Another nail driven into poor Behe

Another review of Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution, has been published, this time in Nature and by Ken Miller. This one focuses on Behe’s central claim, that he has identified a probabilistic limit to what evolution can do that means no differences above roughly the genus level (and in many cases, the species level) can be generated by natural mechanisms. This is his CCC metric, or the probability of evolving something equivalent to the “chloroquine complexity cluster”, which he claims is the odds of evolving two specific amino acid changes in a protein. It’s a number he pegs at 1 in 1020, right at the edge of what a large population of protists can do, but beyond the reach of what a smaller population of slowly reproducing metazoans, like hominids, could hope to accomplish even with geological time limits. It’s the same problem I addressed in my earlier criticism, although Miller manages to slap it down with much greater brevity.

[Read more…]

God deigned to instruct his creation

The omnipotent and omniscient Lord of the Universe, Creator of All, charged with the detonation of supernovae, the majestic movement of whole galaxies, the grand march of all of history and all of time, spoke.

New Kensington resident Joey Salvati, 39, a father of two, was in the shower about a month ago when he first heard God speak to him about the matter. Whether it was an external or internal voice, he wasn’t sure. He tried to ignore it, but it kept coming back, day after day, until he realized he had to do something about it. The message was for Salvati to make wooden paddles for corporal punishment and give them to parents who need help disciplining their children.

God was undistracted by the need to maintain vast weather systems around the planet, or the pleas of billions of prayers, and gave Mr Salvati explicit, detailed instructions. His focus must be awesome.

The first suggestion is for parents to calibrate the force of their swing by testing it on themselves. “There is only one way to measure effectively –swat yourself on the rump and adjust your swing appropriately,” the instructions explain. Also on the site are suggested punishment guidelines. The minimum, one spank, is called for when the child is disrespectful. The maximum, five spanks, is called for when the child does something more serious such as endangering someone’s safety or is caught using drugs. Salvati said he did not research the subject or consult parenting experts before launching the site. He is instructing parents with the guidelines he said God gave to him.

You can read God’s guidelines. He seems to be a very detail-oriented guy who’s willing to explain things patiently to random people in their showers, but I sure wish he’d get his priorities straight. Rather than instructing people in how many times they should spank their children, how about a few hints on curing cancer or developing more efficient batteries or the whereabouts of a serial killer? You know, something useful, and that we could actually confirm? It’s always these mundane trivialities, rather than anything that actually helps people.

Why stars spin slowly

In the Index to Creationist Claims, there is an entry to an old argument from Walt Brown:

Claim CE302:

The sun has 99 percent of the mass of the solar system, but less than 1 percent of the angular momentum. It is spinning too slowly to have formed naturally.

Source:

Brown, Walt, 1995. In the Beginning: Compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation, p. 19.

Response:

Among solar-type stars, there is a strong correlation between age and rotation rate; the younger stars spin more rapidly (Baliunas et al. 1995). This implies some kind of braking mechanism that slows a star’s rotation. A likely candidate is an interaction between the star’s magnetic field and its solar wind (Parker 1965).

So we have a theoretical explanation, braking, and a correlation. Now Phil Plait discusses new evidence supporting the braking model : observations of stars with and without accretion disks show that all that material does seem to slow the rotation of the star down. There are some nice animations, too — the magnetic field of the star is like a big paddle-wheel moving through muck. Very cool.

This is why biologists keep the astronomers around — so they can answer the occasional off the wall questions we get from creationists about stars. And angular momentum. And magnetic fields. You know, all that physics stuff.

Any ornithomancers out there?

I beheld a strange sight when I stepped out my door this morning: a pair of cute little baby duckies waddling down the sidewalk, all alone and peeping frantically. They passed right by my house (of course—the miasma of evil is not inviting), turned left at my neighbor’s driveway, went up the sidewalk, and hopped up the stairs to their door. It was so peculiar — I haven’t seen any ducks in my neighborhood lately, and these two helpless ducklings were clearly lost — that I went up to the door, frightening the little guys away, to ask if they’d been raising ducks and had a couple of escapees. No, they were as mystified as I was. We caught them and put them someplace safe, but now I’m wondering…

I don’t believe in omens so I don’t really need an ornithomancer to interpret the movement of birds, but being a few miles from the nearest body of water does make me wonder what the heck they were doing here. My neighbor is going to call the DNR to see what can be done with them, too.

The corruption of Scooby Doo

Chris Mooney makes a point about the supernatural thriller genre.

Indeed, nearly five years ago I wrote a column entitled “Conversion Fantasies” in which I made the following point: In movies and TV series about the paranormal, the sterotypical “skeptic” figure always seems to convert into a believer by the end. And why does this occur? Well, because in fiction, the author can control the laws of nature, and in these fictional narratives (which show an abundant lack of creativity), the supernatural always turns out to be real.

I think an excellent example of this trend is the Scooby Doo cartoon. Way back when I was a young’un, they always ended the same way: the Scooby Doo gang would always discover that the monster/spectre/alien was actually Old Man Cargill, dressed in a costume, trying to keep visitors away so they wouldn’t discover his secret uranium mine, and they always led him away in handcuffs at the end, while he muttered, “If it weren’t for those darned kids, I would have gotten away with it.” I know, the cartoon was cheesily and cheaply animated, the plots were boring and predictable, and the characters were annoyingly trite, but at least they had a consistent message that the supernatural wasn’t real.

That changed last time I saw it — the ghosts were “real”. It was very strange: it was a badly done cartoon, waning in popularity, and instead of trying to reinvigorate it by, say, coming up with creative plots, or getting better artwork, or making the characters more interesting, they chose to throw away the one novel element of the show. The supernatural resort is often the act of lazy hacks.

I’m not going to be quite as down on the supernatural in fiction as Mooney is — I do like a good cheesy horror flick now and then — but I agree with him that the conversion narrative always seems to run in one direction only, and it’s gotten a bit tired. How about a movie where a confirmed, praying, ghost-fearing, gullible person sees the evidence and is enlightened, and sees at last the sufficiency of natural mechanisms? I don’t just mean discovering it’s Old Man Cargill under the sheet, but gets their whole worldview shaken up and realizes that hey, looking for material causes works.

That would be a hard one to write, I suspect, and me and Chris Mooney don’t represent a very big share of the market.

Mammals have hair. Get used to it.

Tara has successfully grossed me out. She has an article on the unfortunate consequences of a bikini wax—a massive infection that turned the vulva and perineum into something resembling an over-ripe melon. And the woman who had this problem repeatedly tried to depilate afterwards!

I’ve never quite gotten the appeal of this practice. Is it to appeal to men with pedophilic tendencies? Or is it more of a desire to look like you’ve got a mollusc in your crotch? Everybody has their own little kink, so if hairless pubes appeal to two people, I’m not going to worry about it…but it seems to me it ought to be OK for a woman to want to look like a female mammal, and that individuals ought not to feel obligated to follow a very weird and highly artificial standard of beauty to the point where they suffer severe illnesses.

Down House proposal withdrawn

Darwin’s home was going to be submitted to UNESCO’s World Heritage committee for designation as a World Heritage site, but that application was withdrawn, to be resubmitted in two years after some reworking. Down House has some handicaps compared to other World Heritage sites:

But without natural wonders or spectacular architecture, Darwin at Downe does not tick obvious World Heritage boxes. Although he was surprised to hear of Downe’s difficulties, Geoffrey Belcher, site coordinator for the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site in London, thinks that “A site with a limited range of qualities will be at a disadvantage.” The inclusion of the Royal Observatory makes Greenwich one of the few World Heritage Sites to celebrate science, but the site boasts architectural splendour and naval history too.

It is a rather different site—it’s not famous for some major chunk of tangible real estate, something that visitors could touch and take photos of, but for being a place where one of the major thinkers of the 19th century did his research and writing and correspondence, a kind of locus of thought. It’s definitely an important place in the history of science.

Ian Robinson finds one unfortunate comment in the article—a comparison with religious sites. Bleh.

“I can’t think of anything more important to do for the history of nineteenth-century science than to protect the whole environment Darwin inhabited and exploited,” says James Moore, a Darwin scholar at the Open University in Milton Keynes and one of the first historians to explore the importance of this rural refuge to Darwin. “Muslims go to Mecca, Christians go to Jerusalem, Darwinians go to Downe,” he says.

That’s putting the wrong spin on it. Another World Heritage site is Independence Hall in Philadelphia; we don’t go there because we worship the declaration of independence, or because we think the founding fathers were gods (OK, some people do, but they’re insane). Another is the Olympic National Park—again, it’s not a holy place, it’s a natural wonder. I like both, but that doesn’t make me an Independencehallian or an Olympian…although the latter does have a nice ring to it.

Nicholls H (2007) Darwin down but not out. Nature, 20 June 2007, doi:10.1038/447896a