Another example of outrageous creationist lying

I actually watched the entire appalling 10 minutes of this ghastly creationist video by Dr Ron Carlson, Learn How Evolution is Largely Based on the Silly Assumption of a Dead Lawyer. The whole thing is built around a completely false claim, that fossils are dated only from the geological strata, and that the strata are dated by the fossils found in them. He repeats his lie many times in this short video, and each time wanted to stand up and shout at him. Anyone with even a casual knowledge of dating techniques knows that while index fossils give you a quick and fairly reliable estimate of age, other techniques, such as radiometric dating, are used to verify ages.

That’s typical for creationists. Even worse to me is the ahistorical lie in the title. Guess who the “Dead Lawyer” is?

Charles Lyell.

That’s right, this clown has simply misrepresented the most eminent geologist of the 19th century, and derogated his life’s work to a mere “silly assumption”. Lyell initially trained as a lawyer, but began his career as a geologist in his early 20s, and by the time he was 30 he was a full-time geologist at a time when there was little institutional support for the discipline. Since Dr Ron Carlson, before he was 2, wore diapers, by the same reasoning we can now address him as “Diaper Wearer Ron Carlson”. As for the claim that Lyell was an atheist who invented uniformitarianism to prop up the theory of evolution…absolute nonsense. Lyell was not an atheist at all, came up with his ideas long before Darwin, and at first equivocated and then offered only tentative support to the idea of the modification of species.

As for Dr Ron Carlson, to whose name the title “Dr” seems surgically grafted, I haven’t been able to find out what his degree might be in, or where he got it from. Somehow, I don’t think it was in geology.

Evolve: Guts

Last week, we watched Evolve: Eyes on the History Channel; tonight, shall we watch the next episode, Evolve: Guts, together? Tune in shortly!

A disgusting beginning: competitive eaters? Bleh. It’s a basic introduction to mammalian digestive physiology — I can tell we’re going to get lots of Big Vertebrate biology again.

They show a cool machine called Cloaca that simulates human digestion, with vats containing chemicals to act as the various chambers. They don’t bother to explain why this machine was built, but it is kind of weirdly interesting.

Once again, they openly say that the complexity of the digestive system evolved — that’s rather refreshing.

Yay! They go back to microorganisms 700 million years ago…for 30 seconds. Then we move on to Ediacaran organisms. The evidence shows that they weren’t photosynthetic, but were some kind of animal that had to have fed somehow, and probably were passive absorbers of drifting nutrients. They suggest that they were replaced by Cambrian organisms that had guts.

Jellyfish just have a sac, not a tube. Cambrian creatures had a more elaborate feeding system, allowing for sophisticated mobile predators, and we see an arms race. Nice animations of Anomalocaris all over the place!

Zip to the modern day: submersibles discover exotic deep sea worms that live on dead whale bones. They have no mouth or gut, so how do they eat bone? They were drilling in and bringing bacteria with them that broke down the bone, and then the worms absorbed the bacteria.

Hey, they mention bacteria, and talk about how digestive enzymes secreted by bacteria are predecessors, and are necessary for the extraction of food in our own guts.

They also mention fish and specialization of regions in the gut tube! More fish, please! But no, we’re going to go straight to tetrapods now, and the promise before the break is dinosaurs. Oh, well.

I’m really pining for more about the actual evolution of guts — and something about development. How can they talk about epithelial tubes without talking about development? Jumping to dinosaurs skips all the interesting stuff. Guts are done by the time you’ve got dinosaurs.

OK, dinosaurs. Yeah, yeah. They discuss gizzard stones and the relationship of dinosaurs to birds. Were dinosaurs warm-blooded? Their digestion was less croc-like and more bird like, determined by analyzing dinosaur coprolites, including T. rex droppings, which contain fragments of fossilized bone. They contain large quantities of bone, which suggests a croc-like eating pattern. But they also contains fragments of fossilized muscle tissue, which suggests that food passed through rapidly, like a bird. So it was a glutton that also had to eat frequently.

The K/T event meant that these big consumers all starved to death. The lead-in to the next section is all about snakes and mammals.

Snakes! Theyre going to talk about the evolution of feeding strategies (why not use cichlids, though? They’d be better). Oh…because you can show movies of snakes swallowing mice whole.

Nifty x-rays of poor mice dissolving in a snake’s gut.

Discussion of the ability of the snake to shut down its gut between meals. Microvilli lining the intestine actually contract while fasting, and increase in length when feeding.

20 million years ago, there was a widespread increase in grasslands that represented a new opportunity … but was hard to eat because much of it was bound up in cellulose. Ruminants evolved fermentation chambers. They show a surgically fistulated cow that allows researchers to get their hands right into a gut. They use bacteria to help break down tough plant material.

These adaptations promote the growth of herbivores…which leads to the evolution of predators.

Now it’s on to humans, of course. They suggest that maybe the key innovation in our ancestors wasn’t our brain, but guts: big-toothed, small-brained apes evolved into small-toothed, big-brained humans. A switch in diet to more meat, and the use of tools to ‘pre-digest’ food allowed us to have smaller guts. Cooking was another huge change that greatly improved the quality of the diet.

They measure the energy required by snakes to digest raw vs. cooked meat. Cooking reduces the cost of digestion by 12.5%. Human guts evolved to be more efficient, liberating more energy for the evolution of the brain.

OK, much like last week’s episode, this show’s strengths are also its weaknesses. The emphasis on charismatic megafauna may be great for catching the attention of casual viewers, but it leaves out all the important events in the evolution of these structures, and ends up emphasizing late refinements and details. Somehow, we need to get a documentary that brings up more molecules and development and the all-important teeny-tiny creatures, where the major innovations first appeared.

But still, I’m most impressed to see a television show that unapologetically discusses evolution as the only credible explanation for the appearance of these features.

Geek cred at the edge of science and culture

I was sent this lovely bit of poetic biology, by someone who said it was written by a colleague at the Salk…maybe she’ll give full credit in the comments. Consider yourself a knowledgeable cell biologist if you get all the allusions.

The p53rd Psalm

p53 is my shepherd, I shall not cycle
It maketh me to lie down in G1
It leadeth me beside still nucleotide pools
It restoreth my genome
It leadeth me past the restriction point for replication’s sake
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the cobalt irradiator
I shall fear no gamma rays, for thou art Guardian of the Genome
Thy amino and thy carboxy termini, they comfort me
Thou maintainest my genomic stability in the presence of mine enemies
Thou annointest my nucleus with p21/WAF1/Cip1/Sdi1/Pic1
my cyclin dependent kinases overflow
Surely pRb phosphorylation and E2F activation shall follow me
all the cycles of my life
and I shall dwell in a non-tumorigenic state until senescence

And if you want some more literary bioscience, here’s some short fiction I was sent.

What to do when the other side doesn’t argue in good faith?

John Freshwater, the Ohio science teacher who uses his classroom to proselytize and promote creationism, is following a familiar tactic: LIE.

Supporters of a middle school science teacher facing firing for burning crosses into students’ arms were in the majority at a central Ohio school board meeting.

They gave John Freshwater a standing ovation when he rose to speak Monday night during the two-hour Mount Vernon school board meeting. He attended the meeting to say he has never branded or burned anyone.

This reminded me of chapter 5, “Never said it”, in Lauri Lebo’s excellent book on the Dover trial, The Devil in Dover(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). This is the part of the book where the lawyers for the prosecution are trying to get an injunction to prevent the school board from going through with their attempts to promote ID in the classroom, and they bring in the defendants, Buckingham, Bonsell, and others, to corroborate the arguments documented in the press that they were looking for textbooks that blended evolution and creationism. And to the obvious consternation of the lawyers, they all simply lied and claimed that they’d never said it and the reporters had all made everything up. It was patently dishonest, but it essentially blocked the injunction and let them go ahead with their scheme.

Don’t worry, the chapter ends on a good note: Lebo gets footage from a local television that shows they lied, which will later come to good use in the actual trial.

It’s always disturbing to see how readily these creationists will lie for their own ends, and how happily their supporters will cheer for the lie.

Get ready for Comfort

The ever-hilarious Ray Comfort will be on radio station WDAY shortly, at 10am Central — tune in and leave your rebuttals, humorous sneers, brutal put-downs, and random comments here. I’ll be on the same station, same time tomorrow.

Question: Explain what intelligent design is?

Answer: Everything is intelligently designed, it didn’t happen by accident. Explosions don’t produce order, they produce chaos. When he became a Christian, he claims he couldn’t find evidence to back up evolution. No species-to-species transitions in the fossil record.

He actually says this: Dogs do not have chickens. Chickens don’t lay eggs with puppies in them. This is apparently evidence against evolution.

Karen calls in with the Galileo issue: equates Comfort to an inquisitor. Comfort uses this to disavow Catholicism, and says “don’t blame Christians” for the Catholics. Weird.

Alex calls to ask what motivation scientists have for promoting evolution. Two answers: Morality. It lets them lust and sin at will. Money. You can get rich for just finding a bone.

Caller whose name I missed: animals have morality, and since there is no evidence for ID it shouldn’t be taught, but could be debated.

Answer: Dogs feel guilt. Claims there is proof for ID, which is, for every creation, there must be a creator. Paintings have a painter, etc.

Evolutionists claim there was nothing that created something, which is scientifically ludicrous.

John rambles on about how most people believe in god, so he doesn’t understand why there is a debate. No answer.

Another caller (Poe?) suggests that maybe astrology should be taught in astronomy, Atlantis in geology. Comfort replies by claiming that evolutionists are advocating censorship. Announcer brings up Expelled — complains that there was no evidence presented in the movie. Comfort claims that just showing the complexities of the cell is proof. The fact that people don’t fall off the earth is evidence for intelligent design?

Jason brings up the uncaused cause argument: if you’ve got one (god), why can’t there be more than one? Usual avoidance: god is eternal. Bleh. Agrees that other people invent gods, but his god is real.

Derek argues that the fairy-tale perfection of christian religious belief is unbelievable. Morality comes from events on earth.

Announcer asks about the banana argument. Comfort disavows it, claims that it was evolutionists taking it out of context to make him look bad.

A caller asks about Satan…we get biblical babble in reply.

Announcer is skeptical about both sides. Comfort uses this as an excuse to trot out his tired “everyone is a sinner” argument and that you need to read the ten commandments. He’s just preaching at this point.

Cal calls in to promote Answers in Genesis. Phbbththbht. YEC idiot.

Carol is a paleontology student. She points out that they do not do it for the money, and that it’s because they love the work.

Sign out at 10:40am.

That was truly awful. Comfort is a real ignoramus. However, I can see now why they decided not to do a debate: they really gave a lot of air time to callers, which is good, I think. If I’d been on at the same time, they wouldn’t have been heard over my snarling and bone-cracking and horrible slurping noises, and Comfort’s screams.

Ray flat out lied when he claimed that atheists misrepresented his banana argument by removing it from the context of his coke can analogy. Not true. Here’s the whole thing, both the coke can and the banana story, and it doesn’t help him: both parts are incredibly stupid.

TV reminder

Tonight, at 9 Central/10 Eastern, it’s time for the second episode in the History Channel’s series on evolution: Evolve – Guts.

It doesn’t just take willpower to survive. It takes guts–in the form of a digestive system that turns food into fuel. Look closely at the role guts have played in shaping some of Earth’s most successful animals: tyrannosaurs, snakes, cows, humans and others. Take a 575-million year journey that begins with the planet’s first multi-cellular organisms and ends at our dinner tables. Watch as live-action natural history sequences, CGI, epic docudrama, and experimental science help to illustrate our and our fellow species’ eternal struggle for survival on earth.

I think I’d rather hear more about the digestive systems of protists, Trichoplax, sponges, and cnidarians than T. rex again, but shall we watch it together as we did last week?

Some things that might appeal to your pharyngular gland

Who knew that water droplets suspended in the air could could refract light and produce a rainbow? It can’t be. Why, it must be…a government conspiracy! This never happened before!

You might also enjoy this collection of real church signs. My favorite is “A 4 inch tongue can bring a 6 foot man to his knees.” Sometimes, there is truth in these aphorisms.