Islamic apologetics in the International Journal of Cardiology

I’ve run into this particular phenomenon many times: the True Believer in some musty ancient mythology tells me that his superstition is true, because it accurately described some relatively modern discovery in science long before secular scientists worked it out. It’s always some appallingly stupid interpretation of a vaguely useless piece of text that wouldn’t have made any sense until it was retrofitted to modern science. My particular field of developmental biology has been particularly afflicted with this nonsense, thanks to one man, Dr. Keith L. Moore, of the University of Toronto. He’s the author or co-author on several widely used textbooks in anatomy and embryology — and they are good and useful books! — but he’s also an idiot. He has published ridiculous claims that the Qur’an contains inexplicably detailed descriptions of the stages of human development, implying some sort of divine source of information.

I’ve mentioned this before. For instance, the old book claims that at one point the embryo looks like a piece of chewed gum, or mudghah, and Moore announces, “by golly, it does, sorta”, throwing away all the knowledge we have about the structure and appearance of the actual embryo, which is not a chewed lump. I’ve actually seen these kooks show pictures of a piece of gum and an embryo and declare that they are similar. It’s insane. It’s pareidolia run amuck and swamping out actual scientific information for the sake of propping up useless superstitions.

Here’s Moore himself, endorsing the divinity of Allah on the basis of mudghah.

You may not have heard of him before, but I regularly get email from Muslims telling me that as a developmental biologist, I ought to follow Islam because of its insights into embryology, which don’t exist. Thanks, Dr Moore, you dumbass.

Well, now the Muslim cranks have another coup, having persuaded some other dumbasses to publish an appallingly bad paper in the International Journal of Cardiology, a credible peer-reviewed journal. Or, at least, formerly credible.

The paper is disgracefully bad. It’s basically a compendium of an assortment of references to anatomy and health from the Qur’an, endorsing them as accurate sources of information. For instance, the Qur’an prescribes three techniques for healing, “honey, cupping, and cauterization,” and gosh, we now know that “Honey contains the therapeutic contents sugars, vitamins, anti-microbials, among other things”!

Are you impressed yet?

Since this is a cardiology journal, the article also finds it necessary to waste the readers’ time with blather about blood and arteries. Here’s an example of the Prophet’s profound knowledge of the circulatory system.

Another great vessel mentioned in the Qur’an is the Al-Aatín or aorta “We would certainly have seized his right hand and cut off his Al-Watín,” [20]. Al-Watín has been translated into different, yet similar words, including “aorta”, “life-artery”, and simply “artery”. This verse is taken to mean that if the Prophet Mohammed was lying about the teachings of God, then God would have grabbed the Prophet Mohammad’s arm and cut a vital artery, certainly killing Mohammad. This verse confirms that 1. Blood was indeed viewed as a vehicle for life and 2. The artery directly leading from the heart is vital to survival. By analyzing the different translations and exegesis of Al-Watín, it can be safely assumed that it is the aorta that the author of the Qur’an is referring to in this verse.

Hmmm. So a warlike society that had many soldiers running about chopping into people with swords was aware that cutting major arteries would lead to rapid blood loss and death. I have no idea how they could have figured that out without an omniscient god whispering the explanation into the ears of priests.

The holy book also talks about heart disease, something else a readership of cardiologists would find interesting. Does this sound like well-informed medicine to you?

The Qur’an shares with the Hadeeth a metaphorical description of the heart as a possessor of emotional faculties, thus giving the heart many characteristics that modern science attributes to the brain. As is popularly stated in Islamic culture, every action is dependent upon intentions, and “…what counts is [to God] the intention of your hearts…”. These actions, whether “good” or “bad” determine the health of the heart, namely if it is a sound or diseased heart. A diseased heart is one filled with qualities such as doubt, hypocrisy, and ignorance among many others. Possessors of such qualities have a “hardened,” diseased heart. Other malaise qualities contributing to a diseased heart includes blasphemy, rejection of truth, deviation, sin, corruption, aggressiveness, negligence, fear, anger, and jealousy, among others.

The authors of the Qur’an and of this paper seem to have confused poetic metaphor with science.

Yeah, the article also repeats Moore’s nonsense about embryology. There’s much, much more: read the original paper for yourself, or this excellent critique that also points out all the conveniently omitted parts where the Qur’an gets everything completely wrong.

How did this crap manage to get published? Once again, we have a disgraceful failure of peer-review to weed out obvious religious propaganda, allowing an Islamic tract to appear under the guise of a scientific article. Just the fact that the references consist almost entirely of citations to pages of the Qur’an ought to have triggered some concern. I’d like to know what went wrong in the reviewing process that allowed garbage like this to make it onto the pages of the International Journal of Cardiology. Write to the editor and demand an accounting; also make them squirm in embarrassment and appreciate the damage that has been done to their credibility.

And remember: ancient holy books are sources of lies and misinformation, not science.

Loukas M, et al, The heart and cardiovascular system in the Qur’an and Hadeeth, Int J Cardiol (2009), doi:10.1016/j. ijcard.2009.05.011

Fancy that, a fabulous map

This is beautiful, I’d hang it on my wall. It’s a genetic map of the first synthetic organism, and it and many others will be on display in the Serpentine Gallery in London this weekend.

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And gosh, what do you know, I am going to be in London this weekend! I may have to sneak out of The Amazing Meeting a bit, which is going to be hard to do since it’s so jam-packed with cool people and cool stuff, but some of them might want to join me in a little extracurricular travel as well.

A surprising Nobel

I would never have guessed this one. The Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone to Robert G. Edwards for his pioneering work in in vitro fertilization. It surprises me because it’s almost ancient history — he is being rewarded for work done over 30 years ago. It’s also very applied research — this was not work that greatly advanced our understanding of basic phenomena in biology, because IVF was already being done in animals. This was just the extension of a technique to one peculiar species, ours.

I don’t begrudge him the award, though, because the other special property of his research was that it was extremely controversial. These were procedures that simply burned through scores (or hundreds, if you count the ones with such little viability that they weren’t implanted) of human zygotes in order to work out reliable protocols, and throughout faced serious ethical risks — these were procedures that had a chance of producing the worst possible result, a viable embryo that came to full term, but had serious birth defects. The public opposition to the work was tremendous, funding was tenuous, and even many in the scientific community opposed the work and ostracized Edwards and his colleague, Steptoe (who did not live to see this day, and so did not receive the award).

Nowadays, IVF is practically routine and about 4 million people were ‘test tube babies’. It’s still controversial, though, with extremist anti-abortion groups, such as the Catholic church, still fighting it, and the redundant, unused zygotes from the procedure still being a point of major contention (ever heard of ‘snowflake babies’? That’s what they’re talking about).

I’m reading a couple of messages in this award. One is simply acknowledging a hard-working scientist, but the other is a signal that we should soldier on through all of the opposition to reproductive health technologies, that science will be rewarded and the Luddites will find themselves in the dustbin of history. I can’t help but see this as, in part, the Nobel committee making an unmistakeably rude gesture at the anti-science, anti-choice fanatics of the religious right.

(For those who are unfamilar with the IVF procedure that Edwards and Steptoe developed, here’s a lovely summary diagram from the Nobel Foundation.)

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TimeTree

People are always asking me for the source of those nice t-shirts that illustrate how long we’ve diverged from a given species. I think the name must be hard to remember: they’re at evogeneao.com. Now there’s a little software widget that will be just as neat-o.

Look up TimeTree, and remember to show it to the kids. This is a page with a simple premise: type in the name of two taxa (it will accept common names, but may give you a list of scientific names to narrow the search), and then it looks them up in the public gene databases and gives you a best estimate of how long ago their last common ancestor lived.

Grasshoppers and I, for instance, shared a many-times-great grandpa 981 million years ago. My zebrafish and I are practically cousins, with our last shared ancestor living a mere 454 million years ago. Hey, tree, we’ve been apart for 1407 million years, how’s it going? Sparrow! Long time no see! 325 million years, huh?

You get the idea. It’s great for getting the big perspective. The kids will pester you all the time for dates. Especially since…it’s got an iPhone app! Get on the App Store on your smart phone or iPad and search for TimeTree — it’s totally free (except for the cost of owning such a gadget, of course).

Oh, and once you’re done entertaining the children and yourself, it’s actually a serious tool. Tap on the results and it’ll take you to all the scientific details: breakdown of mitochondrial vs. nuclear date estimates, source papers, all that sort of thing.

For details on how it works, there’s also a published paper:

Hedges SB, Dudley J, Kumar S (2006) TimeTree: a public knowledge-base of divergence times among organisms. Bioinformatics 22(23):2971-2972.

Look, a cat! 92 million years.

Astroturfing the scientific databases: spamming the lobster eye

The Encyclopedia of Life is a cool tool which is a sort of wikification of taxonomy — it allows a large number of contributors to add descriptions of species with the goal of eventually documenting all 1.8 million known species in a single searchable source. Look at the page for my experimental animal, Danio rerio; lots of information in a standard format with links and references. Thumbs up!

However, there’s a problem here: the sources. To organize that much data, a large mob of contributors are needed, and that means some fairly open policies to allow contributors have been instituted, and that in turn means that there will be parasites on they system. And a reader sent me an example of a doozy.

Take a look at the page for the order Decapoda. It has an oddly random article on the reflecting superposition eyes of lobsters up top.

A lobster’s eye works on a principle of reflection rather than that of refraction…The most outstanding characteristic of the lobster eye is its surface, which is composed of numerous squares…these squares are positioned most precisely.

It’s OK — it seems to be a rough and unhelpful paraphrase of a section of Michael Land’s wonderfully informative book, Animal Eyes, and it’s correct as far as it goes — lobster eyes do have an array of mirrored light guides that are square in section. The surprise is at the end, where it names the author: Harun Yahya. That’s right, the Turkish creationist. This is taken straight from one of his creationist ravings, where he discusses some amazing detail of biology and concludes that it couldn’t possibly have evolved because he, a wealthy playboy and former mental patient and convicted criminal now representing himself as the Islamic source of creation science, could not imagine it so.

How did Harun Yahya become a source on EoL?

The page links to its source and holder of the copyright on the article: it’s the Biomimicry Institute, an entirely credible educational source, with a specific page, the Ask Nature reference, which is, again, an open source resource with multiple contributors. And yes, there’s Harun Yahya stuffing articles in there.

I did a google search on a few of the phrases in the text, and whoa — it’s everywhere. Harun Yahya’s organization has been dumping this same bit of text, and others, in various of their own websites and also in just about any legitimate source that allows them to open an account and create public content, including Ask Nature and EoL. It has also been picked up by numerous creationist sites as well, all echoing the same unwarranted conclusion: this eye works really well, therefore it couldn’t have evolved.

Try googling for information on lobster eyes. It’s a mess. There are a few credible sources that appear on the first page, like Wikipedia, but for the most part it’s a smear of creationist sites.

I know, this is a truism: don’t trust the Net of Lies, learn to vet your sources, watch out for anything on the net. But it looks to me like the Turkish creationists have been waging a successful astroturf campaign to infiltrate sources that we would normally regard as pretty good, and are thereby corrupting sources even more. It also allows them to pass casual review because their articles are very widely sourced.

I hope the editors of various scientific web sites that allow open submissions will take a look at their collections, and purge them of anything from Harun Yahya. He is not a scientific source, he has absolutely no background in the sciences, and he mangles the information to serve his ideological goals. What he’s doing here is using repetition to make his name widely known, and parasitizing on the good name of some websites to falsely elevate his reputation. There’s a hobo on the train, people, and he’s pretending he’s a railroad executive.

Just in case you are wondering about those lobster eyes, they actually are extremely interesting, using reflecting mirrors instead of refracting lenses to focus light on photoreceptors. It’s not hard to see how they would work: to focus incoming light on a photoreceptor surface, we need to bend light to a target, and refraction or reflection can do the job.

Here’s Mike Land’s summary diagram of the process (and, incidentally, Animal Eyes is an excellent survey of the diversity of biological optics):

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I don’t see how you can argue that the one on the right is evidence of creation, any more than the one on the left. Both take advantage of ordinary physical properties to focus an image on a retina.

The interesting phenomenon is the transition: the eye on the left is almost certainly the ancestral state, since some crustaceans have both kinds of eyes, and also they may have the refracting eye on the left in the early stages of development, and it then transforms into the mirrored eye…and we don’t have good evolutionary examples of the historical transition. That the eye can switch between two forms during development at least implies that no magic is necessary, though, so this may be an open question but it is not a question that requires the invention of a supernatural designer to answer.