Lee's Blog

So, I was reading an anti-creationism blog the other day. In between criticizing creationism, the commenters take occasional breaks to sneer at President Bush, Tea Partiers (whom they refer to by a sexually explicit slur that I will not repeat), and anyone who disagrees with the present Administration.

In the course of such sneering, one of them conflated creationists, Tea Partiers, and birthers, saying that Tea Partiers believe all sorts of impossible things, such as that the President is a Kenya-born Muslim socialist terrorist and the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

Uh, no. That the Earth is only 6,000 years old is impossible. That is to say, if that were true, pretty much all of our scientific discoveries of the past couple of centuries, and a large chunk of known history, would have to be completely wrong. That is as near impossible as it is possible to get.

That the President is a Kenya-born Muslim socialist terrorist is extremely unlikely but not impossible. Kenya-born Muslim socialist terrorists do exist, after all, so in the exceedingly unlikely case that the President somehow turned out to be one of them, that would not invalidate any scientific discovery or any history except the personal histories of a few individual human beings. That possibility dos not belong in the same category as a 6,000 year old Earth.

Actually, I think the possibility that the President is a Kenya-born Muslim socialist terrorist belongs more in the same category as the possibility that the Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt next year. It’s erupted before, so we know the possibility exists, but I’m not moving to the Southern Hemisphere to escape it

Quoth Comfort:

“I sincerely apologize for misrepresenting what Darwinian evolution says about the origin of males and females. I have checked out the references you have given me as to what the theory has to say about their genesis, read them again and again, and I still don’t understand what you believe. It doesn’t make sense to me because I can’t reconcile what I see in creation with what you would have me believe about evolution. Still, that doesn’t give me the right to misrepresent your beliefs, even if it was done in ignorance.”

Okay, Comfort has officially admitted that he is too stupid to understand evolution, and that his tripe is an example of the arrogance of ignorance. Well, good. But I think I’ll try to explain anyway. I’m typing this on an iPhone so please excuse typos.

Let’s do a thought experiment where we try to *actually understand* what biologists think. We’re going to do this honestly, though, so no smuggling in creationist assumptions.

Suppose we have a cage (cage 1) that contains a lion, Leo.  Because this is a thought experiment, Leo will let us take all the measurements we want.  So we write down all the measurements, step out of the cage and see that to its left is another cage, cage 2, containing Leo’s sire and dam.  So we go in there, carefully measure the two animals, compare with Leo, and find that he is very similar to his sire. 

Good.  Now we go to cage 3, containing the sire and dam of the male in cage 2, and we measure again. No surprise; this male is much like his son and the female is much like the female in the next cage. They are clearly of the same species. So we step out and move to cage 4, containing the sire and dam of the male in cage 3 and … you see where I’m going with this. 

Well, this is kind of repetitious so we’ll skip over describing the animals in a couple of million cages, but each cage will contain both a male and a female, and they will always be quite similar to the animals in the cages to their left and right. So we reach cage 2,000,000 or so, start the tedious process of measuring, and then come out of our stupor of boredom and realize — wait, this male isn’t a lion!  It’s smaller, its coloring is different, it’s less heavily built … what is this thing, and how did it get in the lion cages?

We check our records, and this animal looks much like his son, which looks much like his son, which looks much like … all the way back to Leo.  Somehow those small differences, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, added up to a large difference in size. Yet there was never a point where we could say, the animals in this cage are lions and the animals in the next cage are not. Further, of course, every cage contains both a male and a female. 

So we keep going back, seeing that in each cage the animals are similar to the animals on either side, and then after, say, fifty million generations, we’re looking at rat-sized animals that aren’t really cats, or dogs, or bears, though we could trace their descendants and find that some *are* cats (like Leo), while others are dogs or bears. And still each cage contains both a male and a female.

Now we keep going for hundreds of millions of generations, still observing a male and a female in each cage, still seeing great similarity between the animals in each cage and those in the neighboring cages, and we find some reptilian animals, something like Tiktaalik, some fishes (though not quite like modern fishes) and still there are two animals in every cage.

If we traced forward from here, we would have many paths to follow — we would find modern fishes, frogs, turtles, blue jays, eagles, elephants, cattle, lions … all those animals that Comfort observed as having both males and females. 

The various species that have males and females today are descended from species that had males and females. There are species that have lost their males and are female-only, but there are no species that are male-only. 

This doesn’t strike me as terribly difficult to grasp. Now why the two roles of male and female evolved in the proto-species, the worm-like invertebrate, well, scientists are working on that. They are not working on the issue of how lions got along without lionesses for millions of years until lionesses evolved.    

I am still fuming over that dimwit Comfort. Dimwit is too kind. Single-photon-wit is a better match. Since he is plainly uneducable, I won’t waste my time trying to comment on his blog, but will instead comment here (’cause it’s mine! so I can say anything I want!), setting out what I would say to him if I could.

So — this is addressed to Comfort the Clueless Creationist:

Mocking other people is an old tradition, and you are certainly entitled to mock scientists. However, mocking science only works if you actually mock ideas that scientists have at some time advanced; otherwise, you just look ignorant. And if you keep mocking science by mocking ideas that no scientists ever advanced, you just look stupid. And you do, in very truth, look stupid when you talk about evolution.

To put this in terms you might understand, you would likely be offended if I mocked Christianity. However, suppose I said that Christians believe Jesus Christ was a three-ton green unicorn with a silver horn, and that it is obviously ludicrous for them to claim that the Romans crucified him, since they couldn’t very well crucify anything that weighed three tons, and besides, unicorns don’t even have hands for them to drive nails through. You wouldn’t consider that mockery. You’d think I was ignorant. And if, even after being repeatedly corrected, I persisted in arguing about the impossibility of crucifying a unicorn and mocking Christians for believing in it, you’d think I was stupid.

That’s what I think about you. You persist in claiming that scientists studying the evolution of life on Earth believe that males of each species simply appeared and got along reproducing themselves just fine without need of females for millions of years, until females of each species popped up and then somehow became essential for reproduction. And you argue the impossibility of this and mock scientists for their inability to explain how it could have happened.

Well, scientists can’t explain that and don’t try, just as Christians can’t, and don’t try to, explain how the Romans managed to crucify a three-ton unicorn.

I’ve come to wonder how Ray Comfort manages to eat without pouring food in his ear. He is not merely ignorant, but apparently unteachable, and evidently proud of it. He recently appeared in U.S.News excreting the following:

For example, evolution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.

This has been explained to him over and over, but he is obviously incapable of grasping the concept that scientists don’t believe (1) that males are the only real members of their species, while females are just things that the real members of the species use for reproduction (he quite clearly believes that women are just somewhat humanoid things that men have to keep around to reproduce themselves); and (2) that males were created instantly and in their present form.

Those two beliefs are creationist beliefs. Comfort is incapable of comprehending that non-creationists simply don’t have those beliefs, and consequently have no need to try to explain away such nonsense. The fact that he’s willing to display his utter imbecility in the pages of U.S.News (which I presume is still a national magazine) indicates that he simply has no clue, despite efforts by many people to explain to him, that his beliefs are complete twaddle not shared by scientists.

I would call Comfort a toad, but toads are substantially more intelligent than Comfort.

I was going to go on with the Story of Sooty, but I can’t let this go. This Comfort clown is absolutely clueless! He’s been corrected on this in detail, but he just goes on spewing his idiocy:

At what point of time in evolutionary history did the female evolve alongside the male? And why did she evolve? Then explain, if you would professor, why horses, giraffes, cattle, zebras, leopards, primates, antelopes, pigs, dogs, sheep, fish, goats, mice, squirrels, whales, chickens, dinosaurs, beavers, cats, human beings and rats also evolved with a female, at some point of time in evolutionary history.

“I simply expose atheistic evolution for the unscientific fairy tale that it is, and I do it with common logic. I ask questions about where the female came from for each species. Every male dog, cat, horse, elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn’t keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation,” he said.

Note the assumption, which he makes every time he babbles about evolution, that the species consists of males, and it is a great coincidence that females happen to come along in time to keep the species going.

Note also that he has no clue about common descent: “horses, giraffes, cattle, zebras, leopards, primates, antelopes, pigs, dogs, sheep, fish, goats, mice, squirrels, whales, chickens, dinosaurs, beavers, cats, human beings and rats …” Comfort, you imbecile, those are all vertebrates.

The species he names are descended from a common ancestor species which was a vertebrate species. The common vertebrate ancestor species had already evolved sex and the division into males and females. Breeding populations adapted to different environments over a period of hundreds of millions (not billions) of years, and became more and more different, with the result that they are now what we call horses, giraffes, cattle, etc. But all of the breeding populations, by definition, consisted of many females, at least, and almost always many males too. (Although there are some species that, so far as anyone can tell, have been reproducing parthenogenetically for millions of years, so that they are all female, there are no species, and can be no species, that are exclusively male.)

So the issue isn’t that “evolutionists” claim that the (all male) dog species or elephant species or bird species appeared and then, providentially, corresponding females happened to appear. (Female dogs are not really, you know, dogs, just sort of dog-shaped incubators, just like female humans aren’t really, you know, human beings that you might need to regard as equals or as entitled to any respect or human rights, as the clueless creationist makes exceedingly clear every time he shoots his ignorant mouth off.)

In fact, scientists recognize that females existed all along because they’re part of the species, just as much as or even more than, the males, Comfort, you moron!

Now the question of how the division into two sexes initially arose and has been maintained for hundreds of millions of years in nearly all species that ever had it is a very interesting scientific question that real scientists are working on. Claiming that “God did it” may make the clueless creationist happy, but it’s a science-killer. Why research when you can sit back and answer every question with three words recited by rote?

What’s more, lying about the work of real scientists merely makes the clueless creationist look deeply stupid and dishonest. As we say back home, Comfort would have to look up at a snake’s belly. I will now honor the clueless creationist in my accustomed manner: Comfort (*spit*).

I was lurking around some more websites with discussions of intelligent design creationism, and it occurred to me that there is a judo move to be used against it. That is, intelligent design “theory” is blasphemous.

I’m serious.

Or at least, I would be serious if I believed in blasphemy. Remember, the idea of intelligent design “theory” is that we can examine certain, shall we say, artifacts and perceive that they are designed rather than undesigned. So, for instance, we can look at an old campsite and say, this is a broken clay pot, whereas that is a broken rock; the first bears marks of design and the second does not: the second just happened.

Scaling this up, the intelligent design “theorists” point out that we can examine living things and identify them as being products of design, as opposed to other parts, which “just happened” or are the product of random chance. Well, okay, but the difficulty is that, under their assumption of God an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient power that personally created the heavens and the earth universe and the life therein, no part of the universe or the life therein could have “just happened”; every single thing, from the largest galaxy to the smallest mote of dust, is the product of design.

To suggest that some part of the universe is detectably designed, but other parts “just happened” is to suggest that the God the eternal, omnipotent, omniscient power that personally created the heavens and the earth universe and the life therein didn’t create all of it. I believe this would be blasphemy.

To be fair to Pharyngula, one of his recent posts is a thing of beauty. As they say, read the whole thing. The nicest compliment I ever got as a lawyer was, “You write like a piranha.”

Dr. Gotelli writes like a piranha.

Your invitation is quite surprising, given the sneering coverage of my recent newspaper editorial that you yourself posted on the Discovery Institute’s website…

In closing, I do want to thank you sincerely for this invitation and for your posting on the Discovery Institute Website. As an evolutionary biologist, I can’t tell you what a badge of honor this is. My colleagues will be envious.

Thwack!

I’ve reproduced this whole page here, just because it’s so strange.

It starts off in the middle of a speech by Macbeth (which I think has a typo, because that “shard-borne” thing appears in Google almost always as “beetle” not “bettle”), then quotes Lady Macbeth and again Macbeth, then goes on explaining the plot of the play.

Uh … what does this have to do with the topic of the book? All I can figure is it’s something about the effects of conscience and why the conscience must have been specially created by the Creator. Trying to figure out why the page I’m typing contains the text it does makes the whole enterprise more interesting, which is why I don’t just look back a few pages (as I easily could) and find out the context.

In any event, this is my fourth page for the day, so I’m calling it quits.

Twenty P2 pages today. That’s a lot. But I did them all to the very best of my ability, including typing the whole page myself, going line by line from the bottom up in the spellchecker, running the page through three programs to pick up common punctuation errors, smooth-reading, and generally listening to Read Aloud’s rendition of the page. There were some pages that I didn’t give to Read Aloud because I didn’t think it could pronounce them (lengthy table of contents in “History of Greece” with many Greek person and place names).

I read that someone is reading the Origin of Species for the first time and will blog about the experience. Well, I read the Origin some time ago so that won’t work for me, but I may get Creation or evolution? and blog about that. The latest pages demonstrated the author’s inability to break away from “essentialist” thinking, a break-away that is essential (ho, ho, I made a funny) if you want to understand evolution.

One of the interesting features of PGDP is that you join “in medias res”. That is, you just get a page from the book — whatever page is next in line — which may be quite far from the previous page you edited in the book, if you had edited anything else in the book at all. So trying to follow an author’s train of thought can be an entertaining addition to the somewhat tedious process of proofreading.

Witness, for instance, page 337 of “Creation or evolution” by George Ticknor Curtis, which I have reproduced in toto here. This appears to be the middle of a discussion of political events in England and the United States. What does this have to do with creation or evolution?

I know what it would mean if I were writing it. I would contend that the choices available to every human being now alive — indeed the very lives of every human being now alive — are dependent on actions by people long ago and far away, so that existence for each person is shaped in large part not by his free will but by the results of past contingencies. A child might die in infancy because his ancestors chose — or were forced — to immigrate, or alternatively to remain, in an unhealthy environment, and thus that child would never get the opportunity to achieve anything or even to be “saved” as the Christians would wish.

If the Creator (or Intelligent Designer, or God) is okay with that, why would he not be okay with evolution, in which some lineages succeed and others fail, and some develop characteristics that enable them to spread widely while others are restricted to such tiny niches that they can go extinct when the niche is damaged?*

But I doubt that is Curtis’ argument. My guess is that he is making some contrast between the deliberate decisions of human beings as to how to form a government as opposed to the “random” results of evolution. Which would just show that this argument is based on a misunderstanding of where the randomness comes in, and where it doesn’t.

* Much as I love all mustelids, there is no denying that black-footed ferrets are not terribly successful. Even before human beings started destroying the prairie environment, black-footed ferrets were so rare that a quarter century elapsed between the first scientific description and the second. By the time the feds stepped in and did something useful for a change, capturing the entire species and starting a captive breeding program, there were just eighteen black-footed ferrets left in the entire world.