Way, way back on 16 July, I got a letter from the Discovery Institute.

Dear Dr. Myers:

I am writing to ask if you have plans to review Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s new book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne). I would be happy to ask Dr. Meyer’s publisher to send you a review copy.

I know you are busy but if you can get back to me about this, including any thoughts or comments you may have, I will grateful.

Sincerely,

Janet Oberembt
Assistant to Dr. Meyer
Discovery Institute

Oh, great, I thought — I know what kind of drivel Meyer was going to include in this book, just more of the same argument from ignorance and ‘ooh, isn’t it complicated’. I feel obligated to keep up with the creationist literature, though, and you never know — maybe someday they’ll come up with an original idea. So I replied, said yes, thank you, and gave Ms Oberembt my address. She wrote back promptly.

Thank you and I’ll send the request by email this evening.

No review copy ever arrived.

It’s going on 6 months. I’ve talked to a few other creationist critics who also received the offer of a review copy — no one has gotten one. How interesting. I almost certaintly would have bought a copy when it first came out, but held off because I thought one would be arriving in the mail any time now. They haven’t got any novel arguments for their case, but at least they’ve come up with new ways to temporarily stall their critics.

This is just like the movie studios, when they’ve got a clunker of a film on their hands: don’t let the reviewers get sight of it, make sure you’ve got only friendly audiences to see pre-screenings, and then, of course, push only positive reviews.

Yes, the Discovery Institute is also doing that: the creationists are running a push campaign to jack up the positive reviews of the book on Amazon. That’s an old and familiar trick.

I suppose I’ll have to read that 600 page pile of slop sometime…maybe in January. I’m going to be giving a whole series of talks on evolution and creationism at the end of that month, and maybe I’ll be able to squeeze in a section on just Meyer.

Now everyone can read it: Kent Hovind’s thesis from Patriot University has been scanned and put on the web. Remember to breathe now and then when you’re laughing that hard.

Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I have been a high school science teacher since 1976. I’ve been very active in the creation/evolution controversy for quite some time.

He writes like a second-grader, and I haven’t quoted the Christian ravings from it.

(via Kill the Afterlife)

Tim Lambert of Deltoid is discussing a book about climate denialism on FDL. I quite enjoyed his putdown of the ubiquitous Viscount Monckton, and also this familiar joke:

Question: What’s the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?

Answer: A used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

The point he’s making is that there are two broad categories of denialists, the ones who are sincerely nuts (like Monckton) and the ones know better but are lying to make a profit for their cause (like the odious Steve Milloy).

I wish I could make that distinction in my personal choice of targets in the denialist clan, the creationists. I think they are all, as far as I know, personally convinced of the truth of their position and are entirely sincere. That even goes for the most reprehensibly dishonest ‘scholar’ of the bunch, Jonathan Wells, who got a Ph.D. in developmental biology and should know better…but everything I’ve read by him has led me to the conclusion that he is also profoundly stupid. He makes the errors he does because he wants to, but also because he floated through a degree program without ever thinking or learning anything.

That’s the catch with the religious motivation: it couples evangelism with willful ignorance so efficiently that you can’t really separate the tangle and assign intent to their misrepresentations.

…and don’t get into an argument with Aron Ra about creationism.

Oh, when will we learn? Michael Shermer and Donald Prothero duked it out with a pair of Discovery Institute charlatans recently, to predictable results: the creationists cried victory afterwards. It simply doesn’t matter that they had no evidence.

Anyway, a couple of things struck me as too typical in these affairs.

• The creationists changed the topic the morning of the debate, from the general “Origins of life” to the “Adequacy of Neo-Darwinian natural selection and mutation to explain the origin of life”, which already skews the subject. It’s amazing how common it is for creationists to pull this tactic of shifting the goalposts the day of the game. It’s also surprising how often we let them get away with it.

• Despite their change of topic, the creationists ignored it! One guy yammered on about “information,” despite not understanding it; the other made the impossibility of whale evolution the centerpiece of his argument. Whale evolution is cool, but it’s a fact…and note that there were no whales around at the time of the origin of life.

• As usual, our side is all about the evidence. Their side is all about rhetoric and appeals to biases. Guess which side fares best in the debate format? It’s even true in their books: note that Meyer’s book is subtitled, DNA and the Evidence of Intelligent Design, and he couldn’t gasp out any evidence at all for their theory, which they cannot even state.

Oh, well. We’re game, at least, and willing to charge into their playing field no matter how much they have to stack the odds against us. Now if only they would try to do likewise…but of course, they can’t. They’ve got nothin’.

And all I take away from it is that Comfort is as sleazy as I thought. You may have heard that he has retracted his banana argument; not true, as you’ll discover, he’s kind of waffled around objections to it, but he still thinks the banana is an argument against evolution. He also denies that he makes a lot of errors when talking about science. Comfort is the fellow who made this claim:

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through “asexuality” (“without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”). Each of them split in half (“Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).”

It’s not only historically false, but is a complete misrepresentation of what the science says about the evolution of sex.

It’s good that Hemant got him to say a few things that testify to his dishonesty, but I would have liked to have seen him squirm some more.

One of the most common strategems for reconciling evolution and the Bible that I’ve run into is the Day-Age hypothesis, the claim that each of the seven ‘days’ of the book of Genesis represents one of God’s days, which doesn’t have to be 24 hours long, but could be millions or billions of years instead. All you have to do is stretch the timescale of Genesis to fit the geological timescale, and voilà, it’s a perfect metaphorical description of the very same processes science has described. Why, those old Hebrews couldn’t have known all that geology and astronomy, therefore they must have received insider information from their creator.

Believe me, I’ve heard it a thousand times, and I’m not exaggerating when I say they claim it was impossible for the authors of the Bible to have known all that information that lines up so precisely with our modern understanding of the universe’s origins. Really. Would I lie to you? The Washington Post has a perfect example in a short piece by the biologist Andrew Parker (who we have encountered before). He actually has respectable credentials in the field, has written an interesting (but terribly flawed) book about the Cambrian explosion, and is definitely not a young earth creationist. Those guys are deeply crazy.^* Which, when you look at how nutty Parker’s views are, means that we haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of derangement of which these people are capable yet.

I recently volunteered to place the creation account of Genesis 1 side-by-side with our new scientific understanding of the history of life and the universe. Excepting the absurd fiction that the world was created in seven days, I found an eerily-close match. Amazingly, the precise wording of the Bible’s first page, and the events inferred and the sequence with which they are placed, tells the story of life’s history according to our current best scientific understanding. That a man without scientific knowledge , should write such a thing in 700 BCE is almost scary. And then another man of similar stock placed it on the first page of his people’s most important book. This is what I call a genesis enigma.

On the Bible’s first page ‘Let there be light’ is mentioned twice, why? Recently science has provided answers in both physics and biology — the formation of the sun followed by the introduction of vision — and I played some scientific role in the second.

In Genesis 1, emphasis is placed on sea creatures, despite this biblical author being landlocked with little or no knowledge of marine life. Who in their right mind would have placed these center stage? The more I looked, the more the Genesis creation story seemed unlikely to be the result of a lucky guess. That got me thinking a few winters ago.

Are those words really sacred, in some way? As a scientist not in the habit of contemplating the divine, I was later surprised to discover within religion some good old rationality.

No, Genesis 1 does not line up with reality. Try it yourself.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.	Day 1 God makes heaven and a formless earth, and light and dark, apparently in that order. This isn’t right. The earth is a relatively late arrival; there was roughly 9 billion years between the Big Bang and the accretion of the earth. That’s a mighty big gap, and a false statement in the very first sentence. Now if it said, “God created matter and energy,” maybe then it would fit. I don’t get all the “waters” stuff. The early earth wasn’t covered in water.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.	Day 2 God creates heaven by separating waters. Again, water all over the place. This doesn’t fit any physical explanation for the history of the universe or the earth. Note that what is being described here is an aquatic universe in which god creates a solid firmament to separate the earth and its atmosphere from a great watery ocean in which it is floating; this isn’t your modern astronomy by any stretch of the imagination.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.	Day 3 God raises up the land on a watery earth, and then he creates trees and grasses. Again, flowering plants and grasses are late arrivals in the history of life on earth. Grasses arose in the Cretaceous and flourished in the Neogene; angiosperms evolved in the Jurassic. This puts them well after fish (day 5), for instance.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.	Day 4 Finally, God gets around to making the sun and the moon and the stars. You are all aware that these astronomical objects preceded the appearance of life, I presume?
20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.	Day 5 God creates everything that flies in the air and lives in the water. Isn’t this just a little weird? It’s a distinction entirely by habitat, ignoring the fact that whales, for instance, first evolved on the land and then moved into the sea. Birds are also more late arrivals on the evolutionary scene. Most important: squid are completely neglected in this scheme. Apparently, they are just random members of the lumpeninvertebrata, snapped into existence as part of a great sushi gemisch, and not even worth mentioning. Blasphemy!
24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.	Day 6 God creates terrestrial animals, and people. The people are put in charge. It’s a rather shameful compression of time. After all, the first terrestrial animals (something like the trigontarbid fossils from about 440 million years ago) preceded humans by about, oh, 440 million years. I guess they were wandering about masterless for a great long time.
God slacked off on the seventh day, so we’ll ignore it.

And don’t even get me started on Genesis 2, in which a male human is created first, and all the other animals afterwards, and a woman was an afterthought.

Parker is way off base — there is no way to line up Genesis with any modern, scientific history of the universe. Why, it looks to me like raw guesswork building on a Middle Eastern oral and written tradition that had no privileged information about cosmology at all!

Parker’s other assertions are way off, too. He has a bit of an obsession with the evolution of vision, so what he’s trying to claim is that what is being described is first the physical creation of light on Day 1, and then Day 4 is a metaphor for the evolution of vision, which allowed creatures to see the light. Which doesn’t make sense. There were no creatures with eyes on Day 4, just a lot of plants sitting in the dark waiting an indeterminate time (but more than 24 hours) for some way to photosynthesize.

I’d be more impressed if the Old Testament scribes had written, “And lo, on the fourth day, God created opsin and G proteins, and enabled a primitive signal transduction pathway, and God called the signal transduction pathway vision, and God saw that it was good.” That would be scary accuracy. “God poofed the Moon into existence and stuck it to the firmamement with a handy pushpin,”, not so impressive.

And what the heck is Parker smoking that he thinks this text puts emphasis on sea creatures, placing them center stage? They get one clause in one sentence on Day Five, the only ones specifically mentioned are whales, and they’re sharing billing with birds!

I think Andrew Parker is going to have to be my favorite example of an intelligent, educated man who has been totally god-whacked into madness by religion, seeing stuff in texts that is simply not there.

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^*By the way, talking to the ordinary creationist, the kind of person you might bump into the coffee shop, you will sometimes find ones who endorse the Day-Age theory. I’ve even encountered a few grad students who use it to reconcile their beliefs with science. However, by far the most common kind of creationist haunting our country today is the young earth creationist, who dispenses with all that conciliatory fol-de-rol and simply declares science completely wrong in its interpretations and that the earth is literally and actually less than ten thousand years old and that God did it all in precisely six 24 hour days. This has been a trend; anecdotally, I’ve found the YECs are much more common and much more arrogant in their beliefs now than, say, twenty years ago. It’s what Answers in Genesis promotes, after all.

For the sake of completeness, I’ll mention that another way to reconcile the Bible with an old earth is the Gap Theory. This idea states that there is an undescribed gap in the history of Genesis 1, right after “God created the heaven and earth”, in which the earth was riven with catastrophe and chaos, when there were fallen angels and giants and dragons fighting against the legions of heaven, and during which geology happened. This sounds like a very fascinating period that would make a great fantasy novel, but it didn’t involve humans, so God didn’t think we’d be interested…so he starts with the restoration of order and the creation of Eden, which occured 6000 years ago. Personally, I have never met a single creationist who endorsed this interpretation, although I know they’re out there: this was the favored explanation in the Scofield Bible so beloved of fundamentalists for so long.

Another by the way, that a lot of people haven’t figured out yet: fundamentalism does not demand belief in young earth creationism. This is another trend, fueled by people like Ken Ham, who insist that the only true fundamentalist doctrine is one that involves a literal 6000 year old earth created in a literal 6 days. They seem to be winning the propaganda war, too, since many creationists and evolutionists alike think that fundamentalism and young earth creationism go hand-in-hand.

Want another reason to avoid debating creationists? It’s like giving a mangy, limping, scab-encrusted starving fleabait cat a saucer of milk — you’ll never be rid of the whimpering dependent. Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association has taken to pestering me and Mark Borrello with his plaintive demands, and unfortunately I can’t just stuff him into a carrier and drag him down to the humane society or the vet.

Here’s his latest missive. He cuts right to the chase and Godwins with the very first word.

Hitler

Dr. Myers,

The most emotional audience response in the debate came to the charge that
evolution influenced Hitler.

Actually, there is a strong case that it did, as shown in the linked
article.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v13/i2/nazi.asp

Would you be so kind as to respond directly? We will certainly post your
reply.

Also, your claim that evolution increases complexity needs evidence.

Thanks.

Ross

PS I still think that you should use your influence to rein in your most
vehement supporters in the blog — it resembles mud wrestling and is
probably an embarrassment to serious evolutionists and atheists.

The linked article is on the Answers in Genesis site, and is authored by none other than Cap’n Squirrely himself, Jerry Bergman. It is truly awful.

I thought about giving him a short, pithy answer — after all, it’s transparently obvious that development and evolution lead to increases in information, and the claim that evolution influenced Hitler is both trivial and misleading, since we could also say that evolution influenced creationists with as much truth. But then I realized something…

I have a mud-wrestling pit!

So here, I take two questions, 1) Was evolution a significant and essential factor in guiding Nazi thought? And 2) Can natural processes produce an increase in complexity? I throw them down into the alligator-infested pit of churning chaos, and I leave it to you to produce an answer.

The rules: answer each question separately in less than 500 words (as it is, that will strain creationist attention spans), and leave it as a comment in this thread. Be sure to leave a valid email address (which I will see, but no one else will) in the comment header.

Judging: I will be the final arbiter, so the two winners will be determined subjectively and arbitrarily. Other commenters can cheer on their favorites, though, and perhaps I will be swayed by popular acclaim. I’ll also get the Trophy Wife’s™ opinion, which will probably sway me even more than popular opinion. As long as it isn’t overlong, length won’t be a factor; an effective single-sentence answer can win.

Deadline: Let’s say…Tuesday, 15 December. I’ll declare the winners on 16 December.

Rewards: I have stacks and stacks of books, and what I will do is reach into the pile and extract something that I can send to each of the winners. It could be something wonderful, it could be some weird-ass crap. It will be a surprise to all of us.

I’m not going to rein anyone in, that’s for sure. I’m confident the seething maelstrom here will produce answers better than anything Prissy-pants Olson can churn out.