Bergman: Still crazy

Jerry Bergman is a fairly typical creationist: he’s a loon, and he’s dishonest. I debated him once to an utterly ineffectual conclusion, and it was like having an argument with a rabid squirrel — he makes no sense, he splutters out nutty fragments of angry rhetoric, and he’s ultimately of no consequence whatsoever. But he still has an audience, and he’s still out giving invited talks at churches all over the country. Next week, Bergman will be speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and we’ve got a preview of what he’s going to say on the — duh duh DUHHH — Dark Side of Charles Darwin.

Part 1:

• Charles Darwin’s major goal in developing his theory was religious, he wanted to “murder” god (his words).

• He was active in “converting” all he could to his theory of origins.

• Darwin plagiarized most of his major ideas.

• Darwin was a racist of the worst kind and believed the lower races (the blacks) would go extinct.

• Darwin was opposed to helping the sick, but realized this idea would not go over well.

• Charles felt a wife was better than a dog (really!).

• He was severely mentally and physically ill, likely an agoraphobic.

• As a young man he was sadistic and loved to kill animals with anything he had: guns, sticks, even hammers!

Part 2:

• It is well known and well recognized that evolution is the doorway to Atheism.

• About 98 % of leading life scientists are Atheist.

• A major reason given to become an Atheist was evolution.

• The whole point of the evolution creation account is to demolish the theistic creation account.

• It takes more faith to be an Atheist than a Creationist.

• Dr. Bergman will cover the Atheist creation story as developed by Hawking and others to document this.

• Orthodox Evolution is defined as from nothing to everything purely by chance, time, and the outworking of natural law (which also originated by chance, time and natural law).

That first part is just incredibly poorly done, ahistorical, lying character assassination, and is totally irrelevant to the science. Even if Bergman were right and Darwin had been a diseased psychotic squirrel-murderer (Bergman does take that personally) with delusions of being Hitler, we wouldn’t care — the theory of evolution stands or falls on the quality of the current evidence, not the character of its founder.

Bergman’s sleazy attack on a Victorian gentleman’s character says more about Bergman than Darwin. Take that first claim, for instance. It’s a complete lie. Here’s what Darwin actually wrote about “murder”:

At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

I think, if you have a basic grasp of the English language, you’ll recognize that in that passage Darwin is explaining that he felt guilty about arriving at a conclusion opposed by the clergy…not that he had the intent of founding a religion to kill god.

The rest is nonsense of equivalent stupidity. But I’m sure he will be well-received by the creationists of Milwaukee, who share Bergman’s derangement. I hope there are no hunters in his audience, though, who might be a little cranky about calling their interest in guns and hunting “sadistic”.

About that fetal testimony in Ohio…

The fetal test has come and gone with a quiet flop. They didn’t actually have a 5-week pregnant woman to test, and it failed to work for a 9 week fetus.

Two young mothers were given ultrasounds in a packed room at the Statehouse as part of a House committee meeting Wednesday. The heartbeat of a fetus at 15 weeks gestation was easily detected. The heartbeat in a fetus of nine weeks gestation was difficult to detect.

But have no fear! The technology will inevitably improve, and they’ll be able to detect heartbeats earlier and earlier. And then they’ll figure out how to test for expression of heart-specific proteins, and we’ll be able to recognize its presence before it begins to beat. And then some brilliant ideologue will notice that the genes for heart specification are present at fertilization and before, and we’ll be right down to defending every sperm as containing the germ of a beating heart, and deserving of love and protection and reverence, exactly as god intended.

And the heartbeats of women can be ignored again, also as god intended. Shut up, lady! I hear your heart pounding, and the Lord demands your silence!

(via Plunderbund)

I was joking!

Look, when I said this, my point was that it was absurd to use these tactics of asking embryos to testify.

But even if they do get a nice image of a curled, fishlike embryo that is maybe a tenth as sharp as the worst images of zebrafish embryos that I see in my low-power dissecting scope, so what? It’s not testifying. It’s twitching. You’d get a more intelligent response if you dragged a cow in front of the committee and asked it to moo against slaughterhouses.

But wouldn’t you know it, the animal rights extremists are now arguing that they should adopt the tactics of the anti-choice movement, and are carrying it even further than I would have imagined.

Without taking a position on the substantive issues involved, animal liberationists are encouraged to pay close attention to the anti-abortionists’ tactics and strategies and, as activists, we must note the stronghold their cause is gaining. They have begun to move away from theology to secular-based arguments [this is total nonsense, of course –pzm] geared toward the greater population. Many of us have begun to move away from arguing our “theology” of rights toward engaging people on the issues with which they are already concerned (e.g., health, vanity, abuses of tax money).

We need to gain traction despite complacency and by any means necessary.

Moreover, within the past month, a group calling itself “Americans United for Life” (AUL) has successfully introduced bills that are being considered in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa. The proposed legislation seeks to expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include murder committed in defense of an unborn child. The logical extension of their efforts is to expand the definition further to include murder committed in defense of an imprisoned and tortured nonhuman animal.

Someone tell those Republican farmers in South Dakota that kooks have found common cause with their abortion arguments, and think they justify gunning them down. Bringing in a cow to testify would be sane compared to what they propose to do.

Third-grader ‘heals’ friends with magic, Fox News reports it as news

Below is a news clip from our local Fox station. I feel very, very sorry for Leif Reffsgaard, who is being rewarded with a lot of attention for being gullible. He’s a third grader who claims to be able to heal his friends by waving his hands around.

Third-Grader Heals Friends with Qigong: MyFoxTWINCITIES.com

There is some small hope for the poor deluded kid. Here’s what he thinks about his ‘powers’.

I just think magic is really cool…I feel like I’m a wizard using the healing spell.

Maybe someday he’ll wake up to the fact that magic doesn’t work in the real world. Or maybe about the time he reaches adolescence he’ll realize that he looks awfully dorky flapping his hands like that.

There’s probably no hope for the adults in his life who are pushing this nonsense on him. And there’s probably also no hope for those credulous television announcers, but then, they do work for Fox News, so they had to be brain-damaged or desperate before they took the job, anyway.

Soon to appear on a thousand herpetologist’s doors

xkcd digs into cladistics.

i-46b6ffb1cd5ac885a49421a7b2b27cde-herp1.jpeg i-4b78d9bd9df39c74b9c64683ce641f65-herp2.jpeg

Unfortunately, his cladogram is wrong. Mammals should also be a subset of the reptiles, so the herpetologists should be demanding that all other amniotes be absorbed into their more inclusive field of tetrapod biology.

At least, until the ichthyologists show up and point out that we’re all just weird dry land-walking fish.

Just to clear this up, I hope, here’s a modified version of a cladistic diagram to show what herps are:

i-b99daaa4d7677203e77e4656291ebc91-herps.jpg

So if you want to avoid the sins of polyphyly or paraphyly, you must include birds and mammals in the herps. Of course, the alternative is to not care about the abstractions, and recognize that there are plenty of people already specializing in mammals and birds, so someone has to pay attention to all the otherwise neglected classes.

Nutjobs in Ohio plan to ask invisible blobs of fetal tissue to speak

This is a 5-week-old human fetus.

i-039ea37186dd98d25aaa3b750f5527b3-5week.jpeg

It’s an awesomely cool period of development. Organogenesis is well under way, segmentation is completely, limb buds are forming. The heart is beating, which is neat, but then you have to keep in mind that you can tease a heart apart into individual cells in a dish and the cells will throb, so it’s not exactly a magical indicator of sentience. Also, the embryo is only 2-3 millimeters long, which I find to be a highly evocative size: that’s exactly how big my zebrafish embryos are when they have the same level of organization, with segments and organ rudiments and a beating heart.

In Ohio, they are proposing to have these fetuses “testify” in support of an anti-choice bill.

Two fetuses will be presented as witnesses before an Ohio legislative committee that is hearing a bill to outlaw abortions after the first heartbeat can be detected inside a woman’s womb.

The fetuses will appear live and in color before the committee on a video screen projecting ultrasound images taken from their pregnant mothers’ bodies. Janet Folger Porter, head of Faith2Action, an anti-abortion group, said the fetuses will be the youngest witnesses to ever testify when they come in front of the House Health and Aging Committee Wednesday morning.

Oh, really? The legislators might want to read up on first trimester ultrasound, first of all.

Transabdominal ultrasound cannot reliably diagnose pregnancies that are less than 6 weeks gestation. Transvaginal ultrasound, by contrast, can detect pregnancies earlier, at approximately 4½ to 5 weeks gestation. Prompt diagnosis made possible by transvaginal ultrasound can, therefore, result in earlier treatment.

Early ultrasound examinations will primarily detect the presence of the extraembryonic sac, not the embryo itself. It’s too small. Around 5 weeks, you might be able to see a fuzzy small blob with a flutter that is the beating heart, but that’s about it, and you do have to use transvaginal ultrasound to pick it up — that is, you have to insert the ultrasound probe deep into the vagina. That isn’t usually done; any mothers out there will tell you about the gel smeared all over their bellies and the external probe pressed up against them, but the transvaginal examinations are only done if there is suspicion of something going wrong.

So I’ll be very curious to see what these “‘live and in color” images actually look like. I’m already suspicious that they’ll be faked — I can already guarantee you that the color will be entirely false. But maybe someone has a higher resolution ultrasound machine than I’m aware of, which is entirely possible.

But even if they do get a nice image of a curled, fishlike embryo that is maybe a tenth as sharp as the worst images of zebrafish embryos that I see in my low-power dissecting scope, so what? It’s not testifying. It’s twitching. You’d get a more intelligent response if you dragged a cow in front of the committee and asked it to moo against slaughterhouses.

And the bill is ridiculous. They want to prohibit all abortions of embryos that have a detectable heartbeat…but 1) heartbeat isn’t a valid measure of personhood, and 2) pragmatically, it shuts down almost all abortions. The heart starts beating at approximately one month after fertilization; the woman may not have even noticed more than a delayed period at that time, and the early symptoms of some water retention and possibly morning sickness are unreliable. There will be many women who are responsible and want to end a pregnancy as early as possible who will be denied a first trimester abortion because it was too late when they were diagnosed!

Ohioans: bills sponsored by the deranged lunatics really shouldn’t be passed. I’m hoping your lawmakers will realize that during this ginned-up spectacle.

Episode CLXXIX: Everyone must strip to their underwear and dance!

I may need to check myself into a mental hospital, threadlians, because so help me, I like Lady Gaga, even the weird pretentious gynecological bits at the beginning of this video. Maybe especially the freaky alien gynecology.

If you’re not going to dance, I at least hope you’re commenting in your underwear.

(Current totals: 11,956 entries with 1,296,991 comments.)

Do not taunt Anonymous

I agreed with Doctorow that the recent shutdown of the Westboro loons was a stunt by WBC itself. Now Anonymous has spoken out in an interview with Shirley Phelps-Roper denying any involvement. Here’s the hilarious bit, though: midway through the interview, after Phelps-Roper’s prolonged ranting and raving, the Anonymous spokesman calmly announces that they were going to shut down one of her sites, right then and there. And he did.

In the immortal lines of Ash: “Good, bad, I’m the one with the gun.” Do not tease the guys with the high tech weapon when all you’ve got to defend yourself is a loony book of Iron Age dogma.