All that naked Greek statuary, with all their naughty bits hanging out…someone had to document ancient Greek testicles, and that person was Ingrid Berthon Moine.
Hey! Hey you! My eyes are way up here! I’ll have you know I’m much more than just a pretty ball sack…although the boys are spectacular, if I do say so myself.
When we bought our house, it came with a disconnected, nonfunctional hot tub. It’s still here, sitting unused in our back yard, because having a mere Ph.D. in biology means that I don’t know how to fix it, and also, I don’t get paid enough to afford to have it fixed by a competent hot tub expert. And thus am I made to realize that I am a failure. I shouldn’t have wasted effort on that lowly science degree; instead, I should have learned how to install hot tubs.
Because hot tub experts are wizards, masters of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time.
I have been reading the works of James Arjuna, International Spa Design Engineer, who is a real scientist. He said so.
I am a real scientist for over 47 years. I make my living producing functional equipment that always works as designed because I don’t use any pseudo science. I hate pseudo science religious crap in academia.
He says so frequently.
Please check out my science blog. It is based on over 47 years of using the scientific method to solve problems and to seek to find what is really true.
Here is where I do most of my recent research. I have read over 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics.
I don’t know which science blog to check out, though, since he didn’t provide a link. He has several!
41,000 papers is a lot. In 47 years, that’s 2 or 3 papers a day, which is about what I read. It’s hard work reading a science paper with comprehension, so his dedication to biology may be why his hot tub business has some bitter complaints, and why his brother thinks he’s a sleazy con artist. Mastery of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time makes demands on one’s life; sacrifices must be made. This is another mark of my failure; I’m not guilty of bad business practices, and I haven’t alienated either of my brothers yet. I don’t think; maybe I’ll have to ask when I see them next month.
So I looked up Arjuna’s latest science article to learn wisdom and discover the deep secrets of the Hot Tub Masters. In this, he asserts that there is not and never has been a beneficial mutation. His chosen example? The lactose tolerance mutation, because while it may be beneficial, it couldn’t possibly have happened.
The most ridiculous of this is the lactose tolerance mutation. First of all making lactase is made in a gene that is 49,335 base pairs for just one of the THREE lactase genes. This is the most common gene found in lactose intolerance.
First rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a big number. Numbers are sciencey, and big ones are hard, and 49,335 sounds scary. How could it be? 49,355 whatevers must be impossible!
According to the article claiming that this was some great event creating this new gene. It turns out that it is only 2 base pares were changed to cause this gene to function. Where did the other totally designed 49332 BP come from that were aligned perfectly and just needed two base pares to change?
Second rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Find a small number. We must trivialize any accomplishment. Only 2 out of that intimidating 49,355? That can’t possibly matter. The scientists will splutter, “but single nucleotide changes can distort the whole shape of a molecule, or disrupt a biochemically active site; and in this case, the modification is to a cis regulatory element which modifies expression, not the sequence of the enzyme”, but you can ignore them, because of the obvious fact that 2 is a lot less than 49,355.
Third rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You are not bounded by any rules. Even though you’re making a strangely irrelevant argument from arithmetic, you can say that 49355 – 2 = 49332, and no one will care. Also, spelling is an oppressive tool of those pinheads in academia.
Fourth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: You can read 41,000 papers on biology, DNA, Evolution, genetics
and still not understand basic biology, and that’s OK. The thousands of bases in a gene must be aligned perfectly
in your head, whatever that means, and never mind that that is not a rule in reality.
Hot Tub Masters are free spirits. Truth is whatever they say it is.
It was a pre-existing gene from ancient ancestors prior to this finding and they found a group where it was turned off and then a group where they drank milk where it was functioning. The two base pairs were not mutated from disease in the functioning gene and in the malfunctioning gene it was and is a disease.
Fifth rule of the Hot Tub Masters: Consistency be damned. You can simultaneously announce that there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation, and that groups without the mutation are diseased
(surprise, lactose intolerant individuals! You are afflicted with a disease!) and that groups that have the mutation are not diseased. And that it wasn’t a mutation anyway.
In the 2.5 million DNA studies there are no cases of any living or recently extinct (6000 yrs on human studies) showing even one verifiable beneficial mutation.
Not one of the PhD’s have been able to produce one. Therefore, there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation. It is fantasy.
But…but James! You’ve only read 41,000 of the 2.5 million studies!
And I am so confused. The Hot Tub Master plainly said that the 2 nucleotide variation was the difference between diseased and not diseased. Even in his own head it’s clearly beneficial to carry that trait.
We know that Evolutionists believe that “duplication” mutations are the “power behind evolution”. But even a base pair duplication causes disease or deformity because it destroys the original proteins construction with extra proteins that cannot be integrated.
Well, a single base pair duplication would be a frame shift mutation, so it certainly would mess up the structure of the protein. But we’re talking about segmental duplications, where a complete copy of the original gene is left intact and a duplicate is made elsewhere.
I don’t even understand what he’s talking about when he says a single base duplication creates extra proteins that cannot be integrated
. That makes no sense. It’s almost as if he has no understanding of molecular biology and genetics at all.
But that cannot be! He’s an International Man of Mystery Spa Design Engineer!
They cannot be integrated because the HOX genes have to place them into the correct use and the HOX genes are master programmed for a specific master plan of the organism.
Then they cannot be recognized by the immune system and so the immune system takes the only messed up proteins and attacks them. Every mutation destroys the recognition of both the HOX to use them and the immune system to destroy them as foreign attack cells, that our immune system does not recognize.
I…what? I know a little bit about HOX genes; they don’t control every little thing, every gene in every cell. They set up domains with specific body plan identities in early development. Most genes don’t interact with HOX genes at all, so it’s a little peculiar to claim they limit everything — I’m beginning to think the Hot Tub Master memorized a few buzz words and phrases and is plastering them all over his cartoonish and wrong vision of how gene regulation works.
As for his immune system argument — does he know nothing about how adaptive immunity works? How self/non-self recognition is a product of selection?
James Arjuna is bringing discredit to the noble traditions of the Hot Tub Masters. I suspect that he is not a True Hot Tub Master™, and I’m going to have to look farther for a master of all knowledge and the mysteries of space and time. I also think my broken hot tub is going to continue to languish in my back yard, because if his knowledge of hot tubs is as sound as his knowledge of biology, I wouldn’t want him to come near it.
I know I sure can’t do anything about it. I know nothing about hot tubs. Nothing at all.
But not in Minnesota. Are you kidding? It’s cold out there.
(NSFW song. Fertility rites turn out to be something some people find objectionable.)
Here’s an interesting approach to educating the public about health and sanitation — make a song about it.
It’s weirdly catchy, too.
I have seen the light, and all future blog posts will be automatically generated by reionizing their electrons. Life will not only be easier, but more profitable.
Namaste.
The goal of ultra-sentient particles is to plant the seeds of consciousness rather than delusion.
To follow the path is to become one with it. By blossoming, we dream.
How should you navigate this advanced solar system?
Reality has always been beaming with beings whose souls are transformed into self-actualization. We are in the midst of an ancient unveiling of health that will open up the world itself. We are at a crossroads of transcendence and stagnation.
Have you found your quest? If you have never experienced this uprising inherent in nature, it can be difficult to heal. The galaxy is calling to you via a resonance cascade. Can you hear it?
It can be difficult to know where to begin. Although you may not realize it, you are karmic. Child, look within and enlighten yourself.
We live, we believe, we are reborn.
We can no longer afford to live with dogma. Greed is the antithesis of curiosity. Yes, it is possible to erase the things that can extinguish us, but not without inspiration on our side.
Nothing is impossible. Growth is the driver of purpose. Health is the growth of rebirth, and of us.
Do not search for information on getting sand in your genitals. It’s a morass of nonsense out there, with all kinds of bizarre pop culture notions. Most of it seems to be about getting sand in your vagina, which is treated as slogan to mock and trivialize women’s problems, but getting sand under your foreskin…oh, my. That’s no joke. That’s a very serious problem that must be dealt with surgically.
Remember Brian Morris, the Australian circumcision fanatic? One of his talking points is that getting sand in your penis is a major problem for uncircumcised men, and that in particular entire armies have been devastated in the desert by grains of sand getting caught up there, or laid flat in the jungles by all the damp rot and unhygienic conditions. He paints a grisly picture of the uncircumcised penis, and claims that it’s standard military policy to make sure you don’t have one of those dangerous folds of skin. How can you possibly fight if you’ve got a tiny, hideous bit of flesh attached to your penis?
I really had no idea. I may be a flabby old college professor, but apparently because I was born in America in the 1950s, when every boy baby was given cosmetic surgery practically as soon as they were born, I can whip the ass of every anteater boy out there. Good to know.
Morris is rather insistent. He claims that circumcision is a serious medical issue for the military.
In attempting to ridicule the notion that circumcision arose in the Middle East to solve problems caused by ‘sand and dust’, Vernon cites an article by Robert Darby, an anti-circ activist. Darby’s claims stemming from ‘medical records’ ‘he analyzed’ are false. Infections, initiated by the aggravation of dirt and sand, are not uncommon under desert conditions, and have even crippled whole armies of uncircumcised soldiers. It is difficult to achieve sanitation during prolonged battle. To contradict Darby, and thus Vernon, a US Army report by General Patton stated that in World War II 150,000 soldiers were hospitalised for foreskin problems due to inadequate hygiene. To quote: “Time and money could have been saved had prophylactic circumcision been performed before the men were shipped overseas” and “Because keeping the foreskin clean was very difficult in the field, many soldiers with only a minimal tendency toward phimosis were likely to develop balanoposthitis”. The story was similar in Iraq during ‘Desert Storm’ in the early 1990s. In the Vietnam War men requested circumcision to avoid “jungle rot”.
Well, if General George Patton thought it was a serious problem, it must be so. “Old Blood and Guts” wouldn’t be put off by trivia.
Except, well, it turns out that Brian Morris is rather sloppy with the facts.
Attempting to refute my argument he cites “a US Army report by General Patton”, and lists a series of pages that are supposed to back up his claim. But when you actually check those pages you find that they have nothing to do with sand under the foreskin and fail to provide any support for the argument that Morris wishes to make. For a start he gets the details of the book wrong. It is not a “report by General Patton”, but a multi-author volume in the official history of U.S. medical services in World War 2, edited by John F. Patton MD. Secondly, there are only two occurrences of the word sand in the entire volume, neither of which has anything to do with foreskins or circumcision. The volume scarcely deals with the Middle Eastern or North African (desert) combat theatres, but mostly with the South-East Asian and Pacific theatres, characterized by dense jungles and wet, humid conditions that posed many intractable health problems, affecting many parts of the body, not just the penis. But in those conditions sand and dust were not an issue. There is not the slightest support for his hyperbolic claim that “Infections, initiated by the aggravation of dirt and sand, are not uncommon under desert conditions, and have even crippled whole armies of uncircumcised soldiers.”
I’m sure you uncircumcised men are quite pleased to hear this. You don’t need to get the tip lopped off in order to go kill people in the Middle East. And I’ve lost my last possible advantage in a bar fight.
We’re both bearded white guys who can’t dance.
This guy wrote to me back in September, when he was regurgitating creationist rationalizations for the global flood, at the behest of wacky ol’ Walt Brown. He called me again this morning and sent me another missive. On the phone, he sounded a bit miffed that I didn’t immediately remember who the heck he was, but it’s all come back to me now, after reading this.
Dear Dr. Paul Myers,
Like I said, I read your Happy Atheist and regularly read Pharyngula.
RE: Your “Looking for a geophysicist” blog.
What are the facts and what are the beliefs?
1 FACT:
Estimations of the biggest and strongest Supercontinent and all the reservoirs of water under pressure below it Earth possibly had are altogether unheard of.
Its continental landmasses’ three-hundredfold greater concentration of heavy, radioactive elements than our found elsewhere in the Earth aren’t confirmed by observations with measurements to have been in it when the continents yet had all the former connectedness they had (however connected they may have been).
Dr. Bruce Buffett who earned a doctorate in geophysics from Harvard and is now Chairman of Geophysics at Berkeley, considered the no.1 at geophysics research in America).
http://211.144.68.84:9998/91keshi/Public/File/34/485-7398/pdf/485319a.pdf
He has answered my questions and can’t explain why geophysicists never consider that before our planet’s 52,000-mile globe-encircling Mid-Oceanic Range uplifted, fitting like a jigsaw puzzle with specific continental shelf edges, it may have had great reservoirs of water under pressure below a supercontinent, even only one supercontinent in Earth history.
I asked him, “Could not it have thereby had its greatest explosivities of outbursting water and eroded rocks, greatest magnitude earthquake, and super-intense volcanic and earthquake lightnings >1 million amperes whereby electrons shooting through them with >1 MeV produced magnetic pinch effects”?
I hope by the following it will be clear to you what is being proposed as a solution to the problem of Earth’s concentration of heavy, radioactive elements inconsistent with the nebular hypothesis.
Regarding Richard P. Feynman, Ph.D.(physics) Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, (W.W. Norton: New York, NY, 1985), pp. 341, 343:
Physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman noted what is: “generally missing in cargo cult science. . . It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. . . put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that disagree with it . . .
. . . give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction. . .
I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity .. bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.”“Earth’s radioactivity was confined to the crust, a few tens of kilometers thick.”
(John D. Stacey, Physics of the Earth, 3rd edition (1992), p. 45)
“Uranium, thorium and potassium are the main elements contributing to natural terrestrial radioactivity.. All three of the radioactive elements are strongly partitioned into the continental crust.”
(J. A. Plant and A. D. Saunders, “The Radioactive Earth,” Radiation Protection Dosimetry, Vol. 68, 1996, p. 25)
“The molten rock oozing from midocean ridges lacks much of the uranium, thorium, and other trace elements that spew from some aboveground volcanoes.”
(Sid Perkins, “New Mantle Model Gets the Water Out,” Science News, Vol. 164, 13 September 2003, p. 174.
Theories of an unsupernatural ultimate origin and formation of Earth call for the agglomeration of its particles thrown together by cosmic winds. They segregated into the core, mantle, and crust by gravity and heat. However, the heaviest naturally occurring elements: uranium and thorium are not nearly as concentrated under the continents and oceanic floors as they would be if the Earth formed from an interstellar medium. . . . If uranium and thorium were among the nuclides that the universe assembled into the Earth, they would be more concentrated toward its deeper parts. At least, they would be expected to have been evenly distributed throughout it. Yet: “90% of uranium and thorium are concentrated in the continents”*;–Earth’s continents are only 0.35% of its mass.*
*Dan F. C. Pribnow, Ph.D.(geophysics), “Radiogenic Heat Production in the Upper Third of Continental Crust from KTB,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 24, 1 February 1997, p. 349.
* “The Earth’s continental crust occupies 41.2% of the surface area but represents only 0.35% of the total mass of our planet.” (Hugh Richard Rollinson, Ph.D.[geochemistry], Early Earth Systems [Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2007], p. 134)
“Heat production rate is well correlated to lithology; no significant variation with depth, neither strictly linear nor exponential, is observed over the entire depths of the [two German holes].”
(Christoph Clauser, et al., “The Thermal Regime of the Crystalline Continental Crust: Implications from the KTB, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 102, No. B8, 10 August 1997, p. 18,418)
Germany’s Deep Drilling Project discovered variations in heat-exuding radioactivity related to the rock types, not to depths.
Are there higher concentrations of heavy radionuclei in Earth’s continental crust beneath its fossil-bearing rock layers where the one Supercontinent in its history had comparatively greater intensities of lightnings lightening it via having been more violently quaked or comprised of stronger rock types that generated more frictional electrifications and charge condensations?
“Surface rocks show traces of radioactive materials, and while the quantities thus found are very minute, the aggregate amount is sufficient, if scattered with this density throughout the earth, to suppy, many times over, the present yearly loss of heat. In fact, so much heat could be developed in this way that it has been practically necessary to make the assumption that the radioactive materials are limited in occurence to a surface shell only a few kilometers in thickness” (Leonard R. Ingersoll, et al., Heat Conduction : With Engineering, Geological and Other Applications, revised edition [University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI, 1954], p. 102)
You wrote on blog saying: “There was no global flood.” I’m not altogether certain of that.
Perhaps almost all of Earth’s fossil-bearing rock layers and all their heavy, radioactive elements bound to lighter elements evidence that it had extraordinary lightnings in enormous sub-Supercontinental water and in a Supercontinent erupting it whereby the seven continents it divided into were entirely and totally overflowed with tsunamies.
Thank You, Rick Keane
Too long? Shorter Rick Keane: Why haven’t geophysicists considered that there was a giant ocean of water beneath the continent(s) that exploded outward with a lot of lightning?
I don’t know. Why haven’t geophysicists consider my theory, that the earth is a giant eukaryotic cell, that continents are rafts of cell surface molecules, and that volcanoes are examples of exocytosis? Huh? Why? They’ll all be so surprised when the planet undergoes mitosis, I tell you what.
I also have a theory that the KT event was actually a sperm fusion event. Ask me more, maybe I’ll spin out a few thousand words with lots of quotes.
It also explains why someone would write to me asking about geophysics.
Maybe it’s not quite as prestigious as First Man on the Moon, but Minnesota has First Beer Delivery by Drone.
I suspect a little cheating. I don’t think that drone could lift a full box of beer. But then, Amazon hasn’t actually made any deliveries with their drones yet, either — at least Minnesotans have their priorities straight.
