Creationism evolves!

The existence of Ken Ham proves that creationism changes, therefore proving that it is not absolute, inerrant truth as he claims, therefore Ken Ham disproves creationism. QED. We can all go home now.

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By the way, that’s not a bad diagram for illustrating the relationships of the various versions of creationism, except that the pedigree breaks down for Intelligent Design creationism, which is kind of a weird syncretic hodge-podge that accommodates both of the major branches of the creationist tree. It really ought to be shown as the warped, evil offspring of an unnatural act, an orgy of all of the critters in the bestiary. And then it also lies about its parentage (as would we all, if we sprang from such mindless chaos).

Ken Ham put to shame

Oh, sure, Ken Ham wants to build a life-sized Noah’s Ark…but he’s trying to get tens of millions of dollars of tax breaks to build a giant ark that won’t even float. Johan Huibers is building his own version, and even plans to sail it around the world. Sorry, but the video is entirely in Dutch, but at least you can witness his sophisticated building techniques.

Do the Dutch authorities demand some kind of inspection before they allow so-called boats to be launched? Because that thing looks like it will barely make it into the harbor before it capsizes.

Ken Ham needs to meet this challenge: I want to see him out there with a nail gun, tacking sticks and boards together with his own money, and then I want him to set sail into the Atlantic and meet Johan Huibers halfway, where they can argue theology.

Philosophers and the tone argument

A recent issue of the philosophy journal, Synthese, focused on creationism and intelligent design; the articles I’ve read from it have so far all been anti-creationist, or at least recognize that creationism is in deep conflict with science. It’s all interesting stuff, anyway.

But there’s a problem. This issue was assembled with two guest editors, Glenn Branch and James Fetzer, and represents well the consensus view on ID and creationism. The editors-in-chief, however, published a disclaimer in the print edition.

Statement from the Editors-in-Chief of SYNTHESE

This special issue addresses a topic of lively current debate with often strongly expressed views. We have observed that some of the papers in this issue employ a tone that may make it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of other views and disqualification of a targeted author or group.

We believe that vigorous debate is clearly of the essence in intellectual communities, and that even strong disagreements can be an engine of progress. However, tone and prose should follow the usual academic standards of politeness and respect in phrasing. We recognize that these are not consistently met in this particular issue. These standards, especially toward people we deeply disagree with, are a common benefit to us all. We regret any deviation from our usual standards.

They actually used the tone argument! What’s also remarkable is that this is an academic journal, and if you read the papers, you’ll discover that no one is called a poopyhead, there is no broken crockery, and no rhetorical blood is spilled. It’s a gang of philosophers, for christ’s sake, people who can look on a flaming nitwit like Ray Comfort and ruminatively ponder the cognitive framework and perceptual concept-space of the crocoduck icon. Apparently, some creationists, like Francis Beckwith, were deeply offended at the criticism of their nonsense and screamed “libel!” at the journal, and the editors-in-chief covered their butts by disparaging their authors in print, instead.

One of the papers singled out for its wicked “tone” was the article by Barbara Forrest…and already your eyebrows should be rising. She’s one of the nicest people we’ve got combating creationism, who, while fierce, always goes after the wackos with a smile and good old Southern gentility. Here’s the abstract for her article. The rest of the article politely eviscerates the epistemology of intelligent design, but the tone is not at all excessive.

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties. Despite these difficulties and despite ID’s defeat in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), ID creationists’ continuing efforts to promote the teaching of ID in public school science classrooms threaten both science education and the separation of church and state guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. I examine the ID movement’s failure to provide either a methodology or a functional epistemology to support their supernaturalism, a deficiency that consequently leaves them without epistemic support for their creationist claims. My examination focuses primarily on ID supporter Francis Beckwith, whose published defenses of teaching ID, as well as his other relevant publications concerning education, law, and public policy, have been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. Beckwith’s work exhibits the epistemological deficiencies of the supernaturally grounded views of his ID associates and of supernaturalists in general. I preface my examination of Beckwith’s arguments with (1) philosopher of science Susan Haack’s clarification of the established naturalistic methodology and epistemology of science and (2) discussions of the views of Beckwith’s ID associates Phillip Johnson and William Dembski. Finally, I critique the religious exclusionism that Beckwith shares with his ID associates and the implications of his exclusionism for public policy.

That’s the worst the evolution advocates could do? I think it’s obvious that the decision to publish a disclaimer actually wasn’t motivated by a concern about the tone at all, but was actually a surrender to the ranting ideologues of the creationist movement. All we can conclude from it is that the management at the journal is craven.

Brian Leiter is calling for a boycott until the editors-in-chief apologize, which is a rather mild demand. Branch and Fetzer have made a very strong criticism of the journal:

We are both shocked and chagrined that a journal of SYNTHESE’s stature should have sunk so low as to violate the canons of responsible editorial practice as the result of lobbying by a handful of ideologues. This tells us — as powerfully as Forrest’s work — that intelligent design corrupts. We regret the conduct of the Editors-in-Chief and the unwarranted insult to the contributors and ourselves as Guest Editors represented by the disclaimer. We are doing our best to make the misconduct of the Editors-in-Chief a matter of common knowledge within the philosophy community in the hope that everyone will consider whatever actions may be appropriate for them to adopt in any future associations with SYNTHESE.

Shame on Synthese. Let’s all hope the journal staff see their way to correcting their colossal mistake.

John Wilkins is maintaining and updating a list of comments on the boycott.

Dead scientists are the best advocates for religion

Tennessee legislators are debating the addition of creationism to their science curriculum, and apparently they’ve run out of reasonable excuses, so Redumblican Frank Nicely dragged in the corpse of Albert Einstein, stuck his hand up his bony thorax, and rattled his jawbone to make a speech.

I think that if there’s one thing that everyone in this room could agree on, that would be that Albert Einstein was a critical thinker. He was a scientist. I think that we probably could agree that Albert Einstein was smarter than any of our science teachers in our high schools or colleges. And Albert Einstein said that a little knowledge would turn your head toward atheism, while a broader knowledge would turn your head toward Christianity.

No, he didn’t say that. Einstein was a secular Jew.

But wait! He needs to quote more authorities! At least this one isn’t dead yet.

Now I want to quote one other person: Thomas Sowell. In my opinion, the smartest man in America today. I’ve read him for twenty years. He’s a genius, and he is a critical thinker. And he says, why in our colleges and in our high school, why do we spend so much time arguing two theories, the theory of creationism and the theory of evolution, when neither side can prove without a doubt that they are right, when there are so many cold hard facts that our children need to know that we could be spending that time teaching? So if I was a teacher, I would teach them both as theories, and let the child as he grows up make up his own mind. And I’d spend my time teaching them cold hard facts like two and two is four and pi r squared.

Creationism is not a theory, and has been refuted by the evidence. Evolution is made up of cold hard facts. I guess Thomas Sowell isn’t so bright after all.

Isn’t it cool how creationists can just make up any ol’ damned story and get away with it?

Why is the media so hateful to Ken Ham’s “museum”?

The man certainly has an ego. His new commercial features…Ken Ham himself. Speaking as a non-photogenic and not particularly heroically-voiced fellow myself, it’s a big mistake from a purely commercial perspective for creeeepy, neck-bearded, thin-voiced weirdos with a foreign accent to be doing ads, unless he goes for the wacky angle. And this one might just feed the Christian persecution complex by highlighting the way all the media thinks his little freakshow in Kentucky is dumb, but everyone else is simply going to have their impressions confirmed when good ol’ Kenny boy stands up to out-nasal even the standard American nasal voice.

Why is the media so hateful? Because his carny-act pretending to be a “museum” actually is a menace to scientific advancement, a cheesy pile of kitsch, and a haunted house putting on airs and trying to con people into thinking it is an educational institution. They aren’t being hateful, they’re being accurate.

The malignant Jack Cashill

Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he’s not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he’s a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as the fervent but somehow, supposedly, reasonable political voice of creationism. He didn’t have two heads, he didn’t tie anyone to a stake and set them on fire, so by golly, he must not be that bad a fellow…which is an interesting phenomenon, that we so readily set aside significant intellectual differences when we humanize our opponents.

But Jack Cashill has gone on to grander and ever more insane things. He’s a regular contributor to Wingnut Daily, that awful online rag of credulous far right wing pseudojournalism, and he authors the kinds of dishonest hackwork that Teabaggers drool over. His latest effort is penning paranoid conspiracy theory books about Obama, and he’s in the news right now for an absurdly bad photoshop job: he or his sources edited a photo of Obama with his grandparents, snipping Obama out of the picture and then claiming that the photo of the three of them had been the real photoshop job. Too bad their hackwork was so awful that they managed to leave Obama’s knee in their so-called ‘original’ photo.

And now, hilariously, Joseph Farah, the kook who publishes WND, has openly admitted that they “publish some misinformation by columnists”, referring to Cashill.

I knew he was bad from the start. It ought to be a gigantic red flag on anyone’s credibility when they are peddling the kind of intellectual dishonesty that we see in creationism, and it’s no surprise when liars of that sort metastasize into politics.

Sadventists, badventists

This afternoon, a couple of smiling, glassy-eyed young ladies stopped by my house to talk about Jesus. I was delighted, but I made the mistake of telling them up front that I was an atheist, and didn’t believe in their religion…and they backed away slowly, said “goodbye!”, and scurried away. It’s so hard to bait the trap when you insist on using honesty.

Anyway, I did get a little online satisfaction reading this great ferocious rant about Seventh Day Adventists.

The Seventh-day Adventist cult’s “prophet” and founder, the alcoholic, masturbation-obsessed habitual plagiarist Ellen G. White, was astonishingly fanatical and legalistic, and let’s face it, folks, crazier than a bag of wet cats. At the age of nine, Ellen was hit in the head with a rock, which resulted in her being comatose for three weeks. Many think this trauma damaged her brain in ways that could have caused her extreme zealotry — I prefer to call it religious lunacy — which involved what she claimed were visions shown her by god, visitations by angels, and even a trip to Jupiter. Others think she was a calculating, greedy, power-hungry fraud. Some think she was a combination of both. Then there are the Sadventists, who believe even today in 2011 — despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, all of which is poorly explained away by the cult, although the explanations are good enough for the believers — that she was a true prophet of god whose writings were divinely inspired and remain an infallible supplement to the word of god. The cult holds Ellen in the same regard as the biblical prophets (something else they deny vehemently to outsiders but acknowledge within the invisible walls that surround the cult). Over the years, there have been endless revisions and changes made in Ellen’s writings by the Sadventist Powers That Be to cover up some of her more embarrassing statements or obvious errors, which seems odd if her infallible writings are divinely inspired. Nevertheless, nearly a century after her death, Ellen’s writings are still the arbiter of doctrine and scriptural interpretation in the cult.

The really fascinating thing about Ellen White is that most other Christians consider her and her cult heretical — the whole thing about a wild-eyed prophetess declaring a privileged status with God and Jesus and witnessing miracles doesn’t sit well with all the other wild-eyed fundamentalists and evangelicals who declare that they have a special relationship with divinity. And yet the modern young earth creationists, the kooks who trace their interpretation of the Bible and our origins to Whitcombe and Morris’s The Genesis Flood, are actually promoting Ellen White’s version of the creation story. Ron Numbers has traced it all back in his book, The Creationists, and basically what Ken Ham and the Hovind’s are pushing is Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine, sanitized of any mention of the crazy Millerite lady from Maine.

Paul Nelson takes a stab at Ontogenetic Depth again…which makes me go stab-stab-stabbity-stab

Paul Nelson has deigned to write a two-part essay on “Ontogenetic Depth“, his sciencey made-up term for a metric that he claims makes evolution essentially impossible. We’ve been wrangling over this for a long time — he and Marcus Ross introduced this in a poster at the Developmental Biology meetings in 2004, titled “Understanding the Cambrian Explosion by Estimating Ontogenetic Depth”, and in our conversation at that time I certainly got the impression that he and Ross were busy collecting this peculiar thing alien to creationists called “data”. I have asked him multiple times over the last 7 years how to estimate this hypothetical number; at the meetings, I recall asking him specifically how I would go back into my lab and measure it in my zebrafish. He was evasive. We’ve been trying to get him to explain this datum, which was his pretext for getting into a professional meeting, and gotten nothing.

Well, now we’re done. His first point in his first essay is that “ontogenetic depth” is “A Biological Distance That’s Currently Impossible to Measure”.

Oh.

So what the heck were Paul Nelson and Marcus Ross doing? Nelson was certainly doing his best to pretend that they were actually doing real work on this metric, but I should have known better: a failed young-earth creationist philosopher could not possibly have been soiling his hands with empiricism. Now he’s frantically arguing that it doesn’t matter, that once upon a time no one knew the distance from the earth and the sun, but they could at least name the concept, so he can take credit for at least recognizing a real problem, and he can also patronizingly thank me for pointing out that they don’t actually have the tools right now to actually measure it.

Wait, how can they thank me for that? I’m picturing Nelson and Ross sitting at a microscope and looking at eggs of a nematode or a zebrafish or a frog, rubbing their hands in anticipation of a productive morning, and then staring at each other and wondering what to do next…and end up inventing a term for something that they don’t know how to measure. And then a year or so later, Nelson encounters me, I peevishly tell him that he doesn’t know how to measure cell division and differentiation in terms of a single numeric metric, and seven years after that, Nelson finally slaps his forehead and admits “Hey, we don’t know how to measure that!”

I don’t want credit for pointing out the obvious to the clueless, especially not when they’re that slow.

His first essay is an exercise in rationalizing away how he could propose this obstacle to evolution while not having the slightest idea how to measure it. His second essay is an exercise in demonstrating that he doesn’t understand basic biology. He has gussied it up with brightly colored diagrams of cell pedigrees that he purports illustrate the problem, but I think are actually more intended to distract and confuse and make you think he’s actually thought deeply about the subject.

Here’s the gist of his conceptual difficulty: he can’t imagine how the first metazoan got from a crude colonial state, where it’s just a mass of identical cells clumped together, to a state in which regions are consistently specialized for specific functional roles, with the simplest example of an animal that contains only two cell types, a mass of somatic cells that take care of feeding and motility, and a smaller mass of germ cells that do the job of reproduction. Why, that would require a whole series of mutations that selection can’t possibly explain! How could selection possibly create a cell that contains a series of instructions to build a cell type that isn’t going to reproduce?

I’m wishing that Nelson hadn’t chosen to focus on biology. If only he were a creationist philosopher of physics, he’d be the one asking, “magnets, how do they work?” and somebody else would get the job of correcting him.

Nelson summarizes the problem as, at the minimum in the simplest possible metazoan, a three step sequence. First, cells have to divide and stick together; second, they have to have a way to make daughter cells differ from one another; and third, there has to be inheritance of that differentiated state in sublineages. He claims that in none of these steps can selection be involved; this complex process had to evolve independently of any selective effects.

That’s nonsense. The first metazoan already had all the tools needed to build these steps, honed by a billion years or more of selection in single-celled organisms. All three of his steps are found in bacteria.

Step one is simply cell adhesion. Step two is gene regulation. Step three is epigenetics. That’s it. These aren’t glorious novelties invented by the first animals, they inherited this toolkit from their ancestors. Bacteria have been sticking together for billions of years, and they’ve been responding to their local environment by shifting patterns of gene expression for just as long. A bacterium in a sugar-rich environment vs. a bacterium in a sugar-poor environment will make long term changes in gene activity that can persist for a few generations using exactly the same mechanisms as an animal embryo sets up germ and somatic tissues; has Nelson never heard of Jacob and Monod?

Nelson’s argument goes beyond pure ignorance, however. He also recruits Lewis Wolpert to his side, which is remarkable. Wolpert is a brilliant and influential developmental biologist who shaped many of our ideas about differentiation, pattern formation, and evolution. He cites Wolpert as postulating as serious problems for evolution the origin of the egg, and in particular implying that Wolpert sees metazoan evolution as violating a principle. Here’s what Nelson says about a particular paper Wolpert wrote.

Evolutionary developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert — whom no one, even in his wildest delirium, would ever mistake for an ID theorist — had long critiqued the scenario on functional grounds, using what he called “the continuity principle.” (1994) The continuity principle requires that any change occurring in an evolutionary transformation be biologically possible, that is, viable and stably heritable in the next generation.

Whoa — eminent anti-creationist scientist critiques an evolutionary explanation! I’m sure this must make you wonder, familiar as you are with creationist tactics, what Wolpert actually said. Judge for yourself, here’s the abstract for Wolpert’s paper, does it sound like he’s on Nelson’s side at all?

A scenario for the evolution of a simple spherical multicellular organism from a single eukaryotic cell is proposed. Its evolution is based on environmentally induced alterations in the cell cycle, which then, by the Baldwin effect, become autonomous. Further patterning of this primitive organism–a Blastaea, could again involve environmentally induced signals like contact with the substratum, which could then become autonomous, by, perhaps, cytoplasmic localization and asymmetric cell division. Generating differences between cells based on positional information is probably very primitive, and is well conserved; its relation to asymmetric cell division is still unclear. Differentiation of new cell types can arise from non equivalence and gene duplication. Periodicity also evolved very early on. The origin of gastrulation may be related to mechanisms of feeding. The embryo may be evolutionarily privileged and this may facilitate the evolution of novel forms. Larvae are secondarily derived and direct development is the primitive condition as required by the continuity principle.

This is a paper in which Wolpert explains how multicellularity could have evolved, directly answering the questions Nelson raised with his supposedly problematic three steps. How did Paul Nelson miss that?

But wait! There’s more Wolpert abuse!

Nelson has found a paper by Wolpert in which he points out a serious problem in a particular evolutionary strategy, and Nelson, apparently primed by a selective reading of science papers for the magic words “problem”, “difficulty”, “impossible”, or “unlikely” has seized upon it as another instance of Eminent Scientist Critiquing Evolution.

What mechanism is coordinating gene expression among all the members of the colony, such that only one cell lineage will evolve to carry the complete instruction set required to specify the form of the whole? How are mutations — occurring in all individual cells of the colony — transmitted to the next generation? If individual cells continue to reproduce via normal fission, or budding, notes Wolpert, “cell lineages [will be] mutating in all sorts of directions in genetic space.” (2002, 745) Given such genetic chaos, he argues, “we consider it practically impossible” for the collection of cells to “yet retain the ability to evolve into viable new forms.”

Sounds dreadful. I give up, I guess evolution must actually be impossible.

Hang on, though, maybe we should read Wolpert’s paper first. And there what you discover is a story that you would not have expected from Nelson’s peculiarly distorted coverage. It’s a short paper where the authors consider alternative reproduction strategies: not all animals go through a single-cell stage in reproduction, you know. Some, like hydra, reproduce by budding, where a small collection of cells, not just one egg or sperm cell, splits off to form an independent organism. Wolpert is considering which solution is more advantageous for evolution, going through a single-cell bottleneck or through a larger population that would reduce the dangers of mutations? And that’s where Wolpert’s criticisms lie: the asexual budding solution is the focus of his critique, and which is where Nelson draws his quotes highlighting the difficulty of evolution.

In a hydra-like organism that only reproduces by asexual budding, it is impossible to evolve significant changes. There is no way that the genes in the huge number of cells involved in budding can change at the same time, and mutations in individual cells mean that they no longer share the behavioural rules of the majority. It is only through a coherent developmental programme, with all cells possessing the same genes, that organisms can evolve, and this requires an egg.

Huh. So Wolpert is arguing that development from a multicellular propagule is much less evolutionarily flexible than evolution from a single-celled egg. His thesis is explaining why we develop from eggs, not that our evolution is unlikely.

We consider it practically impossible to have many asexual, differentiated cell lineages mutating in all sorts of directions in genetic space and yet retain the ability to evolve into viable new forms. This may not be completely impossible but, taking the broad view in evolutionary terms, organisms that develop from an egg would displace those that do not.

Dang, Paul Nelson. You should be smart enough to know that you don’t quotemine claims from the science literature in an argument with someone who has actually read that literature.

It’s the 7th annual Paul Nelson Day!

How could I forget? Easy, actually, it’s a rather forgettable event in which nothing happens. Seven years ago, Paul Nelson invented a creationist metric, ontogenetic depth, which purportedly measures the complexity of developmental processes and somehow implies that evolution is impossible. At that time, he wasn’t able to tell us exactly what it was or how to measure it, but he promised to explain it…tomorrow. A tomorrow which has so far stretched out to seven long years, and we now annually note the anniversary.

I really don’t care anymore if Nelson ever comes up with a nonsensical rationalization. It’s symbolic. It’s representative of all the promised ‘science’ the Intelligent Design creationists have been claiming to be doing, yet never deliver. Last year I predicted that there would be no revelations from Nelson in 2011, and now I predict that in 2012, I’ll be making the same reminder.

Unless I forget. I might. It’s hard to remember a specific day on which creationists fail — that’s like every day, you know.