One must occasionally take a dip into the creationist literature, although I must admit I’ve been examining it with less and less frequency as time goes by. The problem is that they’ve never got anything new or even interesting, and they keep rehashing the same old nonsense, straining to make it start making sense.

So…The Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism was recently posted, and it’s a good snapshot of the state of creationism nowadays. It has somewhere around 75 titles listed, and clearly there are a fair number of people wasting their time struggling to erect this facade of pseudoscience on the enterprise. I’m taking a step way back and asking what their current obsessions are — and nothing has changed in over 60 years.

An awful lot of the articles are about the age of the Earth. They are desperate to find a way to telescope all of history into 6,000 years, so an immense amount of effort is put into justifying a global flood about 4,000 years ago. Most of the articles are about re-interpreting geology or inventing novel physics to invalidate radiometric dating. I think they realize that their insistence on a young earth is absurd and unsupportable, but is also critical to their interpretation of the Bible, and they’re struggling to resolve their discomfort with reality by making lots of excuses.

Guys, it’s not working. There was no Genesis Flood. Give up. Try instead to remodel your interpretation of the Bible to fit geology and physics.

Probably the second-most popular topic is “baraminology,” their attempt to remake biological systematics in the Lord’s image. Their problem is that modern systematics is built on a solid foundation of statistics and mathematics and vast amounts of data, and they have to ignore almost all of it to make their case, and what little data they do use is ripped out of context and mangled unpleasantly to make weird examples of isolated cases.

I confess that I don’t get the point of baraminology. It’s all about grouping species into specially created “kinds”, but in a sense, we do that already with the real science of cladistics. The difference is that cladistics has a mechanism, descent with modification, while baraminology is presupposing a creator who built “kinds” on his personal and ineffable whim.

One topic that is notably absent from the program is Intelligent Design. This is a group that explicitly supports Young Earth Creationism, so it’s not surprising that the people who avoid publicly advocating for Biblical creationism (while supporting it privately) are excluded. There were a whole 4 articles that discussed capital-D Design, and they were all pathetic. For instance, one titled Testing the Cavefish Model: An Organism-focused Theory of Biological Design reported that cavefish would produce pigment when exposed to high-intensity light, and concludes These implications do not support the conventional view that beneficial adaptations arise through random mutation, unregulated genomic recombination, or accumulation of unguided genetic variation – regardless of time scales. Therefore, organisms are the agents in control of adaptations and diversification. Physiological adaptation does not refute evolution! When my students vanish off to more southern climes for Spring Break and come back with tans, should I treat that as evidence that evolution is false?

That paper had five authors, by the way, all from the ICR. What I conclude from that is that stupidity is additive.

I tried looking at the more novel papers. Apparently, creationists tolerate a high degree of flakiness in their contributors. For instance, John DeMassa claims to have found Messages in the Genetic Code: The DRAm Form through the magic of numerology.

Does the Genetic code contain non-structural information or even intelligible messages? The present work offers a mathematical investigation of the genetic code using a novel numeric procedure applied to both nucleobases and amino acids found in standard code tables. The numeric two step procedure amounts to an atom count of all the atoms in standard genetic code tables and shall be called Compound Numeric Triangulation. The first step called Compound Numeric Indexing (CNI) converts the DNA codon table (purines and pyrimidines),the RNA codon table (purines and pyrimidines) and the 20 standard amino acids into representative index numbers. In this step, cytosine (C4H5N3O), for example, presents 13 total atoms (4+5+3+1) and would be assigned the index number 13. The codon CCC is assigned the CNI value 39 (13+13+13). Similarly index numbers are collected for the other codons in the DNA and RNA tables and substituted in place of the letter codes. The same procedure is applied to the amino acids. Three tables result. The code tables are next examined for reoccurring CNI values. For example, in DNA, the CNI value 39 is found 1 time but 46 is found 12 times. The patterns are next collected and arranged in ascending table arrays (39, 40, 41, etc.) with their respective frequencies and product totals. Since 46 occurs with a frequency of 12 it is entered into the table as its product (46 x 12 = 552). This general method is repeated for the RNA codon table and the 20 standard Amino acid to give a total of three new product table arrays. In the second step, called Numeric Triangulation, the arrays are subjected to the method of finite differences. In this step, adjacent product numbers in an array table are subtracted and the result is placed above and between the adjacent numbers. The process is continued until a triangle is formed. Historically, difference triangles have been used to determine properties of polynomials but other attributes were studied in this examination. The difference triangle for the 10 base product numbers of DNA released 45 additional difference triangle values to give a completed triangle consisting of 55 elements. For the RNA code table 91 numeric elements are produced and the amino acid table 78 numeric elements. Inspection of the triangle tables show number matches at their perimeters which was interpreted as a design element and potentially an assembly motif. Surprisingly, a three triangle composite structure elegantly assembles to reveal a graphed object. This shall be called the DRAm (DNA, RNA, Amino Acid) form. Again, surprisingly the DRAm form is an intelligible pictogram consisting of 224 number pixels. The 2-D picture is next transformed, using suggestive internal number patterns, into a recognizable, printable 3-D object. An interpretative process is lastly applied to the 2-D DRAm form to reveal a startling communicative interactive tool. Theological implications with respect to the question of design and origins will be reviewed and potential applications of this discovery will also be discussed.

Did you get that? He’s manipulating the genetic code into an array of numbers, and then converting those numbers into pictures. It’s important to note that he’s not looking at genetic sequences, but the code itself — so the pictures are going to be the same for every organism.

I had to look elsewhere for examples of his pictures.

I guess that settles it.

In other fun times, an engineer at Liberty University has A Mathematical Description of the Christian God.

The Christian God is one trinitarian God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Omniscience is all-knowing. Omnipresent is being everywhere at once. Omnipotent is all-powerful. Because the Holy Spirit has been revealed in the bible as reflective of different energy forms, He can be abstractly represented as energy in mathematical terms. Since power is the time derivative of energy, we can then cast the energy representation as a time derivative to make it power. When one integrates this equation from zero to infinity over all space and time, then we can get the mathematical expression of God’s omnipotence. We can also integrate information from zero to infinity and garner the effect of omniscience. Finally, we can also integrate time and space from zero to infinity and garner the effect of omnipresence. We can then multiplicatively place these three integrals together to describe the fullness of the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The notion of infinity from Blaise Pascal and David Hilbert is a critical aspect of the mathematical description of the Godhead.

I see nothing specific in that description to justify claiming that generic math describes a particular god.

Enough of that bullshit. I thought I’d browse for some one article that touched on my interests or expertise…but there was nothing about spiders or evo-devo. I was trained as a fish guy, though, so this article, Unresolved Issues in Hypothetical Fish-to-Amphibian Evolution by David Prentice, should contain some common ground that I could dig into.

Unfortunately, Davide Prentice is an unqualified nobody.

B. S. Physics, M.Ed. Curriculum & Instruction, M.A. Science Teaching

LA lifetime secondary certification in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, General Science, Mathematics

Taught on Creation and Apologetics in 13 countries

He’s a retired schoolteacher, which counts for something, but his background is an undergrad degree in physics from what, 40 years ago?

This is a poster presentation bringing together multiple problems with the idea that some ancestral fish evolved into some ancestral amphibian.

The Lamarckian idea that “form follows function” has been thoroughly falsified. The only explanation for characteristics of an organism’s phenotype is the content of its genotype rather than its need for new features.

That’s a really odd way to introduce your subject. “Form follows function” is not a Lamarckian idea, it’s architectural. Here’s a nice summary of the biological uses of the concept.

“Form follows function”, a principle coined by the American architect Louis Sullivan and first introduced to the field of biology by Kosak and Groudine, is associated with modern architectural design, underscoring the idea that the shape of a building or object should be based primarily upon its intended function or purpose. In biology, this principle is reflected in the close relationship between a specific biological structure and its purpose. However, owing to the complex nature of biological phenomena, sometimes it is very challenging to reveal the precise relationship between form and function of an organelle.

Not dead, but complicated. The rest of Prentice’s opening is even more wrong: we don’t talk about need for new features, and any modern biologist will tell you that the phenotype is a product of genes and environment. This is not an auspicious beginning, and it’s all downhill from there.

The new creatures would have to undergo random mutations in their DNA to produce at least thirteen major changes. They would have to (1) leave the water and come onto land, (2) acquire two radically different types of vertebrae (rhachitomous and lepospondylous); (3) acquire segmented backbones in place of a continuous notochord; (4) develop legs instead of fine, (5) develop a pelvic girdle where none existed before; (5) acquire a mechanism to propel themselves with the legs instead of fins, (6) develop muscles strong enough to support their weight on land, (7) develop a breathing apparatus geared primarily to air, (8) develop necks which are not found in fish, (9) acquire a different number and arrangement of bones in the skull, (10) develop eardrums for the first time, (11) acquire eyelids to keep the eyes from drying out, (12) change the method of fertilization from internal as in the alleged ancestral fish to external as in all known amphibians, and (13) acquire a mechanism so as to undergo metamorphosis, which does not occur in the putative ancestral fish.

Only thirteen? That’s an easy problem then.

Except he’s simply following an old creationist stratagem of listing a bunch of stuff, claiming each one is insurmountable, while not bothering to address any of them in detail. Leave water and come onto land is a great big bucket for a whole lot of changes, and that he thinks any of them are difficult tells me he knows nothing about biology. Develop legs instead of fin[s]; yeah, we have a good handle on many of the genetic changes involved in transforming fins into limbs. As for change the method of fertilization from internal as in the alleged ancestral fish to external as in all known amphibians, I have to ask if he’s ever heard of salmon? Most fish use external fertilization!

He’s also ignorant of basic concepts in paleontology.

In addition to the biological problems, the evidence from paleontology indicates that such an evolutionary process did not happen. Tracks of four-limbed creatures have been found in at least four locations around the world. They are dated 395 MYA. The commonly accepted “transition” from water to land, Tiktaalik, is dated 383 MYA. Even if the time scale were correct, this is 12 million years too late.

You know, Tiktaalik is not a direct ancestor of modern tetrapods — it is representative of a clade of transitional forms from the Devonian. This is a non-problem for anyone who has a non-literal understanding of a fossil series and understands the concept of populations changing and diversifying over time. From such ignorance and misconceptions, this non-biologist/non-paleontologist concludes:

In short, the biological and paleontological evidence indicates that the evolution of fish to amphibians never happened.

There’s a reason I’ve been less attentive to the creationist literature over the years: it’s stupid.