The media can’t let today pass by without doing something stupid, so here are a few unfortunate faux pas from our news outlets.

Newsweek has published a dozen reasons to celebrate Darwin. The first? Darwin wasn’t an atheist! Huzzah! He also wasn’t a Jew, let’s celebrate that!

The second isn’t much better. Darwin mentioned “the Creator” once in the second and subsequent editions, therefore you can find God in the story of evolution! Snap your fingers in the face of an atheist for that, believers! You can read the rest, but they’re all rather pathetic.

CNN has also published a long piece of tripe from Stephen Meyer. Yeesh, it’s the same old nonsense: Darwin is controversial (nope, he’s only controversial among ignoramuses), the fossil record and the Cambrian explosion refute evolution (nope, they confirm a pattern of change over geological history), “many biologists now doubt…” (nope, few biologists do, and they all seem to be kooks), DNA is a digital code and a software program (nope, that’s a metaphor, and a pretty bad one, actually), there is evidence of design in cells (nope, if there were, I’d expect some IDiot to show it to me—they never do). It’s an awful, boring, tired old piece trumpeting the same assertions the Discovery Institute has been making for 15 years. When will the media learn that nothing those bozos say is ever news?

Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association has sent me the results of the survey that was given at the debate. He is trying to spin it as supporting the claim that this kind of debate was “useful” — but I’m unimpressed.

About 500 people attended, 290 returned the survey. The survey basically asked two questions about whether they supported teaching creationism in the classroom initially, and the same two questions to be answered after they listened to the debate, with a final question that asked whether the debate was held “on an intellectual level that can serve as an example for other discussions”…and with that, their motives are exposed. It wasn’t to actually work through the problem, but entirely to give credibility to the creationist position. Contrary to Olson’s interpretation, it tells me that this whole farce was a bad idea from the beginning.

When I looked at the numbers, what jumped out at me that there was almost no change in the audience’s position. People who came in firmly opposed to teaching ID in the schools left with the same opinion (no surprise there, Bergman was a kook); people who came in demanding that creationism be given equal time left still feeling the same way. There were a couple of crazy people whose opinions did shift — from being initially opposed to creationism to being for including it in the curriculum. I call shenanigans on that; Bergman did not even try to argue for such a position, so these were ringers who walked in, gave false answers to the first questions, and then pretended to have been converted to a pro-creationist stance by Bergman. That is flatly unbelievable.

The numbers were boringly static. The comments were much more entertaining, and I’ve included them below the fold; to make it a little easier to sort out who was saying what, the comments from evolutionists are in blue, the creationists are in red, and the ones who switched significantly from the two pre-debate questions to the two post-debate questions are in purple.

What I mainly take home from these data is the simple fact that, even though this debate was a complete and embarrassing rout for the creationists, their minds were not changed at all. Debates with creationists are a waste of time, except for the small benefit of entertaining evolutionists with an amusing spectacle, and the larger detriment of giving liars for Jesus an opportunity to piously announce their support for rational discussion…despite the fact that they don’t offer rational discussion.

[Read more…]

One of the peculiarities of my recent debate with Jerry Bergman was that he announced his definition of irreducible complexity, which he claimed to be the same as Michael Behe’s…and under which carbon atoms were IC. It was utterly absurd. A reader wrote to Behe to get his opinion.

I recently attended a debate between Dr. P. Z. Myers and Dr. Jerry Bergman on the topic of “Should Intelligent Design be Taught in the Schools?” The topic of irreducible complexity came up, and Dr. Bergman had an interesting definition. His definition of irreducible complexity was “two or more parts are required for something to function” and that if you “remove one part, it will not work properly.” The example he gave was that a carbon atom is irreducibly complex. He said that “you will not have a carbon 12 atom unless you have 6 protons, 6 neutrons and 6 electrons, therefore it is irreducibly complex.” Dr. Bergman went on to say that, the only things that aren’t irreducibly complex were elementary particles, such as a lepton, because they could not be broken down into smaller parts. Much of the audience was confused about this, because as Dr. Myers pointed out, your definition of irreducible complexity dealt with biochemical systems. Dr. Myers also pointed out that carbon is formed naturally in stars, and if Dr. Bergman’s definition of irreducible complexity were correct, it would show that irreducible complexity occurs naturally, therefore negating it as an argument for intelligent design. Dr. Bergman claimed that he was using your definition of irreducible complexity in the example of the carbon atom. That is why I wanted to ask you for a concise definition of irreducible complexity and if you believe Dr. Bergman’s example and definition fits with yours.

Thanks for you time,
David

Behe wrote back.

Hi, David, nice to meet you. Dr. Myers is right; my definition deals with biochemical systems. I take the underlying laws and elements of nature as given. I do not know where Prof. Bergman got the idea that the concept applies to atoms, but he didn’t get it from me. In Darwin’s Black Box, I defined IC as:

“By irreducibly complex I mean a single system which is composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

Best wishes.

mjb

I got the answer right. I feel so dirty now.

However, I will go on (as I did in the debate) to explain that while it is definitely true that many biochemical systems actually do exhibit the property of irreducible complexity, the fact that an existing pathway can suffer a loss of function when modified says absolutely nothing about whether it evolved or not. Antecedent versions of the current pathway may have 1) had different functions (the exaptation explanation), 2) had less stringent requirements for function because other physiological functions had less specific demands (the coevolution explanation), or 3) had redundant or alternative paths to the final output of the pathway (the scaffolding explanation). IC, even as defined by the author of the concept, is no obstacle to evolution.

KKMS is a Twin Cities Christian talk radio station which has long been on my list of disreputable people and organizations peddling lies to the populace. They really pissed me off a while back when they brought me on to debate Geoffrey Simmons, and after I smacked him down hard, they invited him back for an unopposed free hour of lies. No, of course they didn’t invite me back for a similar hour of discussion.

They’re doing it again.

After that bizarre debate on Monday, KKMS is having Bergman on today to make excuses. I think their invitation to me must have gotten lost in the mail…maybe because they still can’t spell my name correctly.

4:00 Hour -“Debate Follow-up: Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in Science Classes?”  
Dr. Jerry Bergman, Professor and Author will tell us what he experienced in his debate last Monday night with P.Z. Meyers, Professor at the University of Minnesota – Morris.

It should be amusingly unreal. Unfortunately, I’m going to be out of touch at that hour — somebody else will have to listen and fill us in on the delusions and lies and distortions that Bergman will spin out.

Then take a picture of yourself with it and send it to Eric Michael Johnson. I think he’s going to put up a collage of smirking evilutionists with Comfort’s folly.

Here we go again. Ross Olson is sending more patronizing email, so I guess I’ll have to be mean and tear up his prior argument.

November 18, 2009

Dr. Myers,

Thank you for posting my comments and promising to comment on the questions
I raised. Here is the introduction I gave to your debate with Dr. Jerry
Bergman on the topic, “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in the Schools?”
on http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/i_get_email_47.php

Although many of us on the ID side did not think our arguments were clearly
presented, we were pleased with the civil tone and actual intellectual
interaction that took place, just as I asked for below:

*****************************************

Introduction to the Debate

Thank you, on behalf of Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists, Christian
Student Fellowship and Twin Cities Creation Science Association, for coming
to this debate which can serve as an example for dealing with explosive
issues in a courteous, intellectual manner. I am Ross Olson, serving on the
Board of TCCSA. I was educated at the University of Minnesota for both
undergraduate and medical school and never heard any evidence against
evolution. It was 10 years later that I discovered a powerful case against
it and I changed my mind, although it took a long time to do so.

Perhaps some will change their mind today, one way or the other, but even
for the vast majority who do not, a new respect for the other side may be
developed. You may be sitting next to those who you consider enemies
tonight. Those of us coming from a Christian perspective know that we are
told to love our enemies. And from my interactions with Nick Wallin, leader
of the Student CASH, I sense that he follows a very similar principle.
A few years ago I was invited to speak at a gathering chaired by Matt Stark,
former head of the Minnesota chapter of the ACLU. Introducing me he said,
“Unlike theists, we do not believe in revelation. So we have to arrive at
truth the hard way; we have to listen to everybody.” And they did listen and
of course they questioned and argued, but they did listen.

I hope you will take one of the pre and post debate surveys, fill out the
first section now and the second section at the end. This will help us
evaluate the event. We also hope to have a DVD of the entire debate
available through the sponsoring organizations within a few weeks.
I would now like to introduce Dr. Mark E Borrello, Assistant Professor,
Ecology, Evolution/Behavior, UMN Twin Cities who will introduce the debaters
and explain the format.

*****************************************

Dr. Myers, when you do answer my questions, which you refer to as
“creationist fallacies,” could I ask you to send a copy to my e-mail
address? I do not have the time to sift through the chaff of the Blog to
find the occasional grains of wheat.

It is ironic that the characterization of creationists by Carl Sagan as
“armies of the night,” mindless groupies and sycophants, could be applied to
the Blogosphere. I asked you to raise the level of the genre but I get the
impression that you have no desire or intention to do so.
One retired professor began by e-mailing me some barely comprehensible trash
talk in the language of the blog but shifted into normal English and
actually interacted for several exchanges. When he concluded that interlude,
however, he said this, “You are too delusional to continue with…I must
return to PZ’s blog to get my sanity back.”

OK, I have studied the dialect and can try to speak broken “Blog-talk.” Dr.
Myers, you criticized Dr. Bergman’s academic credentials and publication
record as a cover-up for insecurity. May I ask you what you have published
in peer-reviewed journals? Or in edited journals? I find many references to
your blog entries.

And by the way, a blog is not instant peer-review. You would admit — indeed
insist — (as did Superman) that you have few peers and that most blog
entries are not even reviewed by the minds of those who post them. The blog
is combination of mutual admiration society with occasional piranha-like
attacks on any outsider who wanders in.

Ross Olson

Sneer harder, little man.

No, I’m not going to mail him a reply. If he can’t find this, tough. He made a number of ludicrous claims yesterday in a kind of one paragraph Gish Gallop that I’ve broken up here, and I’ll address each one, briefly, with absolutely no expectation that he’ll be able to comprehend the concepts, since he’s shown no such capability before.

To be addressed is your claim that evolution adds information. That needs to be supported.

Of course evolution adds information: it’s a process driven by random variation of a string of information, with subsequent filtering to find viable and more fit variants. My children are not identical to my wife and myself; they contain novel combinations of genes and many new mutations.

I’ll add that development is also a process that adds information. The adult multicellular organism that is PZ Myers is a concentrated node of complex information of much greater volume than the fertilized single-celled zygote that my parents made in 1956. As individuals and as a species, we extract energy and information from our environment to increase our personal information content.

Your closing remarks about evolutionary research into the beak changes of Darwin’s Finches need to be answered with the point that they are still finches and the changes cycle with changing environmental conditions.

No, because that point is stupid.

What do you expect, that finches in the Galapagos will evolve into monkeys? Over the timescale examined, they will change slowly, and any changes we see will be incorporated into our concept of the finch clade. This is what evolution predicts.

I’ll add that we are seeing speciation in Darwin’s finches. Some of the latest work shows the emergence of a new finch species in the populations studied by the Grants. This is what we expect: slow shifts over time, punctuated by the separation of populations into emergent species, and they’ll all be members of the reptile clade, the bird clade, and the finch clade. They branch, they don’t leap categories as creationists demand.

The nonsense about how the changes “cycle with changing environmental conditions” is creo-speak for “they didn’t change directionally!” Again, that’s not what evolution predicts. Populations will drift genetically, and will also to some degree track changes in the environment. That’s what was predicted, and that’s what was seen in the Galapagos.

The only point at which the crowd got rowdy was with the mention of evolution’s influence on Hitler. Actually, that issue is not solved by shouting because there is a strong case that the desire to improve the race leads to eugenic and ethnic cleansing policies.

The shouting and disgust with Bergman was prompted by his dishonesty.

We are very familiar with these facile and ahistorical attempts to pin the blame for the Holocaust on evolution and atheism. It’s not true; Hitler was a Catholic (I will concede that he was a very bad one, one who was attracted to paganism and who also used religious fervor to support his policies), his horrors were supported by many German churches, and by far the vast majority of the German population — you know, the people who ran the death camps and fought the war — were Catholic and Lutheran.

Owlmirror found this very interesting quote in Mein Kampf.

Walking about in the garden of Nature, most men have the self-conceit
to think that they know everything; yet almost all are blind to one of
the outstanding principles that Nature employs in her work. This
principle may be called the inner isolation which characterizes each
and every living species on this earth. Even a superficial glance is
sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the
life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental
law–one may call it an iron law of Nature–which compels the
various species to keep within the definite limits of their own
life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind.

That’s creationist thinking; Hitler could have been a baraminologist. Don’t try to blame evolutionary biologists for the actions of an obvious creationist, like Hitler. Darwin and Haeckel were not such important influences on Hitler as the creationists would like you to think; far more important was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who basically laid out the entire Nazi philosophy for Adolf — and Chamberlain openly despised evolution. (By the way, my colleague Michael Lackey is writing a book on Hitler’s philosophy, which he argues was actually a theology derived from Chamberlain’s work. Look for it sometime next year, I’ll definitely be posting a review.)

By the way, “desire to improve the race” is not a part of evolutionary biology. Some individuals may feel that way, and they may see the tools of biology as useful for carrying out that process, but it’s not implicit in the theory.

Indeed, your claim that morality comes from our culture needs to answer the question, “What if my culture is the Mafia?” Other evolutionary apologists have candidly pointed out that the only morality that can come out of evolution is that I leave my genes, as many of them as possible, to the next generation.

If your culture is the Mafia, you grow up with Mafia morality. Isn’t that obvious? God doesn’t step in and zap you with Buddhism, you know.

It’s the same with Christians. They are brought up with Christian morality, so their beliefs and biases are a product of their culture, which is no mark of shame, although you wouldn’t know it to hear how they deny it. Similarly, my morality is a product of my culture, which I will freely admit was shaped by Christianity and other influences. We have beliefs that have worked to maintain our society, so they’ve been shaped by a kind of natural selection, too — the morality of the Bible has evolved over time. Again, they hate to admit it, because that would be an admission that right and wrong aren’t absolute…but Christian morality is itself a testimony to that fact.

Also, a truly interactive academic blog would allow posting of the studies on the academic success of students exposed to both evolution and intelligent design. You have consistently claimed that those students who do not get pure evolution will fail, but without offering any experimental or observational data.

Well, they will fail my classes, obviously. I ask questions about radiometric dating methods, about allele distributions in populations in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, and about the effects of the environment on the frequency of traits in a population. If you can’t answer those, you’ll fail biology courses. It’s a truism, like pointing out that students who can’t add will fail basic mathematics.

But once again, Olson gets the spirit of the idea entirely wrong. Contrary to his claims, I’ve mentioned repeatedly that creationist students can be quite bright, and the problem is the wasted potential of indoctrinating them into the lies of creationism. I’ve also had a number of creationist students who not only pass my courses, but do quite well: they can learn the concepts even if they don’t believe them. The point I made in the debate was not that creationist students were doomed, but they were handicapped — they didn’t get the background that would have been helpful for freshman biology and had to work harder than students who did get the basics.

And to claim that evidence against evolution does not represent evidence for intelligent design needs closer analysis.

Nope. It’s another stupid claim. Arguing that there are weaknesses in evolution (which are typically bad arguments, anyway, but that’s another matter) does not mean that Genesis is right; obviously, there are many other alternatives. Creationists like Olson want to make a badly performed sleight of hand in which they disagree with some minor technical point in the science, and therefore we’re supposed to swallow the whole bloated, elaborate theology of Christian fundamentalism instead. Nuh-uh, that’s transparently false.

There is a logical dichotomy involved. Life either has a natural origin or not. If not, then the origin must come from outside natural mechanisms. You can claim that we just don’t know, but while waiting, need to entertain the possibility that there is a cause outside of nature. To say there can be no such thing is not a scientific statement or even a logical one but an a priori elimination of one whole field of inquiry.

And there he goes. Don’t trust him; he wants an admission that a supernatural agent is merely possible, and then he’s going to pretend that you’ve admitted that the entire intricate structure of Christianity is a scientific enterprise. I’m not going to fall for it, and no one else should be that gullible, either.

I do not say that there can be no such thing as a supernatural agent; I say that the creationists have not provided any credible evidence for such a thing, which is a very different argument altogether. As I said in the debate, if you want an idea to be scientific, show us the evidence. It’s possible that the elves have been guiding evolution all these years, but it’s not a possiblity I have to seriously consider in the absence of evidence for the existence of elves.

Your redefinition of vestigial organs as reduced function may get some traction but is not the way they were presented 100 years ago,

No, it is precisely the way Darwin presented it. Darwin did not claim that vestigial organs had no function (Bergman’s bizarre and erroneous definition) but that the appendix was reduced compared to the homologous organs in non-human relatives. The word Darwin used was “rudimentary,” not “non-functional.” The only people redefining terms here are the creationists, and Bergman’s peculiar series of bizarre distortions was a perfect example.

but there is no doubt that “Junk DNA’ was clearly touted as evolutionary leftovers and delayed the search for function, which was predicted by Intelligent design.

There is no doubt that Olson is spouting complete bullshit here. At the debate, I recommended T. Ryan Gregory’s website, Genomicron, as a good source for factual information on the history and meaning of junk DNA. You might start with his “best of” post; scroll down to all the links on junk DNA. As he explains, the default view, biased by a strongly adaptationist stance, was that all DNA was functional (creationists thought likewise for different reasons—why would god load up our genomes with junk?). These views did not hold up to scrutiny. The idea that much of our DNA was junk arose from understanding of genetic mechanisms and was further supported by comparative genomics.

If ID predicts that there is little junk in the genome, then ID is wrong. Roughly 95% of the human genome is repetitive sequence, pseudogenes, and random debris. A few percent is coding sequence (not junk), and a somewhat larger percentage is regulatory (also not junk, and never regarded as such — much of the defense of non-junkiness nowadays comes from a bogus appropriation of regulatory DNA as evidence of function, but such regulatory sequences were never part of the ‘junkome’…to coin an ugly new word that Jonathan Eisen can scowl at, righteously, I think).

Most of your genome is junk. Get over it. A small part of the non-coding DNA is intensely interesting to biologists, but not because ID had anything to do with predicting it.

And that’s enough of that. Creationist misrepresentations of science are so ridiculous that you want to slap them down hard, but they also take way too much time to criticize…especially since superficial kooks like Olson love to flit over these claims with so little depth, tossing out a dozen lies instead of addressing a single point with some seriousness, since that would expose their con far too obviously.

He was right on one thing: we do make piranha-like attacks on people like him. The implication of that analogy, of course, is that that makes him dead meat ready for shredding. Bon appetit, my ravenous school!

Apparently, because people had plans to counter some of Ray Comfort’s Origin giveaway — which was announced to occur on the 19th — Comfort is giving them away today. I’ve been getting reports from various universities that his minions are at work right now, as in this photo from Oxford.

Get out and grab yours now!

I’m going to stroll over to the UMM campus, although I’ll be very surprised if any were sent to our very small school.

---

Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron showed up at UCLA. It sounds like they flopped hard. I also got this email account from a UCLA student:

They showed up at UCLA today, the Banana Man himself. I am vice president of the
Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists. They definitely caught our club off balance.
Comfort chose a bad time to show up though, as the UC Regents are holding a high
tension conference, deciding whether to increase fees for all of UC for everyone. So
emotions were a bit taut already. Several people from BASS and freethinkers who came
out of the woodwork found a box and stood it directly across from the box on which
Comfort and friends chose to proselytize from. Their books disappeared really quickly,
but BASS has been vigilant about handing out the NCSE’s bookmarks and “Why Ray
Comfort is Wrong” flyers. I cannot believe that creationist idiot actually chose to come
to UCLA instead of UC Berkeley. Maybe he was afraid of a riot.

Poor Adnan Oktar. The New Humanist published an exposé, and he and his organization are clearly freaking out. I’ve been getting several near-hysterical emails a day from the Turkish creationist mouthpiece, Seda Aral, insisting in many different font colors that the accusations are baseless and are a sign that the humanist movement is melting down. They’ve also come out with these stilted videos where Oktar goes page by page through the New Humanist.

Man. That looks like a really good magazine.

And then the creationists have produced a web page that claims to address criticisms of Oktar. For instance, you may recall that in his lavish creationist book, Atlas of Creation, he claims that organisms never change; the bulk of the book consists of plagiarized photos, pairing a picture of a modern organism with a fossil that shows relatively little change. The classic example of his sloppy methodology is that one of the pairs is of caddis flies, and the modern example is this one, an artificial lure, complete with fishhook.

Well, they have an explanation for that now: uh, yeah, they meant to do that. It was a model, yeah, that’s the ticket. They put that picture in the book intentionally, yeah, and they knew they’d catch Richard Dawkins. And then Adnan would get a date with Heather Locklear! Yeah, that’s the ticket!

The claim regarding the caddisfly: Dawkins highlighted the photograph of caddisfly in Adnan Oktar’s opus, Atlas of Creation as a great discovery. However this is the photograph of a model particularly put by the author in the book. Whether the photograph is of a model or not does not change the fact that this living being is still alive in our day. Desperate, speechless and bored in the face of the extraordinary evidences of Creation in the Atlas of Creation that invalidate evolution, Dawkins takes every opportunity to express this photograph of a model particularly put by the author in his book as a great discovery. By this attitude Dawkins, in fact, reveals the pathetic situation in which Darwinism finds itself. Caddisfly lives in our time with the same appearance its millions of years old fossil has. That is, it has not undergone any change. That is why Dawkins feels offended.

Yeah, evolution is pathetic, because they noticed that Adnan Oktar proudly and intentionally included a photo of a fake fly in his book! That doesn’t quite explain why the creationists have been purging the photos in their more recent work, however.

They’re very defensive about the Atlas of Creation, too. They insist that Oktar’s work is respected everywhere.

New Humanist seems to be in trouble probably due to the extraordinary, real and scientific evidence submitted by Mr. Adnan Oktar to Darwinism. Indeed, due to this trouble the magazine made a very interesting comment and claimed that Mr. Oktar’s claims are met with lampoon in the West. Yet the editorial board in question very well knows that Mr. Oktar provides precise and concrete evidence against Darwinism which is a theory that thoroughly lacks any evidence. Indeed for this very reason he is the one Creationist author whose views are most respected all around the world. Readers worldwide enjoy his books which are also downloaded in ample amounts on the Internet.

I hate to be the one to break the news to him, but the Atlas of Creation is widely regarded as a joke. I know quite a few scientists, and we’ve talked about it; receiving a copy of his book is an opportunity for mirth, and we kind of hope that he’ll send us one…to laugh over. I felt left out for a while when I didn’t get one, and a colleague gave me one out of sympathy—I’ve since felt some vindication, though, as they’ve sent me three more copies now, with different colors of covers.

They are a hoot. I should scan in some of the ridiculous arguments they make, sometime; the photoshopped skeletons to illustrate what evolutionists ought to find but haven’t makes me laugh every time.