Blue Collar Scientist

A few weeks ago, when the news that creationist whackjobs were giving tours at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, I thought I might post a little article here excogitating on how two-faced creationists are, and about how the people doing the tours are nothing more than dishonest cult-enforcers, and about how, despite this, the museum pretty much has its hands tied.

I didn’t, because I didn’t think I really had anything to add that hadn’t already been said (you’ll notice that my m.o. on this blog is to cover a newsy topic a day or two late, but with a surplus of dollars - i.e., with more research than the average blog is putting into it). So I gave it a pass.

However, I’ve now found the best blog entry every written about the topic, bar none. The post is by a DMNS volunteer who has dealt with these whackjobs in person.

(Oh, also, the author is fifteen years old. The main thing about blogging that I learn from this is that I’m doing it wrong.)

Cripes, stop reading my stuff, and get over there and read it, already.

Seriously.

Read it all.

The Institute for Creation Research has released an enemies list, apparently as a tribute to the deep paranoia of Nixonian politics they engage in. It contains some interesting tidbits. It is mostly the usual collection of misleading quote-mining lying by misquoting others, but a few points had me laughing.

For example, about Dawkins - their Enemy Number One - they say:

It is no wonder that Dawkins has elsewhere concluded that “life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” If this is what evolution offers, can there be any other result but despair?

Any other result but despair? Let us read from the Bible. Please open the good book to Ecclesiastes 11:8, and read along with me:

Indeed, if a man should live many years, let him rejoice in them all, and let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything that is to come will be futility.

Well, I can only speak for myself, but it seems pretty clear to me who is purveying despair, and it isn’t Richard Dawkins.

Under Eugenie Scott’s entry, they trot out the tired old lie that creationists have been retreading since the 1860’s:

[T]here has been no observable scientific evidence for macroevolution.

Of course there have been; at one web page alone, you can learn about no less than 29 observed instances of evolutionary speciation, complete with citations to the scientific literature. One wonders, if they are right in their claim that evolution is false, why they have to lie about the scientific findings on evolution all the time….

But that’s not really my point here. I want to return to the bible again. Please attend to Genesis 1:11:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit….

Sadly, the ICR doesn’t respect its own sources. If you read that, you surely noted that the bible does not say that god created plants. The text clearly states that plants were to be brought forth by the Earth. This is a clear example of biogenesis, the transition of inorganic material to advanced organic life.

And let us also look at 1 Corinthians 15:45:

So also it is written, “The first MAN, Adam, BECAME A LIVING SOUL.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual.

A strong endorsement of the naturalistic world view that science, and evolutionary theory, represents. Naturalism comes first; without it, the bible says you can’t have spiritualism.

They move on to PZ Myers, and lead with their chin ignorance:

Although many other evolutionists are active “evangelists” in the world today, P. Z. Myers deserves a mention because of his prolific presence in cyberspace, mainly through blogs on his website Pharyngula.

I was under the impression that Myers’ blog, Pharyngula, is at Scienceblogs. Shows you what I know.

They don’t really say anything in the Myers section about their beliefs, so there’s no way to consult the final authority (the Bible) on the truth of their claims. So, disappointed, I will simply have to bring this posting to a close.

It takes three minutes to explain the evolution of the eye.

It only takes an intelligent design creationist three seconds to say “it is still too complex to have evolved.”

This morning, “cls” left a comment on the Expelled Reviews post, which I’d really like to see some discussion of. The comment brings up an issue that has repeatedly dogged me and almost certainly limited my effectiveness as a science educator, and the issue is simply this: I don’t always understand the questions being asked.

Usually, I understand questions asked by someone who is already engaged with the subject and wants to know more about it. Usually, I understand the questions posed by people who don’t know the answers but are engaged in a quest to satisfy their curiosity. But sometimes I run up against a series of questions that I don’t get, and those questions are usually, but not always asked by one of two kinds of people:

1. Anti-science people, denialists, etc.
2. The profoundly ignorant.

Because I am a scientist, and I know that there’s a lot that I don’t know, when I’m confronted by a question I don’t understand, I usually assume the fault is mine. But that’s not a safe bet when dealing with questions from these two populations. And cls’ comment includes several questions that I just don’t get.

for me, i want to know a few things of the process of evolution:

do the most mixed varieties of living things contain the most genetic
diversity?

I don’t get it. What is a “variety of living thing,” and once that is defined, what does “most mixed” mean? If a friend of mine had said “variety of living thing,” I would probably have understood them to mean a pink rose instead of a red one. But I still wouldn’t know what “most mixed” meant, and I kinda doubt cls is asking about botanical varieties here.

do the most specialized varieties of species have the least genetic diversity?

What does “varieties of species” mean? And how is that different from “variety of living things?” See, from my perspective as an astronomer, this could be (a) a well-established biological term that I don’t know, or (b) meaningless¹.

I’m going to guess that the most specialized multi-cellular organisms on the planet are parasites, and that some populations of parasite have greater genetic diversity than some populations of non-parasitic animals. I’d guess that pandas, California condors, and other organisms having very low populations would be less genetically diverse than a healthy population of ticks that are so specialized they need specific hosts to complete their life cycles.

If yes, this means they are usually successful in a specific environment, and then would only survive in that environment?

I kinda get this, and my answer would be that organisms that exploit certain ecological niches would probably have problems if their niche went away, but it doesn’t mean they couldn’t adapt to new conditions. But here I fail to see the connection to genetics or evolutionary biology - this is Ecology 101, stuff that we knew before we knew much of anything about evolution.

does evolution weaken a species when it becomes specialized?

This kind of question just bugs me. To my way of thinking, evolution doesn’t “do” anything. Evolution is just a description of how things happen.

I think maybe the question here is something like “does increasing specialization weaken a species,” and the answer, I think, would be - yes, and no. Some specialized species are on the decline, others are ubiquitously common and obviously very well adapted for their environment. But it kinda depends on how you define your terms - do specialized species go extinct with greater frequency than non-specialized ones? If so, does this mean they are “weak?” Do they speciate with greater frequency? If so, does that mean they are not “weak?” What does weak mean, exactly? From an evolutionary perspective, I would think it would have to do with how long they can keep their genes alive. I’m just not sure the question is meaningful as asked.

does evolution, like inbreeding, pass on weakness?

What?

in specific environments? (sure those too weak die.)

What?

do the mutations in the pesticides and medicines mentioned above do a lot of killing of unwanted living things?

Mutations in pesticides? What? Pesticides aren’t even living things - how can they mutate?

I can almost discern that this question is along these lines: Since organisms can evolve resistance to pesticides/medicines, there must be mutations. Since there were mutations, pesticides/medicines must be mutagenic. Do the mutagenic properties of pesticides/medicines kill organisms?

If this is what that means, the problem is that a substance need not be mutagenic in order for an organism to evolve resistance to it. Mutations happen, period - whether there are mutagens about or not.² Besides that, a quick scan of encyclopedia articles on pesticides and antibiotics will show that most have their effects through toxic (not mutagenic) properties.

These questions are mixed in with some other musings, which I also don’t get:

whales sometimes use these legs in mating, and
belugas come to shore…

Whales have legs? That’s news to me.³

And belugas do come to shore - to eat. They occasionally get stuck, and they are well adapted⁴ to surviving the ordeal until the tide comes back in and allows them to swim back out to sea. I’ve witnessed this process myself, and I’m not sure what the point is here.

there are some distinct differences in the
nature of birds and reptiles that may be unlinkable with survival

Unlinkable? What does that word mean in this context?

Even if it means that some birds/reptiles have phenotypic characteristics that are not good for their survival, the answer is “so what?” To survive, an organism need only be good enough to get by. There’s no requirement for hyper-optimization.

This kind of thing is extremely confusing to me. A lot of these questions, on first hearing, sound like complete nonsense. The questions appear to have no meaning, even if you read the dictionary definitions of the words used and apply the normal rules of grammar. They have no meaning in the mundane use of the language, and no apparent meaning as part of a technical vocabulary either.

I guess this comment has gotten me thinking about the issue of who can be reached. From long experience, I’ve learned that antiscience people can’t be talked to. If I’m going head-to-head with antiscience, I’m doing it for the onlookers, so that they have a chance of escaping the stupidity. But the people who actually believe things like the plasma universe⁵, the Jupiter effect, and other crazy ideas that shouldn’t survive for ten seconds in a reasonably educated and properly functioning mind - these people cannot be reached. At least not by me.

People who ask questions that I don’t get fall into a gray zone to me. Are they unreachable? Or am I just not able to understand the hip new lingo?

1. Until defined by the person using it, of course. [↩]
2. Besides which, not all evolution works on mutation - selection of favored variations also occurs. [↩]
3. I know all about fossil whales with legs, but don’t know how cls would know how they were used sexually. [↩]
4. Compared to other whales I’m familiar with. [↩]
5. Not the same thing as plasma cosmology - not that the latter is necessarily any good either. [↩]

Ron Britton over at Bay of Fundie today has a good post about peculiar (and as he points out, minority) Christian views of science. It is worth a read, and covers such topics as the necessity of science’s naturalistic approach, the strange way that some Christians become separatists (”They invent themselves out of the majority”), and the currently hot topic of how biologists are really Nazis and are conspiring to kill another six million people in the next holocaust.

One remark made in the post, though, caught my attention, and I couldn’t let it go. Eventually I felt it worthwhile to leave a comment. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not disagreeing with Ron in any way here. I’m just pointing out that evolution denialists are even stupider than he makes them out to be. After I wrote it, I decided it might be appropriate to publish it here as well. So here’s my comment in its entirety (quoting Ron first):

The only real connection between evolution and Nazi-ism is that a few people misunderstood evolution, and they misapplied their distorted knowledge to the social sciences. Darwin is not responsible for the misunderstanding and misuse of his theory….

I don’t mean to be contentious, but even though it is technically correct, this is too generous to the evolution-denying religious whackos who want to link Darwin and/or evolution to Hitler and Nazism. Let me explain….

By Darwin’s time, it was already understood that species could change with time. This knowledge was put into practice in selective breeding of crops, flowers, livestock, puppy dogs, and so on, which had been done for centuries by Darwin’s time.

Darwin’s great insight, his big innovation and contribution to biology, was showing that nature itself served as a selective breeding engine - that instead of a human breeder making the choices about which organisms got to reproduce, in the wild it was nature that made such “decisions,” whether this was a result of the size and hardness of seeds that birds were eating, or the influence of storms, or what have you.

So yes, these people misunderstood evolution, and applied their misunderstanding in an evil way. But they didn’t misunderstand Darwin - they were, and are today, too ignorant to even know what Darwin was talking about, and what his contribution to science entailed. The Nazis applied the principles of deliberate, human-controlled selective breeding programs to what they thought were the problems of their society. Stupid people who know less than nothing about evolution somehow decided this was related to Charles Darwin.

The point I’m trying to make is that the evolutionary denialists - who are demonstrably (and sickeningly) gleefully happy about Nazism and the killing of six million people because it shows evolution is evil - are actually ignorant at a profoundly more fundamental level than they are usually called out for.

Let’s be clear here: Six million Jews Gypsies, and unfortunate others weren’t killed in the Holocaust by natural causes. If the denialists are genuinely trying link Darwin to the Holocaust, that’s what they’re saying - in essence, they are claiming that Holocaust victims died, and deservedly so, because they were unfit. Which is remarkably similar to what Hitler claimed.

But it isn’t true. Holocaust victims were killed by people, not nature; and people already understood well before Darwin’s time the effect that killing off a population - of people, or cattle, or whatever else - would have.

My pal over at Dinosaurs and the Bible: A Creationist’s Fairy Tale is hosting an Expelled carnival, including posts from around the blogosphere offering tons of reading about this Nazi propaganda movie¹. It is up as of a few minutes ago - go check out To Hell with Expelled!

And thanks for getting my submissions in even though I sent them in way late!

1. Er, wait - did that come out right? Hmm. Not sure I care. [↩]

And they want us to think it is evolutionary biologists that persecute religious extremists….

Chris Comer’s story is not new, of course, but this video is part of the newly-unveiled website on Expelled, sponsored by the NCSE.

Michael Egnor, writing on the Discovery Institute blog, has said

Complexity can arise without intelligent design, but complexity is not the same thing as design.

I can’t explain the implications any better than Skeptico, so go over there if you want to learn what I think.

One of the predictions of evolution is that transitional forms will be found in the fossil record. Another is that a variety of intermediate forms will be found in living creatures as well.

We’ve got some impressive transitional forms between fish and quadrupeds from the fossil record, notably Tiktaalik, and some living amphibians exhibit varying amounts of quadrupedal adaptation, to the point that you really have to be obstinate not to see it. And of course the lungfish and mudskippers are living examples of transitional-looking animals among the fish, as are the anglerfish, which have leg-like pectoral fins.

But now there’s another one - this time, an anglerfish without an angler, and, to judge from this picture at least, a particularly well developed “leg:”

This new species was discovered by Buck and Fitrie Randolph, who own a diving business - in other words, it is a rare example of the discovery of a new taxa by amateurs.

The full story and a bigger picture can be found here.