories, including intelligent design, will head to the House of Delegates for a vote after a tweak Tuesday morning.

Senators already approved the bill, Senate Bill 280, early in the legislative session, saying it protected teachers who may face legal challenges when discussing theories outside of evolution.

A Democrat member of the House Committee on the Judiciary argued that the bill didn’t explicitly permit intelligent design in classroom teaching — despite what was discussed as a possible intent of the legislation in the Senate.

During debate, Republicans emphasized that the bill wouldn’t be a mandate of what to teach; rather, they said the legislation ensured that students could have wide-ranging discussions on theories.

“This bill doesn’t require a teacher to teach creationism,” said Del. Andy Shamblin, R-Kanawha, who is a public school teacher. “All this bill does is say if the subject is brought up, the teacher can discuss that subject.”

While voicing support of the legislation, Del. Scot Heckert, R-Wood, said that the bill could result in more students being interested in science or “simply [keep] them from getting involved in drugs, playing on the computer all the time or eating Tide Pods.”

Teachers have not been prohibited from having a conversation about a topic not in the curriculum (unless, of course, it’s mentioning that they’re happily gay-married, in which case fundamentalists will storm the school with pitchforks and torches.) They can say, “I believe in the book of Genesis” and then move on — what they can’t do is derail the whole curriculum by spending class time going over the begats or treating the bullshit peddled by the Discovery Institute as science. Public schools are supposed to have science standards, a set of things the teachers are obligated to teach, because they are supposed to be preparing them for college, or for life as an educated citizen. Teach those religious ‘alternatives’ in Sunday School, where you’re not constrained by the shackles of reality or practicality.

Naturally, the Bible thumpers make the same arguments they always have.

Del. Todd Kirby, R-Raleigh, said that he didn’t see how the legislation introduced religion to students in the sciences classes.

“Just because you believe we came from something greater than a mere chance or an instance when everything happened to come together in our universe and solar system … it doesn’t mean you’re pushing religion. It just means you have a different theory than what’s taught in school,” he said.

Another ignorant yahoo who thinks evolution equals chance, and that any old tall tale you can babble about is a “theory”. What he’s talking about is a peculiar religious myth that he wants taught alongside natural selection and the periodic table and Newton’s laws of motion. He just wants the schools to pretend that Adam & Eve have equal explanatory power to common descent.

No one is fooled. I know and he knows that he is pushing religion, he’s just the one lying about it.

Meanwhile, the state of Kentucky is likewise investing large amounts of money into promoting faith-based bologna, as the FFRF points out.

The Northern Kentucky Convention & Visitors Bureau’s new Kentucky Faith Trail program has received a $305,000 grant from the state. The Faith Trail is a self-guided tour through 11 sites of “faith, culture, and history,” as a Bureau press release states. Even though the trail “is designed to be inclusive, welcoming people of all faiths and backgrounds to embark on a shared journey of discovery and reflection,” all 11 sites are Christian. To belabor the obvious, this makes the trail the opposite of “inclusive” and welcoming to people of “all faiths and backgrounds.”

Two of the sites, the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, are well known for spreading misinformation and promoting anti-science worldviews, FFRF points out. The Ark Encounter purports to be an accurate replica of the mythical ark from the biblical story of Noah and claims that the Christian story of a worldwide flood actually happened. Similarly, the Creation Museum promotes scientifically disproven myths of how the universe came to be and promotes inaccurate information, such as teaching guests that humans and dinosaurs once co-existed on Earth. Both the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum are owned by Answers in Genesis, an extreme evangelical Christian organization that spreads misinformation and scientifically inaccurate teachings about our world.

The Bureau must cease using taxpayer money to promote a Faith Trail that includes the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, FFRF stresses.

Gullibility, unfortunately, does not disqualify one for running for high office.

Nobody calls it the “gender chromosome”

Wow. Answers in Genesis falls back on the old simplistic notion that chromosomes determine sex (and gender!) in this video. It’s an amazingly bad clip.

OK, in 40 years of genetics experience, I’ve never heard the Y chromosome called the “gender chromosome” until now. Her absolutist, rigid definition of sex based on chromosome complement is archaic and ignorant. At one point, she rhetorically asks Can you change your chromosomes? Can you change what God knit you to be in the womb of your mother? You cannot “change your chromosomes”, but the pattern of gene activity changes throughout your life. God didn’t do any knitting in anyone’s womb, but you definitely can change — these Biblical ‘literalists’ are denying the reality of biological change, not just over evolutionary timescales, but on developmental timescales. What she is claiming is repulsively stupid.

You may wonder what Jennifer Rivera’s qualifications are. She holds an education doctorate in curriculum and instruction — it’s kind of odd how many creationists hold advanced degrees in education, which is nice, since it means they know how to teach, but they lack any knowledge of what content they should teach. She also has a BA in criminal justice, so AiG has her lecturing on forensic science.

I hope her understanding of fingerprints is better than her understanding of genetics and sex, but I’m afraid to look.

You are not allowed to follow the evidence

I have no patience anymore. I was sent this video titled Evolutionists Have Been WRONG About Dinosaurs for Years from Answers in Genesis, and I was only able to watch the first 3 minutes.

It opens on two people, one claiming to be a paleoartist, the other a Ph.D. paleontologist. They have to be failures at those occupations because they also announce that they are employed by Answers in Genesis. At least, though, they are quick to state their objection. Is it reasonable to believe in feathered dinosaurs in a Biblical worldview? Their answer is no.

They’re easily refuted, of course, just by showing a dinosaur fossil with feathers. That’s pretty stupid, you’d think, to frame up a target so easily shot down. But they have cleverly created an excuse in advance!

They show some clips from one of the Jurassic Park movies, and telling us that those are fake. Did you know that? That Hollywood magnified the size of dinosaurs and made them look flashier? And that the Pyroraptor holotype was fragmentary and lacked any feather impressions. If only the scientists would stop relying on movies for their data. Of course, they were instead relying on data from other specimens of dromaeosaurids that do have feathers. Those don’t count, though, because then they said the thing that made me close the video.

Evolutionists have been changing the meaning of words…to better fit their evolutionary worldview.

They’re making a definitional argument. Birds have feathers, and dinosaurs don’t, therefore any fossil found with feathers is a bird, not a dinosaur. See? Those dastardly scientists changed the meaning of the word “dinosaur!” That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. The universe is fixed and unchanging, just like the Bible says, and whenever a scientist finds evidence of species in flux, they’re wrong. Because the Bible tells them so.

Ken Ham is sad that other denominations have gotten smarter

Poor man. Ken Ham is being left behind by other creationists, which is of course not his failing, but of all those other faithless Christians. So he’s going to tell us where they are going wrong.

Many things have changed since we started the biblical apologetics ministry that became Answers in Genesis, in our home in Australia in 1977. The culture has changed. But God’s Word has not changed and never will. Man’s word of about origins has continued to change in various ways over this time..
This Bible record of creation rules out the evolutionary philosophy which states that all forms of life have come into being by gradual, progressive evolution carried on by resident (natural) forces. It also rules out any evolutionary origin for the human race, since no form of evolution, including theistic evolution, can explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman. But the bible has never changed in its statement that God made two genders: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)
While we were still living in Australia, I read a report in 1977, that the Assemblies of God denomination had adopted a “Doctrine of Creation” which stated the following:
“This Bible record of creation thus rules out the evolutionary philosophy which states that all forms of life have come into being by gradual, progressive evolution carried on by resident forces. It also rules out any evolutionary origin for the human race, since no theory of evolution, including theistic evolution, can explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman.

If you’re like me, your jaw dropped at that claim that …no form of evolution, including theistic evolution, can explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman. This is Ray Comfort levels of ignorance; we don’t argue that men evolved before women, or that the sexes evolved independently, or that men evolved into women. Those are creationist arguments. We all evolved together, our ancestors had male and female forms, and the first humans were the product of a gradual shift in populations. Anyone who tries to claim that evolution argues that the sexes evolved sequentially is abysmally ignorant, and this question about how women evolved from men is an example of a truly stupid question.

But why does Ham say the same thing twice? The first bit is quoting Answers In Genesis’s statement; the second is quoting the Assemblies of God statement, which AiG plagiarized. What he’s whining about, as he goes on, is that the Assemblies of God no longer claims that evolution can’t explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman. Assemblies of God has abandoned a stupid claim, while AiG still holds to that idea, therefore, to Ken Ham, Assemblies of God has abandoned the truth of scripture! Worse, nowadays they’re arguing for more tolerance on scientific matters, and reject the dogmatism that is the foundation of Ken Ham’s beliefs.

“As a result, equally devout Christian believers have formed very different opinions about the age of the earth, the age of humankind, and the ways in which God went about the creative processes. Given the limited information available in Scripture, it does not seem wise to be overly dogmatic about any particular creation theory. We urge all sincere and conscientious believers to adhere to what the Bible plainly teaches and to avoid divisiveness over debatable theories of creation.”

Uh-oh. That is a direct attack on Answers in Genesis. Ham is going to forever insist on promoting deeply wrong and ignorant ideas, and he’s still clinging to Ray Comfort’s misconceptions.

Every time, I regret examining the creationist literature

One must occasionally take a dip into the creationist literature, although I must admit I’ve been examining it with less and less frequency as time goes by. The problem is that they’ve never got anything new or even interesting, and they keep rehashing the same old nonsense, straining to make it start making sense.

So…The Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism was recently posted, and it’s a good snapshot of the state of creationism nowadays. It has somewhere around 75 titles listed, and clearly there are a fair number of people wasting their time struggling to erect this facade of pseudoscience on the enterprise. I’m taking a step way back and asking what their current obsessions are — and nothing has changed in over 60 years.

An awful lot of the articles are about the age of the Earth. They are desperate to find a way to telescope all of history into 6,000 years, so an immense amount of effort is put into justifying a global flood about 4,000 years ago. Most of the articles are about re-interpreting geology or inventing novel physics to invalidate radiometric dating. I think they realize that their insistence on a young earth is absurd and unsupportable, but is also critical to their interpretation of the Bible, and they’re struggling to resolve their discomfort with reality by making lots of excuses.

Guys, it’s not working. There was no Genesis Flood. Give up. Try instead to remodel your interpretation of the Bible to fit geology and physics.

Probably the second-most popular topic is “baraminology,” their attempt to remake biological systematics in the Lord’s image. Their problem is that modern systematics is built on a solid foundation of statistics and mathematics and vast amounts of data, and they have to ignore almost all of it to make their case, and what little data they do use is ripped out of context and mangled unpleasantly to make weird examples of isolated cases.

I confess that I don’t get the point of baraminology. It’s all about grouping species into specially created “kinds”, but in a sense, we do that already with the real science of cladistics. The difference is that cladistics has a mechanism, descent with modification, while baraminology is presupposing a creator who built “kinds” on his personal and ineffable whim.

One topic that is notably absent from the program is Intelligent Design. This is a group that explicitly supports Young Earth Creationism, so it’s not surprising that the people who avoid publicly advocating for Biblical creationism (while supporting it privately) are excluded. There were a whole 4 articles that discussed capital-D Design, and they were all pathetic. For instance, one titled Testing the Cavefish Model: An Organism-focused Theory of Biological Design reported that cavefish would produce pigment when exposed to high-intensity light, and concludes These implications do not support the conventional view that beneficial adaptations arise through random mutation, unregulated genomic recombination, or accumulation of unguided genetic variation – regardless of time scales. Therefore, organisms are the agents in control of adaptations and diversification. Physiological adaptation does not refute evolution! When my students vanish off to more southern climes for Spring Break and come back with tans, should I treat that as evidence that evolution is false?

That paper had five authors, by the way, all from the ICR. What I conclude from that is that stupidity is additive.

I tried looking at the more novel papers. Apparently, creationists tolerate a high degree of flakiness in their contributors. For instance, John DeMassa claims to have found Messages in the Genetic Code: The DRAm Form through the magic of numerology.

Does the Genetic code contain non-structural information or even intelligible messages? The present work offers a mathematical investigation of the genetic code using a novel numeric procedure applied to both nucleobases and amino acids found in standard code tables. The numeric two step procedure amounts to an atom count of all the atoms in standard genetic code tables and shall be called Compound Numeric Triangulation. The first step called Compound Numeric Indexing (CNI) converts the DNA codon table (purines and pyrimidines),the RNA codon table (purines and pyrimidines) and the 20 standard amino acids into representative index numbers. In this step, cytosine (C4H5N3O), for example, presents 13 total atoms (4+5+3+1) and would be assigned the index number 13. The codon CCC is assigned the CNI value 39 (13+13+13). Similarly index numbers are collected for the other codons in the DNA and RNA tables and substituted in place of the letter codes. The same procedure is applied to the amino acids. Three tables result. The code tables are next examined for reoccurring CNI values. For example, in DNA, the CNI value 39 is found 1 time but 46 is found 12 times. The patterns are next collected and arranged in ascending table arrays (39, 40, 41, etc.) with their respective frequencies and product totals. Since 46 occurs with a frequency of 12 it is entered into the table as its product (46 x 12 = 552). This general method is repeated for the RNA codon table and the 20 standard Amino acid to give a total of three new product table arrays. In the second step, called Numeric Triangulation, the arrays are subjected to the method of finite differences. In this step, adjacent product numbers in an array table are subtracted and the result is placed above and between the adjacent numbers. The process is continued until a triangle is formed. Historically, difference triangles have been used to determine properties of polynomials but other attributes were studied in this examination. The difference triangle for the 10 base product numbers of DNA released 45 additional difference triangle values to give a completed triangle consisting of 55 elements. For the RNA code table 91 numeric elements are produced and the amino acid table 78 numeric elements. Inspection of the triangle tables show number matches at their perimeters which was interpreted as a design element and potentially an assembly motif. Surprisingly, a three triangle composite structure elegantly assembles to reveal a graphed object. This shall be called the DRAm (DNA, RNA, Amino Acid) form. Again, surprisingly the DRAm form is an intelligible pictogram consisting of 224 number pixels. The 2-D picture is next transformed, using suggestive internal number patterns, into a recognizable, printable 3-D object. An interpretative process is lastly applied to the 2-D DRAm form to reveal a startling communicative interactive tool. Theological implications with respect to the question of design and origins will be reviewed and potential applications of this discovery will also be discussed.

Did you get that? He’s manipulating the genetic code into an array of numbers, and then converting those numbers into pictures. It’s important to note that he’s not looking at genetic sequences, but the code itself — so the pictures are going to be the same for every organism.

I had to look elsewhere for examples of his pictures.

I guess that settles it.

In other fun times, an engineer at Liberty University has A Mathematical Description of the Christian God.

The Christian God is one trinitarian God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Omniscience is all-knowing. Omnipresent is being everywhere at once. Omnipotent is all-powerful. Because the Holy Spirit has been revealed in the bible as reflective of different energy forms, He can be abstractly represented as energy in mathematical terms. Since power is the time derivative of energy, we can then cast the energy representation as a time derivative to make it power. When one integrates this equation from zero to infinity over all space and time, then we can get the mathematical expression of God’s omnipotence. We can also integrate information from zero to infinity and garner the effect of omniscience. Finally, we can also integrate time and space from zero to infinity and garner the effect of omnipresence. We can then multiplicatively place these three integrals together to describe the fullness of the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The notion of infinity from Blaise Pascal and David Hilbert is a critical aspect of the mathematical description of the Godhead.

I see nothing specific in that description to justify claiming that generic math describes a particular god.

Enough of that bullshit. I thought I’d browse for some one article that touched on my interests or expertise…but there was nothing about spiders or evo-devo. I was trained as a fish guy, though, so this article, Unresolved Issues in Hypothetical Fish-to-Amphibian Evolution by David Prentice, should contain some common ground that I could dig into.

Unfortunately, Davide Prentice is an unqualified nobody.

B. S. Physics, M.Ed. Curriculum & Instruction, M.A. Science Teaching

LA lifetime secondary certification in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, General Science, Mathematics

Taught on Creation and Apologetics in 13 countries

He’s a retired schoolteacher, which counts for something, but his background is an undergrad degree in physics from what, 40 years ago?

This is a poster presentation bringing together multiple problems with the idea that some ancestral fish evolved into some ancestral amphibian.

The Lamarckian idea that “form follows function” has been thoroughly falsified. The only explanation for characteristics of an organism’s phenotype is the content of its genotype rather than its need for new features.

That’s a really odd way to introduce your subject. “Form follows function” is not a Lamarckian idea, it’s architectural. Here’s a nice summary of the biological uses of the concept.

“Form follows function”, a principle coined by the American architect Louis Sullivan and first introduced to the field of biology by Kosak and Groudine, is associated with modern architectural design, underscoring the idea that the shape of a building or object should be based primarily upon its intended function or purpose. In biology, this principle is reflected in the close relationship between a specific biological structure and its purpose. However, owing to the complex nature of biological phenomena, sometimes it is very challenging to reveal the precise relationship between form and function of an organelle.

Not dead, but complicated. The rest of Prentice’s opening is even more wrong: we don’t talk about need for new features, and any modern biologist will tell you that the phenotype is a product of genes and environment. This is not an auspicious beginning, and it’s all downhill from there.

The new creatures would have to undergo random mutations in their DNA to produce at least thirteen major changes. They would have to (1) leave the water and come onto land, (2) acquire two radically different types of vertebrae (rhachitomous and lepospondylous); (3) acquire segmented backbones in place of a continuous notochord; (4) develop legs instead of fine, (5) develop a pelvic girdle where none existed before; (5) acquire a mechanism to propel themselves with the legs instead of fins, (6) develop muscles strong enough to support their weight on land, (7) develop a breathing apparatus geared primarily to air, (8) develop necks which are not found in fish, (9) acquire a different number and arrangement of bones in the skull, (10) develop eardrums for the first time, (11) acquire eyelids to keep the eyes from drying out, (12) change the method of fertilization from internal as in the alleged ancestral fish to external as in all known amphibians, and (13) acquire a mechanism so as to undergo metamorphosis, which does not occur in the putative ancestral fish.

Only thirteen? That’s an easy problem then.

Except he’s simply following an old creationist stratagem of listing a bunch of stuff, claiming each one is insurmountable, while not bothering to address any of them in detail. Leave water and come onto land is a great big bucket for a whole lot of changes, and that he thinks any of them are difficult tells me he knows nothing about biology. Develop legs instead of fin[s]; yeah, we have a good handle on many of the genetic changes involved in transforming fins into limbs. As for change the method of fertilization from internal as in the alleged ancestral fish to external as in all known amphibians, I have to ask if he’s ever heard of salmon? Most fish use external fertilization!

He’s also ignorant of basic concepts in paleontology.

In addition to the biological problems, the evidence from paleontology indicates that such an evolutionary process did not happen. Tracks of four-limbed creatures have been found in at least four locations around the world. They are dated 395 MYA. The commonly accepted “transition” from water to land, Tiktaalik, is dated 383 MYA. Even if the time scale were correct, this is 12 million years too late.

You know, Tiktaalik is not a direct ancestor of modern tetrapods — it is representative of a clade of transitional forms from the Devonian. This is a non-problem for anyone who has a non-literal understanding of a fossil series and understands the concept of populations changing and diversifying over time. From such ignorance and misconceptions, this non-biologist/non-paleontologist concludes:

In short, the biological and paleontological evidence indicates that the evolution of fish to amphibians never happened.

There’s a reason I’ve been less attentive to the creationist literature over the years: it’s stupid.

Do I have to do this again?

I should warn you, I’m not in a good mood. The Xmas season does that to me, I’m soured on the ugly combination of raging religiosity and constant consumerism, and then the elevated expectations that the holiday never meets, and the fact that it’s just a brief break between labors that I have to spend getting prepared for the next semester. Just call me Scrooge, and I don’t believe in ghosts, so I don’t expect redemption.

Another thing that doesn’t help is other humans. See that grinning fellow on the right? That’s Richard Eggleston, retired ophthalmologist, and shallow Christian. Also a colossal motherfucking dumbass idiot who used his holiday to write a long cliched letter to his local newspaper in which he declared “We are seeing the last few gasps of macroevolution” and parrots the dumbest, most thoroughly refuted canards of the last 60+ years of creationism, failing to acknowledge even the slightest doubt his dogma.

Before I vomit all over it, let me say that I don’t think most Christians share his views. Most citizens of this country broadly accept the general idea that the Earth is very old and that life has changed over that long history, although many will try to vaguely credit some kind of god as having a poorly-defined role in somehow guiding it, and they may also have a reluctance to say humans are directly a product of that process. We’re special, you know. There is, however, a cult-like subset that actively and stupidly denies pretty much all of science in order to prop up their benighted beliefs about Jesus. Richard Eggleston represents these cancerous polyps growing in the feculent muck of intellectually impoverished Christianity.

He’s also a terrible writer who can’t maintain a train of thought for more than a sentence.

Here’s his opening argument, for instance.

Why do evolutionists spend so much time and effort attacking intelligent design? Not because they think it is wrong and want to “save science” but because they know it to be true and that it will demolish their humanistic world view beliefs. When questions are allowed, it is science. When not, it’s propaganda. True science is evidence-based, as is Christianity. Centuries-old prophecies, of which more than 300 about Jesus were fulfilled, and 1,500 others were mostly fulfilled. The rest are waiting for the apocalypse.

In sum: he knows what ‘evolutionists’ believe; we know that Christianity is true; we are afraid that our “world view” will be destroyed if we admit it. None of that is true. One of the hallmarks of the True Christianity is a complete inability to see the world from another perspective.

It’s the Christians who don’t allow questions…or rather, only tolerate one answer. In that infamous Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, it was Nye who was willing to change his mind given evidence, while it was Ham, who seems to be the source of most of Eggleston’s ideas, who refused to consider the possibility. Eggleston then wanders off into Christian propaganda, claiming that “predictions” from a holy book are evidence, rather than ambiguous claims that have been extensively reinterpreted by apologists, and somehow we’re supposed to believe in an upcoming apocalypse. Focus, man, focus. There are at least a half-dozen assertions in that one paragraph and he can’t back up any of them.

The rest of his long op-ed consists of a string of creationism’s dumbest hits: all of the animal phyla appeared in the Cambrian explosion, there are no transitional forms, quote-mines to claim that well-known evolutionary biologists, like Charles Darwin, Colin Patterson, and Jenny Clack denied the evidence for evolution, and gross misunderstandings of what evolution claims. For example,

They believe billions of years of DNA mutations from nonliving goo somehow spontaneously, in a magical moment, eventually brought humans into existence, a process termed abiogenesis. The evolutionists will cite examples of microevolution as being macroevolution to falsely support their position. Most mutations are fatal.

Nope. No one believes in his “magical moment” that transformed goo into humans.

It’s just too tedious to dissect. And then he ends on nonsense about abortions because, of course, he’s just regurgitating familiar fundamentalist bullshit, and that’s part of the litany.

I am so fed up with the never-ending flood of lies pouring out of stupid old farts like Eggleston, or young farts who have been infected with the pathological poison of this peculiar literalist sect that just shrieks the certainty of their dogma but never pauses to think, and evaluate, and question. A child could see through the entirety of his opinions.

Southern Adventist University is a pit of lies

If you’ve never heard of David Rives before, you’re fortunate: he’s a lesser creationist best known for the well-fed, smug, toothy smile of a prosperous real estate agent, and that he was formerly married to Jenna Ellis, former lawyer to Donald Trump who is now facing racketeering charges. It’s always sad when two hellbeasts get divorced.

Rives runs a creationist ministry with a YouTube channel in which he claims to be “changing the narrative.” He’s not. But I had to watch this video, title “Secrets of the Arachnids.” Before you jump in, though, I’ll warn you that the first 20 minutes is incredibly boring: he’s interviewing a dorky arachnologist named David Nelson, and aside from the vapid interjections of Rives, it’s mostly painless, and mostly the kind of stuff you might catch dorky me saying — he’s definitely enthusiastic about spiders. At about the 22 minute mark, though, I lose all sympathy for him.

We learn that David Nelson is a professor at Southern Adventist University in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Oh god. It’s one of those places.

The Biology and Allied Health Department fully supports a biblical six-day creation and developed the Origins Exhibit, a museum-quality display that showcases topics such as irreducible complexity of the cell, the geologic column, the flood, and dinosaurs.

Representatives of protein and peptide classes identified in spider venoms. Top panel: large proteins represented by Phospholipase D. Bottom two panels: short spider venom peptides divided into two major classes. The middle panel depicts selected neurotoxic ICK (inhibitor cystine knot) toxins (Versutoxin, Robustoxin and Huwentoxin-I). The lower panel shows representative antimicrobial peptides (Latarcin-II and Oxyopinin). Species names of spiders from which the components were isolated are indicated below the compound names. Secondary structures are indicated by colour (α-helices in blue, β-sheets in red, and turns in purple).

It’s a temple of misinformation. While I enjoyed the early part of his interview, when he’s talking about survey protocols and cool spider facts, it then goes off the rails when he starts talking about teaching a course in venoms and claiming that all venoms are flawed, degenerate versions of physiologically adaptive molecules, and that they support the biblical claim of a Fall and a loss of ‘information’. No, they’re not. If you read anything about The Biology and Evolution of Spider Venoms, you’d know that the components of a venom are complex and diverse. It’s not just a collection of failed phospholipase molecules, but a set of numerous, specialized molecules produced by duplication and divergence. It’s absurd to claim that this is a sign of biological decay.

Spider venom can contain up to 3000 different molecules, suggesting that the prospecting of all extant spider species could yield ~10 million venom components. Spiders therefore comprise a hyperdiverse lineage of predators with venom that is far more complex than that of most other animals.

Here’s a taste of the detail in the analysis of the structure of venoms. They are beautifully unique and specialized, and the Nelson gomer throws all the information away to claim it’s all about a loss of information. Yeah, guy, when you ignore all the information, it looks like a loss.

ICKs are the most abundant cysteine-stabilized peptides in nature: they are found in the venoms of many spiders and other animals, and have also evolved diverse functions in plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses (Undheim, Mobli & King, 2016). A fundamental obstacle hindering the evolutionary analysis of ICKs is the pseudoknot motif and its disulfide bonds, which are largely responsible for defining the tertiary structure of these peptides. Amino acid substitutions can therefore accumulate with little impact on structure, leading to profound diversity (Olivera et al., 1995; Sollod et al., 2005; Kozminsky-Atias & Zilberberg, 2012; Sunagar et al., 2013; Sunagar & Moran, 2015; Undheim et al., 2016). This challenge has been addressed recently by the application of ‘structural venomics’ (a combination of venom transcriptomics, proteomics and structural biology) in Hadronyche infensa to shed light on ICK evolution (Pineda et al., 2020). This approach showed that most ICK peptides are descendants of a single weaponized ICK lineage that underwent duplication and structural diversification, giving rise to a variety of peptides with elaborate ICK folds following their recruitment as venom components (Pineda et al., 2020). The ancestral ICK toxin was proposed either to contain a fourth disulfide bond that stabilized its β-sheet (lost in some descendants) or the typical three disulfide bonds with the fourth evolving independently at least twice (Pineda et al., 2020). Domain duplication would then explain the dICK peptides (Pineda et al., 2020). Structural venomics thus provides evidence that gene duplication is an important process in the evolution of spider venom and other venomous lineages. Similarly, gene duplication was proposed as an explanation for the evolution of αLTX in Latrodectus spp. (Gendreau et al., 2017; Schwager et al., 2017). However, it is important to note that the confident reconstruction of gene evolution processes requires genomic data. Results based exclusively on venomic data sets need to be interpreted with caution as assembly artifacts and overinterpretation can easily blur the evolutionary signature and lead to false assumptions. At least one ancient whole-genome duplication event is also thought to have occurred in the lineage leading to spiders and scorpions, providing the foundation for extensive neofunctionalization (Schwager et al., 2017).

You can’t talk about the evolution of anything without talking about neofunctionalization — that is, the emergence of new capabilities in evolving molecules. The science of venoms involves deducing where each toxin component came from, and dissecting the functional effect of each one.

Horizontal gene transfer has contributed to the evolution of some venom components, including PLD in the family Sicariidae (Cordes & Binford, 2018). PLD was traced to a single proteobacterial ancestor, from which it appears to have radiated widely, at least partially facilitated by horizontal gene transfer (Cordes & Binford, 2018). Horizontal gene transfer has also been proposed to explain the origin of αLTX, based largely on the complete genome sequence of Parasteatoda tepidariorum (Gendreau et al., 2017; Schwager et al., 2017).

What exactly does David Nelson teach in his venoms course? I am mystified. He seems to be building everything on flawed premises and an utter ignorance of the scientific literature. Does he hide PubMed from his students? Because two minutes with that would show that their professor is lying to them.

I haven’t even mentioned venom delivery systems. Does David Nelson teach that these represent a loss of function from a prelapsarian ideal?

Southern Adventist University ought to be shuttered and burned to the ground. Those poor students.

The appalling inanity of Denyse O’Leary

See this person? She’s the biggest, most ignorant idiot at the Discovery Institute, which says a lot, since she’s in competition with Michael Egnor.

Denyse O’Leary is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, Canada. Specializing in faith and science issues, she is co-author, with neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul; and with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor of the forthcoming The Human Soul: What Neuroscience Shows Us about the Brain, the Mind, and the Difference Between the Two (Worthy, 2025). She received her degree in honors English language and literature.

She occasionally pops up on Evolution News & Views with articles that are stunning in their stupidity and written in the style of a third grade book report. Her latest effort is titled Will the Octopus Ever Find Its Place in the Evolutionary Tree?

Here you go, Denyse. Here’s its place in the evolutionary tree.

That turns up in less than 30 seconds with a google search. Scientists know where the octopus fits in the evolutionary tree. Really, Denyse is a clueless moron.

She then continues to throw out a series of non sequiturs based on her total ignorance of the subject she is writing about.

Just why the octopus — a short-lived, solitary, invertebrate exotherm — should seem as intelligent as a monkey has become quite the puzzle in recent years. Typical evolutionary explanations don’t really work. The octopus’s biological inheritance is precisely the type that we don’t associate with intelligence. For one thing, it is much more closely related to clams than to monkeys.

Uh, right. That’s true. Cephalopods are more closely related to clams than to monkeys. So? People are more closely related to hagfish than they are to cephalopods. This means absolutely nothing.

What about the fact that the octopus has nine brains? Well, do nine invertebrate brains add up to more intelligence than one? That’s a question worth asking because it probably wouldn’t work with grasshoppers or worms. That is, both types of life form have brains but it isn’t clear how an installation of nine of them in a single individual would be any smarter than just one.

The octopus does not have 9 brains. It has a network of distributed ganglia in addition to a central ganglion.

Our nervous system is more concentrated in a large brain, but we also have a substantial network of ganglia, an autonomic nervous system, and an enteric nervous system. Grasshoppers and worms also have a chain of ganglia. What is her point? I don’t think she knows.

Naturally, the octopus has been singled out for a lot of research attention and a recent genetic find has attracted attention: A detailed genetic analysis found that the common octopus has 2.8 billion base pairs of genes…

For comparison, humans have about three billion. Chimpanzees have about the same. Is a large genome a necessary factor in advanced intelligence? It’s too early to be sure but the researchers hope to advance investigations into “more distantly related molluscs such as clams or snails” — species hardly known for intelligence. That might provide a more focused comparison.

Again, what is her point? We have 3 billion base pairs in our genome, so do chimpanzees, so do mice. Axolotls have 32 billion base pairs. There is no correlation between number of base pairs and intelligence. She hasn’t done the most basic, crude level of research to answer the question.

Some other finds about octopus intelligence in recent years give us some sense of why one researcher wondered if the species had an extraterrestrial origin. As PBS tells it,

The unique nature of octopus intelligence has sparked a rather peculiar debate recently: A group of researchers … has suggested that an octopus’ mind might seem so foreign because it may be alien. The hypothesis, published in 2018, states that octopus evolution may have arisen, in part, because of a retrovirus (a type of RNA virus) delivered to Earth by an asteroid during the Cambrian explosion about 541 million years ago.

Oh god. She’s digging deep into the fringe, loony brigade — she’s citing sources from the panspermia mafia, which are not at all credible. When you’re citing people who claim Squids are from SPAAAAAAAAACE!, you lose.

Now she’s just going to throw more shit at the wall, but nothing is going to stick.

Anyway, here are some of the other finds researchers puzzle over:

Many sources have noted that each arm of an octopus can communicate with other arms, bypassing the brain. But, says behavioral neuroscientist and astrobiologist Dominic Sivitilli (who does not think that octopuses are aliens!), it’s even more complex than that: “There are tens of thousands of both chemical and mechanical receptors in each sucker,” he says. “To put that into perspective, each of your fingertips has a few hundred mechanical receptors.”

So octopuses have a well-integrated nervous system and a rich sensory repertoire, therefore…what? We’re supposed to be surprised that they exhibit complex behaviors? I don’t even know what she’s arguing anymore.

Such a system of information-gathering seems fundamentally different from that of the intelligent mammals we know. That raises a question. Are comparisons in intelligence between octopuses and, say, mammals even meaningful?

Another factor that may be linked to high cephalopod intelligence is gene editing…

Hey, I just finished a week of lecturing to my students about post-translational and post-transcriptional modification of gene products. Every organism does it. Cephalopods have one flavor of post-transcriptional modification that they use extensively, which is interesting, but not the game changer Denyse imagines, and it has nothing to do with differences in intelligence. I don’t think she has any idea what’s going on in molecular biology.

In February of this year researchers got a look at octopus brain waves and found out, in one reporter’s words, that their brains behave in an “alien” way…

This is what scientists like to call an “active research area.” It is anyone’s guess whether the octopus will ever find its way into a tidy evolutionary tree. Perhaps it’s not wise to wade in with that goal foremost in mind.

I already did that, see the top of the post.

I am totally mystified about why the Discovery Institute continues to promote someone as obviously dumb and uneducated as Denyse O’Leary — she can’t even write well, despite her degree in English. My current hypothesis is that they keep her around because her existence is an affront to intelligent people everywhere — you know, the Darwinian thought police like P. Z. Myers. Alternatively, a simpler hypothesis might be that all the people managing the Discovery Institute are just as stupid as Denyse O’Leary, she’s simply worse at masking it in front of the public.

The Golden Crocoduck

These creationist goobers are worse than low-hanging fruit — they’re rotting on the ground and indistinguishable from the droppings of frugivores — but a good debunking with evidence is still entertaining and informative. Potholer54 has given out his annual Golden Crocoduck award, and I can tell it was a difficult choice. So many amazingly deserving twits, and he has to pick just one!

This year, it goes to Matt Powell, because not only is he a gibbering fool, but he is blatant in his dishonesty.

For next year, though, I would like to nominate Eric Hovind, who has gotten positively hyper on social media lately, and is flooding Xitter with the most stupid assertions, which mostly seem to have been stolen from Harun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation. Copying your homework from one of the most clueless creationists on the internet (or, now, in a Turkish prison) is a truly stupid move, Eric.