D’oh! We should have known!

The number one most common excuse I have been seeing for Harold Camping’s failure, both before and after yesterday, is that he can’t possibly forecast the time of the Rapture because Jesus said no one can know. You know what? That’s the same stupid reliance on the authority of the Bible that led to Camping’s prophecy. We know the Bible is inaccurate and error-filled, so you can’t use its supposed inerrancy to disprove any interpretation of its contents.

In the same category, but amplifed to even greater heights of inanity is this, the most hilarious argument for Camping being wrong that I’ve seen anywhere, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s on Ken Ham’s facebook page. Ham tut-tutted over the prediction of the date, and one of his readers commented on how to know the world wouldn’t end this year:

Did you notice that he based his prediction in part on the time being exactly 7,000 years after Noah’s flood? What? He must not have visited the Creation Museum (or read his bible) or he would know the earth is only around 6,013 years old or thereabouts!

Give that man a prize for the biggest creationist fallacy I’ve seen this week.

Texas, again

That place is just a magnet for nuts. There is going to be a review of the science curriculum next month, and the creationists on the state board of education are gearing up by appointing more creationists to staff the panels. Furthermore, they’re gathering specific curriculum materials, and skewing them towards lunacy.

One submission has come from a company called International Databases, LLC. It’s a one-man operation run by Stephen Sample, who says he has a degree in evolutionary biology and taught at the high school and junior college levels for 15 years.

The material he submitted consists of eight modules dealing with current issues in biology and ecology. Most are well within the mainstream scientific consensus. But there are two that deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the “null hypothesis” is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case.

International Databases, LLC is a grand name for a shell — all it is is those eight modules. There are collections of pdf files there that you can download, but don’t bother — they’re all password protected, so you won’t be able to read them. So all I have to go on is the summaries.

But that’s quite enough. The null hypothesis is that there is a super-intelligent, all powerful being manipulating the universe? Madness. How does one test against a hypothesis that is ill-defined, shifts constantly, and makes no specific predictions? “My null hypothesis is that god will or won’t affect the results of my experiment, depending on his mood, which I can’t measure.”

It’s just more stealth creationism, gussied up to look sciencey with a few abused science terms.

Kentucky pays off Ken Ham

Today was the day: Kentucky officially approved giving Ken Ham $43 million in tax breaks plus $11 million in road improvements. That’s a nice number; it’s about twice what Answers in Genesis sunk into their Creation “Museum” in total. Now they get double that back from the state, and they can use it to build their grandiose Ark Park.

There was only one surprise. Answers in Genesis brought up an alternative scenario, where they would build a slightly less flamingly insane version of the park. It doesn’t seem to have mattered, because the state seems to have stumbled all over themselves rushing to give the Hamites a big bucket of money, with no reservations.

Hunden divided his study under two scenarios for Ark Encounter. Under “Scenario A”, Ark Encounter would take a “mainstream approach”, where it “does not promote a creationist view of Biblical events that may turn off a portion of the potential market”. Under “Scenario B”, Ark Encounter would be full on Flintstone Truth, where kids are taught that a 600-year old herded T-Rexes onto a giant boat a few thousand years ago.

Now I know what you must be saying: “there’s no way that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis would agree to Scenario A, as they make their living off of vilifying Christians who don’t take a 100% literal interpretation of the Bible and Young Earth Creationism”. First of all, you’re right. But when I questioned Hunden after the meeting about this, he said that AiG/AE assured them that they would consider doing this. In other words, Ken Ham has (as the title of his latest book is called and is about) Already Compromised. Yes, he agreed to abandon the core beliefs of everything he’s done throughout his entire career in order to not potential damage his ability to milk $43 million in tax breaks, plus the $11 million in state money for infrastructure at his park. Truly amazing that he would (1) agree to this, doubting the inerrant Word of God, and (2) that people would actually believe that they really considered this.

But back to the study. In the completely unrealistic fantasy of Scenario A, Hunden claimed that Ark Encounter would create 3,000 new full-time jobs over the next 10 years, 600-700 expected to be onsite. It would have a total fiscal impact of $103.4 million over 10 years and a yearly attendance of 1.24 million a year, in this fantasy world. But the numbers for Scenario B seem to be just as much a fantasy. Under Scenario B it would have a $53 million impact, and create 400-500 fewer jobs, and have a yearly attendance of 871,000.

Well, wait…it’s not just the unlikeliness of Ham actually compromising on his fanatically rigid views, but how do you take a park with a gigantic centerpiece of a life-size version of Noah’s Ark and make it any less of a Flintstone Truth? Its fundamental premises are all based on biblical literalism!

Evolution is a Jewish conspiracy

The essay starts off stupidly enough.

In 1867 Karl Marx dedicated DasKapital to Charles Darwin.

Actually, no, he didn’t. It’s a fairly common lie in creationist circles, though, just like the others sprinkled throughout the story.

Modern creation science is led by an array of top-flight Ph.D. scientists, including biochemists, paleontologists, astronomers and geologists. It presents a formidable battery of evidence now knocking hundreds of holes in traditional evolutionary arguments. As never before, scientific creationism debunks the contrived “evidence” that evolutionary theory has fed on since Darwin.

No, it isn’t. Creation science is led by a gang of ignorant clods who can’t read a paper without mangling it.

But OK, so far this is just your standard modus operandi for creationists. The really weird stuff is shouted out in the title: JEWISH SUPREMACISTS USE EVOLUTION TO CORRUPT MANKIND. Did you know that evolution is a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt Western civilization?

Why doesn’t the scientific community abandon Darwin’s failed hypotheses? Simple: The Jewish-dominated media and educational establishment are determined that, like unconditional support of Israel, Holocaust mythology, hate laws, and “civil rights” favoritism, there will be no end to the relentless force-feeding of evolution. Belief in evolution is a prerequisite for Jewish supremacism’s new-world order.

Yet anti-Zionist leadership on the right remains oblivious to the fact that evolution is the largest, ugliest, most aggressive tentacle of the Jewish revolutionary octopus. Anti-Zionists are often evolutionists, claiming that Jews evolved in a way that makes them inherently degenerate, subversive, and corruptive. They make the most Luciferian, dehumanizing fable ever invented by pseudo-science into a pillar of their thinking!

The Reverend Ted Pike is kind of obsessed with Jews. They’re behind everything.

You see, the degenerate Jews promote evolution, which led the Nazis to kill Jews, and we must organize resistance to the Jewish agenda and the Judaic threat, and we absolutely must support Israel without question. Every paragraph drips with anti-semitic bigotry, but at the same time he rants against the wicked anti-Zionists.

I’ve seen this often in fundamentalist Christians. Jews aren’t really people; they’re just props in the script of their eschatology. We have to keep them around because the True Final Solution is for Jesus to exterminate most of them and convert the survivors, and if we jump the gun and kill them all now, why, that would invalidate the Bible, which would be wicked.

The problem we face today originates in Jewish rebellion to Christ. It is primarily a moral issue which cannot be addressed by dehumanizing Jews or violence. It must be met with reason and persuasion, even love. The Bible presents Jewish apostasy as part of a long-range scenario that will ultimately result in anti-Christ world rule but also redemption of a remnant of Jews out of great tribulation at Christ’s second coming. The problem of Jewish supremacism ultimately is Christ’s problem, to be resolved by Him, not military or persecutive measures.

This is why Adolf Hitler and the Nazis must be damned. Not because they killed people, but because they lead us into “anti-biblical, evolutionary, racist errors”. We must support Israel because it’s a kind of holding pen for the Jews, where they will be annihilated in Armageddon, and you’re a bad, bad person if you begin the slaughter prematurely.

Despite the fact that I don’t have any evidence of any Jewish background in my lineage, I do have to cop to being an ugly evolutionary tentacle, and there are most certainly Jews in my readership. Does it make you feel all warm and happy and safe to peek into the minds of some of the most ardent Christian supporters of Israel?

Synthese scandal makes the New York Times

You may recall the furious debate among philosophers about a philosophy journal, Synthese, that made a tacit rebuke of critics of Intelligent Design creationism in an editorial added after acceptance of a number of papers on ID; it’s not just that they caved to creationist pressure, but that the editors-in-chief went over the heads of the working editors who assembled that issue of the journal to criticize excellent work by rational philosophers like Barbara Forrest. There has been a boycott of the journal; links to various commentaries on the issue can be found on a status page.

Well now the furor has hit the big time, with a summary article in the New York Times.

It’s clear from that article what the problem is: Francis Beckwith, weasely creationist apologist, got his butt hurt by a discussion of his role as a public enabler of bad science. I have long rolled my eyes at every mention of Beckwith — he’s a disingenuous creationist who struggles mightily to pretend that he’s a serious scholar arriving at serious conclusions, despite the fact that his conclusions always agree with those of professional liars and academic frauds. Did Barbara Forrest call him out on his history of baloney? Yes, she did. Is this a problem in an academic journal? I should hope not.

Reactions from Kamloops

The Kamloops News has obligingly published a couple of reactions to my appearance in their fair city. There is a very abbreviated summary of what I discussed on Friday: Prof shoots holes in creationism. Yes, that’s about right. I specifically addressed the fallacies of Intelligent Design creationism.

Now, though, the editor of the newspaper, Mel Rothenburger, has responded: Name callers are just stupid. He begins with this:

I didn’t take in the presentation by American associate professor Paul “PZ” Myers, and I’m glad.

Gosh, I’m chastened already. He objects to the fact that I said creationists were “ignorant and stupid and don’t know anything about history,” facts which I backed up in the talk. Also, facts which were then confirmed in his very own paper, by publishing a letter from David Buckna, the same ignorant, ahistorical creationist I mentioned in a previous post. He showed up with a double-sided list in small print of his objections to evolution; his letter is titled Some questions for Prof. Myers, and it is nothing but the first couple of points from his list.

On May 6 professor of biology P.Z. Myers (University of Minnesota Morris) gave a public lecture (Evolution is True; Intelligent Design Isn’t) in Kamloops.

Questions for Prof. Myers:

Edward Blyth, English chemist/zoologist (and creationist), wrote his first of three major articles on natural selection in The Magazine of Natural History, 24 years before Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published. Why then, do evolutionists think of natural selection as Darwin’s idea?

Why do textbooks claim the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how the cell’s building blocks may have formed on the early Earth, when repeated experimentation has never demonstrated this claim? Efforts to replicate the supposed origin-of-life events have produced embarrassingly small amounts of cell building blocks (eg. trace amounts of amino acids, sugars) with the majority of the mixture being a toxic tar.

On page one of Richard Dawkins’ 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, he writes: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” If living things look designed, then how do evolutionists know they weren’t designed? What is the criterion for “apparent” design?

How does geology explain dinosaur bones with soft tissue, supposedly dated at “80 million years”? (Schweitzer et al, Science 324:626). Bones with red blood cells, including hemoglobin, and blood vessels, which are still elastic.

Most geologists believe diamonds formed deep below the earth’s surface, one to three billion years ago. How do these geologists explain the presence of carbon-14 in a number of diamond samples?

How does evolution explain non-winged pterosaurs gradually developing fully functional wings, with its long bony fourth finger?

These are the very same questions I answered to his face in a two-hour session after my talk. The Schweitzer reference is the same one he has been haranguing me about in email ever since. I already answered him, and here he is simply disingenously repeating the same questions as if I’d never heard of them before. He’s dishonest and contemptible; he’s fairly typical of creationists.

There are answers to his questions in the comments in the paper. I’m not going to bother, since Buckna has amply demonstrated that he’s not going to accept any answer, but will continue to parrot the same oft-answered objections over and over again.

The saga of Junk DNA

So you’re tantalized by this strange obsession creationists have with junk DNA. It offends them mightily, I think because they find comfort in the idea that everything in the universe must have a purpose, because if it doesn’t, maybe that means they are nothing more than spots of dandruff on a dead rock hurtling blindly through space, and we can’t have that then.

It’s true that the odious Jonathan Wells has written a whole book declaring that everything in the genome has a glorious function implicitly designed by his god, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Larry Moran has begun the process of dismantling Wells, with, so far, three posts critiquing his claims, all well worth reading.

Osama bin Laden disproves Darwin!

Oh, yeah…didn’t you know it was a crack team of Darwinist commandos who took out bin Laden, all to protect our secrets? David Klinghoffer doesn’t go quite that far, but he does demonstrate just how insane the gang at the Discovery Institute have gotten. After all, he does claim that Obama delayed the raid on Osama in order to promote creationism.

President Obama is said to have known the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden since September but chose to wait until May to authorize action against him. Why the delay? Could it perhaps have been to provide a super-timely news hook for the rollout of Jonathan Wells’ new book, The Myth of Junk DNA? If so, an additional note of congratulation is owed to Mr. Obama.

How do you think OBL’s body was identified? By a comparison with his sister’s DNA, evidently those non-coding regions singled out by Darwin defenders, among the pantheon of other mythological evolutionary icons, as functionless “junk.” Indeed, the myth has featured in news coverage of Osama’s death. Reports the website of business magazine Fast Company:

Because your parents give you some of their DNA, they also give your siblings some of the same genetic code — which is why sibling DNA tests work. They sometimes concentrate on areas of the genome called “junk DNA” which serves no biological function but still gets passed along to offspring. By testing for repeat strands of DNA code in these areas, it’s possible to work out if two individuals are related as siblings.

Uh, what? Wells is quite possibly the worst and most dishonest “scholars” employed by the Discovery Institute; I’ve been thinking of picking up a copy of his book simply because it will be hilariously bad. He won’t have shown the utility of junk DNA, but I’m pretty sure he will have do a silly dance while trying to justify his claims…rather like Klinghoffer here.

The reason junk DNA is useful for identification purposes is that it varies so much — it is subject to random change at a higher rate than coding DNA, because it is not subject to functional constraints. It’s been called a genetic fingerprint, and that’s a useful comparison. Think about your fingerprints: you can make a general argument that a pattern of ridges creates a texture useful for gripping, but it’s not important that there be a particular whorl or loop at a specific place. Junk DNA also lacks any specific function, but the analogy only breaks down because it also doesn’t seem to have much of a general function, given that some species like Fugu have lost significant quantities of it. The one purpose I find plausible is that, since cell growth is regulated by the ratio of cytoplasm to nuclear volume, adding junk can lead to an overall increase in cell size.

Somehow, the creationist incomprehension of the basic science is used to argue that evolution didn’t happen.

If Darwin is right, there ought to be huge swaths of ancestral garbage cluttering the genome, serving no purpose other than to identify otherwise unidentified forensic remains. So if those huge swaths turn out after all to be vitally important to the functioning organism, what does that say about Darwin’s theory? Ah, that’s exactly the question addressed in Jonathan Wells’ book.

Hang on. Darwin had no molecular biology and no genetics, knew nothing about DNA, and didn’t even know that chromosomes carried genetic information … he postulated the existence of migratory particles called gemmules that were the units of heredity (he was completely wrong, by the way). His claim to fame is discovering and documenting a mechanism that shapes adaptive heritability, and if anything, he thought selection ought to hone the heritable factors, whatever they were, to a high degree of optimality.

And now the creationists want to argue that junk DNA is a Darwinian prediction? They’ve totally lost the plot.

Explain this to me. Darwin, in their confused minds, claims that there ought to be lots of junk having no purpose other than to identify dead bodies. Junk DNA is used to identify a specific dead body, bin Laden’s. Therefore, Darwin is wrong. Even if I grant them their premise (which I won’t, because it is stupid), this doesn’t work.

Let’s see how many Darwin lobbyists have the guts and honesty to acknowledge that another icon has fallen. They have not, on the whole, left themselves a lot of room for deniability on this.

Gibbering lunatics like Klinghoffer and Wells are actually rather easy to deny.

A nefarious plan

Another tawdry semi-biblical cesspit has opened, the Creation Museum of the Ozarks. Of course it gets horrible reviews.

Then I looked it up. It’s located in Strafford, Missouri, which is a town 20 minutes away from Springfield.

Springfield. What do we think of when we hear Springfield, Missouri? No, not the Assemblies of God. We think…Skepticon. Hey, you know what that means…

ROAD TRIP. Make it so, Skepticon organizers. Set aside some time for a godless invasion of your local creation “museum”.