Another embarrassment to the medical profession

We have another M.D. spouting off against evolution using bogus creationist arguments. Jeffrey Dach may also be embarrassing lefty-liberal types, since his page is hosted on Salon. It’s very confused and poorly argued.

He first says that he believes in evolution, but that Darwin’s ideas are outdated, and the new evidence suggests new theories of evolution, because Darwin’s theory can’t answer some big questions. OK, I thought, there are many unanswered questions…but then I read his four questions and realized he didn’t have a clue about the subject.

1) How does random change (mutation) in the genome add information to a genome to create progressively more complicated organisms? It Doesn’t.

It Does. Errors in DNA replication and recombination can produce DNA strands that are longer and contain more information than the parent strand. This is trivial.

2) How is evolution able to bring about drastic changes so quickly? An example is the Cambrian Explosion. It Can’t.

His example of “quickly” is a span of about 15 million years. This may be news to some creationists, but that is a long, long time. If you’re a young earth creationist, it’s a period of time approximately 2,000 times longer than you believe the whole earth existed.

Dr Dach needs to review some population genetics. We have nice algorithms that can be used to estimate how long it takes genetic changes to sweep through populations.

3) How could the first living cell arise spontaneously to get evolution started? It couldn’t.

It didn’t. The first living cell would have been the product of millions (quick!) of years of chemical evolution. It did not arise spontaneously.

4) The Human Genome Project showed that only 1-2% of Human DNA codes for proteins, or about 25,000 genes. These are not enough to account for the complexity of the organism. What is the other 98% of the genome’s function? We don’t know.

This is fast becoming one of the most popular assertions by creationists. Exactly how many genes would be sufficient to account for the complexity of a human being? Show your work. How many genes do we need to have to make you happy, and why should your sense of self-worth be a reason for us to have more?

Less than 25,000 genes is simply the number. It’s what has been counted in analyzing the genome. I don’t quite get the point of complaining that it’s not enough, becaust obviously, it is enough, or we wouldn’t be here.

They always seem so dismayed that humans have that number — it’s never shock that mice or birds have that many, or that flies have about half as many. It’s apparently a very personal issue to them, sort of like how many millimeters long their penis is. Come on, creationists! Be proud of your 25,000 micrometers!

They also seem to take it as a personal insult that so much of their genome is junk. We do know what a lot of the non-coding DNA does: a small percentage of it is regulatory, and most of it does nothing at all. It really doesn’t detract from the importance of the tens of thousands of genes to see that there’s also a lot of filler surrounding them. Perhaps they think there is a secret stash of super-special hidden genes to fluff up the mere 25,000 they find so inadequate?

He throws in another problem for evolution: the lack of transitional fossils. You know you’re dealing with a rube when they make a paleontological argument against evolution and simultaneously reveal that they’ve never looked at the paleontological data.

All right, so what are his “new theories of evolution”? Now it’s my turn to embarrassed: tossed into his superficial list of alternatives is evo-devo. No. Evo-devo is cool, but it isn’t driven by any of his unanswered questions. We don’t have any argument with the idea that mutations can add information, or that they can spread through populations “quickly”, we don’t dabble much in the issues of abiogenesis, and no, evo-devo does not create new jobs for long stretches of junk DNA, nor does it postulate any additional secret genes.

But then, all he is really doing is tossing about a few ideas he’s heard about, but knows nothing about, simply to give the impression that he’s fairly assessing the possibilities. We can all guess where he is really going with all of this:

This brings us to the “Intelligent Design” argument and the question of “is there a creator of the universe?” This is an obvious question raised from biology, which reveals DNA, the genetic code, and complex life forms in the world. All life forms share the same underlying genetic code which translates base pairs into proteins. The existance of a code, or “alphabet” is a language which implies an underlying intelligence for its creation. Coded messages do not happen by random happening. This DNA code was either designed by an intelligence, or not. I will leave it up to you to decide for yourself.


My Own Opinion

My own opinion is that Life did not happen by itself. It is self evident that everything in the Universe is the product of an intelligence, which can be considered as “the creator”. This may not be self evident to everyone, however.

Ho hum. The genetic code is not simply the product of ‘random happening’, nor do we need to invoke a designer to create it. It certainly is not self-evident that the universe is the product of intelligence — that is a conclusion derived from the abundant ignorance Jeffrey Dach demonstrates in his argument.

An ugly debate in Edmonton

Kirk Durston is a cunning wretch. How did he open his part in the debate here in Edmonton? By claiming that atheism was an amoral philosophy that led to the corruption of society, and to prove it, he cited a political scientist named Rummel, who he claimed, had shown that cultures built around a core of atheism had killed the most people in all of history.

If you actually go to Rummel’s site, Freedom, Democide, War, you’ll discover that he said no such thing. His thesis is that democracy is the critical factor in reducing war and the slaughter of civilians. This, of course, I could not do during the debate.

You will quickly discover that Rummel does not talk about this strange “atheist core” to murderous societies like Stalinist Russia or the Pol Pot regime. It’s nonsense; atheism is not the core of Marxism, for instance, and these were autocratic societies with a tyrannical cult of personality. It requires a distortion of history to make this argument, and imposing a personal bias on the data to make up this correlation. Pol Pot was a monster who killed millions, including religious people, in a reign of terror; Mao exterminated any institution, including the religious, to secure a monopoly on power; when I pointed out that Hitler was Catholic and Germans were Catholic and Lutheran, Durston replied that he might have been formerly a Lutheran (?), but he was an atheist. Why? Because anyone who was not doing as Jesus taught was not a true Christian. It’s an interesting piece of circular reasoning. It’s also an interpretation of his own.

He just ignored the fact that the only time in history when you could even describe any society as atheist was in the 20th century, coinciding with the emergence of industrialized tools of mass destruction. There are smart takedowns of the amoral atheist claim, but I was not prepared at all to deal with Durston’s simultaneous poisoning of the well and argument from consequences.

Durston is not stupid. He studiously avoided discussing any biology in his major points. Most of his argument for a personal god consisted of 1) atheists are bad people, 2) cosmology requires a beginning, and that beginning had to have been a god, and 3) the truth of the biblical accounts of Jesus. Would you believe he actually claimed the Flavian testimony of Josephus was valid historical evidence for the divinity of Jesus?

He’s a good debater, because he relies on a powerful tactic: he’ll willingly make stuff up and mangle his sources to make his arguments. I’m at a disadvantage because I won’t do that.

The lesson for me is to pin these guys down much more tightly on the precise subject of the debate. This one was all over the place, especially since Durston consciously avoided any topic on which I might have some expertise.

There is some confusion about what my argument in the debate was. Here’s my first slide, which outlines the two points I tried to make in 20 minutes.

Do gods exist?

  • There is no evidence of intervention by any supernatural force in the history of life on earth, and god-based explanations are inconsistent and incoherent.

  • Every biological phenomenon that we have examined in sufficient detail has been found to be explainable by purely natural causes.

Therefore, probably not.

I picked this approach because it does address the question in the debate (about the existence of an interventionist god), it was actually relevant to the major arguments for intelligent design creationism that Durston has a reputation for making, and I thought it would be a way to introduce some real evolutionary biology into the discussion. Contrary to the assertions of others, I did not open with any insults to Durston at all — it was to be a discussion with some actual evidence.

It was Durston’s first words that were insulting and illogical — a shot at calling atheists evil. I suppose if I’d opened by announcing that Christians were all stupid, we would have had equivalency…but I did not.

And yes, we talked past each other the whole time. The debate topic was far too broad, I thought we were going to argue about the evidence for design, but Durston wiggled away and talked about anything but.

Called out by a clown

Awww, I’ve been challenged by Ray Comfort. It’s hard to take the little man too seriously, though: last time we were supposed to debate on the radio, it ended up with a change of plans, and he instead weebled absurdly without me. At this point, though, his only challenge to me seems to be to explain this post more carefully to him, and I really don’t feel much incentive to use even littler words to go over the same old ground that atheists are smart enough to grasp.

The comments over there seem to answer most of his complaints already, anyway. Is there anybody who agrees with Comfort who reads his blog?

Texas is doing OK

The latest news: in a vote on whether to keep the silly “strengths and weaknesses” phrasing in the Texas state science standards, the forces of light on the board of education have defeated the goblins of the darkness by a one vote margin. There are more votes to come, though, so the battle isn’t over yet.

The banana man thinks he’s got atheists on the run

Ray Comfort has a new site, Pull the plug on atheism. It’s a series of short pages which consist mainly of plugs for some bad books he is peddling, with a few paragraphs in which he announces a few of his misconceptions about atheism, with the air of one who has trounced every objection. It really is as bad as his pathetic blog.

For instance, the first thing he does is define what he means by atheist.

An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything.

Then he goes on and on with fallacious analogies: “Imagine if I said my latest book came from nothing.” Imagine if I say that I don’t believe a builder build my house.” It’s quite sad.

His analogies are foolish. We know how houses and books are made, so he’s peddling a counterfactual claim. We don’t know all the processes that went into the appearance of the universe — and that “we” includes Ray Comfort — so it is an open question. I’m quite sure it wasn’t his imaginary Christian god, since there is no reason to consider the accounts of his faith to be accurate.

He’s also relying on trickery with the language. When we say “made”, it implies an active event by an agent, so what he is doing is setting up a linguistic conflict between a word that implies agency and an event that scientists are saying was not necessarily caused. The conflict isn’t real, but is only a consequence of a limitation of language and the way our brains work.

And of course, he doesn’t bother with this problem: who made god? I can guess how he’d respond: there was no “who”, and god wasn’t “made”. At which time we do a little judo move and point out that the universe wasn’t “made” by a “who”, either.

He also continues to harp on a very silly argument, the claim that evolution is impossible because both sexes need to evolve simultaneously.

If any species came into existence without a mature female present (with complimentary female components), that one male would have remained alone and in time died. The species could not have survived without a female. Why did hundreds of thousands of animals, fish, reptiles and birds (over millions of years) evolve a female partner (that coincidentally matured at just the right time) with each species?

Curiously, he seems to think that a species is defined by the first male of the kind that appears, and females have to follow along. Weird. Sexist much?

Of course, it’s no problem at all. Species do not poof into existence as individuals without parents, siblings, cousins, or other distant relatives. Populations evolve — populations consisting of both sexes. If the population of the state of Minnesota got on board their rocketships and migrated en masse to underground colonies on the moon, and then had no further contact with the rest of humanity for a hundred thousand years, the two populations would diverge by drift and selection into different species. The population in each location would be continually interbreeding; at no point (except in the isolation mechanism) would there be a sudden transition where one group found itself consisting solely of one reproductively isolated male or female, waiting for a member of the other sex to pop into existence and give them something fun to do. Nor would anyone be able to look back and say precisely when their biology became incompatible — it would be fuzzy shifts among large numbers of people at all times.

But that’s Ray: deluded and confused and ignorant, but still plugging away obstinately with the certainty of tightly closed eyes.

Another imminent event of sublime ridiculousness

It’s hard to beat the spectacle of Dinesh D’Souza defending a god for absurdity, but the Twin Cities Creation Science Association will leaven their idiocy with pathos: it will be time for the Twin Cities Creation Science Fair on 14-15 February. I’ve got at least one person promising to send me a report on it, although this is one I won’t be able to attend…I’m arranging a trip to speak in Columbus, Ohio that weekend. And as we all know, there are no creationists in Ohio. Right?

Louisiana does a wicked thing

The state of Louisiana has passed an unfortunate law that allows teachers to toss in any ol’ garbage into their science curricula. For most teachers, this will make no difference at all in their classrooms; this is a law that specifically caters to irresponsible instructors who want to smuggle in questionable content. All you have to know to see that this is a bad bill is to look at the backers: conservative groups that want to see more religion in the schools, old-school fundamentalist creationists, and the Discovery Institute.

Such temerity!

People are telling me that my blog entries are getting sprinkled with creationist ads in the RSS feeds, like this:

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Heh. I think it’s great. This is an old and familiar game that has been played for years, where creationists buy up lots and lots of ad placement on searches for topics in evolutionary biology, and I think they should continue to throw their money down that sinkhole. It seems like an entirely ineffective tactic, to try and dun people who are already willing to look at the evidence with appeals to their dogma.

Shall I start taking out ads in the local church bulletins, perhaps?