Jeffrey Tomkins strikes again!

Any time the various creationist organizations — AiG, ICR, CMI, DI, etc. — start getting excited and claiming that genetics supports creationism, it usually seems to trace back to Jeffrey Tomkins, the one guy who knows a little genetics and molecular biology, and most importantly, knows how to distort the scientific literature. A new paper in Nature, the complete sequencing of ape genomes, does a detailed and thorough comparison of great ape genomic data, and Tomkins does his usual thing and butchers it.

Tomkins is known for his usage of “ungapped” comparisons to depress the percentage similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. This method relies on aligning the beginnings of two DNA sequences, and measuring whether subsequent base pairs at corresponding positions match one another. The flaw in this method is that insertions, duplications or deletions in either sequence may cause parts of it to be shifted forward or backward relative to the other, so that equivalent sets of base pairs are not precisely aligned with one another in the comparison. Ungapped comparisons interpret those parts of the two sequences as entirely mismatched even if there are no other differences between them.

If you see any creationist now claiming that humans and chimpanzees are 15% different, rather than the number reported in scientific journals of 1.5%, it’s all coming from the mangled misinterpretations of Tomkins, who really is obsessed with the idea that humans can’t possibly be at all related to other apes. Casey Luskin accepts the distortion and is stating that scientists have been hiding the magnitude of the differences.

They haven’t. The root of the problem is that there are multiple ways to compare sequences of 3 billion nucleotides. One way is to compare aligned sequences, that is, the genes and regulatory stuff that makes up the functional bits of the genome, and there you find about 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans. Another approach is to tally up all of the sequence differences, whether they have any phenotype or not, and there you can find all kinds of repetitive, noisy stuff in the genome. You can find that a human parent is 10% different from their own child! Here’s a good explanation of the whole data set, rather than a Tompkins-ish cherry-picked mess of lies.

Not mentioned, unfortunately, is the ultimate key to explaining these differences: the differences are in the genetic junk. I guess it’s fair to not bring that up, since creationists do not believe in that anyway.

It does expose the fact that ultimately, all the creationist organizations, including the Intelligent Design wackos at the Discovery Institute, do believe that humans were separately created by a deity/aliens. If that wasn’t their endgame they wouldn’t be paying any attention to Tomkins’ nonsense.

I can’t let this pass. Casey Luskin is particularly egregious in claiming that scientists are lying.

These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall where they may?

Note that this is a response to Nature publishing the complete and detailed results of a complex genetic comparison — they did state the results clearly, and published all of the data. None of the creationist critics have added any new information, every complaint they’ve made is the product of extracting bits and pieces from the Nature paper. It’s not their fault that the paper doesn’t state the implications more plainly because the creationist implications are not there.

It annoys the hell out of me that Nature can publish a 28 page paper with 82 tables of data in the supplementary information, and Luskin can whine that they didn’t dumb it down enough that a lying creationist can find the part where real scientists say god did it.

It’s because the data don’t support your claim, you ass.

The children are squabbling

Musk is on his way out, but he’s not going quietly. It seems there’s been some resentful scuffling over his activities failures.

A physical altercation between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent precipitated the Tesla founder’s quick ouster from the Trump administration, according to a report.

The incident was previously reported as a “screaming match” between the two men, but the physical aspect has since been confirmed by The White House.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail interviewed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon about the DOGE-related scuffle.

“‘Scott Bessent called [Musk] out and said, ‘You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you’re at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?” Bannon recounted. “And that’s when Elon got physical. It’s a sore subject with him. It wasn’t an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him.”

The altercation was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday, the Mail reported.

The Daily Mail is not a reliable source, but we also have physical evidence of the fight.

Cool, hit him some more, and put a little more vinegar in the punch.

You know what? This is not normal.

Spartan Mosquito Pro — save your money

It’s that time of year when we start spending more time outdoors, and when the mosquitos are on the prowl for your blood. Colin Purrington bought these simple devices that are non-toxic but promise to kill mosquitos around your yard — not that I’m at all interested, I like having spider food living around my home — but I can understand not wanting biting, flying insects disturbing your parties. It also seems ecologically safe, since all it is is a tube containing a yeast solution (to produce CO2, a mosquito attractant) and boric acid, to kill insects that drink from it.

Only problem is that they don’t work. They produce very little CO2, mosquitos don’t take the bait, and if they crawl inside the tube, they don’t drink, they just fly out again. And it’ll cost you $50 for a box of 4 tubes! They really shouldn’t have let these devices fall into the hands of a scientist who can think quantitatively and who can devise easy tests of their efficacy.

Oh, another little problem with Spartan Pro: if you write a negative review of their product, they will sue you. It’s a stupid SLAPP suit that was eventually defeated, at a cost of $90,000 to Purrington. No, he didn’t get his legal costs back.

SLAPP suits are evil, and anyone or any compony that deploys them is evil, too.

I’m amazed at all the people leaving comments on Purrington’s site to claim that they actually do work. I don’t know whether they’re gullible, or Spartan Mosquito is paying puppets to leave phony testimonials, or my most charitable interpretation, they’re seeing the effects of general insect decline and attributing it to the magic cylinder they hung from a tree. I’m seeing fewer insects year by year in my area, so this might be a good time to be selling ineffective insect traps and letting your reputation thrive on ecological decline.

Still carrying water for Musk

Here’s a nice Washington Post headline:

SpaceX has a partially successful test flight

The subhead tells the real story.

SpaceX successfully launched its Starship on May 27, but the rocket lost control mid-flight and eventually fell apart.

They failed to recover the reusable booster, which exploded, and the second stage was tumbling out of control, and exploded. SUCCESS!

This was the ninth Starship launch, and none of them have “succeeded” by any reasonable meaning of the word. Maybe someone needs to teach the editors at the WaPo the word “failed”? Somehow, I think they’re going to need to use that word a lot in the next few years, in lots of contexts.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of the flaws in Starship design, with Elon Musk at the top of the list of problems.

Musk isn’t an engineer and doesn’t understand iterative design, and now SpaceX and NASA are facing a sunk cost fallacy.

You never achieve iterative design with a full-scale prototype. It is incredibly wasteful and can lead you down several problematic and dead-end solutions. I used to engineer high-speed boats — another weight- and safety-sensitive engineering field. We would always conduct scale model tests of every aspect of design, iteratively changing it as we went so that when we did build the full-scale version, we were solving the problems of scale, not design and scale simultaneously.

SpaceX could have easily done this. They already proved they could land a 1st stage/Booster with the Falcon 9, and Falcon 9’s Booster could launch a 1/10 scale Starship into orbit. Tests of such a scaled-down model would help SpaceX determine the best compromise for using the bellyflop manoeuvre and retro rockets to land. It would help them iteratively improve the design around such a compromise, especially as they will be far cheaper and quicker to redesign and build than the full-scale versions. Not only that, but these tests would highlight any of the design’s shortcomings, such as the rocket engines not having enough thrust-to-weight ratio to enable a high enough payload. This allows engineers to do crucial, complete redesigns before the large-scale version is even built.

If you have even a passing knowledge of engineering, you know this is what iterative design looks like. So, why hasn’t Musk done this?

Well, developing a Starship like this would expose that making a fully reusable rocket with even a barely usable payload to space is impossible. Musk knows this: Falcon 9 was initially meant to be fully reusable until he discovered that the useful payload would be zero. That was his iterative design telling him Starship was impossible over a decade ago, as just making the rocket larger won’t solve this! But he went on ahead anyway. Why?

Well, through some transparent corruption and cronyism, he could secure multi-billion-dollar contracts from NASA to build this mythical rocket. But, by going for full-scale testing, he could not only hide the inherent flaws of Starship long enough for the cash to be handed over to him but also put NASA in a position of the sunk cost fallacy. NASA has given SpaceX so much money, and their plans rely so heavily on Starship that they can’t walk away; they might as well keep shoving money at the beast.

This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.

That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.

Why are Xian apologists so inane?

I don’t know the answer. This Christian dork kept popping up in my YouTube feed, making this claim that we shouldn’t take atheists seriously because there are so many great arguments for the existence of his god. I had to offer my short sweet response.

Not only are his arguments bad, but arguments are not evidence. I just had to get that off my chest.

Don’t worry about the next pandemic

There is a plan. The FBI will put together a manhunt to catch the people who cause it!

As we read and process reports of a new COVID strain emerging, | want you to know that we are actively investigating, in multiple field offices, the cover-up of the origin of the COVID virus, along with associated matters requiring our attention. You deserve answers.

Yeah, Dan Bongino. Get a crack team of G-men together, give ’em tommy guns, and send them out there to track down, and arrest or kill, the gang responsible for genetic drift. That’s how authoritarian brains work.

I suggest we call it the “Unread Journal of Stupid Ideas”

Scientific publishing has some serious problems: we’ve outsourced the publication of science to for-profit publishers, it relies on it’s ‘customers’ to do peer-review for free, it has no incentive to provide open access to the research that is largely supported by government funding. The system could use a major overhaul. However, this is not the answer.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department.

“We are probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they are all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an episode of “The Ultimate Human” podcast.

Kennedy said such publications are “vessels” for pharmaceutical companies.

The top three journals are the top three because scientists world-wide publish in them — they are popular prestige journals, and scientists prefer to publish in them because these are the sources their peers will read. They are the product of contingent historical processes, not capture by pharmaceutical companies.

Right-wingers are used to relying on billionaires buying “think-tanks” that artificially prop up their bad ideas. That would be a bad model for a scientific journal, which should be a neutral agency. RFK Jr is proposing to build a fake journal that would be under the control of the ideologues who have been appointed for political reasons.

I have questions. Why would anyone want to publish in this hypothetical journal? Why would anyone want to read it? Who’s going to pay for it? The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA have international popularity, both for submissions and subscriptions — how would a journal in the pocket of American conservatives replace that? Are they going to allow publication of data on vaccines, epidemics, trans issues, or anything that RFK Jr doesn’t like?

To be honest, I don’t read The Lancet, NEJM, or JAMA, because those are medical journals. Imagine, though, that the government announced that they were not going to allow American scientists to publish in Nature or Science because they were “vessels” for climatologists or evolutionary biologists or epidemiologists, or that they were going to create their own edited propaganda journal to block those ideas. You can deplore the flaws in those journals, but you can’t just rip them away and erect a fake journal in their place.

Look what I found in the compost bin

Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!

I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.

Spider Baby!

I was home over lunch, and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a shipment of spiders, so I decided to indulge myself in a legendary movie from 1964: Spider Baby. It’s delightfully bizarre and macabre, and yes, it does include lots of spiders.

If that isn’t sufficiently enticing, check out this still:

It stars Lon Chaney jr., and look: a young Sid Haig! The plot — don’t watch it for the plot — centers on a twisted sort of Addams Family group afflicted with an imaginary genetic illness called Merrye Disease. The afflicted go mad and steadily regress to a savage state in which they become voracious cannibals. Along the way, they just develop weird obsessions. One girl likes to play spider, a game that culminates in the spider girl stinging her partner with a pair of butcher knives.

It makes no sense, but everyone seems to be having a ghastly good time playing up the grisly psychos. Recommended!

I am sad to report that my package of spiders hasn’t yet arrived. It may not get here until tomorrow.