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It took me a minute to figure out what this diagram was trying to say.
Then I figured it out. Ewww, yuck. Fundie Christians.
(via Spa_yediMonster)
I thought physics was the most hubristic scientific discipline of them all, but I may have to revise that assessment. Last week I was sent another of those papers published in archiv, the physics repository, making grand pronouncements about evolution, and I made the mistake of simply dismissing it on twitter — it was simply too ridiculous to post about. But now io9 has picked it up, and more people are clamoring at me to explain it.
Jebus, it’s terrible.
Here’s what Sharov and Gordon claim:
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a nucleotide. The genetic complexity, roughly measured by the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides, is expected to have grown exponentially due to several positive feedback factors: gene cooperation, duplication of genes with their subsequent specialization, and emergence of novel functional niches associated with existing genes. Linear regression of genetic complexity on a log scale extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life 9.7 billion years ago. This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: life took ca. 5 billion years to reach the complexity of bacteria; the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth; there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens; Earth was seeded by panspermia; experimental replication of the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare events; and the Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe. Evolution of advanced organisms has accelerated via development of additional information-processing systems: epigenetic memory, primitive mind, multicellular brain, language, books, computers, and Internet. As a result the doubling time of complexity has reached ca. 20 years. Finally, we discuss the issue of the predicted technological singularity and give a biosemiotics perspective on the increase of complexity.
Life originated 9.7 billion years ago, huh? Maybe 13 billion plus years ago? I didn’t even have to read the paper: I predicted that there would be a certain graph in it, opened it up, scanned to Figure 1, and there it was.
We’re done. Anyone else see the problem?
They cherrypicked their data points. They didn’t include lungfish, ferns, onions, or some protists because that would totally undermine their premise; those are contemporary organisms with much larger genomes than mammals’, and their shallow, stupid exercise in curve-fitting would have flopped miserably. It’s a great example of garbage in, garbage out.
There’s another figure, in which they slap their ‘origin of life’ numbers on a diagram of the history of the universe. Very convincing. I could also stick a label on such an image and show the ‘origin of clowns’ at the time of the Big Bang. It wouldn’t make it scientific, though.
Do they have any other evidence to support their claim? No, not one bit. Most of the paper is a handwavey summary of various models of abiogenesis, with no effort to be quantitative…except for their quantitative claim on the basis of one fudged graph that life originated over 9 billion years ago. There’s also some weird stuff about biosemiotics, which they use to argue for goals and meaning in evolution. It seems to be a popular term among creationists, and what little I’ve read on it from marginally more credible sources makes it look like nonsense.
That graph, though, just kills it. At least try to respect the larger data set, will ya, guys?
This was published in archiv, probably to escape the restrictions of peer review (i.e., slip some bullshit under the door), and really, I read that and thought, “physicists, again?” But then I looked closer at the authors. I am so ashamed.
Alexei A. Sharov, Ph.D.
Staff Scientist, Laboratory of Genetics
National Institute on Aging (NIA/NIH)
Richard Gordon, Ph.D.
Theoretical Biologist, Embryogenesis Center
Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory
They’re biologists of some sort. Now I have to crawl off in embarrassment for my discipline.
It is December, isn’t it?
I’m a biologist, Jim, not an astronomer! Someone else can have fun with this one: did you know The Sun is Not a Star?
How many of you have heard this before: "Our Sun is just another star. In fact, it is an average star – one of 100 billion – in the Milky Way galaxy". What if it isn’t just another star? What if what we know about the Sun does NOT apply to all the stars we see in the night sky? Would it throw the big bang theory into irreconcilable doubt? I believe it would.
The goal of this paper is to prove, using only the Bible, that the Sun is NOT a star. There are four major reasons from the Bible why I believe the Sun is not a star, and therefore the assumptions made about stars, their creation, their life, their death, their burn rate, the composition – basically every assumption we make about stars – are faulty. These faulty assumptions completely throw into doubt the theory of the evolution of the universe and the big bang theory.
I think that all that he has proved, using only the Bible, is that he is a ninny.
A ‘professor’ at the far-right wing diploma mill, Judith Reisman, has come out with a bizarre explanation for homosexuality.
On Sept. 21, 2012, Texas neurosurgeon Donald L. Hilton Jr., M.D., spoke on pornography addiction and sexual orientation, saying:
“Pornography is a visual pheromone, a powerful 100-billion-dollar per year brain drug that is changing sexuality even more rapidly through the cyber-acceleration of the Internet. It is ‘inhibiting orientation’ and ‘disrupting pre-mating communication between the sexes by permeating the atmosphere’ and Internet.”
This complements my theory perfectly. My theory is that while watching televangelists on TV, every once in a while a cartoon rabbit with a mallet jumps out and bonks the viewers on the head, causing transient memory loss that eliminates knowledge of the bunny, and also causes the viewer to become more stupid.
I am calling these brain-damaging rabbits ‘leporobashins’, because as we all know, giving things a Latin name makes them real.
(Edited to remove link to source that mangled the story, and replace it with a direct quote from the original source at WND.)
Yesterday, I could start the day with the happy news that New Zealand had passed progressive legislation, and then burst into song. Today I have to look at my home country, and…goddamn, but we’re a dysfunctional mess. America is basically a rogue state, run by plutocrats and incompetents.
After Aurora and Newtown, there was a surge of sentiment in favor of checking the extravagant dissemination of deadly weapons in this country. It’s just a little too easy for hateful lunatics and demented haters to get their hands on weapons of mass murder, and so people proposed taking baby steps and moderating America’s addiction to guns just a little bit. So a bipartisan bill made it to the senate that would have made small changes: it would have required more background checks for gun buyers, and it would have banned assault weapons and high capacity clips. These are not terribly restrictive rules. Who could possibly want felons or people with violent mental illnesses to be able to buy guns casually? Who needs a 60-shot magazine for an assault rifle?
The bill was defeated in the Senate. No word if the attending senators rose up and were led in a rousing chorus of Wango Tango by Ted Nugent afterwards.
Take a look at the roll call for the vote. It was almost perfectly split with the Republicans voting against it (Harry Reid joined them!) and the Democrats voting for it (with John McCain!). It was a simple, common-sense bill and the Republicans united to vote it down. I think it’s way past time that we voted every damn Republican down.
Gabby Giffords agrees. In her editorial on the vote, she says,
Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.
She’s wrong about one thing: to let neglect and crime rule is the American way. We have to change it. It’s going to take more than just elections and laws, though, we’re going to have to change American culture. Because it’s ripe with assholes.
For example, one prominent right-wing, pro-gun voice is Instapundit. You might want to savor his response to Giffords.
Stunning, ain’t it?
He’s telling a woman who was shot in the head and saw friends gunned down to stop bullying the gun lobby. We’ve got people who want to be able to make impulse purchases of weapons designed with one purpose — killing people — and Instahack calls the victim of one of their assaults a bully because she’s trying to promote sensible gun laws.
You can’t deny it. His is one of the voices of America.
But it’s long past time for the rest of us to tell the gun-obsessed macho boy-children to fucking grow up.
Please read Brian Leiter’s very polite gutting of Instapundit. It’s a thing of beauty.
I thought this was charming.
Brian Dunning, the voice behind the Skeptoid podcast, has pled guilty to wire fraud. In a clever scheme to essentially defraud eBay, visitors to his site had a cookie planted on their computers that did no harm to the visitors, but was recognized by eBay as a flag to credit Dunning as an affiliate referrer. When I’d first heard of this case, I thought it could be an innocent error — I have no idea about half the stuff this site is shuttling back and forth to you readers, for instance — but now it looks clear that this was intentionally programmed to game the system. The company in which Dunning was part owner, Kessler’s Flying Circus (KFC), was bringing in a rather noticeably large sum of money from this one little trick.
7. KFC was a member of the Affiliate Program. In 2006, KFC received approximately $2,000,000 in compensation from the eBay Affiliate Program in the United States. Between January and June 2007, KFC earned approximately $3,300,000 in compensation from the eBay Affiliate Program in the United States. As of approximately June 2007, KFC was the number-two producing account in the Affiliate Program. . . .
I’ve met Dunning, I’ve followed his podcast, and he’s a nice, personable fellow who actually has contributed useful information to the skeptical community…but this is a serious ethical lapse. It is criminal behavior. And now he faces possible penalties that include several years in prison.
Everyone seems to be regarding this as a great tragedy and the loss of a hero, and I agree that there is an element of that — it certainly is a personal tragedy for Dunning. But maybe we should also recognize it as a gain, the exposure of a criminal and the cessation of illegal activity. People aren’t one-dimensional heroes or villains, and Dunning, like everyone, is a bit of both.
Let’s hope he comes back from this with that little piece of a bad guy in him suitably chastised, and that he can resume his work as a better person for it all.
Whoa. I was directed to these documents by Melody Hensley: a summary of affiliate litigation which includes Dunning, and a legal motion to suppress evidence gained at the Dunning residence (pdf), which includes an interview in which Dunning admits that he split half the revenue from KFC with his brother, that he was making about $1.2 million/year, and that he was producing all kinds of apps and widgets to spread his criminal affiliate code everywhere.
Sympathy fading…fading…fading…gone.
