I get email: for the programmers out there!

I got a challenge from a creationist.

Hello, I am a Muslim.

Recently I have written a small script as a test to see how many attempts would a random mutation require to reach a target DNA Sequence.

The script simply creates a random target DNA Sequence, and keeps generating random DNA Sequences until it matches the target, and then prints the number of attempts needed.

The Result shows a very large number of attempts the longer the Sequence is.

How does evolution explain the results of this script?

The attached files are a C++ and Python versions of the script.

Thank you.

I don’t know why he needed to announce he’s a Muslim, it’s completely irrelevant.

Here’s his code. I don’t think anyone will have much trouble reading it — it’s about the level of a “hello world” program in an introductory office tech class.

In C++:

In Python:

I think you can see the problem. It’s a typing monkeys simulation: there’s no selection, there’s no accumulation of small variations, on every pass it generates a totally random sequence of the desired length and compares it for identity with the search string. Of course it takes a very large number of attempts to get the desired result!

Here’s what evolution says about it:

Evolution has nothing to say about that script, because a) evolution is not a conscious entity, b) the script has no relationship to the process of evolution, and c) the author is very stupid.

The ICR Guide to Dinosaurs

Dan Phelps sent me a few scans from a ‘treasure’ he discovered — a “99 cent Goodwill find that was 98 cents too expensive”. I thought it was interesting to see how creationist dogma has solidified, since this would be a comfortable fit with Answers in Genesis’s silly beliefs…except that it’s from a rival organization, the Institute for Creation Research, and they’d rather peddle their own garbage, thank you very much. Here’s the cover:

Looks good! If you didn’t notice the ICR logo, you might think it’s a real children’s book about science and dinosaurs. Any thought along those lines would quickly evaporate as soon as you opened it, though.

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The Flood problem, illustrated by Oglaf

What? By Oglaf? And it’s entirely safe for work? Yep.

You don’t get to postulate a globe-spanning catastrophic flood that demolishes everything on the land and simply assume that fish will be unaffected. Every aquarist knows fish are profoundly affected by things like salinity, pH, elements like phosphates, etc. We don’t usually have to worry about violent churning and silt, fortunately, but in Noah’s flood you would.

I hadn’t thought about the potatoes, and most plants, in fact, but they also wouldn’t tolerate the massive disruption caused by the Christian magic flood story.

Of course, if you accept the metaphor, myth, and poetry theory, all the problems go away.

Something is wrong!

Do any of you old-timers recall TXPiper, the obnoxious racist creationist I banned in 2013? Would you believe he still occasional pesters me with blindingly stupid email? I must be spectacularly compelling and charismatic, since so many of these bozos never go away. I wish they knew how to quit me.

He threw a whole lot of stupid at me the other day, so I had to respond with a video.

Transcript below the fold.

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Why does hateful bigot Kent Hovind still have a YouTube channel?

Emma Thorne made a compilation video of Kent Hovind and Matt Powell being “horrible, horrible people”. It’s pretty good, and illustrates why those two actually are horrible. She notes that they are “slipping in more and more dramatic, violent, out-there viewpoints into their religious ministry”, so there is cause for alarm, although I’d suggest they’ve always been this way, they’re just becoming more vocal about it.

Well, ol’ Kent is not having any of that, so he made a response video (I’m not linking to it, if you must, look it up). You can tell he’s having a slow burn over it, and he’s annoyed that his hateful views are being shown to the public in a disapproving manner. He’s pissed off — his jaw is clamped tightly shut as he watches — and when he can take it no more, he erupts into babble near the end. Emma highlights some of his more awful ideas, like his statement that All the Chinese look alike (he usually keeps mum about his bigotry on YouTube, but in his unrecorded lectures I’ve heard him throw out all kinds of “jokes” about Jews and black people), and the fact that he brags about how brutally he beat his children.

His response to that last comment is to call upon someone in his audience at Dinosaur Adventure Land, at about the 24 minute mark:

Brother, how many children do you have? Four? Do you once in a while have to discipline them to get them to understand? Is that Biblical? Is it effective? Do the kids love you and want to do right, or do they love you for it? They love you for it!

Um, no. Children love their parents in spite of any abuse, and sometimes they stop loving them. You don’t get to call on the natural charity children exhibit for the people they depend on and have grown up with to justify any harm you do to them!

At about 26 minutes, Emma has hit him with his callous comments about the boy who drowned at his camp. Does Kent talk about his responsibilities as a manager, about the need to improve safety at his lake, his sympathy for the grieving parents? No. He responds with excuses, and justifies it all because the father of the dead child made a donation to his camp.

The dad of that boy loves our ministry, donated money to build a dock that gazebo out there, he paid for that to be in memory of his son. He had twin boys, seven years old, one was kind of hyperactive, and apparently came up under the dock, hit his head and knocked himself out, and nobody saw him. The water was 3 feet deep. The parents were there. Nobody saw him under the dock. And he drowned. I’m sorry. People drown in lakes all the time. It’s tragic and bad, but it happens. People get in car wrecks all the time too. They still want to say something about me, I wasn’t there.

It was tragic, but the dad loves our ministry. I should have him on the program sometime and say, look, guys, quit picking on Kent Hovind, my boy drowned in the lake, that’s bad enough, knock it off, OK, it’s fine.

No, it’s not fine. Hovind wants this man to appear with him on camera and say that it was fine that his child died (it’s OK, it was the hyperactive one, after all.) That is disgusting and psychopathic. He’s entirely focused on the harm done to him, that he’s getting “picked on”, not that a child died in his irresponsibly maintained bible school.

This is what he does throughout his response video. He takes a criticism from Emma, and tries to argue that it was fine, and makes it all ten times worse. We need a phrase stronger than “doubling down”, because this guy is just throwing everything into the pot all at once. He’s justifying everything she said while trying to defend himself.

For example — and these really demonstrate what a horrible person he is — Emma quotes him saying, Have you ever heard of the Palestinians? They should have totally destroyed them back then, three thousand five hundred years ago. How do you think he should respond to a direct quote in which he advocated genocide? His response is to declare that God said it was OK, and besides, the Palestinians were filthy, dirty people who had sex with animals.

When God told the children of Israel to go into that land, he said to totally destroy certain nations. They were loaded with diseases. And god said utterly destroy them and they did not obey. And there are some diseases haunting humanity today that could have been wiped out in their infancy. The Palestinians, some of those people, had unbelievable sex practice with animals and other things like that, and God said to kill them all. The children of Israel did not obey, and that’s a long interesting story, but it’s what God said to do.

Well, now, the Bible says nothing about Palestinians, a modern people who did not exist as a distinct nation 3500 years ago. But this does not in any way lessen or excuse Hovind’s bigotry! It makes it all worse!

Oh, but wait until you hear how he defends himself when Emma quotes Matt Powell and Kent Hovind ranting about how homosexuals ought to be executed. He says of AIDS, suppose when the disease was first discovered, those who had it were isolated or euthanized. Just a hypothetical, right? No, he really does believe they should have been rounded up and killed. He brings up a slide that says there are 30 verses in the Bible about homosexuality, and points out that it repeatedly says it is an abomination…and he looks up “abomination” in a dictionary, where it says “abomination: a thing that causes disgust or hatred.”

I guess it’s OK to hate gays, then, since the Bible says so.

Then it gets weird.

He goes on and on about disgusting things, trying to make inappropriate comparisons. Is it disgusting for a parent to let their baby eat poop? This has nothing to do with private behavior among consenting adults; parents have responsibilities to their children. Most ironically, he also rants for many long minutes about how the government has the right to regulate many behaviors — Child Protective Services can take children away for good cause, they can set speed limits on roads, they can execute people for murder, they can get involved to stop sex trafficking, etc., all these things that are not at all relevant to being gay, unless he’s trying to argue that being gay is tantamount to murder, therefore execution is warranted.

What’s ironic is that he repeatedly defends the right of the government to decide on any punishment for any arbitrary law, while forgetting that earlier in the video (and many times in the past) he has tried to argue that he was innocent of ever violating any law. He also seems to assume that Emma Thorne is a proponent of capital punishment for certain crimes; I don’t know what her stance on that is, but at a guess, as a liberal lefty like me, she’s probably against it.

You can tell he’s warming up to say that we should have murdered all the gay people.

First case of what would later become known as AIDS was in 1981. What are the main risks of anal sex? Penetrative anal sex has a higher risk of spreading STIs than many other types of sexual activity. This is what the homosexuals do. They’re going to spread disease. “Nobody tells me what to do”, yes they do. They tell you how fast to go, they tell you what side of the road to drive on, that’s a moron, lots of people tell us what to do. Duh. 42,000 people were unknowingly HIV positive at the time. So in 1981, 42,000 people is the estimate, would it have been better at the time to quarantine or execute? Would that have been better for humanity? That’s what I said, and Emma, and her other homosexual friend AJ, are so upset about this. I’m just point out what God’s law says and the logic behind it. 42,000 people had it. How was it transmitted? How did they get this disease? Let’s see. Having anal sex is riskier than vaginal sex. This is where you get the disease, contact with the feces. Duh.

HIV related deaths. 1.4 million people died in the year 2000. Now hold it. When it was first discovered only 42000 people had it. If it had been stopped then, 1.4 million people would not have died in 2000.

All I said was would it have been wise to stop it then?

Yes, it would have been wise to stop it then. We could have saved a lot of lives. But take it up with Ronald Reagan, who ignored the disease, and didn’t do anything to protect people. Protect people, not round them up and execute them. Public education, health measures, active research into treating the disease, condom use, needle exchange programs would have all saved lives. But the plan that leaps to the sick minds of Matt Powell and Kent Hovind is that now they have an excuse to murder lots of people they don’t like.

Also, here’s a hint: the disease is primarily spread by the exchange of blood, not contact with feces. Hovind is just full of misinformation that way. He’s a very stupid man, as well as a bigot.

So let’s end our engagement with these disgusting men with one last amusing quote from Kent Hovind, as he mansplains British history to an English woman.

Study the history of England, and why your sailors were called Limeys. They brought sheep on board, and got all kinds of diseases from sex with the sheep, the sailors did, Emma, study your history.

Yeah, that’s how ignorant Kent Hovind is.

Yet another pseudoscientific fraud

A while back, this guy Nathaniel Jeanson sent me a copy of his book, Replacing Darwin, and sent a few email suggestions that we debate or that he appear on my YouTube channel. I glanced at the book, saw that it was rank drivel, trying to reconcile young earth creationism with modern science. I looked up Jeanson, and found a fundamentalist fanatic who went to all the trouble of getting a Harvard biology Ph.D. while ignoring all the science he was supposed to learn, and that he was now employed by Answers in Genesis. I knew enough. I ignored him, didn’t reply to any of his emails, and stuffed his bad book onto a shelf with a lot of other creationist trash*.

My approach was perfect. He hasn’t pestered me since.

Unfortunately, he has continued to write bad books. His latest is an abomination called Traced: Human DNA’s Big Surprise, in which he claims to have figured out how all the peoples of the world arose…from the 8 people on Noah’s Ark, of course. There’s no way he could derive that from honest, accurate population genetics, or the actual data from modern molecular genetics (IT DOESN’T FIT), so he’s relying on cramming badly interpreted science into an absurd hypothesis derived entirely from a few chapters in the book of Genesis. Fortunately, an actual scientist has reviewed the book.

Nathaniel Jeanson’s Traced: Human DNA’s Big Surprise (2022, Master Books) offers virtually no surprises. This is not a science book. It is a work of fundamentalist religious propaganda dressed to appear scientific. Jeanson attempts to employ an analysis largely of his own invention on a narrow sampling of the human genome – extant Y-chromosome samples borrowed from other studies. These doctored genetic patterns are mapped onto historical events in an attempt to prove to the reader that all human beings are the descendants of the three sons of Noah – Shem, Japheth, and Ham. Jeanson’s views on world history are adolescent, Western-centric, and almost entirely focused on conflict and his science amateurish and divorced from any established methodology in molecular population genetics. In the end Jeanson, like all good science denialists, ends up ostensibly proving to the reader what he believed to begin with. Traced is a book working within his contractual obligations to his employer (the evangelical, conservative Christian ministry, Answers in Genesis) to promote a narrow, legalistic, literalist reading of the King James Bible and a Christian culture war agenda. It is not a science book. It is not a sober, informed historical account. It is a proselytizing work of pseudoscientific apologetics covered with a thin veil of carefully selected empiricism in an attempt to give his ideas the credibility he apparently craves.

I bet it’s on sale at the Ark Park, though.

He may have a Ph.D. in biology, but…you know that biology is an immensely broad field, right? Getting a degree in one area does not mean you are qualified to discuss in detail another area. That’s what Jeanson is doing, using his irrelevant credentials to hop over and mangle a sub-branch of biology he has no credentials in.

The science in Traced is, like that of his previous book, sloppy, contrived, and completely divorced from any semblance of rigorous methodology in the field of either history or population genetics. This should be no surprise. Jeanson has absolutely no training in these fields. His PhD never dealt with the subjects he is now researching at his job at the Answers in Genesis ministry. As I have observed in my assessment of Replacing Darwin, Jeanson appears to be making up methods as he goes and in doing so makes what I would consider embarrassing mistakes – mistakes easily avoided by taking the time to read even basic textbooks in the fields of molecular systematics and population genetics.

That made me wonder what his actual degree is in, and to my immense shame, it’s cell and developmental biology. Goddamn. He’s another Jonathan Wells.

I want you to know that developmental biology is not an easy sub-discipline of biology. It’s just one where there a number of old school faculty focused on classical embryology and experimental manipulation of embryos, which are good and interesting topics, but which also don’t require that you learn any population genetics or evolutionary biology in general. It’s just that the good ones do try to learn more, especially since evo-devo has become prominent, and they don’t go into careers with anti-science organizations to misrepresent that which they don’t understand.

Another thing about this review: it turns out, entirely unsurprisingly, that Jeanson and AiG are eurocentric bigots.

Jennifer Raff has a new book out now on the peopling of the Americans (Raff. 2022. Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas. Twelve. Hachette Book Group. New York.) and like any good scientist should she addresses the problem from multiple disciplines from genetics to archaeology to anthropology. Reading Raff alongside Jeanson reveals how different their two worlds are. Raff is multidisciplinary and scholarly with a dual PhD in anthropology and genetics and a publication record in these disciplines commensurate with her professional experience. Jeanson’s attempts at answering questions about human history are almost entirely uninformed by any professional expertise in any relevant discipline, his methods are amateurish, he has no record of publishing in these fields, he ignores long-standing and well-established data. But perhaps the most striking difference is the great care and respect Raff takes when dealing with the history of people outside of her ethnic and cultural identity contrasted with the ham-handed way in which Jeanson deals with culture, ethnicity, and issues pertaining to race.

Jeanson’s approach to history reminds me of my own thoughts about human history as an adolescent boy – views of history that an appetite for knowledge and eventual experience with other cultures compelled me to outgrow pretty quickly. In Jeanson’s view of human history war is entirely central. Virtually every movement of people he describes is the result of violent conflict. Aggressors are everywhere and every geographical feature is either a fortification or invitation to invasion.

Jeanson is liberal with pejorative labels for entire cultures, sometimes with a wink enclosing these labels in quotations and sometimes not. He describes the people of Mongolia as “barbarians” and “…the long-standing enemies of China.” (using quotes to hopefully insulate the reader from thinking he thinks they are barbarians, pgs. 117-119). He paints simplistic descriptions of otherwise complex people using terms such as “primitive” (pgs. 159-160). He uses stereotypical tropes such as when he says, “The diverse peoples of East Asia all resemble one another.” (pg. 115).

Yeah. Go read Origin, a terrific book by a qualified scientist on her area of expertise, without a load of baggage from racist white people.

I predict, though, that we’re going to hear a lot more from Jeanson, given that AiG is promoting him heavily and that his views align so nicely with the bloc of Republican ignoramuses that have become so vocal in recent decades, and no one listens to qualified scientists on anything anymore.

*That shelf (actually a couple of shelves) is overburdened right now, and I might have to start dumping books. Some of them I would never give away to a library, and others are curiosities with no educational value at all. I might start giving away to my patrons on Patreon, where at least they’d go to people smart enough to not take them seriously. Maybe I’d balance them by giving away a few good books, too.