Squid and bacteria don’t need The Man

The Institute for Creation Research has just published a fairly typical article for them: it’s the usual laundry list of amazing biological structures that cry out “Jaaayzuusss!” to the faithful. In this case, they pick on squid. You see, squid have wonderfully complex specializations to control pigment granules in their skins; these are so lovely and so intricate that — and this is the major leap of ignorance they demand of their readers — they couldn’t possibly have arisen by natural mechanisms, and must have been specially placed there by a loving god. As an extra special bonus, some squid have a symbiotic relationship with luminescent bacteria, so at long last the creationists notice a possible benign function for bacteria.

The reflectins seem to be unique to squid, coded for by at least six genes (specific DNA segments). In addition, researchers have found that the Hawaiian bobtail squid efficiently uses an exclusive bilobed ("two-lobed") light organ to its advantage. A species of bioluminescent bacteria called Vibrio fischera in the light organ receives nourishment from the squid. In return, the bacteria secrete a tracheal cytotoxin designed to control the development of the light organ. This cytotoxin is a small segment of the deleterious bacteria that causes whooping cough in humans. But perhaps the toxin served a more useful function, as we see in the squid, prior to the introduction of sin into God’s creation, which led to the Fall and the current curse under which creation groans (Romans 8:22).

To conclude, not only is biophotonic design evidence for a clearly seen creation (Romans 1:20), but the Hawaiian bobtail squid in particular provides the creation scientist with a possible original benign function for disease-causing bacteria. Truly, God’s creation declares–and reflects–His glory (Psalm 19:1).

Reflectins are proteins that stack in flat plates and efficiently reflect light, and it’s true that they are unique to cephalopods. However, there’s nothing magical about them — other animals have similar structures, they just tend to use crystallized purines. All it takes to make a reflector is a layered tissue that alternates sheets of high and low refractive index, and there are many routes to that kind of functionality.

I love how they had to spell out to their readers that “bilobed” means “two lobed”. They could have just written out “two lobed” in the first place, so all they’ve done there is show that they are pompously bad writers, and that they have a very low opinion of the reading abilities of their audience. It’s perfect.

Bacteria secrete all kinds of interesting stuff; in this case, Vibrio is pumping out a peptidoglycan, a pretty common class of molecules with diverse functions. It is not a sign of intent that similar molecules can regulate cell growth or cause symptoms of disease; rather, it tells us something about the flexibility of proteins and the variety of effects they can have in different contexts. The lesson of Darwin is that unguided natural processes have the ability to generate complex functionality, so it takes more than just showing complexity and function to demonstrate purpose. Creationists don’t understand that at all, so they keep whining “it’s complex!” as if they have brought up an irrefutable argument for design, when they’ve done no such thing.

And finally, isn’t it annoying and doesn’t it expose the ignorance of this creationist writer that he thinks finding bacteria that glow in squid at long last reveals a purpose for disease-causing bacteria? Bacteria thrive because they have abilities that help themselves, not because they’re servants to squid. That same creationist is carrying along a gut full of bacteria, and is covered with a layer of bacteria, and is living in a world aswim with bacteria, all dribbling out molecules that they find useful, and that sometimes do unpleasant things to human beings (and sometimes do useful things, but usually do things that have no direct effect on us) … and this confused, blinkered gomer finds one symbiotic function that biologists have known about for many years and thinks he has an answer? Please.

I wish I could think this article was an April Fool’s joke, too, but I know that creationists babble this kind of nonsense all the time.

Point and laugh

Sometimes, people wonder if criticizing creationists brings more attention to them than they deserve — it’s a weird dynamic on the web, where we measure popularity by traffic (unfortunately), so referencing the bad guys sends them traffic, which seems to increase their apparent popularity. There’s no way around it, because that’s the way it works.

So we’ve always got people urging stasis — don’t raise a ruckus, keep mum, hush, don’t draw more attention to the crappy, crazy creationists — and they mean well, but they’re wrong. I say we need to be loud and tell everyone about them. We need to point and laugh. Really, it works. It does bring more attention to them, and I think there is a certain movie that will have more viewers than it would otherwise, but it’s all people seeing people point and laugh and going into it with a more skeptical, critical attitude, and that’s a win for us. They get to take home a little more money, but we have more people willing to point and laugh, and that’s the currency I’m gambling for.

One of the rascals at AtBC (not the one who is a witch) dug up an interesting Alexa comparison of traffic to my site (actually, the whole of scienceblogs, but I own an embarrassingly large percentage of that — please do go to the entry page and say hello to some other worthy blogs, won’t you?) and to that movie site. Guess which one is the gently rolling prairie beneath the craggy mountain peaks?

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(Click for larger image)

At a recent phone conference, the possessors of the tiny little red line claimed to have achieved massive popularity on the web last week, and even said they had the #1 spot for popularity at that time…but I think you can tell who was actually winning that little competition for eyeballs, and who was fibbing again.

You can go ahead and tell me to shut up, but you better be careful — I might point and laugh instead.

By the way, I mentioned that a bunch of reporters had contacted me about the recent chaos at the conference call — almost all of them are from very small outfits, mostly religious newspapers and sites. I suspect that the big newspapers have given up on Expelled as fluff and noise, and no longer newsworthy. We’re getting our cake and eating it, too! It’s also amusing that the producers are still trying to buy an audience.

The simple falsehood at the heart of Expelled

I have to make this really, really simple for the “Hitler was an evolutionist” dimwits.

There is a central, incredibly obvious fact in Darwin’s insight.

If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations.

It isn’t razzle-dazzle genius. Any idiot can figure that one out — and many idiots have. Farmers have known it for millennia, when they set aside particularly fruitful seed stock or especially robust farm animals for breeding, and eat the rest. Nazis used this elementary logic when they decided to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. Eugenicists used it when they wanted to argue for shifting the distribution of certain properties in a population.

It ain’t “Darwinism”. It’s self-evident, obvious, selbstverständlich, apparent, évidente, transparent. The KKK knows it, farmers know it, dog and horse breeders know it, the Nazis knew it, they didn’t need Darwin to spell it out for them. Blaming that on Darwin is awesomely stupid.

Darwin’s real contribution, the one that had everyone smacking themselves in the forehead and wondering why they didn’t think of it first, was the realization that the natural environment does the killing — that natural selection shapes heredity. The idea of culling populations is not only so easy that a hate-mongering cretin can think of it, but that weather, bacteria, viruses, parasites, predators, etc. have been doing it for eons, with no intelligence required, and that mindless microorganisms have been far greater agents of hereditary change than the worst the Nazis ever accomplished; does Charles Darwin also get the blame for that? Darwin realized that the environment has consequences and can shape the generation-by-generation passage of hereditary traits in populations, and that examination of the natural world reveals that it has been doing exactly that. He realized that ubiquitous forces that are so simple we take them for granted have been quietly and slowly sculpting our heredity since the beginning of life on earth.

When clueless creationists argue that Darwin led to Hitler, or worse, throw away buckets of money making elaborate propaganda films arguing such nonsense, it’s worse than inane. It’s as if they have completely missed the point of the idea they are damning.

I always aim to misbehave

Some of you know that the producers of Expelled had a conference call this afternoon…a carefully controlled, closed environment in which they would spout their nonsense and only take questions by email. I listened to it for a while, and yeah, it was the usual run-around. However, I dialed in a few minutes early, and got to listen to a tiresome five minutes of Leslie and Paul chatting away, during which time they mentioned the secret code (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!) for the two way calls. I know. Sloppy, unprofessional, and stupid, but that’s the way they work.

So … I redialed. (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!)

Then I listened along quietly until I could take no more.

They repeated the usual lies (the Minneapolis event was a private screening [which was publicly linked on the web, where any idiot could get to it]; their blog was #1 on blogpulse [near as I can tell, it wasn’t—it was my exposure of their hypocrisy that was #1]; they didn’t lie to get interviews [totally bogus], etc.). They made amusing contradictions. Walt Ruloff first claims that the genesis of the movie was in 2006, when he claims to have started investigating biotechnology and discovered that there are “questions that can’t be asked” and that people were suppressing information that called Darwinism into doubt — note, though, that he never stated what those unnameable questions are. A moment later Mark Mathis comes on to say that the subject of the film was a work in progress, that they hadn’t settled anything, and that the name wasn’t even decided upon. Come on, they registered expelledthemovie.com in early 2007, well before they asked us to be interviewed.

They threw out a bunch of softball questions to Ben Stein: “How can you be so intelligent and question Darwinism?”, I kid you not.

One good question got through on email: KMOX radio contested the claim that there was no distortion of the interviews of Dawkins and Myers because they surrounded the interviews with film clips of Nazis — I think it’s obvious how they were trying to bias the discussion, and I was floored by Stein’s reply. He wanted more goose-stepping Nazis all over the place.

This was all a great deal to stomach, but I restrained myself. Then Mathis really started to lie: he said that all anybody ever blogged about was distractions, and several times he claimed that we never addressed the content of the movie. Let’s set aside the rank hypocrisy of expelling the people interviewed in the movie from screenings so we couldn’t see it; it’s simply not true. We have blogged extensively on the ridiculous premise at the heart of the movie, that the Holocaust was a consequence of evolutionary theory.

Here’s one of my entries in this subject.

Here’s Richard Dawkins’ review, which discusses the bogus Nazi connection quite a bit. Josh Timonen, of the RDF, also saw the movie.

John Wilkins has an excellent post on Darwinism and racism.

The Panda’s Thumb has discussed the false connection several times.

So I interrupted. I said, in essence, hang on — you guys are spinning out a lot of lies here, you should be called on it. I gave a quick gloss on it, and said that, for instance, anti-semitism has a long history in Germany that preceded Darwin, and that they ought to look up the word “pogrom”. There was some mad rustling and flustering about on the other side of the phone some complaints, etc., and then one of them asked me to do the honorable thing and hang up…so I said yes, I would do the honorable thing and hang up while they continued the dishonorable thing and continued to lie.

Then I announced that if any reporters were listening in, they could contact me at pzmyers@gmail.com and I’d be happy to talk to them.

So excuse me, I’ve got a few dozen emails in my inbox right now.

More accounts of the press conference:

Why we need academic freedom…to question Newtonism

I’m writing this at an altitude of 37,000 feet, 7 miles up in the air. Now I’m not really afraid of flying — I am entirely confident that I’ll be able to post this sometime after I land — but if you think about it, it’s grounds for trepidation. This is insanely high, and I’m in this fragile tin can that is reliant on a constant stream of exploding jet fuel to keep from simply falling out of the sky … an event which I and the other passengers would not survive. I don’t want to dwell on it, of course, but I have put myself in a potentially lethal situation, and I have to do this regularly as part of my job. Why? Who is at fault for creating this culture of risk?

I blame Newton.

Newton was a wild-eyed lunatic, cruel and inconsiderate to his peers (actually, he was so arrogant he seems not to have regarded anyone as his peer), and he documented in excruciating, obsessive detail the behavior of falling objects, which includes the falling of living, breathing, caring people. He plotted mathematically and with complex formulae the rates that objects, including people, would fall, and the force with which they would strike the ground — it’s hard not to imagine him cackling with glee like a psychopathic child pulling the wings off flies as he calculated the trajectories of objects, like people, flying through space. He was a horrible man.

Look back over the worst tragedies of the twentieth century, this period of time when Newtonists have run amuck. We’ve been lofting people into the sky for well over a hundred years, and quite often, they’ve fallen down. How many have died due to the tyranny of the gravity Newton put into the hands of conscienceless materialist scientists? Examine Hitler’s record, for instance. He was an ardent Newtonist who put his Wehrmacht to evil purpose, building machines that used the wicked geometries of Newton to shatter Europe. Nazi artillery and tanks used Newton’s tools to strike at his righteous opponents. Who can forget the V2 rockets lofting into the air on tongues of F=ma (another Newtonist “theory”!) to then fall along Newtonian trajectories, showering death on the good Christians of England. Hitler also dreamed of firing his evil Newtonist weapons on America, and if we’d given him enough time, he would have succeeded…thanks to Newton.

Perhaps you want to argue that Newton is not to blame, that someone would have said the same thing; or perhaps you want to make the claim that the world would have been the same without his work. But that neglects an important fact: Newton killed hope. Once, I might have thought that I could survive falling if I watched my diet and were as light as a feather, but no — Newton’s cold equations dictate that no matter what I weigh, I’d fall just as fast, so in despair I have let myself go, just as, I can see, many of my fellow Midwesterners. We despair because of Newton, and seek forlorn solace in trying to increase our wind resistance.

And those equations! The force of gravity is described as g•M1•M2 / d2, and those little letters don’t stand for God, motherhood, marriage (heterosexual), and devotion. There is no room in Newtonism for the reassuring idea that my airplane is being cradled in the loving, supportive hands of an intelligent anti-gravity agent. Just the idea of opposing gravity is anathema to the intelligentsiac — they think gravity is a great thing, and don’t want to question it.

Try polling university physics departments sometime: you won’t find the faculty questioning Newton at all. Gravity is over and done with those people, with nothing left to learn, and they won’t tolerate even the slightest deviation from Newtonist dogma. An open-minded physicist who suggests even the tiniest revision to the “theory” — for instance, suggesting that maybe Newton got the exponent a little bit wrong, and gravity varies with the cube of the distance, and they laugh at you and refuse to give you tenure. Shouldn’t these questions be discussed? Are they so intolerant that they will allow no dissent at all?

Don’t be fooled. The catastrophic social consequences of falling demand that we question all of Newtonism.

*For instance, those feminists. Little known fact: bra-burning is actually an act of submission to Newtonist theories of gravity.

Uh-oh. Bad news from Florida.

Florida did it: their ridiculous “academic freedom” bill that promoted creationism has been approved by their senate committee.

Here’s the cast of characters:

Floridians, you have a job to do.

Call or write Sen. Ted Deutch and thank him: he’s the only one who voted against the bill. Urge him to keep up the fight.

The chair and vice chair of this committee were absent and did not vote. Call them and cuss them out for abdicating their responsibilities. Tell them they screwed up, and that you do not support failure.

The rest…call or write and tell them that you won’t be voting for them in the next election. Explain that as members of the education committee, they had a responsibility to support good science education.

I don’t think all is lost just yet. This just means it moves out of committee and on to the rest of the senate (OK, maybe we are doomed). Whoever your representative is, call or write and tell them that this bill must be opposed, that it is a potential disaster for science education in the state, and that it is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Action items

Here are some quick, simple things you can do right now.

Lying by press release

The producers of Expelled have spent a couple of days sweating over damage control, I guess. They’ve shut down or delayed all the pending screenings of their movie, and now they’ve issued a remarkably dishonest press release. The mendacity is astonishing in its scope; somebody tell me, is this “framing”?

Something amazing happened yesterday. The controversy around Premise Media’s upcoming movie Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed became the hottest topic in the blogosphere. According to BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the issue held the number one slot throughout the day on Monday, March 24th (http://www.blogpulse.com). There were also over 800 results on Technorati (www.technorati.com).

Well, yes, it was HUGE. I know, because I was the recipient of much of the buzz. Most of those links were not congratulating Expelled on their success, they were laughing at their hypocrisy and incompetence, they were linking to me, and they were spreading the news that this was a creationist propaganda film run by particularly clumsy ideologues. It was a hot topic, all right.

Mathis continued, “I hope PZ’s experience has helped him see the light. He is distraught because he could not see a movie. What if he wasn’t allowed to teach on a college campus or was denied tenure? Maybe he will think twice before he starts demanding more professors be blacklisted and expelled simply because they question the adequacy of Darwin’s theory.”

I wasn’t distraught. At worst, I felt a little guilty that I’d escaped a bad movie while my friends and family were stuck with watching it.

I haven’t demanded expulsions or blacklists — I will proudly continue to demand competence. Unlike watching a movie, being awarded a professorship should require some substantial understanding of a discipline; does Mathis really think that the position of teacher and researcher ought to be simply handed to people for showing up, no matter what their qualifications?

They were also aware that Dawkins, who oddly used his formal surname “Clinton” instead of Richard to sign up, was in attendance.

No, this is not at all true. Richard Dawkins was in attendance as my unnamed guest; the reservation form had asked for my name and affiliation, and only asked how many (up to three) guests I would be bringing with me. There was no public announcement anywhere that he would be attending. Also, although he was prepared to show his passport, he wasn’t asked for it at the door.

Also, what kind of illiterate is writing this press release? Dawkins surname is Dawkins. Slow down, bozos, you’re in such a frantic hurry you haven’t even bothered to proofread.

Recognizing the opportunity to make a point of the inconvenience and pain that they, and others like them, have caused to numerous scientists and educators, the decision was made beforehand to deny Myers access to the film if he actually showed up.

Yet another revision of their story…if this were true, why not ban every evolutionary biologist? Their rationale applies just as well to Dawkins as it does to me. Also note that Mathis previously admitted to banning me on a whim: “You should know that I invited Michael shermer to a screening at NRB in Nashville. He came and is writing a review for scientific American. I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.“

Someday, they’ll settle on one story, but it won’t matter — they’ve left too long a trail of revisionist excuse-making.

Executive Producer Logan Craft noted: “EXPELLED makes it clear that academic freedom is at stake. Yet Dawkins and his friends continue to misrepresent the film and slander the producers. It is obvious that they do not want to debate the real issues raised in the movie.”

What misrepresentations? It’s a movie that blames the Holocaust on Darwin — it’s stupid and foolish. How have the producers been slandered? They’re the ones lying at every step. This is their movie, in one perfect picture:

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Myers has apparently been asking supporters to sneak into the different private screenings for many weeks. After being denied his chance to see the movie, Myers blogged about his experience and expressed his outrage.

Errm, what? I haven’t asked anyone to sneak into screenings. I haven’t even asked them to sign up for them, as I did. This claim is as complete a fabrication as anything else in this press release.

As for “expressing [my] outrage”, that’s absurd. I laughed and laughed, and had trouble maintaining my normally sober decorum in a public place as I left the theater. Outrage? Judge for yourself.

The only other thing remarkable about their collection of lies is how desperate they sound — you can practically smell the flop sweat.

Another Expelled roundup

The volume of email coming into my mailbox is a bit overwhelming right now — that silly story about getting expelled from Expelled was funny enough that it got picked up all over the world, an opportunity that you’d think some communications experts would use advantageously … but that’s another argument. There has been an uptick in nasty “I-will-pray-for-you-and-laugh-when-you-roast-in-hell” messages, but the majority have been positive, with a lot saying they like the site and are going to be return readers. This is not going to be an all-Expelled-all-the-time blog, however, despite the fact that right now most of my non-spam email seems to be about Expelled. Here, then, in one place, are some of the more interesting recent articles I’ve been sent about the fiasco, and then we’ll move on for the rest of the day.

  • Amanda Gefter got into a screening and reinforces our opinions: it’s a poorly made movie that clumsily tries to associate evolution with Hitler, and that the producer, Mark Mathis, is a bullying control freak. She also makes an excellent point: the Intelligent Design movement has been desperate to publicly distance itself from religion, yet this movie argues that ID is religious.

  • Scott Hatfield digs into the background of the Expelled team. It’s nutty fundagelical Christian kooks all the way down, with not an iota of science expertise among them. I know. That is so surprising.

  • Speaking of a complete absence of knowledge…ah, Uncommon Descent. UD has been having so much fun with this story, especially since one of our local sciencebloggers gave them some useful apologetics. Unfortunately for them, if you read the succession of accounts they give — and do note, none of these people were there — they are mutually contradictory and completely divorced from the facts. Trust me, their kind of sloppy, speculative, and false approach to a recent incident accurately parallels their explanations of life’s origins, too.

Miseducation by the creationists

Watch this appalling video of homeschoolers misusing the Denver museum to promote creationism. Aside from the general pattern of lies from the tour guides, two things jumped out at me.

The really awful pedagogy. Over and over again, the creationist says some stock phrase and then pauses, waiting for his kids to fill in the missing word. This is simply demanding rote learning. Similarly, he leads the kids in asking a good question — “how do you know?” — while training them to ignore any answers. Right there on the wall is a description of radiometric dating methods, for instance, and they turn their back on it.

Then there is the twisted logic. T. rex has big sharp teeth; they know, though, that he was a vegetarian, because “if this creature was designed to eat meat from the very start, what would he have to do until Adam and Eve sinned, and death entered the world? What would he have to do? Fast and pray for the Fall.” Oh, and of course, he then says, “Is that likely? Everyone look at me and say…<pause>no. Try that with me…no.”

This is child abuse. Those kids are getting their heads stuffed with ignorance.

At least this news report is unsympathetic.

(via Sandwalk)