The worst article on Ardipithecus yet

The dishonor goes to ABC News, which put together an appalling mess of an article that gives credibility to creationist denialists. Right from the beginning, you know this article is bunk.

But despite the excitement from the paleontology community, another group of researchers, many of them with advanced degrees in science, are unimpressed by Ardi, who they believe is just another ape — an ape of indeterminate age, they add, and an ape who cannot be an ancestor of modern man for a range of reasons, including one of singular importance: God created man in one day, and evolution is a fallacy.

The whole article is like that: they cite Creation Ministries International, the Institute for Creation Research, and Answers in Genesis, puffing up the credentials of these loons and credulously reporting their dissent. None of these fellows is any kind of researcher, all are looked upon as utterly crazy, and there is no reason to consult any of them on a science story, let alone dedicating a long article solely to their batty position (they quote one of the real researchers just once, saying that the discovery was an important find — but it is more to lend weight to the parade of nutcases declaring it trivial.)

They give a lot of space to Answers in Genesis, especially to one of their pet frauds-with-a-degree, David Menton.

“What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible,” said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. “The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can’t live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages.”

Menton is not an acclaimed anatomist. His sole claim to fame is his weird belief that the earth is only 6000 years old. Although, I must say, I agree with his sentiment here: the first page is metaphorical, poetical nonsense and should be thrown out, and the rest should be tossed right after it. But what really annoys me is the patent disrespect for knowledge in these people. Ardipithecus is a genus that lived over 4 million years ago. Shouldn’t there be a little bit of awe at that? Not from the ICR.

“This is a meaningless discovery of another ape. As far as the creationist community is concerned, this is a big yawn. There is nothing about Ardi that has anything to do with the evolution of man,” said John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas.

Menton just keeps on bringing the dementia.

Menton believes scientists sat on the Ardi discovery for over a decade just to roll it out during the Darwin anniversary. He questions the ability to accurately date any fossils more than a few thousand years old, let alone millions, and he said the condition of the skeleton was so incomplete and fragile that serious research was almost impossible.

Menton said Ardi’s skull and feet are exactly the kind of skull and feet you would expect an ape to have and have none of the features of modern humans.

“Evolutionists want to call Ardi ‘ape-like.’ This creature is ape-like, because she is an ape. Just call it an ape,” he said.

The biggest problem Menton has with Ardi is her estimated age. The Earth, he says, is no more around 5,000 years old, a number creationists have estimated by counting the generations of man named in the Bible from Adam to Jesus.

“Evolution is supposedly based on science, but the science does not prove what they want it to. Creationism is not based on scientific observation but on God’s word. God created everything in six days, and that’s it.”

Errm, the scientists all agree: Ardi was an ape. They say it right out. They’ll also tell ‘acclaimed’ anatomist Menton that, based on the anatomy, we humans are also apes. We also regard the even older last common ancestor of chimps (which are apes) and humans (also apes) to have been an ape. Therefore, any transitional form between an ancient ape and a modern ape is expected to be an ape.

What did Menton expect? A frickin’ giraffe?

As for the rest…anyone in the 21st century who rants about the earth being 6000 years old and unthinkingly accepts the scientific authority of an ancient book cobbled together by tribes of sheepherders really needs to be shuffled off to a rubber room.

So what is ABC News doing getting a story on a serious scientific issue from a series of lunatic asylums? I don’t know. Who is this ‘journalist,’ Russel Goldman, who scribbled up this gullible slop? I don’t know and I don’t care, except that I’ll know to throw anything else he writes in the rubbish.

Nice psalm

Here are the lyrics:

Don’t need no god.
Don’t need no eternal paternal god.
Don’t need no reassuringly protective
good and evil in perspective god.
Don’t need no imported distorted,
inflated updated,
holy roller, save your soul, or
anaesthetisingly opiate gods.
Don’t need no “all creatures that on Earth do dwell”
be good or you go to Hell god.
Don’t need no Hare Krishna Hare Krishna,
Hail Mary, Hail Mary god.
Got no yen for zen, Baghavad-Gita or Gurdjieff.
No Mormon, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist god,
no absolutes beyond refute,
no reverential preferential Judaic Messianic god.
No Bibles, no Mahayanas, Delai Lhama
instant dharma gods.
Don’t need no spiritual suicide or
prefrontal lobotomising god.
Don’t need no stoic sexless
anticeptic god.
Don’t need no neon crucifix,
no jade Buddhas, no Vedas or Upanishads,
no camels or needles or Papal decrees,
no mail-order ikons, Koran’s or Mandala’s,
no Sri Chimnoys, Meha Baba’s, or Ayatollah’s,
no Guatama’s, no Manitou, Ouspensky or Marx,
no yin/yang, no tao, no tarot or incense,
no sacred mushrooms
no dianetics,
no Tibetan prayer mats
no “Immortal invisible gods only wise”.
Don’t need no televised circumcised
incessant incandescent god.
Don’t need no god.
I need human beings.
I need some kind
of love.
I need
you.

AAI: I am an ACTOR!

Just not a very good one, but you’ll see for yourselves. I spent the morning in heaven, which consists of a well-lit white screen in Southern California, trying to master my lines for a future Mr Deity episode. That stuff is harder than it looks. We went through many takes while my brain was freezing up at inopportune moments — there’s a reason not everyone is a movie star, that’s for sure.

Anyway, “Lucy” and “Mr Deity” are actually Amy and Bryan, and they have a nice house with a couple of kids, two dogs, and a cat, and the episodes are filmed in the family room. I hope I haven’t shattered any of your illusions. Amy made me pancakes, I think because she’s very nice, but it might also have been to load up the klutzy professor’s sputtering brain with carbohydrates so that maybe he’d remember his lines.

I made it through it all, though, and I’m hoping that Mr Deity will be able to work a miracle and make me look good with some creative editing. You’ll probably see the results next week. It can’t possibly be worse than Expelled!

By the way, he mentioned that they’re hoping to build up the budget to make a half-hour pilot, which would be awesome — Mr Deity as weekly dose of broadcast irreverence for American living rooms would be an excellent and entertaining corrective. Support them if you can!

Maybe the media should interview this guy for “interesting” science

Since the mere majesty and grandeur of the natural world are insufficient to provide entertainment, perhaps science coverage in the media should become something like the Weekly World News. Arthur David Horn could be a major media star.

He now advocates the theory that modern man is not the result of a natural process of evolution, but that evolution was artificially aided by reptilian extraterrestrials. The reptilians bred mankind as servants and continue to rule the planet today, Horn said.

Reptilians have manipulated perceptions of world history and hold power over humankind through their influence over an elite and powerful group of humans, known as the Illuminati, Arthur said. Throughout human history, the reptilian beings have been recorded as dragons or gods.

I don’t think that was an example of media quote mangling, either. He was speaking at a meeting called a “Galactic Gathering,” organized by The Institute for the Study of Galactic Civilizations.

A plus on his side: there’s also a nice human interest story there.

The shift in Arthur’s focus came shortly after meeting Lynette, who was then a metaphysical healer, he said. After many conversations over the telephone, Arthur and Lynette finally met face-to-face in July of 1988 when they spent a week in Northern California’s Trinity Mountains searching for Sasquatch, commonly known as Bigfoot.

The couple never spotted the mythic creature, but fell in love, Lynette said. Only a few months later, they were married in the chapel on the CSU campus.

Awww. Woo Love.

Somebody pass his name on to Sharon Begley, who is manufacturing pseudo-controversies this week. She’s defending Lamarckism now, based on some work that suggests a plausible basis for multi-generation responses to the environment, a justification for some of the observations made by Kammerer on toads.

Genes for living on land seem to get “environmentally silenced in early embryos exposed to water,” says Vargas, who combed through Kammerer’s lab notes and whose analysis appears in the Journal of Experimental Zoology. “It has taken a painfully long time to properly acknowledge that environment can influence inheritance,” he told me. “I think academia has discouraged experiments testing environmental modification of inheritance,” because the inheritance of acquired characteristics—Lamarckism—drives the self-appointed evolution police crazy.

They might want to spend more time reading studies and less energy manning the barricades.

Aaaargh! Epigenetics is not Lamarckism! Also, Begley doesn’t seem to understand that the institution of science is extremely conservative, and rightly so: we ‘man the barricades’ because science isn’t like the Huffington Post, letting any wacky idea sail through unchallenged. There is a demand for rigor: show us the data, do the experiments, repeat until you’ve got a case that can’t be shot down by a lone skeptical first year grad student. Postulating reptoids guiding human evolution isn’t going to be credible until someone shoots one and writes a paper about the dissection, and Lamarckism is going to be sneered at until someone does the experiment that shows it.

I don’t think academia has been neglecting this field because of dogma, either. Epigenetics is hot right now (and again, it’s NOT Lamarckism!), and there’s some interesting work going on in the field of eco-devo. I also think that a replication of Kammerer’s work that demonstrated an actual effect would be easily publishable — I’d be interested in reading it, for sure.

We’re all the evolution police. It isn’t as sinister as Begley seems to imply: we just demand a little more evidence than speculation.

Way to go, Charlotte — get out there and boogie down!

The Charlotte Pop Fest ’09 is going on right now — it’s a music festival that also raises money for charities. You should go. The recipient of the profits this year will be the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

What, you say? They’re raising money to promote secular science? In North Carolina?

Yes, they are. And the organizer, James Deem, says he is doing it to raise awareness for science and science education. I blow kisses his way — what a great idea.

Unfortunately, there are problems. Sponsors have pulled out, meaning that they had to cut some bands from the schedule, and of course, some members of the public are unhappy. You knew that was coming.

Thorne stressed that the bands are there to play music, not give out a message about atheism or anything else.

Pop Festival attendee Debbie Aintrazi of Mint Hill hopes they don’t.

“If they start going around saying, ‘no, you shouldn’t believe in this, you shouldn’t believe in that’– that’s when I [get upset],” she said. “I don’t believe in not believing.”

Wait, what did she say? I’m going to have to let the idea of not believing in not believing curdle in my brain for a bit, because it’s kind of indigestible right now.

While Ms Aintrazi is working on believing everything she hears, though, those of you near Charlotte should support this event — a swarm of enthusiastic atheists descending on the festival might convince them that supporting us and science is a good idea.

(via the Impolitic)

Rapping about genes

I like it!

I know this will set off another round of culture sniping — get over it. You don’t personally have to like this genre, just as no one has to like every kind of music out there, and turning your nose up at one form doesn’t necessarily mean your taste is better than someone else’s. Just recognize that it’s different. It’s not Mozart or Manilow, it’s just its own sound. If it helps you get over the rejection of something that doesn’t sound like the music you are familiar with, think of it as a poetry performance instead.

As for myself, most rap and hip-hop leaves me cold, but every once in a while something in it connects with me, and I can’t predict what it will be. I’ve even got some Busta Rhymes on my iPod that I really, really like…and no, I don’t have to justify it to anyone!