It’s not such a drag to be the skeptic in the room when the room is full of skeptics. Keep on arguing.
(Current totals: 12,053 entries with 1,311,057 comments.)
I do get strange complaints sometimes.
Dear Mr Myers,
My fathers name was Helmut Max Karl Ritter.
However, in Australia, due to people’s inability to pronounce his name correctly, he suggested that they call him Tom, Dick or Harry. Henceforth, they decided to call him ‘Tom Ritter’.
I take sincere umbrage at your rants against a Thomas Ritter, and the fact that you call him Tom Ritter and therefore everyone else that responds to your comments, calls him Tom Ritter.
If I do a search for the name Tom Ritter I do not expect or appreciate finding such vitriol as yours (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/tom_ritter_has_figured_out_the.php)
Please remove such offensive materials as I find it completely inappropriate and deeply disturbing, and in essence, it is a disservice to my father’s name and his history. If you do not wish to remove it, at least rename it appropriately as it is ‘supposedly’ about Thomas Ritter, which would have nothing to do with my father
Kind regards,
[Name removed] (daughter of Helmut (known as Tom) Ritter).
So her father, Helmut “Tom” Ritter, is an Australian. The crazy Tom Ritter I wrote about is a creationist school teacher in Pennsylvania. There is no connection other than the similar name.
I suggest that she instead write to the wacky school teacher and point out that his antics are bringing dishonor to the distinguished name of Ritter, and leave me out of it. I’m busy. I’ve got to write letters to the Herbalife con artist Paul Myers, the Canadian songwriter Paul Myers, the British graphic designer Paul Myers, and the Texas Attorney Paul Myers and convince them all to change their names.
I’m going to suggest that they change it to “Tom Ritter”.
Scarcely do I put up a post arguing with Jerry Coyne, when I notice he has put up another with an example of evidence for a god from John Farrell. And lo, I did look, and verily, I did become depressed at how stupid and pathetic it was.
An archeologist working in Israel, discovers an ossuary from the NT era: the inscription on the stone in Aramaic reads: “Twice dead under Pilatus; Twice born of Yeshua in sure hope of resurrection.” And the name corresponds to what in Greek would be Lazarus.
There are bones, so presumably with luck there may be some DNA that could be sequenced, but my main idea is that you have a clear physical candidate for an actual person written about in the Gospel of John. (There are some scholars who have argued that the author of the Gospel of John was Lazarus.)
Now, this isn’t evidence for “God” in his omnipotent sense, which I know is more what Jerry Coyne and PZ were debating. But, given most scholars believe the four gospels were composed no sooner than 70AD, and for that reason less likely to be reliable accounts, you now have evidence from decades before of a key character in one of the Gospels. And more: an inscription that, whatever we might think, clearly indicates whoever buried him knew of the miraculous story of his raising from the dead and believed it.
Seriously? This is the best that Farrell can do? Confirmation that people really believe in myths and fairy tales is not evidence of a deity. Nor is the existence of people named Jesus or Lazarus in the first century AD a point of contention or dazzling supporting evidence for a magic man in the sky.
With that level of empirical support, we could point to even older inscriptions that reference Jupiter Optimus Maximus and conclude that Jupiter actually was the bestest and greatest god ever, and therefore we all ought to worship him.
Farrell seems to realize his invention is rather feeble, so he adds another level of nonsense to it.
What if the family members from the same ossuary showed a related genome (as expected for his brothers, sister, parents) except that cancer-causing mutations in all of them were…found to be missing from his genome. Or even more startling, found to be ‘corrected.’
How do we know they’re all family members? Aside from the shared ossuary, all we’d have is genetic evidence…and here he’s saying there is genetic evidence that they are not related. I think if we went poking around in various families nowadays we might discover a few surprising insertions into the family gene pool, and I doubt that anyone’s first assumption would be that a Holy Ghost had been dicking around with Great Aunt Mary, or that an angel must have tweaked Cousin George’s genome when his mother wasn’t looking.
And what the heck is the difference between a particular allele being “missing” and being “corrected”? Does this guy even have a clue about what he’s talking about?
Anyway, here’s the general conflict: material evidence will have material explanations. Any natural explanation will be preferable to a supernatural explanation that drags in an all-powerful invisible boogey man in order to explain the arrangement of nucleotides in one set of old bones.
Uh-oh. Jerry Coyne is calling me out and reopening our old argument about whether there could be evidence supporting a god. I said no, for a number of reasons, but I haven’t convinced Coyne.
The statements by P.Z. and Zara seem to me more akin to prejudices than to fully reasoned positions. They are also, of course, bad for atheists, since they make us look close-minded, but I would never argue that we should hide what we really think because it makes it harder to persuade our opponents. On the positive side, a discussion like this one is really good for sharpening the mind.
He’s also gone to the Big Guy in the UK, Anthony Grayling, to get some allies; Unfortunately for him, Grayling is siding more closely with me than him. And now Ophelia Benson also sides with those who say gods are incoherent. This is not going well for him.
So I’ve got to pile on.
Religion has had a couple of millennia to make a case for its fundamental concepts: the existence of the supernatural, the existence of deities, the effectiveness of priestly intermediaries, etc. It has failed. It does not provide support in the form of evidence or logical consistency; it also fails to show any pragmatic utility. Religion never does what it claims to do. At what point do we learn from experience and simply reject the whole worthless mess out of hand? The abstract possibility that the god-wallopers will finally come up with a tiny scrap of evidence for their outrageous beliefs in the coming eon is not enough to win it credibility as a reasonable contender, either; you might just as well speculate that archaeologists could unearth artifacts from Middle Earth, or astronomers observing a galaxy far, far away will discover The Force. There is no cause to expect fictions and fantasies to manifest themselves as actual realities.
Religion plays Calvinball. There are no rules except what they make up as they go. You might think that maybe you ought to concede that they could get a score of 13 and beat your 12…but they are already convinced that their Q trumps your puny pair of digits. And if they get a score of Oatmeal-Sofa, they’ll announce victory. Heck, if they somehow end up in the realm of numbers with you and get a 7, they’ll declare that they win because they’ve got a Mersenne prime and we don’t. Or because it’s like a golf score. The mistake is to play the game in the expectation that the other side has the same respect for evidence that we do, or that evidence even matters.
Here’s an example. This is part of a debate between Peter Atkins and William Lane Craig. Craig is an exceptionally glib debater, and he’s also an evangelical Christian who supposedly defends a very specific doctrine, that his god turned into a human who lived on Earth 2000 years ago, and that belief in his magical powers is your ticket to a Disneyland for dead people in the sky. I’d like to see some evidence for that, but no…his tactic here is to demand proof of bizarre assertions from science, answering questions that his religion can’t.
What’s amazing here is that Christians are actually impressed with Craig’s millimeter-deep, reason-free handwaving. Ha ha, you scientific smartie-pants, you can’t use science to prove you’re not a simulation on a computer of a brain in a vat that was created five minutes ago with false memories of your life, so therefore, Jesus. Never mind that science doesn’t deal in proofs. Never mind that Craig’s religion can’t prove it either, except by blind obdurate asseveration. Never mind that those are all non-questions, non-issues, irrelevant sophomoric wanking. Never mind, it’s Calvinball! The score is now Paisley over Feldspar, we win!
In science, we’re used to incremental progress and revision of our ideas. Evidence is our currency, it’s how we progress and it’s what gets results. It is a category error, however, to think that the way to address free-floating word salad and flaming nonsense is to take the scalpel of reason and empiricism and slice into it, looking for definable edges. No, what you do is look over the snot-ball of self-referential piffle, note that it has no tenable connection to reality, and drop-kick it into the rec room, where the kids can play with it, but no one should ever take it seriously.
Just make sure the kids wash their hands afterwards. That thing is slimy.
On second thought, just dump it in the trash. The kids would rather play video games, instead.
But we do have a little more information from Seed management.
Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating from Turkey and Qatar, and until it stops, Rackspace must block IP ranges in order for the site to be accessible to anyone. They are also unwilling to manually unblock hundreds upon hundreds of individual IPs. They have advised that we invest in a firewall and additional services from them, but we are still working out what these will cost and how effective they will be. I am not sure if I was correct in thinking that these attacks are not malicious, but I said so because we were told the attackers were trying to use our servers as an open proxy, with the request “GET http://www.kosmodiskmedikal.com/ HTTP/1.1.” Upon reflection, I have no idea what that means.
I don’t know what it means, either, but I bet someone will tell me in the comments.
I’ve got banners out the wazoo now: 19 26 have been installed now, and I can always add more, so it’s not too late to send one in.
As several people have noticed, I was wrong. The actual dimensions of the space allotted for banners is 760×126 pixels, but the bottom 24 pixels are obscured by a menu. Those who sent me adjusted banners, I’ve already swapped them in — it may take a while for your image cache in your browser to clear. If anyone else wants to patch theirs up, send ’em along and I’ll replace those, too.
All of the current banners are on display below the fold.
Science journalists, you really piss me off…at least some of you. Here are a couple of headlines about that recent paper I summarized that make me want to slap someone.
“Eye evolution questioned.” No, it’s not. That’s just trying to stir up a non-existent controversy. The eye evolved. This was a paper exploring the details of how specific photoreceptor types with the eye evolved. (I should mention that the summary is OK, but the headline was stupid. Maybe I ought to slap the editor.)
“Ancient Origins of the Human Eye Discovered.” Aaargh, it’s a paper about brachiopods, not humans, and it’s about the evolution of protostomes as well as deuterostomes…it’s about the whole frackin’ animal kingdom, not just our self-exalted little twig.
Both of those headlines are about the very same paper, and I get the impression the reporters hadn’t even read it, but instead relied on teasing out comprehensible angles from interviews. We ought to have a rule: if you can’t read the research and comprehend it, you shouldn’t be writing about it. I know, suddenly 9/10ths of the science journalists in the world are abruptly unemployed.
Ben Goldacre offers some excellent commentary on this problem. Read it if you’re hoping to be a professional science communicator. I agree with him: you don’t need a Ph.D., but you do have to have some knowledge of the field you are reporting on, and most importantly, a passion to learn more about it.
About 600 million years ago, or a little more, there was a population of small wormlike creatures that were the forebears of all modern bilaterian animals. They were small, soft-bodied, and simple, not much more than a jellyfish in structure, and they lived by crawling sluglike over the soft muck of the sea bottom. We have no fossils of them, and no direct picture of their form, but we know a surprising amount about them because we can infer the nature of their genes.
These animals would have been the predecessors of flies and squid, cats and starfish, and what we can do is look at the genes that these diverse modern animals have, and those that are held in common we all inherited together from that distant ancestor. So we know that flies and cats both have hearts that are initiated in early development by the same genes, nkx2.5 and tinman, and infer that our common ancestor had a heart induced by those genes…and that it was only a simple muscular tube. We know that modern animals all have a body plan demarcated by expression of Hox genes, containing muscles expressing myoD, so it’s reasonable to deduce that our last common ancestor had a muscular and longitudinally patterned body. And all of us have anterior eyes demarcated by early expression of pax6, as did our ancient many-times-great grandparent worm.
We do not have fossils of these small, soft organisms, but that’s no obstacle to picturing them. You just have to see the world like a modern molecular or developmental biologist. One of the graphical conceits of the Matrix movies was that the hero could see the hidden mathematical structure of the world, which was visualized as green streams of symbols flowing over everything. We aspire to the same understanding of the structure of life, only what we see are patterns of genetic circuity, shared modules that are whirring away throughout development to produce the forms we see with our eyes; and also, unfortunately, we currently only see these patterns spottily and murkily. There is no developmental biologist with the power of Neo yet, but give us a few decades.
There’s another thing we know about these ancient ancestors: they had two kinds of eyes. ciliary and rhabomeric. Your eyes contain ciliary photoreceptors; they have a particular cellular structure, and they use a recognizable form of opsin. A squid has a distinctly different kind of photoreceptor, called rhabdomeric, with a different cell structure and a different form of opsin. We humans also have some rhabdomeric receptors tucked away in our retinas, while invertebrates have ciliary receptors as well, so we know the common ancestor had both.
Now this ancestral population eventually split into two great tribes, the protostomes, which includes squid and flies, and the deuterostomes, which includes cats and starfish. It should be an obvious indication of the general state of that ancestor that it represents all that those four diverse animals have in common. It also tells us that while that ancestor had eyes, they were almost certainly very simple, and could have been nothing more than a patch of light-sensitive cells, or perhaps even single cells, as we see in some larval eyes.
What we think happened at this division is that both tribes took the primitive eyes and specialized them independently. Each group evolved under similar constraints: they needed directionally-sensitive eyes that could tell what direction a source of illumination was coming from (and these would eventually form true image-forming eyes), and they also needed sensors to detect general light levels — is it day or night, are we in the open or under a rock? Think of it like a camera system: there is a part that gets all the attention, the lens and image-forming chip, but there’s also a light meter that senses ambient light levels.
The two tribes made different choices, though. The protostomes pulled the rhabdomeric photoreceptor out of their toolbox, and used that to make the camera; they used the ciliary photoreceptor to make their light meter. The deuterostomes (actually, just us chordates) instead used the ciliary photoreceptor for their camera, and the rhabdomeric photoreceptor for the light meter. It’s the same ancestral toolkit, but we’ve just specialized in different ways.
At least, that’s the general model we’ve been exploring. A new discovery at the Kewalo Marine Laboratory, one of the premiere labs for evo-devo research, has made the interpretation a little more complex.
That discovery is that brachiopod larvae, which are protostomes, have been found to have directionally sensitive eyes…which are ciliary. A protostome should have directionally sensitive eyes that are rhabdomeric. How interesting!
In addition to being ciliary in structure, these eyes express ciliary opsin. They are also true cerebral eyes, also expressing pax6 and having a nervous connection to the central nervous system.
Notice what is going on here: a protostome is building a camera, and unlike all the other protostomes we’ve observed, it’s pulled a ciliary photoreceptor out of its pocket to make it. This is a surprise, but it doesn’t upset any theories too much — it just means we need to explore a couple of alternative explanations. We don’t have answers to resolve these hypotheses yet — we need more data and experiments — but it’ll be fun to watch the work roll onward.
One explanation is illustrated in A, below. The initial animal state was to build directional, cerebral eyes using rhabdomeric photoreceptors. The vertebrates are oddballs who swapped in ciliary receptors instead, while these larval eyes in brachiopods are major peculiarities, an evolutionary novelty which resembles a cerebral eye, but is actually non-homologous. This seems unlikely to me; there are multiple elements of the eye circuitry at work in these eyes, and if they’re using the same gene circuitry, we ought to recognize them as homologous at the molecular level…the only one that counts.
The second explanation in B is that all of these cerebral eyes are homologous, but that the receptor type is more plastic than we thought — it’s relatively easy to switch on the ciliary module vs. the rhabodmeric module, so we would expect to see multiple flip-flops in the evolutionary record.
If we accept that it’s easy to switch receptor type, though, then why assume that the last common ancestor had a directional, cerebral eye that was rhabdomeric? It could have been ciliary, which is also a more parsimonious explanation, because it requires only one switch of types in the protostomes, shown in C.
Whichever hypothesis pans out, though, the important message is that photoreceptor type is a more evolutionarily labile choice than previously thought. What I want to see is more research into photoreceptor development in more exotic invertebrates — that’s where we’ll learn more about our evolutionary history.
I have to mention a couple of other cool features of this paper. If you ever want to see a minimalist directional eye, here it is: the larval eye sensor of brachiopods consists of two cells, a lens cell that actually does the job of light detection, and a pigment cell that acts as a shade, preventing light from one direction from striking the lens cell. That’s all it takes.
I lied! That isn’t a minimal directional eye at all: here it is.
This rather blew my mind. The brachiopod gastrula senses light. The figure above is of a very early stage in development, when the organism is little more than a couple of sheets of cells with no organs at all, only tisses in the process of forming up into rough structures. It definitely has no brain, no nervous tissue at all, and no eyes…and there it is, that dark blue smear is a region selectively expressing ciliary opsin as if it were a retina. Furthermore, when tested behaviorally (mind blown again…behavior, in a gastrula), populations in a light box show a statistical tendency to drift into the light. Presumably, light stimulation of the opsin is coupled to the activity of cilia used for motility in the outer epithelium of the embryo.
Amazing. It suggests how eyes evolved in multicellular organisms, as well — initially, it was just localized general expression of light-sensitive molecules coupled directly to motors in the skin, no brain required.
Passamaneck Y, Furchheim N, Hejnol A, Martindale MQ, Lüter C (2011) Ciliary photoreceptors in the cerebral eyes of a protostome larva. EvoDevo, 2:6.
The situation in Japan is looking dire. Workers have been evacuated for their safety from one of the failing nuclear plants, setting the stage for a possible meltdown. There have been more explosions, and more venting of radiation. Another unit, Unit 4, which was not one of the plants that was highly stressed in the earthquake, is now on fire.
I’m going to be going to bed soon. I have a grim feeling about the news I’ll be waking up to. But I figured I’d better create a space here for the overnight discussion of the doomful news coming out of Japan.
Holy crap, have you seen the line up for The Amaz!ng Meeting? Everyone is going to be there, except maybe the Chinese army and a forgotten marching band in Lithuania. How are they going to schedule this monster? How many people are they going to have attend…or are they all signed up to present talks?
I know DJ told me I was supposed to give a talk, but I may only get 10 minutes on the stage at this rate. The theme this year is “TAM 9 From Outer Space”, and they’re going to focus on space science and skepticism, with a whole throng of astrophycist/astronomers getting top billing. It’s a good thing I’m going, though: I’m planning to talk about aliens and bad biology, so they need someone to bring them down to earth.
Maybe we should just stage a brawl: me against all the unemployed Klingons from the now-defunct Star Trek Experience. Oh, wait, I think they’re busy — they’re probably all signed up to present at TAM!
