Darwin came up with memetics?

Oh boy, chew on this comment on my YouTube channel:

@Toytime-TV
I Got you PZ…It goes like Yah, Darwin noticed adaptation and developed an expansive theory to encompass his study of that progress in an attempt to understand the nature and origin of creation because the vastness of his theory held millennia of time spans causing him see patterns and repetition throughout the ages, which caused him to then develop the theory of memetics, which sir truly is the language of the divine as it can only be understood over long periods of study, causing one to MUST believe in an Originator of the system of sequences he had uncovered. Most of your smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator, even if they loosened the ideology and imagery. You can believe too PZ, being a smart man like you denotes, you must. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmgYIzpSGgk

Don’t bother with the included link: it’s just an old one-eyed man dancing. No real content.

This is somehow a reply to my video in which I said that evolution wasn’t simply made up by some guy, Darwin. The comment starts out OK, saying that Darwin developed a theory to explain what he observed in nature…but then they go on to say that Darwin invented memetics (not true, you can blame Dawkins for that one), and that it is a divine language and that you MUST believe it originated in a creator. I think we’ve all heard that before. Then they tell us that the smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator, and concludes with a little flattery that being a smart man I must also believe.

I guess I’m not as smart as @Toytime believes, because that is a load of horseshit.

Jeanson sinking deeper into the swamp

Portrait of a pseudoscientist

Nathaniel Jeanson, that incompetent “geneticist” who was employed by Answers in Genesis, has a new gig: he has been hired by Columbia International University as a visiting research professor. This is not a step up in prominence. It’s actually kind of a step backwards, but the creationists will crow about the words without recognizing the meaning.

A “visiting research professor” is often a prestigious appointment, but it’s not an effective research position — it’s more of an attempt to bring a big name into connection with a university, and possibly forge new partnerships (Note: Jeanson is not a big name, except to the intellectually impoverished creationist community.) I’d be interested to know what the quid pro quo here might be, because he’s not going to improve the reputation of CIU.

Curiously, if you read that announcement from CIU, there’s no reference to Answers in Genesis anywhere in it. They name-drop Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, but the noisy loud creationist/Christian organization that has been associated with him for years? Not a whisper.

It’s unclear what they are going to accomplish with this appointment. He is still employed at AiG, they don’t discuss what his teaching duties will be, other than just talking to students. This is purely an attempt to swap titles and connections, but CIU is going to do this without openly acknowledging AiG.

This is also not going to help Jeanson’s career. CIU is a private Christian college that used to be called Columbia Bible College. It requires a whole lot of fundamentalist bullshit to graduate from there.

There are seven doctrinal points which students must consent to as a part of their admission to and candidacy for a degree from CIU. These are biblical inspiration, natural separation of humanity from God, salvation by grace through faith in Christ, the historical doctrine of the Trinity, the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer, and the evangelical mandate to witness to the gospel of Christ. The doctrine of Premillennialism is officially held by the school, but students are not required to adhere to this doctrine. CIU requires all teaching faculty to affirm Premillennialism.

That’s a fake school. It’s a Sunday School with delusions of grandeur.

Anticipating Kent Hovind’s next wack-a-…what?

I’ve been featured in Kent Hovind’s regular Wack-An-Atheist nonsense, as have many other opponents of creationism. Now a different person has criticized him, Dan McClellan, a bible scholar, who points out that no, the bible does not discuss dinosaurs.

Ol’ Kent is going to have to flail about a bit in response, and I’ll be looking forward to it. I’m going to predict that what he’ll do is declare McClellan to be an atheist by default.

Also, I despise those tik-toks or whatever that feature someone just smiling and nodding along, but making sure that their face is on screen the whole time. I’ve seen a few lefty videos like that. Speak up and contribute something!

Another creationist falls into my cunning trap

This morning, I was surprised by a comment on this YouTube video, in which I pointed out the fallacies of a creationist, Rob Carter. That video starts with me summarizing my relevant background as a developmental biologist. This commenter then makes this scurrilous accusation!

Rob Carter is correct, and PZ Myers, as an old-fashioned population geneticist, is wrong. Don’t you understand that environmental conditions and factors affect the organisms’ epigenomes? DNA is just a passive information data repository and its reading is completely controlled and regulated by epigenetic mechanisms and factors.

First of all, did this guy even listen to the video before he rushed in with his knee-jerk defense of Rob Carter?

Secondly, I am not a population geneticist. I am a professor at a small liberal arts college, which means I have to be a jack-of-all-trades within my discipline — I can teach population genetics at the undergraduate level, but I would never claim to be a pop gen guy. That’s the domain of people like Dan Stern Cardinale and Zach Hancock on YouTube, and they could tie me in knots with their expertise. They definitely shred Rob Carter, who doesn’t even understand it as well as I do.

I am primarily a developmental biologist. That’s my focus and my interest, although in recent years I’ve been expanding that focus into eco-evo-devo…I’ve taught courses in that. My research is all about looking at the development of local spiders, to identify what factors in each species development shapes their adaptation to a particular niche, and how we can have so many different species of spiders co-existing in my backyard. To claim that I don’t understand the multiple factors that affect development is ludicrous. Rob Carter is just droning out buzzwords with little comprehension, and to someone who actually knows the subject he is discussing, he comes off as a fool.

Just a reminder: 15 years ago, in Dublin, Ireland, I was confronted by a group of Muslim apologists who tried to bamboozle me with claims about Mohammed’s revelations about development. They asked (at the 7 minute mark), Are you an embryologist?, to which I said “Yes,” and set them aback a bit.

I’ve always said I am a developmental biologist. My commenter was trying to make a peculiar ad hominem, suggesting that I was wrong because I’m only an old-fashioned population geneticist, and then rattling off a bunch of concepts that are actually the meat-and-potatoes of developmental biology.

Also, that DNA is just a passive information data repository nonsense is a strategem used by creationists to deny the significance of changes to the genome in evolution.

Model ship building fad

I just posted about building a ship model, and what happens? Ken Ham posts about building a model ark. I begin to suspect that he’s copying me.

We’ve partnered with an Australian businessman to produce a beautiful model kit of Noah’s ark (based on the Ark Encounter’s design) made from authentic Australian hoop pine. Available in three different sizes from “small” (over two feet long and 506 pieces) to large (over four feet long and 760 pieces!), this scale model is extremely detailed and comes apart to show off the three decks. Once complete, it makes a great display for your home or for churches, or it can be used as a conversation starter for outreach.

It’s not that detailed because it fails to include the large concrete office building asymmetrically grafted onto one side. The article reveals the construction method of the model.

Ick. It’s assembled from thin sheets of laser-cut pressboard, one of the cheapiest, laziest way to make a model…and which will almost certainly be incapable of holding together in water. It wouldn’t be worth the $200 and/or $800 they are asking for the two model sizes. I guess the extra layer of fakery and religion must add value to this piece of crap. My model only had love added, and I didn’t charge anyone for it.

Don’t waste your money on this inauthentic, cheaply-made nonsense.

I think the Ark is slowly sinking

It’s been afloat for about 10 years. When the notion was first proposed in a gambit to get state tax subsidies, Ken Ham & Co. said it would bring in 1.6 million tourists in the first year, and that that number would go up by about 4% each following years, with occasional surges by 10% as new planned exhibits were opened. By those 2015 estimates, they should be bringing in 2.5 million visitors this year. Are they?

  • Year 1(JY 2016-JE 2017): est. 800,000 (50% of projected attendance)
  • Year 2 (JY 2017-JE 2018): 865,761 (52% of projected attendance)
  • Year 3 (JY 2018-JE 2019): 875,882 (51% of projected attendance)
  • Year 4 (JY 2019-JE 2021): 841,772 (44% of projected attendance)
    Given the impact of COVID on Ark attendance, I left out March 2020-February 2021
  • Year 5 (JY 2021-JE 2022): 775,731 (39% of projected attendance)
  • Year 6 (JY 2022-JE 2023): 782,660 (36% of projected attendance)
  • Year 7 (JY 2023-JE 2024): 764,258 (34% of projected attendance)
  • Year 8 (JY 2024-JE 2025): 682,101 (27% of projected attendance)
  • Year 9 (JY 2025-JE 2026): 664, 813 (26% of projected attendance)

For May-June 2026 I used the attendance numbers from May-June 2025. If history is any guide, this may serve to overestimate Year 9 attendance.

They made the invalid assumption that, after the novelty had worn off in the first year, they would get sustained growth for some reason. I’ve been there. I feel no desire to repeat my visit, especially after the ridiculous parking and admission fees. There is nothing there in the big wooden box! Once you’ve read the numerous silly and static infographics pasted on the walls, what would be the point?

I am amused that they only got about half their projected numbers in the first year, and it’s been declining ever since. They’re probably not suffering much, though, since the costs to maintain a big empty wooden box are probably relatively low.

No, Ken, molecular biology does not support Biblical dogma

Ken Ham takes the opportunity of Craig Venter’s to misunderstand everything he studied, condemning atheism and making the weird argument that the scientific evidence supports his version of Bible interpretation.

We can skip past the familiar preamble where Ken Ham deplores the fact that Venter was an atheist who will be separated from God for eternity, and jump ahead to the point where Ham agrees with the science.

1:32 Scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome and the researchers had unanimously declared there is only one race, the human race. Wow. only one. You know what? They were confirming the Bible’s history. Now, they didn’t say that. Of course, I’m saying that, but that’s what they were really doing. This was observational science. They obtained DNA from people groups all over the world, and they sequenced the human genome.
…
You know what should have happened at that stage? I’ll tell you what should have happened back then. Christian leaders all over the world and Christians should have jumped up and said, “Told you so.” See, if you believe the Bible, if pastors had have taught Genesis as history, Genesis 1:11, we would all know that we all go back to one man, one woman. That’s that’s the biblical history and it’s real history. And so therefore, there’s only one race biologically, which would mean from a perspective of biology, there’s no such thing as interracial marriage and no such thing either as biracial children or anything like that.

It’s very strange that all those Southern Baptists who fervently studied the Bible somehow came to a very different conclusion, that black people were a different and inferior race, and that miscegenation was a terrible evil. I guess the Bible wasn’t as clear as he thinks it is. The Southern Baptists have long lobbied for segregation, and they now tie that belief in the separation of races to their positions on transgender and gay issues. A few years ago, Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would have protected same-sex and interracial marriage. I guess they hadn’t read their Bibles.

I agree that everyone, whether they are Christian or not, should jump up and state their support for the science that shows all humans come from a common ancestor. But they should also realize that this very same science, the science that agrees with their biblical perspective, also says that all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor — that humans are related to chimpanzees and iguanas and blobfish and insects and bacteria. It’s real history! It was determined by observational science, his imaginary category, therefore it must be true.

He will never accept that. His version of science is one that only allows confirmation of his prior beliefs, i.e. it isn’t science at all.

Then he launches into some dogmatic garbage straight from the Discovery Institute.

3:11 Here was his team sequencing DNA. And DNA is not just a molecule. It’s not just chemistry. We now know that DNA is the most complex information system, language system in the entire universe. Zillions of bits of information in the DNA of living things on this planet. And DNA has the information to make the code system to read the DNA. DNA is the software of life. There’s no question about it. Codes only come from an intelligence. Information can only come from information from an intelligence. DNA cries out in the beginning, God. But he was an atheist doing good science, observational science, sequencing the human genome, and that’s observational science. They admitted there’s only one race which confirms the Bible’s history.

DNA may be the software of life, but we have no cause to believe codes only come from an intelligence. Mice make baby mice without an advanced degree in bioinformatics; biology is a mindless exercise in chemistry and physics. And mice have roughly the same amount of information in their genomes as do human beings. DNA doesn’t cry out anything.

A Kentucky pharyngulation?

Ken Ham is trying to game a tourism poll in Kentucky — he wants his followers to vote for his crappy “museum” as the best museum and as the best kid-friendly attraction in Kentucky. I think we should vote for Big Bone Lick State Park as the best museum, but that poll asks you to enter a zip code — I don’t know if they’re only going to accept Kentucky resident’s vote. I went ahead and voted anyway, since I have visited both the AiG frauds and the state park, and even if I hadn’t, I’d know that the Creation “Museum” and Ark Park are pretty much bottom of the barrel roadside attractions.

In the kid-friendly attraction category, the Ark Encounter is up against the Louisville Zoo, which is an insane match-up. Really, does Ham seriously think his pathetic fake boat is of a caliber that can stand up against an accredited, science-based zoological garden? I cast my vote for the real thing. I will be very disappointed if Kentucky blesses the stupid lie and con game of Answers in Genesis.

Go ahead, make Ken Ham disappointed instead.

Both of these polls allow you to vote every day this month, which makes them bogus from the outset, so neither are going to be very meaningful.

I have to roll my eyes when a creationist says information!

You can tell when you’ve encountered some gullible twit of a creationist who has swallowed the Discovery Institute line whole. Whenever they recite Stephen Meyer’s favorite line, that only intelligence can create information, you know you’re debating a fool.

It’s simply not true. Anyone who has studied genetics knows there are many natural processes that generate information, making the claim obviously false. It’s good to have Dr Dan present a short sweet refutation.

I’ve confronted people with this kind of explanation many times in the past. Just search PubMed for “random nucleotide sequences” (or amino acid sequences) and it’ll come back with page after page of articles on the subject — they’re fairly common tools for exploring the functional space. Notice that the first one on this list is from 1983.

The standard response I’ve gotten from creationists is that’s not complex information, and if you ask them to define “complex” they will waffle around, and eventually declare something about complex specified information, which just means information that was defined by a prior source, by which they mean “God”, because they sure as heck don’t have a primordial volume that dictates the modern sequences.

It’s really just a rabbit hole that they can lead you into. They don’t even have a grasp on the meaning of “information” — it just sounds sciencey to their ears.