Flogging mythical dead horses

Bill Dembski has another triumph under his belt. He has shown that James Cameron’s math in the Lost Tomb of Jesus show was wrong. It seems a little late, given that even the show’s statistician has made a retraction. But of course, Dembski’s got to claim that the analysis is tangentially related to his debunking of evolution, and further, he’s got to make this ridiculous taunt:

Question: You think any of the skeptic societies might be interested in highlighting this work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb people? I’ll give 10 to 1 odds that they won’t. Indeed, how many skeptics now believe that we’ve found the tomb of Jesus? And to think that until just recently the skeptics didn’t even think that Jesus existed.

They won’t be interested because the author is Dembski, a man with no credibility. They also won’t be interested because it’s a dead issue; none of the skeptics I know or read were at all impressed with Cameron’s methods or interpretations, and certainly didn’t make any declarations that Jesus’ tomb had been found. I saw the program, and I thought it was crap from beginning to end. I think the universal consensus was that Cameron was a laughingstock and the whole sorry episode was a joke. But now Dembski thinks he has accomplished something by debunking a claim we rejected months ago?

I have this mental image of Dembski strutting around the dusty roads of Texas and finding a dead horned toad, partially consumed by birds, dessicated and defleshed and clearly long deceased. He gives it a kick, and then pompously declares that he has slain the ferocious dragon that had the godless skeptics cowed. And he writes a paper about it.

Evolution of a sex ratio observed

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If you’ve been reading that fascinating graphic novel, Y: The Last Man(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know the premise: a mysterious disease has swept over the planet and bloodily killed every male mammal except two, a human named Yorick and a monkey named Ampersand. Substantial parts of it are biologically nearly impossible: the wide cross-species susceptibility, the near instantaneous lethality, and the simultaneity of its effect everywhere (there are also all kinds of weird correlations with other sort of magical putative causes, which may be red herrings). On the other hand, the sociological part of the story seems very plausible. There is no feminist utopia, the world goes on in a traumatized and rather complicated way, and the reactions everywhere vary from crazed euphoria to a more common despair. One thing that isn’t at all implausible, and actually has been observed, is a plague that selectively exterminates males.

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Colorado kook identified

If you’ve been wondering who the ‘non-religious Darwinist’ (according to the DI, that is) who sent threatening notes to the University of Colorado at Boulder faculty might have been, wonder no more. The Colorado Daily News has revealed his name: it’s Michael Korn.

You can read Korn’s website and decide for yourself whether he fits the DI’s description of the culprit. Personally, I think the forensic skills of the gang of IDists have failed spectacularly, once again.

Friday Cephalopod: Origin of the Octosquid?

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Mastigoteuthis sp.

Since I recently pointed out the strange news reports of an “octosquid” that even went so far as to call it half squid/half octopus, I thought I’d show why the preliminary assignment to the genus Mastigoteuthis was suggestive. It probably did have 8 arms and 2 tentacles … before it got sucked up in a pipe and flung to the surface. Those two feeding tentacles are delicate.

Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

Good ol’ Christian tolerance

This is amusing in so many ways to an atheist. Christian activists tried to disrupt a Hindu prayer in the Senate.

It’s absurd but so typical of Christian extremists that they would freak out at the imposition of a prayer that does not reflect their beliefs — welcome to my world, guys. We learn from an early age that the appropriate response is just to wait it out and not participate … and that any protests have to be made at an appropriate opportunity.

I’ll also point out that while everyone is pissed at the crazy Christians, the Hindu prayer is a rather vapid bit of meaningless nonsense, too…something about a transcendental glory living in the soul of the heavens, bla bla bla. The only part I liked was the request to lead us from the unreal to the real, which is exactly what I say all the time. Only I don’t address it to an unreal superman living in hearts.

Anyway, the only fair response to all this is simply to stop the magic incantations to any deity in our government. Let the senators who feel a need say a quiet prayer on their own, without dragging everyone into their personal superstition. And let’s chide any senators who complain about that for the weakness of their faith, that they can’t even pray without someone at the front of the room to help them out.

Silly and naive

Paul Nelson isn’t happy that I explained that W. Ford Doolittle is not denying common descent when he says there was a large and diverse pool of organisms swapping genes at the base of the tree of life, and he presents a very revealing counter-argument:

Before I respond to PZ’s baseless charge, let’s see what mental image the following proposition generates:

All organisms on Earth have descended from a single common ancestor.

I’ll bet “single common ancestor” caused you to picture a discrete cell. And if you opened a college biology textbook, to the diagram depicting Darwin’s Tree of Life, you’d find that same image.

Maybe among Nelson’s clique, they imagine a single cell; I don’t know of any biologists who would, though. Do they also imagine a single pair of humans giving rising to the modern population, too?

Lineages do not have descent through single individuals or pairs in any evolutionary explanation. It’s always populations. Humans arose as descendants of a group of our ancestors who also apparently maintained a loose and slowly weakening genetic contact with the root stock and closely related primates — there was a gradual separation of the lineage over time and embodied in many individuals. The rise of life in general was even less tidily bounded in the absence of strong isolating mechanisms — the little buggers were promiscuously sloshing genes back and forth among all kinds of cells.

I’m afraid that all Nelson has accomplished with his complaint was to reveal yet again how naive and simplistic the creationist view of biology is. And we already knew that … there’s nothing new there at all.

Oh, and do take a look at Nick Matzke’s mocking of his claim about textbooks. He seems to think the bars on a cladogram represents single, discrete individuals? I think Nelson has just flunked Evolutionary Biology 101.

Pseudoscience by press release

I just had to repost my review of Lifecode because the author, Stuart Pivar, is pushing the book again. Here’s the press release, shocking in its pretentious flapdoodle:

Prominent Scientists Reject Mainstream Genetics, Support New Theory of How the Human Body is Formed

New York, NY: In the foreword to the new book Lifecode, From Egg to Embryo by Self-organization, by Stuart Pivar, (Ryland Press), Darwin scholar Richard Milner* directs attention to the recent landmark ENCODE report (June 14) in which Human Genome Project Director Francis Collins calls the long-accepted model of genetics “badly flawed.” A week later, in a NY Times Science Times report, scores of scientists concluded that, after fifty years of genetic research, they don’t really understand what genes do, or how they work.

Lifecode presents an alternative theory of evolution which contends that the embryo is formed by self-organization, as are crystals, rather than by a genetic code subject to   natural selection. Accompanying illustrations depict hypothetical construction blueprints for the various body forms. Biological Self-organization has long been a contending alternate theory for the code of life; recent proponents include evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Goodwin.

In a review of Lifecode, Robert Hazen calls the model plausible, worthy of publication and further study. Professor Hazen is a leading NASA origins of life scientist at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC. Other supporters include Dimitar Sasselov, Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, evolutionary biologist Brian Goodwin, author of “How the Leopard Changed its Spots,” and Neil Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium.

This new theory detailed in Lifecode may also be said to counter Intelligent Design by providing a more cogent account of evolution than does Darwinian natural selection.

Nowadays, I don’t consider an encomium from Francis Collins to be worth much of anything, but he cites some other big names in there … I am highly dubious about any of them. He earlier made a big deal out of Stephen Jay Gould’s support, after Gould was safely dead and unable to question it, and what the book contains is page after page of rank nonsense that Gould would not have endorsed. I’d be disappointed if Hazen and Tyson had recommended the book, and particularly appalled if Goodwin actually liked it—the book is a series of pretty pictures of imaginary embryology taken entirely from the mind of Stuart Pivar and with no support from actual embryology, that is, the stuff we see in our labs in our microscopes. I have a suspicion that their praise is a distortion as gross as the claim that scientists don’t understand genes or how they work.

Pivar is a classic crackpot, and Lifecode isn’t a science book by any measure. There is no theory there, and no evidence or observation. I can’t believe any scientist would be taken in by it.