Blue Collar Scientist

Never challenge stork theory. It can only get you in trouble.

Hat tip to loyal reader Scott Hurst, who I met at TAM 5.5 earlier this year.

Can I have mine please?

Didn’t you know that all directors of the EAC get their very own jetpack? (PZ Myers)

Oh, wait - I’m not a director yet. That explains it.

…because so many of the science ones seem perfectly plausible if you’ve ever talked to a creationist.

Vietnam has banned hamsters, but as funny as this sounds, there’s a rationalist running this national security effort. Nguyen Thanh Son, an official at the agricultural ministry, said:

“I think the Vietnam animal health department should take some samples, conduct tests, and see how dangerous the hamsters in Vietnam really are.”

I’m fully in support of this. Any good skeptic should take samples and conduct tests before concluding that the hamsters are (or are not) coming to kill us.

…then why are so many religious people so full of - ahem. Sorry, I’ll try to keep it family friendly here. What I’m talking about today is Almighty Cleanse:

Careful internet research suggests that this is an evangelical Christian bowel flush. Apparently something like radiator flush, except it is isn’t meant for your car, it’s meant for your caboose. The marketing materials include some remarkable claims:

By Peeling off the built up fecal matter and flushing it from your digestive tract and body, this allows for better absorbtion of vital nutrients from the foods you eat.

Note the bizarre use of capital letters, which appears to be a Characteristic of people Who believe strange Things. I point this out so that you, gentle reader, won’t think that I committed a typo while quoting the source. But I also use the statement to show the implicit assumption that fecal matter builds up in the colon and needs to be Peeled away, kind of like a little colon-shaped papier-mache sculpture which, if you asked the artist, you would find was supposed to represent mankind’s straining to overcome the burdens he¹ must carry to the ends of his days.

You are carrying around old fecal matter that is polluting your system.

Right, then.

I can’t imagine how something builds up like that in an organ characterized by the passionate heaving contractions of intermittent peristalsis, but, ummm, I’m not a doctor or anything, and I certainly haven’t crawled up in there to check for myself², so I thought I’d consult an actual smart person with credentials in the field who has, in a sense, crawled up there and had a look.

…as a surgeon, I can tell you from simple experience operating on the colon that hardened feces do not accumulate on the walls of the colon as the colon cleansers claim. Any gastroenterologist who does a lot of colonoscopies could tell you that too. Even in disease states in which colon motility is impaired, we generally do not see the feces “caking” on the walls.

Colon. Motility. Impaired. I don’t ever want that to happen to me, please.

Back to the marketing crap:³

You should be having 3 to 4 bowel movements a day. Are you?

Ummm, no. By which I mean, (a) I’m not, and (b) I really shouldn’t be. Despite having caught the latest incarnation of cold/flu/Alaska’s current seasonal epidemic nastiness, hot on the heels of having caught something remarkably similar three weeks ago, and therefore having a significant risk factor for poop-related malfunctions, I am nevertheless pooping once per day like clockwork. You could probably set your watch and you’d find that my mean delta-poo is less than the equation of time on any given day⁴.

But this really isn’t about me. Honestly, it isn’t: I swear to you that I didn’t start blogging to talk about my bathroom adventures. It is much better to again consult with qualified representatives of the sciences. Accordingly, we turn to our expert, who seems to think that you should poo when you have to go, not in adherence to a particular schedule:

I mean, why would you want to have to drop a bowel movement three to five times a day? It’s bad enough having to urinate multiple times every day.

Yeah. Although it might give me a chance to catch up on my reading.

Back to the colon cleanser’s imposing marketing genius:

If your system is polluted, and you are only having 3 bowel movements a week.

Then what, hey? Ummm, guys, there’s a reason we computer programmers refer to “If-Then” statements: it is because if you start a sentence with an If, then you have to end it with a Then⁵, because if you don’t, your audience will sit there wondering how the story ends, imagining what the dire consequences of pooing three times a week might be, straining to achieve understanding, veritably groaning with desire to learn the, er, outcome.

So learn to finish a sentence, already.

What do you think that water that is being used throughout your system is like? Its filled with bacteria, and other pollutants from the build up caused by a incorrect filtering of the water.

This is, apparently, a reference to water which is absorbed by the large intestine. Our Actual Expert again:

…the very function the colon evolved to have is to remove our digestive wastes safely and efficiently, extracting water, electrolytes, and what little other nutrients are left over, before depositing the waste into whatever receptical the body sees fit to sit on.

I’m going to guess that water gets absorbed by the intestinal wall through something like osmosis, and it just might be that water, which is a really tiny molecule, can get through membranes that, say, bacteria, which are like big huge lumbering gigantic oil tankers full of cytoplasm and miscellaneous cargo⁶ by comparison, can’t really penetrate unless the rectal tissues get, uh, penetrated, through improper penetration of something that may or may not look like an eneMan.

Back to the marketing text:

Loose the bloated feeling, Feel lighter and healthier, cleanse the digestive tract.

Loose. I guess if you were going three times a day, thats how you’d Feel. Sometimes the typos are so appropriate you just can’t improve on the funny.

New and Improved Almighty Cleanse® now includes WILDCRAFTED ingredients! - What are wildcrafted ingredients? “Wildcrafted” plants are carefully harvested from their unspoiled natural habitats.

So now what you’ve got here is a bunch of people tramping their way into some pristine habitat, picking what they want, hiking back out, stuffing it into pills⁷, and selling it. The customer has to hope that the people doing all this environmental damage know how to properly identify the plant they actually want to use as an ingredient. One thing I remember very clearly from trying to learn to identify some species of plant a few years ago in Arizona was that some plants are very difficult to tell apart without the use of molecular methods. You wouldn’t want to be putting concentrated poison ivy into your colon cleansing pills, I’d guess. I emphasize that I’m guessing, because I’m not actually an evangelical expert on colon cleansing, and it is just barely possible that I might possibly be full of crap on that, despite my clockwork visits to the facilities.

And let’s hope that these plants aren’t growing in “unspoiled natural habitats” in Alaska’s national parks or elsewhere, because we’ve got easily measurable levels of mercury, pesticides, and estrogen-mimicking compound in our “unspoiled” places.

My conclusion: If this kind of marketing material sells product, there’s lots of people out there who are a bit too concerned about their poo.

Hat tip to Amanda.

1. Or she - I understand girls poo too. [↩]
2. Actually, a couple years ago at the Ride for Life, a bicycling benefit for cancer research, there was a Giant Colon set up that you could walk through - you know, for education. And if that counts, which I don’t say it does, I can say that despite the presence of hundreds of small children, there appeared to be no buildup of fecal matter there. But then again, that Giant Colon was not actually attached to a working digestive system, although it was, admittedly, here thanks to some local politicians, who have since been discovered to have been so full of ____ that they are now in jail. So, anyway, quit reading the footnotes - get back to the post. [↩]
3. In this case, I’m saying exactly what I mean, with no obfuscatory use of slang or casual terminology. [↩]
4. If you get the joke without clicking the link, you are my kind of geek. [↩]
5. As I just did - see how that works? [↩]
6. Including magic flagella, according to creationists. [↩]
7. I presume it is pills. If they aren’t pills, I do NOT want to know about it. [↩]

Creationists have hailed the development of a new material for the manufacture of fishing lures, as reported yesterday by Science Daily.

The new lures were developed to reduce the environmental impact of lost “soft baits” like rubber worms and twisters. Such lures do not stay on the hook well, and contain high levels of phthalates, which have been implicated in a variety of health problems.

Creationists have hailed the new technology as a significant leap forward in their efforts to deceive people into accepting anti-evolution propaganda. “This new technology means that we can make even more realistic reproductions that look vaguely like the pictures of fossils we downloaded off the internet” said Hardin Yoyo, author of Atlas of Caddis Fly Ties Misrepresented As Living Insects. The book, weighing in at 23 metric tons, is famous for having pioneered the use of fishing lures in place of live specimens.

While creationists have praised the new technology, it was developed for entirely secular purposes. The new material utilizes microfibers embedded in the soft plastic lure to increase retention of the lure on the hook, and reduce phthalate use in manufacturing. Both reduce the environmental impact of fishing.

Religious interests believe that the new technology could be put to use in a variety of ways.

“It is our hope that with this new material, realistic reproductions of fruit flies might be created, that will allow us to conduct genetics and medical research on an equal footing with the materialist godless scientists,” said Anderson Eggface, of the Theological Genetics Department at the National Institute of Technology in France. “Fruit flies have long been the oppressed slaves of scientific investigators studying mutation and development,” Eggface noted, adding when asked about hox gene influence on development that a fly can be trained to do just about anything. “Scientists are barking up the wrong tree here. It isn’t genes that make legs where fly antennae should go. We just know we have the answer - Goddidit. The ability to make durable fruit flies in whatever shape we desire should push forward our research into the glory of God as revealed in His creation.”

Michael Brayhay, biochemist at Leelow University, added, “Fly legs are irreducibly complex, even if they do grow out of an antenna hole. Therefore, evolution is false. As you can see, that’s a significant limitation of science.”

The new creationist plans were criticized by godless evolutionary biologist Peasey Meyers. “Perhaps for their next great advance they can figure out how to surgically remove the fishhooks from their insect forgeries” he suggested while sorting through octopus pictures his readers had sent in. He questions whether the creationist plans are consistent with humane treatment of research subjects: “Having a fishhook crammed down the center of your body like that has to hurt like hell,” he noted.

S. Walker at Inconcinnus Sermo has posted some excellent observations about intelligent design creationism and organism behavior.

Has anyone ever wondered why intelligent design never really talks about anything but complexity and molecules or just complain about all the ‘holes’ in evolution (NOT)?

Walker continues:

How about infanticide? How would intelligent design explain infanticide? This would be a real test of the ID paradigm.

Indeed. Does intelligent design creationism predict and explain infanticide?

Evolutionary theory does. Here in Alaska, any brown bear sow with a cub will go to considerable trouble to avoid interaction with a male, because the male will frequently attempt to kill the cub. It makes sense that the bear would do this - the chances of a particular cub being his offspring are very small, so eliminating a cub almost always eliminates the genes of a competing male. It also makes the sow sexually receptive more quickly, thus increasing the male’s chances of mating. By this means males who commit infanticide make their genes more frequent in the population. In other words, in this case, the genes that make infanticidal bears perpetuate themselves in the gene pool.

What about infanticide in humans? There are many cultures in which people committed infanticide under various circumstances. Some cultures set deformed children out of doors to die by exposure. While not morally defensible in our culture, in a society in which resources are scarce, doing this makes a certain amount of perverse sense - you want to expend what little in the way of crops that you have on children who are healthy and vigorous. Evolutionary theory predicts that those parents who expend the least on children of low fitness will better perpetuate their genes. Just because a baby is lost this year, doesn’t mean you can’t try again next year, or the year after, when crops are good.

In addition to these well known forms of infanticide, other cultures have committed infanticide for other reasons. The ancient Israelites killed¹ all of the children of the city Ai in a military assault. In a society based on genetic relationships², killing all the inhabitants of a city you wish to take by force means that your clan can avoid competition with the remnant of a competing clan. By eliminating the children, they eliminate long-term resentment that can work against them in the future. But it also eliminates the conquereds’ genes. Evolutionary theory shows that what at first might seem to be merely a political policy also has a genetic effect: genes that influence people to kill “enemy” children - if any - will have an advantage over the genes of peaceful people - they will, on average, be slaughtered by the former, not vice-versa.

While evolutionary theory explains this brutality, it also suggests a solution to the problem. Knowing that the natural process of evolution encourages some nasty behaviors in our fellow man is a powerful realization. While very few people condemn competition, virtually everyone believes competition should be fair. It is pretty obvious that in the genetic lotteries, killing helpless children is an unfair tactic - you reap a big genetic reward with little cost and little risk³. Without evolutionary theory, we wouldn’t have this insight - the only thing standing in the way of people killing their neighbor’s babies would be a vague distaste over the noise, or perhaps the mess. There’d be an emotional reluctance, perhaps - but we wouldn’t have any knowledge about why such a thing is wrong.

Evolutionary theory also suggests ways that society can respond to this bloodthirstiness and suppress the killing of children. One potential way to do that is to found a religion in which an all-powerful sky god condemns the killing. Unfortunately, the god of the most popular religion in the United States is depicted as being pro-infanticide⁴. I guess that explains why this idea hasn’t worked out.

Obligatory good art: Giotto’s Massacre of the Innocents.

Another way is to create a government that (1) protects each of the society’s productive members right to exist, and (2) allows them to make effective decisions about when to reproduce. There’s a potential evolutionary advantage to leveling the genetic playing field in this manner. By ostracizing and penalizing child-killers, their genes will be less perpetuated in your society’s gene pool. As a result, your gene pool should be more diverse, rather than dominated by genes influencing infanticide, thus possibly making the species more survivable in the face of changing environmental conditions.

And by giving adults the means to prevent reproduction, the genetic competition is played out in terms of strategy, instead of violence and force. Those who are best at determining when to reproduce, and how many times, prevail in the genetic lotteries. To the extent that genes determine good decision making, this is a recipe for evolving a smarter society.

So much for the beneficial insights of evolutionary theory. Let’s leave aside the peaceful morality that proceeds from evolution, and explore what intelligent design has to say on the issue.

I started with a Google search, and I was disappointed to find that Walker is correct when he says that intelligent design creationism is silent on the issue. I found nothing from an intelligent design creationist on the web⁵ that said anything about intelligent design creationism’s views on infanticide.

That leaves us to explore the issues for ourselves. As Walker notes:

What characteristics of the unknown designer might we infer from infanticide? … [T]he issue here is that ID as a theory is doomed unless something is known about the designer and that information can be used to generate hypotheses about the real world.

That’s a real problem, because intelligent design creationists frequently refuse to say who or what the creator/designer is. But we can obviously go the other direction here. Infanticide is widespread, not only among people, but also in nature. This is observed fact. Given this, what does it say about the designer/creator?

What it necessarily must say is that the designer/creator found nothing wrong with killing children and helpless young animals. Otherwise, this capability would not have been built into creation. Even if we accept the rather ad-hoc and evidence-lacking assertion that “the fall” corrupted creation and infanticide did not exist prior to then, organisms could not be physically capable of infanticide if the tools for it had not been built into life in the first place.

Intelligent design creationists say that biological structures are intelligently designed to fulfill their functions. If so, that means that the biological structures that animals use to kill babies were intelligently designed for the purpose of killing babies.

Furthermore, infanticide is practiced by organisms that are incredibly diverse. Even plants do it. Bacteria do it. Lobsters do it. The list is incredibly long, and as far as I can tell every class of organism does it. That suggests that not only does the designer/creator condone infanticide, but that he’s positively enthusiastic about it.

This picture of the creator/designer is not, I would suggest, the kind of supernatural power or little green alien that my readers would enjoy hanging out with.

Of course, science is all about finding out what is true, and not about gathering support for what you want to be true. So all we need to do is look at the evidence. Evolutionary theory makes several predictions and provides powerful explanations for what we observe in the biological world - including infanticide. It is so successful at this that it it responsible for originating or explaining - or both - all of our knowledge of biology. Every day, more scientific studies about evolution are conducted, and every day, all of them show that evolution is sound.

Meanwhile, intelligent design creationism? It explains nothing. Even infanticide, which it explains, presumably, by hypothesizing a bloodthirsty infanticide-loving designer/creator, is better explained by evolutionary theory. But it goes beyond this. An intelligent design creationism that explains infanticide with a designer/creator that approves of violence against children cannot cope with the simultaneous presence of altruism in organisms - while evolutionary theory does.

Not only does science better explain what we know about infanticide, in a modern civilization evolutionary theory shows us how the problem it represents can be solved. Meanwhile the primary accomplishment of intelligent design creationism has been to demand that the government subsidize the teaching of its nonsense by raising taxes on the populace so stickers can be placed in texbooks and teachers can be forced to offer religious indoctrination in science class.

1. If we believe the account in the bible, in Joshua chapter 8. [↩]
2. Which is how the bible describes the ancient Israelites. [↩]
3. Babies aren’t really known for defending themselves successfully against the assaults of adults. [↩]
4. In Joshua 8, god is said to not only have approved of, but to have planned, the killing of the children of Ai. In 1 Samuel 15:3, god commands the slaughter of infants. Psalms 135:8 & 136:10, god is praised for killing babies. Psalms 137:9, god commands babies be dashed against the rocks. Exodus 12:29, god plans and carries out the killing of the oldest child of every family in an entire country. Etc. [↩]
5. After looking at a few pages of search results. [↩]