I get email

Joe wrote me a letter because he doesn’t think my arguments against creationism are very good. Unfortunately, his arguments are…well, pretty much the standard inconsistent and incoherent tripe I always get from creationists. But at least Joe has an excuse: he’s only 12.

By the way, his email actually was in Comic Sans. Part of it, anyway: a large random chunk in the middle was set in good ol’ Comic Sans.

Hello. This is not Spam. I would like to have a discussion on your post ‘The five best arguments for creationism ever.’ (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/the_five_best_arguments_for_cr.php) Where you try to disprove theory’s made by creationists on a news paper article I left a comment but I feel that your points are not strong and I (being a twelve year old kid) would like to argue them further the other way. Here is the comment that I left (well i changed it a bit from my original comment).
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1. We have lots of evidence between evolution with in a species BUT NOT BETWEEN SPECIES its called the missing link!

The “missing link” is copy from tabloid journalism. There is no “missing link”, scientists are not looking for one, and it’s silly to argue that we have to find something that evolution does not predict.

It’s populations that evolve, and we have plenty of examples of transitional forms. Look up ring species, or Tiktaalik, or whale fossils, or any of the hominid fossils. What you are calling the “missing links” are out there, and closing your eyes won’t make them go away.

2.Just because the earth is obviously old doesn’t mean that this point is incorrect as got could have easy created a pre-aged earth (god dint create Adam and eave as babies, he created them pre-aged.

OK, that’s fine; you’ve just invoked a major magic trick by a deceiver god. That is a possibility that would account for the existence of all that evidence for evolution, but then you don’t get to deny the existence of “missing links”; that’s part of the evidence for an old earth that your trickster deity salted in the ground.

3. The compound eye is an example of irreducible complexity so complex that it cannot be any less complex its ether an eye or it isn’t there is no evolution in the middle. Another example of irreducible complexity is blood clotting.

Irreducible complexity is a dead issue, I’m afraid. It’s no obstacle to evolution, the examples of IC that creationists frequently trot out, like the clotting cascade, are explainable by natural processes.

4. It is true that some creationists think that ‘the bible uses allegory to explain the creation of the earth. It is a story, so employs figures of speech and other literary devices to tell the story of how God created man e.g. Genesis “days” could also be read as “ages”.’ but I don’t see what the newspapers point is there.

The newspaper tried to suggest that there were reasonable scientific arguments in favor of a young earth, that is, an earth less than ten thousand years old. It was wrong; there are none.

By the way, you haven’t presented an argument here. Have you run out?

5. Evolutionists have not, cannot ant will not prove evolution… mainly because they have not cannot and will not find the missing link.

This is the same as your first argument. I guess you really are done.

So you’ve managed to come up with a grand total of three arguments: the first is built on a misconception and denial of the evidence; the second simply argues that it was all magic; and the third simply regurgitates an intelligent design creationism buzz phrase. That’s a rather poor performance.

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I have a problem with many science teachers teaching evolution. If you are going to teach students evolution you need to teach students all the opposing theories. I

however Evolution and Creation may not be opposite and it may be that they merge together as the book of genesis is taken by many to be a story of figures of speech and literary devices and therefore can mean that evolution may merge into that. And personally given better evidence I may be able to accept that idea however I refuse to believe that man evolved from any other species because man is created in gods image and any other species are not.

Your refusal to believe in the evidence because you don’t like the conclusions is fairly typical creationist thinking, and it’s also illogical and wrong. There is no reason to accept the book of Genesis as a legitimate source of scientific information, and your refusal to consider the possibility that it isn’t a science text and gets all the science wrong puts you out of the realm of scientific thinking.

Intelligent Design creationism is fundamentally wrong

Via Sandwalk, this is a clip of Paul Nelson praising Jonathan Wells and his godawful gemisch of bad scholarship and lies, Icons of Evolution. They were making a big to-do over the ten-year anniversary of publication of this ghastly hackwork, and here Nelson is piously praising the premise.

It’s infuriatingly dishonest. Notice what he repeats over and over: the textbooks “diverge from the actual evidence,” they’re “out of touch with the actual evidence,” we “need to take these standard stories back to the evidence.” This, from the Discovery Institute, a propaganda mill with no evidence for their fantasies about design at all. There is such an egregious disconnect between what Nelson says and what he and his cronies do that I half-expected his sanctimonious head to explode. If you’re an intelligent design creationists, you do not have the privilege of hectoring others about evidence.

Furthermore, he’s spewing this nonsense in praise of Icons of Evolution, a book to which honesty and evidence are words in a strange foreign language…yet Nelson claims the message of that book is that textbook authors need to be “scrupulous about accuracy” — and yet those scruples are never applied to Wells, and further, Nelson is more than a little self-serving here: he is co-author on another awful DI production, Explore Evolution, which is little more than a warmed-over edition of Icons, and which has also been panned in reviews.

And then Nelson says the “response was much more hostile than I would have guessed.” He claims the hostility was because they were airing “dirty laundry,” which is simply wrong. The hostility derived from the fact that it was an appallingly bad work of misrepresentation and misleading innuendo, all on the service of an intellectually bankrupt theology.

On top of Icons of Evolution and Explore Evolution, Wells rehashed the same lies again in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It’s become obvious that the Wells has gone dry: he’s simply repeating the same errors and phony arguments over and over again. This is not a man or work that warrants praise, but only condemnation and contempt.

In the past, I’ve focused on one specific issue that Wells repeatedly brings up, the idea that Haeckel’s embryos are some kind of ongoing problem for evolution. There are a lot of articles on Pharyngula on this subject, but I’ll just point to this one omnibus summary of links to articles on Haeckel and Wells, and briefly explain the nature of this ‘controversy’. There is a 19th century observation, made by multiple scientists and easily replicated today, that embryos go through a period called the phylotypic stage (and in vertebrates, called the pharyngula stage), in which species within a phylum exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity to one another. This is simply a fact: stop by my lab and I can pull out a series of slides of birds and mammals and reptiles and fish and show you how they all exhibit a set of characters, the presence of a tailbud and pharyngeal arches and somites and so forth, that are the hallmark of this relatively well-conserved stage. Now in the 19th century, Haeckel over-interpreted them to postulate a recapitulation of evolution within the development of an embryo, an idea now known to be false; Wells strategy has always been to point to an obsolete and falsified explanation for the similarities to argue that the evolutionary relationships are untenable. It’s a sleazy sleight of hand. Recapitulation theory is not in any way endorsed any more, but the similarities at the phylotopic stage are undeniable…yet Wells condemns any textbook that even shows photos of embryonic similarities.

That’s the central problem here. We have a phenomenon, the similarities between embryos at one stage of development, for which the creationists have no explanation, so they’re reduced to frantically denying the phenomenon. This isn’t the way science should work. The phenomenon is real; that these common similarities between embryos is better explained by common descent than by design may make creationists uncomfortable, but what a scientist should do is find an answer, not try to wave the problem away (or worse, accuse everyone who has seen these similarities as guilty of fraud).

I’d go further than to argue that the creationists are trying to hide data that defies their ideology. They’re trying to bury something that is almost paradigmatic of juicy, exciting science. There are a couple of properties of significant scientific questions that I consider emblematic of exactly the kind of work that is of great value.

  1. It has to address a universal phenomenon. The problem of phylotypy isn’t representative of all of life by any means, but it seems to be a near-universal within the animal kingdom. Why do organisms as diverse as insects and mammals exhibit this morphological bottleneck in their development? It’s a great question; it doesn’t deserve to be swept under the rug as the creationists would like to do.

  2. It has to be a non-trivial problem. Trying to figure out exactly what is going on in phylotypy isn’t easy, because the current best hypotheses all involve interactions within complex gene networks, not the most tractable problem, and solving it will require both comparative and computational tools. It’s the complexity of the subject that makes it both challenging and rewarding to solve.

  3. One thing guaranteed to spur interest if the postulated mechanisms are controversial. Proposed mechanisms for phylotypy are non-Darwinian: they involve selection for intrinsic properties of networks of developmental genes that establish large scale properties of embryonic patterning. Notice that it isn’t anti-Darwinian, or the creationists would be happy with it; the mechanism fits within the context of our understanding of evolution, but extends it somewhat to include conservation of a kind of sophisticated, modular array of genes that work together to build the body plan. It’s not just the alleles that matter, but the connections between them.

  4. Maybe I should have mentioned this one first. A key quality of good science is that it is doable — we have to be able to sit down and do measurements and experiments. Truth be told, a lot of ordinary science doesn’t engage the first three principles I listed above as much as it permits the rapid and routine collection of data. The phylotypy hasn’t been quite so tractable, and to move beyond a kind of morphological phenomenology that has characterized much of the work so far, requires comparative analysis of large dataset of developmental gene expression data. Until recently, that kind of information simply hasn’t been available.

I used the past tense there: that data hasn’t been available. But that’s changing fast now with new techniques in molecular and developmental biology, and later today I’ll summarize a couple of beautiful recent articles that have revealed some of the underpinnings of the phylotypic stage. The creationists weren’t just wrong, they’re on the wrong side of history, and day by day they are bing shown to be increasingly far off base.

When did Oklahoma start electing shaved apes to their legislature?

Oh, actually, shaved apes would be an upgrade from Josh Brecheen, who is more like a shaved and bipedal member of the subgenus Asinus. He’s a new legislator who has announced his intention to introduce creationism into Oklahoma schools (or, as perhaps I should refer to them, “skools”) for a set of reasons he laid out in a notably ignorant column in the Durant Daily Democrat.

His column is amazing. The faculty of Southeastern Oklahoma State University are covering their eyes in shame right now, since apparently this creationist-cliche-spewing plagiarist and professional goober managed to successfully graduate from their institution. My students ought to be worried, too, because now I feel like I’ve got to tighten up my standards and start flunking more students out lest they come back and haunt me from positions of power. Seriously, it’s a remarkable work he’s posted: it’s largely cribbed from the creationist Lee Strobel, but at the same time, he’s managed to make standard creationist arguments worse. Here’s his whole column, with a little helpful annotation from me.

One of the bills I will file this year may be dismissed as inferior by “intellectuals” [It’s not a promising beginning when you’re discussing a scientific topic and immediately dismiss intellectuals] so I wanted to devote particular time in discussing it’s [sic] merits. It doesn’t address state waste, economic development, workers comp reform or lawsuit reform (although I have filed bills concerning each) [I dread learning about their quality, given the dreck espoused here] but it is nonetheless worthy of consideration. It is an attempt to bring parity [a familiar refrain, in which a fringe belief is undeservedly promoted to equal time with well-established science] to subject matter taught in our public schools, paid for by the taxpayers and driven by a religious ideology [says the guy who wants to promote a religious ideology] . I’m talking about the religion of evolution [eyes roll everywhere]. Yes, it is a religion [No, it isn’t]. The religion of evolution [Seriously. It isn’t. It’s a scientific theory that explains a large body of confirmable facts, and that provides a useful framework for new research. It has no resemblance to any faith of any kind.] requires as much faith as the belief in a loving God [God: no evidence, no math, no experiments, no observations. Evolution: evidence, math, experiments, observations. Case closed.], when all the facts are considered (mainly the statistical impossibility of key factors [Here comes the bad math]). Gasp! Someone reading this just fell out of their enlightened seat!!! [Only at the sight of three exclamation points…we’re all wondering if he typed this while wearing his underpants on his head] “It’s not a religion as it’s agreed upon by the entire scientific community,” some are saying at this very moment [No, we’re not, because its status as a science rather than a religion is determined by its properties, not some kind of consensus or vote]. Are you sure? Let’s explore the facts. [As if Brecheen has any.]

As a high school and university student forced to learn about evolution [If only someone had forced him to learn about logic and grammar!] I was never told there were credible scientists who harbor significant skepticism toward Darwinian Theory [Because there aren’t any, at least not in the sense Brecheen is talking about. There are critics of aspects of the theory and differences in emphasis, but no credible, knowledgeable scientist has any doubts about the overall fact of evolution]. I easily recall a full semester at SOSU where my English 1 professor forced us to write [What we professors call “teaching”, or dumber students call “forcing”] almost every paper over the “facts” of evolution. That professor had a deep appreciation for me [Oh, really?] by semester end due to our many respectful debates [In the classroom, professors tend to avoid expressing what they really think of some of the clowns in our student body. Don’t mistake professionalism for intellectual respect] as I chose to not be blindly led [Says the creationist]. I specifically remember asking how in 4,000 years of recorded history how we have yet to see the ongoing evidence of evolution [But we do! Bacterial resistance, new species, observations of changing frequencies of alleles, etc., etc., etc.] (i.e. a monkey jumping out of a tree and putting on a business suit [Jebus. What a maroon. No, evolution does not predict that monkeys will don business suits]).

Following a 2001 PBS television series, which stressed the “fact” of evolution, approximately 100 [100 fringe cranks out of a population of about a million scientists] physicists, anthropologists, biologists, zoologists, organic chemists, geologists, astrophysicists and other scientists [Don’t forget the dentists! Relatively few on the “Dissent from Darwinism” list were actually qualified biologists, and quite a few have since been very surprised to learn that they were included] organized a rebuttal. So much disagreement arose from this one sided TV depiction that this group produced a 151 page rebuttal stating how the program, “failed to present accurately and fairly the scientific problems with the Darwinian evolution”. These weren’t narrow minded fundamentalists, backwoods professors or rabid religious radicals [Actually, yeah, they were] ; these were respected world class scientists like Nobel nominee [Anyone can be nominated, and nominations are supposed to be secret; why this is always cited as a qualification is mysterious] Henry Schafer, the third most cited chemist [chemist, no expertise in biology] in the world and Fred Figworth [This is called a plagiarized error. Lee Strobel made this typo, and now it gets echoed in creationist rants everywhere. There is no Figworth at Yale; his name is Sigworth] , professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale Graduate School.

Ideologues teaching evolution as undisputed fact are not teaching truth [Yes, they are. Evolution is firmly established.]. Renowned [Fact not shown] scientists now asserting that evolution is laden with errors are being ignored [Also laughed at] . That’s where we should have problems with state dollars only depicting one side of a multifaceted issue [Oklahoma: mountain state, archipelago, rain forest, or lunar mare? That’s a multifaceted issue, too. Shall we teach invented geography with equal time?]. Using your tax dollars to teach the unknown, without disclosing the entire scientific findings is incomplete and unacceptable [OK, if we’re to teach the complete story, we’ll rightfully have to invest 179.99 days in teaching the scientific evidence, which all supports evolution, and 3 minutes on creationism on the last day. Fair’s fair]. For years liberals have decried how they want to give students both sides of an argument so they can decide for themselves [Both sides doesn’t imply a body of evidence is equal to a body of myth and superstition], however when it comes to evolution vs. creation in the classroom, the rules somehow change [Wrong. We’re consistent: we want the scientific evidence taught. It’s not our fault the creationists haven’t provided any]. Their beliefs shift, may I say… evolve to suit their ideology.

We must discuss the most recognizable icons of the evolution religion. Darwin sketched for The Origin of Species a visual [This one? Wrong. It’s not in the Origin, it’s in Darwin’s notes, which I doubt that Brecheen has read. It also looks nothing like what he describes] to explain his hypothesis that all living creatures evolved from a common ancestor. The tree of life scenario, engrained upon most of our memories [What he’s about to describe isn’t the tree of life, and I don’t know where he came up with it, but plucked from his ass seems a reasonable hypothesis], depicts gue transitioning into a hunched over monkey which then turns into a business suit [What’s with all the monkeys in business suits?].

Darwin himself knew the biggest problem with his visual (cornerstone concept of his hypothesis) was the fossil record itself. He acknowledged major groups of animals, he coined “divisions” (now called phyla) appear suddenly in the fossil record [Fair enough, Darwin does propose this as an issue, saying that there should have been long periods of time prior to the Cambrian, during which life swarmed in the seas. Of course, he’s since been shown to have been right.]. The whole basis for evolution is gradual differences and changes to be confirmed by modified fossils (phyla cross-over [What? Never heard of it]). Even Christians believe in biological change from species to species (adaption) over time. The taxonomic hierarchy which includes species, genus, family, order and class must be visualized [What?] for understanding separation from phyla and species classifications. As an OSU Animal Science graduate [I’m so sorry, OSU] I readily admit the adaption of animal species from interbreeding such as Santa Gertrudis cattle, a “weenie” dog or even a fruit fly. Even the difference among lions, tigers and cougars could be attributed to species adaption and interbreeding if one so decried [sic]. Additionally, human differences seen notable in ethnicity proves that change among species is real but this is NOT evolution [No, it is evolution. You don’t just get to define away obvious examples of changes over time as non-evolution] , its [sic] adaption. Changes with the classification of species is DRAMATICALLY different then changes among Phyla [Again, I say, what? I’ve been grading a lot of papers lately. I can tell when a student is trying to BS his way through a topic he doesn’t understand, and Brecheen is showing all the signs] . Phyla changes would be if an insect, with its skeleton located on the outside of soft tissue (arthropods), transformed into a mammal, with its skeleton at the core of soft tissue (chordates) [Ah, so that’s what he’s getting at. An insect must turn into a mammal for evolution to be true. Sorry, guy, such a phenomenon would demonstrate that evolution was wrong — biologists make no such prediction]. Phyla changes must be verified for Darwin’s common ancestor hypothesis to be accurate [Nope. This nonsense about “phyla changes” or “phyla cross-over” is simply stuff Brecheen has made up out of whole cloth (or stolen from one of his creationist source). Real biologists argue that mammals and insects evolved from a common ancestor in the pre-Cambrian, which would have been a generalized worm-like creature. Organisms do not suddenly leap across lines of descent; it’s like arguing that before you’ll believe I’m descended from my grandmother, I have to give birth to my cousin].

The rapid appearance of today’s known phylum-level differences, at about 540 million years ago, debunks the tree of life (common ancestor) scenario [No, it doesn’t.]. This biological big bang of fully developed [Nonsense. Cambrian organisms were precursors to modern forms, and the full range of extant forms was not present in the Cambrian—there were no bumblebees or birds, no squirrels or snakes.] animal phyla is called the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion’s phyla fossils and the phyla of today are basically one in [sic] the same [Nope. The Cambrian chordates, for instance, were represented only by small wormlike swimmers that were spineless and jawless and brainless; modern chordates are significantly more diverse. Mr Brecheen, for instance, possesses a jaw, although he may be lacking in some of the other key characters]. These phyla fossils of that era are fully developed [What does that even mean? Of course they were functional organisms], not in a transitional form [“Transition” refers to an intermediate between two forms. They were transitional between pre-Cambrian forms and modern chordates]. In fact we don’t have a transitional form fossil [Of course we do.] crossing phyla classification [Again with this bizarre “phyla crossing” nonsense. We expect no such thing] after hundreds of years of research looking at sediment beds spawning the ages. There are certainly plenty of good sedimentary rocks from before the Cambrian era to have preserved ancestors if there are any [Again, we do! We have fossils from the Vendian/Ediacaran; we have 600 million year old embryos; we have trace fossils and the small shelly fauna. Brecheen’s ignorance is not evidence of absence] . As for pre-Cambrian fossils being too tiny or soft for secured preservation there are microfossils of bacteria in rocks dating back beyond three billion years [As I just said, we’ve got ’em. They’re worms and slugs and fans and weird quilted creatures] . Absolutely ZERO phyla evidence supporting Darwin’s hypothesis has been discovered after millions of fossil discoveries [Imagine Brecheen closing his eyes real tight right now, sticking his fingers in his ears, and going “lalalalala”. What exactly did he learn in that OSU Animal Science program? It sure wasn’t any basic biology]. Darwin’s cornerstone hypothesis where invertebrate’s transition into vertebrates is majorly lacking [No, it isn’t. The molecular evidence is robust. Brecheen just doesn’t understand it, or more likely, never saw it] and so is Darwin’s “theory”.

I will be introducing legislation this session to ensure our school children have all the facts [So, Oklahoma, you elected this idiot to office. Are you going to stand by and watch him poison your educational system with this garbage?].

Wow, that number keeps going up

In their invisible feasibility study, proponents of the very silly Ark theme park in Kentucky claimed it would create 900 jobs. Now a mysterious consultant claims it will be even more effective:

The ripple effect of the first year in job creation will be over 14,000 new jobs.

But wait! That’s not big enough! Here comes Ken Ham to fluff the statistics a little more.

A lot of left-wing media and bloggers have reacted very negatively, writing a lot of false information. They only represent a minority of the people in this nation. The majority of people in this area and across the nation are supportive. The statistics show about 200 million people would want to come if the ark were rebuilt. Locally, the majority of people are really thrilled because it’s family-friendly and it would bring hundreds of jobs to the region.

The current US population is a bit over 300 million…so Ken Ham is waving around two thirds of the population of the country as prospective customers, if only the state will give him some support? Does anyone believe this guy?

Imagine you’re a tourist visiting the Cincinnati area. You’ve got the choice of taking the family to Kings Island, a major recreational park nearby, or the equivalent of Heritage USA, an evangelical Christian park with no rides, presided over by a creepy Australian dude who demands that you obey his ‘literal’ interpretation of the Bible or burn in hell.

Do you think the creepy dude actually has a realistic business plan?

Not even wrong, again

Creationists say the weirdest things. Every once in a while, someone sends me a creationist quote that reveals exactly how clueless and ignorant these guys are, because they start lecturing people on biology, a subject they clearly know nothing about. We’ve got a local boy named Brock Lee in Owatonna who is fond of writing amazing letters to the newspapers — I’ve mentioned him before — and here’s a remarkable example of creationist inanity. Look at the conclusions he draws from the biological species concept:

What is a species? The evolutionary answer seems simple enough: a species is an interbreeding population.

Most people walk away from biology classes with this definition, and it is this definition which causes problems. (In the first DVD of Hovind’s debate series, you can hear one college student give this exact definition.)

Notice that by this definition, those that are not interbreeding are not part of the species. This means that a virgin is not, by this definition, a human. If you use this definition, child sacrifice would not be considered murder, since murder only applies to humans; the child is not able to interbreed, and thus cannot meet the criteria of being in the human species. Do you see how something so simple as a wrong definition can have devastating effects?

Hormones, peers and the teaching of evolution work as a trifecta to push teens into being sexually active. Teens can control behavior and change friends, but the corrosive teaching of evolution will linger beyond them because it is ingrained in the modernist humanist belief system.

It is no surprise, then, that some teens in this town think sex stores are a good thing. They’ve been taught that sex is the only way to become human, and that even then humans have no value anyway because we’re part of the problem. The right approach is not simply to get rid of the store, but rather to destroy the false teachings which make such a store thrive.

As Kent Hovind says, “What you believe determines how you behave.” And when it comes to studying beliefs, begin at the beginning. If you would like to volunteer your time or talents to combat false teachings about origins, please contact me at brocklee@youngearthcreation.org.

God made sex, so use it as he says — in marriage.

Brock Lee

Got it, people? According to a creationist who claims that this is according to evolutionary biology, if you aren’t pregnant or having sex right now, you aren’t a human being, and we can kill you. And this is one of the reasons teenagers are having sex, because they’ve been taught that that “is the only way to become human”.

His source is Kent Hovind.

Well, ol’ Kent is in prison right now, and he sure isn’t procreating in there. Why would anyone care what a non-human said?

It does provide us with a new pick-up line, at least. “Help, my humanity is fading! Only you can restore it!” Let me know if it works for you.

Imaginary evidence never stopped them before, why should it now?

This is a remarkable bit of news about the magical Ark Encounter in Kentucky. You know that feasibility study, the one written by Ken Ham’s good buddy and co-author, the one that justified the them park because it would bring in 900 good jobs and swarms of tourists? The governor never saw it. Nobody in the Kentucky government has seen it. The state never received a copy to file. They refuse to show it to the press, even. The report is reportedly 10,000 pages long, with just the executive summary being 200 pages long, and apparently the only people who have seen it are Ham and his cronies, and Beemer, Ham’s pal who wrote it, and they aren’t letting anyone else review it.

The state of Kentucky is buying a pig in a poke.

The deal was rotten from the very beginning, with the state handing out money to a religious organization that would use it to miseducate children, but it’s really beginning to stink now. Maybe Kentuckians won’t rise up to oppose Christian inanity, but let’s hope they’ll cast a skeptical, even a conservative eye, on a deal that reeks of corruption and cronyism.

(via Barefoot and Progressive)

The latest ark news from Kentucky

There is some faint concern from the Kentucky governor that the Ark theme park will discriminate in hiring — I doubt that it will become a major sticking point. But still, it’s true, they will be selective in their hiring based on religious belief. They say that isn’t true, but one thing we know about creationists is that they lie.

“There will be positions that will require Bible knowledge because…we have certain things in there that are requiring biblical knowledge,” he explains. “That doesn’t mean, though, if you don’t have that you can’t work over in the restaurant or some other part of the facility.”

Oh. Since atheists tend to know more about religion and the Bible than Christians, can we expect a larger proportion of them to show up in those jobs requiring biblical knowledge? No. Because they have a requirement that people sign a testimonial of their faith, which means they’re actually going to discriminate on the basis of whether you agree with them or not.

Liars. Like I said.

There’s also an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (something intelligent on the WSJ opinion page? Amazing in itself) that waffles unfortunately over the conflict with the principle of separation of church and state that giving privileges to the Hamites brings about — there really is a problem here, it’s just that the professional liars of creationism have gotten very good about making excuses for themselves. But what I agree with is the recognition that modern creationists are a bit cleverer and better at exploiting the modern world than many give them credit for.

What is more interesting about Ark Encounter is what it tells us about the paradoxes of American evangelicalism, a non-worldly belief system with a restlessly entrepreneurial and commercial spirit. The term “fundamentalism” generally denotes a comprehensively anti-modern movement. But this is only partly true. Far from being a counter to modernity, American fundamentalism often embraces it with far greater enthusiasm and finesse than its mainline competition.

Look at the effectiveness with which conservative evangelicalism has made use of television, radio and the Internet. Or consider the eagerness of “creationism” to claim the mantle of science, which is quite a different matter from rejecting modernity altogether. In commercial enterprises like the Christian music industry, or Ark Encounter, the packaging of products is the same as it is in the most successful secular businesses; only the content is different. Evangelicals assume that all such modern techniques can be redeemed through certain proper uses. The medium, in this view, is not the message.

That’s the striking thing about the Creation “Museum”: it is not a reverent place. It does not exhibit any of the serious religious solemnity of the so-called sacred: it is a place dedicated to making money, and to aping the trappings (but not the substance!) of modern science. It’s as if a church opened a gift shop, and the shop was so successful that it grew and grew, and people stopped coming for the church and instead came for the sales, and eventually the church part was quietly demolished and nobody noticed.

When you go through it, too, the way it slickly copies the façade of a real museum — a rather cheesy and commercialized children’s museum — is weird and disturbing. They will put on a display of some detail of the construction of the ark, for instance, and present it as a real museum would a collection of ancient tools, but it’s all fake, completely made up, a model of an imaginary effort. As the op-ed states, this is a capitalist enterprise that has fully embraced modern packaging and marketing.

I suggest a compromise. If the state wants to recognize the Ark Encounter as a commercial effort to bring money into the state, fine; but then Answers in Genesis should be stripped of its tax exempt status and recognized as a beard for a profit-making enterprise. Alternatively, if they get to keep their status as a church-like entity, yank any attempt by the state to prop up their shell game with government support.

And anyone ought to recognize their phony legal games as a sham. They’ve set up multiple entities, some that are claiming religious status, others that are the admitted for-profit commercial arm, but all of them are funneling money in to support the promotion of a religion.

Ken Ham is feeling defensive

Poor Ken Ham is getting mocked everywhere for his Creation “Museum” and proposed Disneyland for Dummies, so he has put up a post defending Kentucky. It’s a remarkably weak argument (no surprise there, that’s all he can do), which mainly lists famous people who have been born there and occasional connections and horse racing. Whoop-te-doo. He also left off a few important merits to the state.

  • PZ Myers had ancestors who lived in Kentucky!

  • PZ Myers has a son who lives in Kentucky right now!

  • Ken Ham is not from Kentucky!

Ham did find one relevant piece of information: he dug up one study that developed a metric of important educational parameters like average class size, drop-out rate, teacher salaries, etc. that gives Kentucky a #1 ranking in public education. Good work, I knew there were smart people in Kentucky who had their priorities straight, and being from that state or living there is nothing to be ashamed of. We don’t have a detestation of Kentuckians.

The thing is that Ken Ham brings down the state average in intelligence, and his exhibits of stupid ideas bring the region and the country into disrepute. We don’t blame Kentucky.

It’s all Australia’s fault.

Martin Gaskell was not expelled

Gaskell is an astronomer who applied for a job at the University of Kentucky, and didn’t get it. This is not news. The great majority of the people who apply for jobs in the sciences don’t get them, even if they are well qualified — the rejected candidates know just to pick up and move on to the next application, because it is so routine.

Not Martin Gaskell, though. Gaskell is suing the university for not hiring him, which is amazing: when I was on the job market, I sent out at least one hundred applications, and ultimately got hired for one, so I guess that means I missed 99 potentially lucrative lawsuit opportunities. Dang. Is there a statute of limitations on civil suits?

Of course, Gaskell has a predisposition: he’s a devout Christian, so that persecution complex is rooted deeply. He claims he was denied the job because he’s an evangelical Christian. I say he’s just inventing rationalizations…something else his religion has made him very good at. And the newspapers are helping him out.

No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 — until his writings on evolution came to light.

Wrong. I’ll deny it. The leading candidate is the one you make an offer to — and the identity of that person varies throughout the review process. You can talk about a “leading candidate” when you look at just the cover letters and CVs; you’ll probably have a different “leading candidate” when you’ve had a chance to read through all the letters of recommendation; it’ll change again when you do the phone interviews; it’ll change again when you’ve had the on-campus interviews; and it’ll change again as the committee hashes over the discussions before making the final offer. This always happens. It’s ridiculous to complain that it was somehow unfair that facts emerged during a fact-finding process.

I’m in the middle (nearer the end, I’m pretty sure) of a job search to hire a new faculty member here at UMM, so I know whereof I speak. It doesn’t matter that Gaskell was well qualified for the job, since most of the applicants were probably well qualified; making a hiring commitment is a big deal that involves consideration of a great many factors, including subjective personal ones, so you simply can’t complain about individuals not getting the job. It’s fair to look for systematic bias, though, but Gaskell can’t make a case there. He claims he wasn’t hired because he’s a Christian.

I don’t believe it. There is no pattern of discrimination against the dominant religious group in the country, and Gaskell knows it. If you look at one of the documents he has written about his beliefs, scroll down to the very end, where you’ll find that Gaskell has a long list of religious organizations, like the ASA, the Affiliation of Christian Biologists, the Christian Engineering Society, etc., etc., etc. It seems that being a Christian is not considered a de facto strike against the possibility of being a scientist or engineer.

The fact that some Christians are in the sciences doesn’t argue against the fact that they could be under-represented, and face an unfair uphill struggle to get jobs. However, being a Christian is not like being a woman: it’s not something that is necessarily obvious in a job interview. We don’t ask candidates where they go to church, and if we find out, we don’t care (not even me, the arch-atheist, will bat an eye if you let slip that you attend). Gaskell will have to show that the search committee was opposed in even a vague sense to hiring a Christian, and he can’t do that. Why? Because there’s a great big fat loomin’ obvious Problem with a capital “P” splatted putridly in the pages of his CV, and all of the concern in hiring him was with that, not where he went to church.

Gaskell is an evolution-denier. He’s an old-earth creationist, a theistic evolutionist who looks favorably on Intelligent Design creationism.

It’s evident in his public defense of the Book of Genesis, in which he goes on and on with unlikely rationalizations for a metaphorical interpretation. This is a fellow who says, “It is true that there are significant scientific problems in evolutionary theory (a good thing or else many biologists and geologists would be out of a job) and that these problems are bigger than is usually made out in introductory geology/biology courses“, and then goes on to endorse Josh McDowell, Phillip Johnson, Harun Yahya, Hugh Ross, and the day-age interpretation of Genesis, as if they are somehow not afflicted with these “problems”.

There is a difference between accepting a theory that is incomplete, like evolution, and a set of wacky ideas that are contradicted by the available evidence, like these various flavors of creationism that Gaskell is favoring. That calls his ability to think scientifically into question, and that is legitimate grounds to abstain from hiring him.

The record shows that what people were discussing was not his religion alone, but the way his religion has affected his job as a scientist and communicator of science, and the effect of hiring someone with such dubious views in a state already trying to overcome the embarrassment of being home to the Creation “Museum”. These are valid concerns. It’s also a fact that when hiring, we want to have people whose skills we can respect as colleagues, and Gaskell was not in a good position that way. One of the faculty members who reviewed the case said it very well:

Another geology professor, Shelly Steiner, wrote that UK [University of Kentucky] should no more hire an astronomer skeptical of evolution than “a biologist who believed that the sun revolved around the Earth.”

That’s the bottom line. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that Gaskell was exceptionally competent in the very narrow domain of his astronomical work, but faculty don’t get hired to do only one thing, and Gaskell himself is quite clear that he isn’t going to confine himself to talking only about his field…and unfortunately, it’s also clear that he was a confused and ignorant boob about all the other subjects he was happy to lecture about.

Good grief, but I despise the Discovery Institute

There’s nothing I detest more than intellectual dishonesty, and the Discovery Institute is a world leader in that. They have a ghastly little article up on their website, “Is origin of life in hot water?”, which cites a recent paper in PNAS to argue that life couldn’t have evolved without the enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions. Here’s what they say about it:

So it seems according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors address the conundrum of origin of life chemists between the rate of (un-catalyzed) organic reactions and the lack of time available for these reactions to occur. From the article (note: an enzyme is a biological catalyst):

Whereas enzyme reactions ordinarily occur in a matter of milliseconds, the same reactions proceed with half-lives of hundreds, thousands, or millions of years in the absence of a catalyst. Yet life is believed to have taken hold within the first 25% of Earth’s history. How could cellular chemistry and the enzymes that make life possible, have arisen so quickly?” [Internal citations omitted]

Indeed this is one of the problems with origin of life scenarios, particularly those scenarios that presume a metabolism-first world (as opposed to an RNA-first world). The half-life of certain reactions without a catalyst can be millions of years, but studies show that the emergence of early bacteria could be dated as far back as 3.5 billion years (see ENV post on a cold origin of life and Schopf, J. William, “The First Billion Years: When Did Life Emerge?” Elements vol 2:229 (2006) for more on this). This means there was a limited amount of time for fundamental biological reactions to occur. Reaction kinetics can be prohibitive. However, the authors of this paper have a theory to solve the reaction kinetics problem.

No, the authors provide data to support a dramatic (and unsurprising) effect of temperature on the rate of chemical reactions, and the Discovery Institute uses a paper demonstrating the feasibility of life’s early chemistry to argue the exact opposite.

It’s stunningly arrogant — I guess they’re used to their readers simply accepting whatever they say. They quote the first three sentences of the paper, and leave off the rest of the paragraph. Would you like to know what it says?

Do you think the DI might have accurately represented the sense of the paper?

Place your bets now. Here’s the remainder of the paragraph:

Here, we show that because of an extraordinarily sensitive rela- tionship between temperature and the rates of very slow reactions, the time required for early evolution on a warm earth was very much shorter than it might appear. That sensitivity also suggests some likely properties of an evolvable catalyst, and a testable mechanism by which its ability to enhance rates might have been expected to increase as the environment cooled.

It reminds me of the infamous quote mine of the that section of Darwin’s Origin on the evolution of the eye, in which he rhetorically sets up the problem and then goes on to explain exactly how it occurred…and the creationists only ever quote the part where the problem is laid out, and pretend the answer was missing. That’s exactly what the creationists have done to this paper by Stockbridge et al. — they’ve pulled out just the few sentences at the beginning where the authors explain why this is an important problem, and then gloss over the whole point of the paper, which is to solve the problem.

Just in case you’re curious, here’s the abstract — there’s absolutely nothing in here to provide any consolation to a creationist.

All reactions are accelerated by an increase in temperature, but the magnitude of that effect on very slow reactions does not seem to have been fully appreciated. The hydrolysis of polysaccharides, for example, is accelerated 190,000-fold when the temperature is raised from 25 to 100 °C, while the rate of hydrolysis of phosphate monoester dianions increases 10,300,000-fold. Moreover, the slow- est reactions tend to be the most heat-sensitive. These tendencies collapse, by as many as five orders of magnitude, the time that would have been required for early chemical evolution in a warm environment. We propose, further, that if the catalytic effect of a “proto-enzyme”—like that of modern enzymes—were mainly enthalpic, then the resulting rate enhancement would have increased automatically as the environment became cooler. Several powerful nonenzymatic catalysts of very slow biological reactions, notably pyridoxal phosphate and the ceric ion, are shown to meet that criterion. Taken together, these findings greatly reduce the time that would have been required for early chemical evolution, countering the view that not enough time has passed for life to have evolved to its present level of complexity.

Stockbridge RB, Lewis CA, Yuan Y, Wolfenden R (2010) Impact of temperature on the time required for
the establishment of primordial biochemistry,
and for the evolution of enzymes. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1013647107.