Natural selection is not the whole of evolution, but it’s still definitely part of it

Ken Ham has been having a grand time redefining evolution. It’s interesting in a twisted kind of way: the anti-evolutionists are now at the point of having to accept natural selection as true, and are simply declaring that sure, natural selection is fine, it’s just not evolution, which we hate.

He’s linking to an article by Georgia Purdom that is a fine example of selective use of information, and represents AiG’s weird stance. It begins with a hypothetical dialog. It’s really weird.

Let’s listen in on a hypothetical conversation between a biblical creationist (C) and an evolutionist (E) as they discuss some recent scientific news headlines:

E: Have you heard about the research findings regarding mouse evolution?

C: Are you referring to the finding of coat color change in beach mice?

E: Yes, isn’t it a wonderful example of evolution in action?

C: No, I think it’s a good example of natural selection in action, which is merely selecting information that already exists.

E: Well, what about antibiotic resistance in bacteria? Don’t you think that’s a good example of evolution occurring right before our eyes?

C: No, you seem to be confusing the terms “evolution” and “natural selection.”

E: But natural selection is the primary mechanism that drives evolution.

C: Natural selection doesn’t drive molecules-to-man evolution; you are giving natural selection a power that it does not have—one that can supposedly add new information to the genome, as molecules-to-man evolution requires. But natural selection simply can’t do that because it works with information that already exists.

You know, that last bit is actually sort of true: natural selection shapes, or selects, the variation that already exists (although, indirectly, natural selection does create new conditions in the environment by changing allele frequencies, and those changing frequencies can create new probabilities for recombination…but I’ll give her a pass on that for now, because it’ll just lead to arguments about defining “creative” vs. “unpredictable”). But evolutionary biologists already know about all that. She’s not saying anything that we’d find surprising.

She goes on, though.

From a creationist perspective natural selection is a process whereby organisms possessing specific characteristics (reflective of their genetic makeup) survive better than others in a given environment or under a given selective pressure (i.e., antibiotic resistance in bacteria). Those with certain characteristics live, and those without them diminish in number or die.

Hey, guess what? That’s what we’d say from an evolutionary perspective, too! Unfortunately, this state of blissful concordance cannot last.

The problem for evolutionists is that natural selection is nondirectional

Nope. That’s not really a problem, because a) selection is directional in the short term, shaping the population towards greater adaptedness to local conditions, and b) we generally don’t believe in any kind of long term directionality. It’s the creationists who believe in a mysterious molecules-to-man kind of pressure.

—should the environment change or the selective pressure be removed, those organisms with previously selected for characteristics are typically less able to deal with the changes and may be selected against because their genetic information has decreased…. Evolution of the molecules-to-man variety, requires directional change. Thus, the term “evolution” cannot be rightly used in the context of describing what natural selection can accomplish.

It is correct to note that selection is largely a conservative force — it prunes out variation from a population. So she is right that if natural selection were the only force operating on the gene pool, the distribution of variants would get smaller and smaller over time.

Gosh. If only there were some other forces acting on populations to produce a constant source of new information that apparently Answers in Genesis has never heard of. If only there were other processes that generated new genetic variants that natural selection could act on…

Surprise! There is! It’s called “mutation”.

No matter what the exact value of the human mutation rate, every single possible point mutation will happen in just a few generations somewhere among the seven billion or so people on Earth. And each individual who lives to the ripe old age of 60 (i.e. youngsters) will have experienced a huge number of somatic mutations.

Let’s also note that we have a large body of phenotypic variation, not all of which is genetic but which is observable, measurable, and quantifiable, and which AiG ignores. We also have deep information about population structure and patterns of inheritance and descent with modification that directly contradicts AiG’s claim that we are descended from a population of two people only 6,000 years ago.

You cannot imagine how stupid Purdom’s article looks to anyone who has some knowledge of genetics and populations, unless you actually know a little bit about those disciplines. She is willfully ignoring a huge part of genetics in order to make a truly idiotic argument.

We’ve all laughed at this clueless quote from fundies.

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

Purdom has basically said the equivalent.

Natural selection reduces genetic variation in a population. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant source of new mutations supplying the population with huge amounts of variants. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

You bet we would.

This means war

Last night, I had to make a run to the grocery store. On the way, I encountered traffic from the Festival of Lights, the annual Morris holiday parade. Then, in the grocery store, they were piping in Christmas carols already.

This is intolerable.

The 2016 War On Christmas begins today. Gird up your loins, atheists!

I have already made my assault plans, and am assembling my army. Next week, all three of my kids, and one daughter-in-law, are gathering at my house, and I’m going to propose an all-out attack to them. We’re going to travel north a few miles to the local tree farm to savagely cut down a pine tree, which we’ll erect in our house and festoon with fearsome glittering objects. We will drink hot apple cider. There will be reindeer-drawn wagon rides downtown the day after Thanksgiving — we will ride the hell out of them. We may even put up decorations in our windows, and I’m even tempted to get lawn ornaments, or maybe put up colorful lights around the door. We shall be blatant.

And when the believers feebly protest, But you’re atheists…, I shall tell them, “Yes, and this is my celebration of family and relaxation and a secular federal holiday, and it is a godless, humanist occasion. Why don’t you go mewl at ghosts in church, or more likely, trundle soullessly through a noisy shopping mall?” Because I’m taking over.

Still waiting for journalists to learn

It’s not happening. They’re doing their best to normalize racists while calling it “journalism”. Read this NPR interview with Breitbart editor Joel Pollak, in which he fawns over Steve Bannon to a ludicrous degree, and the interviewer fails to call him out.

INSKEEP: I mean, let me just stop you there because I do want to ask about something that you said. You were talking about facts and data and how he ran Breitbart. Why did he make Breitbart the platform for the alt-right?

POLLAK: You know, all I can speak to is the content on the website. And the only alt-right content we have is a single article out of tens of thousands of articles, which is a journalistic article about the alt-right by Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari, which basically went into this movement and tried to figure out what it was about. That’s not racist. That’s journalism.

Inskeep presumably thinks of himself as a journalist. Pollak has just maligned all of journalism, and has also outright lied in this interview (Bannon: We’re the platform for the alt-right.), and what does Innskeep do? He let’s it slide and he changes the subject.

No. That’s not how you do it. You do your homework ahead of time, and when you ask why Bannon made Breitbart the platform for the alt-right, you’ve got sources and quotes to back up your assertion, so that when a liar like Pollak makes such a ludicrous and patently false claim, you use that information to fucking pound him into the ground. You don’t change the subject. The interviewee has just exposed his fundamental wrongness, and you tear into that. Shove it in his face and make him address it, don’t let him dodge it. Your job is not to provide a pleasant, soothing environment for the guest, it is to probe down into the guts of the topic to extract some germ of insight, which might be very uncomfortable for him.

Inskeep seems to have an abstract notion of what journalism should mean as he later says:

INSKEEP: I want to mention, you know, actually putting controversial opinions out there is a perfectly fine idea. We’ve had David Duke on this program, but we fact-check, we try to question, we put in context.

Right. So where’s the instant fact-check on Pollak’s lie? Innskeep goes on to try and address a Breitbart article that praises the Confederacy, but then Pollak uses that as a springboard for more bullshit.

POLLAK: I think that we can talk about individual articles out of the tens of thousands at Breitbart, but, you know, NPR is taxpayer-funded and has an entire section of its programming, a regular feature called “Code Switch,” which, from my perspective, is a racist program. I’m looking here at the latest article, which aired on NPR, calling the election results “nostalgia for a whiter America.” So NPR has racial and racist programming that I am required to, I’m required to pay for as a taxpayer.

So that’s our story. NPR, which has just in this segment demonstrated a complete lack of any kind of teeth, is the racist news source, while Breitbart, which is an unremitting stream of hate endorsed by the KKK and the Daily Stormer, is journalism. Who cares about facts? Not modern journalism, it seems.

Oh, well. It’s not like Bannon is literally Joseph Goebbels.

Here’s a quote to keep in mind:

For those covering Trump, the lesson is that adversarial journalism, not access journalism, will better serve the public interest.

Adversarial journalism? What’s that? I don’t think I’ve seen much of that in the wild lately. Maybe it’s gone extinct.

Deplorable pairings

The other day, I posted a photo of Trump and Nigel Farage, which I suspect might have prompted a sudden efflux of vomit into the Atlantic Ocean from both sides (don’t do it again! Ocean acidification is a real problem!), but now I’ve found a picture that’s going to have a similar emetic effect.

wakefieldtrump

Oh dog. Trump plus Andrew Wakefield. You have to read the lunatic demands anti-vaxxers are making of Trump now (Forbid the CDC from uttering the phrase “herd immunity” during your presidency, for instance). It’s almost laughable, except that Trump lacks the knowledge to be able to discriminate sane from insane policy, and might just take them seriously.

Self-indictment

A member of the Seattle city council has been flooded with hateful email because she, a proud socialist, has advocated for protests at the presidential inauguration in January (oh, and gosh do I love Seattle). This is not surprising. It’s the new reality that all the racists and sexists in the country have gotten goosed on happy juice by the recent election, and since Kshama Sawant is both a woman and brown, of course she’s getting the worst of the frenetically incoherent deplorables shrieking at her. But I just wanted to single out one message she got that demonstrates racist logic.

Go back to India b*tch. I am tired of being shamed because I’m a white male. You automatically think I’m a racist. How about you go the f*ck back to India or wherever you came from?

Isn’t that amazing? It’s a couple of sentences that completely fuck themselves over. Has the stupid sap ever stopped to think that maybe he’s not being shamed because he’s a white male, but because he says absurd things like “go back to India” to an elected American official?

Of course I also have the liberty of marveling at such dazzling inanity because I’m not the target (at least, not as much of a target — I still get the occasional rant cussing me out for being a Jew). It’s got to be even more terrifying to see that your opponents angry and irrational.