I missed the TCCSA debate until now. Nothing was lost.

A while back, I mentioned that the Twin Cities Creation Science Association was doing an online creation/evolution debate on the 26th and that maybe I’d tune in and see what they had to say. I didn’t. I knew the creationist, Brian Lauer, would natter on about the kinds of arguments Kent Hovind makes, and that he’d misrepresent the science, and that he’d do nothing but trot out oft-refuted nonsense, and I decided to wait until today, when I could play it back at a faster speed and skip over the stupid bits, of which there were many.

Lauer turned out to be worse than I thought. He’s an acolyte of Walt Brown’s hydroplate theory, the idea the “fountains of the deep” blasted massive amounts of material during the flood that shot out into space, so when scientists find amino acids in meteorites, that’s because they all originated on Earth, and were subsequently launched skyward during the flood catastrophe. There isn’t a single crackpot explanation some fringe doofus could mention that Lauer wouldn’t bring out in the debate…and then he’d cherry-pick headlines from scientific sources to show that science was in the Bible.

Mark Reid, his opponent, was batting these claims down as fast as Lauer would make them, but nothing was penetrating the creationist’s smug smirk. I was falling asleep when, surprisingly, my name was brought up, at about the 1:36:00 minute.

Oh boy! This was Bob Enyart’s Trochlear Challenge, where he demanded that I explain the evolutionary origin of a specific ocular muscle. Lauer brought it up so he could crow about the fact that I said “I don’t know”.

OK, but Enyart has challenged me to explain how this feature evolved. I have an answer. It’s easy.

I don’t know.

I don’t see any obvious obstacle to an arrangement of muscles evolving, but I don’t know the details of this particular set. And there’s actually a very good reason for that.

This is a case where you have to step back from the creationist and look at the big picture. Don’t get bogged down in the details. Take a look at the whole context of the question.

We don’t know exactly how this evolved because all living vertebrates, with the exception of the lamprey, have the same arrangement of extra-ocular muscles. This is a primitive and very highly conserved condition, with no extant intermediates. We’ve seen the arrangement of these muscles in 400 million year old placoderm fossils, and they’re the same; these muscles probably evolved 450 million or more years ago, and we have no record of any intermediate state. So I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.

But that’s where we have to look at the big picture: Bob Enyart, a raving loon and young earth creationist who thinks the whole planet is less than 10,000 years old, is asking me to recount the details of an event that occurred almost half a billion years ago. I should think it’s enough to shatter his position and show that he’s wrong to simply note that however it evolved, it happened in animals 75,000 times older than he claims the planet is. Has he even noticed this little problem with his question?

How nice of Lauer to remember part of what I said. But as was typical of all of his arguments, he only mentioned part of the answer, the part he could twist to fit his beliefs, and not the whole of the answer, which shot down the greater YEC thesis.

I haven’t encountered Lauer until now, and he’s based in St Cloud, where my son lives. He’s one of the many shames of Minnesota.

Lying about Native American history to benefit creationism

Portrait of a pseudoscientist

One of the landmark legal decisions in the history of American science education is Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 Supreme Court decision that ruled that creationism could not be taught in the classroom because it had the specific intent of introducing a narrowly sectarian religious view, which violated the separation of church and state. This is obviously true: creationism, as advanced by major Christian organizations like AiG or ICR is simply an extravagant exaggeration of the book of Genesis from the Christian Bible.

Ken Ham dreams of overturning Edwards v. Aguillard, and now he thinks he has a way.

These findings mark a monumental change in the origins debate. In the 1980s, the federal courts and the Supreme Court declared the teaching of creation science in the public schools to be invalid.7 According to the courts, creationists didn’t do science; therefore, creation science could not be taught in the science classroom. Jeanson’s new paper represents a bona fide scientific discovery, nullifying the legal basis for this 40-year-old practice.

The “findings” he is touting are from a paper by Nathaniel Jeanson, “Y-Chromosome-Guided Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA: New Evidence for a Mitochondrial DNA Root and Clock, and for at Least One Migration from Asia into the Americas in the First Millennium BC“, published in the Answers Research Journal (not a valid peer-reviewed scientific journal), which Ham thinks “proves” that creationism is scientific. Surprise, it doesn’t. Even if Jeanson’s research were valid, it is irrelevant to the whole creationism vs. evolution argument — Ham summarizes the results of the paper.

New research published today in the Answers Research Journal solves this mystery and extends our understanding of the pre-Columbian period back to the beginning of the Mayan era. Through a study of the female-inherited mitochondrial DNA, creationist biologist Nathaniel Jeanson uncovered evidence for two more migrations prior to the AD 300s. In the 100s BC, right around the time that Teotihuacan began to rise, a group of northeast Asians landed in the Americas. In the 1000s BC, right around the time that the Maya began to flourish in the Guatemalan lowlands, another group of northeast Asians arrived in the Americas./p>

What does that have to do with Genesis?

Again, Edwards v Aguillard says nothing about specific scientific research; it rejected the teaching of creationism because it was specifically intended to advance a particular religion, not that creationists are incapable of using the tools of science. It does not help their case that their research is secular when it’s published in an in-house journal dedicated to to the technical development of the Creation and Flood model of origins, written by an author who is an employee of AiG, which specifically requires that he signed a statement of faith, which states that Scripture teaches a recent origin of man and the whole creation, with history spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ and that No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field of study, including science, history, and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture.

So even if Jeanson were doing good science within those constraints, the paper would not demonstrate secular intent. Even worse, though, Jeanson does not do good science. He’s a hack trying to force the molecular data to conform to the timeline of Genesis. Here’s an excerpt from Dan Stern Cardinale’s (a real population geneticist) review of Jeanson’s book, Traced. Jeanson doesn’t understand the basic science — he can’t, because it would undermine his entire faith-based premise.

There are, uh, significant problems with the case Jeanson makes.

The first, which underlies much of his analysis, is that he treats genealogy and phylogeny as interchangeable.

They are not interchangeable. Genealogy is the history of individuals and familial relationships. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of groups: populations, species, etc. A phylogenetic tree may superficially look like a family tree, but all those lines and branch points represent populations, not individuals. This is an extremely basic error.

There are additional problems with each step of the case he makes.

In terms of calculating the Y-TMRCA, it’s nothing new: He uses single-generation pedigree-based mutation rates rather than long-term substitution rates. It’s the same error that invalidates his work calculating a 6000kya mitochondrial TMRCA. He even references a couple of studies that indicate the consensus date of 200-300kya for the Y-MRCA, but dismisses them as low-quality (he ignores that there are many, many more such studies).

He is constrained in an extremely narrow timespan for much of the Y-chromosome branching due to its occurrence after the flood (~4500 years ago) and running up against well-documented, recorded human history (he ignores that Egyptian history spans the Flood). So he has to squeeze a ton of human history into half a millennium, at most.

Nathaniel Jeanson isn’t going to be the secular savior of creationism. Ken Ham’s dream of overthrowing the tyranny of a Supreme Court decision is not going to be fulfilled by an incompetent hack writing bad papers. He should still have some hope, though, because the current Roberts court is hopelessly corrupt and partisan, packed with religious ideologues who are happy to overthrow precedent if it helps the far right cause. The crap pumped out by the Answers Research Journal isn’t going to help him because real scientists can see right through the pretense, but that the current administration is on a crusade to drive scientists out of the country might.

P.S. Jeanson has been scurrying about trying to find support for creationism by abusing Native American genetics, but you’re better off reading Jennifer Raff’s Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas for the real story.

Creationists still exist?

This is absurd. Here’s a video where a bunch of ICR wackaloons get interviewed.

Next you’re going to tell me some people think the earth is flat.

Anyway, that made me wonder…these are all conservative Christians. Many of the recent appointees to high positions in the federal government are also conservative Christians. Has anyone asked them their position on creation and evolution in their senate hearings? I’d be curious to hear RFK jr or Trump or Noem or Bondi state what they think about an established scientific fact, like the age of the Earth or whether humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

I suspect we’d get some waffling about “some people believe” with a conclusion about how the evidence isn’t conclusive. Which, while they don’t seem to realize it, is just a wordy admission that they are fools.

Ken Ham is having a snit

Ken Ham is spittin’ mad. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear made a statement in support of LGBTQ+ people and the importance of inclusion…but he didn’t plug Ken Ham’s little roadside attraction! How dare he? He’s supposed to advertise the stupid wooden “boat” with every breath!

Can someone help me here? I want to know what Kentucky Gov Beshear means by “more equal and inclusive.” The reason I as is that the Ark Encounter @ArkEncounter is the biggest themed attraction in Kentucky and the biggest Christian themed attraction in the world.

Also the Ark Encounter and @CreationMuseum are the two leading Christian themed attractions in world and they have had billions of dollars of positive impact on the state of Kentucky.

I’ve been to both of Ham’s sideshows, and if those are the leading Christian themed attractions in the world, then Christianity has a problem. Those are boxes full of lies and nonsense, distortions of scientific facts that promote foolish myths that they can’t support with evidence. You could say that of every religious center for every religion, but most of them, unlike Answers in Genesis, try to promote myths that support their beliefs — AiG is dedicated to lying about science and the nature of the universe outright. That is their sole purpose, to tear down the reality that exposes their folly.

Even if we ignore their lack of a dignified intent, they are a bad attraction. There is nothing inviting about the Ark Park, unless you’re desperate for displays that prop up your ignorance. They’re fucking weird. You’ve got a few animatronic displays of Adam & Eve, or Noah speaking with a heavy Yiddish accent, and unanimated baby dinosaurs in crates, and lots and lots of hectoring signs explaining why the Bible is true and you’re going to hell if you don’t believe it. It’s boring.

If I were to compare it to anything, it’s the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, which trust me, is not appealing to non-Mormons. Lots of empty space, paintings and sculptures and dioramas promoting LDS history, and hugely grandiose buildings. It’s much more elaborate than the Ark Park. The Ark Park is an embarrassingly gauche red-neck version of what some particularly ignorant set of anti-science gomers think a temple should look like, and they failed to even build an impressive facade for the whole thing.

And yet when Gov Beshear is giving talks on Tourism and listing tourist facilities he never mentions the Ark (or Creation Museum). And the Ark is not mentioned in most State promotional materials.

Also Gov Beshear calls his administration “Team Kentucky.” AI sums up “Team Kentucky” as “”Team Kentucky” refers to a broad concept encompassing different initiatives and programs under the leadership of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. It’s used to promote unity, economic, development, and various state-wide efforts.”

Beshear is probably trying to promote Kentucky as a beautiful state with great economic potential, and the citadel of stupidity Ken Ham has built is an embarrassment. Ken Ham had to go to ChatGPT to interpret Beshear’s slogan, and it came back with an accurate explanation that Ham just ignores. Unity is not promoted by a narrow religious sect. Economic development is not going to be built on the back of an egregiously idiotic theme park.

So Gov Beshear uses terms like “inclusive,” “equal,’ and “Team Kentucky” to promote unity, but the Ark and Creation Museum are basically excluded.

Now I understand an LGBTQ group would never employ me as a bible believing Christian who builds his thinking on God’s Word and thus adamantly believes that there’s only one marriage, that of a man and woman (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-7) and only two genders of humans (Genesis 1:27). Now that is not hate speech. It just means we have different worldviews. I wouldn’t expect an LGBTQ group to hire a Christian who believes as I do based on the bible. But they have the freedom to exist as a group. And the Governor has the freedom to promote them if he wants. But how about promoting the Ark and Creation Museum as well to be truly inclusive and a team working for unity?

Impressive. He somehow brags about his regressive views on homosexuality and trans issues (it’s only his “belief”), and then requests that he get more free advertising for his theme park under the banner of inclusivity. If you were truly inclusive, you’d be promoting his exclusionary views. It’s the paradox of intolerance, but there’s no point in explaining it to him because Ken Ham is to narrow and bigoted to comprehend it.

Now the Ark and Creation Museum employ Christians who adhere to our statement of faith. A Federal judge in Kentucky ruled we have a right to do this according to the law and freedom of religion. But everyone is welcome to come to the Ark and Creation Museum and we’ve seen people from all sorts of backgrounds visit, including LGBTQ people. We publicly promote the attractions to everyone as all are welcome.

Now Christians are persecuted around the world and in some places much worse than others. In some countries Christians can’t meet publicly or distribute bibles. How about a Christian month to promote unity and thus be inclusive of Christians to send a message to the world?

It is true that everyone is welcome to visit his grossly overpriced dreary carnival sideshow, and I think a few LGBTQ+ people (also some atheists!) have actually visited it, but they have not been there because they found it inviting. It’s more to witness the freak show. Or to protest it.

And of course he concludes with his martyr myth, that somehow endorsing the existence of LGBTQ+ people is equivalent to persecuting Christians, and Ken Ham in particular. He says this in a country that has allowed him to con hundreds of million dollars to propagandize Christian lies, with a government that is dominated by the Christian right, in a state that gave him millions of dollars in tax breaks to subsidize his Christian cult, and goes further to ask that a month be dedicated to honoring his weird version of Christianity.

There is going to be a protest at the Ark Park next month. That is not hate speech. They just have different worldviews. But the AiG worldview is founded on hatred, ignorance, bigotry, and superstition, and must be opposed. Governor Beshear is being political and avoiding talking about the shameful disgrace located in his state, and Ken Ham ought to shut up and appreciate that that is the best he’s going to get.

Jeffrey Tomkins strikes again!

Any time the various creationist organizations — AiG, ICR, CMI, DI, etc. — start getting excited and claiming that genetics supports creationism, it usually seems to trace back to Jeffrey Tomkins, the one guy who knows a little genetics and molecular biology, and most importantly, knows how to distort the scientific literature. A new paper in Nature, the complete sequencing of ape genomes, does a detailed and thorough comparison of great ape genomic data, and Tomkins does his usual thing and butchers it.

Tomkins is known for his usage of “ungapped” comparisons to depress the percentage similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. This method relies on aligning the beginnings of two DNA sequences, and measuring whether subsequent base pairs at corresponding positions match one another. The flaw in this method is that insertions, duplications or deletions in either sequence may cause parts of it to be shifted forward or backward relative to the other, so that equivalent sets of base pairs are not precisely aligned with one another in the comparison. Ungapped comparisons interpret those parts of the two sequences as entirely mismatched even if there are no other differences between them.

If you see any creationist now claiming that humans and chimpanzees are 15% different, rather than the number reported in scientific journals of 1.5%, it’s all coming from the mangled misinterpretations of Tomkins, who really is obsessed with the idea that humans can’t possibly be at all related to other apes. Casey Luskin accepts the distortion and is stating that scientists have been hiding the magnitude of the differences.

They haven’t. The root of the problem is that there are multiple ways to compare sequences of 3 billion nucleotides. One way is to compare aligned sequences, that is, the genes and regulatory stuff that makes up the functional bits of the genome, and there you find about 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans. Another approach is to tally up all of the sequence differences, whether they have any phenotype or not, and there you can find all kinds of repetitive, noisy stuff in the genome. You can find that a human parent is 10% different from their own child! Here’s a good explanation of the whole data set, rather than a Tompkins-ish cherry-picked mess of lies.

Not mentioned, unfortunately, is the ultimate key to explaining these differences: the differences are in the genetic junk. I guess it’s fair to not bring that up, since creationists do not believe in that anyway.

It does expose the fact that ultimately, all the creationist organizations, including the Intelligent Design wackos at the Discovery Institute, do believe that humans were separately created by a deity/aliens. If that wasn’t their endgame they wouldn’t be paying any attention to Tomkins’ nonsense.

I can’t let this pass. Casey Luskin is particularly egregious in claiming that scientists are lying.

These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall where they may?

Note that this is a response to Nature publishing the complete and detailed results of a complex genetic comparison — they did state the results clearly, and published all of the data. None of the creationist critics have added any new information, every complaint they’ve made is the product of extracting bits and pieces from the Nature paper. It’s not their fault that the paper doesn’t state the implications more plainly because the creationist implications are not there.

It annoys the hell out of me that Nature can publish a 28 page paper with 82 tables of data in the supplementary information, and Luskin can whine that they didn’t dumb it down enough that a lying creationist can find the part where real scientists say god did it.

It’s because the data don’t support your claim, you ass.

Astronauts can be total dumbasses, too

I have talked to many creationists who, when asked for evidence that the universe was created by a god, tell you to look at the trees. They think the fact that the world can be beautiful is sufficient to prove the existence of a supernatural being, and therefore you should be converted to Christianity by contemplating biology, but I’ve been thinking about biology for a few decades, and I look at a tree and am impressed by the chemistry of photosynthesis, and don’t see any Jesus in it.

Look at the trees is shorthand for the most vapid, shallow, stupid kind of creationist argument. In a propaganda coup, Answers in Genesis has found three astronauts who are willing to endorse religious beliefs because they saw the grandeur of the Earth, because people float in space, and the Earth is a beautiful planet. They claim the Bible is absolutely true, it’s inerrant, it’s sufficient for everything we need, it’s not a science book but where it speaks to science it is absolutely accurate, 100%. Watch this video and see your respect for these men plummet.

Nauseating. AiG is hosting them at some event at the big fake Ark this summer (buy your tickets now!), but all I see is a couple of pilots and mechanics who have been persuaded by religious nonsense to believe in anti-scientific ideas. Sad.

Ironically, there’s a chunk in the middle of this video where they get quite irate about people who think the Earth is flat or that the moon landings were fake. It’s utter foolishness. And frankly it’s becoming more concerning, If you can get caught up in that kind of system of belief, you’ve completely detached yourself from the truth. The truth of scripture, that is, he quickly adds, before going on to denounce the wicked lie of evolution.

Stop letting creationists host your ideas

I sat through the whole debate last night, which was supposed to address the premise that “The hominin fossil record demonstrably supports human evolution”, with Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) on the pro side, Jerry Bergman against. It was half bad. Erika was well-prepared and tightly on-topic, and her part was worth listening to. Bergman, as I predicted, was a sloppy mess with a scattershot collection of slides which were mostly off-topic and irrelevant, and was full of wrong examples that didn’t make his case. Would you believe he talked about Nebraska Man, a hoary old chestnut of tabloid excess that never had the support of the scientific community, presented alongside Piltdown Man as evidence that the fossil record was fake? How about the claim that Australopithecines were just the bones of pygmies?

But I almost gave up in the first few minutes, before either had a chance to speak, when the screen loaded and there across the top in big capital letters was the banner “STANDING FOR TRUTH BIBLICAL MINISTRIES” with the logo for that disgraceful organization popping up throughout. The moderator/host was that smug twit, Donny Budinsky, a hardcore young earth creationist with no education in science, geology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology, who promotes these inane “debates” between creationists and sane evolutionary biologists. WHY? This was a promotional event for the dumbest collection of ignorant yahoos on YouTube. These are terrible people, and yet so many science educators will voluntarily send traffic their way, and, by the way, platform dogmatic buffoons like Jerry Bergman.

I don’t understand it. Most of the people on our side are educators who know how to deliver a presentation, and have the ability to do it well. It has become easy with tools like StreamYard and Zoom to host a video session with multiple simultaneous contributors. We don’t need grifting yahoos like Donny Budinsky to organize and host these “debates”, and if you ditch mind-numbing parasites like Bergman, you don’t even have to waste time on them — Erika had a robust, informative 45 minutes of science talk imbedded in the superfluous, distracting garbage of the Jerry and Donny Show, with an ad for creationism layered on top.

You know I despise debates, but even worse are debates that donate unwarranted attention and respect to lying apologists for anti-scientific claims. Stop it, everyone.

Missionary Lizards!

How many ignorant claims can a creationist pack into a short clip?

If there’s one thing the world uses to steal the hearts and minds of our kids it’s dinosaurs.

One thing? Absurd. We have all of reality to entice kids away from the lies of Answers in Genesis.

“Hey look kids. Look at these fearsome creatures. They’re amazing. They’re fascinating. They died out 65 million years ago. They’re products of evolution. They’re just the results of chemicals bumping together over millions of years.

Come on. If you’re going to convince people that evolution is not true, you should start by accurately describing it. No one claims that dinosaurs arose spontaneously from simple chemical processes.

Just like you, evolution’s true.” They use dinosaurs to convince our kids they’re nothing but rearranged pond scum.

We also don’t claim that.

Stop and think. Why would scientists be arguing that, when it’s not true, and wouldn’t accomplish much of anything? It’s clear that this guy is proselytizing and trying to recruit followers, so if we just assume that scientists have a similar, competing motive (we don’t), how does telling someone they are rearranged pond scum serve our purpose? Or Satan’s purpose?

We use dinosaurs to call our children back to the authority of the word of God. We call dinosaurs missionary lizards because we want to give children sound biblical scientific answers about these incredible creatures.

I do appreciate that contradictory phrase, biblical scientific answers, especially given that the Bible says nothing about dinosaurs. But AiG will tell us all about it! The next AiG video linked to by the above short is titled You’ve Been LIED to About How Dinosaurs Looked, which explains how a creationist artist uses the Bible to help him figure out how dinosaurs actually looked.

The unfathomable question is why AiG chose to use this AI-generated image of “dinosaurs” on their video?

Abomination, I say! Who is lying to kids about dinosaurs now?

Poor Martyn Iles

Martyn Iles lost his status as Ken Ham’s successor at Answers in Genesis (there’s a story there, I’m sure, but no one is talking), and now he’s an immigrant wandering loose in the United States, which is definitely not a good position to be in. Normally, I’d be sympathetic, but Martyn Iles? The Young Earth Creationist and far right kook? Nah. Deport him.

Prayer request: | need a new visa for the USA so | can come and go freely for our new project.
The lawyer recommends going for an O-1 visa, but it’s a high bar.
I’ll need some senior political and church figures to help me out with letters that verify my past activities… essentially to confirm that | have been a national leader in political, legal and grassroots advocacy work. And trust nobody who really hates my beliefs ends up with the application on their desk.
But once it’s granted, it’s a very good visa, and very durable.
So… Pray everyone is suddenly overtaken by a desire to do me just a small favour

OK, I’ll be generous: everyone can give him all the prayers he might want. I don’t know what his “new project” is, but I’m sure it’s garbage pandering to ignorance.