Respect the tradition

Today, you may notice people wandering about with strange smudgy marks on their foreheads. You may also know that today is my birthday. And you might be wondering if those two observations are related.

Yes, they are. I traditionally celebrate my birthday by punching god-botherers in the forehead. Some of those people may have been victims of my fists, and are badly bruised. Others, more cunning, put the marks on their heads so that when they see me coming, they can say, “Hey, you already got me!” Either way, the appropriate remark to individuals you see with these smudges is, “I’m sorry, I hope you get better soon.”

There are alternative explanations. You can also say “Praise Odin” to them, and point them at the nearest monastery to sack and burn. Another possibility is that they’re credulous, brain-damaged nitwits, but I think it’s kinder to pretend they’ve been punched in the head by PZ Myers. It’s a gentler, more accommodating belief, and as we all know, tone and sucking up is so important.

How do we know when the world will end?

Harold Camping has been predicting the end of the world for quite some time. He’s always been wrong, but now he is insisting absotively posilutely that the earth really will end on 21 May of this year, and he’s got teams of brainwashed, deluded followers roaming the country claiming the end is nigh.

I’ve always wondered how he comes up with his specific dates, and now here’s a short article that lays the math out for us.

According to them, Noah’s great flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C., ‘exactly’ 7000 years ago. Taking a passage from 2 Peter 3:8, in which it is said a day for God is like a thousand human years, the church reasoned that seven ‘days’ equals 7000 human years from the time of the flood, making 2011 the year of the apocalypse.

In its second ‘proof’ the exact date is revealed by working forward from the exact date of the crucifixion – April 1, 33 AD. According to their reasoning, there are exactly 722,500 days from April 1, 33 A.D. until May 21, 2011 – the alleged day of judgement. This number can be represented as follows: 5 x 10 x 17 x 5 x 10 x 17 = 722,500.

The church then argues that numbers in the bible have special meanings, with the number 5 signifying atonement or redemption, the number 10 signifying ‘completeness’ and the number 17 equalling heaven.

That is quite possibly the dumbest reason I have ever heard to throw away all of your belongings and go on the road screaming about the end of the world. I think humanity is in on some great conspiracy to forever disappoint my opinion of it.

Ken Ham is my straight man

Ken Ham really hates those weasely Christians who accept the phrase “millions of years” more than he does us atheists, I think. He really gets worked up over Biologos, but I only got as far as this paragraph:

If there was not one man Adam and one woman Eve, and a literal event of the one man Adam taking the fruit in rebellion and thus bringing sin and death into world, then one may as well throw the rest of the Bible away. It would mean what God wrote through Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5 for instance is plain wrong. If we are not all descendants of one man who sinned, then who are we, and why are we sinners?

Well, yes. You might as well throw the Bible away, Kenny boy, and it is wrong.

It really is that simple. Why can’t you see it?

Ham also has some highly twisted logic.

“The reason the age is such an important issue is, from a secular perspective, if you don’t have millions of years, you can’t postulate evolution,” Ham explains. “Think about it: if you believe in a young earth as we do — 6,000 years on the basis of adding up all the dates in the Bible — evolution is impossible. It can’t happen.”

To the creationists, what is true is whatever they want to be true, and they’re so limited in intelligence that they project onto us their attitudes: we don’t say the earth is ancient because we want it to be so in order for evolution to work, but because that is what the evidence tells us.

Testing, testing

Strangely, I just got two requests for participation in discussions: one from an Intelligent Design creationist apologist, Jason Rennie, and another to join in a debate this weekend from Dinesh D’Souza. I just thought I’d test whether these guys actually pay attention to what I write by putting the answer here.

NO.

Science papers sometimes contain strange folk art

I cannot resist. Every once in a while, I’ll show a bad graphic from the world of molecular biology to one of my classes, and I’ll try to extract the significant point from it…but I’ll also tell the class that this is one of those places where the stupid scientist ought to have walked over to the fine arts building and asked one of those hip young undergraduates to apply a little design sense to their work. However, that peculiar astrobiology paper had a doozy, and I just have to show it off. Behold. Figure 4.

i-49464ac01ccf04572ba739daa81d241f-hgd.jpeg

So…are your eyes hurting as much as mine are? I don’t know what it is that figure is trying to tell me, but whatever it is, that clutter and eruption of primary colors isn’t helping.

Ignorant rabbi demands evidence he won’t provide for himself

Why do you torture me so? For the past week, the number one request in my mailbox hasn’t been this nonsense about bacteria in meteorites, it’s been people asking me to address Rabbi Adam Jacobs’ stupid article on the Huffington Post.

I have a problem with that. I despise the Huffington Post and the fact that some liberals who ought to know better take it seriously as a leftist voice, instead of the lowbrow, pandering, honking noise of stupidity that it is. And in particular, I cannot support Arianna Huffington’s contempt for labor and her privileged pretentiousness. So I cannot link to her site any more at all.

Fortunately, I can link to Jerry Coyne instead, who takes the silly rabbi apart. I’ll only mention one item that jumped out at me.

His whole piece is a complaint that science has failed to explain the origin of life, and that we don’t have a complete step-by-step description of every process that generated the first replicator over four billion years ago.

One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it.

We’ve only had a few decades of steady progress, and already he’s demanding the moon? I notice that the rabbi has had a few millennia during which his ancestors have claimed an intimate and special relationship with an omniscient super-being, and all they have to show for it is “god did it.” You would think that with all that privileged access, there would have been some tiny fragment of scientific utility somewhere in their holy book, but no, nothing.

If we’re going to start comparing lacunae, let’s start with thermodynamics. We’ve got detailed, complete mathematical descriptions of a fundamental mechanism that drives all of biology; the Torah’s got nothin’. The believers have got a dissipated invisible vapor with not reasonable support; we’ve got Ludwig Boltzmann.

We win. Argument over.

Fuck off, rabbi.

I am getting a very poor impression of astrobiology

I received email from one of those astrobiologists, the people behind the Journal of Cosmology, in this case Carl H. Gibson. I was…amused.

Dear Professor Meyers:

I understand you have some problem with our interpretation of Richard Hoover’s article proposed for the Journal of Cosmology. I certainly hope you will write up your comments for publication in a peer review, along with the article.

Attached is an article that might interest you on the subject of astrobiology. Have you written anything in this area?

Regards,
Carl

Ah. He understands that I had some problem with Hoover’s article. I think if he takes a slightly closer look at what I wrote, he might be able to notice that I think the whole article was a creaky, broken cart loaded with rotting donkey bollocks. I thought it was perfectly clear, but I guess I have a thing or two to learn about expressing my opinions unflinchingly.

No, I haven’t published anything in the field of astrobiology. It’s not my area of interest at all, and I don’t seem to meet any of the qualifications, all of which involve being an engineer, a physicist, or a crackpot. I’m only a biologist.

I do have to thank Dr Gibson for the very interesting article he sent along. It was quite the silliest thing I’ve read in days … which is saying something, given the kind of stuff creationists like to throw over the transom. I had no idea the field was such a mucking ground for foolishness.

The paper is titled, “The origin of life from primordial planets”, by Carl H. Gibson, Rudolph E. Schild, and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, and you can find it in the International Journal of Astrobiology 10 (2): 83-98 (2011), if you’re really interested. Almost all of it is physics and cosmology, and it’s way over my head, so that part could be absolutely brilliant, and these guys really could be shaking up the entire discipline of cosmology and I wouldn’t be aware of it. So let me just grant them that part of their story, although to be honest, the parts that I do understand make me really, really suspicious.

Anyway, they’re pushing a new cosmological model called HGD (hydro-gravitational-dynamics) in opposition to the standard ΔCDMHC model (that stands for dark energy cold-dark-matter-hierarchical clustering). They really like their acronyms, which made the paper a hard slog, but my impression is that they’re arguing that planets formed first out of turbulence in cosmic gases, congealing into dark clumps that were home to life first, and then colliding together to form stars. I have no way to tell if the physics is BS, other than that it isn’t any part of the standard models I’ve read in popular physics books, but the basic premise is that first masses condensed, then life evolved, then stars formed. Yeah, seriously.

The onset of prebiotic chemistry and the emergence of life templates as a culmination of such a process must await the condensation of water molecules and organics first into solid grains and thence into planetary cores. Assuming the collapsing proto-planet cloud keeps track with the background radiation temperature, this can be shown to happen between ~2-30 My after the plasma to neutral transition. With radioactive nuclides 26Al and 60Fe maintaining warm liquid interiors for tens of My, and with frequent exchanges of material taking place between planets, the entire Universe would essentially constitute a connected primordial soup.

Life would have an incomparably better chance to originate in such a cosmological setting than at any later time in the history of the Universe. Once a cosmological origin of life is achieved in the framework of our HGD cosmology, exponential self-replication and propagation continues, seeded by planets and comets expelled to close-by proto-galaxies.

That’s right. Life arose 14 billion years ago. They say it again in the abstract: Life originated following the plasma-to-gas transition between 2 and 20 Myr after the big bang, while planetary core oceans were between critical and freezing temperatures, and interchanges of material between planets constituted essentially a cosmological primordial soup.” We’ve also got a diagram.

i-a4f05a8a7c9c8d45eba6124517386b3e-bigbang.jpeg

That is awesomely weird. So, somehow, life evolved under the bizarre physical conditions of the early universe, under conditions completely unlike anything on earth, survived the formation of stars, incredibly low population densities, extreme variations in temperature and radiation, and drifted through space for billions of years to finally settle on the relatively warm, wet, thick oceans of ancient Earth, and found itself right at home.

And this is somehow a better explanation than that life arose natively.

Why? All they’ve got to justify this nonsense is the long discredited views of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that 4½ billion years is not enough. And their alternative explanation is that the Big Bang produced a universe-spanning interconnected soup in which evolution occurred.

In view of the grotesquely small improbability of the origin of the first template for life (Hoyle & Wickramasinghe 1982) it is obvious that it would pay handsomely for abio- genesis to embrace the largest available cosmic setting. The requirement is for a connected set of cosmic domains where prebiology and steps towards a viable set of life templates could take place and evolve. In the present HGD model of cosmology the optimal setting for this is in events that follow the plasma-to-gas transition 300000 years after the big bang. A substantial fraction of the mass of the entire Universe at this stage will be in the form of frozen planets, enriched in heavy elements, and with radioactive heat sources maintaining much of their interior as liquid for some million years. The close proximity between such objects (mean separations typically 10-30 AU) will permit exchanges of intermediate templates and co-evolution that ultimately leads to the emergence of a fully fledged living system. No later stage in the evolution of the Universe would provide so ideal a setting for the de novo origination of life.

Never mind. I don’t think any serious biologist has any significant problems with the probability of life originating on this planet, but I think we’d all agree that the ancient planetary nebula was an even more hostile environment than the Hadean earth. I think their team needs some more competent biologists contributing — they may have the “astro” part down, but the “biology” part is looking laughable.

I do hope there is intelligent life in astrobiology, and that there are better qualified scientists who will take some time to criticize the cranks in their field.

It will not be important

Greg gets it completely wrong: my birthday is so trivial, even I forgot that it’s coming up. The most notable thing about it is that it’s the last day I have to give a lecture before spring break, and if I want to, I can just shut my mouth after 9am on Wednesday and not say anything for a whole week and a half. It’s going to feel so good. All I’m going to do is focus on this book thingamajig for a solid block of time (yes, there is significant progress: my editor has fixed a bunch of things and also bounced back into my lap a million other things for me to fix up. So we’re at the stage where all the organs and tissues are formed, but full functionality is going to require some further differentiation, including a lot of apoptosis.)

Also, I’ll be fooferty-leven æons old. I think I’d rather not dwell on it.

We are experiencing technical difficulties

As many people are reporting, the site is having a few problems, and you may occasionally experience errors when commenting or even trying to look at Pharyngula. I know the site banner also mysteriously disappeared a few weeks ago, and yeah, I also know about the el cheapo ads for psychics that sometimes appear in the sidebar.

Unfortunately, the landlord is currently unavailable even to us residents, and I don’t even know who to complain to anymore, and even if I did, we don’t seem to have the tech support we’d need to fix the problems. Bear with us. I’m kind of expecting that when the whole dang network collapses, somebody in management might notice and come around to hand out blankets and tarps so we can assemble a few rickety shelters to keep going a little longer.

I also haven’t been paid as contracted.

Seed has some special deal with a big corporate benefactor, though, so somebody might profit soon!