No surprise at all

The copy-&-paste creationist is a familiar figure in internet debates — they don’t have an original idea in their head, but they know how to copy some long screed off the internet and paste it into a comment box, almost always without attribution, or even a link back to their source. I am completely unsurprised by the fact that Ray Comfort is a plagiarist who ripped off a brief biography of Darwin.

He stole the one piece of his introductory essay to the Origin that wasn’t awful. I suspect the rest, though, is of similarly dubious provenance.

The remainder of the pamphlet is as expected. DNA is too improbable to arise by chance, there are no transitional fossils, Hitler was a “Darwinist”, evolution and atheism share joint ideology, the eye is irreducibly complex, et cetera et cetera. He even trots out old nonsense about evolution and thermodynamics.

Anyone want to bet that if you take pieces of the creationist part of Comfort’s essay and plug them into google, you’ll find he’s parroting lots of familiar creationist sources?

A creationist at the Chicago meeting

Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra — seriously, if I were half my age right now, I’d be knocking on their doors, asking if they had room for a grad student or post-doc or bottle-washer. They are using modern techniques in genetics and molecular biology to look at variation in natural populations in the wild, and working out the precise genetic changes that led to the evolution of differences in development and morphology. They are doing stuff that, back when I actually was a graduate student, would have been regarded as technically impossible; you needed model systems in the laboratory to have the depth of molecular information required to track down the molecular basis of novel morphs, and you couldn’t possibly just grab some interesting but otherwise unknown species out on a beach or a pond and work out a map and localize genetic differences between individuals. They’re doing it now, though, and making it look easy.

Then there were all the other talks in population genetics and paleontology (and the talks on history and philosophy, which I almost entirely neglected)…this was a meeting that everywhere demonstrated major advances in our understanding of evolution. Every talk was about the successes of evolutionary theory and directions to take to overcome incomplete areas of understanding; this was a wonderfully positive and promising event that should have impressed all the attendees with the quality of the work that has been done and the excitement of the potential for future research. Like I said, there were a whole bunch of people here that I want to be when I grow up.

Well, normal people would feel that way. Paul Nelson, that creationist, was also there. Nelson is a weird guy; he’s always hanging around the edges of these scientific meetings, and you’d think that after all these years of lurking, he’d actually learn something, but no…the only skill he has mastered is the art of ignoring what he doesn’t like and incorporating fragments of sentences into his armor of ignorance. It’s very sad.

I talked with Nelson briefly at a reception at the meetings, and we both agreed on the quality of Kingsley’s work — but that’s about all. Nelson thought it supported ID better than neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. His argument was that a) all anybody ever described was loss of features, and b) a large parent population was the source of all the allelic variation in the sub-populations studied, which is what ID predicts. He didn’t mention their favorite magic word of “front-loading”, but I could see what he was thinking.

How Nelson can hang about on the fringes of the evo-devo world and not notice that what was described by modern empirical research is exactly what the evo-devo theoreticians expected is a mystery — these were results that fit beautifully what science, not the wishful voodoo of intelligent design creationism, predicts.

Both Kingsley and Hoekstra are looking at recent species, subpopulations that separated from parent populations within the last ten thousand years, and have adapted relatively rapidly to new environmental conditions. The sticklebacks are fragments of marine species that were isolated in freshwater streams and lakes, while the beach mice are parts of a widespread population of oldfield mice that are adapting to gulf coast islands. They are also working with populations that can be bred back to the root stock, that retain the ability to do genetic crosses, so of course the variation is not on the magnitude of turning fins into limbs (we need large amounts of geological time to do that; it’s the kind of work Neil Shubin would do, and unfortunately, he can’t cross Tiktaalik with Acanthostega). Complaining that the variants the real scientists are looking at aren’t the kind that the creationists want is a particularly clueless kind of whine, since the scientists are intentionally focusing on the variants that are amenable to dissection by their techniques.

The other aspect of their work that confirms evo-devo expectations is that what they’re discovering is that the genetic mechanisms behind morphological variants are changes in regulatory DNA — that what’s happening is that regulatory genes like Pitx1 or Mc1r are being switched off or on. We anticipate that a lot of morphological novelty is going to be generated by switching genes off and on, and by recombination of patterns of gene expression. Nelson and Behe are reduced to carping on the sidelines that observed variants are just the product of getting large effects by trivially flipping switches, while all the real biologists are out there in the middle of the work happily announcing that we can get large-scale morphological effects by simply flipping switches, and hey, isn’t that cool, and doesn’t that tell us a lot about the origins of evolutionary novelties? It’s not just a to-may-to/to-mah-to difference in interpretation, this is a case of the creationists wilfully and ignorantly missing the whole point of an exciting line of research.

There’s also a fundamental failure of comprehension. Creationists see loss of a feature like pelvic spines, or a reduction in pigmentation, and declare that the evolutionary evidence is “all breaking things and losing things”. Wrong. What we have here is a complete lack of understanding of developmental genetics. What we typically find are changes in the pattern of expression of developmental genes, not wholesale losses. In the stickleback, Pitx1 is still there; what’s different is that the places in the embryo where it is turned on have changed, the map of the pattern of gene expression has shifted. You cannot describe that as simply a broken gene. Similarly, in the mouse, Hoekstra showed that the expression of genes that reduce pigmentation has expanded. We’ve seen the same thing in the blind cavefish; a creationist looks at it and says it’s just broken and has lost its eyes, but the scientists look closer and see that no, the fish have actually increased gene expression and expanded the domain of a midline gene.

Just wait for the detailed analysis of jaw morphology in cichlid fishes. These animals have radically different variants in feeding structures, which is thought to be the root of their adaptability and the radiation of different forms, and I guarantee you that the creationists will ignore the morphological novelties and focus on the fact that to achieve that, some genes will be downregulated (I also guarantee you that there will be such shifts in expression). It’s “all breaking things and losing things”, after all; just like baking a cake involves breaking eggs.

I don’t know how the creationists fit known variations in the coding sequences of genes (how do you translate a single-nucleotide polymorphism into their vision of all change being a matter of losses?) into their idea that all evolution is a matter of breaking DNA, or how they can claim all novelty requires a designer when people can track the progression of morphological shifts in the tetrapod transition, for instance, across tens of millions of years. It seems to be their desperate 21st century excuse in the face of the overwhelming progression of information from 21st century biological science.

Nelson ends his skewed summary of the meeting with the comment that “It’s a heck of a lot of fun to attend a conference like this, if you don’t mind being the butt of jokes.” I’m sure. I suppose Nelson could have even more fun if he put on a dunce cap and drooled a lot, because that’s basically his role at these meetings anyway — he’s the butt of jokes because he shows up and then happily demonstrates his ignorance about what’s going on. It’s not a role I’d enjoy, but the gang at the clown college called the Discovery Institute have a slightly different perspective, I suppose.

Ray Comfort Replies to Eugenie Scott

I could only get two paragraphs into that sleazebag’s reply in the debate about his Origin giveaway before I had to close the window and throw him away.

A major concern of Genie Scott was that the copy of On the Origin of Species sent to her by my publisher was missing “four crucial chapters,” as well as Darwin’s introduction. She will be pleased to know that the second printing of 170,000 copies (the one that we will give to students) is the entire book. Not one word will be omitted.

Then perhaps Comfort should have acknowledged that it was a dishonest move on his part in the first place?

Most troubling to me, though, is the fact that an ignoramus like Comfort can raise the kind of money to publish that many copies of a book on such short notice. Who is his sugar daddy? Or can you really tap into that much free-flowing cash by appealing to the ignorant masses of America? It’s rather disturbing.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that Ray Comfort is an idiot, putting his name on science books. I do not use the word “idiot” lightly here, either — the man is demonstrably ignorant and obtuse. Here’s his first argument for his cause:

Scott quoted a famous geneticist, who said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” I would like to drop one word, so that the quote is true. It should read, “Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.” For example, evolution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.

No one?

NO ONE?

I have explained this stuff to him repeatedly. I first covered it almost a year ago, when he misrepresented Darwin and claimed that women evolved millions of years after men. Comfort is the kook who claimed that Darwin believed that humans initially reproduced by asexual fission…and now he’s putting out an edition of the Origin?

I know he has seen my explanation, because he responded to it in the august pages of Whirled Nut Daily. Of course, what he did was acknowledge this explanation:

This has been explained to him multiple times: evolution does explain this stuff trivially. Populations evolve, not individuals, and male and female elephants evolved from populations of pre-elephants that contained males and females. Species do not arise from single new mutant males that then have to find a corresponding mutant female – they arise by the diffusion of variation through a whole population, male and female.

I also wrote a lengthy explanation of elephant evolution that points out that no species of elephant ever had to re-evolve sex. I am now amused to note that the first comment on that post is a one-liner: “He won’t get it.” How true.

He’s still repeating his argument that speciation occurred by a male (it’s always a male to him, I don’t know why) evolving first and having to go on a quest to find a female of the same species. He has a remarkably discontinuous view of the nature of evolutionary change, and seems either utterly unwilling or incapable of thinking of species evolving as populations.

I’m also rather amazed that the media, in this case US News & World Report, will freely grant space to such a dishonest loon. I know they’re relying on Genie Scott to come back with a rebuttal, but there ought to be a moment where the people publishing his nonsense stop a moment and say, “Wait a minute—this guy is writing pure drivel, and we’re publishing it!” Come on, US News, a little self-awareness and responsibility would be a welcome change.

Scott vs. Comfort

You’ve probably all heard by now that Ray Comfort is coming out with his own butchered version of Darwin’s Origin, with big chunks cut out of it, and a deeply stupid introduction slapped on. It’s within his rights to do that, since the book is in the public domain now (as is, say, the KJV Bible), but it’s also a metaphor for the sleaziness of creationism. They have no original ideas, so all they can do is steal the work of real scientists; their ideas are contradicted by the evidence, so their only strategy is to delete the parts that make them uncomfortable, and put a false spin on what’s left. Ray Comfort also has a lot of gall; he doesn’t understand the concepts Darwin discussed, so he’s got no foundation on which to base his editorial decisions. What next? Will he decide to put out a special creationist edition of Relativity: The Special and General Theory with the math chopped out and his own clueless introduction that calls it all bunk?

Anyway, Ray Comfort tries to defend his act of intellectual vandalism online in a written debate with Eugenie Scott, who shreds him. This is going to be interesting, since what’s up so far is only part 1; next week, they’re going to reply to each other’s initial argument.

Ron Numbers—Anti-evolution in America, from creation science to Intelligent Design

Ron Numbers gave a brief history of creationism, reminding us that perhaps a majority of the people in the world reject Darwin, and he also emphasized a few facts in that history that many would find surprising.

There was no organized opposition to evolution until the 1920s, when it was marshalled by William Jennings Bryan, who was most concerned about the ethical implications of evolution. He made the point that the popular movie about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, was historically inaccurate. One of the most memorable moments in the movie was when Darrow pinned Bryan down on the date of the creation to 4004 BC…but Bryan had no such preconception. The primary strain of creationism at that time had absolutely no problem with the age of the Earth, and Bryan plainly stated in interviews and speeches that he was a proponent of the day-age theory, in which the “days” of creation week were not required to be 24-hour modern days.

These early creationists had no bone to pick with geology at all, and were unperturbed at the thought that the world was hundreds of millions of years old. The two dominant explanations were the day-age theory, which stretched out the time-span of creation week to cover the whole of geological time, and gap theory, which argued that between the creation of the world mentioned at the beginning of Genesis, and the account of the 6 creation days, there was a long undocumented period of time in which geological history occurred. The latter model was also popular because it was presented in the Scofield Reference Bible, which specifically placed the geological column in a ‘gap’ in the account, and stated that the 6 days referred to the creation of Eden.

The dissenters from this position were a tiny minority, the Seventh Day Adventists, who were regarded as weird by the majority of fundamentalists. The Seventh Day Adventists credited a source of divine information other than the Bible, the prophecies and visions of their founder, Ellen White, who was the source of the idea that Genesis had to be describing a literal six 24-hour day creation occurring 6000 years ago. Her disciple, George MacReady Price, came up with the idea of wedging all of geology into the Noachian Flood. These were not popular ideas.

The mainstreaming of literalist creationism occurred in the 1960s, when John Whitcomb and Henry Morris wrote The Genesis Flood. It’s basically the same nonsense he Seventh Day Adventists were peddling, but Whitcomb and Morris were not SDAs, making it possible for conservative Christians, who regarded Seventh Day Adventism as a freaky cult, to coalesce in the formation of the Creation Research Society. These people had no ambition to convert the research community, but instead wanted to wean bible-believers away from what they considered the compromises of day-age and gap theory.

Another consequence of this shift was that it opened up hard-core creationists to a kind of hyper-evolution: they had to explain how a small ark of fixed size could contain all the animals in the world, so they had to postulate a small number of created “kinds” that diversified into new species after the flood, at a pace evolutionary biologists consider absurd.

In the early 1980s, these new, literal creationists got ambitious and started trying to push into classrooms by legislation, efforts that got stymied by major court decisions in Arkansas and Louisiana, which ruled that mandatory teaching of creationism was unconstitutional. One consequence of the Arkansas decision was that, when the creationists had been anticipating victory, they had begun assembling a creationist textbook. When they lost instead, they had to rewrite to remove the word “creationism” and replace it with “intelligent design”.

Numbers talked a bit about Intelligent Design, and argued that it was different from the previous version of creationism…but not in a good way, or in a milder way. The brainchild of Philip Johnson, Intelligent Design was far more radical than the previous iterations — Johnson opposed methodological materialism, and specifically wants to incorporate god into science. While arguing that ID is something new, though, he also made it clear that it is not because ID is a secular theory — it’s an extraordinarily religious idea, backed by religious proponents, and funded by theocratic extremists like Howard Ahmanson.

He ended by giving us the discouraging news that 65.5% of Americans believe in creationism, and that the movement is expanding beyond US borders to the Islamic and Jewish world, too. Bummer, man. He could have at least offered some hope for the future.

They really are that crazy

Answers in Genesis, that site that tries to promote an alternative view to natural origins, has put up an article to answer that question that I’m sure is pressing on everyone’s mind as we get close to Halloween: Are demons real?. You won’t be surprised to learn that AiG’s answer is that yes, they are.

According to the Bible, demons are real spiritual and personal beings, not just forces or phenomena in the physical and psychological realm. Various Bible passages reveal that they have intellect, emotions, and will. They think, hate, and choose plans of action against God, Christ, and mankind. They especially hate believers in Christ because believers belong to Christ and are foes of Satan.

The Scriptures provide many details about demons. They are spirit beings created by God and responsible to God (Colossians 1:16). They are creatures limited in space, time, and powers. They have become morally perverted and are called “unclean spirits” (Matthew 10:1) or “evil spirits” (Luke 7:21). They promote immoral and sensuous lifestyles (2 Peter 2:1-18). They cause false teachers of depraved minds to oppose the truth and appeal to carnal and selfish impulses (2 Timothy 3:6). They sow false followers of Christ in the world (Matthew 13:37-42). They blind the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing God’s salvation through faith in His Son (2 Corinthians 4:3-4).

Wow, they’re everywhere. The best part, though, is the next paragraph.

Demons promote primitive religions, magic, superstition, and worship of evil spirits. They are the dynamic behind idolatry and their devotees, whether worshipers of the gods Marduk, Asher, Zeus, Jupiter, Apollo, Ra, Diana, Aphrodite, or a host of lesser manmade deities.

“Like Jesus,” I ask, innocently?

I will agree that belief in demons is a sign that you’re dealing with a primitive religion and superstition.

More reasons not to debate creationists

I’m going to be in this silly debate on “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?” with creationist kook Jerry Bergman on 16 November, sponsored by CASH and the local Kook Central. The latest hangup, though, is that the creationists want to have a pre- and post-debate survey, and they plan to give the audience these questions:

I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in all schools, public and private.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution by teachers who support it, without punishment.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I think that as a minimum, the evidence against evolution should be taught alongside evidence for evolution.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I’ve told them that that last question is simply unacceptable: it’s misleading, prejudicial, and begs the question. There is no evidence against evolution. If there were, I’d agree — teach it. However, until they can say something specific, I’m not going to let them get away with sneaking in a stupid loaded question to their audience ahead of time.

I explained that as is, I’d answer that question with “strongly agree”, because I think that evidence should be taught…but that I know they want to use it to pretend that there is some substantial support for teaching creationism, which is not the case.

Much waffling is going on on their part. I’ve put my foot down: cut the question out. They’re trying to weasel in some fuzzy alternative that will have the same effect. The first two questions are fine, they directly address the subject of the debate more specifically (that is, “Intelligent design”), but the last is just an open-ended bit of noise that they want to use to justify their anti-science agenda.

Dealing with these charlatans is aggravating on so many levels.

Oh, yeah…Happy Birthday, Earth

I almost forgot — in 1658, Archbishop Ussher determined that the world was created precisely at 9am, 23 October, 4004 BC, making today the official creation day, and the earth 6012 years old.

Stop laughing, people. There are some who still seriously believe that: I just got spam from Whirled Nut Daily pushing this very silly book, The Annals of the World, buy James Ussher. They call it a masterpiece. I call it a quaint old oddity.

Dawkins vs. Hewitt

Whoa. Richard Dawkins appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show. Hewitt, in case you didn’t know, is one of those far right radio wingnuts, a lawyer with a blog who defended George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and always sides with religious conservatives in the culture wars.

It’s a fairly long interview, and you can see Hewitt trying to make lawyerly probes to lead Dawkins away from the book, and he’s also good at making lawyerly innuendo for his already anti-Dawkins audience — he’s constantly trying to cast doubt on the evidence for evolution, for instance — and you can tell that Richard is getting increasingly exasperated with the silly line of interrogation…until he finally snaps.

RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?

HH: Yes./p>

RD: You seriously do?

HH: Yes.

RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?

HH: Yes.

RD: My God.

HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…

RD: I’ve realized the kind of person I’m dealing with now.

I’m sure he’s overwhelmed right now with his book tour, but somebody needs to warn him about exactly what he’s walking into before he gets in front of a microphone. Hewitt is a ridiculous puffed-up blowhard of very little brain, and a remarkably calm, polite discussion while he ducks and dodges and blows a dog-whistle for his crazy listeners doesn’t work very well.

If Dawkins is going on the Glenn Beck show, though, I want to know about it.

(via Instaputz)

Listen and cringe

Americans have to own up to a little bit of an inferiority complex in one thing: our accents. If you watch TV at all, you know that whenever a documentary wants its viewers to be impressed with the erudition of the narrator, it’s got to have a British accent — it sounds so posh and educated and aristocratic, you know.

I have a cure.

Watch the videos below. These are direct recordings from the exhibits in a creation museum in the UK, and you get to hear those lovely British voices reciting the most godawful drivel, the most cliched creationist nonsense, the most ridiculous lies, and I guarantee you that after 20 minutes of that, those round vowels and gentle ‘r’s will sound to your ears like the braying nasalities of an episode of Hee Haw.

Oh, and you will realize that English creationists are just as stupid, if not more so, than their American counterparts.

I shouldn’t pick on Hee Haw, though. The most beautiful accents in America are from the South — just listen to Shelby Foote sometime. There are good things that come out of Mississippi, even.