Luskin dealt another slap

Casey Luskin has been at it again. The underwhelming squeak toy of the Discovery Institute, the good Christian kid with an undergraduate degree in earth sciences who couldn’t cope with reality so he went for a law degree instead, has written another of his uninformed screeds explaining evolutionary developmental biology to the masses, despite knowing nothing about the subject himself, except what Jonathan Wells shat into his cranium. And I’m not going to waste any more time with it; I’ve hammered home the stupidity of his comments often enough recently. He also wrote an appalling pile of ignorant nonsense about the Miller/Urey experiment, and I don’t need to write about, because Andy Ellington took care of it.

Ellington is a researcher into chemical evolution and mechanisms of abiogenesis in Texas; he recently testified to the Texas SBOE, and after Luskin vomited up his folly, was moved to write a thoroughly kick-ass summary of the significance of Miller/Urey, with good solid dismissals of the incompetence and futility of the Discovery Institute. Ellington vs. Luskin is like fierce Siberian tiger vs. anemic, dull-witted rodent.

What should we call the new exhibit at the Creation “Museum”?

Answers in Genesis has done something really stupid (I know, that’s no surprise). The Creation “Museum” has some new exhibit, and they’re trying to come up with a name for it.

With a poll.

And here’s the best thing: it’s on facebook, and it’s a poll in which you can suggest names. It’s up over 30 suggestions now, and most of them are making fun of the thing. Go ahead and add your own ideas, but vote for a good one, too: so far, “From Ignorance to Stupidity…a Journey” is leading in the mocking names, so I suggest we all throw our votes behind that one.

I don’t know if I believe this

Texas, that hotbed of creationism, has been reviewing curriculum supplements, including some additions composed by creationists. Governor Rick Perry recently appointed a hard conservative, Barbara Cargill, to head the state board of education. It was looking gloomy.

And now the board voted 8:0 to reject the creationists and approve good evolutionary biology standards. I’m impressed. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that they’ve got something devious in mind.

Just maybe, though, the board is wising up.

Dembski is just another wacky Christian

How do people stomach this stuff? Bill Dembski was on the Bible Answer Man broadcast, so I tried to listen — the host goes on and on about his dogma, and it makes no sense. “Here’s what the Bible says, it’s true, therefore you have to believe.” And then he introduces Dembski as someone who uses science to justify Christian superstition in a “biblically satisfying” way.

Then Delusional Dembski gets on, and the first thing he does is claim the evidence for design in nature has been getting stronger and stronger…and he claims that the reason scientists haven’t been embracing it is the problem of evil. No, wrong, it’s because there is no evidence for design. He cites things like the rabies virus that seems to be designed to destroy human nervous systems, and fire ants, and parasitic wasps, and that these are problems for Darwinists (?) and that this natural evil has to be explained. His explanation: the Fall. But wait, he also admits to being an Old Earth Creationist; if natural evil was present long before Adam and Eve, how can the Fall be an explanation?

Easy. The effects of the Fall work backward through time. God created a world containing evil in anticipation of Eve chomping on an apple.

That was enough. I stopped right there. I’m not a psychiatrist, so listening in to two lunatics babbling at each other isn’t particularly interesting.

Wait…let’s add a third lunatic. Ken Ham was outraged at Dembski’s “outlandish statements” and is very peeved at the Bible Answer Man. They’re heretics! He doesn’t find them outlandish because they’re babbling pseudoscience, it’s because they don’t immediately reject this old earth stuff to accept Ham’s literal interpretation of the Bible. Ham is upset because Dembski is undermining the authority of the Word of God.

I say put ’em in a cage match and let them tear each other apart.

They have secret meetings?

Creationists are so far from being scientists that I’m frequently astounded at just how unaware they are — surely, if you’re being that crazy, you’ve got to realize that what you’re doing is nothing like what scientists do, right? I guess when you’re that nuts you don’t even know it.

The Intelligent Design creationists have been having a secret meeting in Italy, where they claim to be challenging Darwinian orthodoxies. Well, semi-secret: they brought in David Berlinski’s daughter to pretend to be a “journalist” and throw gentle little softballs in youtube interviews, but many of the attendees are anonymous, the meeting program is not available, and the place is stocked with devotees of religious orthodoxy who are singularly clueless about science. What it really is is a great big creationist circle jerk where everyone is free to say stupid things and not have one of those annoying evidence-based scientists in the audience asking difficult questions, and also avoid real journalists who might publicly expose their inanity.

Jeff Shallit has gleaned a little information about what’s going on at this ‘conference’ by looking at who is willing to be interviewed: it’s the usual Discovery Institute suspects. For example, this video of Paul Nelson is so revealing: everyone else in camera range fled lest they be exposed, and he’s got his excuse. They’re afraid of reprisals from the Darwinist mullahs! This is such an unhealthy situation! Dissenters are intimidated and their careers threatened!

Yes, their careers are in danger, because disciplines that value rigor and evidence and science are not going to be impressed at all by deluded cowards who hide in closets and whisper oft-debunked stupidities at one another. If you’ve got the goods, stand and deliver; show us your evidence, explain your reasoning, persuade people who disagree with you with the strength of your argument. They can’t, so they scurry off to picturesque villas in Tuscany, shoo away those difficult criticisms, and sit and reassure each other that they are very clever indeed while mangling information theory and biology.

My favorite quote from Darwin’s Origin is so appropriate here.

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “plan of creation” or “unity of design,” &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for thus only can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.

There was an orthodoxy in Darwin’s time, too, and it was the dogma of creationism. Darwin’s advice to young scientists was to conscientiously express their convictions, and to get out and publish, publish, publish their observations. That’s how science progresses, by wrestling with disagreement and confronting it with evidence and experiment.

Creationists do the opposite. They must, because their ideas have already been met and dismissed as wrong.

It’s Casey Luskin, so what else is new?

Oh, man, Casey Luskin is such an embarrassing spokesperson for the intelligent design creationists — I hope they keep him employed forever. His latest tirade against me is a cacophany of inanity. His primary point is that creationists like Jonathan MacLatchie have forced me to make concessions to creationism when I say that there are differences between vertebrate embryos. It is no concession to anything other than reality: the differences have been known for a long time. My first laboratory experiences as a graduate student were doing work on frog embryos with Phil Grant at the University of Oregon; my second were working with zebrafish embryos with Chuck Kimmel. Guess what: I could tell them apart, easily, as a first year grad student. I can also tell the difference between a zebrafish and medaka embryo! So this is a stupid claim on his part.

Here’s his second major absurdity:

If PZ is correct that evolutionary biology predicts both similarities and differences among embryos, then evolutionary biology makes no predictions and is unfalsifiable regarding the similarities and differences in vertebrate development. According to PZ, evolutionary theory predicts whatever it predicts, conserves whatever it conserves, and modifies whatever it modifies. Some theory.

Look at a cat and a dog. They are different animals; they have different forms and behaviors. However, they also have deep similarities: they are mammalian carnivores, they have the same basic bone structure, they have very similar physiologies. Any theory that purports to explain the existence of these two organisms must account for both the similarities and differences. Evolution would be falsified if it predicted that every organism was exactly the same, or if it predicted that every organism was completely different, because that isn’t what the real world looks like.

Go back to third grade, Casey. You are a very silly, ignorant fellow.

Turnabout is fair play

Phil Senter has published the most deviously underhanded, sneaky, subtle undermining of the creationist position I’ve ever seen, and I applaud him for it. What he did was to take them seriously, something I could never do, and treat their various publications that ape the form of the scientific literature as if they actually were real science papers, and apply their methods consistently to an analysis of taxonomy. So on the one hand, it’s bizarre and disturbing to see the like of Ken Ham, Jerry Bergman, and Henry Morris get actual scientific citations, but on the other hand, seeing their claims refuted using their own touted methods is peculiarly satisfying.

Senter has published a paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology that takes their claims at face value and analyzes dinosaur morphology using their own methods. ‘Baraminologists’ have published a set of taxonomic tools that use as input a matrix of morphological characters for an array of animals, and then spits out numbers that tell whether they were similar enough to be related. You can guess what the motivation for that is: they want to claim that Noah didn’t have to carry representatives of every dinosaur species on the Ark, but only representatives of each ‘kind’, which then diversified rapidly after the big boat landed to generate all the different species found in the fossil record.

The problem for them is that Senter found that it works far too well. Using creationist techniques, all of the Dinosauria reduce to…eight kinds. That makes the boat haulage problem relatively even easier.

Here is the summary diagram, illustrating the derived creationist tree of common descent. Oops.

i-cf7aed20267bbf27bd8d0565d5df2681-creationisttree.jpeg
Summary of results of taxon correlation analyses across Dinosauria. Each boxed group of silhouettes indicates a group for which taxon correlation found within-group morphological continuity; for silhouette groups in different boxes, taxon correlation found morphological discontinuity between the groups. Dotted lines represent uncertainty as to whether morphological discontinuity is truly present. On the cladogram, triangles indicate paraphyletic groups.

At first, the results of the taxon correlation analyses appear to imply good news for the creationist world view, on several fronts. First, seven major dinosaurian groups (birdlike coelurosaurs, Tazoudasaurus + Eusauropoda, Stegosauria, Ankylosauridae, Neoceratopsia, Hadrosauridae and basal Hadrosauriformes) are separated from the rest of Dinosauria by morphological gaps (Fig. 15). Creationist inferences that variety within Eusauropoda (Morris, 1999) and Ceratopsidae (Ham, 2009) represent diversification within separately created kinds are congruent with these results. Second, each morphologically continuous group found by taxon correlation includes at least some herbivores. This is congruent with the creationist assertion that all carnivorous animals are descendants of originally herbivorous ancestors (Unfred, 1990; Gish, 1992; Ham, 1998, 2006, 2009; Larsen, 2001; McIntosh & Hodge, 2006). Third, although creationists have answered the problem of room on Noah’s ark for multiple pairs of gigantic dinosaurs by asserting that only about 50 ‘created kinds’ of dinosaurs existed (Ham, 1998, 2001, 2006, 2009; Morris, 1999), the problem is solved even better by the results of this study, in which only eight dinosaur ‘kinds’ are found.

Awww. I guess I’m going to have to become a creationist, now that the evidence shows that dinosaurs are related by common descent…oh, hey, wait. Isn’t that what evolution says? And isn’t that easier to accommodate within the idea that they did this over millions of years, rather than the freakishly unrealistic hyper-speciation within a few thousand years that the creationists insist on?

However, a second look reveals that these results are at odds with the creationist view. Whether there were eight dinosaur ‘kinds’ or 50, the diversity within each ‘kind’ is enormous. Acceptance that such diversity arose by natural means in only a few thousand years therefore stretches the imagination. The largest dinosaurian baramin recovered by this study includes Euparkeria, basal ornithodirans (Silesaurus and Marasuchus), basal saurischians, basal ornithischians, basal sauropodomorphs, basal thyreophorans, nodosaurid ankylosaurs, pachycephalosaurs, basal ceratopsians, basal ornithopods and all but the most birdlike theropods in an unbroken spectrum of morphological continuity. The creationist viewpoint allows for diversification within baramins, but the diversity within this morphologically continuous group is extreme. Also, the inclusion of the Middle Triassic non-dinosaurs Euparkeria and Marasuchus within the group is at odds with the creationist claim that fossil representatives of the predinosaurian, ancestral stock from which dinosaurs arose have never been found (DeYoung, 2000; Ham, 2006; Bergman, 2009).

So, effectively, these results, made using the creationists own tools, demonstrate a genetic relationship between a diverse group of animals that evolution predicted, and confronts young earth creationists with the problem of a kind of frantically prolific speciation that is unimaginably rapid. If species are that fluid and can change that rapidly, their own claims of fixity of species are patently wrong.

The final word:

The results of this study indicate that transitional fossils linking at least four major dinosaurian groups to the rest of Dinosauria are yet to be found. Possibly, some creationist authors will hail this finding as evidence of special creation for those four groups. However, such enthusiasm should be tempered by the finding here that the rest of Dinosauria–including basal members of all major lineages–are joined in a continuous morphological spectrum. This confirms the genetic relatedness of a very broad taxonomic collection of animals, as evolutionary theory predicts, ironically by means of a measure endorsed and used by creation science.

This is so wonderfully, evilly devious. Superficially, it seems to support creationist methods—but what it actually is is a grand reductio ad absurdam. Laugh wickedly at it now, but laugh even harder when you see creationists citing this paper in the future, as you know they will.

Senter P (2011) Using creation science to demonstrate evolution 2: morphological continuity within Dinosauria. J Evol Biol. doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02349.x.

The Bergman live!

If you’re really interested, that Cretinist Jerry Bergman is going to be on some weird “Ask the Expert” show at Creation Conversations, a site I’m going to have to browse more often because it is one of the lamest creationist web sites I’ve seen yet — it’s all young earth creationism presented with the goofiest arguments, like that vestigial snake limbs disprove evolution.

One warning: in order to access everything on the site, they insist that you fill out a little questionnaire with your date of birth, home town, etc., and one of the questions is “Who created the world?” You don’t get to leave it blank; Allah, Jehovah, and No One are not acceptable answers, and it only let me through when I typed “Jesus”. Way to stack your audience with clown clones, guys! Since I was honest with all the other answers, unfortunately, I doubt that they’ll approve my application.

By the way, here’s how they describe Bergman:

Ask the Expert is all new with Jerry Bergman, PhD. He has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology on the college level for over thirty years.

I genuinely pity the students who’ve had him as an instructor. Thirty years of an incompetent dilettante miseducating students…it’s tragic.