It’s always good to go straight to the source

I tell other scientists all the time that their work is being appropriated by creationists who barely understand it, and that it is getting distorted to support bogus pseudoscience. Whenever you see a creationist quote a genuine science paper, you can pretty much trust that it is going to be mangled beyond recognition.

For instance, Jonathan MacLatchie raised a peculiar collection of questions to grill me with; here’s one of them.

9) If, as is often claimed by Darwinists, the pharyngeal pouches and ridges are indeed accurately thought of as vestigial gill slits (thus demonstrating our shared ancestry with fish), then why is it that the ‘gill-slit’ region in humans does not contain even partly developing slits or gills, and has no respiratory function? In fish, these structures are, quite literally, slits that form openings to allow water in and out of the internal gills that remove oxygen from the water. In human embryos, however, the pharyngeal pouches do not appear to be ‘old structures’ which have been reworked into ‘new structures’ (they do not develop into homologous structures such as lungs). Instead, the developmental fate of these locations includes a wide variety of structures which become part of the face, bones associated with the ear, facial expression muscles, the thymus, thyroid, and parathyroid glands (e.g. Manley and Capecchi, 1998).

You might be wondering about what that paper actually says, and you should. Never trust a creationist! And here’s where I get to pull Marshall McLuhan into the frame from offscreen.

Nancy Manley of the University of Georgia wrote to me today.

As a fan of both your website and of the pharyngula stages of development, I was intrigued to see the questions posed to you by ID followers before your recent talk. And kind of surprised, and bit taken aback, when one of my postdoctoral papers was cited in one of the questions – I am the Manley of Manley et al.

Since the ID questioners used a reference to one of my papers in the question, and this is actually an issue I am personally interested in from a scientific point of view, I feel compelled to answer also. In a way, it is ironic that they used this paper to illustrate their question, since it was our analysis of the pharyngeal pouch phenotype of the Hoxa3 null mice that led to our own interest in why terrestrial animals don’t have gills, and how the thymus and parathyroids may have evolved. We hypothesized that the evolution of morphology in the pharyngeal region (i.e. loss of gills and gain of pouch-derived organs like the thymus and parathyroids) was due to changes in the expression and/or function of the Hoxa3 gene. This hypothesis was proposed in a book chapter that I co-authored (Manley, NR and CC Blackburn. Thymus and Parathyroids. In Handbook of Stem Cells, Vol. 2: Embryonic Stem Cells, R. Lanza (Ed). Academic Press, 2004 v. 1:pp 391-406). I even obtained an NSF grant (now defunct) to test this hypothesis, and recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about it (Chen, et al., 2010, PNAS 107(23):10555-10560). We haven’t solved the problem yet, but the data so far indicate that changes in both the expression and function of Hoxa3 may have been involved in the evolution of pharyngeal region derivatives during vertebrate evolution, including loss of gills and development of pharyngeal pouch-derived organs.

I wish I could magically pull scientists out of a hat every time some po-faced creationist stooge raises a hand at one of my talks and starts lecturing me on their memorized quotes from the scientific literature. They always get them wrong.

By the way, I’ve been playing a game with MacLatchie. Every time I look into one of his citations, I go to google and type in both the author’s name and that of Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist. It’s amazing — every time, I get a couple of quotes from one of his books, and they’re almost exactly the same as MacLatchie’s comments.

For example,
Harun Yahya also cites Manley. Compare this with what MacLatchie wrote, above.

Those human emryonic “gill slits” are just another Darwinian myth. These pharyngeal pouches do not develop into homologous structures such as lungs or gill-like structures. The developmental fate of these pouches include a wide variety of structures that become parts of the face, ear cavities, bones of the middle ear, muscles of masticulation and facial expression, the lower jaw, certain neck parts, and the thymus, thyroid, and parathyroid glands. (Manley, N.R. and Capecchi, M.R., Developmental Biology, 195 (1):1-15, 1998)

Isn’t this just weird? Now Yahya is a notorious plagiarist who rips off everything he’s written from the Christian creationist literature, and I don’t think MacLatchie is getting it from him. On the other hand, MacLatchie is a nobody, so I don’t think Yahya stole it from him. I think there’s another creationist source book somewhere, which both are borrowing from to make their claims, and I’m itching to know what it is.

The one thing I know for sure is that neither MacLatchie nor Yahya are at all original or creative, and that both are just trained parrots echoing some other source. If anyone recognizes where these claims are coming from, let me know — I’d like to go straight to the original compendium of nonsense and prune it at the root.

EVIL ATHEISTS ATTACK NINE YEAR OLD GIRL!

Yeah, that’s me. Ken Ham has noticed a certain article I wrote, and describes it for his blinkered followers.

Apparently, in this instance with Emma, a well known atheist wrote (very typical for him) an anti-Christian blog attacking me/AiG. Apparently some of his followers decided to send this on etc. I don’t read these vile blogs, but it is typical of these extremely intolerant people who in the anger, shake their fist at God.

I am amused at the characterization of the article in question. Emma’s mother is quite irate, too:

I had to tell you that my friend wrote on Ken’s Facebook page that she knows Emma and some guy… sent my friend a PRIVATE message blasting Ken and Emma (how sweet). I didn’t see the message because I didn’t want to…

Well, Emma’s mother is willfully blind, while Ken Ham knows full well what was written, and has chosen both to lie about it and to run away from providing a link to it. Now his followers are claiming that atheists are making “cowardly attacks”, that we “must be really scared of all the Emmas in the world to attack a 9 yr old like that”, and that atheists are “cowards at heart.” — but we know who the real coward is here, and it is the dishonest fool who is afraid to expose his lies by linking to me.

Liars for Jesus who have to cower and hide before the truth…it is so typical.

I was sent the perfect illustration for this post:

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I think the creationists would rather just forget about Expelled

As I’ve already mentioned, the makers of the Expelled movie have gone bankrupt, and the movie itself is on the auction block…and a few people on the side of goodness, light, and knowledge are making a bid to buy it. There’s some reasonable interest there: the Expelled crew did a lot of interviews, and only a small portion of them actually made it to the screen. Personally, I can tell you that they spent about three hours with me one afternoon, and maybe a minute of that total made it to the movie. I was actually surprised that that one bit was all that made the cut, and even it was absurdly innocuous — it made me suspect I’d been doing my teddy bear imitation that afternoon again.

Anyway, it’s a reasonable interest to get all the other stuff that was left on the cutting room floor, as the Panda’s Thumb bidders have already explained:

The auction promises that besides all available rights and interests in the finished film itself (there is an existing distribution contract), the winner will get all the production materials and rights to them. Want to know what was in the rest of the interviews with Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers? I know I would like to have that material archived and made available to the public, among other things that Premise Media found inconvenient to include in their film.

Alas, one of the writers for the movie, Kevin Miller, is having a hissy fit over this right now. It’s pathetically amusing. He’s now comparing his dishonest failure of a movie to The God Delusion, which he claims was also a forgotten flop, just like Expelled.

That said, it does strike me as rather odd to see all of you obsessing over gaining access to this film. If Expelled truly is an inconsequential piece of horseshit, I fail to see why it’s so important to gain access to the archives. I can’t imagine how pathetically you would view Christians who set about to do the same if they had the chance to get their hands on the original drafts, notes, etc. behind Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” for instance. The book was a full frontal attack on religion. But it’s arguments were so easily defeated that its relevance (and perceived threat to theism) quickly faded from view. I defy you to find a group of theists hunkered down in a shady corner of the internet talking about it right now. And I can hardly conceive of a group of Christians gleefully plotting to gain control of the rights so they could publish their own annotated version of the book. And if they did, I can hear you people mocking them mercilessly. And it would be well deserved, b/c it would be a pathetic form of behavior fear-based behavior. It would also be extremely telling in terms of the perceived threat “The God Delusion” represented. The fact that you’re still hunkered down over here chortling about “Expelled” three years later, full of vitriol and immediately defensive at the slightest criticism of your behavior is the most telling of all. Just an observation.

A full set of drafts and notes for The God Delusion would be a fascinating bit of scholarly minutia! It’s fairly common for well-known scholars to leave their notes and works to a library, because many people will be interested in how the ideas formed. And I think a collection of unused footage of Dawkins would have some interest; he’s also made public unused footage from his documentary “Root of All Evil?” in the past, to good reception. He’s not afraid to reveal the full content of his interviews.

It’s extremely silly to claim that The God Delusion has lost its relevance and faded from view. It’s sold over two million copies, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year. I’ll note, too, that Richard Dawkins isn’t the one gone bankrupt and left with a dud property on his hands that he’s trying to sell off to appease his creditors. And yes, Christians obsessed and are still obsessing over it. Look up “Dawkins’ fleas”: he practically sparked a whole industry of Christian apologists writing desperate rebuttals of the book. The Dawkins Delusion, Beyond the God Delusion, The Dawkins Letters, The God Delusion Revisited, Deluded by Dawkins, The God Solution, A Catholic Replies to Professor Dawkins, Darwin’s Angel, The Argument Against Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, The New Atheist Crusaders, The Truth Behind the New Atheism, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion, God is no Delusion, Challenging Richard Dawkins, Mysterious Reality: God, the World and Ourselves in the Light of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, God and the New Atheism…you get the idea. I guarantee you, there are theists hunkered down right now kvetching about it.

We’re chortling over Expelled now, but for a different reason. It was a flop. It’s backers lost money and their reputation over it. It’s writer was exposed as an incompetent hack. The content of the movie was revealed to be a dishonest hash of mangled interviews. Their PR was a disaster from day one. And now my side is considering seizing it as a trophy. We’re chortling because it was a triumph for our side. I can understand why poor Kevin Miller might feel disgruntled about evolutionists cheering over the tattered corpse of his beloved baby…just as I can understand how Napoleon might have been a bit disgruntled about Waterloo, and found the British revelry entirely unsettling and annoying.

Too bad, Kevin. You lost.

Jonathan MacLatchie really is completely ineducable

It’s like talking to a brick wall: MacLatchie is appallingly obtuse. When last I argued with him, I pointed out that the major failing of his entire developmental argument against evolution was that it was built on a false premise. As I said then,

I can summarize it with one standard template: “Since Darwinian evolution predicts that development will conserve the evolutionary history of an organism, how do you account for feature X which doesn’t fit that model?” To which I can simply reply, “Evolution does not predict that development will conserve the evolutionary history of an organism, therefore your question is stupid.” It doesn’t matter how many X’s he drags out, given that the premise is false, the whole question is invalid.

So now MacLatchie revisits the debate, and what does he do? He just reiterates his flawed premises!

For those who want the bottom line, here it is. Myers thinks I’m worried about Haeckelian recapitulation. But that’s completely wrong. Neo-Darwinism itself predicts that early development, starting with fertilization, should be conserved.

And then just to make himself look even more stupid, he restates it in simple-minded logical terms.

The logic of my position takes a modus tollendo tollens form of argument:

A

1 If P then Q
2 ~ Q
3 ~ P

By instantiation in A

B

1 If the theory of common descent is true then early developmental stages should be conserved.
2 Early developmental stages are not conserved.
3 The theory of common descent is not true.

The argument is impeccable: Whence the disagreement?

And as if that were not enough, he closes his post by reiterating a variation of the same argument:

C

1 If the theory of common descent is true then mutations to early developmental stages should be beneficial.
2 Early developmental mutations are not beneficial.
3 The theory of common descent is not true.

Good god. After I lectured him about how early developmental stages are not conserved, after I wrote the same thing, after I posted a refutation of his claims by pointing out that his premise is false, he somehow thinks he can win me over by repeating his premises a little more loudly?

Let’s make this equally simple-minded and clear.

Neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved.

If it did, since it is trivially observable that there is wide variation in the status of the embryo at fertilization, then neo-Darwinism would be refuted, and would have been falsified prior to its formulation. Yet somehow, people like me, like Pere Alberch who he cited last time and like Rudy Raff who he cites this time, have no problem with evolution while openly discussing the divergence in early embryos.

Think about that, MacLatchie. Isn’t it obvious that you must be missing something?

Here’s another counter-example: Ernst Mayr, about as authoritative a source as you can find on the neo-Darwinian synthesis, wrote a very negative assessment of the likelihood of any molecular homology in the 1960s, before lots of sequence information became available.

Much that has been learned about gene physiology makes it evident that the search for homologous genes is quite futile except in very close relatives (Dobzhansky 1955). If there is only one efficient solution for a certain functional demand, very different gene complexes will come up with the same solution, no matter how different the pathway by which it is achieved (Mayr 1966:609).

Mayr died in 2005, at a time when there was a wealth of comparative information on the ubiquity of conserved genes in development: not only wasn’t conservation of homologous developmental genes a prediction of evolutionary theory, but discovery that there were homologous sequences didn’t induce Mayr to recant evolution on his deathbed.

Is it sinking in yet?

Neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved.

It is just freakin’ bizarre to see these guys falling all over themselves to declare that a specific prediction of evolutionary theory has been falsified, when they can’t even comprehend that it is the scientists studying the phenomenon who are handing them all the data that they think invalidates the scientists’ science. The closest thing I can find to it is those crazy creationists who claim that evolutionary theory requires junk DNA, so every time a minor function for any piece of DNA is found, they can claim evolution is refuted.

MacLatchie is hopelessly confused. That early stages should be more resistant to change is not a prediction of evolutionary theory; it’s an inference from molecular genetics, that genes at the base of a long chain of essential interactions ought to be less likely to vary between species. What that doesn’t take into account is that genes are part of the great cloud of environmental interactions that go on to generate a selectable function, and that if the environment in which the gene is expressed changes, it can enable great changes in the activity of the gene.

These early genes are a classic example of this phenomenon: what we see in many lineages is variation in the degree of maternal investment in the egg. It can be yolky, it can be low in yolk, it can have cytoplasmic determinants directly imbedded by maternal factors in the egg, or it can be mostly uniform and regulative. The early zygotic genes can be freed up for evolutionary novelties if their functions are assumed by maternal genes, so we can correlate a lot of this variation with variation in maternal investment.

It wouldn’t be a creationist paper without a quote mine, and MacLatchie does not fail: he quotes Rudolf Raff to support his claims. Rudolf Raff! One of the founders of the whole field of evo-devo! Dragooned into supposedly supporting an Intelligent Design creationism claim! These guys have no shame at all.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read the specific paper MacLatchie cites, but I’m familiar with the work: this is Raff’s beautiful examination of two closely related urchin species, Heliocidaris erythrogramma and H. tuberculata, which are practically indistinguishable in their adult morphology but have radically different embryos. Here’s the abstract, at least, from the paper MacLatchie chose to distort:

Larval forms are highly conserved in evolution, and phylogeneticists have used shared larval features to link disparate phyla. Despite long-term conservation, early development has in some cases evolved radically. Analysis of evolutionary change depends on identification of homologues, and this concept of descent with modification applies to embryo cells and territories as well. Difficulties arise because evolutionary changes in development can obscure homologies. Even more difficult, threshold effects can yield changes in process whereby apparently homologous features can arise from new precursors or pathways. We have observed phenomena of this type in closely related sea urchins that differ in developmental mode. A species developing via a complex feeding larva and its congener, which develops directly, have different embryonic cell lineages and divergent patterns of early development, but converge on the adult sea urchin body plan. Despite differences in embryonic developmental pathways, conserved gene expression territories are evident, as are territories whose homologies are in doubt. The highly derived development of the direct developer evidently arises from an interplay of novel organization of the egg, loss of expression of regulatory gene involved in production of feeding larval features, and changes in site and timing of expression of a number of genes.

I’ve highlighted the relevant part of the story for poor blind MacLatchie. One species is a direct developer: it lays a large yolk-rich egg which develops directly into the round spiky adult form. The other is an indirect developer, which lays a less yolky egg which first forms a feeding ciliated larva which swims about eating before making a metamorphosis into the adult form. These are radically different embryonic forms.

Gosh, I guess evolution is false.

But no! Remember, neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved.

The explanation is given right there in Raff’s abstract, which MacLatchie must have read, and equally obviously must not have understood. Raff does, though: he understands that there were evolutionary changes in “novel organization of the egg, loss of expression of regulatory gene involved in production of feeding larval features, and changes in site and timing of expression of a number of genes,” all phenomena entirely compatible with evolutionary theory.

As one last instance of the muddled logic of Jonathan MacLatchie, I will leave you with two quotes from him. The first is from his last article on this subject:

At best, all his case demonstrated was common ancestry — a proposition which is perfectly compatible with intelligent design.

This is a common statement from creationists like Behe, who also say they have no problem with common descent, it’s just that they don’t accept that mutation and selection and natural processes could possibly have done the job. So MacLatchie is just stating the nominal, default, superficial position of many Intelligent Design creationists.

This time around, though, he says this:

If common descent is true, however, early development must somehow evolve via mutations.

Oh, really? Which is it going to be? Does he think common descent is true or not true?

He doesn’t need to answer, I already know it: whichever claim suits his current rhetorical purposes.

I approve this purchase

The Talk Origins Archive Foundation is bidding to buy the movie Expelled from its bankrupt owner. They’re looking for donations to use in bidding in the auction (note: donations will be used for this purpose, but they obviously can’t guarantee they’ll win; if they don’t, the money will be used to support the foundation in other ways). I think it would be wonderful and ironic if the most heavily promoted creationist propaganda film of the decade and its unused footage became the property of a science education organization, so help them out if you can.

Dear Emma B

Ken Ham is crowing over fooling a child. A young girl visited a moon rock display from NASA, and bravely went up to the docent and asked the standard question Ham coaches kids to ask — and she’s quite proud of herself.

I went to a NASA display of a moon rock and a lady said, “This Moon-rock is 3.75 billion years old!” Guess what I asked for the first time ever?

“Um, may I ask a question?”

And she said, “Of course.”

I said, in my most polite voice, “Were you there?”

Love, Emma B

Ken Ham is also quite proud of himself. He’s also pleased with the fact that many people will be dismayed at the miseducation he delivers.

Each time I give examples in my blog posts of children who have been influenced by AiG, the atheists go ballistic on their blogs. They hate to read of instances like this. They want to teach these children there is no God and they are just animals in this hopeless and meaningless struggle of this purposeless existence.

I am angry at Ken Ham, but in this case, I mainly feel sad for Emma B, who is being manipulated and harmed by a delusion. So I thought what I would do is write a letter to her — a letter which I wouldn’t send, because I’m not going to intrude on a family with the actual science, but because this is what I would say if Emma actually asked me.

Dear Emma;

I read your account of seeing a 3.75 billion year old moon rock, and how you asked the person displaying it “Were you there?”, the question that Ken Ham taught you to ask scientists. I’m glad you were asking questions — that’s what scientists are supposed to do — but I have to explain to you that that wasn’t a very good question, and that Ken Ham is a poor teacher. There are better questions you could have asked.

One serious problem with the “Were you there?” question is that it is not very sincere. You knew the answer already! You knew that woman had not been to the moon, and you definitely knew that she had not been around to see the rock forming 3.75 billion years ago. You knew the only answer she could give was “no,” which is not very informative.

Another problem is that if we can only trust what we have seen with our own two eyes in our short lives, then there’s very little we can know at all. You probably know that there are penguins in Antarctica, and that the Civil War was fought in the 1860s, and that there are fish swimming deep in the ocean, and you also believe that Jesus was crucified two thousand years ago, but if I asked you “Were you there?” about each of those facts, you’d also have to answer “no” to each one. Does that mean they are all false?

Of course not. You know those things because you have other kinds of evidence. There are photographs and movies of penguins and fish, there are documents from the time of the Civil War, as well as the fact that in many places you can still find old bullets and cannon balls buried in the ground from the time of the war, and you have a book, the Bible, that tells stories about Jesus. You have evidence other than that you personally witnessed something.

This is important because we live in a big ol’ beautiful world, far older than your 9 years, and there’s so much to learn about it — far more than you’ll ever be able to see for yourself. There’s a gigantic universe beyond South Carolina, and while you probably won’t ever visit a distant star or go inside a cell, there are instruments we can use to see farther and deeper than your eyes can go, and there are books that describe all kinds of wonders. Don’t close yourself off to them simply because you weren’t there.

I’d like to teach you a different easy question, one that is far, far more useful than Ken Ham’s silly “Were you there?” The question you can always ask is, “How do you know that?”

Right away, you should be able to see the difference. You already knew the answer to the “Were you there?” question, but you don’t know the answer to the “How do you know that?” question. That means the person answering it will tell you something you don’t know, and you will learn something new. And that is the coolest thing ever.

You could have asked the lady at the exhibit, “How do you know that moon rock is 3.75 billion years old?”, and she would have explained it to you. Maybe you would disagree with her; maybe you’d think there’s a better answer; maybe you’d still want to believe Ken Ham, who is not a scientist; but the important thing is that you’d have learned why she thought the rock was that old, and why scientists have said that it is that old, and how they worked out the age, even if they weren’t there. And you’d be a little bit more knowledgeable today.

I’ll assume you’re actually interested in knowing how they figured out the age of the rock, so I’ll try to explain it to you.

The technique scientists use is called radiometric dating. It uses the fact that some radioactive elements slowly fall apart, turning into other elements. For instance, a radioactive isotope of potassium will decay over time into an isotope of another element, argon.

One way to think of it is that it’s like an hourglass. You know how they work: you start with all the sand in the top half of the hourglass, and it slowly trickles into the bottom half. If you see an hourglass with all the sand at the top and none at the bottom, you know it was recently flipped over. If you see one with half the sand in the top, and half in the bottom, you know it’s about halfway through the time it will run. And if you look at how quickly the sand moves through the neck of the hourglass, you could even figure out how long until it all runs out.

In radiometric dating, the scientists are looking at how far along all the radioactive potassium is in the process of turning into argon. The amount of potassium is like the amount of sand in the top half of the hourglass, while the amount of argon is like the amount in the bottom half. By measuring the relative amounts of the two elements, and by measuring how fast radioactive potassium turns into argon, we can figure out how long it’s been since the rock solidified.

It takes a very long time for the decay to occur. It takes 1 and a quarter billion years for half the potassium to turn into argon. When they measured those elements in the moon rocks, they found that the radiometric hourglass had mostly run out, so they knew that it was very, very old.

Scientists double-check everything. They also looked at other elements, like how quickly uranium turns into lead, or rubidium into strontium, and they all agree on the date, even though these are decay processes that run at different rates. All the radiometric hourglasses they’ve used give the same answer: 3.75 billion years. None of them say 6,000 years.

I think you’re off to a great start — being brave enough to ask older people to explain themselves is exactly what you need to do to learn more and more, and open up the whole new exciting world of science for yourself. But that means you have to ask good questions to get good answers so that you will learn more.

Don’t use Ken Ham’s bad question, and most importantly, don’t pay attention to Ken Ham’s bad answers. There’s a wealth of wonderful truths that reveal so much more about our universe out there, and you do not want to close your eyes to them. Maybe someday you could be a woman who does go to the moon and sees the rocks there, or a geologist who sees how rocks erode and form here on earth, or the biologist who observes life in exotic parts of the world…but you won’t achieve any of those things if you limit your mind to the dogma of Answers in Genesis.

Best wishes for future learning,
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Sometimes, we make progress

It takes decades, though. When did you last hear anyone seriously advocate a flat earth? How many Republican presidential candidates would raise their hands if asked if they believed the earth was flat? Sure, you can find a few far out fringe cranks who babble about it, just as there are a few geocentrists around, but it’s a dead idea — not even Ken Ham pushes it, although I am wondering, since the Bible does support it literally, whether he doesn’t secretly suspect the astronomers have been lying to him for all these years.

But there used to be more noisy flat-earthers around. A complete copy of a map by Orlando Ferguson from 1893 showing his flat earth model has been found, and it’s gorgeous and hilarious. Here’s his Biblical interpretation of the shape of the earth:

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Spectacular! Unfortunately, the book that justifies this is lost, and all we have left for support are the notes on the map: Four Hundred Passages in the Bible that Condemn the Globe Theory, or the Flying Earth, and None Sustain It. This Map is the Bible Map of the World.” Just like creationists, though, he does emphasize negative evidence: he ridicules physicists with their absurd proposition that the earth is zooming through space.

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Let’s hope that a century from now people will look back on the quaint artifacts from the age of Creationism and Intelligent Design as amusing curios that only a lunatic would find plausible.

Jailbird Hovind still haunts us

I actually had a creationist try to stump me by pointing to this page at chick.com, reiterating Kent Hovind’s arguments. I was stunned at their stupidity. The first is that strange numbers game that argues that starting with 8 people 4400 years ago and multiplying by some arbitrary rate produces exactly the number of people we have nowadays (nobody ever dies prematurely!); the second is that the planets are cooling and would have lost all their internal heat if they were millions of years old (as if there were no internal heat sources); you get the idea. Tired, dumb, old. Have fun with them.

There is more news, though. Dinosaur Adventure Land is being auctioned off tomorrow! There’s also some adjacent property being auctioned off. Just think: you could own a 1 acre lot with some plywood dinosaurs on it!

A beautiful mind

I am not a fan of beauty pageants, especially after hearing about the preliminary questions in the Miss USA contest. The women were asked if evolution should be taught in US schools. Only two of the 51 contestants could bring themselves to answer yes.

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But here’s the good news: one of those two was the ultimate winner.

The newly crowned Miss USA, Alyssa Campanella, 21, of Los Angeles, who calls herself “a huge science geek,” says evolution should be taught in public schools.

…

Before her victory night, Miss California earned her way into the semi-finals in preliminary judging including interviews in which she was one of only two among 51 contestants to unequivocally support teaching evolution.

I suppose the photo is redundant. I already like her for her brain. How about if we judge all future Miss Americas by their performance on a test of general knowledge?

You really don’t want to know how the other 49 answered the question.

Good Texans

I often pick on Texas — that is one screwed-up, backwards, insane state, you know — but just for a change I thought I’d mention a few good people working there and doing what they can to improve the dump.

  • Aron Ra, of course, who is one of the best purveyors of scientific information on youtube.

  • Dr Michael Soto, who is on the Texas State Board of Education and is one of the few people there who promotes teaching kids good science instead of that hackneyed medieval crapola other board members peddle. Keep him on the board, please, and elect more like him.

  • All the scientists working in Texas universities who do a fine job doing and teaching science. To represent them all, I’ll just cite the biology department at Sam Houston State University, which goes against the political grain and makes a clear statement about evolution:

    We unequivocally support evolutionary theory, which has gained unwavering support by scientists who acknowledge that scientific validity comes only as a result of hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and replication by others. It is this respect for the scientific method and scholastic integrity that has convinced the scientific community that evolutionary theory and the work of Charles Darwin are one of the most important of our time.

    In short, we acknowledge that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky 1973).

  • All the fierce readers of Pharyngula from Texas who are fighting the good fight. You can take a bow in the comments.

Keep on battling!

All right, because everybody is reminding me in the comments, I’ll also recommend The Atheist Experience. I wasn’t trying to be exhaustive, there’s a swarm of good Texans out there!