Inventing excuses for a Bible story, and getting them published in a science journal?

I sometimes teach a course in scientific writing, in which we instruct students in the basics of writing a paper: citing the literature, the conventions of the standard science paper (introduction, methods, results, discussion), all that sort of thing. We also discuss research topics and coming up with a reasonable rationale for doing the work, and “the instructor told me to do it” or “I like turtles” isn’t adequate — that one of the results of researching a topic should be the discovery of genuine problems that warrant deeper analysis. A science paper is a story, and it always begins with a good question.

I think I’m going to need to add another bad rationale to my list: “I like the Bible” isn’t justification for research. Although, I notice, there are a lot of people in the bureaucracy of science who don’t see it as an obstacle to funding or publishing research built on that premise.

A bad paper has been published in PLoS One. It’s competently executed within its narrow scope, as near as I can tell, but its premise is simply to reach for more pretense of a scientific basis for biblical fairy tales by an old earth creationist. It should have been rejected for asking an imaginary question and answering it with a fantasy scenario.

One summary catches the gist of the ‘research’.

The study is intended to present a possible scenario of events that are said to have taken place more than 3,000 years ago, although experts are uncertain whether they actually occurred.

Yeah, it’s a Christian using a computer simulation to try and justify the story of the parting of the Red Sea by Moses. And it’s pointless. If you read the paper, you’ll learn that under certain very specific conditions involving making up a bit of Middle Eastern topography, a strong wind can push shallow bodies of water sufficiently to temporarily exposed the floor. Woo hoo, I say, unenthusiastically. This is an utterly trivial result, and the paper doesn’t seem to have anything of general use to say.

The paper itself is a weird combination of transparency and disingenuousness. The title and the introduction are all about the dynamics of wind setdown, this phenomenon in which wind pressure can cause a drop in water level, but then throughout, the author describes the work exclusively in terms of explaining “a possible hydrodynamic explanation for Moses crossing the Red Sea”. And the author is also very open about declaring his interests:

Competing interests: The lead author has a web site, theistic-evolution.com, that addresses Christian faith and biological evolution. The Red Sea crossing is mentioned there briefly. The present study treats the Exodus 14 narrative as an interesting and ancient story of uncertain origin.

It’s a simple exercise in post-hoc rationalization of an unfounded event in a myth, gussied up as if it were science. It isn’t. It’s an invention of no utility, the kind of fantasy world-building that looks goofy even in fiction; and it’s going to be abused by religious nuts to argue that their superstitions are genuine.

It doesn’t even make sense from the perspective of a believer. So one of the great miracles of the Bible is being reduced to a meteorological fluke with an entirely natural explanation? It makes bible stories compatible with science by making the supernatural elements of the story completely irrelevant, which is nice if you’re an atheist, but only if you’re an atheist who is very gullible and willing to accept other elaborate prior premises.

It’s also troubling that this work actually got funded by NCAR and the Office of Naval Research. Why? I suspect that sympathetic Christians somewhere in the administration gave bad Christian research a pass that they wouldn’t have if, for instance, someone proposed doing simulations to determine the meteorological conditions that could loft a horse and Mohammed into the air, or exactly what confluence of geology and atmospheric effects could lead to the illusion of Thor tossing thunderbolts from a cloud.

And how is this garbage getting published in PLoS One? If a paper like this were plopped on my desk for review, I’d be calling the editor to ask if it was a joke. If it wasn’t, I’d laugh and reject it — there is no scientific question of any significance being addressed anywhere in the work. Is this representative of the direction PLoS is going to be taking, with low standards for acceptance and what had to have been nonexistent review?

A suggestion for Mr Drews, the author, who sounds like he is a software developer affiliated with a research institution: you aren’t a scientist, stop pretending to be one. I’ll also say the same thing I tell every creationist pseudoscientist who tries to resolve their mythical stories with unconvincing handwaving about science: it doesn’t work. We see right through you. Bad, overstretched technical justifications for miraculous events are even less persuasive than simply declaring “My omnipotent god did it with magic”.

SoCalians: you have a date for Saturday

The Institute for Creation Research has a “museum”, and they’re having an open house on Saturday, 25 September, from 9-5. I think it would be lovely if smart, science-minded people were to crash the event, either to politely protest outside of it, or quietly enter and offer rational commentary on the exhibits — your choice.

Here’s the address:

Creation and Earth History “Museum”
10946 Woodside Ave
Santee, CA

Send me accounts and pictures if you go!

John May vs. the Irish

That Irish crank who had a technology minister on his side had his book launch, and the Irish Atheists were there. It sounds like May was laughable.

While being filmed for a documentary about his book, the author says he was asked about Lucy and whether this discovery did not provide evidence for evolution. May dismissed it as a hoax, saying that it was made from a pig’s jawbone and that this was a well-known fact. At this early stage, this bizarre comment was mostly greeted with rolled eyes and suppressed giggles. As May continued presenting “facts” of this calibre, the objections from the audience were to become louder and more sustained.

I’m sure it was entertaining.

Out of consideration for your embarrassment, I’ll refrain from making rude comments about the Texas electorate

Revealing much about Texas education, Governor Rick Perry speaks out proudly about his state.

Texas is a national example of how to best prepare our children for higher education and the workplace.

Oh, really, Governor? Perhaps you could give us a specific example of a well-prepared Texas student?

I am a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect, and I believe it should be presented in schools alongside the theories of evolution.

Oh.

I think I know everything I need to know about the Texas educational system from just that. Thank you very much.

Astroturfing the scientific databases: spamming the lobster eye

The Encyclopedia of Life is a cool tool which is a sort of wikification of taxonomy — it allows a large number of contributors to add descriptions of species with the goal of eventually documenting all 1.8 million known species in a single searchable source. Look at the page for my experimental animal, Danio rerio; lots of information in a standard format with links and references. Thumbs up!

However, there’s a problem here: the sources. To organize that much data, a large mob of contributors are needed, and that means some fairly open policies to allow contributors have been instituted, and that in turn means that there will be parasites on they system. And a reader sent me an example of a doozy.

Take a look at the page for the order Decapoda. It has an oddly random article on the reflecting superposition eyes of lobsters up top.

A lobster’s eye works on a principle of reflection rather than that of refraction…The most outstanding characteristic of the lobster eye is its surface, which is composed of numerous squares…these squares are positioned most precisely.

It’s OK — it seems to be a rough and unhelpful paraphrase of a section of Michael Land’s wonderfully informative book, Animal Eyes, and it’s correct as far as it goes — lobster eyes do have an array of mirrored light guides that are square in section. The surprise is at the end, where it names the author: Harun Yahya. That’s right, the Turkish creationist. This is taken straight from one of his creationist ravings, where he discusses some amazing detail of biology and concludes that it couldn’t possibly have evolved because he, a wealthy playboy and former mental patient and convicted criminal now representing himself as the Islamic source of creation science, could not imagine it so.

How did Harun Yahya become a source on EoL?

The page links to its source and holder of the copyright on the article: it’s the Biomimicry Institute, an entirely credible educational source, with a specific page, the Ask Nature reference, which is, again, an open source resource with multiple contributors. And yes, there’s Harun Yahya stuffing articles in there.

I did a google search on a few of the phrases in the text, and whoa — it’s everywhere. Harun Yahya’s organization has been dumping this same bit of text, and others, in various of their own websites and also in just about any legitimate source that allows them to open an account and create public content, including Ask Nature and EoL. It has also been picked up by numerous creationist sites as well, all echoing the same unwarranted conclusion: this eye works really well, therefore it couldn’t have evolved.

Try googling for information on lobster eyes. It’s a mess. There are a few credible sources that appear on the first page, like Wikipedia, but for the most part it’s a smear of creationist sites.

I know, this is a truism: don’t trust the Net of Lies, learn to vet your sources, watch out for anything on the net. But it looks to me like the Turkish creationists have been waging a successful astroturf campaign to infiltrate sources that we would normally regard as pretty good, and are thereby corrupting sources even more. It also allows them to pass casual review because their articles are very widely sourced.

I hope the editors of various scientific web sites that allow open submissions will take a look at their collections, and purge them of anything from Harun Yahya. He is not a scientific source, he has absolutely no background in the sciences, and he mangles the information to serve his ideological goals. What he’s doing here is using repetition to make his name widely known, and parasitizing on the good name of some websites to falsely elevate his reputation. There’s a hobo on the train, people, and he’s pretending he’s a railroad executive.

Just in case you are wondering about those lobster eyes, they actually are extremely interesting, using reflecting mirrors instead of refracting lenses to focus light on photoreceptors. It’s not hard to see how they would work: to focus incoming light on a photoreceptor surface, we need to bend light to a target, and refraction or reflection can do the job.

Here’s Mike Land’s summary diagram of the process (and, incidentally, Animal Eyes is an excellent survey of the diversity of biological optics):

i-85911739de924305fffbd6eff8c87e59-lobstereye.jpeg

I don’t see how you can argue that the one on the right is evidence of creation, any more than the one on the left. Both take advantage of ordinary physical properties to focus an image on a retina.

The interesting phenomenon is the transition: the eye on the left is almost certainly the ancestral state, since some crustaceans have both kinds of eyes, and also they may have the refracting eye on the left in the early stages of development, and it then transforms into the mirrored eye…and we don’t have good evolutionary examples of the historical transition. That the eye can switch between two forms during development at least implies that no magic is necessary, though, so this may be an open question but it is not a question that requires the invention of a supernatural designer to answer.

How about the Irish Minister of State with special responsibility for pseudoscience?

This is John J. May. He has written a creationist book.

He’s a barmy, ignorant crank. I read the sample pages, and his big argument is from pregnancy and development (!) — he’s looked at it, superficially, and come away from it all dazzled at how complicated it all is, and that’s the entirety of his argument: it’s all too complicated.

Some people look at nature, marvel, and say that no one can comprehend it, therefore it must be magic. Other people look at nature, marvel, and say, “I think I can figure out how that works.” May is in the first category.

So, just another random kook on the internet with a self-published book promoting his own ignorance…with one odd twist. He’s having a launch party, and the big man doing the introductions is Conor Lenihan, the Irish Minister of State with special responsibility for Science, Technology, Innovation and Natural Resources.

Lenihan doesn’t seem to have any actual qualifications in science. I think he needs a change of title.

By the way, you can write to Lenihan and let him know what you think. Be nice — laughing at his foolishness will be more effective than snarling at him. It might be especially effective to write to the Irish Times or the Independent and let them know there is a local politician doing something stupid, which is always good entertainment.

I guess we were effective. Lenihan has withdrawn from the book launch.

Will the real Catholic please stand up?

Nominally, the Catholic church has no beef with evolution — they’ve got their own official twisted logic in which God did some invisible indetectable hocus-pocus somewhere in the documented evidence of evolution. Sometimes, though, that seems as thin and neglected as church doctrine on contraception. Here’s an article on catholic.org that is pure unadulterated creationism, flatly denying the facts of human evolution because it contradicts the Magisterium of the Church on original sin and our exclusive descent from Adam and Eve.

It’s unclear how this particular site is associated with the official Catholic church, but one thing should be clear: practicing Catholics seem to ignore official papal decrees fairly routinely, and there are a lot of creationist Catholics.

The other thing of note in this particular article is the blatant quote-mining going on. One mention is of this strange Jesuit I first heard of on the Larry King interview of Stephen Hawking, Robert Spitzer — this article makes him sound like he’s anti-evolution, and he actually is, but it’s in that waffling pettifogging traditional Catholic way of accepting the evidence but imagining a lot of god-diddling in the background.

What made me sit up and notice, though, is that in the opening paragraph, it cites John Tyler Bonner as a prominent scientist who questions evolution. Whoa. JT Bonner is the guy who got me excited about developmental biology when I was an undergraduate and picked up a copy of his On Development: The Biology of Form at the UW bookstore. He was a prominent supporter of evolution and against creationism in the 1960s. He wrote The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection, The Evolution of Culture in Animals, Life Cycles: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, and First Signals: The Evolution of Multicellular Development. And now they’re insinuating that he’s on the side of the creationists.

How stupid do they think their readers are?

I get email

It’s an unfortunate fact of google life that links to my criticisms of Kent Hovind pop up quite high in google listings, so I’m always getting these letters from pissed-off creationists who are shocked, shocked, shocked that there they are, innocently searching for information on their hero, when Pharyngula rises up and dares to criticize the great bible-thumping convicted tax cheat.

In addition to the usual incoherence and refusal to offer any scientific support for their position, these letters are usually marked by a rather sniffy attitude of offended sensibilities and surprise that web pages criticizing creationism actually exist. It must be scary to step outside the church.

Here’s the latest. I’ve put my impressions in red.

To whom this may concern; [this was sent to my personal email account; does he think a committee lives here?]

I had a look at your web site today and frankly can’t figure out [count me unsurprised] just what all

the uproar is concerning “scientists” such as yourself feeling that you have to
spend so much effort [it’s easy, I assure you] trying [trying?] to discredit Kent Hovind [he’s a convicted felon and phony with an unaccredited degree] and/or others in his field
the way that you do! If indeed he is the ignorant individual [yep] that you attempt to

[don’t ask me why he inserted these odd random line breaks]

portray him as, “writing like a fourth grader” [excuse me, that would be “second grader“] as you say, then why should you
waste such valuable research time slandering him? [it takes very little time to dismantle Hovind; why are you wasting your valuable time writing to me?]

My guess is, as I have watched this whole rairoading [he was convicted, and his own testimony and behavior indicted him] of him and his
organization

[mystery line breaks!]

come about, that individuals and groups for that matter with your particular
mind-set are either scared to death [he’s a worm, not a snake] of the debate [there is no debate] between creationism [bullshit] and
Darwinian evolution [science. We win!], or that you simply do not have the intellectual cahonas [??? Do you mean “cojones”?] to
engage creationists such as Mr. Hovind in any real truth [he has none to share]– revealing discourse
concerning the subject.

What are you afraid of? [ebola, senility, and bad clams]

I find it quite revealing indeed that when the “non-believers” in the world
bash Christians as a bunch of prudish [QFT], bible thumping [QFT], homophobic [QFT], hate
mongering [QFT] flat earthers [QFT] that nobody really seems to care [it’s the banality of a pedestrian truth]; in fact it has become
something of a national pass-time [???] it would seem. But!!!!! [are you wearing your underpants on your head?], suggest for a moment
that the so-called [what other scientific community is there?] scientific community has at the very least bought into a
theory that has been highly questionable at best since it’s inception [nope—enthusiastically embraced by the scientifically literate at its inception, and become more and more strungly supported since], and the
mobs are ready to light torches and take up their pitchforks! [personally, I prefer a cyber-pistol]

With all due respect [dishonest again], I find your tactic of attacking Mr. Hovind [I think it’s entirely appropriate to criticize tax cheats and creationists—why should he be exempt?], and on such
ridiculous grounds as his doctoral dissertation no less [it’s true, his dissertation was rather ridiculous], quite an immature
stretch to say the least [given that “Dr” Dino calls himself a degreed scientist on the basis of that thesis, examining its quality is entirely reasonable]. This is exactly the kind of thing [what? that we examine scholarly claims?] that tells me that
not all scientists are anywhere near to being the “rational thinkers” [I question the ability of Hovind fans to recognize such] that we’re

[another line break interlude]

always being reminded of in this God hating society [I wish] that we are living in.

Get some backbone about yourself sir and take a look at ALL the evidence [curious fact: these cranks are always telling me I missed some key evidence, but they never quite get to the point of telling me what it is], not
just the convenient parts as you and yours are so quick to accuse creationists
of doing. [instead of whining, you could have actually cited some evidence…but I think these jokers know I’ll joyfully tear their ‘facts’ apart]

Sincerely, W.C. Revere [email says “William McKinney”, but signs it “W.C. Revere”. Don’t play games, please.]

I get these fairly regularly. There’s some odd combination of oblivious hero-worship and total cluelessness about the internet in Kent Hovind fans that sparks a need to rage at me. I don’t reply, but I do feel like sending them links to Fark or /b/ just to wake them up a little more to the medium they’re using.