The Duggars are that creepy family paraded about on The Learning Channel — the ones with the swarm of kids. It’s a horrifying show, but in this episode, the nightmare is compounded by the fact that they visit the Creation “Museum” and even get a personal guided tour from freakishly dead-eyed Ken Ham. Only watch it if you like to torment yourself.
One other reason to watch it: they show enough of the “Museum” that you really don’t need to go there.
Do pity these poor kids, too.
Oh, this is a cunning ploy to foil pharyngulation: a whole page of creationist polls, thrown up like chaff to distract us so we won’t slam any one of them too hard. You can still play, though, and skew them some. Here are three:
Do you believe dinosaurs and humans ever lived at the same time?
No
45,21%
Yes
39,92%
Probably not
7,84%
They probably have.
7,03%
How old is the earth?
Billions of years
47,01%
Around 6000 years
35,26%
Closer to 10,000 years
8,40%
Millions of years
7,56%
Close to 100,000 years
1,77%
Do you believe that humans were created or that they evolved?
I believe humans were created as humans in the beginning by God.
51,56%
I believe humans evolved from ape-like creatures with no intervention by God.
33,09%
I believe something different from all the options above.
9,44%
I believe God created humans and then they evolved.
5,91%
Right now it looks like a third to half of all respondents picked the stupidest answer possible, which is quite an accomplishment.
I’m getting a flood of email from Israel. As one correspondent explains, Israel maintains three kinds of state-supported schools: one kind for the ultra-orthodox, because the state has always fostered freakishly fanatical ignorance among the lunatic subset, and these schools teach no science at all; a fully secular system, particularly in higher education, because Jews have also had a strong scholarly tradition, and Israel depends on material strategies for its survival, and these schools teach science very well; and a general intermediate kind of school where religion may be taught but science is also taught. That situation may be in peril now. Gavriel Avital, the chief scientist in the education ministry, has made a few statements that show he is a lunatic.
“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don’t believe the evolutionary account is correct,” Avital said yesterday.
“There are those for whom evolution is a religion and are unwilling to hear about anything else. Part of my responsibility, in light of my position with the Education Ministry, is to examine textbooks and curricula,” he said. “If they keep writing in textbooks that the Earth is growing warmer because of carbon dioxide emissions, I’ll insist that isn’t the case.”
Nobody has explained to me yet how such a putz got appointed in the first place, but this isn’t a good sign. The man is a freakin’ incompetent.
Prior to his appointment, Avital said in a video interview with Machon Meir, a religious-Zionist Jewish studies institute, “Another scientific field that is problematic is biology, or life and environmental sciences. When your doctrine is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution and its implications, you are standing on unreliable foundations – that is, there is no God, there was only something primeval, and then there are certain random developments which led to the apex of all creation, the human being.
“Today I am pleased that more and more scientists engaged in pure science, rather than being employed in the name of an ideology, are reaching the conclusion that the world must have a master. Nothing is given to chance,” he said. “These are my opinions and I won’t deny them just because I was appointed to an Education Ministry position.”
The chorus of outrage is already building among sensible scientists in Israel.
Yehoshua Kolodny, a professor emeritus at Hebrew University who won the Israel Prize for his contributions to the study of earth science, responded furiously to these statements yesterday.
“Denying evolution is like denying science itself,” Kolodny said.
“Evolution is not a theory, but an observation point that anyone can see. Perhaps Dr. Avital did not notice that throughout history, various species existed and then became extinct. In 2009, the entire world celebrated 200 years since the birth of Darwin and 150 years since the publication of his book ‘The Origin of the Species,'” he added.
“When a top scientist ignores these things, it’s a cultural calamity,” Kolodny said. “There are no disagreements among scientists regarding evolution. Catholics and Protestants long ago ended their war against evolution, and Avital is for all intents and purposes joining the radical fringe of evangelicals in the United States.”
I have to disagree with Dr Kolodny on one thing: Catholics and Protestants are still fighting over evolution in the US. Apparently some Jews are simply joining them now, parroting the same drivel that had its origins in fundamentalist/evangelical Protestantism.
Still, let’s add a few international voices to that chorus. Write to tluna@education.gov.il and politely suggest that Gavriel Avital is clearly not the right man for the job.
The freethought community is grieving at the loss of Helen Kagin, and Ken Ham, petty whiner that he is, has decided to complain about her obituary.
We found it unfortunate that someone took this sad time as an opportunity to take a shot at the Creation Museum in an obituary. And sad, too, that some of the information was not correct. There were not hundreds at the protest rally outside the gates of the Creation Museum when it opened–we counted perhaps 70 people. Also it was not so “peaceful,” considering that the protestors brought in a loud rock band to disrupt our opening day, and also rented a plane to circle and buzz the museum for a few hours, dragging a banner stating: “Thou shalt not lie.”
She was one of Ken Ham’s many enemies, so I could understand a little fist-shaking…but this is so piously hypocritical. He finds it unfortunate that someone would snipe at the idiocy of his “museum” in an obituary, but doesn’t seem to find it at all unfortunate that he has chosen to snipe at the deceased.
And that’s without even the standard Christian snideness of opening up his complaint by pointing out how sad it is when someone dies…but at least Christians get to live forever in the “arms of the Lord and Savior”! I’ve run into more than a few Christians like that, who find their joy in the misfortune of others amplifed by the fact that not only are they dead, but they’re burning in hell, unlike his or her prospects.
Although I do find some personal satisfaction that Ken Ham is seething in this life over the contempt the Kagins have frequently expressed for Ham’s follies.
Unfortunately, these stats don’t look much different from what we’d get in Minnesota.
I’ve got my hands on a strange paper by D Kanduc: “Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments”. Here’s the abstract.
Discovering the informational rule(s) underlying structure-function relationships in the protein language is at the core of biology. Current theories have proven inadequate to explain the origins of biological information such as that found in nucleotide and amino acid sequences; an ‘intelligent design’ is now a popular way to explain the information produced in biological systems. Here, we demonstrate that the information content of an amino acid motif correlates with the motif rarity. A structured analysis of the scientific literature supports the theory that rare pentapeptide words have higher significance than more common pentapeptides in biological cell ‘talk’. This study expands on our previous research showing that the immunological information contained in an amino acid sequence is inversely related to the sequence frequency in the host proteome.
What? This is an intelligent design paper? How interesting. Unfortunately, the abstract is wrong, and ‘intelligent design’ is not a popular way to explain information in biological systems, and I read through the whole thing, and missed the part where it actually supports ID.
Here’s what the paper actually does: it dissects a sample protein and asks about the frequency of its components in the proteome. It looks specifically at calmodulin (CaM), an important and highly conserved protein that is involved in all kinds of developmental and physiological interactions. The rather arbitrary unit the protein is broken down into is 5 amino acid chunks, or pentapeptides, and each pentapeptide sequence is searched for in genes other than CaM. If this is the initial sequence of CaM,
MADQLTEE…
Then what Kanduc does is search the proteome for MADQL, ADQLT, DQLTE, etc., and count the number of times each appears. Rare pentapeptides are equated with high information content, and common ones are assigned low information content. Some pentapeptides, in his analysis, are found only in CaM, while others are found multiple times, with an average of 12 occurrences. This is supposed to be significant.
It’s also where he loses me. If you search a completely random string of amino acids for an arbitrary pentapeptide, it should turn up, on average, once in every 3,200,000 amino acids. If you search a long enough chunk of amino acid sequence, one that’s long enough to generate on average 12 hits, what you’d expect to see is a bell-shaped distribution — some pentapeptides may appear only once, while others appear dozens of times, just by chance. And that is what Kanduc sees. That some pentapeptides are unique to CaM is perhaps not too surprising, especially when you consider that the proteome is not a random sequence at all, but the product of frequent gene duplications and is also refined by selection.
So far, this idea that some pentapeptides will be rare and others common, is utterly uninteresting and unsurprising. I would have liked to have seen some consideration of the null hypothesis, that the distribution is due to chance alone, but that seems to be totally lacking. If I’d been reviewing the paper, I would have sent it back with a request for revisions to consider that possibility.
However, Kanduc does propose something that actually is interesting: that the rare pentapeptide sequences in specific genes also correlate with regions that have important functional roles.
Using the CaM features, attributes and annotations reported at www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P62158, we find that modification sites, structural beta strand motifs, functional domains, and epitopic determinants are confined primarily to areas of low similarity with the human proteome.
Now that’s kind of cool, if true. It’s also a bit unsurprising. He does examine the length of the CaM protein and show that rare pentapeptide regions are also sites for for acetylation, ubiquitylation, and phosphorylation, and also at the calcium binding site, for instance; but these are functional regions of the protein where one would expect some selection for specific properties. We get a different analysis, in which naturally occurring pentapeptide fragments that are known to have significant biological activity are searched for in the human proteome, and found to be fairly rare. Again, this might be an expected result explained by selection — after all, a sequence that can trigger apoptosis might be expected to be confined by selection to a limited range of sites — and don’t seem to me to require postulating an intelligent designer.
As a paper that hints at some possible functional correlations in the proteome, it’s mildly diverting. It’s weak in that it doesn’t address the null hypothesis very well — I get the impression the author is more interested in fishing for correlations than in actually testing his hypothesis. Where it starts triggering alarm bells, though, is the shoutout to creationists. Kanduc says this about CaM:
…the CaM sequence is characterised by both specificity and complexity (what information theorists call ‘specified complexity’); in other words, it has ‘information content’.
Uh-oh. “Specified complexity” is a meaningless phrase; the creationists have not defined how to measure “specification”. In this case, Kanduc hasn’t either, and his criterion for calling it “specified complexity” is that CaM has various functional domains, which is kind of expected for a protein that has functions. I find it interesting, too, that he doesn’t provide a citation for his claim — Dembski doesn’t get an acknowledgment. Probably because it would be a too-obvious hint about where in looney-land this idea is coming from, and because Dembski doesn’t bother to explain how to calculate “specified complexity” either.
Also, there’s something suspicious about the phrasing there — it seems to be straight out of Meyer 2000:
Systems that are characterized by both specificity and complexity
(what information theorists call “specified complexity”) have
“information content”.
Hmmmmm. (Thanks to Blake Stacey for picking up on that identity.)
Another problem with the paper is the conclusion, which is some unholy amalgam of a dog’s breakfast and a word salad, and either way is grossly unappetizing.
Researchers in the fields of biology and immunology need to define objective informational entities and reductionist basic laws that are valid everywhere and for everything. As new objects and scientific laws are absorbed into experimental protocols and reports, abstract terms such as “sense”, “edit”, and “attack” as well as old dogmas such as the self/non-self dichotomy will become obsolete in favour of more intelligible and concrete theories and biological activities. This process will enable the effective translational application of science to medicine.
What the heck does that mean? What does it have to do with the rest of the paper? Again, if I’d been reviewing it, that would have gone back with a recommendation to delete the gobbledygook and write a conclusion that actually makes sense in the light of the rest of the paper.
What we have here is yet another case of poor reviewing and editing. There is a germ of an interesting observation in the work that the author fails to examine critically and convincingly, but the main intent seems to be to inject the words “intelligent design” into a reviewed scientific paper (while failing to justify why that is a useful hypothesis) and for the author to ride some obscure immunological hobbyhorse which is also not addressed by any of the data. It’s remarkably sloppy work that should have been sent back for extensive revision, rather than being published as is.
I do notice that it was received at Peptides on 20 January, and then bounced back and accepted after what must have been only minor revisions only two weeks later. The journal is commendably fast in its turnaround, but this looks like a case where haste just churned up the garbage a bit more.
Kanduc D. Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments, Peptides (2008), doi:10.1016/j.peptides.2010.02.003
Hussain is an eighth grade science teacher in North Carolina who was getting harrassed by bible-thumping students in her classroom — harrassment that was apparently encouraged by their red-necked ignorant parents. The kids were giving her Bibles and Jesus postcards and reading Bibles instead of doing their classwork, and seemed to have enjoyed flaunting their dumb-ass religiosity at her. So she vented on Facebook. The parents got indignant that she would dare to express her unhappiness with their darling little children, and are pressing to have her fired — but the curious thing is that the only comments they quote all seem reasonable and moderate.
Hussain wrote on the social-networking site that it was a “hate crime” that students anonymously left a Bible on her desk, and she told how she “was able to shame” her students over the incident. Her Facebook page included comments from friends about “ignorant Southern rednecks,” and one commenter suggested Hussain retaliate by bringing a Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster to class with a swastika drawn on the NASCAR driver’s forehead.
Notice that other people are making rude comments about the Bible-thumpers (and I feel the same way), not the teacher. That was the worst they could find? That she rejects religious harrassment and shamed her students to get them to stop doing it?
Here are some more atrocities from her Facebook page.
Parents said the situation escalated after a student put a postcard of Jesus on Hussain’s desk that the teacher threw in the trash. Parents also said Hussain sent to the office students who, during a lesson about evolution, asked about the role of God in creation.
On her Facebook page, Hussain wrote about students spreading rumors that she was a Jesus hater. She complained about her students wearing Jesus T-shirts and singing “Jesus Loves Me.” She objected to students reading the Bible instead of doing class work.
But Annette Balint, whose daughter is in Hussain’s class, said the students have the right to wear those shirts and sing “Jesus Loves Me,” a long-time Sunday School staple. She said the students were reading the Bible during free time in class.
“She doesn’t have to be a professing Christian to be in the classroom,” Balint said. “But she can’t go the other way and not allow God to be mentioned.”
I think teachers have a right to complain when their students and their students’ parents spread rumors and are disruptive in class. And yes, singing “Jesus Loves Me” during science class is inappropriate, a waste of time, and a transparent attempt to taunt the teacher. I also doubt that there is such a thing as “free time” in a science class: more likely, they’re given time to work as individuals or groups on classwork, and reading their Bible is not getting their work done. Eighth grade science class is not Sunday School, although I guess some retrograde retard might understandably confuse the two.
And of course Hussain is getting no support.
Thomas and Jennifer Lanane, president of the Wake County chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators, said she wasn’t aware of the details of the Hussain case, but said that teachers need to be careful about information they put online.
“We are public figures,” Lanane said. “We are held to a higher standard.”
Quit your jobs, Lananes. You should be ashamed. Stand up for the educators you supposedly represent; I do hold teachers to a higher standard, a standard that involves honesty and integrity and service to their discipline. The Lananes know nothing about this case, but are willing to throw a teacher who struggled with a classroom of militant morons to the wolves. Idiots who confuse “held to a higher standard” with refusing to challenge their students or bowing to community pressure, instead of to being forthright and outspoken, are the peril here.
I support Melissa Hussain. She sounds like a fine teacher who made entirely appropriate responses in a difficult situation, and I want more teachers who are willing to oppose the willful stupidity of communities full of science-hating throwbacks who want to impose Sunday School ‘rigor’ on science education.
Without hesitation, I can tell you who the most contemptible, repulsive creationist I know is: he tops even Ray Comfort and Ken Ham in the pantheon of creationist liars for Jesus. It’s the otherwise negligible Sal Cordova, a whiny little nobody with no talent and no reputation other than his ability to cobble up some of the most disgusting innuendo. His latest achievement is to tie the murders by Amy Bishop to evolution; he’s found that Bishop is named in the list of supporters of the Clergy Letter Project, which means he gets to sneer a bit.
Amy Bishop was charged in the murder of several people recently. Now, there are some very fine Darwinists like Francis Collins, and I don’t mean to say Amy Bishop is representative of all Darwinists. But I’d recommend that if the Clergy Letter Project wishes to put on a good face for Darwinism, they might consider disassociating themselves from Amy Bishop.
They may not want to promote “survival of the fittest” in their sermons today. That would be kind of poor taste in light of the fact a presumed societal degenerate (Bishop) is the “fittest” survivor while 3 (possibly 4) innocent victims are the “unfit” dead.
As if the preachers were going to endorse Bishop’s actions from the pulpit; as if evolutionary biologists anywhere promote the kind of simplistic ruthless extermination that Cordova fantasizes over as the only possible fitness strategy. All we learn from his nasty little dig at evolution is that he doesn’t understand it — he does have some competition from Ray Comfort in the stupidity department — and that he’s willing to capitalize on a tragedy to make a fallacious argument against science.
And, as usual, he loves to make the out-of-context quote from Charles Darwin, in this case, the phrase “How I did enjoy shooting,” taken from
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. As if Charles liked to open fire on his rivals and climb to eminence on the corpses of his competitors. Here, by the way, is the full quote in context; he was an enthusiastic sportsman who liked hunting game, and would have been sick with disgust at the thought of shooting people.
I kept an exact record of every bird which I shot throughout the whole season. One day when shooting at Woodhouse with Captain Owen, the eldest son, and Major Hill, his cousin, afterwards Lord Berwick, both of whom I liked very much, I thought myself shamefully used, for every time after I had fired and thought that I had killed a bird, one of the two acted as if loading his gun, and cried out, “You must not count that bird, for I fired at the same time,” and the gamekeeper, perceiving the joke, backed them up. After some hours they told me the joke, but it was no joke to me, for I had shot a large number of birds, but did not know how many, and could not add them to my list, which I used to do by making a knot in a piece of string tied to a button-hole. This my wicked friends had perceived.
How I did enjoy shooting! But I think that I must have been half-consciously ashamed of my zeal, for I tried to persuade myself that shooting was almost an intellectual employment; it required so much skill to judge where to find most game and to hunt the dogs well.
Slimy Sal repels me, so I’ll leave it to Allen MacNeill to take his post apart.
Sal, what precisely is the point of this post? It seems to me you are making the following assertions:
A1) Amy Bishop is a member of the consultant group for the Clergy Letter Project
A2) Amy Bishop is alleged to have murdered three of her colleagues and seriously injured three others by shooting them
A3) Charles Darwin indicated that he enjoyed shooting (target unspecified)
There appears to be considerable evidence in support of these assertions. However, it is also clear that your intention in making these assertions is the following:
I1) Amy Bishop is an evolutionary biologist
I2) Evolutionary biologists enjoy shooting
I3) Some evolutionary biologists enjoy shooting their colleagues to death
And from this you appear to be strongly suggesting the following conclusion:
C1) The practice of the science of evolutionary biology predisposes people to commit murder by shooting their colleagues to death.
It is a matter of simple historical record that many of the regular commentators at this website agree with something very similar to C1. Indeed, they waste no opportunity to state it as an incontrovertible fact, and cite this “fact” as a reason to reject the methodology, conclusions, and (by implication) the character of the practitioners of evolutionary biology, and especially Charles Darwin.
Let me therefore construct an exactly equivalent line of “reasoning”:
A4) Andrea Yates was a member of a Christian worship group led by the itinerant Christian preacher, Michael Peter Woroniecki
A5) Andrea Yates was convicted of murdering her five children by drowning them in a bathtub
A6) John the Baptist indicated that he enjoyed submerging sinners in water
Again, there appears to be considerable evidence in support of these assertions. Using the line of reasoning you seem to be promoting here, it would be equally “reasonable” to make the following inferences:
I3) Andrea Yates is a Christian
I4) Christians enjoy submerging people in water
I5) Some Christians enjoy murdering their children by drowning them
You should therefore be very willing to accept the following conclusion:
C2) Christianity predisposes people to murder their children by drowning them.
Please correct me if I have somehow misconstrued your intentions here. Also, please explain how your training in science and scientific reasoning leads you to make arguments of this form.
And,while you’re at it, please let me know how you can look at your own reflection in the mirror after making arguments like this.
We can always play the guilt by association game…in this case, the nastiest person I know is Sal Cordova, a creationist, therefore creationists are all people with no sense of common decency.
Shorter Ken Ham: Other museums have dinosaur models with saddles, so why does everyone pick on my “museum”?. Ham seems to have been scrambling to save face by finding a few other places that put out exhibits of dinosaurs with saddles, but he, as usual, misses the point.
Yes, other places will display dinosaurs as fun exhibits for the kids, and I have no problem with that. The natural history museum at the University of Utah had a talking dinosaur out front — throw a coin in its mouth, and it would roar and thank you for your donation, and my kids were always pestering me for my spare change. That’s fine; they knew it was for fun, and when you went upstairs, you saw serious displays of real fossils with accurate ages and relationships posted by them, and no one argued that they could talk, or that people coexisted with them, or that they could be saddled and ridden.
Ken Ham doesn’t do that. Right after he blubbers that he is being unfairly mocked, this is what he has to say:
By the way, we do believe that dinosaurs and humans have co-existed; I am only pointing out here how these evolutionists can be inconsistent–and also misrepresent what is in our Creation Museum. The Minnesota professor we mentioned above knows that our saddled dinosaur is in a children’s play area and is not a museum exhibit. Even though there is a sign next to the sculpted dinosaur that says it is only for children to get on (“wear and tear” is lessened that way), this atheist professor–consistent with his belief that he lives in a universe without purpose and standards of any kind–felt that he could disregard the child-only sign (even after he signed an agreement–drafted by the tour leader of his atheist group–that he would obey the museum’s policies rules).
Kenny baby. That’s the thing: your “museum” pretends, in defiance of all the credible evidence, that dinosaurs and humans co-existed. That’s what makes your whole preposterous edifice a great big joke — not that you have kiddie rides, but that the dinosaur with a saddle is so perfectly emblematic of the whole Creation “Museum” experience. That’s what makes this picture funny.
(Thanks to Steve O’Kane for the cleaned-up, polished version of this image)
We aren’t laughing at the dinosaur with a saddle, Ken. We’re laughing at you, and the fact that you are so oblivious to the absurdity.
That sad creationist, Professor Dendy, has been banned from this site, but he still rails against us in prolific obsession from his website. His latest diatribe is irresistible — he claims that atheists can’t handle the truth, and you’ll be surprised to learn that the “truth” is that Charles Darwin denied the efficacy of natural selection. “Oh, really,” you might ask, “He’s not going to trot out the hoariest old quote mine in the universe to back that up, is he?” And the answer is that yes, he certainly is. I had to laugh aloud. This is only second in the list of ridiculous but common claims made by creationists (first, of course, being “if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”).
He thinks he’s got us up against the wall with the terrifying truth of the complexity of the eye.
The truth of the matter is that even Charles Darwin himself said it would be absurd to think that the complex eye could been formed by natural selection.
Then he lists a few eyeball facts just to make us squirm. I’m sorry, Professor Dendy, but someone else has done this with far more detail and style than you ever had. I give you the inestimable William Paley, who made the same argument 208 years ago.
Were there no example in the world, of contrivance, except that of the eye, it would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator. It could never be got rid of; because it could not be accounted for by any other supposition, which did not contradict all the principles we possess of knowledge; the principles, according to which, things do, as often as they can be brought to the test of experience, turn out to be true or false. Its coats and humours, constructed, as the lenses of a telescope are constructed, for the refraction of rays of light to a point, which forms the proper action of the organ; the provision in its muscular tendons for turning its pupil to the object, similar to that which is given to the telescope by screws, and upon which power of direction in the eye, the exercise of its office as an optical instrument depends; the further provision for its defence, for its constant lubricity and moisture, which we see in its socket and its lids, in its gland for the secretion of the matter of tears, its outlet or communication with the nose for carrying off the liquid after the eye is washed with it; these provisions compose altogether an apparatus, a system of parts, a preparation of means, so manifest in their design, so exquisite in their contrivance, so successful in their issue, so precious, and so infinitely beneficial in their use, as, in my opinion, to bear down all doubt that can be raised upon the subject.
William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 1802
Oh, gosh…Paley and Dendy, double-teaming us with two-century-old opinions. However shall we cope?
This really is an old and moldy argument. Charles Darwin dealt with it effectively 150 years ago, and I strongly urge Dendy to read beyond the first sentence he quoted, since from the second sentence on he shows that the supposition is false.
Just to be sure no one misses it, I’ve included the entirety of the section from Chapter VI, “Difficulties of the Theory: Organs of extreme Perfection and Complication” below the fold. The point of his argument is not, “Oh, no, selection fails!” but “Oh, look — selection can explain even these organs that seem absurdly complex.”
