Pallacken Abdul Wahid is back!

You just can’t shut this crank up. You may recall that he earlier published a paper in an Elsevier journal claiming that all of genetics is wrong, oh, and by the way, the Quran and Bible are right because chromosomes look like ribs. He has a new paper out (only it’s actually the same old word salad, freshly tossed), Molecular genetic program (genome) contrasted against non-molecular invisible biosoftware in the light of the Quran and the Bible.

The current perception of biological information as encoded by a chemical structure (genome) is critically examined. Many features assigned to the genome are violations of chemical fundamentals. Perhaps the most striking one is that a living cell and its dead counterpart are materially identical, i.e., in both of them all the structures including genome are intact. But yet the dead cell does not show any sign of bioactivity. This clearly shows that the genome does not constitute the biological program of an organism (a biocomputer or a biorobot) and is hence not the cause of “life”. The molecular gene and genome concepts are therefore wrong and scientifically untenable. On the other hand, the Scriptural revelation of the non-molecular biosoftware (the soul) explains the phenomenon of life in its entirety. The computer model of organism also helps understand the Biblical metaphor “Adam’s rib” as chromosome, the biomemory of the cell. The Quran provides ample insight into the phenomenon of human biodiversification. It also reveals the source of biological information required for creating biodiversity in human population. The Scriptural revelation of the invisible non-molecular nature of biosoftware rules out the possibility of creating life from chemical molecules without involving a living cell (or organism) in the process. Claims of creation of “synthetic life” or “synthetic forms of life” employing living cell in the process cannot be accepted as creation of life from non-life as non-molecular biosoftware can be copied from the living cell to the prosthetic cell. Instead of chemically synthesizing a cell from scratch to prove life is a material phenomenon, biologists can as well resort to a more practical and convincing method by restoring life to a dead cell (which carries all the hardware structures including the genome but lacks the biosoftware) by chemical means. The failure of experiments to produce life through purely chemical means or to restore life to a dead cell would in fact invalidate the molecular biological program (genome) concept. More importantly, the failure would confirm the Scriptural revelation of non-particulate nature of the divine biosoftware and the existence of God.

It’s nonsense through and through, and it’s even recycled nonsense — there’s nothing new in here that you can’t find in his previous paper from Bizarro land, except this one seems to emphasize his claim that the impossibility of restarting a dead cell proves the existence of a creator.

The man is a flaming crackpot, but the real shame here is that he is regularly getting published, even if it is in bottom-tier journals. This one was in “Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology“, which bills itself as an international journal of bioscience, very broadly defined. I suspect it’s a money-making racket. It says “A fee will be charged to cover the publication cost” (which is not at all unusual in science, and many of the very best journals charge a page fee to authors), but it also says the papers “are subject to a rigorous and fair peer-review process”, a claim clearly given the lie by Mr Wahid. This is a paper that could not have survived a cursory glance, let alone a rigorous review.

I’m sure Ken Ham is grateful

Ken Ham is humbly appreciative of the coverage his Giant Wooden Box project is getting.

We were notified late this morning that AiG’s latest project, the Ark Encounter, will be featured tonight (Monday) on ABC-TV’s evening newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer. Check your local listings for the ABC affiliate station in your area and the time of broadcast. (See the ABC-TV news site.) Also, here is a link to the article about the Ark project that appears in the New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/us/06ark.html.

The website for the Ark Encounter is ArkEncounter.com.

We are grateful to God for all this media coverage.

And well he should be. I looked at the NY Times coverage, and was appalled.

I have to explain something to the Times. Some guy building a little theme park in Kentucky is not news. It’s something for the state and local news, sure, but not something that warrants a good-sized spread and a big image of the proposed park in the N freaking Y frackin’ Times.

So why is it given that much space and a purely vanilla description of the events and people involved, as if it is simultaneously a big deal deserving national attention and a weirdly blasé occurrence that requires no investigation — how can it be both controversial enough to warrant attention and so uncontroversial that the reporter can’t even be bothered to mention how ridiculous and anti-scientific this endeavor is?

It is an astonishingly insipid article. The only good (?) thing about it is that finally the NY Times breaks its bad habit of “he said, she said” journalism and didn’t even bother to contact a scientist to get the “other” side. You know, the rational, accurate, honest, scientific side.

I don’t have much hope for the Diane Sawyer story going on the air tonight, either. Anyone want to bet on whether Ham gets pitched some softballs and the park that encourages children to be stupid is treated as purely an economic development issue?

It’s Wikileaks Day

Today, Wikileaks begins releasing a huge collection of US embassy cables, and we’re about to discover the degree of skullduggery that’s been going on.

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

It is to be hoped that every major newspaper with some respect for its job has got people going over these documents carefully. The description above is correct: if we’re to deserve the title of democracy, we must have an informed citizenry.

But it’s the only good song on the whole CD!

It’s almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: the deluge of Christmas carols is about to commence. This is the time of year when I dread turning the radio on, because I know I’ll hear the same sets of songs over and over again, and the kind of uniform anti-eclecticism characteristic of Top 40 AM radio gets amplified and expanded and starts to spread everywhere. I’m always pleased to see something new, especially since it doesn’t happen very often…Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War is Over), Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun?

Some people get cranky about anything that isn’t sufficiently antiquated or sufficiently reverent, though. Now some people are freaking out over the inclusion of a song they don’t like.

A Christmas CD aiming to raise funds for a Christian charity has been slammed for featuring an anti-Christian song.

Faith and family groups have labelled the song, which includes the lyrics “I get freaked out by churches,” and “I’m not expecting a visit from Jesus”, as “disrespectful” and a “sick joke”.

But the executive producer of Myer’s annual star-studded Spirit of Christmas CD has defended his decision to include the song, White Wine in the Sun.

The song, written by atheist entertainer Tim Minchin, features alongside traditional Christmas carols such as Joy to the World and Little Drummer Boy.

I don’t know. I’m offended by both of those traditional Christmas carols — should I scream at WalMart and demand they be pulled from the store? Or, maybe, I should just look at the CDs and buy the ones with music I like, and understand that other people might want to buy Elmo & Patsy’s Grandma Got RunOver by a Reindeer on the Country Christmas CD.

Minchin’s song is quite nice. Here it is, if you hadn’t heard it before:

There is one thing in this story I find objectionable.

Profits from CD sales go to The Salvation Army.

Uh, what? Tim Minchin’s work is now being used to prop up a notoriously anti-gay organization? That sounds wrong.

An ethical dilemma!

It’s hard not to crack a cheerful smile at this story, but do try to take it seriously. A coven of Westboro Baptist anti-gay kooks went off to protest outside a soldier’s funeral in Oklahoma, and returned to their car to find their tires slashed. When they drove into town on the flat tires anyway, to try and get them repaired, they were refused any help at all.

There’s a grim part of me that feels a kind of satisfaction at that, I’ll admit. But I think it was wrong.

Don’t harm the WBC cretins no matter how awfully they prance. Do not vandalize their possessions. Don’t even threaten them. Even if they weren’t a lawsuit-happy group of parasites, they have a right to free speech and can protest all they want. This seems clear to me, with no ambiguity at all; and if I witnessed someone trying to slash the tires on a car with a “god hates fags” bumper-sticker, I’d try to stop them and alert the police. Somebody crossed the line in Oklahoma when they did property damage, even if it was to an odious gang of idiots.

I’m torn on the refusal to help them afterwards, though. If I were a tire salesman, and Fred Phelps came through the door and asked to buy a new pair of Firestones, what would I do? I despise the man and everything he stands for!

I think I’d sell him his damned tires. I think I’d even help him put them on his car. Oh, but it would pain me. It just seems to me that there is a principle at stake here, of an obligation to grant equal treatment to even the nastiest members of our society, and we violate it if we turn anyone into a pariah because of their beliefs.

So I can feel some schadenfreude here, and think Phelps actually deserves worse…but I’m also disappointed in the people of McAlester, Oklahoma who didn’t demonstrate that they were better citizens than the mad dogs of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Bad move, A&E

The A&E Channel has a new show coming up: Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. Sounds awful already, doesn’t it? But it’s worse than you think: they’re looking for disturbed kids who think they’ve got magic powers, and then they’re flying in “professional psychics” to coach them in dealing with their awesome powers, i.e., indulge their delusions, get off on feeling superior to unhappy kids, and collect a paycheck for psychic child abuse.

They’re putting kids in the hands of a creepy skeevo like Chip Coffey, all for your entertainment.

This is quite possibly the most loathsome thing I’ve ever seen on TV, and my cable gives me access to the Trinity Broadcast Network, so that’s saying a lot.

Skepchicks are mobilizing the skeptic hordes. Call or write to A&E and let them know that their schlock has reached a new and despicable low.

I mentioned that I have cable…but there’s almost nothing on. The quality has been on a steady decline for years; cable stations like A&E, TLC, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel were all set up with the noble goals of providing good educational/informative programming, and they’ve all sold out to provide little more than dreck ala Psychics with Serious Mental Illnesses Hunting Hitler’s Ghost While Driving A Big Truck with Their Freakish Family. It’s cheap, it’s easy, the ‘talent’ they hire are all boring nobodies with only their disturbed personalities as a selling point — these are modern freak shows, plain and simple — and audiences eat them up.

Meanwhile, look here: somebody has a petition begging someone, anyone to pick up Richard Dawkins’ thoughtful and intelligent documentaries. They’re done, they’re just sitting there, they’re begging to be broadcast…but I guess he just doesn’t have the charisma of a hammy metaphysical child abuser.

What madness will the NY Times take seriously next?

I’ve noticed that the bad practice of “he said, she said” journalism so common at the NY Times disappears when the subject is religion. There, instead, the standard role of the journalist becomes one of the credulous, unquestioning observer. It’s evident in this new article on the revival of Catholic exorcisms, being discussed at a conference.

The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

That’s not a quote from one of the participants in the conference, it’s straight from the reporter, Laurie Goodstein. Does she really think there are patients who really need an exorcism rather than psychiatric care? Is demonic posession a real problem? Maybe Homeland Security should be involved, if we actually have an ongoing invasion by demonic creatures from Hell.

No critical thinking is presented in the article, and I was rather disappointed: the usual journalistic substitute for critical thinking is to scurry off and find some random person who disagrees, in order to toss one or two contrary quotes on the page. That’s what they’d do if the subject is evolution or climate change, for instance, and that’s the way so many cranks can get their words in major newspapers. We don’t even get that much here, though: just quotes from various people who think it’s perfectly ordinary for the Catholic Church to be promoting the idea of the Devil instead of dealing with the idea of, you know, real human people and real illness.

I would like to have seen at least one sentence suggesting that it’s nuts to be training witch doctors, but nope…this is the closest we get:

“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.

“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ “

OK, so the Catholic Church deals only with the unreal and nonexistent. Now if only we had media that dared to point out that angels and demons don’t exist.

“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”

In any other subject, if someone made a specific claim like that, I’d expect a good journalist to ask, “how do you know that?” and try to track down a credible source for such a claim about an individual. When the subject is the Devil, though, anything goes. You can say any ol’ crazy thing about Satan, and the reporter will dutifully write it down and publish it without ever stopping for a moment to wonder, “Hey, is my source just making shit up?”

Oh, well. It’s important news, I guess. “Catholics are crazier than we imagined!” should have been the front page headline.