Creationists have a time machine!

That’s the only possible explanation for their curious anachronisms. The Institute for Creation Research has just claimed that Mendel published his paper on genetics in 1866 to refute Darwin’s theory of pangenesis (which, by the way, was published in 1868). Furthermore, Mendel’s paper was initially rejected for publication by editors who were in thrall to the dogma of pangenesis, which, as was mentioned, wouldn’t be published for two years.

Wait…that means just about everyone in the 19th century must have had time machines!

Whoa…this is better than crashing polls

Michele Bachmann is a great fundraiser…for Democrats. Since that creepy video of her calling everyone who isn’t a rightwingnut “anti-American” has spread all over, money has been pouring into the Elwyn Tinklenberg campaign. Check out Tinklenberg’s ActBlue page: he has received over $100,000 since yesterday. I opened the page a few hours ago and just checked again, and it had shot up about $20,000. Add a few pennies to the total, if you can!

Lady Hope was a piker

This is really weird. Dr Imad Hassan claims to have proven Darwinian theory from the Qur’an and the Bible. Only…his version of Darwinian theory is a bit eccentric.

Then we disclosed that the word ‘Adam’ is a simple Arabic term for ‘convertible’ or ‘adaptable’. It is a collective description by God in the scriptures for a species of lower creatures which became ‘adaptable’ for radical change after long evolutionary processes.

We followed the description of modifying the ‘Adams’ and arrived at the conclusion that there were many individuals, males and females, who were converted to intelligent ‘humans’ by direct detailed divine intervention. This is the missing link in Darwin ‘s theory!

The ‘Adams’ were then given an induction period in the divine custody, in a specific garden on the earth, a few miles away from the location of conversion which was the same location where the first ever living cell was created! In their induction period, the ‘Adams’ were allowed freedom except from approaching the forbidden tree, which is ‘Shajara’ in Arabic! As a result of their failure to keep the commands, some of the female ‘Adams’ got pregnant from ‘eating’ from the Shajara! The whole group was then expelled to take the role for which they were created as intelligent beings on the Earth.

You might think this is awfully unlikely, if you didn’t know that Darwin was inspired by Muslim philosophers, that he had access to a decrypted series of messages from the Qur’an, and in fact died a Muslim, something we noisy atheists don’t recognize.

In his new delusional short-sighted religion, Richard Dawkins has adopted the work of Charles Darwin as the prophetic message on which the new dogma – ‘There is no God’ – is based. Despite the apparent respect and appreciation of his work, no one could harm Darwin as much as those who unlawfully associate his name with their atheism. The idea of Charles Darwin of the ‘Evolution and the law of natural selection’ was an ‘evolution’ of ancient Islamic theories, not innovation! In his Creation and/ Or Evolution, T O Shanavas provided enough evidence that: attributing the concept of evolution to Darwin alone is a ‘gigantic rip off’! Over 800 years ago, Ibn Arabi proposed the idea that the monkey was the last animal and first human in the evolution ladder. It was Darwin ‘s grandfather who studied these ancient Islamic theories that inspired Chares to find the proof for that. Charles Darwin was so honest that he described only what he could proof, leaving the missing link very prominent in his incomplete evolutionary work. That missing link, to the dismay of Dawkins who misused the work of Darwin , is now confidently and astonishingly proved by the very God that Dawkins struggled to deny. The process of evolution is described in a series of coded messages in the Qur’an, the divine book that somebody like Dawkins would be too reluctant to challenge, as he can only challenge the man-made, outdated misconceptions attributed to God in the translated Bibles.

It’s crazy time all the time on that site…and I haven’t even gotten to the extraterrestrial origin of cows. But I can’t go on. It’s just too much.

Our local horror

If you think Sarah Palin is bad, try listening to
Michele Bachmann for seven minutes. This is her interview with Chris Matthews, in which she accuses swarms of people of being “Anti-American”.

One thing is amusing. Intermittently, Matthews tries to pin her down in her blanket screeds against liberals, and asks her to state specifically whether some Democrat is actually, literally anti-American. You can see her expression lock in place, her eyes stare blankly out, and you can imagine her tiny brain doing little shuddery spasms of confusion in the vast and roomy vault of her cranium…then <click> <reset> <reboot>, she glides right past the question and continues her imprecatory rant.

This is one of Minnesota’s representatives. Please, people in the 6th district, vote for Tinklenberg. It’s embarrassing to have this shrill munchkin in office here.

You mean it’s all my fault?

And your fault, too. The conservative columnist Melanie Phillips has an explanation for our current economic problems, for drunkenness and drug abuse, for rudeness, for psychopathic killers, and for the wholesale collapse of Western culture. What could possibly be the single root cause of so many catastrophic consequences? Why, atheism, of course.

I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is ‘militant atheism’ which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda — and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.

Phillips is also a denier of evolution, the safety of vaccines, and global climate change, which sort of tells you what her opinion is worth.

Will the availability of C-sections give humans bigger brains?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

While Steve Jones might think human evolution has stopped, I have to say that that is impossible. If human technology removes a selective constraint, that doesn’t stop evolution — it just opens up a new degree of freedom and allows change to carry us in a novel direction.

One interesting potential example is the availability of relatively safe Cesarean sections. Babies have very big heads that squeeze with only great difficulty through a relatively narrow pelvis, so the relationship in size between head diameter and the diameter of the pelvic opening has been a limitation on human evolution. We know this had to be a factor in our evolution: the average newborn mammal has a cranial capacity that is roughly 50% of the adult size, chimpanzee babies have heads about 40% of the adult size, but human babies have crania that are only 23% of what they will be in adults. While our brains have gotten larger over evolutionary time, they have not gotten proportionally larger in utero, because large-headed babies increase the difficulty of labor and cause increased mortality in childbirth. If childbirth could bypass the pelvic bottleneck, that would allow for fetal heads to grow larger without increasing the risk of killing mother and/or child.

And childbirth is a risky proposition for women; 529,000 die every year from this natural process (although only about 1% of those deaths occur in places where women have access to good, modern medical facilities — hooray for modern medicine). About 8% of those deaths occur from obstructed labor, where the fetus is unable to proceed through the birth canal for various reasons, and these are the kinds of birth problems that can be circumvented by C-sections. In practice, teaching health care workers how to carry out emergency C-sections has been tested in regions in Africa, where it has actually worked well at reducing maternal mortality.

This is the subject of an article by Joseph Walsh in the American Biology Teacher, which suggests that C-sections will have an effect on human evolution.

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” This was the title of an essay by geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky writing in 1973. Many causes have been given for the increased Cesarean section rate in developed countries, but biologic evolution has not been one of them. The C-section rate will continue to rise, because the ability to perform a safe C-section has liberated human childbirth from natural selection directed against too small a maternal pelvis and too large a fetal head. Babies will get bigger and pelves will get smaller because there is nothing to prevent it.

The evidence so far is entirely circumstantial, but Walsh makes an interesting case. There are several correlations that imply an effect, but I can’t help but think there are alternative explanations that may swamp out any heritable, evolutionary effect. The kinds of evidence he describes are:

  • A known trend for increasing birth weight in the US, by about 40 g over 18 years in one study. It’s there, all right, but these studies don’t demonstrate a genetic component to increased size — it could be a consequence of better nutrition and medical care.

  • An increasing frequency of C-sections. Again, this isn’t necessarily genetically based at all, but could be a consequence of fads in medicine, or social factors, such as an increase in the likelihood of medical malpractice suits making doctors more cautious.

  • Walsh describes a couple of studies that seem to show that cephalopelvic disproportion (small pelvis or large babies or both together) does have a genetic component. So at least it is likely that there are heritable variations in these parameters that could influence the likelihood of obstructed labor.

  • There is statistical variation in neo-natal mortality that varies with birth weight in a suggestive way. Low birth weight clearly puts infants at risk, and there is an optimum weight around 3600 grams for newborns that minimizes mortality. Death rates also rise with increasing birth weight above the optimum. There is some data that suggest that availablity of modern medical care and C-sections reduces infant mortality at larger birth weights.

That increasing availability of C-sections might lead to an evolutionary shift towards increasing cranial capacity at birth is a reasonable hypothesis, but I’m not convinced that it has been convincingly demonstrated yet. There are too many variables that effect brain size at birth to make a clean analysis possible; in addition, many of the measures are indirect. Often, we use birth weight as a proxy for cranial capacity, and that means the numbers and correlations are sloppier than they should be. Many of the measurements made are of factors that are readily influenced by the environment, which makes it difficult to imply that these are the product of genetics.

So the idea is weakly supported, but tantalizing. Even as a purely theoretical exercise, though, what it does say is that it is obvious that human culture cannot end human evolution…all it can do is shape the direction in which it can occur.

Walsh J (2008) Evolution & the Cesarean Section Rate. The American Biology Teacher 70(7):401-404.

I don’t believe you, Bill

Bill Donohue is at it again. He has pestered YouTube into putting age requirements on viewing videos of host desecration, and now he’s claiming that “we do not object to making fun of Catholics, or for that matter Catholic beliefs and practices, just so long as they are made in good taste”. ORLY? One name puts the lie to Donohue: Webster Cook. Cook wasn’t making fun of Catholics, he wasn’t doing anything in particular, and he certainly wasn’t doing anything I consider tasteless…yet Donohue tried to get him expelled from his university over that.

And now he thinks he gets to dictate what is good taste, and clearly, that now means any mockery of his cracker god.