Paul was at a Christian homeschooling conference, and was asked outright how old he thought the earth was. He refused to answer.
Silly man. These were Christian homeschoolers in Kentucky. Everyone knows that on that planet, the correct answer is “6000 years”.
Libertarians, you aren’t really going to vote for this kook, are you?
The apologetic gang at BioLogos is complaining again — Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins and I didn’t understand their recent piece by Daniel Harrell on Adam and Eve, and oh, it is so hard to be the ones in the middle of all those atheist and creationist extremists.
Note to BioLogos: squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you’re halfway to crazy town.
The core of Falk’s article consists of complaining that we didn’t understand what they were talking about, and took their article out of context. Unfortunately, as Falk attempts to restate the original bogus argument, it becomes apparent that the only ones who were clueless and confused were the theistic evolutionists. What they were doing in the original article was distinguishing between two alternatives: #1, Adam and Eve were created literally as the Bible says, and #2, that Adam and Eve were historical figures who were chosen by God out of existing populations that had evolved as science explains. #1 is patently ridiculous, as they admit, and comically, they argue that #2 is eminently reasonable and supportable by science, and assume that therefore all our criticisms must have been made under the misapprehension that we thought BioLogos was endorsing #1. No! We can read, and we could see exactly what they were saying with their goofy dichotomy, and we’re saying the whole effort to reconcile science with the book of Genesis is a misbegotten waste of time — we were addressing #2, not #1. (Although Harrell also argues that #1 could be true, since his god can do anything).
#1 and #2 are both wrong, and there is also a #3. There was no Adam and Eve. There is no reason to believe there was; the authors of the book of Genesis had no source of information about prehistory, no authority to outline anything but their own recent history, which they were only able to do rather poorly and inaccurately, and the whole story was simply made up. Furthermore, this fable of a few unique individuals founding the whole human race is contradicted by the evidence: we are descended from populations with a pattern of continuous variation, grading over long ages from species to species to species. Not only is it irreconcilable with the Genesis myth, but there is no reason to expect it would be.
What they are attempting to do is shoehorn the evidence into their theological preconceptions. They need to face up to facts: it’s not a shoehorn in this case. When you’re reduced to using a hatchet and a sledgehammer to wedge the divine foot in, the shoe simply doesn’t fit.
One of the things I failed to mention when I discussed the Bergman-Enyart dialogue was that the spent some time talking about whether Adam had a navel or not, and the general historicity of Adam and Eve. I did not mention it because it was stupid, and that discussion already had a surfeit of stupid.
But now I discover that BioLogos is also carrying on about the historicity of Adam and Eve, with their usual load of waffle and metaphor and vague ways of trying to say it was really true, and God made us really, really special anyway.
There are such things as stupid questions. Stupid questions are questions that have no reasonable or rational referent, that out of the blue ask us to rationalize and reconcile, on the one hand, a patently silly fable with trivial content, to, on the other hand, the whole of known science. Just by asking, it’s an effort to equate the neglible to the substantial, to the benefit of the fluff and to the detriment of the serious.
There was no Adam. There was no Eve. We are the product of populations and pools of genes that are briefly instantiated in individuals, and it’s a great conceptual error to even fuss over finding “the” many-times-great grandparents of us all. It’s an even greater error to try to use poorly understood genetics to justify believing in a goofy myth created by people who hadn’t even imagined genetics yet.
I am amused to see both a couple of crazy young earth creationists and the pompous apologists at BioLogos have something so clearly in common, though.
I was cured of any interest in debating creationists by Jerry Bergman, that astonishingly awful whiny young earth creationist I crushed last November. It was embarrassingly bad — Bergman wandered all over the place, made absurd claims (did you know the periodic table of the elements was irreducibly complex — even Behe says it isn’t), and spent more time bragging about his many degrees and his evangelical history than he did on the topic at hand. Everyone I talked to, including the creationists, thought Bergman’s performance was dreadful. And you know that the hosting organization, the Twin Cities Creation Science Association knew it was bad for one obvious reason: they brought in a a lot of video gear, recorded the whole event, and “promised” (we all know how little a promise means to a Christian) to send me a DVD copy, but for some reason, the DVD has never appeared, and the debate also hasn’t appeared on youtube or any other video sites. They are doing a good job of burying it.
But here’s why it’s a waste of time to debate these frauds. The TCCSA immediately sent me a letter trying to spin the outcome in their favor. As is their usual M.O., the local evangelical radio station brought Bergman on afterwards to defend himself — of course I was not invited. The TCCSA also surveyed the audience: there was little change in opinion.
So I come home to several emails from some radio wacko named Bob Enyart challenging me to a debate — and after I briefly and rudely told him to get lost, I get the lame retort that if he’s so stupid, I should be able to demolish him easily, so I must be afraid to debate him. Jebus, talk about not getting it — I’ve come to the decision not to debate after one-sided triumphs with people like Bergman and Simmons — it’s not about winning or losing, it’s about how the creationists will lie and twist and distort no matter how it goes.
For example, they tried to pad Enyart’s résumé to make it sound like he was a worthy opponent. In particular, a previous debate was crowed over, in which Enyart’s opponent praised him for his intelligence.
Richard Dawkins once said that “if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” It rapidly became clear that Bob was none of these things. For a start, I know a fair bit about evolution and genetics. But when it came to familiarity with the arguments, he was way ahead of me. On epigenetics, RNA/DNA chemistry, and animal physiology, I was hopelessly outclassed. Bob is not ignorant. And it is pretty clear he is neither stupid nor insane. He came across, in fact, as extremely intelligent. So perhaps he is wicked? Well, despite a brush with the law a few years ago, I am sure he is nothing of the sort. Comments such as those made by Dawkins only further undermine the presumption of good faith on the part of creationists and Darwinists.
Wow. This summary was written by James Hannum, a theistic evolutionist who has written a book about medieval history and philosophy. Enyart had to find a medieval historian to find someone who might think he was scientifically competent.
As for “a brush with the law a few years ago”, that’s painting lightly over the facts. Enyart has a history of law-breaking derangement. He was an activist with Operation Rescue and was frequently arrested for his, shall we say, vigorous protesting style. He was divorced, and was later convicted of child abuse for beating a girlfriend’s son — he’s very big on beating up children. He was most recently arrested for trespassing at Focus on the Patriarchy — they weren’t conservative enough for him, having endorsed John McCain for the presidency.
I think it’s safe to say that Enyart is both insane and wicked. Ignorant, too, and maybe even stupid. I tried listening to the Enyart-Hannam discussion for evidence of his knowledgability about biology, but I’m sorry — tl;dl. It’s mostly Hannam and Enyart fawning over each other and not talking about biology, which neither know anything about anyway. I did hear enough to learn that Enyart is a young earth creationist and Biblical literalist, which is enough to indicate that he’s pretty damned ignorant.
So I poked around to see if I could find something shorter and clearer in which Enyart would demonstrate some scrap of sense about science. And what did I find? A mutual backslapping session between Bob Enyart and Jerry Bergman! Listen and be amused — it’s like a two-stooges routine.
Of course they start by being awed by Jerry Bergman’s NINE DEGREES, as if they indicate some great intelligence. Sorry, guys, you’ve got it backwards. A graduate program is a training program that culminates in the award of a degree — it is not an accomplishment to require multiple education attempts. Somehow, I think that if I mentioned that I had a bike with training wheels for a month or so when I was six, Jerry Bergman would try to top me by claiming that he kept his training wheels on his bike for 9 years, and is currently getting it fitted with a new set.
They then spent some time talking about vestigial organs, one of Bergman’s favorite topics, because he thinks if he finds some tiny function for an organ, it’s proven to be non-vestigial. This has never been the criterion for assessing whether an organ is vestigial or not, and Charles Darwin himself was very clear on the topic.
An organ, serving for two purposes, may become rudimentary or utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain perfectly efficient for the other.
Bergman tried flailing away on this hobby-horse during our debate, too. All it tells us is that he doesn’t understand evolution.
Another topic discussed was sexual selection, in reference to the peacock’s tail. Bergman doesn’t believe in it! And worse, he lied shamelessly about the science, claiming that peacock tails have no influence on female mate choice, when exactly the opposite is true. Enyart really revealed the depth of his competence in evolution when he claimed that these fancy patterns on tails were evidence against evolution because…well, look at his analogy.
If tattoos become really popular so that women are attracted to men who have tattoos, how long will that be the fad before kids start being born with tattoos? When is that going to happen? How stupid could Darwin be and all the world full of evolutionists?
Oh, gosh, I guess that settles it, then — how dare all those scientists believe so fervently in the inheritance of acquired characteristics?
Sorry, Bob Enyart, I won’t be debating you. I don’t respect you in the slightest, and I’m not going to give you an opportunity to claim parity. You’re a raving loony!
A few years ago, the Discovery Institute set up laboratory to do research, the Biologic Institute, which is in principle a good thing — they do claim to want to take a scientific approach to understanding the origin of life, after all. So far, it’s been less than spectacular. They published one paper on software that models encoding Chinese characters as an analogy to protein folding. It’s mildly interesting, but its connection to intelligent design is tenuous and abstract, and it’s not at all clear how they can use it to expose problems in evolution…and even if they do find a problem in their model, it’s not a given that it will apply to real biology. One has to wonder what the Intelligent Design creationists are actually doing in their lab. Others have wondered and tried to peek into the goings-on, but have been turned away.
Those madcap jokers at antievolution.org have found another way to peek in. The Biologic Institute is a tax-exempt organization, which means they had to file a form with all kinds of interesting information in it — follow the money! You can look at their Form 990, too, just search for “biologic institute” and you’ll get a nice pdf back.
Their income for 2008 was $300,000. That’s a tidy sum of money — compared to what I need to run a small lab at a teaching university, it’s a spectacular sum of money, and is actually about 10 times more than the yearly supply and maintenance budget for our entire biology department (not counting salaries, of course; the Biologic Institute does pay salaries out of that $300K). Oh, what we could do with that much support…
On the other hand, it’s not very much money at all for an outfit with the grand goal “to conduct basic scientific research on topics relating to the origin, organization and operation of living things and their parts, and to the nature of ecosystems and environments conducived to life”. The DI is getting some cheap PR out of this, but nowhere near the amount is being invested that would be needed to address their grandiose goal. By comparison, the National Center for Science Education (you can get their Form 990, too!) had a budget of about $1.3 million in the same period. Here are their goals:
Science Education. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a membership organization providing information and resources for schools, parents and concerned citizens working to keep evolution in public school science education. NCSE educates the press and public about the scientific, educational, and legal aspects of the creation and evolution controversy, and supply needed information and advice to promote and defend good science education at local, state, and national levels.
The NCSE is specific, focused and actually has a good-sized staff that does a lot of work that is visible to the public. We’re getting a bargain there. The Biologic Institute is vague, and while they’re operating on a quarter of the budget, doesn’t seem to do much.
It is a good racket, though. The director, Douglas Axe, receives a salary of $92,000, which is a heck of a lot more than I get paid (not that that means much: college professors in general aren’t exactly rich). Man, if I were in this business for the money, I should have gone into creationism. By comparison, though, you might wonder how much Eugenie Scott gets paid: $77,000. I was surprised — sure, she’s also making more than I am, but she’s a national figure with far more experience than I have. There is also a collection of well-known people like Barbara Forrest and Kevin Padian who serve on the board of the NCSE and get paid nothing. Again, don’t go into science with the expectation of riches.
Forget salaries. They’re the biggest part of most organizations budgets, but the news that people are working there isn’t news — we want to know what kind of nifty science gadgets are whirring away there. That’ll tell us what they’re up to. PCR machines? Sequencers? Lasers? Giant saltwater aquaria and bags and bags of squid chow? Here are there reported assets. Don’t get too excited.
I guess that’s reasonable for an outfit that’s coding up software, and not much else. It’s kind of a let-down if you’re expecting the Biologic Institute were doing biology. (I know, they aren’t; they’re doing biologic, whatever that is).
But let’s not be quick to judge. Maybe they’ve achieved amazing things with a small lab and limited resources. Here’s what they proudly announce as their accomplishments for 2008.
Hang on there…Doug Axe is getting paid $92,000 for getting 4,000 visitors a month to his website? I get more visitors than that in an hour! I’ve got to do some quick calculations here…if I were getting paid an equivalent amount per visit, based on last month’s traffic, I should be getting $67,677,045.43 for a year of Pharyngula! Where’s my money?
Now, unfortunately, I can’t link to the Biologic Institute web site, because if I did, I’d probably increase their productivity 100 fold.
I try to be patient with all the email I get, I really do, and usually the greatest forebearance I can offer is to simply set a piece of email aside and go on. There simply is not enough time to answer everything, especially when my correspondent is better off going to the library, and most especially when the only reply I’m inspired to give is to snarl, “Go away, kid, you bother me.”
So let me introduce you to young Mr Rosenberg. He has written me twice, the first time with a fairly routine set of questions that I politely set aside because I get a few hundred of these every week, and because he was asking the wrong person, and the second time with a pushy rude letter that prompts me to now be impolite and actually answer him. Here’s his first letter, in which he introduces himself, and as is so common in these things, tells me how smart he is. Well, if you’re so clever, Mr Rosenberg, why are you asking me the questions?
Questions on the Universe
Hi Professor Myers,
My name is Andrew Rosenberg, I am 18 years old and I live in Racine Wisconsin. I have been raised in the Lutheran Church since I was born and view myself as a Christian. Recently I have been pondering the universe, especially the existence of God in general. I have the belief that if God exists, then Christianity makes the most sense for me to follow. But that brings up the question…does God exist? I am an intelligent individual, whose thoughts go beyond the typical 2010 senior’s tangents. I graduated valedictorian of my class, and so I thoughtI would like to contact another intelligent individual, such as yourself, who has conflicting viewpoints from me. After all, if you surround yourself with the same types of people all your life, then you will never learn anything or make your own decisions.
My first question for you is this: Christianity aside, what makes you an atheist? I know I could probably find the answer deep in your blog, but to me, atheism is just ignorant of the universe around us. Existence….just the simple existence of a hydrogen atom gives me the thought that something had to, and I hate to say this, create it. With something to create, how could the materials and fabrications that make up the universe–atoms, protons, neautrons, electrons–come to be? What cause the theories such as the big bang? Put the universe’s energy into action. As easy as it is to say that a God does not exist, its just as easy to say that one (multiples?) does.
On the topic of evolution, I have further questions– I fully believe in micro evolution, whether it be by mutation of natural selection…but how can the existence of the world’s first bacterium be? How can proteins and other chemicals come together to make an organism? For if you take that same organism apart and puts its pieces back into a jar of water, it will never come back to life or reassemble itself. So how did such a thing happen in the beggining of time?
The bottom line for me is, yes the existence of some supernatural being who has divine powers seems very far fetched. But the non-existence of such a being seems far less plausible to me. How can we be without a supernatural beggining at some point in the univeral timeline? Something, from nothing. Its a supernatural question in itself that puzzles me, but makes me view atheists as ignorant. No God, yet countless molecules and building blocks that just….appeared? No, it doesn’t make sense.
Please explain any view point or answer that you have to my questions. I am not afraid to be proven wrong.
Andrew Rosenberg
“atheism is just ignorant of the universe around us”…well, la-de-da, says the high school student who hasn’t bothered to look up anything in basic physics, and is demanding that a biologist explain it all to him in an email message.
First strike against him: I am a biologist. It says so right up there at the top left, under my picture. I am not a physicist. As a biologist, I’m even more narrowly specialized than that: ask me about the evolution of multicellular animals, ask me about development, ask me about various bits and pieces of molecular evolution in the last half billion years, and I can probably give you a decent answer, and I might even talk your socks off for an hour. Ask me about physics, the big bang, and cosmology and…I’m a well-informed layman, nothing more. A literate 18-year-old could be just as current on the topic, if not more so, by going down to the library or bookstore and picking up a few texts and, you know, reading them. This isn’t hard.
Go read a book by Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, or Sean Carroll; Scientific American has a primer on cosmology, even. If you can work your way through Steven Weinberg’s Cosmology, you’ll be much, much smarter than I am. But pestering random biologists with misspelled missives demanding that they explain particles to them? Dumb.
It’s often part of a cunning ploy, of course, not that I know that this is the case with Mr Rosenberg. I’ve noticed that, after many of my more detailed talks on biology, some clueless creationist will raise their hand and ask me to explain what existed before the Big Bang, completely ignoring the topic I’ve just explained to them. I’ve also compared notes with a few physicists; they’ll give talks on the origin of the universe, and afterwards be asked to explain the evolution of the eye. I think they know better than to ask a question in which they may get a deep and knowledgeable answer, because they don’t want an answer.
I would just have to give a very general answer that we know that heavier atoms are assembled by processes in stellar evolution, that many complex molecules are constructed by natural processes (formaldehyde forms in space, for instance), and that fundamental particles arose in the Big Bang; that physicists I have talked to, like Lawrence Krauss, have pointed out that stuff spontaneously forms all the time, and that there is no such thing as empty space. Try this on for size.
I can say why I’m an atheist, though, and I’ve talked about it numerous times. Here’s a short, succinct image that explains it all.
Mr Rosenberg has not explained why I should believe in his Christian deity at all, and his only explanation for why he believes in his peculiar god is a self-confessed complete lack of knowledge and imagination, which given that he’s the clueless fellow asking a biologist to explain physics to him in 200 words or less, is not at all impressive.
But now, today, I get another message from him. I get these all the time, too, demands from ignorant jerks who are so infused with a sense of entitlement that they think they can demand that I spoonfeed them. “Christian humility” is just an ironic phrase for arrogant insincerity.
A Few Questions for an Atheist.
Hello PZ Myers,
My name is Andrew Rosenberg. Last week I sent you an email talking about why I believe in a creator. You did not respond. I would really like to hear your opinion on what I sent you. I also have another concern about you. I have been following your blog and youtube videos for a little while. I think that it is extremely rude of you to constantly criticize religeous groups on your blog. You do it everyday. I don’t know if lashing out at people gives you confidence because your followers laugh at your witty, little remarks, but I certainly think its rude. Especially when you get in person and you are just a little man with a quiet voice. Yet on the internet you spew forth brash criticisms like a volcano.
But besides those opinions of mine, I would really like to hear your take on my question of existence itself that I sent you.
Andrew
Hey, Andy — GET STUFFED.
You’re a perfect example of why I am rude — I am really tired of pretentious twits who’ve barely got a high school education, which isn’t much to begin with, and who think they’re brilliant because they can answer everything with “goddidit.” Am I rude? You bet. It’s not going to change, either.
But then you exhibit typical inconsistency: I’m a “little man with a quiet voice.” Would I have more authority if I glopped on some pomade and bellowed at you? Do you even listen to what I say in those videos? It’s nothing different from what I write — it’s just that my presentation is different than the howling protestations you get from televangelists.
I will remember what you expect, Andrew Rosenberg of Racine, Wisconsin. If we ever meet, I’ll make a special effort to yell rudely at you and just you, and do my best to send your know-nothing pious butt away crying. And don’t bother writing to me again.
The creation museum in Social Circle, Georgia, complete with all of its contents, is for sale. Like me, I’m sure all of you are going “squeeee!!” right now.
You know, Father’s Day is just around the corner, and rather than getting me a $5 tie, maybe the kids should chip in and get me this. It shouldn’t cost much more. And as a special bonus, Georgia benefits when the trucks come in and haul all this trash away. There should be a picnic and a parade.
Maybe I’m being unfair. It might be worth more: that “museum” looks wonderfully kitschy. Everything is in flashy gilt frames, and just the Robot Giant Pandas have got to be worth something.
Jonathan Sarfati, a particularly silly creationist, is quite thrilled — he’s crowing about how he has caught Richard Dawkins in a fundamental error. The eye did not evolve, says Sarfati, because it is perfectly designed for its function, and Dawkins’ suggestion that there might be something imperfect about it is wrong, wrong, wrong. He quotes Dawkins on the eye.
But I haven’t mentioned the most glaring example of imperfection in the optics. The retina is back to front.
Imagine a latter-day Helmholtz presented by an engineer with a digital camera, with its screen of tiny photocells, set up to capture images projected directly on to the surface of the screen. That makes good sense, and obviously each photocell has a wire connecting it to a computing device of some kind where images are collated. Makes sense again. Helmholtz wouldn’t send it back.
But now, suppose I tell you that the eye’s ‘photocells’ are pointing backwards, away from the scene being looked at. The ‘wires’ connecting the photocells to the brain run over all the surface of the retina, so the light rays have to pass through a carpet of massed wires before they hit the photocells. That doesn’t make sense…
What Dawkins wrote is quite correct, and nowhere in his refutation does Sarfati show that he is wrong. Instead, Sarfati bumbles about to argue against an argument that no biologist makes, that the eye is a poor instrument for detecting patterns of light. The argument is never that eyes do their job poorly; it’s that they do their job well, by a peculiar pattern of kludgy patches to increase functionality that bear all the hallmarks of a long accumulation of refinements. Sarfati is actually supporting the evolutionary story by summarizing a long collection of compromises and odd fixes to improve the functionality of the eye.
There’s a fundamental question here: why does the vertebrate eye have its receptors facing backwards in the first place? It is not the best arrangement optically; Sarfati is stretching the facts to claim that God designed it that way because it was superior. It ain’t. The reason lies in the way our eye is formed, as an outpocketing of the cortex of the brain. It retains the layered structure of the cortex, even; it’s the way it is because of how it was assembled, not because its origins are rooted in optical optimality. You might argue that it’s based on a developmental optimum, that this was the easiest, simplest way to turn a light-sensitive patch into a cup-shaped retina.
Evolution has subsequently shaped this patch of tissue for better acuity and sensitivity in certain lineages. That, as I said, is a product of compromises, not pre-planned design. Sarfati brings up a series of odd tweaks that make my case for me.
The vertebrate photoreceptors are nourished and protected by an opaque layer called the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE). Obviously, you couldn’t put the RPE in front of the visual receptors, so the retina had to be reversed to allow it to work. This is a beautiful example of compromise: physiology is improved at the expense of optical clarity. This is exactly what the biologists have been saying! Vertebrates have made a trade-off of better nutrient supplies to the retina for a slight loss of optical clarity.
Sarfati makes the completely nonsensical claim that the presence of blood vessels, cells, etc. in the light path do not compromise vision at all because resolution is limited by diffraction at the pupil, so “improvements of the retina would make no difference to the eye’s performance”. This is clearly not true. The fovea of the vertebrate eye represents an optimization of a small spot on the retina for better optical properties vs. poorer circulation: blood vessels are excluded from the fovea, which also has a greater density of photoreceptors. Obviously, improvements to the retina do make a difference.
It’s also not a condition that is universal in all vertebrates. Most birds, for instance, do not have a vascularized retina — there is no snaky pattern of blood vessels wending their way across the photoreceptors. Birds do have greater acuity than we do, as well. What birds have instead is a strange structure inside their eye called the pecten oculi, which looks kind of like an old steam radiator dangling into the vitreous humor, which seems to be a metabolic specialization to secrete oxygen and nutrients into the vitreous to supply by diffusion the retina.
Sarfati also plays rhetorical games. This is a subtly dishonest argument:
In fact, cephalopods don’t see as well as humans, e.g. no colour vision, and the octopus eye structure is totally different and much simpler. It’s more like ‘a compound eye with a single lens’.
First, there’s a stereotype he’s playing to: he’s trying to set up a hierarchy of superior vision, and he wants our god-designed eyes at the top, so he tells us that most cephalopods have poorer vision than we do. He doesn’t bother to mention that humans don’t have particularly good vision ourselves; birds have better eyes. So, is God avian?
That business about the cephalopod being like a compound eye is BS; if it’s got a single lens, it isn’t a compound eye, now is it? It’s also again pandering to a bias that our eyes must be better than mere compound eyes, since bugs and other lowly vermin have those. Cephalopods have rhabdomeric eyes, meaning that their photoreceptors have a particular structure and use a particular set of biomolecules in signal transduction, but that does not in any way imply that they are inferior. In fact, they have some superior properties: the cephalopod retina is tightly organized and patterned, with individual rhabdomeres ganged together into units called rhabdomes that work together to process light. Their ordered structure means that cephalopods can detect the polarity of light, something we can’t do at all. This is a different kind of complexity, not a lesser one. They can’t see color, which is true, but we can’t sense the plane of polarity of light in our environment.
I must also note that the functions of acting as a light guide (more below) and using pigment to shield photoreceptors are also present in the cephalopod eye…only by shifting pigments in supporting cells that surround the rhabdome, rather than in a solid RPE. Same functions, different solutions, the cephalopod has merely stumbled across a solution that does not simultaneously impede the passage of light.
Color vision, by the way, is a red herring here. Color is another compromise that has nothing to do with the optical properties of the arrangement of the retina, but is instead a consequence of biochemical properties of the photoreceptors and deeper processing in the brain. If anything, color vision reduces resolution (because individual photoreceptors are tuned to different wavelengths) and always reduces sensitivity (you don’t use color receptors at night, you may have noticed, relying instead on rods that are far less specific about wavelength). But if he insists, many teleosts have a greater diversity of photopigments and can see colors we can’t even imagine…so humans are once again also-rans in the color vision department.
Sarfati is much taken with the discovery that some of the glial cells of the eye, the Müller cells, act as light guides to help pipe light through the tangle of retinal processing cells direct to the photoreceptors. This is a wonderful innovation, and it is entirely true that in principle this could improve the sensitivity of the photoreceptors. But again, this would not perturb any biologist at all — this is what we expect from evolution, the addition of new features to overcome shortcomings of original organization. If we had a camera that clumsily had the non-optical parts interposed between the lens and the light sensor, we might be impressed with the blind, clumsy intricacy of a solution that involved using an array of fiber optics to shunt light around the opaque junk, but it wouldn’t suggest that the original design was particularly good. It would indicate short-term, problem-by-problem debugging rather than clean long-term planning.
Sarfati cannot comprehend why the blind spot would be a sign of poor design, either. He repeats himself: why, it’s because the eye needs a blood supply. Yes, it does, and the solution implemented in our eyes is one that compromises resolution. I will again point out that the cephalopod retina also needs a blood supply, and they have a much more elegant solution; the avian eye also needs a blood supply, but is not invested with blood vessels. He gets very circular here. The argument is not that the vertebrate eye lacks a solution to this problem, but that there are many different ways to solve the problem of organizing the retina with its multiple demands, and that the vertebrate eye was clearly not made by assembling the very best solutions.
Sarfati really needs to crawl out of his little sealed box of creationist dogma and discover what scientists actually say about these matters, and not impose his bizarre creationist interpretations on the words of people like Dawkins and Miller. What any comparative biologist can see by looking at eyes across multiple taxa is that they all work well enough for their particular functions, but they all also have clear signs of assembly by a historical process, like evolution and quite unlike creation, and that there is also evidence of shortcomings that have acquired workarounds, some of which are wonderfully and surprisingly useful. What we don’t see are signs that the best solutions from each clade have been extracted and placed together in one creature at the pinnacle of creation. And in particular — and this has to be particularly grating to the Genesis-worshipping creationists of Sarfati’s ilk, since he studiously avoids the issue — Homo sapiens is not standing alone at that pinnacle of visual excellence. We’re kinda straggling partway down the peak, trying to compensate for some relics of our ancestry, like the fact that we’re descended from nocturnal mammals that let the refinement of their vision slide for a hundred million years or thereabouts, while the birds kept on optimizing for daylight acuity and sensitivity.
The Discovery Institute is getting so politely eviscerated by a couple of people right now — you ought to savor the destruction.
Richard Sternberg, the wanna-be martyr of the Smithsonian Institution, made a stupid mathematical mistake in explaining alternatively splicing, and then, after it was explained to him, did it a second time, revealing that it wasn’t just an unfortunate slip, but a complete failure to grasp the basic concept. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, except that Sternberg has been yammering away about how alternative splicing represents a serious problem for evolution.
Steve Matheson continues his deconstruction of the DI’s poor performance in a recent debate. The creationists are constantly cheesed off about the whole idea of junk DNA, that there are great stretches of sequence that have no specific functional role, and seize upon every little example of non-coding DNA shown to have an effect on the phenotype to claim that all of it does. They don’t understand junk DNA. Again, it’s embarrassing that they even strain at this topic when they are so clueless.
My objection to Meyer’s references to introns and “junk DNA” is more than just a quibble about the molecular biology of introns. I’ve explained before why I find the whole “junk DNA” mantra to be utterly duplicitous, and I referenced my previous writing in the critique of Meyer. The basic story told by DI propagandists and other creationists is that non-coding DNA was ignored for decades, during which it was thought to be completely functionless (due to “Darwinist” ideas), only to be dramatically revealed as centrally important to life. That story is false. The real story is more interesting and complex (of course) and has been explained in detail several times.
Really, T. Ryan Gregory’s short and sweet post on the history of the concept is essential reading. If only the ID creationists would read it…
And finally, Matheson has a far too charitable letter to Stephen Meyer. He assumes that Meyer is a smart guy, honestly interested in science, who has gotten sucked into the inbred and self-deluding folly of creationism, urging him to get out and talk to actual scientists, where he’d learn what they really think, rather than these fallacious myths creationists tell themselves. It’s a nice idea, but I think the premise is incorrect. Meyer is a creationist first, who has been trying to learn little bits of science that he can use to rationalize his preconceptions.
It’s still a very nice letter, though, and a scathing denunciation of the Discovery Institute. They’ll ignore it, I’m sure, except to move Matheson a few notches higher on their list of enemies.
