Weep for Denyse

It’s tough being Denyse O’Leary. She’s one of the loudest voices for Intelligent Design on the net, and she has to perpetually struggle with her own ignorance in order to come up with new excuses to deny evolution, and all she ever accomplishes is to briefly dazzle us with her incompetence. She has come up with two new problems with evolution lately. Brace yourselves, put your coffee down, and swallow before you read them. I’ll will not be held accountable for damaged keyboards!

How about this? Macroevolution is about changes in form and size, which kittens do routinely as they grow up. Therefore, evolution is trivial. And false? I’m not sure where she’s going with that. I wonder if she’s been consulting with that JohnHamilton wanker on this thread.

And here’s another one: if chimpanzees and humans are 98% identical genetically, why are spinsters so picky about marrying humans? Seriously: she’s proposing a “Would Denyse O’Leary marry it?” test for speciation.

It’s so sad. The only cheerful news here is that Ms O’Leary is completely unaware of the scrambled state of her brains, which is a small mercy.

Fresh scientological meat!

I know many of you are occupied with batting around an obtuse creationist named JohnHamilton, but if you need a break, there’s a nice post here that has drawn out a couple of scientologists. They’re actually trying to defend the fantasies of L. Ron Hubbard as “science”!

Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning “knowledge”) is, in its broadest sense, any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a correct prediction, or reliably-predictable type of outcome. In this sense, science may refer to a highly skilled technique, technology, or practice, from which a good deal of randomness in outcome has been removed.

Dianetics and Scientology processes fit that description.

Why, no it does not, since Scientology has no reliable, testable outcome other than the separation of the suckers from their money.

The Large Hadron Collider will confirm the Bible

Good news: the Large Hadron Collider is operational, and has fired two particles together with a force of 7 trillion electron volts…and it’s only the beginning, since they’re going to ramp up the power gradually. It’s too bad Michio Kaku had to muck it up with a lot of nonsense.

“This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 – what happened in the beginning,” physicist Michio Kaku told The Associated Press.

“This is a Genesis machine. It’ll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe.”

Please, no. Genesis has zero correspondence to reality. We are not going to drill back through Biblical events to find the truth of Genesis 1:1, which reads, by the way, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Is Kaku suggesting that the LHC will test that proposition? That is a genuinely tone-deaf thing for a scientist to say in fundie-infested America.

And of course, Answers in Genesis stands ready to appropriate the LHC for its purposes. It’s a rather bizarre support they offer to the LHC, though. You see, AiG does not accept the Big Bang, or any early event in the history of the universe that precedes 4004BC. So they have to tip-toe around it: nothing the LHC will discover can possibly confirm modern cosmology, but, they say, it can “give us some interesting insight into how God upholds His universe today”. Science works only because God makes it work.

The author, Jason Lisle, is quite possibly the most boring creationist I’ve ever read, so his essay here is scarcely worth reading unless you are really in need of a nap, but it does conclude with a useful revelation.

Whatever scientists discover about the universe from the LHC, it will show that the universe is upheld by God in a consistent way. This will therefore confirm that the Bible is true.

Get that? No matter what evidence is unearthed, no matter what science learns, no matter what history tells us, everything will be interpreted to confirm their freakish interpretation of the history of the universe. This is not science. There’s nothing you can say that is more contrary to the ideal of science than to claim that your ideas are completely impervious to the evidence.

For those who are hard of reading: I KNOW THAT KAKU’S WORDS WERE A METAPHOR. I DO NOT THINK HE IS A BELIEVER, LET ALONE A CREATIONIST NUTJOB.

Better?

I do think he said something stupid and thoughtless. And please learn something: saying something is a metaphor does not automatically make it good or even excusable. For some reason, the word ‘metaphor’ has become a kind of catch-all excuse whenever someone says something stupid and unjustifiable. It isn’t. This is almost as bad as rationalizing gobbledygook and nonsense by calling it art or poetry, which is so insulting to the muses of poetry that I expect Calliope and Erato and Polyhymnia to materialize and start thwacking everyone upside the head with a cithara or stuffing scrolls up their nostrils or strangling them with a veil.

Again, for those having trouble following along: METAPHOR IS NOT A MAGIC GET-OUT-OF-STUPID CARD.

Yeah, we’ve got insane people prowling the Midwest

The FBI is cracking down on a Christian militia group that has been threatening to assassinate police officers and overthrow the government. There are nuts like this scattered all over the place; they collect guns, dress up in military gear, and play war games in the woods. They have no chance of succeeding in their aims, but are so delusional the believe they are the vanguard of a coming revolution. Why? Because God tells them so. These fanatics are typically deeply immersed in Christian End Times mythology.

Read their statement about their aims. They are “Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive” — by making pipe bombs and planning acts of terrorism.

It’s wonderful that the government is finally treating these kooks as what they are: dangerous, seditious criminals. But one thing you have to recognize is that there are a lot of Americans who think losers like them are simply heroic. If you look at the comments on the Freep article, there are lots of critics — I think it’s a good sign that more and more people are getting vocal in ridiculing the militia hate groups — but there are also lots of crazies. Here’s a sample:

Just once I wish the Michigan Militia would bring out the multiple 50 clibe3r machine guns they own and teach Obama’s Gestapos they phucked with the wrong group of sheep. My weapon gets confiscated only from my cold dead fingers. Would someone please read article two of our US constitution to these looney toon Democrats? before we start the revolution again

Hey Feds–Concentate your investigations on the Politicians of The city of Detroit.You guys start fooling with the Militia,your going to get another Oklahoma City

These raids are likely trying to “stave off” an announcement due Mon, Mar 29, regarding the total dissolution of the U.S. Corporation which has been ignoring the constitution, and reverting our country back to the original REPUBLIC in which it was founded. We become “sovereign citizens” who control our govt, and not vice versa. All 50 states were served papers, plus the military and Supreme Court on Friday. The military is onboard. This means freedom FINALLY for all Americans from the IRS and many other wonderful changes. It appears “the powers that be” and the Rockefellers don’t want to lose their vice grip, thus the raidsprior to Monday’s announcement of the changes. Each person in office must take an oath to the common law and the constitution, or be fired immediately. Many brave citizens behind the scenes have helped in this effort to free us.

More gun-waving psychos, more terrorist threats, and more delusional nonsense. This is what we get for keeping the citizenry stupid and ignorant.

By the way, it is Monday, 29 March. I await the announcement of the dissolution of the US.

Genomics is ALL WRONG!

One can acquire all kinds of interesting “scientific” perspectives on the interwebs. For instance, Professor Pallacken Abdul Wahid of Kerala Agricultural University has written a fascinating demolition of genetics and genomics for SciTopics (“Research summaries by experts!” Sponsored by Elsevier!) titled Phenomena of life and death explained based on a computer model of organism in the light of the Quran and the Bible.

Take a moment to bask in the wondrous promise of that title before diving into the link. And have no fear, your every hope of delightful wackaloonery will be fulfilled!

What you will discover is that Professor Pallacken Abdul Wahid hasn’t the vaguest, foggiest notion of what genetics and genomics are, but that doesn’t stop him from making up entirely imaginary problems and even more fanciful solutions. His actual academic specialty is Agricultural Chemistry and Agricultural Botany, which don’t seem to involve much actual, you know, biology…either that, or Kerala Agricultural University has remarkably low standards and allows clowns to teach science. Or both!

He raises two objections to our understanding of genetics. The first is that he notes that all cells have the same genetic constitution, but express different patterns of activity, producing multiple cell and tissue types. Well, OK, this is a real issue, but one that has been long explained by biology: genes are regulated by proteins in the cell, and different cells contain different assortments of proteins because they have different developmental histories. The good professor claims that “the molecular gene concept fails to explain” this concept. He’s wrong. It does so very well. He really needs to read up on some molecular and developmental genetics.

His second objection is novel. Live cells and dead cells have exactly the same genome, therefore genetics cannot explain death. Novel, all right, but one has to say, DUH. Death is not a genetic process. It’s a biochemical and physiological one. Death for a multicellular organism is the result of an irreversible breakdown of integrated metabolic events such that the integration of the whole is disrupted; we really have to look at cellular and organismal activity to observe death, it isn’t simply an intrinsic property of a certain sequence of nucleotides. This is simply a silly argument he’s making.

In order to explain his invented problem, he invents a bizarre and fact-free fairy tale. Since genes obviously can’t be responsible for life, differential gene activity, and death, he claims that there is some non-material property associated with chromosomes that he calls “biomemes” and analogizes to software running on the hardware of the genetic material. Here’s his explanation, with his data. (Note: this is exactly as written, except that I had to put it in Comic Sans, simply because Comic Sans is like awesome sauce for crazy.)

The non-particulate biological information stored on the chromosome can be perceived in terms of a biomemetic concept. The term “meme” was originally proposed by Richard Dawkins to mean “replicator”. The term “biomeme” used here is a modified version of “meme”. Biomeme is the smallest unit of biological information that can be transmitted from parent to offspring and that can take part in natural biosoftware engineering processes like cutting and splicing of chromosomal sectors, deletion, replication, translocation, crossing over (recombination), etc. These phenomena lead to alteration of the biosoftware via rearrangement of the biomemetic sectors on the chromosome (Figure 1). All these processes, which biologists treat as ‘errors’, are in fact program-controlled functions to bring about the required alterations in chromosome organization, and hence in the biosoftware. In this way, Johannsen’s non-particulate gene can be conceived and applied to biological systems. A detailed discussion of the computer model of the universe including biocomputer concept may be found elsewhere [15, 16]. In the computer model of the universe, chemical information (abioprogram) exists as coded in the form of chemical structures while the biological information (bioprogram) exists as stored information on chromosomes (biomemory).

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Note the lovely detailed diagram of a chromosome, which seems to rename chunks of chromatin as “sectors” which somehow correspond not to genes, but to “bioprograms” running on the genome. This is real cargo cult science; the author has no notion of modern biology, but is plopping his own weird interpretations sans any appreciation of the actual data underlying genomics on top of a few cartoon portraits. It’s freakishly irrelevant.

But wait! There’s more! We haven’t even struck the Fool’s Gold of kook ravings yet!

And here it is. You know what would complete the lunacy of his ignorant mangling of biology? You guessed it, religion.

The Scriptural revelations agree well with Johannsen’s non-particulate gene in conjunction with the computer model of organism. “Breathing of
rooh” into a clay model to create man (Adam) mentioned in the Quran (Q. 15:26-29) and “breathing of life” mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 2:7) refer to one and the same event – installation of divine biosoftware in a clay model of man. Upon installation of the
rooh (the term
nafs is also used in the Quran), the non-living clay model sprang to life much like a lifeless computer springs to “life” when software is installed. Thus the
rooh or “breath of life”, which is a non-physical entity, is the divine biosoftware (bioprogram) of human species. It needs a physical medium for storage, which is the chromosome. The Quran further states that it is from the
nafs (biosoftware) of Adam, woman (Eve) was created (Q. 7:189). The Bible says that it is from Adam’s rib, Eve was created. The rib mentioned in the Bible corresponds to the X chromosome of Adam [19]. The word ‘rib’ is used in the Bible metaphorically to mean chromosome (for the obvious reason that chromosome was unknown to the people of Prophet Moses’s time). Ribs are the only part of human body that morphologically resembles the chromosome. As two arms of a chromosome are joined on either side of the centromere, two ribs are joined on either side of a vertebra (Figure 2). Of the two sex chromosomes (X and Y), Adam’s rib must be referring to the X chromosome because XX combination determines femaleness. Further, the arms of the X chromosome are more nearly equal in length than those of the Y chromosome. This characteristic of X chromosome makes it more comparable with the ribs on either side of a vertebra. Since the Bible mentions only one rib, the biomeme for femaleness might be located on one of the arms of X chromosome. The Scriptural account of creation of Eve from Adam also reveals the karyotypes of Adam and Eve. If the karyotype of Adam is designated as 22 (autosomes)
A + (XY)
A, where subscript A denotes Adam, the karyotype of Eve will be 22 (autosomes)
A + (XX)
A. The analogy of rib used in the Bible for chromosome also confirms that the biosoftware is stored on the chromosome.

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Once again, it’s Pallaneck Abdul Wahid’s illustration that puts the perfect wacky icing on top of the silly cake of his theory. That’s quite a stretch, to claim that chromosomes resemble ribs, therefore that’s what the Bible was talking about.

Here’s a test. Below are pictures of ribs and of chromosomes. Can you tell them apart? Pallaneck Abdul Wahid can’t.

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His conclusion also demonstrates that he’s a bit lacking in basic logic skills as well.

Although a good number of Quranic revelations can be identified as falsifiable through scientific means, the revelation about the non-physical nature of biological information appears quite suitable for the purpose. Studies to synthesize “life” from non-life
without in any way involving a living cell during experiments are in full swing in several institutes. These studies are also a test of validity of the Scriptural revelations about life. If we succeed in creating life from chemical molecules, it will mark the end of religion and God. On the other hand if the research fails, it will not only prove the molecular gene wrong but will also confirm that God exists and the Quran is true. Let us wait for the verdict – the scientific answer to the biggest question ever!

So if a living cell is created in the lab, God is disproven? Go, Craig Venter, go! Unfortunately, it would shoot down vitalism, but not necessary religion. Well, vitalism is already shot down — it’s more like walking out to the crater, finding a few scraps of wreckage, and kicking them around for a while.

On the other hand, if the current efforts to synthesize life fail, it does not confirm the existence of God, and it especially does not support the Islamic faith. Creating a complete and functional chromosome is technically difficult, and that a non-trivial task is taking a while is no surprise. But if, somehow, there is some key aspect of the cell that we’ve been completely missing, even if vitalism reassembles itself and shows that it has some life (hah!) left in it yet, that does not say anything uniquely valid about the Quran. Especially not when its proponents are goofballs scribbling squiggles and claiming ribs look like chromosomes.

The Graeme Bird Memorial Thread

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It happens now and then that some gibbering loon makes a persistent appearance somewhere on the blog, and the ensuing wrangle goes on and on and on. We’ve had just such an occurrence on this thread, which is bloating up to almost 700 comments now. Graeme Bird is an Australian wanna-be politician of the crank variety, a global warming denialist,

anti-vaxer,

anti-evolutionist and fan of ID,

birther,

truther, and like your typical obsessive kook, he just can’t let it go, even though he’s getting laughed at rather cruelly (and deservedly).

Anyway, the thread is getting too long and with no end in sight…so I’ve closed it.

It’s like taking a dead bird carcass away from a cat, though, so this new thread is for anyone who wants to continue mauling the crackpot, or for Bird himself, who will probably continue to caper for our amusement.

By the way, this is how Bird refers to his blog (decor courtesy of Kagato):


My Blog Is a Fucking Magnificent Blog

A Broadway Musical by Graeme Bird

“Choc-full of ideas and speculations!”
– Graeme Bird, Author

He’s not just crazy, he’s flamboyantly crazy.

Advice from believers is demonstrably worthless

Speaking of the ABC, I revisited their Global Atheist Convention blog, which I can say without hesitation was absolutely the worst effort any of the media put out. I think I prefer the blatant stupidity of a Gary Ablett to the mawkish blitherings of a gang of pious apologists — at least it’s honest. And that’s all they’ve got — the blog is still limping along with a series of tepid guest posts by people making weak excuses for their faith. It was supposedly a blog about the convention, but it never quite rose to the standard of even meeting their own aims — instead, it’s an exercise in breast-beating by sorry-assed theists.

It’s utterly negligible and irrelevant, unless you like the spectacle of Christians going boo-hoo-hoo. I did catch one gawdawful post by Chris Mulherin, though, which adds the additional fillip of seeing a Christian getting everything completely wrong. It’s embarrassing. I even addressed several of these points in my talk, and said the exact opposite of what Mulherin claims are truisms for atheists. Maybe I put him to sleep.

Anyway, here are 5 things that Mulherin claims are ‘unscientific beliefs’ that must be held to get science off the ground.

Five things that atheists (and others) believe that cannot be shown by the evidence of science:

  1. The universe is governed by the law of cause and effect.

  2. We can normally trust human rationality and the evidence of our senses.

  3. The axioms of mathematics and the laws of logic are true.

  4. Moral language makes sense and cannot be reduced to personal preferences. Racism, paedophilia, destroying the planet and chauvinism are wrong in a more binding sense than “I/we don’t like those things.”


  5. Humans have freewill and are not totally determined by the laws of science.     In order to live, converse, decide what I will put on my sandwich, or whether I will attend an atheist convention, I must have the freedom (within limits) to make decisions.

There is more to be said, and the debate can be complicated, but the gist of the idea is that science must take some things as given before it can start its work. Most atheists take the above truths as givens, despite the fact that none of them can be derived scientifically.

Ugh. See? This is what happens when you gather a band of happy theists to interpret the words of a convention of atheists — it goes plunging off the rails.

  1. Wrong. I think chance is a significant factor in the universe. Cause and effect are important but not necessarily assumed; causal relationships are what we test for in scientific experiments.

  2. Completely wrong. Quite the reverse, actually; science is a tool we use to correct for the unreliability of our minds and our senses. I know I don’t trust my perceptions at all, and consider independent confirmation a great reassurance.

  3. In an utterly trivial sense, “truth” is an outcome of logic and math, so yes, this is accurate, by definition. We do believe that there is a real universe, and we attempt to probe it empirically, and in that sense we suspect that there is an actual deeper material truth, but that’s about it.

    I do wonder, though, if logic is false, how Christians interpret the world. Wouldn’t that make everything arbitrary and chaotic? In that context, maybe the Bible is useful after all, since it is an awfully arbitrary book.

  4. Mulherin needs to read some Hauser. A lot of morality is driven by personal revulsion, nothing more. There is a greater binding sense, however: a rational decision that says that discriminating against fellow human beings, abusing the next generation, reducing the carrying capacity of our environment, and treating women as objects has long term consequences to our society that are deleterious to the preservation of culture. We do make an assumption our culture is worth preserving, of course, but then, so do people in all viable cultures.

    It’s very Darwinian reasoning, though. Maybe Mulherin hasn’t quite grokked that major insight.

  5. Free will is philosophical bullshit. You can have an entirely natural biology that is subject to investigation by science that is not some kind of clockwork, predestined sequence of events. I decide what to put on my sandwich, but “I” is an unpredictable product of very complex neurological activity, colored by history over a baseline of biological predispositions.

It’s extremely annoying to be told by a delusionist precisely what beliefs I must hold because I’m an atheist, when I don’t. It’s a bit like concern trolling: the helpful faith-head erects a squad of five straw men which he’ll then kindly offer to demolish from us to clear the illusions from our eyes. No, thank you: you believe in ritual sacrifice, god-men, magical supplications, and supernatural beings. Your advice on science is worthless except for comedy purposes.

I’ve always wondered what he looked like

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The regal figure to the right is Terrill Dalton. He had a vision that revealed that he, personally, was the Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ’s dad. Who knew the Holy Ghost would look a bit like the Pillsbury Doughboy?

Anyway, the Holy Ghost has come down a bit in the world. He’s now living in a collection of campers and vans on a 5 acre lot in Montana, leading a breakaway Mormon sect that was too crazy for Utah.

Members of the Church of the Firstborn and General Assembly of Heaven had fled to Idaho from Utah last year after their large home in a Salt Lake City suburb was raided by federal officials investigating claims of child sexual abuse and assassination threats against President Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Thomas S. Monson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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He also has a webpage with an anorexic Jesus and a mushroom cloud background; he’s been busy rewriting the Bible, which is good — a hobby might distract him from the molesting children and assassinating people gigs.

My apologies to Canada

We have further information from the University of Ottawa about Coulter’s non-appearance last night.

Last night, the organizers themselves decided at 7:50 p.m. to cancel the event and so informed the University’s Protection Services staff on site. At that time, a crowd of about one thousand people had peacefully gathered at Marion Hall.

So…no word of violence at all, just a peaceful protest. Ann Coulter simply chickened out, and the decision was entirely hers and the organizations that invited her.

Never mind, there was no infringement of open discussion here, just another example of right wing cowardice.

Oh, wait — it gets worse. Here’s Ann Coulter’s description of the event.

The police called off my speech when the auditorium was surrounded by thousands of rioting liberals — screaming, blocking the entrance, throwing tables, demanding that my books be burned, and finally setting off the fire alarm.

I don’t know. Setting off a fire alarm after that chaos of rioting, screaming liberals sounds a bit anticlimactic, you know. As that link also reveals, most of the people in that mob were her fans, politely lined up to attend her lecture.

We also know it wasn’t the police who shut down the talk — it was the organizers. Her people.